tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6653623656548536202024-03-19T07:43:44.050+00:00Pun based title, when I think of oneMarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04344313339971737295noreply@blogger.comBlogger64125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-665362365654853620.post-83067001171096977492024-03-15T00:37:00.002+00:002024-03-15T15:33:30.219+00:00Use of Weapons, by Iain M. Banks<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipmODgoEKUFpEMzyKt5EM0uRyR5gYAC9dzCbtzU31rSwA4Eqp0p30FLmI7RtS00Cv40bOuSDd4rUcdlJuXf6Qohx6wTKuygFyLASOJuPNm0tuKZZEop8GQM6htEeNLlufAlzr9XlA4h0Fh1D3qI41AU2Y7UfGxwuinOlBP6KibFzuZKhHYgBquqksmxYg/s663/2024_03_13a.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="663" data-original-width="445" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipmODgoEKUFpEMzyKt5EM0uRyR5gYAC9dzCbtzU31rSwA4Eqp0p30FLmI7RtS00Cv40bOuSDd4rUcdlJuXf6Qohx6wTKuygFyLASOJuPNm0tuKZZEop8GQM6htEeNLlufAlzr9XlA4h0Fh1D3qI41AU2Y7UfGxwuinOlBP6KibFzuZKhHYgBquqksmxYg/s320/2024_03_13a.jpg" width="215" /></a></div><br />I'm stunned by <i><b>Use of Weapons</b></i> by <b>Iain M. Banks</b>. Looking around, this is not an uncommon reaction for readers, to a shock of an ending. I'll say straight off, if there's any chance you'll read the book - if you read SF, if you've heard of it - minimise any time you spend reading reviews. Too bad, that I've already mentioned a shock ending, but...<p></p><div>I gather Banks's first try with this story, written I think before his first success with more mainstream fiction, employed a very complicated narrative structure. This later take only appeared as the 3rd in his '<b>Culture</b>' series. It still does make demands on the reader, with two interleaved strands, one going forwards recounting the story of mercenary <b>Cheradenine Zakalwe's</b> latest mission for the Culture, the other going backwards to the darkest events of his past. And before even starting you'll notice in the contents the oddity of a book which tails off with an epilogue, some verse, and then a prologue(?).</div><div><br /></div><div>It's more complicated than I said, to be honest, because there are a multitude of diversions, in the shape of flashbacks, flash forwards, and switches to different points of view. And Banks is clearly withholding information all the time. There's good reason for this. It sinks in that the main point of it all is not the outcome of Zakalwe's mission or anything like that, but his <b>profoundly damaged psychology</b>. The writing often has the quality of interior landscapes, rather than banal reality. I found it possible to accept the narrative as is, understanding this. As an aside, the descriptive writing, of both land- and cityscapes is often lyrical, evoking feelings of beauty and yet the melancholy of past experiences. It's so well written...</div><div><br /></div><div>The <b>writing</b> has laser like precision at times; individual words have to be exactly so. I'm going to riskily (from the spoiler perspective) quote a few sentences. The context here is that two principal characters have found themselves leading opposing armies, in a terrible struggle which has taken a toll on the minds of both. One of them, besieged in a landlocked battleship, finds the means to trigger an extreme reaction in the other. This other has to hand just a small handgun:</div><div></div><blockquote><div><i><span style="font-size: medium;">He pressed the gun hard against his temple and pulled the trigger.</span></i></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>The besieged forces around the </i><b>Stabarinde</b><i> broke out within the hour, while the surgeons were still fighting for his life.</i></span></div><div><i><span style="font-size: medium;">It was a good battle, and they nearly won.</span></i></div></blockquote><div></div><div>So: read that last bit carefully. <b>Who</b> nearly won? Did he survive? </div><div>A perfectly crafted ambiguity; I'd love to know if the same thing is achieved in translation. As I read <i>Use of Weapons</i> it dawned on me that Banks had left evidence and signs all over the shop, as to what was going on, and about the truths which lay behind the fragile picture of things which Zakalwe seemed to have. <b>This book needs to be read again</b>, in the light of what we finally understand at the end.</div><div><br /></div><div>Let's talk about <b>The Culture</b>. Most of Iain M. Banks' science fiction is set within the universe of the Culture, but there are only occasional links between the books. I've now read just under half of them. The basic idea is that The Culture are the galaxy's ultimate 'goodies': they have superior technology to everyone, and when they see fit, they guide and intervene as appropriate, ideally without even being noticed. However, things are often not ideal. Sometimes, in contradiction to all their utopian principles, they get their hands dirty, employing the secretive organisation known as <b>Special Circumstances</b> and its agents, such as <b>Diziet Sma</b>, who features heavily in <i>Use of Weapons</i>, and who for all her special abilities and omniscience, fails to realise the truth until the end of the story. When things get really dirty, Sma and the rest employ unusually able mercenaries like Zakalwe. Zakalwe seems to like his work, but won't become an actual citizen of the Culture. As you may guess, the culture of The Culture is more or less anarchist, which never works for long in any kind of human situation; unless there's another factor. This factor is <b>artificial intelligence</b>. All the various AI '<b>Minds</b>' run everything, and look after the humans. I know I'll have to read more books before I can really comment further, but on the face of it, life is near ideal for the humans of The Culture. The Culture faces many challenges in and around the galaxy, especially from civilisations who see The Culture as an existential threat to themselves. They're usually some kind of empire, of course.</div><div><br /></div><div>We do see quite a lot of Diziet Sma - and also her drone sidekick who supplies a lot of the dry humour in the story (one of the most appealing aspects of the Culture books is the <b>humour</b>, which often comes from the AI). Sma isn't perfect, but she's a classic powerful female hero (I'm dodging around use of that dire expression "kick-ass"). She's exemplary in following the Culture principle of intervening and tinkering from as much distance as possible. But agents like her will always have a problem with someone like Zakalwe, who doesn't welcome SC's desire to track them everywhere - even though he wants and frequently needs them to come and rescue him when necessary. And it's more of a problem when she doesn't know as much about him as she thinks. <b>Diziet Sma</b> appears elsewhere in the Culture books, but I think this is the most prominent role she has in a story.</div><div><br /></div><div>For a while, I thought that <i>Use of Weapons</i> was going to be about the toll that war takes from its soldiers, and other participants. That this skilfully written story would submerge itself into its character, Zakalwe especially, and show the true long term damage left by <b>all the scars of war</b>, physical and psychological.</div><div>It sort of does. </div><div>But I haven't mentioned the other characters, the ones from his childhood.</div><div>The gut punch delivered by the eventual unfolding of the book's story is only incidentally about war. It's a bleak message, of how our birth, upbringing, nurture or lack of nurture, govern almost everything about our lives. The real scars go right back to the start of our lives, and it's a rare thing if someone can escape them.</div><div>I think I may have just read <b>one of science fiction's greatest books</b>.</div><div><br /></div>Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04344313339971737295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-665362365654853620.post-60901031635361337492023-12-29T12:41:00.004+00:002023-12-29T19:17:26.357+00:002023 > 2024: Show you care!<p>Writing one of these again? A sort of <b>end of year review</b>? More a sign of nothing better to do I might think. I don't think I bothered last year. But I am pleased with one or two cultural glimmers from the last 12 months, and I never wrote about some of them, so here's a series of barely connected reports about films and books and; not much else actually.</p><p><b>Films</b> - off the top of my head, I saw barely three films. But at least I have been getting to the cinema. The thing is, for reasons of circumstance, the cinema means Manchester, which entails an unfun car journey, or what used to be a train journey I was quite happy with, once. But <b>the train services</b> have been getting poorer in the North West in recent years. It's all a matter of slow deterioration, but the little losses make a difference. In my case, the loss of a particular afternoon train from the timetable meant that for most films of typical blockbuster length, I could no longer get home off peak. For the first film of 2023, <i><b>Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3</b></i>, I gambled wrongly and missed the ending. But did I care? I know people like that film but maybe I've seen enough superhero stuff by now. The third film of 2023 I saw quite recently, and I did put down some thoughts in this blog, namely about <i><b><a href="https://punbasedtitle.blogspot.com/2023/12/napoleon.html" target="_blank">Napoleon</a></b></i>. Click on that if you very much have to see how <b>physically excited</b> I was by it.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpN8JuhEfNLq1-wumXGz73dxzh_bEhJEBc9T6h29kbTG7jeVEwBSh8AeZKkH0TG9uezzfqV7Ecs3WEEHsJl4BRlQRKd3jZK40sBmoeFkk5vqqYLrEJsKUQrvmuPiKckdL87ahq2bkKK3ek_zCXKa1J8wWD5-8uKJLFGMkxe7jfZWqv09x0wpEZwBxZnpI/s490/2023_12_31a.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="490" data-original-width="331" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpN8JuhEfNLq1-wumXGz73dxzh_bEhJEBc9T6h29kbTG7jeVEwBSh8AeZKkH0TG9uezzfqV7Ecs3WEEHsJl4BRlQRKd3jZK40sBmoeFkk5vqqYLrEJsKUQrvmuPiKckdL87ahq2bkKK3ek_zCXKa1J8wWD5-8uKJLFGMkxe7jfZWqv09x0wpEZwBxZnpI/w270-h400/2023_12_31a.jpg" width="270" /></a></div><br />The second film more than made up for much of my failed cinema going of recent times. I loved <b style="font-style: italic;">Past Lives</b>, and I'm so glad people have been to see it. I may be in a minority but I relished its understated story telling, its understanding of real life and the way time passes and we change with it. It's so grown up, and the director - her first film, but an accomplished theatre director - crafted her narrative with such a sure touch, and drew wonderful truthful performances from her cast. I can't imagine anyone especially 30+ seeing this film and not reflecting on their own past life and not wanting to talk about it with others. I wish the poster quote didn't call it a romance. Not that there isn't romance running right through it, but there isn't an actual romance between the two principals. The comment misses the whole point of the film I think. Which is there in its title. It's a conundrum we all have when we reflect on what we once were. We know we did those things, and were like that. But we know we're not that person any more. And those lives have gone.<div><br /></div><div><i>"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there"</i> L.P. Hartley<br /><div><br /></div><div><b>Books</b> - avid reading as ever. Not as large a number as before, but most of them were good food for the brain. And as the year progressed, it became clear that I was going to achieve something never accomplished before: this year, for the first time ever in my reading life, I read <b>more books by female authors than male ones</b>. The actual count is <b>15</b> by women, <b>8</b> by men. Honestly, I don't know if this amounts to anything of any value, at all? Is it a good thing? Is it maybe a sign that in the last fifty years or so, female writers have been more successful in getting published? Who really knows, except that in my case, it is at least in part the consequence of accidental factors. The main one is that I paid another visit to my Devon cousins, and there my chief book swapping accomplice happened to lend me a much bigger pile than usual - and yes, she does read predominantly female authors. If she says a writer is good, I have tended to find I agree, so I've been successfully introduced to several new writers, mostly though not exclusively female ones, and have even surpassed her with one or two, by which I mean lending back to her other books by one or two of them which she hadn't read yet - two such favourites of mine, both read this year, have been <b>Sarah Moss</b> and <b>Sue Gee</b>. But I have to make the point that the femaleness or maleness of all these writers is surely irrelevant; I can see that there's greater diversity just between the various female writers, and also between the male writers. The female writers read this year range from <b>George Eliot</b> to <b>Kate Atkinson</b> and <b>Tove Jansson</b>, the male ones from <b>Albert Camus</b> and <b>Alan Moore</b> to <b>Mick Herron</b>.</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPvfI5Wsm7efEJRPZknStS2zlCWnvfnZEd3NA-96sVk8r_g3JQzaKdCGmXU6ppOoU0Kf5jggBYSQDNPGh17xhVp7Er1w_8E2jNNOwBaNITsHzJqb2B9P6wMw0NZ1oWtcwNutbzlk3SMWtE49U8tYfBiM2aBFozHtRzdQhM0heN8qC4xI_vSOZ0U_mFeAo/s459/2023_12_31b.JPG" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="459" data-original-width="286" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPvfI5Wsm7efEJRPZknStS2zlCWnvfnZEd3NA-96sVk8r_g3JQzaKdCGmXU6ppOoU0Kf5jggBYSQDNPGh17xhVp7Er1w_8E2jNNOwBaNITsHzJqb2B9P6wMw0NZ1oWtcwNutbzlk3SMWtE49U8tYfBiM2aBFozHtRzdQhM0heN8qC4xI_vSOZ0U_mFeAo/s320/2023_12_31b.JPG" width="199" /></a></div><br />And then maybe at an even further extreme, there's this gentleman. I'm singling out <b>Eric Goulden's <i>A Dysfunctional Success</i></b> because it's the book which made most impact on me, certainly towards this end of the year. I was going to say, "You may know him better as <b>Wreckless Eric</b>", his stage name; but it hits me that even then he's probably a bit obscure these days. He's from the long ago late Seventies, the era when British Pop (and indeed, Rock) was given a kick up the jacksie by Punk, Pub Rock and New Wave. He was a major part of a pivotal moment in that history, the famous/infamous Stiff Records Tour, the one which included a load of soon-to-be-big names, notably Elvis Costello. He had one big hit, <i><b>Whole Wide World</b></i>, and for a host of music industry and personal conflict reasons, he fell from the barely touched limelight into the hinterland of dodgy labels and agents, a life not far removed at times from that seen in <i>Spinal Tap</i>. The book is frequently very funny - no word of a lie, I spat out my tea a couple of times. But more often it grips you in your guts with its visceral depiction of the <b>dysfunction</b> in its title. He wanted to make music, to do pop and rock and everything. But the music <span style="color: red;"><b>'</b></span>industry<b><span style="color: red;">'</span></b> - it really does need those inverted commas - is just the worst, at least as he encountered it. Selfish, greedy, exploitative. And it all flushed further down the tubes as he <b>drank</b>. Weirdly, he doesn't seem to have got into the other stuff. But the drink did for him, until, many years too late, he knocked it on the head.</div><div><br /></div><div>That's as much of the story as I want to spill. All genuinely fascinating if you remember those times and were into music. But the joy of the book is that <b>Eric can write</b>. Of course he can, <b>lyrics</b> were his strength, weren't they? His story grips from start to finish. Sometimes it's mundane, briefly it's almost glamorous, but it's never boring. Don't be fooled by the <b>anarchic style</b>, the jumping forwards and back, it works brilliantly. Write more Eric, please, if it can be this good. I'd better add, it's honest. So honest in fact, that he's open about telling us some stuff, and leaving out the rest of it. You don't get the feeling that he's that bothered about secrets, just that this, nothing else, is what he wants to say.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Music</b> - Mostly on YouTube. Traffic, L7, Django Reinhardt, Electric Six, Screaming Blue Messiahs and so on and so forth. Anything new? Now and again :)</div><div><br /></div><div>I used to write about <b>Christmas cards</b> and their trends in <b>imagery</b> in these end of year pieces. Okay: my verdict is that on the basis of what I've received (~40-odd physical cards), there were no clear trends, certainly as regards particular animals. But quite a few did seem to focus on the Christmas tree itself. We don't really learn anything from this. But we never did, did we? I was sent a few e-cards, more than previously. That's a definite trend, especially now that stamps are <b>so expensive</b>. The "writing's on the wall". Or it would be, if the handwriting habit wasn't vanishing fast along with it.</div><div>So there's a cheerful message to sign off with - let's have <b>more handwriting!</b> It's creative, it's rewarding, it's good for the brain, and some vital bits of muscle memory. And <b>it shows you care</b>.</div><div><p></p><p><br /></p></div></div>Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04344313339971737295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-665362365654853620.post-7499600553372410712023-12-10T11:29:00.003+00:002023-12-31T16:39:22.272+00:00Napoleon<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZMFQrIe742bQWEsMj20IuiXaqBBqjkjqaQH0Ysam-HWp5LWa3lqkVSukl0oi31OlQfMHM6k4OMc-Ny3aPZNKPqvffnIavQ0pQRT-MUwhJ1VSsIZ0db1VCJ7UsfGboG0ZzHsRwnUoVLsVoReTpGVmwrqeslJO5K_FKW8Pp4-YajFeo1n9JiGaP2sgNl5U/s447/2023_12_07a.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="447" data-original-width="299" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZMFQrIe742bQWEsMj20IuiXaqBBqjkjqaQH0Ysam-HWp5LWa3lqkVSukl0oi31OlQfMHM6k4OMc-Ny3aPZNKPqvffnIavQ0pQRT-MUwhJ1VSsIZ0db1VCJ7UsfGboG0ZzHsRwnUoVLsVoReTpGVmwrqeslJO5K_FKW8Pp4-YajFeo1n9JiGaP2sgNl5U/w268-h400/2023_12_07a.jpg" width="268" /></a></div><br />Watching <i><b>Napoleon</b></i> has left me feeling a little sad. It's also left me feeling violently shaken, but more about that later.<p></p><div>As it says on the poster, this is a <b>Ridley Scott</b> film. I can't claim to have seen all of his films, but I have seen many of them, in the cinema, and the fact that he was the director was usually the main reason I went and parted with cash, to see a film on the big screen. I'm certainly drawn to science fiction, so <i>Alien</i> and <i>Blade Runner</i> are the films of his which figure most prominently in my mind. But I've enjoyed his work in many other genres as well, <i>Thelma and Louise</i> and <i>Gladiator</i> and so many more. I'd barely heard about Scott before I saw his first film, <i><b>The Duellists</b></i> (who are Keith Carradine and Harvey Keitel), which made a big impression with its spectacle and its rendering of its almost Shakespearean theme. Interestingly, it also has the Napoleonic Wars as its background.</div><div><br /></div><div>I got to wondering how many times I'd seen <b>Napoleon Bonaparte</b> in the cinema: it's actually quite a few. Off the top of my head, he was there in <i>Waterloo</i>, in the person of Rod Steiger, up against Christopher Plummer. Another no less memorable appearance for me was in <i>Time Bandits</i>, represented brilliantly and sympathetically by Ian Holm. In <i>Napoleon</i>, he is <b>Joaquin Phoenix</b>, an actor who's impressed me several times, not least in Ridley Scott's <i>Gladiator</i>. But I found his performance here weird, detached and almost disinterested; I never found him convincing as the charismatic leader Napoleon surely was, and couldn't understand his desultory love making in a context not that common amongst the contemporary elite, of actually being passionate about his wife. This approach to the part must have been deliberate by both him and the director, so I don't know what to think. </div><div><br /></div><div>We gather the French really don't like the film. However, their main complaint is that it's "<b>historically inaccurate</b>". This is a laughable complaint, history is generally too messy to render and explain clearly in 2/3 hours on film without some 'tidying up'. And with a life as complex and important as Napoleon's, it's impossible. But the French are bound to feel that they 'own' the story of Napoleon, and one has a bit of sympathy for their feeling resentful at foreigners attempting to tell it.</div><div><br /></div><div>Some time ago I was a member of a club devoted to French culture, and we did have a couple of bona fide French members. One of them was a fierce supporter of Napoleon and in due course gave us a lecture designed to underline his historical importance. She said virtually nothing about his military campaigns. What she revealed, which I knew very little about, was <b>his legacy in the government and legal systems of nations right across Europe</b>, a legacy which continues today. This film doesn't concern itself with any of that. Should it? Maybe not in any detail, but by avoiding it altogether, in the end, I felt it had made Napoleon seem an almost trivial figure.</div><div><br /></div><div>The film's core is Napoleon's relationship with <b>Josephine</b>. How true to history the film is, no one can really know, but we probably do know more of the intimate details than with most famous couples. If this is it, we have a Napoleon who continues to love his wife throughout despite her wandering fancy. Josephine, played by <b>Vanessa Kirby</b>, I found much more believable, but I admit I'm a fan of the actress. The story does dwell on her failure to produce an heir, and also the poignancy of her death, though it's off screen and Napoleon hears about it from her daughter (adult daughter - the aging process is a bit vague for the main characters in this film). Finally there's her spectral voiceover as he awaits death on St Helena.</div><div><br /></div><div>So, I'm sad. It's not great as a historical biopic, and film wise the story and script don't really come together. But it is a Ridley Scott film, and <b>it's spectacular</b>, lavish sets and battle scenes and all. Honestly, despite all my misgivings, you don't take your eyes off the screen for a moment.</div><div><br /></div><div>I did also say <b>I was thoroughly shaken up</b> by the film. That's because this was my initiation into 'sensurround' or what ever you want to call it ('4DX'); <b>seats which worked somewhat like a flight simulator</b>, lots of shaking, blasts of air past your ears, and even splashes of water drops (as if there hadn't been enough torrential rain on the way to the cinema). Naturally this was working overtime during the battle scenes, and any time a horse turned up. There were <b>many, many horses</b> in this film. You began to speculate about what you were going to be treated to when Napoleon and Josephine expressed their passion, but the shaking was disappointingly absent then. Perhaps that was its own comment on the famous love affair. </div><div><br /></div><div>But this is one director who really doesn't need any extra assistance with action scenes to prompt your imagination. 4DX was an amusing novelty, but I don't think it'll become an essential part of my future cinema experiences. Though I'll likely still go back for Scott's next film.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04344313339971737295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-665362365654853620.post-51127021925726426172023-10-31T22:30:00.005+00:002023-11-21T00:09:29.717+00:008 - merimetso<p style="text-align: left;">Let me just say first that the picture below is indeed <b>a really terrible picture</b>. I'm not pretending for a moment that I'm providing a useful illustration of what these birds look like. The thing is, I was caught by surprise: I wasn't expecting to see any interesting birds at all when I walked up to the service area this morning, for a sandwich. The route passes the small pond where I used to see various species of birds, as written up (according to their Finnish names) in this ridiculous wildlife series previously. I only had my <b>cheap smartphone</b> on me, and taking bird pictures greatly exceeds the practical specs of its camera.