Mind of My Mind by Octavia E Butler (Books 2015, 6)

The next book in the Patternist series after Wild Seed, which I wrote about before. I would describe it as the sequel to the other one, except that it turns out that they were written out of sequence.

This perhaps explains why the character of Anyanwu, who, as you’ll recall, I felt was slightly disappointing in the first book, is completely sidelined and, indeed, thrown away, in this one.

The other reason is that the focus has moved on to a new generation of Doro’s descendants. We are in mid to late 20th-century America, and his breeding programme is finally beginning to pay off. More spectacularly than he had ever imagined, it seems, as some of his telepaths – who up until now have not been able to bear being near each other – form a kind of group or meld they call the Pattern.

This makes them able to both work and live together, and increases their power and effectiveness enormously.

Things ensue. It’s good, but still feels kind of weak to me. I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t that compelling.

Also I thought I had read this one, years ago, but none of it was even the slightest bit familiar to me, so I guess not.

Drive-By Brucellosis

The day after I post linking to Patterson Hood's NYT piece, I get an email from Amazon recommending a Drive-By Truckers album. I assumed it was a new one.

Not too spooky – I doubt their bots are reading my blog. It’s nothing more than the fact that I’ve bought DBT albums from Amazon before. Only the timing was surprising – plus the fact that I had no idea that the album was coming out. Though further research shows that it’s not actually a new album, making Amazon’s prompt slightly more suspect again.

Anyway the interesting thing about this album – The Fine Print: A Collection Of Oddities And Rarities 2003-2008 – is that it contains a track called ‘Play it All Night Long’. I’m assuming that this must be a cover of Warren Zevon’s song of the same name.

Now, that song is a dissection of DBT’s beloved Lynyrd Skynyrd. Or at least it uses “that dead band’s song” as part of its critique of the South. For DBT to cover it must be an example of “the duality of the southern thing,” of which they speak extensively on Southern Rock Opera.

Of course, large parts of that album are about Skynyrd, so covering a song that is also partly about them isn’t much of a stretch. Thing is, Zevon’s song is less than positive about the South as a whole, or Skynyrd by implication. Not, of course, that the DBTs are entirely positive about the South; that duality again.

‘Play it All Night Long’ is also the only known song – known by me, at least – to contain the word “brucellosis”.

The South’s Heritage Is So Much More Than a Flag

Paterson Hood of the Drive-By Truckers talks wisely about the southern USA.
If we want to truly honor our Southern forefathers, we should do it by moving on from the symbols and prejudices of their time and building on the diversity, the art and the literary traditions we’ve inherited from them.

Wild Seed by Octavia E Butler (books, 2015, 5)

Halfway through the year and only five books in? This is shocking behaviour!

I’m glad I read this, and I sort of enjoyed it, but I wasn’t entirely happy with it.

There are two main characters, both of whom appear to be functionally immortal, though with different mechanisms for keeping them alive. The shapeshifting, self-healing (and healer of others) Anyanwu is an African woman in the seventeenth century when we meet her. She is already two or three hundred years old.

The male immortal, Doro, is even older. For perhaps thousands of years he has survived by stealing bodies. His consciousness hops from his current one to another when the latter threatens him, or just when he chooses it. The personality of his destination body is of course destroyed in the hop, and the body he leaves also dies. Anyanwu is attracted to his power and the fact that they are apparently the only such long-lived people on Earth, but is repelled by the mechanism of his survival.

As she is by his long-term (really long-term) project to try to breed people with special abilities – many of the subjects of which are, or may be, distant descendants of her, or of his original people (most of whom he killed in panic when he first “died” and found himself in a new body).

I was annoyed at Anyanwu as a character at times, by the way she didn’t resist Doro when he had her do things she didn’t want to do. But he is an expert manipulator and is willing to threaten her kids to bend her to his will. And I guess that cleverly evokes the reality of women’s situation often in history, and certainly at that time.

This is the start of the Seed to Harvest series, and I’m keen to see where it goes.

The Phantom Menace

Just who (or what) is the menacing phantom?

Following on from my On things never seen post, yesterday was Father's Day, and we watched The Phantom Menace.

It is not as bad – not nearly as bad – as nearly everyone makes out.

It starts badly, oddly enough. Not just the dull scroll about the Trade Federation, but then you have the Japanese-sounding guys in charge of the blockade and invasion, who are voiced by people who seemingly can't act. Their dialogue is frankly embarrassing.

But much of it is fine. Sure, there are holes in the logic, places where it doesn't exactly make sense; but what film doesn't have instances like that?

