Longform
Sir Gawain and the Green Night translated by Bernard O'Donoghue (Books 2014, 15)
This is an unusual choice. It was a present; I do like poetry, but I probably wouldn’t have chosen it for myself.
But it’s great. I really enjoyed it. It’s a strange story. Set in King Arthur’s round table, of course — at least at the start. The titular hero (Gawain, I mean) is said to be the noblest, bravest, most humble, etc, knight.
A mysterious, supernatural, green figure interrupts the New Year feast at Camelot and issues a challenge. Gawain takes it up, and has a year to complete his side of the deal.
He’s clearly the top procrastinator of the round table, too, because he leaves it till after the following Christmas before he sets off to find the Green Knight.
The noble hero is tested and tempted, and (spoilers) wins through. It’s short, and fun. Oddly (or not) I remember the story, but nothing of the poetry. I could go and get the book and quote you some, but I think I’ll just leave it at that.
Oh, except to say, of course, this is an ancient work, and Tolkien also did a cover version of it. But I expect you knew that.
How to fix the UK constitution
There is a solution to one of the great constitutional questions of our age, and I have it.
Not, I might add, the question of making parliament more representative (that’s actually quite an easy one, and we even had a referendum on making it a bit better in this parliament, but we voted the wrong way). Nor indeed the one triggered by the Scottish referendum. It’s not even the most basic problem of our constitution, though I’ll answer that in passing: write it down.
No, I’m speaking of the problem of the head of state. Now it seems to me to be uncontentious to say that we need to move from a hereditary system to an elected one. The existence of a hereditary element to the government of a democracy is anathema; this is plain.
But if you suggest this to many (perhaps still most) British citizens,1 they will speak of a great affection for the Queen; maybe for the monarchy as an institution; and for the pageantry, and how great it is for tourism. Plus they’d point to recent less-than-impressive examples of US presidents, and say something like, “I wouldn’t want President Tony Blair." Well, I could argue against any or all of those. But there’s no need to. Here’s the thing: as soon as we want to, we could switch to having an elected head of state, without losing any of the positives there, or introducing the negatives.
Well, we’d have to lose the Queen; the actual, current one, Elizabeth II. But that’s no problem: there won’t be any serious talk of change in her lifetime anyway. And probably not in Charlie’s for that matter. But at some point in the future we could have an elected head of state, and still keep the monarchy, the pageantry, and the palaces.
How? We just redefine the words “monarch”, “king”, and “queen”.
We redefine them to be the title of the elected head of state in the UK. We elect one every few years — four, six, eight, it doesn’t really matter — and we keep everything else exactly the same.
Because of course, we’re a constitutional monarchy. The monarch has no real power, officially,2 except to ask the leader of the party with most seats at a general election to form a government.
The rest is window-dressing: pageantry and symbolism. The individual doing the job could as easily be one chosen by the electorate as one assigned the task by chance of birth.3
Sure, such a person would be a president — a powerless president — in all but name. But I’ve come to the conclusion that the name is — to a lot of people, at least — what matters. Or at least that the concept referred to by the name does matter to many.
We would let the Windsors live on in reasonable splendour, in some of the Royal Palaces. We would only require one — and realistically it should probably be Buckingham Palace — to be the official residence of the new monarch. The others would still be owned by the state, of course, but the descendants of the last hereditary monarch would be allowed to live in them for a few generations at least.
Now, what sort of person would stand for election to a position with a fair amount of responsibility (state visits, and so on) and very little power? I don’t know, but that would work out over time. The principle works well enough in countries like Germany, where the president — yes, Germany has a president; who knew? — has a similar status to that of our elected monarch — and gets to live in a state-owned palace.
Furthermore, one power that the monarch does have is being the entity to whom members of the armed forces, the police, and indeed, MPs, take an oath. But even that wouldn’t be a problem. Those oaths are worded something like, “to Queen Elizabeth, her heirs and successors.” The new, elected monarch would indeed be the “successor” of the last hereditary one.
It turns out, not surprisingly, that this idea has been thought of before. There don’t appear to have been many examples of it, and slightly disturbingly, one of the few examples of one that’s currently in use is the Vatican. But in that case the Pope is head of state, head of government, and sole executive power; an elected dictator-for-life, in fact (and by a tiny, restricted electorate). My version would be much more limited in what they could do. And they wouldn’t think they had a direct line to anything more supernatural than the prime minister’s office.
When looking into the matter, I also found this forum discussion wherein people keep saying things like, “It’s a contradiction in terms: monarch means hereditary ruler…” Do they forget that English is a changing language, always growing, expanding, shifting meanings? If we want to redefine a monarch as being an elected person, we can.