</p><p style="text-align: left;">You might want to check back through this absurd little series. Most of the pictures were taken at this pond, though any future pics are likely to be taken at the much larger fish pond over on the other side of the dual carriageway here. It just became a thing for me, when I began to spot interesting birds at the small pond now and again, other than the common or garden <b>mallard</b> (= <b>sinisorsa</b>). There used to be more bird action there (birds and fishermen), but lots of new houses have been built nearby, and the service area has been expanded. I don't think they restock the fish there any more.</p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoKBtwoaGgasbxzFmCsrmTlO31qo1YpQzdoaqAtQp5uhPs1k1dMGvK0IOaWUbWbvEQ9cLscsSljY2HZ-eAv558p86h_FHXmfRvebGSACXLIb5W9Q5sQPUKkMYciaeknSUfGMQCpqvlItc3QGvPqSNUmzTmPFBqOi5tGV5Y4tTJyM08wG92n690RMS7yCA/s594/2023_10_31a.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="530" data-original-width="594" height="358" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoKBtwoaGgasbxzFmCsrmTlO31qo1YpQzdoaqAtQp5uhPs1k1dMGvK0IOaWUbWbvEQ9cLscsSljY2HZ-eAv558p86h_FHXmfRvebGSACXLIb5W9Q5sQPUKkMYciaeknSUfGMQCpqvlItc3QGvPqSNUmzTmPFBqOi5tGV5Y4tTJyM08wG92n690RMS7yCA/w400-h358/2023_10_31a.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />This is a <b>cormorant</b>, known in Finland as the <b>merimetso</b>. It's a large-ish seabird, though sometimes seen inland from the coast, as here. Except that all the time I've been coming this way, I'd never seen one here before. I don't know if it would have had any joy, since although it isn't a fussy eater, it pretty much has to be fish. Nevertheless, I watched it <b>dive</b> several times. It took off at one point and landed up the other end of the pond, giving me a little thrill (I'm easily pleased) and a flash of its white underside; sadly too quick for me to capture what would anyway have been a very blurred picture.<p></p><p style="text-align: left;"><i>(an embarrassed warning - as this rambles on, there will be a childishly smutty anecdote towards the end)</i></p><p style="text-align: left;">The <b>merimetso</b> (by the way, the Finnish name translates as <i>'sea grouse'</i>) is found right round the world. I have an old but vivid memory of watching cormorants skimming the water off the coast of Maine in the US, emerging from and then disappearing into dense fog, making their haunting calls. And did you know that in the Far East, fishermen have used them to catch fish, putting a tie around their necks to prevent them swallowing their catch - obviously, they get a reward in the end! </p><p style="text-align: left;">My <b>lintuopas</b> (bird guide) was published in 1996. This is interesting because while it gives the number of breeding pairs in Finland as ~1000 (migratory/seasonal numbers can be several times that), Wikipedia gives the current (estimated) figure as over 26,000. There's been a rapid increase since the end of the last century, which reflects a <b>worldwide upward trend in their population</b>. Earlier in the Twentieth Century they were persecuted; fishermen vastly overestimated their take from fishing stocks. Their principal enemy nowadays is probably the sea eagle.</p><div style="text-align: left;">There are a couple of other cormorant species relevant to this discussion.</div><div style="text-align: left;">One is a bird virtually never seen in the UK and only very rarely in Finland, when it's lost, the <b>pygmy cormorant</b> or <b>pikkumerimetso</b>, a much smaller bird found in Anatolia and further South East.</div><div style="text-align: left;">The other is the <b>karimetso</b> (sort of, 'rock grouse'), bigger than the pygmy but still rather smaller than the merimetso. There's more of a difference in its habits, in that it doesn't stray inland, and is much more confined to colonies on rocky cliffs. So we don't see it so often in the UK, although it does live and breed here and is quite common. In fact, it's found around all Europe's Atlantic coasts, but not in the Baltic, so it's very rarely seen in Finland. Visually it might be confused with the larger cormorant/merimetso, except for its lack of white plumage (as an adult).</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">At this point a British reader might wonder why I'm being so coy about its English name. Well, some years ago, a good friend over in the Merseyside direction got himself a very fancy camera and started taking bird pictures. One day, with great pride he forwarded to me a picture of a cormorant-type bird with a "Guess where I took this?" and yes it was from his living room window. Being very immature, I had to reply, "So you had a shag in your back garden??"</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Due apologies. Especially since I knew perfectly well that a <b>shag</b> (= <b>karimetso</b>) would never have come inland like that, and it was of course a <b>cormorant</b> ie <b>merimetso</b>. If you're Finnish and you're still baffled about why this is (typically British) rude, I'll refer you to the Finnish translations of different meanings of 'shag' in my dictionary:</div><b>shag</b><span> s<span> 1 <b>merimetso</b></span></span><br /><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> 2 <b>(tupakkalaatu) shag</b></span><br /><div style="text-align: left;"><span><span><span><span><span><span> </span><span> </span><span> tr 1 <b>naida</b></span></span></span></span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span><span></span></span></div>Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04344313339971737295noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-665362365654853620.post-83824199920555028602023-10-25T23:42:00.013+01:002023-11-14T15:57:54.818+00:00Scenes of Clerical Life, by George Eliot ...Who Still Reads the 'Classics'?<div style="text-align: left;">Do <b>you</b> still read any of the 'classics' of English Literature? </div><div style="text-align: left;">By which I think I mean any of the great monumental novels of the Nineteenth Century. I was wondering about this having just read <i><b>Scenes of Clerical Life</b></i> by <b>George Eliot</b>. I looked back through my reading record for the last few years, reading 20-30 books a year, and saw that I read Jane Austen's <i>Mansfield Park</i> last year, and several books by Jerome K. Jerome at various times, though they're not exactly 'great novels'. That's all. Also, there have been a couple by Joseph Conrad, however now we're edging into the Twentieth Century. So it seems I don't read 'classics' that often myself, despite having a Lit degree and being a keen reader.</div><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #666666;"><i></i></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="color: #666666;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieekhZskXXrYMcu0-A_xbJYzkIompgeB7PVJSaBwa8KyvnGSK15Ay5d_wvmitpIKZbUdcoIodatarU8Qq4w1Guq-wvibYzljgrMBhjc4_IY4M9Kc4ZL_Vs4h9PhEbAxjJdyC6UbdQwVYhpJuQQYydXO3qpACECIkpwOANF84XOiC5iKhG271mRSAB6qf0/s518/2023_10_23a.JPG" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="518" data-original-width="319" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieekhZskXXrYMcu0-A_xbJYzkIompgeB7PVJSaBwa8KyvnGSK15Ay5d_wvmitpIKZbUdcoIodatarU8Qq4w1Guq-wvibYzljgrMBhjc4_IY4M9Kc4ZL_Vs4h9PhEbAxjJdyC6UbdQwVYhpJuQQYydXO3qpACECIkpwOANF84XOiC5iKhG271mRSAB6qf0/s320/2023_10_23a.JPG" width="197" /></a></i></span></div><span style="color: #666666;"><i><br />(FYI - there will be a few remarks about <b>Scenes of Clerical Life</b>, eventually, but this didn't turn out to be the usual sort of review I'd planned)</i></span><p></p><p style="text-align: left;">Do you remember <b>Heron Books</b>? You'd have to be quite mature; they were advertised all the time for a period, in the old 3/4 channel television age, also in magazines. All those Nineteenth Century novels were already out of copyright, therefore the text was freely available. What Heron Books and some other similar outfits did was print them and give them classy 'prestigious' bindings, providing you with a long row of famous books for your living room, much like those to be found in the libraries of stately homes. This is <b>literature as pure decoration</b>. It's unlikely that anyone ever read them. If the thought had crossed anyone's mind, they might have been worried about spoiling the look of the gold finish to the pages' edges. Very classy, except that the gold leaf lettering etc tended to look a bit tacky, and nobody's living room looks like that kind of library.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The funny thing is, this has been going on forever. Some years ago, I had to clear my aunt's house, which was all very sad, including finding a large box containing books which I'd never seen on her bookshelves. Most of them consisted of a very large and probably complete <b>set of Charles Dickens' novels</b>. They are in a very poor state; the binding of several is crumbling to dust. It's hard to tell if they've been read, but I'm sure it's only a few, if any. No, they're not Heron Books or similar, from the Sixties. I believe the set dates from the turn of the century (as that used to mean, 19th into 20th Century!), and they were almost certainly bought, by Joan's parents I assume, to impress on the bookshelf.</p><p style="text-align: left;">A friend of mine - normally reads genre fiction - is ploughing through <i>Little Dorrit</i> at the moment. I haven't read that myself, but it's a formidable tome, and I'm not surprised he's finding it hard going. Maybe <i>Great Expectations</i> (the one Dickens I have read) or <i>A Christmas Carol</i> would have been a better choice. Another friend is considering reading Smollett's <i>Tristram Shandy</i>, and has been for a while. It's a remarkable book by the way and I'm sure it'll be rewarding to read. I've had that book since university days, and still haven't read it myself.</p><p style="text-align: left;"><b>I studied English Literature</b> for a degree, and to be honest I consciously skewed my module choices to <b>avoid the Nineteenth Century</b>, knowing I'd find the sheer amount of reading required to be a challenge, to do it properly. So my direct knowledge of the so-called classics is largely limited to a few authors I admire. Jane Austen is one, and George Eliot is another. I've read all but one of each of their outputs. My thematic question here is, now we're well into the Twenty-First Century, with all those <b>Great Novels</b> fast receding from the world we live in, not to mention the language they're written in, <b>how many of us still do happily read them</b>? If we don't have to, because we're not studying them? I'd be surprised if it didn't turn out that they don't get read, outside literature courses, unless they're the subject of a new film or television series.</p><p style="text-align: left;">I was curious about what a modern Literature course was like, and so I looked up the course now offered by <b>the English Department at my old university</b>. Unsurprisingly, it's very different to the course I took. Overall, I was impressed, by its intelligent approach to its subject, its complete embracing of the state of the art, and especially its relevance. Despite greatly respecting the course I followed, I think it was weak in turning out graduates with solid skills to offer prospective employers; that's very much not the case now, with an emphasis on real world activities and experiences (even encouragement to take spells abroad), and requirements to gain and use all kinds of personal working skills, ie. in presentation (some interesting multimedia elements), arguing ones case, different forms of writing, varieties of team work, and so on and so forth. There's a greater emphasis on research than I remember. For a smart, ambitious and adventurous student, it's brilliant. If one has good ideas to explore, it looks as if the university would help you any way it could.</p><div style="text-align: left;">There were some aspects of this picture of excellence which cast slight shadows for me. For one, <b>would I have even been accepted for the course these days</b>? Actually, maybe, because the school I went to has also changed in the intervening years, and without checking, I'm sure I'd be much better tooled up to apply today. But then there's the money. Any prospective student in the UK today has to think long and hard about whether they can justify the expense. As I've said above, my old college has clearly done its best to make its English course one of the best (and it currently ranks near the top). But it costs, especially if one wants to follow that dream to spend part of the course in one of their foreign partner institutions.</div><div style="text-align: left;">A second 'shadow' for me is that overall the course demands <b>even more reading</b>. I barely managed to survive that in my time, now, well I wonder, suppose like so many others I had to support myself with a part time job. I think I'd definitely have to cut down on my table football practice.</div><div style="text-align: left;">A more mildly critical point is to do with <b>foreign literature</b>. It is a department of 'English and Related Literature', and in my day you couldn't do the course without some proficiency in a foreign language. I weakly satisfied this by doing a module on Dante, and making a hash of starting to learn Italian (Can I just say I do today possess both a GCSE and an AS Level in Italian - after years of evening classes!) If I've read the website correctly, although you will engage with foreign literature more widely than we were expected to, it does seem that you can avoid actually knowing a foreign language, if you fashion your course to do so.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">All very fascinating. As I said, I was impressed. The progress made, the evolution of the course, as far as I can tell from what I read, suggests that while the course and its tutors still hold the study of literature in the highest regard, they've created something valuable and relevant to the world we live in.</div><div style="text-align: left;">And yes, it does seem that you can configure your course to minimise the attention you pay to the 'classics'. The modern course is much less of a study covering the corpus of English Literature than it was; on the other hand, whatever English Literature is, <b>in a modern globalised world, English Literature is a far more expansive beast than it was</b>. Does it matter, if we gradually forget such authors as George Eliot, all but the select few favoured by film producers? </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">For a long while now, if you wanted to read anything from the Early Modern era or earlier, you had to interpret or even translate. The language barrier has moved forwards, I think, in my own lifetime, into the Nineteenth Century. Perhaps as far as mid-century writers like George Eliot and Charles Dickens. The main and obvious obstacle is vocabulary. There are whole areas of terminology which are obsolete today, which can make a reader want to have a dictionary handy. And in <b>George Eliot's <i>Scenes of Clerical Life</i></b>, her (I hope you haven't got this far without knowing that 'George Eliot' was the pen name of <b>Mary Anne Evans</b>?) writing is full of words for clothing. This won't have been accidental; the curious thing is that she was writing stories set a generation beforehand, and the various words for clothing would have been obviously old fashioned for her readership. In the second story, she even writes about Gothic architecture as a new fashion. 'Trending', as we would say today. She wanted to underline that she was writing about a world gone by, even for her and her readers. </div><p style="text-align: left;"><b>So much alien vocabulary</b> means we have to be historians as much as literary critics. And Eliot's style of writing, like most of the Great Novel Writers, can seem ponderous to modern eyes, and not easily digested. I mean, I'm relatively familiar with these <b>elaborately constructed sentences, fitted together with so many sub-clauses</b> that you don't want to be too sleepy or it becomes impossible to hold in mind the various elements that make up the whole, before, after many lines of text, you reach the end of the sentence, and then wonder how it started. <i><span style="color: #999999;">(Do you like how 'meta' that last sentence was?!)</span></i> Almost reminds me of trying to read Finnish... ;) Anyway, Eliot's writing here was a mixed pleasure for me at times. And yet, I'm going to tell you that she writes beautifully. One trivial discovery, which delighted me, was spotting so many names of <b>familiar garden flowers</b>. I had no idea that so many of today's standard garden flowers have been commonplace in England since, at least, right back in early Victorian times.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Not trivial at all is that Eliot's writing makes its strongest impression in its realism. <b>Social and psychological realism</b>. Her characters are three dimensional, their virtues and failings quite believable. She didn't start writing until around 30 I believe, and her maturity and keen eye for character and behaviour are evident. <i><b>Scenes of Clerical Life</b></i> was her first book and it made a great impact. The book's three stories are very readable. They do focus on the lives of clerical figures, and from the historical point of view the last story, <i><b>Janet's Repentance</b></i>, has much to tell us about the divisions between Church and Chapel, and within the established Church, between Episcopalians and Evangelicals. Don't be put off!, it's done entirely in the context of the travails of the characters.The tales are a little sentimental at times, and the various Victorian-style tragedies can feel a bit much, but on balance they convey a picture of real life and people in the English Midlands of the early Nineteenth Century. I guess, there's the answer to my question. The Great Nineteenth Century novels have become books we mainly read out of historical interest.</p>Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04344313339971737295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-665362365654853620.post-38730104722423828532023-09-29T16:59:00.001+01:002023-09-29T16:59:53.101+01:00A 'Best Ever Videos' List? Really?<p></p><br />Lists here, lists there, <b>lists everywhere</b> on the World Wide Web. They're ridicuous. The value of a 'best ever' list ends as soon as you've read it. Your taste isn't the same as the person's who devised the list. And when we're talking about pop culture, <b>what could be more disposable?</b><p></p><p>However, here is a list of favourite music videos. Mine, just mine. Its main purpose is to remind me of them - then I can go straight to YouTube and watch them. They're all there. You may have noticed I have a 'Desert Island Discs' page. But this isn't really appropriate for that. Partly because of the inevitable confusion with the 'favourite music' theme. A lot of 'best ever videos' lists I've seen are clearly lists of someone's favourite music, when they've simply gone and found the video made for the various songs. Not here. <b>These are film pieces</b>. True, they are all for songs I like. But in my humble opinion, with each one, a film maker with skill has taken the music up a level and created art. No worries if you don't agree, though I'd ask you to check if that isn't just because you don't like the songs. Appreciate the video as a thing in itself. Sometimes it's here for its <b>humour</b>; sometimes there's a genius 3/4 minute <b>drama</b>; sometimes it's innovative <b>video trickery</b>; sometimes it's great <b>cinematography</b>. See for yourselves.</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzYgxJuh_8GR_nv8K5rLqAnVmVO7_dSuOCeJJpBZD5Kwmk2jPQ5qmk70qZllu6vOTXP9uNpA4gxow2Uk2FEyl3Ct2DAve7_WOp4NErZqub7wLqTo4_EJYkRHq-g8ZudKyU2eHmJsCu5XTcGoHNkDZQ4rRrt-CQwhsnqHLvc4DzILa5P0lcAE_9_Qu3WpQ/s1217/2023_09_24a.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="673" data-original-width="1217" height="354" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzYgxJuh_8GR_nv8K5rLqAnVmVO7_dSuOCeJJpBZD5Kwmk2jPQ5qmk70qZllu6vOTXP9uNpA4gxow2Uk2FEyl3Ct2DAve7_WOp4NErZqub7wLqTo4_EJYkRHq-g8ZudKyU2eHmJsCu5XTcGoHNkDZQ4rRrt-CQwhsnqHLvc4DzILa5P0lcAE_9_Qu3WpQ/w640-h354/2023_09_24a.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><p></p><div style="text-align: left;"><b><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhgVu2lsi_k" target="_blank"><i>Figure It Out</i> - Royal Blood</a></b></div><p style="text-align: left;">Great rock song, with its bass lead guitar. But this is a perfect little film, using trick colour filters to keep you puzzling about what's going on. You have to <i><b>'figure it out'</b></i>, geddit? Brilliant start: barefoot girl walks into a cafeteria in a mall: why is everyone backing away from her? Then we see why. The ending is a neatly delivered surprise. But it's the actress (Stella Maeve) who really sells it, dodging security guards etc without ever trying to kid you she's as strong as them, utterly convincing as...(spoiler!)</p><p><b><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTWKbfoikeg" target="_blank"><i>Smells Like Teen Spirit</i> - Nirvana</a></b></p><p style="text-align: left;">So hard to portray <b>anarchy</b> and yet not fall apart from being anarchic as you make it :) But this video comes close. There's definitely some loss of control as the crowd start spilling over the scene. The whole thing is heaving. But by the end the chaos has been well shepherded. Simple effective use of the 'janitor'. Love it, especially the 'anti-cheerleaders' with their anarchy logos and total lack of blondeness. The band all hair and energy. Does justice to an iconic song.</p><p><b><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IslF_EyhMzg" target="_blank"><i>Gay Bar</i> - Electric Six</a></b></p><p style="text-align: left;">Ha ha yes this startled me when I first saw it. My shock was less to do with the blatant homoeroticist provocation, but the extreme irreverance of dressing up as BDSM Abraham Lincolns. I thought, they're American, how on earth are they getting away with it? You can't do this to <b>Abraham Lincoln</b>!! This was my introduction to a band who take no prisoners and make it work for them, being (sort of) under the radar. Love this video for its cheerful outrageousness. Though annoyed at some of the lyrics being censored. NB link only works at time of this posting. It gets regularly taken down. Can't think why.</p><p><b><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m97WlpsuU74" target="_blank"><i>Something Good '08</i> - Utah Saints</a></b></p><p style="text-align: left;">Here's a song considerably transmogrified from the one which Kate Bush wrote. But I gather she loves it. As you can tell from the title it's been out more than once. And has had more than one video made for it. This is the one to watch, tells a cute and very silly story of a guy introducing the 'Running Man' dance into <b>South Wales night clubs</b>. Totally absurd and with a very funny pay off at the end. Gorgeous girls, fantastic choreography and brilliant upbeat music; a comic delight from beginning to end.</p><p><b><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWmrfgj0MZI" target="_blank"><i>Unfinished Sympathy</i> - Massive Attack</a></b></p><p style="text-align: left;">I have watched this many many times and have never not found it profoundly moving. You wouldn't know it from a one line description: Shara Nelson walks along a straight street and sings the song. Wonderful voice, she reaches into depths of the human soul with the lyric. It's not perfect I think; some of the bystanders and pedestrians (and legless skateboarder) are a little too organised/arranged. But the simple concept lets this poignant and <b>melancholy masterpiece</b> work its emotional brilliance on us.