Even – and I realise I'm committing a kind of geek sacrilege as I write this – even Jar-Jar Binks isn't that annoying. Could the plot have worked without him, or with him not being a comedic figure? Of course. But having him as he is, does no harm.

But hey: I liked Wesley Crusher, too.

And that's about as much as I'm going to say about it for now.

Test from Editorial

A test from the iPhone Editorial app.

Today's xkcd is weirdly compelling

Just run your eyes over the names and let the imagined connections form.

And look at the hover text; do you know who the missing doctor is?

The Tories want to reintroduce the Lord Chamberlain

From The Guardian:
David Cameron has backed plans to give Ofcom stronger powers to prevent the broadcast of “extremist messages” despite concerns from one of his own cabinet ministers that this could amount to state censorship.

The prime minister appeared to support Theresa May, the home secretary, after the Guardian revealed a split in the cabinet over her counter-extremism measures.

Let’s return to the days when creations had to be authorised by a state censor, says Cameron.

The night after, and shame

Well how the hell did that happen?

There are two questions there:

  1. How could the opinion polls be so wrong? and
  2. Why did all those people make such bad choices?

On the radio they were talking about “shy Tories” as an answer to 1. That’s a term that was coined after the 1992 election, apparently, to describe all those people who voted Tory but who had never let anyone know that that was what they were planning. I remember the aftermath of that one, and the thing that struck me was all those people I worked with who read the Telegraph “for the sport”; and how smug they looked that morning.

I became wise to that. But nowadays no-one comes into work with a paper any more, so it’s harder to tell such things. And how would it help, even if they did and you could?

The thing is, the pre-election polls must have been deceived.

Of course, no-one is obliged to tell the truth to a pollster. No-one is obliged to even answer their questions. But if you do agree to answer their questions: why would you lie?

I can think of only two possible reasons. Maybe you want to deliberately skew the poll results. But that seems unlikely. Sure, some people will feel like that; a few. But not lots. Not enough to actually have a deceptive effect.

And the other reason why, if you answered, you might lie; the only other reason I can think that might make people lie to a pollster.

Because you’re embarrassed about your answer. Or stronger: because you’re ashamed of it.

Shame can be a powerful influencer.

And it makes sense that people would be ashamed of voting Tory. Most of us were brought up to know that we shouldn’t be selfish; that sharing is best, and just being out for yourself is bad. We learn that at our mother’s knee, generally.

This tweet from Irvine Welsh sums up what I think is a good approach;

If you’re reasonably comfortably off, and you’re voting for the party that you think is going to make you better off – no matter how wrong you might be;1 and if you’re doing it mainly because you think that – then you are selfish and ought to be ashamed of yourself.

And in that attempt to answer the first question, I appear to have answered the second one as well. Why did all those Tory voters make such bad choices?

Selfishness.

It’ll hurt us all.

  1. And that’s a whole nother discussion. ↩︎

On things never seen

There's a programme on Radio 4 from time to time (and it has made the transition to TV) called I've Never Seen Star Wars. In it Marcus Brigstocke gets a guest to try things that they have never tired before. Conversation ensues, and it can be amusing.

Anyway, the title clearly derives from how unlikely it is that anyone (of a certain generation or three, at least) will not have seen it.

In case you’re worrying, I saw the original – back when it was just called Star Wars, without the Episode IV: A New Hope subtitle – in the cinema (probably second run, not first, but still). And the second and third, of course.

But then there was the prequel trilogy. To be honest, when The Phantom Menace came out, I don’t think I was all that interested. I had known from early on that Lucas had planned the original as part of the middle trilogy of three. But by the time the prequels started, it had been so long that it just didn’t seem very important, you know?

And more importantly, in 1999 when it came out, I had a small child. We weren’t going to many films that weren’t aimed at like two-year olds. And after that, there was always something more interesting, more pressing to see…

I mislead you slightly, here. I did, in fact, see The Phantom Menace, after a fashion: on a shonky old VHS, with a three-year old sweetly chattering on the sofa next to me throughout. It hardly counts. And I definitely haven’t seen the others.

And I know everyone says, “Don’t bother, don’t waste your time, they’re terrible;” but they can only say that because they’ve seen them. And now – now there’s a new one coming down the line. Episode VII, The Force Awakens is due out in December, and I’ll certainly want to see it. Of course, it will follow on from Return of the Jedi, and it probably won’t matter if you haven’t seen episodes I-III; but it just wouldn’t feel right to not see them.

So I intend to watch the prequel trilogy. I was going to start today – the fourth of May be with you, and all that – but events got in the way. Still, over the next few weeks I’ll watch all three, and report back here.

Wish me luck.