Oh, and hey — there’ll be nothing to stop a Windsor standing for election. You never know, they’d probably win. But at least then they’d have a mandate.
Doctor Who: The Writer's Tale: the Final Chapter by Russell T Davies and Benjamin Cook (Books 2014, 14)
I read the original version this a few years back, when my sister bought it for my son. It was good, very interesting and informative. And I wanted to read this expanded edition when it first came out. Although it’s called “The Final Chapter”, as if it were purely an additional piece, it contains both the original book and the new work — which is a lot more than just a “chapter”. But it was always just ferociously expensive.
Like, old-school hardback price for a large-format paperback. And it never seemed to come down, or come to in a smaller-size, mass-market paperback edition. So it always just felt too daunting.
Then eventually I saw it was on Kindle for what seemed like a more reasonable price, so I grabbed it.
It’s nothing more or less than an edited, long, email conversation between Davies and Cook. Sometimes several emails a day, in which Cook asks Davies questions about the latter’s writing process and other aspects of making Doctor Who (and to a lesser extent Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures).
And it’s absolutely fascinating read, especially if you’re at all interested in the creative process, in how writers write, and so on. It also feels a bit like you’re eavesdropping on someone else’s conversation at times, Somehow that’s not a problem, though. After all, it’s an interesting conversation, and we’ve been invited to listen in.
It’s clear that Davies enjoys sharing his thoughts on his process in this way, and it sort of makes you wonder why he doesn’t blog. But then, if he had been writing these emails as blog posts at the time, he couldn’t possibly have shared as much as he did with Cook, and with us several years after the events.
Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie (Books 2014, 13)
This is the one that's won them all: BSFA (jointly), Clarke, Nebula, and more recently, the Hugo Award. Never before has a single book had such a sweeping effect on the world of SF awards.
And does it deserve them all? Does it live up to the effusive reaction of the community?
Err, well… no, not really.
Which is not to say it’s bad. In a sense, nothing could live up that level of praise.
However, my personal problem with it – at least at first – was this: I like my super-intelligent spaceship minds to be the good guys. To be part of, and defending, Utopia. In short, I want The Culture. And I guess I hoped that Ann Leckie might sort of take Banksie’s place.
Obviously there wasn’t much chance of that, and it isn’t fair to judge the book on those terms.
So, back to its own terms. In any case, these super-intelligent spaceship minds aren’t necessarily bad guys; but they’re in the service of a pretty unpleasant empire. Though things get ambiguous. And interesting. And of course, there’s the gender-blindness of the viewpoint character, which is great. So yeah, it was fun, I enjoyed it, it goes to some interesting places, and it sets things up nicely for a series.
Oh, god, a series. Does nobody write books in ones any more? I was just looking at the current crop of so-called “Black Friday” deals on Kindle. There were quite a lot of books for crazy-cheap prices. Except… there weren’t really that many if you count a series as one.
C’mon, folks, write a book that doesn’t have a sequel, hey?
But I digress. Go read about Ancillary Justice: you’ll find reviews of it all over the place. Then go and read it. It’s great.
Thin
We used to call this “thin clients”; or just a terminal logged on to a server or mainframe. Jason Snell writes of something newish that Adobe and Google are doing with Chromebooks:
This week I got a demo of Photoshop running inside Chrome, and while it was really interesting, some of my assumptions were faulty. It turns out that when Adobe says Photoshop is a “streaming app,” they mean it—it’s much more like screen sharing than native software. Photoshop runs remotely on a Windows-based server, and video of the app’s interface streams to the Chrome browser.
Hijacked
Can anyone explain to me why this is resignation-worthy?
Simon Danczuk, Labour MP for Rochdale, ... told the Mail Online it was “like the Labour party has been hijacked by the north London liberal elite, and it’s comments like that which reinforce that view”.
The comment was, “Image from #Rochdale.” It was a picture of a white van outside a house covered in English flags. And that can drive a shadow cabinet member to resign. What?!?
Dotter of her Father's Eyes by Mary M Talbot and Bryan Talbot (Books 2014, 12)
Excellent graphic novel; part Mary’s autobiography, part the biography of Lucia Joyce, who was James Joyce’s daughter. Mary’s father, who was distant and borderline abusive, was a noted Joyce scholar.
Well worth a look if you enjoy comics. The “graphic biography,” if you will, is a little-used form.
EU 'benefit tourism' court ruling is common sense, says Cameron
I’m assuming the UK government won’t be bound by this European court ruling. After all, UKIP don’t like European court rulings, and government policy these days is all about keeping the Kippers sweet, isn’t it?