</p><p><b><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uz1Jwyxd4tE" target="_blank"><i>Hate to Say I Told You So</i> - The Hives</a></b></p><p style="text-align: left;">The Hives are the one band here I've seen live, and I still rank it as the best live show I've been at. With this song they were everywhere for a period. And if you've seen only one of these videos, I bet it's this one. The idea is that the band play the song in a studio, and we're watching it on a <b>dodgy</b> tv screen. They're a bit punk you see, but thankfully with lots of knowing humour. And they do a very clever freeze frame at the heart of the video. Maybe nothing special in what I've said, except that The Hives are a VERY energetic band and the video serves that up well.</p><p><b><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNNdarr_RpA" target="_blank"><i>Summernight City</i> - Therion</a></b></p><p style="text-align: left;">What do ABBA fans make of this? I suspect they're a little nonplussed. It's very very different in tone from the original. For starters, Therion are a Swedish metal band with a penchant for operatic singers. Which you get here. The lyrics are unchanged, but given a satirical and very ironic twist, by a film which is all about class. The setting is sepia 1920s-ish (I suppose) and it portrays the arrival (via a steam train accompanied by some <b>excellent metal chugging</b>) at a lavish party at an old mansion, attended by members of privileged high society. <i>"...My kind of people everywhere..."</i> Watch this! Start the revolution! (well, in your mind)</p><p><b><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3PJkciaQAU" target="_blank"><i>Fast and Frightening</i> - L7</a></b></p><p style="text-align: left;">Though not from the punk era, 90s rather than mid 70s, L7 are more punk than anything, much more convincingly '<b>don't care</b>' than any of the other later 'punk' bands. The video's method is typical of a lot of hard rock bands, to film the band playing the song. Seems so simple, except that Hollywood director Gore Verbinski does a genius job with punk style cuts and overlays. The band and the instruments are all there, though Donita Sparks is the main focus. She's terrific in this. She's charismatic and defies any kind of sexist nonsense about women in rock. It's a great song but from everything I've heard and read it was in the live sets that they really shined. Near impossible to catch that in a video; so this one is a perfect substitute.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhydram3esnFi1VjhB6kNGpSgwLBWgxsiFd47TrpdVamMXH_QW_DpQsVN4Ex95wgcvMwu3jXtbjzR9lnqMA4PSA0dsrL3Uef_XXFFrM4AUSnNkKg4sx0O4_WIsdm8Ra78qxma1YXScCAJijb14nNSS5v3ai-YEjSrLvwz-Y3f84BxvzT4hOJNM3RVbUALc/s950/2023_09_24b.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="683" data-original-width="950" height="288" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhydram3esnFi1VjhB6kNGpSgwLBWgxsiFd47TrpdVamMXH_QW_DpQsVN4Ex95wgcvMwu3jXtbjzR9lnqMA4PSA0dsrL3Uef_XXFFrM4AUSnNkKg4sx0O4_WIsdm8Ra78qxma1YXScCAJijb14nNSS5v3ai-YEjSrLvwz-Y3f84BxvzT4hOJNM3RVbUALc/w400-h288/2023_09_24b.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p style="text-align: left;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: left;"><br /></p><p>So, a page for me, an aide memoire; but great if anyone's bothered to have a look and then go and see some of the videos. No doubt I'll add another video or two later, when I remember favourites from the past, or discover new ones.</p><p><br /></p>Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04344313339971737295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-665362365654853620.post-7993099912650527422023-09-21T23:39:00.005+01:002023-11-02T21:48:46.709+00:00Revenger, by Alastair Reynolds<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwt04RnK6laFG_8WkkcvMcqf7qrPnzcSKZe8f2EaO2vIj_NhA0AO4qW3_a5pE2PU74rMf1cc7QwcKQFRLgRuXpwKPJGlif9InupexuUB3gwl1iEBbg1rxvPmo-I9WbXu4sTI0_EFZLwTF_ZjPWd_m2eNGlgX4fuePYqKU7h_HR4xi6LDesTrgJw6a6bss/s459/2023_09_21a.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="459" data-original-width="313" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwt04RnK6laFG_8WkkcvMcqf7qrPnzcSKZe8f2EaO2vIj_NhA0AO4qW3_a5pE2PU74rMf1cc7QwcKQFRLgRuXpwKPJGlif9InupexuUB3gwl1iEBbg1rxvPmo-I9WbXu4sTI0_EFZLwTF_ZjPWd_m2eNGlgX4fuePYqKU7h_HR4xi6LDesTrgJw6a6bss/s320/2023_09_21a.jpg" width="218" /></a></div><br />Space pirates!! <i><b>Revenger</b></i> is what you might call a ripping yarn. Two kids steal aboard a pirate's sailing ship and go in search of treasure, hoping to repair the family fortunes. They have to prove themselves to their shipmates, deal with abrasive friendships, betrayals, tragic losses, and all sorts of nasty surprises; all in all growing up very quickly. A great range of unearthly threats and devilish traps confront them, not to mention some very unpleasant villains. Yes, <i><b>Revenger</b></i> might well have been a typical classic boy's adventure story; except that this isn't the 19th Century, it's set in space, the 'ship' sails on the sun's light, and the two sibling teenagers are girls.<p></p><p>It's the first book in a trilogy by <b>Alastair Reynolds</b>. He's best known for his <i><b>Revelation Space</b></i> series, the epitome of what most would think of as 'hard sf'. Which means that the real meat of the books is the speculative science, and its far future setting. I have read <i><b>Revelation Space</b></i>, and while for me it's not quite on the same high level as Iain M. Banks' <i>Culture</i> books, it's certainly ram packed with fascinating imaginative ideas, and I could well carry on and read more. But here, anticipating a week or so on holiday, I wanted something a little lighter, and this other series seemed to fit the bill. Maybe I was wary of the Young Adult branding (not that Reynolds or the publisher use it themselves, or do they?) some commentators throw at it, but I was basically after an engaging story, and in particular, a tale in which an sf author plays around with the concepts connected with <b>solar sailing</b>, which I can't recollect in other sf stories I've read. Not that such stories don't exist, I just haven't read one so far - ah! I lie! Of course that vessel in Gene Wolfe's <i>Urth of the New Sun</i>... But a very different book, definitely not for new readers :)</p><p>I'm torn, commenting on this book. I'm apparently not the only reader who's felt the tone is 'uncertain', and some of the narration a bit shambolic. To start with, the <b>characters</b>: if you took them individually and profiled them, I think you'd say Reynolds made them distinctive and interesting. Though I was somewhat disappointed by the Big Baddie when she finally appears at the end. The set-up deserved a sort of female Alan Rickman (think Sheriff of Nottingham or Hans Gruber), but we got... not that. By way of contrast, I think <b>Fura's</b> (the younger sister, protagonist in this book) character development is effectively done, though maybe that's because much of it depends on startling sf-style metamorphosis. But where's the sex, to be blunt? Not that I require gratuitous stuff, but the main two are teenagers, and there's no suggestion anywhere in the book that the thought of it has ever crossed their minds. Like I said - TEENAGERS!?!</p><p>But the <b>character interaction</b> and the <b>dialogue</b> is often clunky. I don't think Reynolds quite pulled off his version of pirate speech - he opts for <i>'ain'ts'</i> and similar vernacular. He resolutely avoids any <i>'Aarrrhs'</i> but we might as well have had one or two, for the laughs. </p><p>Then there's the <b>plotting</b>, which is annoying at times. It often feels forced, in pursuance of showing off the book's inventiveness and the various reveals. Getting through the various tight squeezes often required lots of handwaving and suspension of disbelief. On a tangent: readers not well used to science fiction might be seriously nonplussed at that remark, saying, but isn't it all fantastical? Well, yes and no. SF world building may be entirely beyond our own realities, but still needs to maintain a strong level of consistency. If you will, it needs to obey its own rules. Not too much of a problem in this book, but on the other hand, there's an awful lot of <b>convenient happenstance</b>. Just a small example, the way Fura rescues Paladin's head when escaping from Mazarile (yes, what the hell am I talking about... Need to know: Paladin's a robot).</p><p>Now I feel I'm overplaying the criticism. There are qualities strongly on show in <i><b>Revenger</b></i> which are very familiar from <i>Revelation Space</i> and, I assume, Reynolds' other books. One is Reynolds' habit of thinking up astonishingly unpleasant ways to die, taking full advantage of sf and space-set possibilities. Honestly, some of the gruesome deaths beat situations which have made movie goers rush out of cinemas, and if this book were ever filmed, I think producers' brows would be painfully knitted, trying to figure out what to do with them, if to show them at all.</p><p>No argument about the <b>imagination</b> involved! And that's the other quality which does give a shine to <b>Reynolds' writing</b>. The book is pleasingly full of ideas, often highly original ones, which I won't spoil here. I did feel the ending was a little weak, but there are two other volumes which perhaps make up for that. One does want to know how Fura turns out, and whether her sister has actually gone 'to the dark side', to use that clichĂ©. I haven't even touched on the solar system of the book, and the extreme transformation it has undergone, into millions of microworlds. Neatly avoiding an issue many of us have about space travel in the future, the need for faster than light travel, because we don't have to go outside the one solar system.</p><p>So, <b>decent SF</b>, <b>excellent world building</b>, but uneven in some of the writing departments. I can see myself reading more in this series, but maybe given a choice, I'd pick up the next in the <i>Revelation Space</i> series first.</p><p><br /></p>Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04344313339971737295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-665362365654853620.post-71245263737025765552023-06-21T23:06:00.000+01:002023-06-21T23:06:48.296+01:00Longbourn, by Jo Baker<p><b></b></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyQfdUROVEvR4unmC6D5LP5DB81hSK3T-HUSPz_haehfr61h-HTjjAXPt9CHqSUPXb7VToCpVZC2E0wA5ThD98g5Ya2dZ6mFyZqKlydgjc7PX8pGsQk4V4UttmyHvwCGH2FNkuouhnlL6eu2bePJTBtMUQnOsfs3uelpLvjBV0lmG9p4v7agDSxGWJ8KM/s562/2023_06_21a.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="562" data-original-width="371" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyQfdUROVEvR4unmC6D5LP5DB81hSK3T-HUSPz_haehfr61h-HTjjAXPt9CHqSUPXb7VToCpVZC2E0wA5ThD98g5Ya2dZ6mFyZqKlydgjc7PX8pGsQk4V4UttmyHvwCGH2FNkuouhnlL6eu2bePJTBtMUQnOsfs3uelpLvjBV0lmG9p4v7agDSxGWJ8KM/s320/2023_06_21a.jpg" width="211" /></a></b></div><b><br />Longbourn</b> is home to the <b>Bennet</b> family. They are Mr and Mrs Bennet, with their five daughters, Jane, Elizabeth, Mary, Lydia and Kitty. If this sounds familiar, it's hardly surprising. However while <b>Jo Baker's</b> book <i><b>Longbourn</b></i> is set in the Bennet household which readers worldwide know and love from Jane Austen's most famous novel, it has as its focus a cast of characters who are usually only fleetingly seen in classic novels, the various servants who keep the household running. <p></p><p>There is quite a cottage industry - or should I say, stately home industry - devoted to spinoffs from <b>Jane Austen's <i>Pride and Prejudice</i></b>. Many years ago I gave my Mum one of the better known examples, <i>Pemberley</i> by Emma Tennant. At that time I hadn't read any Jane Austen myself, but I knew she was a fan; as far as I remember she was non-commital about its worth. I've just had a quick check online and it does seem that the majority of these books are continuations of the story.</p><p>I confess I've only read <i>Pride and Prejudice</i> once, long enough ago to be a little unsure about certain comparisons. I will read it again some day; it'll be interesting to see whether I find it hard to appreciate the novel in the same way, after reading <i>Longbourn</i>. I gather that the events of the narrative match up well with those of the original. But <b>the world of the servants</b>, the downstairs world, <b>is largely separate from that of the landowning classes</b>, and most of the prominent characters of Austen's book are only occasionally glimpsed, and they barely interact with our foregrounded characters when they do. For instance, when the horrendous Lady Catherine de Burgh arrives at Longbourn in order to bully Elizabeth for her presumptousness, she sweeps right in without acknowledging the existence of the housemaid at all. As for the conversations between the finer folk, we mostly aren't privy to them, unless one of the lower orders presses an ear to a door.</p><p>The author Jo Baker has a clear agenda, in <b>wanting us to think about this state of things</b>. Most readers take it as read that for Jane Austen, these class divisions are the natural order of things. (Reading more deeply, Austen does seem to address some diverse thinking in typically subtle fashion, such as the matter of slavery, in <i>Mansfield Park</i>). I don't think Baker is seeking to undermine Jane Austen, so much as trying to make us understand the reality of the lives of all these underlings, that the whole grand social edifice depends on. There is some powerful writing throughout, vivid at the start as she describes how tough it had to be for the housemaids forced to give their hands such harsh treatment on washing day. The Bennet girls never appear to understand the physical grind forced on the servants in order to enable their endless social round.</p><p>Moreover, crucially for this story, they never seem to understand that <b>the servants lead lives as social human beings</b> as well. When near the end protagonist housemaid Sarah wishes to leave her employ at Pemberley (sorry, that's a minor spoiler), Elizabeth and Darcy find it incomprehensible. For a servant, no more congenial post could be found anywhere. But the events of Baker's story, largely taking place out of sight of their 'betters', have made the decision impossible to resist for Sarah. It's a scene I like very much. It's the first time we have properly seen Darcy, and while at first he stands right over Sarah in a fashion which he must have used time and again with servants, asserting his superiority, it's a test of Sarah's willingness to take charge of her life; she passes it, and he accepts it. </p><p>I'm less sure about <b>the representation of Elizabeth</b>, in that scene, and also several scenes beforehand. The Elizabeth of <i>P & P</i> is loved by readers for her empathy and wisdom, and strength of character (yes?); but here, with the servants, while never unkind, she does come across as blithely indifferent. Another (not-really-a)spoiler: Sarah has fallen in love with the new footman (barely mentioned in the original), but who has disappeared for reasons I'll leave alone. When she first tries to engage her superiors there's no interest and soon it's as if he was never there. Speaking to Elizabeth, she refers to him as <i>"<b>Mr</b> Smith"</i> and Elizabeth is baffled; enlightened, she responds with <i>"Oh you mean Smith! The footman!"</i> at which point her mind is soon on other things. I don't really know about this. It'll be one of the aspects of <i>P & P</i> I'll be most curious about, to judge whether Elizabeth could be quite as shallow as she is shown to be there.</p><p><i><b>Longbourn</b></i> is full of elements which make one itch to read <i>Pride and Prejudice</i> again. <b>Some readers will find it difficult to view the original in the same way again</b>. I know that my attention will be focused on any appearance or simply any mention of the servants. Baker is obliged to invent some of them anyway, so they won't figure (like the highly entertaining Polly). But I'm full of praise for bringing them to life. I'm also greatly impressed with the writing, the rendering of the natural environment in and around the great houses. It's richly detailed at times, but never detached from the human experience of life in that world.</p><p>I've no idea what Mum would have thought of <i><b>Longbourn</b></i>. As you may have guessed from how I started this piece, I was resistant to yet another example of Austen follow-on fiction. But <b><i>Longbourn</i> is definitely its own book</b>. I would think most readers will get wrapped up in the stories of Sarah and her fellow downstairs dwellers. The characters are all beautifully written. One or two may seem to display a very different side to them from that seen in <i>P & P</i>; but people can look different from different perspectives in real life, can't they? There's a film on the way; unusually, I'm really looking forward to it. Though it'll miss the warm experience of reading this book.</p>Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04344313339971737295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-665362365654853620.post-32198488157429059842023-06-02T23:30:00.001+01:002023-06-03T09:58:23.711+01:007 - riikinkukko<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinanfv81_kqlHPUxQ9Ftwgpf0Gk8uaPQc-1OO1Qnve7YQHpzoPB0pGHvDbw9wj7MOZADAxn-AO5EOJBlGJ8JHByR5qFfl13Abeu9vtIHldwC6eueJDcWaQSu3B7IUydYQgP8FFmoj3J3OECtKAQFCOj_mp2_JaTcLl4gilhPBdLeFKtPzobjxHqouA/s606/2023_06_02b.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="374" data-original-width="606" height="394" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinanfv81_kqlHPUxQ9Ftwgpf0Gk8uaPQc-1OO1Qnve7YQHpzoPB0pGHvDbw9wj7MOZADAxn-AO5EOJBlGJ8JHByR5qFfl13Abeu9vtIHldwC6eueJDcWaQSu3B7IUydYQgP8FFmoj3J3OECtKAQFCOj_mp2_JaTcLl4gilhPBdLeFKtPzobjxHqouA/w640-h394/2023_06_02b.jpg" width="640" /></a></div> You will know the <b>riikinkukko</b> better as the <b>peacock</b>. Or, strictly speaking, the blue or Indian peacock. I didn't know until just now that there are three species of peacock. The green peacock is found in South East Asia, and a third, the Congo peacock in Africa. Quite mysterious how that one ended up where it is. They all have striking trains for display. Of course the extraordinary multi-eyed feather display of the male peacock isn't evident in this picture, not least because that isn't a male peacock.<p></p><p><b>Peacocks</b> have been introduced all around the world, especially for decoration in <b>ornamental gardens</b>. My local <b>tip</b> (ie. local council refuse disposal site) is not an ornamental garden. Nevertheless, from somewhere nearby which I haven't figured out yet, they come and hang out at the tip. At first it's a pleasant surprise to see them, but soon they're more of a nuisance, getting in the way as you park and unload your stuff (today, hedge clippings, cardboard, and other sundry rubbish). Worse, they're quite snooty as birds go, and sometimes show active resentment to the humans around them. And then there's their vocalisation, which isn't the most attractive, like a crow on steroids.</p><p>So, I took this snap today. I only take my phone with me when I go out in case of car breakdown, but I had to take a snap of this young lady peacock (er, '<b>peahen</b>') on seeing this amusing behaviour. I spotted her entranced by the new friend she thought she was making, admiring her in these <b>mirrors</b>. Someone had dumped several of them here, and she was moving along the row of them, engaging with her reflection in each one.</p><p>The peacock or <b>riikinkukko</b> doesn't feature at all in my <b>lintuopas</b> (= bird guide). The Finns clearly do have them however, in the same way we do; I looked them up to see if I could justify including them in this series, and ticked that box when I discovered Finnish does have a word for the peacock, ie. <b>riikinkukko</b>. It dates back to the 17th Century. I was intrigued by the word, because although <b><i>kukko</i></b> unsurprisingly means <i>cock</i>, I couldn't figure out the first bit. It turns out that <i><b>riiki</b></i> is an old term for the Kingdom of Sweden. It makes sense, that Sweden their imperial rulers at the time, would have brought some to Finland. I guess.</p><p>So today, they can be seen at <b>Korkeasaari Zoo</b> in Helsinki amongst other locations. Or if that's too far to travel, you can come and see them at my local tip.</p>Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04344313339971737295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-665362365654853620.post-75478360555039099342023-05-03T00:15:00.001+01:002023-06-03T10:08:11.334+01:00Coming Home, by Sue Gee<p><i><b></b></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1P89HLd87kSWvZEouevaZkKJKDZOaahgfdlwZePpTxxOaQSU8Pm2JXrTRwQyjC1Q3v1wabLH7lAJIDkRs772xVrN1Mfs60ovErHV_7WqcV8dUz9NOdHr5y9WXFagY-YT0y45VBRHGsNXFMlhq0Y22iEv6XEiCTIym7dk_yy7xg4tGcOIXj9KpYv7i/s562/2023_05_02a.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="562" data-original-width="377" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1P89HLd87kSWvZEouevaZkKJKDZOaahgfdlwZePpTxxOaQSU8Pm2JXrTRwQyjC1Q3v1wabLH7lAJIDkRs772xVrN1Mfs60ovErHV_7WqcV8dUz9NOdHr5y9WXFagY-YT0y45VBRHGsNXFMlhq0Y22iEv6XEiCTIym7dk_yy7xg4tGcOIXj9KpYv7i/w269-h400/2023_05_02a.jpg" width="269" /></a></b></i></div><i><b><br />Coming Home</b></i> by <b>Sue Gee</b> tells the life story of a family, born at the end of Britain's time in India and then making its unassuming way in the aftermath of the Second World War, sending two new lives out into the world while experiencing the fading away of the old.<p></p><p>Many of the books I've read recently have been thought provoking and worthy of comment, and yet I haven't done so. Yet this... Maybe I shouldn't write about it, because there is so much that is <b>personal</b> attached to my response to it. Which I can't ignore. I have glanced at some other reactions to the book, and while it's been mostly liked, it doesn't seem to rank as highly as others of her books. Myself, I have read <i><b>The Hours of the Night</b></i> and loved it, it's beautifully written and left a lasting impression. I knew I'd read more by this author.</p><p><i><b>Coming Home</b></i> seemed a natural choice, because of its background in British India. This is one of a long list of story elements which are echoed in my own life and in my family's. In our case, it was our Mum who grew up in India where her father my grandfather worked for the railway. He fought in Mesopotamia in WWI; and Mum herself went into uniform with the General Slim's army in Burma in 1944-5. Both were seriously injured in their respective wars. Dad hadn't been in India but as a career Army officer his life was also involved with Empire, and its coming back home. </p><p>I would seem to have been perhaps 7/8 years or so younger than the children in the book. <b>Many details of family life resonate</b>, notably that I was sent away to boarding prep school at the same age as Freddie in the book, and was about as suited to it as he was. Which is to say, not very much at all. I don't have any ill feeling towards my parents about it, it was simply something so many middle class boys did in those days. I didn't share the awful delusion of Freddie's about his birth, but looking back I can see that the feeling of missing out on family life (eg. no birthdays, mine fell during term time) contributed to childhood depression in a major way. Then, later on in life, I also went to York University, to study English. Yes, I recognise many small and large details in the lives of both Freddie and Bea.</p><p>I could add much more, quite a list really, but it really would be a matter of missing the wood for the trees. The details aren't the point. Many of those readers who were non-plussed by the book seem to feel that there's <b>no 'story'</b>. I did wonder if one of the editors or Sue Gee herself may have felt the same, because the theme of Freddie's origin may have been introduced to satisfy that 'need'. It didn't ring true for me; it spins off Freddie hearing a brief snatch of speech by his father, <i>"No son of mine..."</i> which as adults, and understanding the bluff character of Will the father, we recognise for what it is, but which young Freddie takes literally as an indication that he was adopted. I feel this is something which would have been resolved by a smart boy like Freddie well before the age at which it all comes out. No, I don't think elements of melodrama like that were needed. I think it's telling - if I read correctly - that that storyline was a wholly fictional one, while most of the book consists of a retelling of <b>Sue Gee's own</b> experience of <b>family life</b>, with mainly the names changed for the sake of objectivity.</p><p><i><b>Coming Home</b></i> I felt profoundly, and it was a difficult read in some ways, as my mind spun off into the story of our family. Perhaps it's one of those books which won't mean very much to people outside a certain generation, the middle class British who grew up in the Fifties. I couldn't help alternate waves of sadness and nostalgia. I shouldn't let the melancholy take over though, it's purely the natural feeling one has when the past stretches so far back, into such a different world. A world populated by family who once meant so much but now exist only in memory.</p><p>The blurb on the back is a little misleading. India itself has very little presence in the book; its importance is its place in Will and Flo's world view, as the place which formed so much of what they are. But the actual life of the Sutherland family is lived in Southern England, which changes remorselessly of course. We all feel out of touch in the end. It's funny how so many people see their family as almost a fixed thing; but that fixed picture is a different one for each person in it. I'm grateful for this book. It achieves one thing very well, conveying the soul of a family while portraying its growth, its shifts, its fissures, its accidents and its healing. Best of all its elusive fondnesses. The characters in and around the family all change as time goes on, and the author renders it with great empathy. I guess she had to - Bea is her, pretty much.</p><p><i><b>Coming Home</b></i> isn't - in my view! - about post colonials adjusting to the end of empire, it's not about changing times, or women venturing outside a domestic life or a dozen other themes of late Twentieth Century history. It's about <b>the beats in the family story</b>, the image of itself which gets presented and sometimes falls apart (if there's one small detail which I can vividly imagine my own father emulating, it's that continually repeated <i>"Oh I don't know..."</i> of Will), and it's about the way the nebulous thing that the family is gradually and inevitably fades away. The theme's there in Flo's sister Vivie's dying words: "...All families disappear, and become one." And the poignant coda, familiar to anyone who's had to organise a house clearance, seen at the end when Bea delves into boxes of old family papers: <b>What is she to do with all this?</b></p>Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04344313339971737295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-665362365654853620.post-53989061683929492542022-11-14T23:37:00.001+00:002022-11-14T23:37:17.610+00:00Ghost Wall, by Sarah Moss<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXyKNr8L4jvKgyE0QbuZiR7fNYYc9zD2v5Z90PwF_CtBDDDwSZgbVqkRN1-WdsMsrcelPKQlO1QlKTloUEKBUaJMrCDTGzeirUjHLXdBzBi4L6ng9EQhVYKl17sXaUPASVEECRO93-ljA4lJ9F20N0ts0BeminjtmC9H13kBuhQzAzsA5LnIRcGTps/s510/2022_11_13a.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="510" data-original-width="345" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXyKNr8L4jvKgyE0QbuZiR7fNYYc9zD2v5Z90PwF_CtBDDDwSZgbVqkRN1-WdsMsrcelPKQlO1QlKTloUEKBUaJMrCDTGzeirUjHLXdBzBi4L6ng9EQhVYKl17sXaUPASVEECRO93-ljA4lJ9F20N0ts0BeminjtmC9H13kBuhQzAzsA5LnIRcGTps/s320/2022_11_13a.jpg" width="216" /></a></div><br />I finished this book hating someone. Someone who doesn't exist. <b>Sarah Moss</b>' writing can do that to you, and paradoxically the hate is fiercer for the fact that the villain of <i><b>Ghost Wall</b></i> isn't out-and-out evil; though he's not far off it.<p></p><p>It's 17 year old <b>Sylvie</b>'s Dad, who signs the family up for a summer 'camp' experiencing Iron Age life up in Northumberland, organised by a university Professor, who's brought three of his students along. Her Dad is obsessed with the life of the pre-Roman peoples of Britain, of Northern England particularly. He's often drawn the family into this, so Sylvie and her Mum have often found theselves spending their holidays trudging aong ancient pathways, or going to museums to view ancient artifacts. And once he took Sylvie with him to see one of the <b>bog people</b> at an exhibition; a sacrificial victim her appearance preserved by the peat, who turned out to be a young girl not unlike Sylvie herself.</p><p>At this summer camp, although Prof Jim and his students are sleeping in tents, they're otherwise experiencing ancient life in many ways, notably in donning similar rough clothing and <b>eating food they can hunt or forage</b>. Sylvie's Dad Bill goes further, and obliges his family to sleep together in primitive straw cushioned bunks in the <b>replica round house</b> which was previously built at the site. She doesn't sleep well there, one of many ways in which her resilience is ground down. She gains a friend, in the one female student, Molly, who as some would see it, "isn't taking it seriously". Seems the Prof thinks her grades are weak. It makes Sylvie anxious when Molly goes off script and eg. goes off to the Spar to get some ice cream. Ice cream was unknown to the Celts. </p><p>Molly realises that Sylvie isn't anxious about stuff like that because she herself is taking it seriously, or due to those moor walking times with her Dad thanks to which she already does have lots of appropriate skills and knowledge. It's because she knows that if people break the 'rules', she and her Mum will cop it from her Dad. He hurts them. Mum has telling bruises on her arms. And she has the apathetic demeanour of someone utterly beaten down by Bill's domineering behaviour. Sylvie has marks on her legs and shoulders. Thhey're abused. Though this is an eternal theme, this rendering of <b>a man controlling and physically hurting the women in his life</b> is vivid and delivered with stripped down sensitivity by Sarah Moss. </p><p>The key to the story's power is the first person narration, from <b>Sylvie's point of view</b>. She's intelligent, perceptive and knowledgeable, in fact she has no problem with learning about nature, the land, the people who have lived there before and now. Of course her Dad is less interested in that last bit. She's been conditioned to her Dad's controlling nature all her life and despite now being 17, moving past an age when so many conflict with ther parents anyway, she finds it near impossible to call him out on what he's doing to his family. There's a scene in which he gives her a <b>belting</b>: it's just descriptive enough for us to feel it, without it being gratuitous (if the book is ever filmed, it'll be essential that the director takes note that that is avoided). Yet it is sickening and horrible, mainly because of her reaction to what is being done to her, or lack of it, I should say. I can't speak to my own experience but from what I have picked up, this is a very accurate depiction of abuse, of how a person is affected.</p><p>Where this story leads can be guessed. Little by little Bill and Professor 'Call Me Jim', for different motives, erode the walls of modern civilisation and it's a little bit <i>Lord of the Flies</i>. She's conditioned and singled out and can't resist when those two responsible adults come to her with <b>a horrible proposal</b>. Her Dad promises she won't be hurt but we know that for him it could never simply be play acting. The ending by the way;... um, well, at first sight you might think we should be told more, but on reflection I think it's the right place to end it, because of the sheer isolation of Sylvie's point of view, which ends at that point. We have to think that at the end of the book she's free.</p><p>Apologies if I've said too much there. The book is very short by the way, but it has a power way beyond its length. It's the second book of Moss' that I've read. In some ways it's odd that I wanted to read another, because I really didn't like any of the characters in the other one (<i><b>Night Waking</b></i>). But it was so well written, it sucked you so much into the situation of that story, and those characters were familiar and real. I've read some comments about this book <i><b>Ghost Wall</b></i> that point to a political theme, but I feel a shrug coming on about that. I think the instances they have picked out are there to show the sort of man Sylvie's Dad is. For me this book's driving theme is how love can be twisted and beaten and negated, and thankfully, how it can be found again. </p><p>I've been lent another Sarah Moss book, <i><b>Cold Earth</b></i>. I'm looking forward to reading that some time soon.</p><p><br /></p>Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04344313339971737295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-665362365654853620.post-4222346468566786132022-11-06T17:54:00.001+00:002022-11-06T21:12:34.281+00:00Novel Notes, by Jerome K. Jerome<p><b>Jerome K. Jerome</b> wrote one famous book, <i><b>Three Men in a Boat</b></i>, still very readable (and highly entertaining) today, and likely to remain so for some time yet. It created a much imitated formula for comic narratives based on the farcical adventures of three foolish men. The realisation that this formula could be applied anywhere transformed the BBC's <i><b>Top Gear</b></i> from a worthy but slightly dull and definitely niche motoring programme into one of the most watched general entertainment shows on the planet. </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvrthlc1YdOYvC6br-NnrSQ_MAArI4qe_STPVSBb1757GuffmtkYh4rDV0BdSbSQMF0igSmRWTTSwBKJ9U8-6t6lWJrpWwYNn2edP4yAvqO9198tvZH1ktCgYI97KGNGl4DbkizOu-YnFiMabsIbf2CQo-3yanXqnPOKW8rhmOdrPPCJ_4O1Z5NYQl/s727/2022_11_02a.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="727" data-original-width="470" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvrthlc1YdOYvC6br-NnrSQ_MAArI4qe_STPVSBb1757GuffmtkYh4rDV0BdSbSQMF0igSmRWTTSwBKJ9U8-6t6lWJrpWwYNn2edP4yAvqO9198tvZH1ktCgYI97KGNGl4DbkizOu-YnFiMabsIbf2CQo-3yanXqnPOKW8rhmOdrPPCJ_4O1Z5NYQl/s320/2022_11_02a.jpg" width="207" /></a></div><br />There are four rather than three foolish men in Jerome's <b style="font-style: italic;">Novel Notes</b>. And while there are any number of interesting occasional characters, notably the unnamed narrator's wife <b>Ethelberta</b>, and their marvellously nonplussed and unimpressed maidservant <b>Amenda </b>(is that a historical spelling of Amanda?), they don't partake in any picaresque adventures. No, they assemble, regularly at first, and then more and more infrequently, in order to <b>write a great novel</b>. They are convinced, on the basis of a belief that between them they ought to be able to produce something of consequence (they have clearly never read any of Jerome K. Jerome's books). No, four heads are not better than one, when it comes to novel writing.<p></p><p>The narrative is actually a <b>flashback</b>: the narrator discovers <b>an old notebook</b> recording their meetings many years before, and sets about going through it, wondering why they never succeeded. This seems unlikely; one imagines the memories would flood back. Anyway, this structure helps to make the early enthusiasm more convincing. Each time they meet they get out their pipes and tobacco, locate some brandy or similar, and discuss all sorts of issues such as the nature of a hero, or the heroine, and the villain. If they're even necessary. The respective natures of the four makes agreement impossible on any topic, and the old notebook peters out without anything having been written. These scenes are nicely written. In all sorts of simple but telling details, we understand and appreciate the <b>smoky atmosphere</b> of these late evening meetings. Choice of chairs, how they sit in them, the attention given to smoking and alcoholic comforts, so much there to demonstrate to us why they never achieve anything. </p><p>This might seem a little dry compared with <i>Three Men in a Boat</i>, but there's a good measure of humour in the characterisations. My guess is that Jerome knows his audience expects this kind of thing, but what he's on about isn't really a repeat of those earlier adventures. The thing is, he wasn't at all impressed with the conventions of the <b>Nineteenth Century novel</b>, and this book goes some way to exposing their nonsense, as he saw it, without simply preaching to us. No, this really isn't his equivalent of E.M. Forster's <i>Aspects of the Novel</i>. It's more of an anti-novel, dedicated to suggesting to us that despite its pretensions <b>Literature</b> (with a capital L) is no more successful in describing the reality of life than any other genre. As each of the four (they each have a different stance on what is good and what is bad about contemporary novels) says their piece Jerome deals with what literature can do, often quite subtly. One section I liked follows a discussion of <b>dreams</b>; the narrator experiences a succession of strange dreams and attempts to derive insight from them, in the process showing that they don't mean anything, and are useless in offering inspiration for narrative. I think, at one remove, he's showing us that in structuring a tale at all, an author has to <b>deviate from the experience of real life</b>.</p><p>Just by the way, I gather that he had similar axes to grind regarding contemporary <b>theatre</b>, but I haven't yet read any of his critiques or the 'plays' he wrote in pursuance of that.</p><p><b>Novel Notes</b> is the fourth of Jerome's books which I've read. I'll probably read more, because despite having not aged well in various respects, his writing reveals a sharp and very witty mind. I should have said more about his four characters, they're recognisable and manage to come to life even though they're being used as mouthpieces for various points of view. He describes <b>human nature in all its vanities, selfishness and foibles</b>, and yet offers us some warmth in our humility. It's not that some people don't deserve despising, but occasionally we can forgive, and smile, and ask 'Does any of it really matter?'</p><p>I'd better add, I definitely benefited from borrowing this particular edition (from <b>Alan Sutton Publishing</b>, see in the thumbnail above), because it's graced with plenty of evocative pen and ink illustration. Gentlemen, ladies, dogs and cats. Oh yes, cats.</p>Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04344313339971737295noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-665362365654853620.post-46523549902710469932022-09-27T23:16:00.001+01:002022-09-29T18:46:23.538+01:00Harrow on the Hooghly, by John Lethbridge<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgS7vujlIg2NTovP7zFNRsNJdCuM-_FZErDaF_uLHGu9GJpKJqHhFXAadyC_MVVVD4OdiwJnzEOd_8LfvT2FKy5a53d2BEZbWDtHbZHIiv3ry7Zk38Cx6uIkjv7yb9JYicrBiVMPAUoYazHMls6oMn13JBFqzSMAmHEX5wIJ1eKXlDStg7ThfUvSQRN/s526/2022_09_26a.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="526" data-original-width="362" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgS7vujlIg2NTovP7zFNRsNJdCuM-_FZErDaF_uLHGu9GJpKJqHhFXAadyC_MVVVD4OdiwJnzEOd_8LfvT2FKy5a53d2BEZbWDtHbZHIiv3ry7Zk38Cx6uIkjv7yb9JYicrBiVMPAUoYazHMls6oMn13JBFqzSMAmHEX5wIJ1eKXlDStg7ThfUvSQRN/w275-h400/2022_09_26a.jpg" width="275" /></a></div><br /><i><b>"Harrow on the Hooghly"</b></i> was a nickname given to the <b>New School</b> of <b>Calcutta</b> and <b>Darjeeling</b>, on its founding in 1940. The Hooghly is the principal river running through Calcutta; Harrow is one of England's most prominent private schools. It was one of a number of emergency schools set up early on in the Second World War, for children of British parents in India who would otherwise have been educating them in Britain. In 1940 India would have seemed much safer than Britain; there was a real threat of invasion by Germany and, worse, the sea lanes were becoming very dangerous. Getting passage as a civilian was very difficult, and the normal route to India via the Suez Canal was impossible until after VE Day in 1945. There was an excess of <b>refugee children</b> in 1940, with a pressing need to be educated, who could not be accommodated in the existing European schools in India.<div><br /></div><div>Then <b>Japan went to war with Britain</b> and the situation in India suddenly looked very threatening. If you glance at the map you'll see why Calcutta was very vulnerable. The New School, which in time honoured colonial fashion escaped from the summer heat up to the cooler climate of Darjeeling at seven thousand feet, based itself permanently there after Japan's quick conquest of Burma. By 1944 however, the tide of the war had clearly turned and the need for the New School receded, as passage back to Britain became more reliable and safer. It was agreed to close the School. </div><div><br /></div><div>In 1990 a <b>50th Anniversary celebration</b> was held, at St Anne's College in Oxford, and this book <i><b>Harrow on the Hooghly</b></i> was the outcome of a desire to put together some sort of written history. It was organised and written by <b>John Lethbridge</b>, one of the 80 ex pupils who were able to attend. He sent round a questionnaire and received 59 replies and 47 reminiscences.</div><div><br /></div><div>Sadly, <b>my mother</b> Molly wasn't one of them. </div><div>There was a letter from John Lethbridge slipped into this copy of the book, regretting that he hadn't had my mother's address when the reunion was organised. She attended the School in its first two years, and then the family seems to have moved further West, and she continued at the Loreto Convent School in <b>Simla</b>. But my grandparents were mainly based in <b>Bengal</b>, since my grandfather was, I think, an engineer(?) on the Bengal and Nagpur Railway, and Calcutta/Kolkata was the capital of Bengal.</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXskSXw4ZOJqGaGHkYKeAClyxX6QiA6Pr0f09Iru65nUV9fDZzeX48Cerkf5EgpTwOR5PfEHLARktMtuwQBX59LkkWcGjMh7Nzsb86iGrkOQ8jReAiy2Xw8KTlUb1ZAW0cMF1ctd7f3flNh5Zii7lxO6a1eS6Sn_aSx-G-POe3NpH5ITO7DQA_okCt/s543/2022_09_26c.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="412" data-original-width="543" height="243" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXskSXw4ZOJqGaGHkYKeAClyxX6QiA6Pr0f09Iru65nUV9fDZzeX48Cerkf5EgpTwOR5PfEHLARktMtuwQBX59LkkWcGjMh7Nzsb86iGrkOQ8jReAiy2Xw8KTlUb1ZAW0cMF1ctd7f3flNh5Zii7lxO6a1eS6Sn_aSx-G-POe3NpH5ITO7DQA_okCt/s320/2022_09_26c.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />You'll see six <b>photos</b> here. They're not from the book (which is well illustrated with photos and simple maps of the School's locations in Calcutta and Darjeeling), but five are from amongst my mother's photos. They are only loosely related to the subject, but perhaps add a little to the theme of the narrative. Of course my mother was quite young (she was born in 1926) and there aren't many pictures from that time anyway. This one shows a Tibetan monastery in Darjeeling. The town is just South of Sikkim, still independent in those days, as was Tibet a little further North.</div><div><br /></div><div>So how easy was it to create a functioning school in such short order? Finding <b>good qualified staff</b> was unsurprisingly hard, and keeping them on harder still. The book does explain that things were quite chaotic for a year or two, but also that the staff was surprisingly stable for the last two years. As for the physical reality of the school, there was never an identifiable campus, and in fact there was no major construction of any kind of accommodation, except for a few structures in Darjeeling, 1940s equivalents of Portakabins. The school existed scattered among a hodgepotch of disparate buildings and sites around Calcutta and even in a small hill town like Darjeeling. <b>Finding buildings</b> was made relatively easier by the circumstances of the war; there were many abandoned or unoccupied buildings with absentee owners, some quite substantial. It probably helped with aspects like boarding and the coeducational nature of the school, to be using separate sites.</div><div><br /></div><div><i><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyNWB1gPMAAEluofOVJqUpadEjeMOEPfvaCgSw_hq18h53gsZLO6aJh3fgE3On22AcHeNigxyxM8vVp7sj4HA4rV3l9IDjiXzWpnHSGy9XCgSOYP2Mud04pE8jp8HLh0LDzKcACfMTbsoXLRrqMC4UqJ9V48kp9AMAP_52Jy5NS7a_3mybGfHr6Qrc/s575/2022_09_26d.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="398" data-original-width="575" height="221" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyNWB1gPMAAEluofOVJqUpadEjeMOEPfvaCgSw_hq18h53gsZLO6aJh3fgE3On22AcHeNigxyxM8vVp7sj4HA4rV3l9IDjiXzWpnHSGy9XCgSOYP2Mud04pE8jp8HLh0LDzKcACfMTbsoXLRrqMC4UqJ9V48kp9AMAP_52Jy5NS7a_3mybGfHr6Qrc/s320/2022_09_26d.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />(Picture: "Seen on a walk")</i> Anyone reading this is bound to be wondering, isn't this all taking place against the backdrop of the end of <b>Empire</b>? Isn't the New School an example of the cosseted and artificial world sustained for the benefit of the British colonial elite? Yes, it is. And it's inevitable that the reminiscences of the book, fifty years on, are filtered through the rose tinted lenses of nostalgia. Especially since they involve school days and childhood. There are many Indian characters who feature in the book, though usually named according to their function, such as cook or ayah (nanny). Relationships are often warm and generous, but even then they're obviously dependent relationships. It's hard to judge, but contemporary attitudes seem to have been very variable, especially among the staff. I'll mention the Head in a minute, but many of the staff appear to have been progressive for the time, both politically and in educational matters. And one reads more than once of regrets by some teachers and others about condescending attitudes from pupils towards the Indians. On the other hand, in the face of the appalling Bengal famine of 1943, the pupils were energetic in fundraising and concern (whether they knew quite how responsible the British were, one can't say). The picture isn't simple. The British came into a social system that was already highly stratified, ie. the caste system. The British slotted in neatly at the top. And there was class snobbery among the British as well. You knew your place. At the very top was the renowned ICS, the <b>Indian Civil Service</b>. The <i><b>"heaven-born"</b></i>. A familiar fact bears repeating: India, this extraordinary, huge, complex land was administered by a mere 600 individuals, the members of the ICS. Out of ~275 pupils at the New School, 15 were children of ICS officials.</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvIP9X4kISpnVDSsxbpZWbhXc352Pb_UpaAsAuO_VDHEbGvklIwKDXLR4j0cMWknVk7xSypA4v20io0-5HN6HhYS9C2uEoS_qj9Jz20JXf9eojOOHjJvHSdmNA_xm0ox0NzTTs3ImPPPa2-0Ti6doSoRcDjjx2zwRayXm52hjIcf1qN_8J70lW61dt/s545/2022_09_26e.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="358" data-original-width="545" height="210" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvIP9X4kISpnVDSsxbpZWbhXc352Pb_UpaAsAuO_VDHEbGvklIwKDXLR4j0cMWknVk7xSypA4v20io0-5HN6HhYS9C2uEoS_qj9Jz20JXf9eojOOHjJvHSdmNA_xm0ox0NzTTs3ImPPPa2-0Ti6doSoRcDjjx2zwRayXm52hjIcf1qN_8J70lW61dt/s320/2022_09_26e.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />The School was always stretched in what it could offer. <b>Sport</b> has eternally been a prerequisite of any British school, especially private ones; and even in its limited circumstances the School did put together teams playing cricket, boxing, hockey (both sexes) and netball. Few recorded any victories. But the pupils didn't lack for <b>exercise</b>, especially up in Darjeeling. Most would experience dramatic improvements on moving down to the plains from the rarified air of the hills. They loved the hills, the views of the <b>Himalayas</b> (Darjeeling is close to Kanchenjunga, 3rd highest mountain on Earth), trekking or just the constant climbing and descents of the <i>'khud'</i>, the hillsides, to and from School. And their time in Darjeeling was book ended by a consummate treat, since some enjoyed an adventurous drive by station wagon <i>(picture: on the way to Siliguri)</i>, and others on the fantastic <b>Darjeeling Himalaya Railway</b>, known as the Toy Train, a narrow gauge railway obliged to tackle the steep gradients by means of Z-bends and in some places, complete loops over itself.