EU ‘benefit tourism’ court ruling is common sense, says Cameron
On Writing by AL Kennedy (Books 2014, 11)
Unlike Stephen King’s book of the same title, this isn’t exactly “a manual of the craft.” You won’t find much about the writing side of writing here; nothing about crafting sentences, forming paragraphs, developing characters or plots.
It’s less about the craft of writing than about the life of a writer; and it shares with King’s eponym the part-memoir approach. Kennedy spends a lot of time describing how writing has been bad for her health in various ways, and how in turn her pathological fear of flying has made the writing life more difficult, (travelling to North America by ship for a signing tour) for example.
The largest and most entertaining part of it was originally published as blog entries on The Guardian’s site.
It’s very good. And not from the book, but with Doctor Who back (and nearly finished) you should read her meditation on it and on the state of Britain.
The Silkworm by Robert Galbraith (books, 2014, 10)
Always good to get a new JK Rowling, of course, whatever name she's using. I sometimes wonder if she's got loads of other things out there, under other as-yet-undisclosed pseudonyms; probably not, though.
Anyway, in the second Cormoran Strike book, we have more of the same sort of thing we had in the first. This time it’s set in the world of publishing, with all sorts of rivalries between more and less successful authors, agents, editors and publishers. “Write what you know”, Jo.
But can such rivalries drive someone to murder? It seems so.
My main, and very minor, complaint about this was that there wasn’t enough of sidekick Robin in it, I felt.
I don’t know how many of these she’s planning to write, but sooner or later Cormoran has to meet – and presumably solve a crime for, or concerning – his estranged rock-star father. who is a recurring offstage character.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon (Books 2014, 9)
In the interest of trying to catch up, I’m not going to say much about this. You probably know all about this already.
Also, it’s been quite a while since I read it, and although I enjoyed it, it hasn’t really stuck around in my head in a way that leaves me much to say. It’s clever in giving us some idea of what it might be like to live with autism. That might be its greatest strength.
Suzi Q, where are you?
I got a card in the post the other day, from my friends Di and Johnny. Regular readers will know Di as one of the most frequent commenters here (ie, she has commented). We disagreed over The Great Gatsby.
Anyway, the card had a post-it stuck inside, with some writing on it that I couldn’t quite make out. Di wrote, “Been trying to get this for you for ages… can you guess who it is?”
I was slow to realise that the “who” referred to the writing on the post-it. But she also said there was a clue on the back of the card.
On the back she’d written “devilgate.org”.
The post-it looks like this:
And I read it to say, “To Martin. Suzi Quatro.”
I mean, if it says that it makes sense considering my origin story; otherwise, not so much.
Thanks Di and Johnny. It’s a lovely thought.
BBC Music Greatest Covers
This BBC Music "Greatest Covers" poll has some quite good -- and interesting -- choices. It has the right answer, of course, but also Hüsker Dü and The Fall (and not even The Fall's best cover -- that would be "Xanadu").
The Severed Streets by Paul Cornell (Books 2014, 8)
I'm now so far behind in posting these that I'm just going to put very brief notes up for most of them.
As a sequel to the excellent London Falling this suffers slightly from what feels a bit like middle-book-of-trilogy syndrome; though I believe Cornell intends this to be an ongoing series, rather than a trilogy.
That said, there is an overarching mystery, which we must hope will be resolved over the course of several books. And at that point, maybe he’ll stop. But the actual story here is perhaps slight compared to the origin stories of the first one, and the horror that Quill and his wife, in particular, experienced.
A mysterious ghostly figure – invisible to all who don’t have The Sight, of course – is killing people in London. There appears to be little to connect them at first, but graffiti at some of the scenes suggests there might be a link to Jack the Ripper. Has his ghost come back and this time gone after rich white men? Or is it something else entirely?
It’s a fun read, despite my reservations above, with some amusing reference to fandom, and the terrible, terrible abuse of a giant of the fantasy genre.
The tragedy of the Liberal Democrats
It seems like a curious choice for the Liberal Democrats to have their national conference in Glasgow this year, what with everything else that’s been going on in Scotland. I don’t think they’re very popular there.
Then again, they’re not very popular anywhere.
Back before the the coalition, when the Lib Dems were the third party, they always spoke in favour of coalition government. They always said that they would work with anyone if it they ever held the balance of power.
Then when it looked there was going to be a hung parliament, and when there actually was, they still said that they would work with either Labour or the Tories in order to bring a government into being.
The trouble is, no-one really believed them.