</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKnpPZrt4UdCmpuhEc05k9pFdOB1jZEocqk5xT3TQIGsUNDXF4FcUOJCALS-vsN9ZmOkBAUuv2z9ilA_zX2rugSK2q7wPgM3C19RaItnrfb1SEEoMs49CiTuVd22e3PDvICdePeyFHtAqdhzBSYM40zYBekHBi_E-ZTmP0NO0mmfIPM200r82CD6al/s300/2022_09_26g.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="295" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKnpPZrt4UdCmpuhEc05k9pFdOB1jZEocqk5xT3TQIGsUNDXF4FcUOJCALS-vsN9ZmOkBAUuv2z9ilA_zX2rugSK2q7wPgM3C19RaItnrfb1SEEoMs49CiTuVd22e3PDvICdePeyFHtAqdhzBSYM40zYBekHBi_E-ZTmP0NO0mmfIPM200r82CD6al/w197-h200/2022_09_26g.jpg" width="197" /></a></div><br />Despite those rose tinted spectacles, <i><b>Harrow on the Hooghly</b></i> - the soul of the New School was surely more in Darjeeling than in Calcutta - does feel like a fair and fully dimensional portrait. There are allusions for instance to a degree of bullying early on. And the staff certainly weren't perfect. One teacher left 'under a cloud'; but a more general problem was the uneven standard of the teaching, which couldn't be helped. They had to take what they could get. Considering everything, the New School was remarkably fortunate, especially in acquiring the services of their Headmaster, <b>Harold Loukes</b>. He was an Oxford man, a lifelong <b>Quaker</b> with several books to his name, a respected educationalist and on the evidence of exam results, a very good and inspiring teacher. The first picture (Googled!) above shows him in later life with two of his children; there's an even chance that the young man next to him there is also in the picture below, taken by my mother, I assume during her time at the School: <i>"Joyce Lee, Drake Hocking, and Anthony Loukes"</i>. <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFyEgndmNheVI4y8uulJRmhT2yzcW2wK15C-F9zu3om_VkwDhAjJZU5kNf3IlPNnZ7n6oKZ3QpG57f_iXttSIu64Iq3AKwstTtlcv-IvrK0jFPFPrtsm_meO3EZ2zg1FRb9lmH12EHZRRHyKMNePXV2KCd9HlllyN09WJ9E8OBmx8cRLNbk7mVZeSM/s541/2022_09_26b.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="354" data-original-width="541" height="131" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFyEgndmNheVI4y8uulJRmhT2yzcW2wK15C-F9zu3om_VkwDhAjJZU5kNf3IlPNnZ7n6oKZ3QpG57f_iXttSIu64Iq3AKwstTtlcv-IvrK0jFPFPrtsm_meO3EZ2zg1FRb9lmH12EHZRRHyKMNePXV2KCd9HlllyN09WJ9E8OBmx8cRLNbk7mVZeSM/w200-h131/2022_09_26b.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>Many of the teachers are spoken of with affection and admiration, they must have changed some lives. But the ethos of the School was undoubtedly set by Harold Loukes. Many pupils who moved back to England to school for 'proper' education, were very unhappy in the face of the grey and restrictive schooling offered there. Some comment that back in Britain a <b>coeducational school</b> was likely to be severe and admonishing regarding any contact between boy and girl pupils. Harold Loukes was having none of that sort of attitude. He addressed the issue at the start, telling the pupils that they were well brought up and he trusted them. No scandals are recorded during the School's time. As for corporal punishment, he was set against it. Although on one occasion a boy exasperated him so much he did reach for a cane. He would have been gloomily resigned to the result: the boy was of course received as a hero by many of the girls.</div><div><br /></div><div>In contrast to sport, the New School excelled in its drama productions, both with classical plays and with revues and also musical concerts. People paid money and turned up to see them. And there was a lively Debating Society, and achievements in art and craft. Perhaps a book like this is bound to puff up such things, but the impression one receives is that students were flourishing on the whole, and most were happy. </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBrAWfs2uv_zMFiBw_S600lAwPyU3I601BXsApAL2TSnqvySrk8-F0brHBcZUD7URMDJi89wH_3VCGY6BSiWSg5n1LBT_syKegf7_67CRiS58iS6ycwDN8zg4zToYaeiMkKbA1bylEn57ZcXslLDB7-2Duea3OhUUQgwAAHnAiZwv6IoCospveYnZA/s617/2022_09_26f.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="617" data-original-width="457" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBrAWfs2uv_zMFiBw_S600lAwPyU3I601BXsApAL2TSnqvySrk8-F0brHBcZUD7URMDJi89wH_3VCGY6BSiWSg5n1LBT_syKegf7_67CRiS58iS6ycwDN8zg4zToYaeiMkKbA1bylEn57ZcXslLDB7-2Duea3OhUUQgwAAHnAiZwv6IoCospveYnZA/s320/2022_09_26f.jpg" width="237" /></a></div><br />As for my mother Molly, she's only mentioned a couple of times in passing, secondly as having gone on to teach in kindergarten. This is only part of the story; she joined up as soon as she was allowed - here she is in uniform - and became a <b>Wasbie</b> (Women's Auxiliary Service Burma), providing support to General Slim's army. Supposedly behind the front lines, but a friend of hers told me Molly had come under sniper fire at one point. At the end of the war she was mentioned in dispatches. I didn't appreciate at first the significance of that: it's a humble little bravery award, an unostentatious oak leaf cluster. She came down in a Liberator crash (large four engined aircraft) in a paddy field near Calcutta, and despite a broken back kept the pilot's head above water until help came. </div><div>During the course of the New School's existence quite a few pupils left to join up, and some of them were casualties. After VE Day, with most in Britain feeling the war was over, Slim's army and the rest of the Allies in the Far East and Pacific, had to carry on until August in 1945. They became known as, and felt themselves to be, the '<b>Forgotten Army</b>'.</div><div><br /></div><div>I hope you'll allow me the addition of my mum's story. I was bound to read <i><b>Harrow on the Hooghly</b></i> wanting to learn a little more about her life, especially since like so many of her generation, she had said so little about her wartime experiences. She may herself have been barely mentioned in the book, but I know she was very glad to read it, and see many of her friends feature. </div><div>And I was very glad to read it too. It's such a poignant book; it describes a school which only had a bare, fleeting existence, which was a tiny part of something enormous ie the British Empire which was soon to vanish like dust in the hot desert wind; but which touched the lives of a few hundred people. In special and unique ways, perhaps, thanks to the remarkable talents and personality of <b>Harold Loukes</b>. Now, anyone who was there has almost certainly passed away. But if you're reading this maybe you've Googled a parent or grandparent who might have been there, or the New School itself. If like me you have such a connection, see if you can find this book, it'd be worth your time reading it.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04344313339971737295noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-665362365654853620.post-20865769195666552852022-02-20T15:29:00.005+00:002022-02-23T01:03:29.591+00:00Life After Life, by Kate Atkinson<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgDF8D-l7kLy1msD0-oVrLIzHhwGNE7jja5Hqqch75GKEiPlUmdDIJZBMPFVNYg9MmmVdC6PgKHtQykyVjRtTc7Iq4aSfikQ4ux6dabxz_yUEY1jTZ3UkjY1mvs0rRy-olInGcDizvLRbZSMhYLJfEMvgtEEoRonbSr55dx9sLif_d9-6mPttuwtEA4=s504" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="504" data-original-width="309" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgDF8D-l7kLy1msD0-oVrLIzHhwGNE7jja5Hqqch75GKEiPlUmdDIJZBMPFVNYg9MmmVdC6PgKHtQykyVjRtTc7Iq4aSfikQ4ux6dabxz_yUEY1jTZ3UkjY1mvs0rRy-olInGcDizvLRbZSMhYLJfEMvgtEEoRonbSr55dx9sLif_d9-6mPttuwtEA4=s320" width="196" /></a></div><br />I gave <b>Kate Atkinson's <i>Life After Life</i></b> a star straight away when I noted it down in my book list last night. Meaning, that I was (and am) already sure that at the year's end, this will turn out to have been one of the books to have made a lasting impact on me.<div><br /></div><div>It's been hanging around on my 'to read' shelf for a while; I admit that I only picked it up now for the quirk, of reading it (and therefore listing it) immediately after <i><b>Life</b></i> ie. the Keith Richards book. With which it shares almost nothing, and on the other hand, everything. Especially a feeling for that elusive sense of what we are, adrift in the stream, as life flows on. But expressed very differently :)</div><div><br /></div><div>Before you even read the back cover blurb, you're assaulted by profuse encomiums (apologies - that's my sole lifetime use of that word) from reviewers and famous literary names, a few of which you can see on the cover. There are many more inside, before you get anywhere near the book itself. I wish they hadn't done so much of this. For many, it will be a very personal book, and it's unsettling to be forced to react to it in the public context of the commercial space. I've come across - before I managed to stop myself doing this - some <b>reviewers' comments</b> demonstrating a very different take to mine. Oh, that's okay, but it's unhelpful. </div><div><br /></div><div>The one I'm thinking of, just a quote so probably unrepresentative - suggested that it's a book asking what if Hitler had been killed before his rise to power? There's a connected question: is this a fantasy, or even <b>science fiction?</b> The '<i><b>Life After Life</b></i>' of the title is literally that. After a mysterious prologue in which someone (identity not mysterious at all) is shot, the story begins with Ursula's birth in 1910, and death, then birth, then death again, and on and on repeatedly, the circumstances varying sometimes greatly, sometimes only slightly. Are these <b>multiple timelines</b>? Is this something to do with the '<b>many worlds</b>' hypothesis? Are these lives experienced according to Buddhist beliefs in <b>reincarnation</b>?</div><div><br /></div><div>The book is long as it is, and all the potential outcomes of <b>Ursula's life</b> aren't explored right the way through. There are certain periods which are crucial in her life, such as <b>Spanish Flu</b> just after the First World War, and the <b>London Blitz</b> in the Second. But the consequences of changed decisions, or different luck, are looked at all along. One striking example (of, if one was considering it all in the context of the fantasy genre, a 'side quest') is the timeline resulting from a bad marriage. A choice made by Ursula for flimsy reasons, made as life seems to her to be offering nothing better; also, a sad choice the lot of so many women. By the way, <i><b>Life After Life</b></i> does in my view demonstrate the most powerful kind of <b>feminism</b>, showing (truth) not telling.</div><div><br /></div><div>Kate Atkinson writes an <b>afterword</b>, in which she talks about the history she explored while writing the book, and also shrugs at any inquiry as to <i>'what it's about'</i>. I'm glad to hear that, I like artists who acknowledge that they can't just say <i>'it's about such-and-such'</i>, because if they've created anything truthful then it's bound to provoke new responses in a viewer/reader. Having said that (!), I suspect it will mean a bit more if you're English (or British) and (although by now, you probably weren't living during the War), the people around you were affected by the War. I certainly fall into that category. My upbringing was English middle class, and my father was in the Army, and both parents were in uniform during the War. And said almost nothing about it. Some particular things they didn't say about it are still alternately sad and troubling for me and, I'm sure, my brother. Kate Atkinson says in her afterword that she thinks we were <b>at our best during the War</b>, which I'd agree with, but she does also render the way War affects us, how much we lose, for all that there is heroism to inspire us. And people in those times aren't all wonderful.</div><div><br /></div><div>So, I respond to the depictions of what you could call the (illusory) lost Arcadia of the England that was, to the glimpses of a history which has indirectly affected me, and to all the 'what-if' conjecture.</div><div><br /></div><div>I think one can get too diverted by the device of birth, death and rebirth: the conceit of Ursula gradually realising that she has consciousness of alternative existences, and deciding to exploit her '<b>foreknowledge</b>' in the most dramatic and significant way possible. Note, that there's no attempt to explore what would have happened if Ursula had done the deed, though there seems to be an implication that it changes an outcome in a different 'timeline', involving their favourite brother Teddy. </div><div><br /></div><div>I think the real power of the book is in showing us that <b>we do experience life like this</b>, ie. not in an uninterrupted linear flow from A to B, but in fits and starts, always aware of what we could have done, and then later, sometimes actually think we did. We do change how we look at our lives. Kate Atkinson's characters do exactly that, as the book goes on. All the triumphs and failures (both potential and actual) take a toll on us. And how we look at the people around us - especially our own family. It's our sister Debbie's birthday today (yes, this very day I'm posting this). She died a long time ago, aged 28, but sometimes it feels like yesterday. Quite close to me in age. I think about her often, about the life she might have had. Just think about that eternal mystery, how all your siblings despite similar upbringings can turn out so different. I identify with Ursula quite a bit, but only up to a point, and if I'm honest (is this a mistake?) I can think of one or two Maurice-like behaviours at moments in my childhood. Yes, now I'm cringing.</div><div><br /></div><div>I love Kate Atkinson's <b>characters</b> by the way. They may not be equivalents of people in my life, but they live and breathe convincingly, even the dogs, and a certain vixen; I can imagine them, and imagine Fox Corner, the home of the Todd ('sigh' - yes, I did spot that this is virtually the German for 'death') family, through the various seasons. None of it would work so well without <b>the brilliant writing</b>. In the end, life is made up of all its little moments, its experiences big and small. If any of them are warm and reassuring, happy and loving, then be glad for that. And there are so many things, some momentuous, some the tiniest but very niggling, which never get explained at all. (If you've read the book, do you remember this one, from the briefest of sightings by Ursula, on a bus - <i><b>was</b></i> Sophie having an affair?) So much of this, in a book rich with textures of life.</div><div><br /></div><div>So much to talk about with <i><b>Life After Life</b></i>. I've had to make myself stop. (Sorry if you've got to the end here and wondered why you persevered!) Heh yes there are a lot of <b>brackets</b> in this piece. But you could say it's about a book which is itself about how life is full of stuff in brackets.</div>Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04344313339971737295noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-665362365654853620.post-56340113490296264522022-01-30T14:17:00.001+00:002023-12-29T00:21:44.197+00:00Life, by Keith Richards<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi7zx1mZprAdUo-pE1fUvuEDd9ZWtxPOQPglZganMz8PJbhbmXz7OGIJ7EG3gYJ7nVqq-ziFM0Tn5qXfYJXNliTD_m7lhjXF_f8d3qyiQsOT8LwfpoaGT_NVkX43b_LFFx6ujhnanPkTXImzz0VtBRjQj5yGokKk5bOGAjyBwmYd2fPI6hAWQ5L94XR=s469" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="469" data-original-width="310" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi7zx1mZprAdUo-pE1fUvuEDd9ZWtxPOQPglZganMz8PJbhbmXz7OGIJ7EG3gYJ7nVqq-ziFM0Tn5qXfYJXNliTD_m7lhjXF_f8d3qyiQsOT8LwfpoaGT_NVkX43b_LFFx6ujhnanPkTXImzz0VtBRjQj5yGokKk5bOGAjyBwmYd2fPI6hAWQ5L94XR=s320" width="212" /></a></div><i><b>"with James Fox"</b></i>. Thoroughly engrossing, and eye opening. It's a quick read, despite topping 600 pages; and you sense it could have been much longer and still have stuff left out. For me, it strikes an ideal balance in its content. It covers almost everything you want it to cover, and despite its contradictions and changing moods - actually, because of those things - it feels honest and direct, and presents a pretty <b>complete picture of the man</b>.<div><br /></div><div>I'm in an odd position, as someone who despite being in a great demographic to be a Rolling Stones fan - I'm twelve years younger than Richards - I never really paid them much attention, and only once bought a Stones record, for a mate for his 21st. I instinctively preferred their sound to the Beatles' ie. for its explicit blues base. But, well, hard to say, apart from getting into prog early on. However, one was always aware of the Rolling Stones. They were <b>often in the news</b>, in reports which also mentioned the police. And I dimly remember the news of Brian Jones' death.</div><div><br /></div><div>After that - now I'm talking about the bulk of the book, dealing with the mid-70s onwards - I was even less aware of the band. The reason I'd have given then was that I was getting into music which was changing very rapidly, against which the Stones image-wise looked old fashioned and less 'relevant'. But reading the book provides me with a bigger reason: they left the UK for tax reasons, and became disreputable members of the globe trotting rich elite. In particular they found themselves <b>at home in America</b>, which suited them with having a much less febrile music scene; in other words, their music wasn't going to look out of date any time soon. Anyway, that's why in the UK we didn't really see much of them.</div><div><br /></div><div>He talks about people. Oh blimey yes. Keith Richards is all about people, in a whole mixture of ways. Mainly, bandmates. He always, from being in the Scouts as a kid, has been one for making groups of like minded blokes - interesting as you're already thinking, only a few women as bandmates like singer Sarah Dash get mentioned - <b>getting a group of guys to gel and work together</b>. When one of the guys starts getting independent ambitions, or a belief that he's the real leader of the gang, Keith - 'Keef' - has never liked that. So, that's what much of the book is about, first Brian Jones, then Mick Jagger. But he does give credit to both, and it comes across as totally genuine. It's just that the other stuff is weighted with a sense of being let down.</div><div><br /></div><div>You don't really have to take sides. Keith is like that, <b>he fires in all directions</b>, usually with a deep sense of what's right. Quite often you'll think he's contradicting things he says in other places. I mean, we're never like that, are we?? In the end, the only thing which will prevent more Rolling Stones music will be Old Father Time. </div><div>By the way, he makes a sharp point about <b>reputations</b> which hadn't struck me before; actually, it may have been in one of the YouTube videos I watched after finishing the book. It was to do with what so many have stupidly thought, including me, stuff like 'How relevant are the Stones any more?' and 'Aren't they too old to be doing arena shows or indeed any shows?' His answer is a good one: we'd never say that about the veteran black bluesmen. In other words those old bluesmen who carried on performing until they put down their guitar for the last time. I remember going to see <b>BB King</b> at the Manchester Arena back in the Eighties. He was certainly of pensionable age, in fact he had to have assistance to get up on to the stage. But he delivered some classic licks, some familiar vocals, and I loved it. At no point did I wonder if this was 'relevant'. So sure, the point is well made: if Keith and Mick and the (surviving) Stones want to get up on stage, and people want to see them, what's the problem?</div><div><br /></div><div>There's a lot of poignancy in the book, in relation to women and family. It's funny but maybe unsurprising that for all of the philandering, and the sort of open relationship he had with Anita Pallenberg, he seems to feel very strongly and loyally about the woman he actually loves, and have a strong sense of family. But is that the softness of old age speaking? Maybe a little. The pictures in the book tell it that way. And it's dedicated to his wife, Patti Hansen.</div><div>What complicates this is, or was(?), not so much the philandering but the <b>drugs</b>. This was the part of the book which really made me feel I'd led a very sheltered life. Keith Richards is famous for having been for many years at the top of the <b>list of 'musicians most likely to die next'</b>. In this book he answers the question of why he's still alive. More or less. the answer is a combination, of 1) having a good constitution, 2) as much as possible sticking to the 'pure' stuff, 3) actually cleaning himself up, and, I think, 4) the fact that there was always something which meant more to him than drugs, namely music.</div><div><br /></div><div>Any personal regrets by me? Apart from never having been to see them? I find the <b>lack of comment about other great British guitarists</b> a little odd. Even musicians of his own era. He talks very interestingly about his forebears, the guys who were around in the rhythm'n'blues scene while the Stones got together. But even Eric Clapton gets barely a mention, none really as a guitarist. And you'll search in vain for any mention at all of Jeff Beck, the very best guitarist I ever saw. And countless others. He (and you) might say that's not the object of the book, despite it featuring other musicians so prominently. If so, how about writing a book like that, Keith? I'd read it with massive interest, no matter whether I agreed with you or not.</div><div><br /></div><div>Look, the book is as worth reading as all the reviewers say. It's provocative, fiery, fascinating about questions you have probably wondered about, and a slice of social history. The Stones were there at a pivotal point in the evolution of the modern music scene, they played a crucial part in it, especially in the US, and Keith Richards is the reason for their long career. Yes, he leaves out a lot, a lot has obviously been 'edited in hindsight', but this is as good a picture of the man as you're going to get. He'll never be knighted, but total respect to him, he's earned it.</div>Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04344313339971737295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-665362365654853620.post-87691119271779501232022-01-01T16:37:00.000+00:002022-01-01T16:37:44.665+00:002021: Bring On The Giant Asteroid<p>Quite. The apocalyptic wish for a giant asteroid, sure, does reflect emotions I find it hard to let go of about 2021; however, it sort of spins off one of the most hopeful things all year which has just occurred, namely the launch of NASA's fab new <b>space telescope</b>. Some will nitpick forever about projects like this, especially the money, but it offers a prospect of discoveries even more wildly amazing than Hubble, and that can retire happily with all that it achieved for human knowledge.</p><p>So, despite an inclination to get down about what I 'only' managed this year, let's talk about some worthwhile cultural things which I did or enjoyed, despite some tough stuff which happened.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhVC8Zz62MWpCQzmpvY1j8eo3tEn-uD10_MFwSb4wrRijO5p6Mfh6CrZV2vontk47l1oVrn0sS91FdqgS6t9of4V5qnwhyKzS47G9d7AjwvBDjRYGzWnSzbmgZ9RJztBdnkdiIvcdye-7VGVYb2MnqSICLYaRVVi9rAoGmwJZbhyqtAuPJ9lHy-HQ5k=s479" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="479" data-original-width="411" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhVC8Zz62MWpCQzmpvY1j8eo3tEn-uD10_MFwSb4wrRijO5p6Mfh6CrZV2vontk47l1oVrn0sS91FdqgS6t9of4V5qnwhyKzS47G9d7AjwvBDjRYGzWnSzbmgZ9RJztBdnkdiIvcdye-7VGVYb2MnqSICLYaRVVi9rAoGmwJZbhyqtAuPJ9lHy-HQ5k=s320" width="275" /></a></div>I actually saw two films in the <b>cinema</b>. This isn't enough to pretend to comment on 'the year in film' or anything like that, but it meant a lot to me, having that experience which I enjoy a lot. I saw <b><i>Dune</i></b> in one of the new little boutique cinemas, the sort where they bring food to your seat etc. Dune is of course huge in scope, one epic vista after another, but I found it didn't suffer too much in that venue; the screen was still much bigger than my telly at home :) And the sound very much better. This version - only <i>'Part 1'</i> - is by <b>Denis Villeneuve</b>, who made <i>Blade Runner 2049</i> which I loved. This was as well made, and if I didn't 'love' it quite as much it's because the story and its themes don't reach to me quite so much. I have a long history with <i>Dune</i>, first reading it over the course of a week's guard duty in a railway van (holiday job), then seeing and enjoying David Lynch's film version. Maybe because of his creepy visceral touches, maybe just for fancying Virginia Madsen, I'm a fan. But Villeneuve's version is immense and I look forward to <i>'Part 2'</i>.<p></p><p>The other film was the last Daniel Craig <b>James Bond</b>. What was it called, <i><b>No Time to Die</b></i>? Glad I saw it, all the familiar Bond action and Daniel Craig is the best Bond I would say. One small annoyance was that it was in Manchester, hence a train journey, and I've sort of 'lost the habit', hence cocking up timings and ending up having to go for my train home a few minutes before the end. Later I discovered that its ending went exactly as I'd imagined(!).</p><p>I've read a lot of books this year. As before, a healthy variety of fiction and non-fiction, some intellectually challenging and some definitely for putting the brain in neutral. But I definitely need to change some bad reading habits, having started 2022 in very unhealthy fashion. I got up after midday thanks to being absorbed in my latest <b>Jack Reacher</b> thriller (actually the 2nd in the series, <i><b>Die Trying</b></i>) past five o'clock in the morning. Oh yes, that's the way I partied in the New Year. </p><p>Much of the non-fiction was strongly written and for various reasons made a great impact on me. <i><b>Operation Jedburgh</b></i> by <b>Colin Beavan</b> was bound to: it's about the liaison teams which dropped behind enemy lines around the time of D-Day in 1944, to co-ordinate with and supply the French Resistance; our Dad was in one of those teams and is mentioned a few times in the book. </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgJK3fBIetuMYlJ7ELZglTAHkmZKMTWFxFrsF0dp_h-6OG4vlu83h8u9QCETlG_EM1xUcaA8vEmJu_qPmQlRyY5uHpGLc9ARM93kgdIAyVLyEKcBEcQECXwNNDWWppezF9YvkRbgAp21Oo83yP8mY4ABlMM7FVba9r1z8Mi2m_HQXrW9EPDfG8u9ins=s516" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="516" data-original-width="338" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgJK3fBIetuMYlJ7ELZglTAHkmZKMTWFxFrsF0dp_h-6OG4vlu83h8u9QCETlG_EM1xUcaA8vEmJu_qPmQlRyY5uHpGLc9ARM93kgdIAyVLyEKcBEcQECXwNNDWWppezF9YvkRbgAp21Oo83yP8mY4ABlMM7FVba9r1z8Mi2m_HQXrW9EPDfG8u9ins=s320" width="210" /></a></div>A very(!) different piece of non-fiction was <i><b>'The Boy Looked at Johnny.'</b></i> by <b>Julie Burchill</b> and <b>Tony Parsons</b>. It's been neglected (apart from its picture gallery) on a low shelf ever since I bought it, not long after <b>punk</b> was over; and that's what it was about, published in 1978, which you might call the perfect point. I mean, it's funny to read their very brief comments on some artists who were background to punk, pub rockers really, almost insignificant when they wrote but who were about to become huge, like Elvis Costello. It's mostly about the <b>Sex Pistols</b>, but nobody at all escapes their scathing analysis, except where they lapse into their personal uncriticised favourites, Poly Vinyl and Tom Robinson. The book manages to pull off the feat of presenting punk as a cultural car crash, and yet making us feel that it was exactly the rush of adrenalin which music needed. I was about to say 'jolt in the arm', but then remembered how much of the story features extensive use of <b>drugs</b>. Never mind. I can't help the <b>nostalgia</b> factor, I was around at the time ie. 1976-77, but in a difficult place as they say; in effect, I blinked and I missed it. I loved New Wave stuff of course. Punk has been much written about over the years, but in less than 100 pages Burchill and Parsons pretty much give it the history it needs. It's funny, it's almost like a Heisenberg Principle thing; you can stand back as we do now, and observe punk as a fixed historical event, but if you try to examine it for what it was actually like, to understand it as an experience, it seems to vanish before your eyes.<div><br /></div><div>Otherwise, I'll mention <i><b>Trail of Tears</b></i> by <b>John Ehle</b> - I've already done a <b><a href="https://punbasedtitle.blogspot.com/2021/08/trail-of-tears-by-john-ehle.html" target="_blank">post</a></b> about that - which relates the removal of the Native Americans of the South East to the West, in particular the Cherokee. I fnd that history compelling, but it is a tough read, because essentially it's a history of genocide. Another slice of history, just as interesting to me, was <i><b>The Royal Navy's Air Service in the Great War</b></i> by <b>David Hobbs</b>. It's true that its editing/proof reading left something to be desired, but the story and its illustrations were fascinating, in the way that largely forgotten worlds tend to be. Another book I <a href="https://punbasedtitle.blogspot.com/2021/11/the-royal-navys-air-service-in-great.html" target="_blank"><b>posted</b></a> about!</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhiy044F8Vlj9RmWX-zUr7MDMU3ip0T98xNBzijQWMz_P1oWmYYIXOL21gM86oASoCAFaLOAjXLeJByXJZ2L3MMmQ-eXRb737hG1G0kSrb_KSmwgSNxQVMVVdH7CJK8AYpuIE83DnP1WSsAXvzyRadA1zxLlPBtosl5qWBj1RftIh9esh_5fyoq3y0n=s469" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="469" data-original-width="313" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhiy044F8Vlj9RmWX-zUr7MDMU3ip0T98xNBzijQWMz_P1oWmYYIXOL21gM86oASoCAFaLOAjXLeJByXJZ2L3MMmQ-eXRb737hG1G0kSrb_KSmwgSNxQVMVVdH7CJK8AYpuIE83DnP1WSsAXvzyRadA1zxLlPBtosl5qWBj1RftIh9esh_5fyoq3y0n=s320" width="214" /></a></div>As far as fiction is concerned, I seem to have been reading a lot of books from series. I finished <b>Gene Wolfe's <i>Book of the Long Sun</i></b>, reading the last three books of that this year. By way of contrast, a couple of <b>Tove Jansson's <i>Moomins</i></b> books. They're great! Maybe weird to adult eyes, but probably not to a child :) I read one of <b>Christopher Shevlin's <i>Jonathan Fairfax</i></b> books, and want to read more. Another <i><b>Jackson Brodie</b></i> (ie. <b>Kate Atkinson</b>). More of the aforementioned <i><b>Jack Reacher</b></i> (<b>Lee Child</b>). A <b>Iain M. Banks</b> <i><b>Culture</b></i> book. And maybe most prominently, lots more <b>Mick Herron</b>, mainly from the <i><b>Slough House</b></i> series. One of them <i><b>Spook Street</b></i> is my favourite out of them so far. I have two more to go of the core series published so far. Pity I won't be able to see the tv series about to hit the screens of streaming subscribers, but, "the book's always better".</div><div><br /></div><div>As far as giant asteroids are concerned, it's apt that 2021's last book was <i><b>Comet in Moominland</b></i>, which was a lovely read. Scientifically inaccurate, but heart warmingly wise about human nature.</div><div><br /></div><div>PS - Oh yes, my annual 'Christmas Card poll': <b>robins</b> ran out the easy winners.</div>Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04344313339971737295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-665362365654853620.post-29545688244259295292021-11-10T22:43:00.002+00:002023-02-19T00:00:18.987+00:00The Royal Navy's Air Service in the Great War, by David Hobbs<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1NCf8Y_i2f9yon34eWXs5VSkeqAhFDS7XvnPeoNWEuw-lBNMpJppeiMhdPin2jZ0juUnlSQYTYVZziwlcG-05bQbFXtrF4wH4C8n7mDVtWKMY8JEw5bHrGokftKBmSN5Zjfpq9ux9pT4/s632/2021_11_10a.JPG" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="632" data-original-width="430" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1NCf8Y_i2f9yon34eWXs5VSkeqAhFDS7XvnPeoNWEuw-lBNMpJppeiMhdPin2jZ0juUnlSQYTYVZziwlcG-05bQbFXtrF4wH4C8n7mDVtWKMY8JEw5bHrGokftKBmSN5Zjfpq9ux9pT4/s320/2021_11_10a.JPG" width="218" /></a></div>This is an excellent introductory history of the <b>RNAS</b>. Hobbs' book tells the full story of the RNAS's birth and death; its life spanned a mere four years, but by the end of the book you'll marvel that he managed to cover it in just under 500 pages. It's an extraordinary story of invention, innovation, tactical and strategic vision and, not least, inspiring selflessness and courage.<p></p><p>The photographic content is fulsome, really very good, including many images I'd certainly never seen before despite my long time interest, of the aircraft, the new seaplane and flush deck aircraft carriers, including plentiful deck and hangar views, of experiments and trials, and of many of the main personalities. There are also maps, of varying use - there was one page in particular whose narrative discussed the conflict in the Eastern Mediterranean in some detail; but I looked in vain for many of the place names on the map provided on the same page. Not to worry: overall, the illustrations support the text very well indeed.</p><p>I have a few reservations, which may not be an issue for you. The first is the standard of the text. I'm sure that the writer's own standard of English is of a high standard, so the sheer quantity of mistakes is baffling. I'm sure they're typos, or I should say, the result of poor or non-existent proof reading. Long stretches of the text are fine; until you reach a passage which brings you to a halt while you figure out where adjustment or correction should have happened. A tiny example, from the chapter about Politics: <i>"...Sueter should to able to communicate directly with staff officers..."</i> That may not seem like much, but there's a lot of the same kind of thing.</p><p>The second is, I guess, a matter of taste. Hobbs writes at length about many parts of the story, and is always interesting. I'd known nothing about the projected <b>plan to attack the High Sea Fleet in its harbour</b> in 1918, just beaten to the line by the Armistice. Yes, that directly presaged Taranto and Pearl Harbor. He mentions that a Navy delegation went to Japan in 1921 with 6 Sopwith T.1s to teach the Japanese Navy how to attack warships with airdropped torpedoes, and telling them all about the wartime plan!</p><p>However, there are two topics I'd have liked to read much more about. One is the story of the RNAS fighter and bomber squadrons on the Western Front. True, much of that story has been told in other volumes. But the other is in my view criminally ignored, the work of <b>John Porte</b> and the Air Station at <b>Felixstowe</b>, which did so much to combat and reduce the U-boat menace. While the plan to attack the German fleet in its harbour, which never happened, has a chapter devoted to it, Porte only gets mentioned in passing.</p><p>Before those sound like major complaints, please let me say I'd never have felt those frustrations if I hadn't been so engaged by the book as a whole. Here was a subject I thought I was familiar with, but in the event found that there was a host of stories which I was unaware of, each worth a book in themselves.</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>As already mentioned, the plan to use <b>HMS Argus</b>, the world's first true aircraft carrier, and other vessels, to attack the High Sea Fleet in its harbour.</li><li>The part played by the Royal Navy in the gestation and development of both the <b>armoured car</b> and the <b>tank</b>, (at one time referred to as landships) and its use of <b>armoured trains</b>.</li><li>The proliferation of inventive solutions devised to enable the <b>operation of aircraft from ships</b>.</li><li>The widespread use of seaplanes in the <b>Dardanelles campaign</b>.</li><li>The extent of <b>airship operation</b> and development by the Navy, far more than I'd ever imagined. My impression is that the RN made better use of airships than the Germans, but that's my opinion.</li><li>The multiple attempts to attack Zeppelins in their sheds, as early as 1914. (The <b>Friedrichshafen raid</b> is a real Boy's Own story, starring the larger than life <b>Noel Pemberton Billing</b> - there's an exciting account of it in an Osprey book by Ian Castle)</li></ul><p></p><p>...And so much more. If you have half an interest in the subject matter, the book is worth your while. The picture content as I say is superb. The bottom line is that David Hobbs writes with passion for his subject, with great respect for most of the Navy men involved, even as he admits their failings; and very little respect for those who took advantage of the pace of change in politics, technology, and the course of the war, to create the <b>RAF</b> as an almost entirely military rather than naval organisation. Before I read this book, I was blissfully neutral about the beginnings of the RAF. Hobb's analysis of the politics behind it is depressingly familiar to anyone who looks at how people behave in the corridors of power. Now, I find it hard to disagree with <b>Hobbs' conclusion that the disbandment of the RNAS was wholly unnecessary</b> and did long lasting harm to naval aviation, gifting the Royal Navy's long lead to the United States and Japan.</p>Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04344313339971737295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-665362365654853620.post-88732131222888083192021-08-09T22:44:00.001+01:002021-08-10T13:13:26.881+01:00Trail of Tears, by John Ehle<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgK3b4e5EXjn6SeZSWVTbwZCa06eoJvqwTcgDps4iRCpAR0IXlh-Ud49XoSHBtwWkWxE8nabUig_cvauttHAecjdgCBLlee9SOEGLr-SbJO3DM0XVvJeHZTCNnbLUeWt21OpaxkORMxY3Y/s484/2021_07_30a.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="484" data-original-width="310" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgK3b4e5EXjn6SeZSWVTbwZCa06eoJvqwTcgDps4iRCpAR0IXlh-Ud49XoSHBtwWkWxE8nabUig_cvauttHAecjdgCBLlee9SOEGLr-SbJO3DM0XVvJeHZTCNnbLUeWt21OpaxkORMxY3Y/s320/2021_07_30a.jpg" width="205" /></a></div><br />Or, <i><b>The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation</b></i>. <i><b>Trail of Tears</b></i> describes the historical event known by that name, the removal of the Cherokee people in 1838 from their homeland in the South East of America, to what was then known as Indian Territory, now Oklahoma, West of the Mississippi.<div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>John Ehle's</b> book was published in 1988, so in some ways it really isn't that old; but I must have bought it not long after. At any rate, it's been sitting on my bookshelf for a very long time. Browsed through a few times, that's all. I have a number of books about the <b>Cherokee</b> and their history - as a people they're rather better documented than most other indigenous American nations - and with a renewed interest in the topic I thought this volume would be a good place to start.<p></p></div><div>So, why have I been putting off reading the book properly? I think it's partly because I may have felt I knew the basics of the story already, and partly because I understood it as a story of genocide which would offer only unrelenting grimness. I wasn't entirely wrong in those <b>assumptions</b>, but reading it has opened my eyes to many things which diverged from them. It's fair to say I didn't really know the story as well as I thought.</div><div><br /></div><div>As to the <b>genocide</b> - leaving aside the question of whether modern Americans think they had conducted a genocide - but pointing out that the villains of the story, such men as John Sevier in Tennessee and Wilson Lumpkin in Georgia, were completely gung ho about the prospect of eliminating the 'Indians' entirely; I'd been biased by my knowledge of the Armenian genocide of 1915, the core part of which involved driving the Armenians of Eastern Anatolia into the Syrian desert. There was little pretence then that any Armenians would survive. I admit I assumed that the Trail of Tears was a similar process, but this time deliberately forcing the Cherokee along the trail during the harshest conditions of winter.</div><div><br /></div><div>I now know that the passage West occurred at that time largely through the <b>poor leadership</b> of certain Cherokee, specifically <b>John Ross</b>. And that they went by land, making painfully slow progress along the muddy trail, because of deep seated prejudice against using the rivers. Water transport had been offered, indeed, John Ross took advantage of it himself. Secondly, there's the question of how many died. I don't feel confident in giving a figure, either of the size of the entire Cherokee nation, or of those who died on the Trail. Maybe it will become clearer as I read other books, but at the moment I take away a sense that it was possibly a couple of thousand, out of a total of up to 20,000. </div><div><br /></div><div>That last figure may surprise you, as it did me. It's true that the <b>numbers of indigenous peoples</b> in North America collapsed in some areas when Europeans arrived, but in the case of the Cherokee, there may never have been many more than that. By the Nineteenth Century, the whites (and blacks) greatly outnumbered the tribal peoples whose land it was, so they were never really in a good position to keep the settlers out. Before most Cherokee had even seen any whites, lines had already been drawn on the map, and land the Cherokee thought was theirs, was split between Tennessee, North Carolina, Alabama and Georgia. Forward thinking Cherokees, who were usually half bloods, were driving development of Cherokee lands away from hunting and superstition (most game had disappeared anyway) toward agriculture and education, but the prospect of civilised Indians so appalled the settlers, especially in Georgia, that laws were enacted which denied them any rights, even to their own property. The discovery of <b>gold</b> on Indian land in Georgia was the final blow.</div><div><br /></div><div>I must apologise, because I've done precisely what I didn't intend to do, which is to discuss the history, rather than the book. Maybe it's a compliment, in that the book is engaging and tells the story effectively and well. I found it very readable. The author <b>John Ehle</b> struck just the right balance, it seems to me, being detached while letting the reader feel the impact of events. The ends of the spectrum are extreme: crucial scenes take place in the salons of Washington, when those civilised half bloods, Major Ridge and his son John, Elias Boudinot, David Vann, John Ross et al, plead their case to the President and others. Others take place in the towns of Cherokee country, where farms and mills (and even a printing press, producing a newspaper and other texts in both English and Cherokee, using <b>Sequoyah's</b> newly invented writing system) are appearing, but also the old ways are strongly in evidence, conducted by the shamans. As their society falls apart, and then even as they begin to create a new home in Oklahoma, brutal killings are never far away.</div><div><br /></div><div>I emphasise the balance that Ehle successfully strikes. The thing is, you naturally wonder what <b>sources</b> could there have been, let alone what sources survived, to describe all this. We rely very much on the writings of those civilised half bloods, in particular John Ridge and Boudinot, and probably most of all on the writings of the various missionaries who endeavoured (with varying agendas and degrees of self interest) to improve the situation of the Cherokee. There could have been a jarring discontinuity between what he derived from those sources, and what he derived from modern research, and again what he's been obliged to write to 'fill in the gaps'. These are quite disparate things, but I feel he did well to weld it into a story which flowed naturally. What <b>he writes impressionistically</b>, to convey the Cherokee's perception of their world, I felt was wholy justified and successful.</div><div><br /></div><div>Their gaining access to <b>literacy</b> in a very short time was remarkable (Sequoyah is an enigmatic figure but Ehle renders his story tellingly in a few short passages). I admit in the past I've told people, 'You know, the Cherokee became literate practically overnight thanks to Sequoyah's syllabary etc...' The cold facts are that literacy only came to a small portion of the Cherokee, and I'd guess might have been yet another factor dividing the half bloods, who were pushing hard for modernisation, from the majority full bloods, who were under the influence of the shamans.</div><div><br /></div><div>I have to be cautious about something else: Ehle does tend to <b>take sides</b>. No, not between the settlers and the Cherokee, that would be crass. But between two bitterly opposed parties, known as <b>the Ridge and Ross parties</b>. I've glanced into one or two other books already and was surprised to find a significantly different take on the actions of those figures. It seems weird to find two supposedly objective historians capable of this after nearly two centuries. One might think that none of it mattered, the Cherokee were always going to be removed and reduced. However, it's hard not to think that different actions might have led to a better, less grievous outcome. You see, John Ehle makes Ridge the protagonist of his story. Though a half blood, he grew up a warrior, and never really learnt English. But he determined that modernisation was the only chance the Cherokee had of being taken seriously, hence the education of his impressive son John. Both were powerful orators. But they were unable to make much impression on the shamans, who were determined to stick it out. John Ross, on the other hand, seems to have been adept at saying what the poorer Cherokees wanted to hear (and also adept at doing deals financially beneficial to himself), but with poor judgement about what favours he could win from Washington or the Georgians. He is the 'hero' of at least one other volume I've seen. Apparently he knew nothing about the cruel assassinations of the Ridge party.</div><div><br /></div><div>I can't know how much my understanding of the Cherokee's history will broaden and change as I continue my reading. But <b>I'm very glad I read this book</b> first. Ehle writes very well in my view, and with unsentimental sympathy for a people who just might have come out of the trauma of European settlement with more of their nationhood intact. His book ends with the assassinations. I'll learn about the further reduction of the Cherokee in the 19th and 20th Centuries in other books.</div><div><br /></div><div><i>PS - What on earth is <b>Andrew Jackson</b> doing on one of the most used notes of the nation's currency, the $20 bill? He's very much one of the main villains of the story, he even benefited from the support of the Cherokee in the Indian Wars, only to put the seal on their removal later. But I mean, at a time when you're pulling down the statues of Confederates, you're still celebrating an actual instigator of genocide? One of the people responsible for the Trail of Tears?</i></div>Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04344313339971737295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-665362365654853620.post-89060879300959424782021-05-01T15:48:00.003+01:002021-08-09T00:24:51.110+01:00How To Talk Trash In Cherokee<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_8A1a65eCyyR451IPCQfCoP6eRq4DkNRHprhUjjYAV6Vu5WQJNeyhClC1nT3T8CSymUhLDHG4zGoWZCYjK_Z2hif1HoglWtRwdwPPOIrsojbJ0qQr6uREXP4Gwx4y83IXftPzBClgkhA/s575/2021_04_29a.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="575" data-original-width="396" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_8A1a65eCyyR451IPCQfCoP6eRq4DkNRHprhUjjYAV6Vu5WQJNeyhClC1nT3T8CSymUhLDHG4zGoWZCYjK_Z2hif1HoglWtRwdwPPOIrsojbJ0qQr6uREXP4Gwx4y83IXftPzBClgkhA/s320/2021_04_29a.jpg" /></a></div><br />by <b>Don Grooms</b> and <b>John Oocumma</b> is at barely over 100 pages a basic down to earth introduction to speaking <b>Cherokee</b> in everyday situations. Superficially it seems to be a typical <b>phrasebook</b> as you might find for any language.