OK, I can only really speak for myself; but I’m probably not that unusual. The Lib Dems were always seen as being closer to Labour than to the Tories. There was the Lib-Lab pact back in the seventies. And all through the New Labour years, they were generally seen as being further left than Labour.
So when they held the balance of power in 2010, it was obvious — so we all thought, I say — that they would work with Labour, rather than the Tories.
Alas, it was not to be. Imagine how different the country might be now if Clegg had swung the right way back then. The country wouldn’t have been half-destroyed by Osbourne’s “austerity” measures. (I mean, really: haven’t they learned by now that you don’t cut public spending in a recession?)
Of course, there have been some good things during the coalition: marriage equality; the Scottish referendum (irrespective of how it turned out, Cameron agreed to it). There was even — if you recall — a referendum on electoral reform. Remember that?
No, me neither. It was a fix (since it got voted down), but I don’t recall how. Oh, yes wait: the anti-reform camp made a big thing of how much more complex than first-past-the-post the alternative vote (AV) system would be. When in fact it’s quite simple. And I guess they got the friendly media working against it.
Anyway, now they’ve been all but wiped out in yesterday’s by election. The worst thing about that is that UKIP seem to be in danger of replacing them as the third party.
Scary but interesting times.
Space bat angel dragons hatch in their own way
Sometimes you're thinking about writing a blog post and then you write a long comment on someone else's post that contains most of what you were planning on saying. So I wrote this as a comment on The Reinvigorated Programmer, and thought I should repeat it here.
The background: Mike, the Programmer and Doctor Who fan, if that’s not too tautologous, was complaining about the latest episode, “Kill the Moon”. Now, I didn’t think it was all that bad, as these things go, but I knew that other people, on Facebook and elsewhere, have both complained about it and praised it. Which seems to be par for the course this series (and maybe every series). Anyway, I had some thoughts on the matter, and put them like this.
I was disappointed that they didn’t put in at least a handwavy explanation of the extra mass (which they could have done: posit highly-effecient energy-to-mass conversion, and the sun). But as people have said in other places, you’re accepting a time-travelling, dimensionally-transcendental blue box, and a regenerating Time Lord, so…?
As to the biology of the creature… well, it’s alien. Possibly one of a kind. Why wouldn’t it lay an egg as soon as it hatched? Remembering that “egg” and “hatch” are only our Terracentrist words for something entirely other.
Indeed, that could be exactly why the creature’s mass spikes in the last few years or months of its dormant cycle: it’s forming the new “egg” so it itself will be ready to “hatch”.
And by default it would be in the same orbit, unless something displaced it.
But yes, while you can argue all that, the story would have been improved if it had included at least a nod to those points. And they should have got their sums right.
But I think there’s something bigger going on across this whole series. It’s the development of Clara’s character, and Danny’s secret, and everything. It’s more: I just have a feeling that there’s something else behind it all. Maybe I’ve just been trained to expect a season arc since the Bad Wolf, but… there’s definitely something going on.
And Missy and the promised land, of course.
Someone somewhere suggested that maybe the whole series is taking place in a miniscope, since the Doc mentioned them in episode 3. I hope it’s more than that.
The morning after
I wake to disappointment. I had vacillated away from a “Yes” position to some extent in the days since I wrote that I favoured it, but I can’t help but be saddened by the result. Mainly I feel let down that my countryfolk didn’t grab hold of an opportunity when they were offered it.
On the other hand, I can’t help being a little bit pleased that we’re all going to stay part of one country.
The Westminster politicians this morning are promising more devolution for Scotland, and for all the countries of the UK. Now we have to get hold of some of the energy, the political engagement that Scotland showed, and hold them to it.
To use a favourite quote from a great Scot1, it’s time for all of us to “Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.”
-
Though according to that article, he attributes it to a Canadian author called Dennis Lee ↩︎
Andy's unpunctuated ambiguity
“Andy Murray finally reveals views on Scottish independence“, says the headline in the Telegraph. It goes on to say he “appeared to declare his support for Scottish independence”. That “appeared” is key, because the lack of punctuation and capitalisation in Andy’s tweet actually allows at least a couple of interpretations:
Huge day for Scotland today! no campaign negativity last few days totally swayed my view on it. excited to see the outcome. lets do this!
The Telegraph is clearly reading that as “‘No’-Campaign negativity…” The negativity from the “No” campaign, in other words.
But you could read it simply as “[there has been] no campaign negativity…” In other words, the absence of negativity in the campaigning (by either side or both) has left him with a positive view of the referendum.
I’d guess that the Telegraph‘s opinion is correct. But it just goes to show… if he could place a quote character like he can place a tennis ball, it would all be perfectly clear.