<p></p><p>Except that Cherokee isn't any language. Linguists would have to say it's in <b>decline</b>, mostly spoken by the older generation. Numerically the Cherokee would appear to be doing well, compared with other indigenous peoples, especially if you include all those who say they're part Cherokee. But they live entirely within the USA, they're extensively mixed with the general population, and few are inclined to hold on to their ancestral language. They exist as <b>distinct communities</b> in only two places: on the Qualla Boundary, the Cherokee reservation in the Smoky Mountains at the Western end of North Carolina; and around a couple of towns in the Eastern part of Oklahoma. </p><p>The plain fact is that any Cherokee you met would be a <b>fluent speaker of US English</b>. A Cherokee who spoke English might indulge you with a few words and maybe some of the phrases you picked up from this book (or any other of a surprising number of available books about the language), but you'd never settle into the natural spoken banter which is what the '<b>trash</b>' of the title refers to. Because '<b>trash</b>' isn't just about communication, it's about living the culture.</p><p>Here's another consideration. The Cherokee of this book may not be the one you want. My exploration of the topic so far doesn't tell me whether it matters, but <b>there are differences</b> between the Cherokee of Oklahoma and the Cherokee of the Qualla Boundary. These differences are the result of the split which occurred two centuries ago when most of the Cherokee were driven West on the '<b>Trail of Tears</b>' (deliberately during winter; it was an act of genocide) into 'Indian Territory', later Oklahoma, while a few stayed behind, hidden away in the recesses of the Smokies, and, long story too involved to tell here, but in a rare success for Native Americans were eventually allowed to remain, establishing the only native reservation of any size East of the Mississippi.</p><p>Almost all the books you may find about the Cherokee language are about the Cherokee of Oklahoma. <i><b>How To Talk Trash In Cherokee</b></i> is unusual in being about the Cherokee of the Qualla Boundary.</p><p>And I have another problem in using this book. I'm not American. The thing is, just like all those little Lonely Planet etc. phrase books which tourists used to get before we had language apps on smart phones, this book <b>invents its own phonetic system</b> to render the Cherokee words and phrases. That's a problem for me as a British English speaker because I'm almost certainly not pronouncing what I read in the way intended. US phonemes and accents vary enough from British ones to make my utterances probably nonsense to a Cherokee.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsRuHrImoNwjrDY-Hp80xVG0my6qDQ1HDnHgyafpAhr0CwRm0lvazwdfLNUkfrrrh-Ap82Td-Rqq1Ddaa38wwpOnFHvye3c_0ygQMyc4ME8Pv3JwhamobbwKRreLHwAgOXCqfiL_hYyh0/s486/2021_04_29b.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="486" data-original-width="372" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsRuHrImoNwjrDY-Hp80xVG0my6qDQ1HDnHgyafpAhr0CwRm0lvazwdfLNUkfrrrh-Ap82Td-Rqq1Ddaa38wwpOnFHvye3c_0ygQMyc4ME8Pv3JwhamobbwKRreLHwAgOXCqfiL_hYyh0/w490-h640/2021_04_29b.jpg" width="490" /></a></div><br />This page gives you a fair flavour of the book. Naturally you first notice the <b>illustration</b>. There are a lot of these comic drawings in the book; they keep it light, but also noticeably show Cherokees living ordinary modern albeit rather downbeat lives in North Carolina. They do love sport, they play it rough, and yes, here it's baseball. So this is a page of some stuff a spectator or player might call out. But reading the <b>phonetic Cherokee</b> here is of limited help unless you can hear some of it spoken by an actual Cherokee as a reference model. It bothered me at first, until I realised that this book doesn't pretend to turn you into a Cherokee speaker all by itself. But it's cleverer than you think. Without ever telling you that you're learning some <b>grammar</b>, there actually is a degree of <b>progression</b> taking place as you read it through. There's a small example on this page, where we're given the two phrases, <i>You missed it</i> and <i>You missed it again</i>. If nothing else, we learn that the verb goes at the end. Usually.<div><br /></div><div>I'm pretty weak as a language learner, especially when it comes to the spoken variety, which is what <i><b>How To Talk Trash</b></i> is all about. Like most people(?) I first look for words which correspond to words in my own language. Since Cherokee is about as related to English as Klingon, the only vaguely familiar words are going to be <b>borrowed</b>. They're not pointed out to us, but I did spot one or two, like their word for money. <i>I've got some money</i> is rendered as <i>ah-dale-dah-gill</i>, and <i>I've got ten bucks</i> as <i>shko-dale-uh ah-gee-LAH</i>. We find out later that the <i>shko</i> bit means <i>ten</i>. Tell me if I'm wrong, but surely the <i>dale</i> element means money, ie. from our word dollar.</div><div><br /></div><div>Progression from there involves <b>a good ear</b> and <b>spotting patterns</b>. But one can only go so far with this book, because the English in this book is always given a natural conversational feel, and therefore rarely translates the Cherokee word-for-word. So while certain elements become very familiar to us, like <i>dooley</i> meaning want, we clearly lack information a lot of the time. We're told early on that <i>noo-gah-ee-yuh</i> means when. Mostly(!). Here are some phrases to do with snow.</div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>When does it snow = <b>noo-gah ee-yuh goo-tee-shkoh</b></li><li>Snow = <b>oon-zah</b></li><li>When's it gonna snow = <b>noo-gah-ee-you dah goo tahn</b></li><li>It's snowing = <b>goo-tee-AH</b></li></ul></div><div>So, can you tell me which bit means <i>snow</i>? Purely guessing, as a verb the root is <i><b>goot-</b></i>, but as a noun, well, see the second phrase. See what I mean about wanting more information, to grasp what's going on there?<br /><p></p><p>I admit some frustration with the <b>inconsistent</b> nature of the phonetic transliteration. But it has to be this way because that's reality: if you saw similar transcriptions of English expressions you would find, maybe to your amazement, that <b>we don't say things exactly the same way all the time</b>. The words might look the same in written form, but the specific sounds we utter may change according to mood, context, or simply the differences of the other words which surround them.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi55GRNaHaQ1KTKCY0F7h9hMZhSueYo00rWAmvmevysjaotWlrsx6ElpVpFKS_G61-QUj6MP9ASVBc92XcTVoHIiWTdUC7mudZMpT7ol5zBDAZGDAem7g5kiQtfNpiohdHGfS5S9tRP1_M/s560/2021_04_29c.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="394" data-original-width="560" height="450" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi55GRNaHaQ1KTKCY0F7h9hMZhSueYo00rWAmvmevysjaotWlrsx6ElpVpFKS_G61-QUj6MP9ASVBc92XcTVoHIiWTdUC7mudZMpT7ol5zBDAZGDAem7g5kiQtfNpiohdHGfS5S9tRP1_M/w640-h450/2021_04_29c.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br />This <i>(above)</i> is only half way through the book but I feel this spread gives a good idea of what the authors are doing. Without any heavy lecturing, we're given a sense of <b>the Cherokee mindset</b>. They're not presented as perfect - there are a lot of entertaining pages related to the potential enthusiasm of Cherokee men for getting into fights - but we are gently encouraged not to make assumptions and shown that there's much to respect.</div><div><br /></div><div>As for the language, despite the difficulties mentioned above, the book is much more <b>informative</b> than you'd think it had any right to be, and as the sections go by the language does begin to form some shape in your mind. Even mine. Look, it's always going to be hard for any Westerner, because - I think this is the right term, or something like it - Cherokee is an <b>agglutinative language</b>, which means any given word can be a sentence in itself, containing indications of person, action, intention, time and much more. If one is serious, one moves on, to businesslike language books, or online teaching. Personally it'd have been nice to hear the phrases spoken, on a cd perhaps though that would have raised the price. Today they might have provided an internet link to sound samples we could hear. But for an American, perhaps the phonetic system the book uses is as clear as day.</div><div><br /></div><div>But be realistic about your ambitions, as a Cherokee would about any hard task. There's a joke on the last page: <i>How do you say '<b>watermelon</b>' in Cherokee? You follow the expressway till you see a sign that says '<b>Cherokee</b>'. Drive into the middle of town, stand in front of the Information Center and say '<b>Watermelon</b>'.</i><br /><p></p><p>I definitely recommend <b>reading the book</b> as a book ie. from <b>beginning to end</b>, rather than dipping in to the various themed sections randomly. Cherokee grammar is a world away from that of any Indo-European language like English, but in a quietly subtle way <i><b>How To Talk Trash</b></i> has made me a bit better prepared for what I'll face in some more serious language books I have.</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">I know perfectly well that no one if they read this at all is going to go off and search for this book, but it did grow on me as I read it, and with its humble almost homemade nature I feel like giving full <b>credits</b>, beyond just title and authors: it was published đ«1989 by the Downhome Publishing Company of Gainesville, Florida and Cherokee, North Carolina, where I bought it in the museum bookshop.</span></p></blockquote><p><br /></p></div>Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04344313339971737295noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-665362365654853620.post-5718608494932767582021-01-29T00:52:00.002+00:002021-01-29T22:19:45.262+00:00Consider Phlebas, by Iain M. Banks<p><i><b></b></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijSZCAalAKpYAwj3xv2UO8HbHiCPloyOZ9S0OANUeElnpKkLMTPnbSlNjrfe1KIMRNKYji5XQW6QUGOsxxf0vRf9q0xYJrEPrKyPl9ekQgNsv7vz9qviqKUyzuJjpAvznzQqBNm6zR95E/s514/2021_01_28a.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="514" data-original-width="332" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijSZCAalAKpYAwj3xv2UO8HbHiCPloyOZ9S0OANUeElnpKkLMTPnbSlNjrfe1KIMRNKYji5XQW6QUGOsxxf0vRf9q0xYJrEPrKyPl9ekQgNsv7vz9qviqKUyzuJjpAvznzQqBNm6zR95E/s320/2021_01_28a.jpg" /></a></b></i></div><i><b>Consider Phlebas</b></i> is the first book in <b>Iain M. Banks's Culture</b> series. It's a fairly loose series; the stories are apparently self contained. 'Apparently'? That, because it's the first Culture book I've read. However, I have read one other of his science fiction books, <i><b>The Algebraist</b></i>, also a work of space opera. In some ways it could almost be a Culture book except it wouldn't quite fit. It impressed me as regards his writing and world creation, and since I had another Iain M. Banks Culture book lying around which I'd never read, <i><b>Look to Windward</b></i>, I went for that and then saw that it stands quite late on in the collection. I decided to read the first - this one, <i><b>Consider Phlebas</b></i> - even if not strictly necessary, figuring that any writer creating an ambitious 'universe' will do a lot of introducing of the features of that universe in the first volume, even if the story itself is fully resolved by the end.<p></p><p>A side note here is that I've never read an <b>Iain Banks</b> book. For those that don't know, Banks began as <b>a 'mainstream' novelist</b>, making quite an impact with books like <i><b>The Wasp Factory</b></i>. When he embarked on a parallel career as a science fiction author, he adopted the pen name of Iain M. Banks. I suppose this made it easier for bookshop owners to pose a new Iain Banks book in the front window and then on the centre store shelves, while slotting any Iain M. Banks books into the slightly grubbier room at the back where they ghettoise science fiction, fantasy and horror. But being aware of the twin strands of his writing, I'm naturally curious to sample <b>the quality of his writing</b>, because surely no writer is going to consciously slum it as a writer simply because he or she has switched genres? It's an abiding question for me, having drifted away from science fiction in my younger years at a time when little science fiction demonstrated what they used to call 'literary quality'. But there are many science fiction works today which deserve critical respect. And <b>Iain M. Banks's</b> should, you would think, be amongst them.</p><p>The narrative of <i><b>Consider Phlebas</b></i> is commendably tight. The principal characters are established straight away, with deft skill, considering that the protagonist is a 'Changer' ie. able to physically transform his appearance. Although the action spans distances we can't comprehend, the setting of every scene is well managed, and we can get our heads around them even though we may be talking about a spaceship the size of a small planet, or a giant orbital ring with a land area many times larger than any rocky planet. The thrust of the narrative is very clear, in that the protagonist <b>Horza</b> has a definite objective. And though as in most space opera the characters all have bizarre names, they're usually abbreviated just as would happen in real life, and you get used to them.</p><p>What about <b>the characters</b>? The setting is so alien from anything we know here on Earth*, how easy is it to imagine them, their motivations and behaviour? Well, it's true some of them are very alien. One is supposedly removed from our physical universe and we only observe the results of its actions. But the rest are all given <b>thoroughly detailed, convincing personalities</b>. We sympathise to some degree with most of them. Though there are, necessarily a handful of irredeemable individuals. Just as in real life. But as to our protagonist Horza's principal opponent towards the end, Xoxarle, though unlikeable, Banks renders him well enough to make him understandable. </p><p>Relationships are always a test for books like this. Because, they're (probably) not the point of a science fiction story, but for most living beings they're a major preoccupation of the time they have in existence; and readers tend to wonder if their 'hero' is going to get any at some point. I liked what Banks did here. It was a perfectly natural part of the story, Horza's past and present relationships affected his actions, and the story, without unbalancing it at all. And they fed into the emotional impact of the outcome. </p><p>Yes, as a reader, <b>you find yourself strangely mourning</b> these totally fictional and not entirely human people you've come to know.</p><p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWv3E4V90njtU1dIhqWNPwLkG8xmwTZQY14oEwFFDuXy7YCooTf8VT8s_mucfNdU5s9kZyW4zBMRcGaghFfSB4L3MKc1XlY__pMdf0QZ_Wqpno481EQ57015FlJB-27NKn6LPPEzI7u3M/s452/2021_01_28b.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; display: inline !important; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="452" data-original-width="303" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWv3E4V90njtU1dIhqWNPwLkG8xmwTZQY14oEwFFDuXy7YCooTf8VT8s_mucfNdU5s9kZyW4zBMRcGaghFfSB4L3MKc1XlY__pMdf0QZ_Wqpno481EQ57015FlJB-27NKn6LPPEzI7u3M/s320/2021_01_28b.jpg" /></a>It took me some time to get used to Banks's writing. First in <i>The Algebraist</i>, then in <i>Consider Phlebas</i>, I wondered if I'd experienced before another writer so inclined to switch tone so much, from serious to flippant, from detached, clinical description, small scale as well as too great a scale to take in, to thriller style action. It's all there. And it's worth underlining that although Banks describes all kinds of alienness in his universe, he clearly decided to hand wave difficulties with conversation. <b>Different languages</b> certainly exist, and he tells us if it's relevant, that a character can't understand what another says. But Banks is far more interested as we would be in what characters say, their truthfulness, and how they might be using words to influence others. I think he does this really, really well. I should mention for instance that <b>Xoxarle</b> is a three legged giant, but never does he seem more human when near the end he manipulates his captors in order to gain an advantage. </p><p><b>The Culture</b>? It was a perfect choice, to begin this series by looking at it from the outside. Horza is a spy, you see. There was no glib childhood trauma or somesuch, he simply, profoundly, doesn't agree with the Culture. He's flawed morally, most clearly when he kills someone in his way. They're not complete innocents, but still, it's murder. Anyway, you follow him on his quest and you're pretty much rooting for him at the end. But the Culture is there, represented by a female agent who's well realised herself. Their occasional conversations make one puzzled as time goes on - you wonder why he can't see he's on the 'wrong' side. If it is. Though only depicted at a distance in this book, it does seem as if the Culture may not entirely be a blissful utopia. I suppose I will have to read more Culture books to find out.</p><p>On the evidence so far, these are terrific books. <b>Space opera for grown ups</b>.</p><p><b>*</b>- Ah yes, I'd almost forgotten that asterisk. The last portion of the book takes place on a 'Planet of the Dead', Schar's World, a frozen near lifeless place normally barred from outsiders and containing only the artifacts of a long dead civilisation. It isn't Earth; but the way it's described it very much <b>sounds like an Earth</b> experiencing a new ice age. And the civilisation destroyed itself; it had built great structures and machines in preparation for global war, but was wiped out by a plague. Woops.</p><p>Another footnote. I read today that an <b>Amazon TV series</b> based on <i>Consider Phlebas</i> was in the works, but has been cancelled, it seems because Iain Banks's estate has backed away from the project. I can get why producers might be interested in the book: a lot of it reads like a thriller, especially at the end, where the viewpoint switches faster and faster between the different participants in the action - all very filmic.</p>Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04344313339971737295noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-665362365654853620.post-46004841598880993822020-12-31T13:00:00.000+00:002020-12-31T13:00:18.364+00:002020!!! [expletive deleted]<p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSF7g-k7hsftUWmhh25g8LmMzvFlyYi8TvnmF6EM7sGEz83onBLPn5VTJzBUsSksXLcSZoKxiJ8PQoYKtwIxSQjV9uvB9FFfl_kULxysseWJ0tqAIycpHkgO8S6dRVxV5TzhamU4HsPLU/s450/2020_12_30a.JPG" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="449" data-original-width="450" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSF7g-k7hsftUWmhh25g8LmMzvFlyYi8TvnmF6EM7sGEz83onBLPn5VTJzBUsSksXLcSZoKxiJ8PQoYKtwIxSQjV9uvB9FFfl_kULxysseWJ0tqAIycpHkgO8S6dRVxV5TzhamU4HsPLU/s320/2020_12_30a.JPG" width="320" /></a></div><br />2020!!*!%&!! đŹ This year... I've read a lot of books. I may even manage a 34th by midnight! That's a lot for me. However, there's a lot I haven't done. Like see a film.<p></p><p>A big regret is that I failed to visit the <b>cinema</b> before my trip to Finland in early March. In other words, the last time there was no issue about going to a cinema. There's all the difference in the world as far as I'm concerned between idly watching a film on the telly, probably with lights on, probably with adverts, lavatory breaks and so on, and actually going to the cinema. <b>HOME</b> includes Manchester's arthouse cinema, and I miss that place, right down to its sweet potato chips and boutique beers. Even if it is a bit of a trek from the station to get to it. I want to see a film with someone, take a trip, have a meal etc. quite apart from enjoying the full experience of great sound, widescreen and everything. That's <b>seeing a film properly</b>.</p><p>Worse, at this end of the year, I don't feel I missed many great films, because the year's releases were so limited. No cinema trips, no streaming or any other kind of platform either. I've seen one or two end of year lists, and yes there were one or two films I'd probably have enjoyed at a pinch, but going to see them would have been risky, especially at <b>HOME</b> where most of the screens are quite small spaces, there would have been no amenities in Manchester or wherever it was, and I'd have been by myself. So that was that.</p><p>Only once did I have the pleasure of a browse in a <b>bookshop</b>, Waterstones in Preston. Yes, a pleasure although they'd had to remove all the seating (and there was nowhere at all to have a pee in the city centre). My mission to get through a large chunk of my unread books took a small hit, when I bought a few more. <br /></p><p></p><p>Here's one of my 'starred' books from this year. I've had <i><b>Always Coming Home</b></i> by <b>Ursula Le Guin</b> for years, decades in fact, waiting to be read, put off not simply by its length but by its complex multi-genre organisation and its density of ideas. It was a marathon of a read, but definitely rewarding. It may be her masterwork; the thing about Le Guin is that at the point, about when I was leaving school, when I was beginning to appreciate that most science fiction was poorly written, I recognised that she was one of the very few exceptions who wrote very well. When <i><b>Always Coming Home</b></i> turned up a few years later, I sort of put it to one side for when I was 'ready for it'. This year was good for it: it's about a far future post apocalyptic society, not wholly free of the damage done in the past by our treatment of the planet, but still a moving <b>message of hope</b>.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdWhX-dr-HT0cN8DjY5gFE-SLYKDQ9siyT_2_0Yi2sShjePnWSAu1W5c2bTrJhTeUYXOe1NBK2zJMgw9uX8IHJ-YG8CBprlFvY1xu8Qo4QaJWN8xnvwZ_fIURc8aTqhKYpX7jpYuDhLbw/s512/2020_10_18a.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="351" data-original-width="512" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdWhX-dr-HT0cN8DjY5gFE-SLYKDQ9siyT_2_0Yi2sShjePnWSAu1W5c2bTrJhTeUYXOe1NBK2zJMgw9uX8IHJ-YG8CBprlFvY1xu8Qo4QaJWN8xnvwZ_fIURc8aTqhKYpX7jpYuDhLbw/s320/2020_10_18a.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><p></p><p>Elsewhere, I may have embarked on a long term relationship with quite a different SF author, <b>Iain M. Banks</b>, who died back in January I think. He wrote the other doorstopper of a book I read this year, <i><b>The Algebraist</b></i>. He's known for a long series of books set in 'The Culture', ambitious far future space opera like this book which however stands on its own, as far as I know. From what I've heard, it probably had to be because one element of this book was active hostility towards any kind of Artificial Intelligence, which I believe dominates The Culture. Being introduced to the universe of <i><b>The Algebraist</b></i> made for hard work for the reader, in particular the setting in the atmosphere of a gas giant and the imagining of a complex advanced society of beings who dwell in it. All quite a test for someone wondering whether to invest time in further books by Banks; what with their tendency to be rather long. I have to say, it took a long time for me to get used to his 'tone', but by the end I was well engaged by his characters, both alien and human, and I admired his skill in depicting non-trivial consequences. I will read more <b>Iain M. Banks</b>.</p><p>Books, more books... No, I'll leave off excessive commenting on other individual books. Those two were the most monumental page-wise, but overall I'm pleased with the variety of fiction and non-fiction, all sorts of genres, and a few sentimental reads (mainly thinking of my Mum's childhood copy of <i><b>Swallows and Amazons</b></i>). I did, by the way, complete my reading of Keith Waterhouse's novels, with his last two. Not his best, and in different ways very self aware of time having passed, but I'm glad to have done it. There are one or two which I will <b>re-read</b> sometime. Do you ever do that? I found I'd done it far more frequently than I imagined, when I checked back. I saw that as a boy several times I read a great book and then would read it again maybe six months later. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhOjLpDXeO-Oy7AoHZleIdVoXGnhy4_Ss1QzzB9rhqrvy8_yLrb1QqLJAsnvD3R3ABdTq7biAM_DXj8J8pSjJlp2N05PZiPwVv9RjWCgJrxwpMuhZbGPpxm8JYxQFg-aWYNKJVBLMrEfU/s559/2020_09_27a.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="559" data-original-width="372" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhOjLpDXeO-Oy7AoHZleIdVoXGnhy4_Ss1QzzB9rhqrvy8_yLrb1QqLJAsnvD3R3ABdTq7biAM_DXj8J8pSjJlp2N05PZiPwVv9RjWCgJrxwpMuhZbGPpxm8JYxQFg-aWYNKJVBLMrEfU/s320/2020_09_27a.jpg" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p>No trips, beyond nearby parts of Lancashire. But I was on one to <b>Helsinki</b> with a couple of friends when it all kicked off. Finland hasn't suffered the virus too badly compared to here, certainly, but even then there was self consciousness at times when meeting people. Now, not only do I wonder if I'll go back to Finland, see friends, eat salmiakki ice cream, and watch ice hockey any time soon, I haven't been able to attend Finnish School here either. I've gone from disliking the sheer idea of <b>video calling</b>, to being used to classes on Zoom. When I think about the ways I've replaced real life experiences with online ones, it's dispiriting, to be so dependent on <b>wifi connections</b> (they failed at times) and reliable post/package <b>delivery systems</b> (stressful - I'm currently waiting for another lp from Finland, I've been told it'll be a while).</p><p>This has got unhelpfully negative. I can't really complain too much: isolation has been bad for me, but physically I'm basically well, and a lot of friends aren't. And this Christmas time, as so often during the year, there have been many instances of <b>kindness</b> and <b>thoughtfulness</b> which I probably don't show enough appreciation of.</p><p>Finally, to lighten things further, I'll briefly give you the annual stat report on the <b>Christmas cards</b>. I can tell you that equal in 2nd place were <b>deer</b> (not reindeer, I would count them separately) and <b>owls</b>. But just ahead, the winner this year was - <b>hares</b>.</p>Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04344313339971737295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-665362365654853620.post-39037144686162728242020-06-28T02:02:00.002+01:002023-02-15T22:51:10.032+00:00Courrier Sud / Southern Mail / Postilento etelÀÀn, by Antoine de St-ExupĂ©ry<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i><b>Courrier Sud</b></i> was <b>St-Exupéry's</b> first novel. It's known in English as <i><b>Southern Mail</b></i>, and sometimes published together with his next book <i><b>Vol de Nuit</b></i> / <i><b>Night Flight</b></i>, both books being quite short. A few years ago it received a translation into Finnish, as <i><b>Postilento etelÀÀn</b></i>.<br />
<br />
The story tells of a French mailplane pilot who on a return visit to Paris, meets up with a childhood friend he has always loved, just as her marriage falls apart when her child dies. He tries to take her away from an urban world and a husband now inimical to her, but away to his own world, which is even more alien; before they ever get there she falls ill and the dream is seen for what it is, an impossible one. The central narrative is topped and tailed by the circumstantial scenes of resting and flying in the harsh environment of the <b>Sahara</b>.<br />
<br />
Short though the book is, I've been saving it up since finding, with great surprise and delight at the time, <b>this Finnish translation</b>. Who would have thought Finns would bother with a book such as this? I'd like to think it was a labour of love, because although <b>St-Exup</b><b>Ă©</b><b>ry</b> is not so well known nowadays, he is still well regarded by some - yes, including me - especially thanks to his children's book <i><b>Le Petit Prince</b></i> / <i><b>The Little Prince</b></i>, which has been translated into countless languages.<br />
<br />
<b>I read them together, all three books.</b> It seemed like an ideal project for a June 2020 spent under coronavirus restrictions. Initially, I did it virtually as a parallel read, chapter by chapter. However, after the first part, I realised a feel for the story was as or even more important than what was becoming a very technical translation exercise, in particular with <i><b>Postilento etelÀÀn</b></i>, so I continued with <i><b>Southern Mail</b></i> and then carried on with <i><b>Courrier Sud</b></i>. I kept the English text next to me while reading the original; and in June both of those accompanied my painstaking reading of the Finnish translation. Though the most important nearby volume has been as you may imagine my large <b>Finnish dictionary</b>.<br />
<br />
The question is, have I read three different books, or three versions of the same book? This relates to the well known doubt about how much is lost in translation. Personally, while I have read <b>foreign literature in translation</b>, I have never really felt I was appreciating the original to its fullest extent. I admire people who produce beautiful language as much as I admire great storytellers, so while I can enjoy the work of the latter, the quality of the former may be only dimly seen. That's okay. There are some excellent translators whose writing is very much on a level with the original. Anyway, who am I to say? I should be able to judge the quality of writing in English, on the basis of a degree in it, but as for other languages, I have <i>*cough*</i> lesser qualifications in French, Italian, and none at all in Finnish, apart from attendance at <b>suomikoulu</b> (Finnish School) for many years.<br />
<br />
Let's see.<br />
<br />
<i><b>Courrier Sud</b></i> is fiction, but it heavily reflects St-Exupéry and his world. The viewpoint veers between that of the protagonist, Jacques Bernis, and the unnamed narrator who is equivalent to St-Exupéry himself. They are both <b>pilots</b>, working on the long and dangerous route between France and South America, back in the 1920s. They were pioneering these routes, desperate to prove their practicality, and there was great pressure to carry on in the face of all the difficulties. Its environmental and meterological conditions, across endless desert as well as open ocean and the Andes, feature in all his books, especially the Sahara. It's this which draws readers; and it's not just a matter of his description of these scenes, but the vivid way he expresses his humility in the face of nature at the same time as his extraordinary sense of humanity, its nobility and its fragility. If <i><b>Courrier Sud</b></i> was only a narrative, it wouldn't amount to much. But St-Exupéry's humane and poetic sensibility evokes moving truths, about people in general, and about his own troubled soul. So his language is crucial, hence the challenge posed to any translator of his writing.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvCZ1RP711rbq46b6TIGcTnEOasbPlr4potS_14RUfIAoZrHdfEtDvA_gBxK6QrTddLI1dbSwGFW5aHepiIXcOYtqN1pTRAQDEYPj1kqjZW7cV-Qt4xcEHAw4wbOsrVbj0aPr0aWuiXEk/s1600/2020_06_29a.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="292" data-original-width="176" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvCZ1RP711rbq46b6TIGcTnEOasbPlr4potS_14RUfIAoZrHdfEtDvA_gBxK6QrTddLI1dbSwGFW5aHepiIXcOYtqN1pTRAQDEYPj1kqjZW7cV-Qt4xcEHAw4wbOsrVbj0aPr0aWuiXEk/s1600/2020_06_29a.jpg" /></a>One striking aspect relates to the <b>technology</b>. Most contemporary accounts of aviation emphasise its glamorous modernity, but when St-Exupéry's aviators engage with their aircraft, it's all about the roughly used nuts and bolts, the sheet metal, the oil, the radiators and so on. They're merely working machines. He never names the planes or seems especially interested in the technological side of things. In fact, I've read that he wasn't a particularly skilled pilot. But he vividly renders what flying was like, from the joys of being up in the air, seeing the beauty of the heavens close up, as well as the terrors of what raw nature could do to the flimsy aircraft of the time.<br />
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In <i><b>Courrier Sud</b></i>, the author presents a contrast between the distant world of the African air routes, and an estate in rural France. Here, the expected picture of civilisation is not at all to do with progress (even the scenes in Paris don't reflect that) but with timeless tradition. It's here that Bernis and the narrator were boys, and knew GeneviÚve the daughter of the house. It seems they were welcome and familiar visitors, but usually chose to sneak in over a hedge, past a neglected shadowy water tank... The figures are often just blurred details in an old photograph; <b>St-Exupéry's style</b> consists of <b>light playing over surfaces</b>, tactile sensations, small sounds and movements. It's extraordinarily immediate.<br />
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There's only one <b>English translation</b> as far as I'm aware, by <b>Curtis Cate</b> in 1971. He's a respected biographer of St-Exupéry. I have to be grateful, because I'm not sure I could have read the French without having Cate's <i><b>Southern Mail</b></i> to hand; but I feel a better translation is begging to be done. Cate's feels dated, right down to coyness in translating swear words. That doesn't matter. But I had some difficulty with Cate's tendency to 'know better', to extemporise a bit if he felt the original was insufficiently clear. He invented new stuff a little too often for my liking, as I sometimes found checking back with the French when I was reading <b>Pertti Jokinen's 2017 Finnish translation</b>. Jokinen had a habit of missing out phrases here and there, I guess he felt they were redundant, but sometimes I found he was closer to the French than Cate.<br />
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One has to be cautious, in commenting on the translators' ways with words. In the end, how do I know? The poetic element may be important, but is my own sense of <b>the sound of words</b> in each language good enough? I will soon check this out with Finns I know, with the proviso that they are unlikely to be acquainted with <b>St-Exupéry's</b> French. Just for the sake of giving any sort of example, look at these versions of the same sentence.<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>Ce petit poste au clair de lune: un port aux eaux tranquilles.</li>
<li>This little outpost under the moonlight is like a smoothwater port.</li>
<li>TÀmÀ kuun valaisema vÀhÀinen vartiolinnake on kuin makean veden satama.</li>
</ul>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiMngtiDmavMCBvUxrLruF6eU8NV2mNIdDwfgbRX0rSytyQxCXmaB-e2PsE_T0FQLMn-Ii-oLymFh7Xr43OZKctzOXdRvmmoCkhGPVjXHsh-0AYRMIbQOC7IQ16D3_qTEEheBMQkZufaA/s1600/2020_06_29b.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="372" data-original-width="253" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiMngtiDmavMCBvUxrLruF6eU8NV2mNIdDwfgbRX0rSytyQxCXmaB-e2PsE_T0FQLMn-Ii-oLymFh7Xr43OZKctzOXdRvmmoCkhGPVjXHsh-0AYRMIbQOC7IQ16D3_qTEEheBMQkZufaA/s320/2020_06_29b.jpg" width="217" /></a>I like the sound of the Finnish sentence in particular. Whether or not you understand Finnish, you can see the deliberate <b>alliteration</b>. Pertti Jokinen employs it a lot, often when St-Exupéry doesn't, I think because even if it's not the same effect, he is still reflecting the heightened poetic style of the original. Right down to sequences of short, clipped sentences - not something I'm used to seeing in Finnish(!). Unfortunately for me and my vocabulary resources, his deliberate crafting of his words has led him to seek out words which don't often see the light of day. And I've travelled to recesses of my Finnish grammar I've never walked in before.<br />
Oh well.<br />
Each writer aimed to render the idyllic peacefulness of the scene, and succeeded. The only word I raised an eyebrow for was <i>smoothwater</i>: a better word would have been freshwater, but I guess Cate wanted the <i>moo</i> in <i>smooth</i>, to resonate with <i>moo</i> in <i>moonlight. </i>In contrast, <i>makean veden</i> does more properly translate as <i>freshwater</i>, though <i>makea</i> by itself rather nicely means <i>sweet</i>.<br />
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You've heard enough...? I feel I could have opened <i><b>Postilento etelÀÀn</b></i> anywhere and found other examples of mellifluous writing, but I admit I often feel this way about the sound of Finnish. And it helps to have <b>the writing of St-Exupéry</b> in the first place. <i><b>Courrier Sud?</b></i> Sentimental, melancholic, low on drama it may be, with a tragic ending, but along the way its poetry and humane sensibility give power to the painful life experiences contained in the story, and the author's love of nature both in the cultivated countryside and in the raw wilderness.Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04344313339971737295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-665362365654853620.post-88134203119284656112020-06-18T23:33:00.001+01:002023-06-02T22:40:33.843+01:006 - meriharakka<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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You should be just about able to pick out the bird in this poor mobile phone picture - sorry - and identify it. The <b>oystercatcher</b> has no close relatives, so while it may have a muddy outline here and - sorry again - in the other pic, its characteristic features stand out well enough. See the <b>bright orange beak</b> (and legs, visible in someone else's superior photo image), and black and white plumage.<br />
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Finland boasts 4,000 pairs, seen mostly on the coasts. As in Britain, or so I thought, until I saw these on the River Lune, though to be fair this wasn't so far from the coast. Anyway, to return to my self-apponted task of telling you what a bird is in Finnish, I can tell you as per the title of this post, that they call it the <b>meriharakka</b>. I found this quite interesting, because I knew that '<i><b>meri</b></i>-' meant '<i>sea</i>-' something-or-other. So what is a <b>harakka</b>? The answer is that it's a <b>magpie</b>, so they're calling the oystercatcher a 'sea magpie', which does make sense, regarding the plumage, though it's a very different bird.<br />
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And if you've been following this fascinating ornithology series, you may well ask, what happened to the pond? Well, it's still there, but this story is all about our release from some of the <b>coronavirus restrictions</b>, enabling my first bit of <b>socialising</b> since March. Four of us met up from three different directions at an equidistant point, a picnic site near where we were able to enjoy a very pleasant riverside walk, admiring ducks, geese, swans, sand martins and three (I think) oystercatchers, or <b>meriharakat</b>.<br />
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The pictures aren't great - yes of course I should have taken my proper camera - but they do serve as a record of the sighting. More interesting was their <b>behaviour</b>. Two of them were positioned like this on adjacent bits of rock sticking out into the stream, calling to each other, the calls bouncing back off the high bank on the other side.<br />
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Hmm one of my friends had promised kingfishers on this trip. How annoyed would I have been, if we had seen them and I'd still only had this rubbishy picture taking device?Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04344313339971737295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-665362365654853620.post-18994282407665677092020-04-29T00:08:00.000+01:002020-04-29T00:08:45.185+01:00My Time, by Bradley Wiggins<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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...<b><i>"with"</i> William Fotheringham</b>! There, that, is a tiny part of how this book seeds tiny bits of mistrust throughout. (And beyond, as we will see.) Yes, there is a <b>ghost writer</b> at work; to be fair, it's not often that the presence of one is so upfront. It still nudges one into suspecting some image massaging.<br />
<br />
Overall my reading has been quite eclectic, but I must admit I've very rarely ventured into the <b>sports</b> genre. These books are almost always the work of journalists, which doesn't mean they're poorly written, not at all, but stylistically they tend to fall into a narrow range. <b>William Fotheringham</b> is a good writer, by the way, I've read some of his pieces in the <i>Daily Telegraph</i> if I remember correctly.<br />
<br />
As for other sports books, I certainly liked Simon Kuper's <i>Football Against the Enemy</i>, all about clubs and fans in odd places around the world; but the biographies, usually published to cash in on recent achievements, have been a bit like this one, with a similar superficiality, faux-directness, and a feel of so much being left unsaid. A long time ago there was one by Sebastian Coe, <i>Running Free</i> I think; again, written "with" a respected journalist which is a little surprising now, seeing as he must have been perfectly capable of writing it himself. Then more recently, <b>Mark Cavendish</b>'s <i>Boy Racer</i>, very relevant to this book and very readable, but with any writing 'help' completely hidden. I enjoyed that book.<br />
<br />
And despite what I've been saying so far, I enjoyed this one. For all that sports autobiographies are self serving by their very nature, they have one intrinsic plus: if you followed the events in the first place, then here's a chance to relive them, through the eyes of the principals, or one of them. <b>I love watching the Tour</b>, it's epic and one of that select handful of the best that sport has to offer. On the face of it, it shouldn't be so, since cycling is nominally a performance sport. But the Tour goes way beyond, and crucially becomes <b>a team sport</b>. An individual has no hope of winning, because the support of a team makes all the difference. Then there's the complexity of all the permutations made possible by the make up of any particular team. Wiggins's <b>Sky</b> team were caught from several angles - Cavendish's presence, as the Tour's best sprinter, threatened to split their priorities, and then <b>Chris Froome</b> turned out to be a potential winner himself. And finally, there's the fact that it's France, and so much of it takes place in some of the most beautiful landscapes on Earth. <i><b>My Time</b></i> couldn't help but be an absorbing read.<br />
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It's clear that Wiggins isn't the easiest guy to work with, and people around him must often need to exercise a lot of patience. But the cycling fan doesn't have to be too concerned with that: the fact is, <b>Wiggins</b> was <b>an extraordinary cyclist</b>, he had an amazing career <b>on the track</b>, hauling in a sackful of medals, and on top of that, after devoting himself to <b>road cycling</b>, he finally hit a peak in <b>2012</b>, culminating in winning the Tour and then the London Olympic Road Time Trial. <i><b>My Time</b></i> is all about this one year.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqiVfMMNhq4K2r9GfPUgCybIyvL6cC84t031Jh3qq6fNfuuhcSKRzUEYV_bIkodIJwRD_5gKO0WWuKx8GHlpjBPbnQiL2Us93ZIE_ifPP_j60swH10Bke6NzT_Nv0JK8taZ2MDdplSnDk/s1600/2020_04_28b.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="392" data-original-width="443" height="283" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqiVfMMNhq4K2r9GfPUgCybIyvL6cC84t031Jh3qq6fNfuuhcSKRzUEYV_bIkodIJwRD_5gKO0WWuKx8GHlpjBPbnQiL2Us93ZIE_ifPP_j60swH10Bke6NzT_Nv0JK8taZ2MDdplSnDk/s320/2020_04_28b.jpg" width="320" /></a>The book comes close to sinking under the weight of questions going begging, over <b>two explosive issues</b>. One is to do with Chris Froome's behaviour. He appeared stronger than Wiggins on a couple of mountain stages, and journalists were quick to stoke the fire, asking if Froome shouldn't take over as leader. This was while Wiggins was still in yellow, with a bit of a margin. He would win if he was supported by his team, as he did, mainly by winning both individual time trials by impressive margins. Some people seemed to ignore the fact that it is perfectly okay to win the Tour like this. That's the Tour, it demands a variety of skills, and it's not only great climbers who get to shine. The view seems to be that maybe Froome was already stronger than Wiggins overall, and of course he's won several Tours himself since. But at the time, there was every reason for Wiggins to be leader, and in my view you don't ditch a leader while he's still on track for the win. I think people forget that Froome could be a bit of a git himself. I'd like to think his perspectives on <b>team discipline</b> are more mature these days. Stepping back, one should consider the consequences for the team as a whole, of switching support at such a stage of the race. I reckon things would have come unstuck very quickly, especially for team morale. The bottom line is indeed the bottom line: Froome and the rest were paid to do a specific job, and all that mattered was the judgement of Dave Brailsford the team manager, Shaun Sutton the coach, and Sean Yates the directeur sportif.<br />
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The book covers those incidents in the mountains very cursorily, and with contradictory remarks on Froome, on the one hand praising his riding, on the other, expressing 'confusion' about what 'Froomie' was up to. It's <b>a section of the book</b> which will be baffling for <b>any reader who wasn't watching at the time</b>, but I doubt if there are any such.<br />
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The other issue isn't covered at all, and I feel like only briefly referring to it. Doping, under the guise of <b>Therapeutic Use Exemptions</b>. This only came out 4-5 years later, and it's very sad, upsetting even considering the long passionate rant in the book about the damage drug taking has done to the sport. It does seem that Sky and Wiggins were following <b>the letter of the law</b>, but as for the spirit... One should heavily emphasise that others in this story are also implicated.<br />
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It's one of those situations where opposite things feel true at the same time. The behaviour of Sky in 2012 in relation to 'medicine' is questionable; and yet I can't deny feeling then and now that <b>the Tour win was an amazing, thrilling, inspiring achievement</b>, especially for any British cycling fan. And the book goes some way to remind one of that.<br />
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<br />Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04344313339971737295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-665362365654853620.post-89300993130559596622020-04-22T23:34:00.001+01:002023-06-02T22:40:54.334+01:005 - naurulokki<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The entertainment never stops! Yet another entry in this unique unmissable series on 'Finnish names for utterly ordinary birds'! Here's another temporary visitor to the pond up the hill. Except for a handful of mallards and moorhens, the pond is just a pitstop for birds having a short rest on their way to somewhere else. This one is known as the <b>naurulokki</b> in Finland, which sounds like it means 'laughing gull'. It's common, with 80,000-130,000 pairs there. It's Latin name is <b>larus ridibundus</b>, known in Britain as the <b>black headed gull</b>.<br />
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Like the others I've recently featured, it's probably already gone. But past experience suggests there'll be more now and again, as the summer goes on. Who knows what else will turn up? As far as overall bird numbers is concerned, that's down to <b>available food</b>, and there won't be much until the fishermen return, the pond is restocked, people in general start feeding the ducks again and also the reeds make a comeback after the major cutback and clearance they've had.<br />
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<br />Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04344313339971737295noreply@blogger.com0