Monthly Archives: June 2010

Facebook gets its man

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You can run from Facebook but you can’t hide. Middle Godson’s father tells me:

“You now have a Facebook page:http://www.facebook.com/pages/Ben-Jeapes/103136406393148 because people like me have said that we like your books in our facebook profiles.”

Well, whoever the other guy is, thanks to both of you and I will try to be worthy of your trust.

I have occasionally thought of reviving my Facebook account. I could defriend-

[Defriend? How the hell did that word ever become meaningful? If language shapes cognition – the jury will always be out, but face it, it must do to at least some degree – then a whole generation is growing up with the idea that one of the priceless treasures of being human, the ability to have friends, is something that can, nay should, be ended with the click of a button. It’s a horrible, horrible word. If Facebook is ever hauled before some kind of Nuremberg for the crimes of society, this will be the first item on the charge sheet.]

– everyone I rashly signed up with in the early days when everyone was doing it, change my status to “writing” and leave it at that. This would be a way of dealing with all those people who start a conversation with something like “are you writing anything at the moment?” or “how’s the writing going?”

To which the best answers are respectively “yes” and “fine, thanks, how’s the marriage?”, though I’ve never quite had the courage to use the latter because I know they’re just trying to be friendly and wanting to have a conversation, and it would be like kicking a puppy. The implication of the latter response is meant to be that the question is far too personal and complex for the kind of short-term small talk they’re thinking of.

But, speaking of writing, this is my morning pre-work writing time so I’d better get on with some. I’m within 20 pages of finishing the current Work-in-Progress’s final comb-through. See, I’m sharing information already.

Fezzes are cool

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Okay, I know everyone was waiting for my reaction to the Dr Who finale, like my good opinion is the sole decider on whether there’s a new series.

Well, you can all relax because I enjoyed it. Enjoyed it because it wasn’t as sheerly awful as the last few DW finales have been. Enjoyed it because faith in the Moff has been vindicated. Enjoyed it because it was heart warming and well acted. Enjoyed it because after far too long we finally get a vaguely menacing Dalek – ironically, after their relaunch in new child-friendly dayglo colours, in monochrome.

(When this one is up for a Hugo (as I suspect it will be), and they play a clip from it, I hope they show the bit with River and the Dalek. Edited update that occurs to me hours later: “One alpha meson burst through your eyestalk would kill you stone dead.” So why doesn’t it just look away? HA-HA! I AM TURN-ING MY HEAD! YOU CAN-NOT SEE ME!)

But, it was still just as silly as all the other finales – just better done. It’s still TVSF, a medium on which I have previously recorded my thoughts. So I will spoil everyone’s fun and pick holes in it.

First of all – my one disappointment – I was hoping that the extremely unlikely grand alliance of unholy races at the end of last week was yet another illusion because it was just so unlikely. But no, apparently not. We’ll put that to one side.

Now, 1800 years ago, it appears, every star in the universe was unmade. I lost track of whether they subsequently never had existed at all, or whether they just exploded, which would have bathed this world in a sterilising wash of radiation that burned the very microbes off the topmost layer of rock. Never mind. We can assume that since then Earth has developed more or less as before but with absolutely no knowledge of stars. Heat and light in the meantime provided by a permanently exploding TARDIS.

Yet everything else we saw about history seems exactly the same. They had World War 2. They have Richard Dawkins. Did they have Copernicus? Galileo? The heliocentric theory came about as the only one to explain the movement of stars, sun, Earth and other planets all in relation to each other. Did that happen? Somehow during WW2 fleets of Luftwaffe bombers still managed to find their way in the dark to London. Handy things, stars, if you’ve got them. Not easily replaced if you don’t.

(Besides, it’s an established fact that a race which grows up with no knowledge of stars turns into a race of charming, delightful, intelligent, whimsical, manic xenophobes.)

I know, I know. Wibbly wobbly timey wimey. But like so much TVSF, it all falls apart if you look too closely; and while the logical treatment of time travel verges on Einsteinian by RTD standards, Bill & Ted did it all more funnily a long time ago. Books will always be better …

But, it was a very nice bit of TV, for all the above reasons. However, I do hope that people stop phoning the Doctor up with their problems – he’s not Batman, you know. His adventures work best when he turns up at random. Much more of this and they’ll be summoning him by beaming the image of the Seal of Rassilon onto a planet.

We have an interesting dynamic in the TARDIS crew, with a married couple now on board, but as it is still their wedding day I hope the Doc allows them a little privacy. I don’t believe there’s any canonical record of that kind of activity on the ship before now but there’s a first time for everything.

Resurrection of the Soldiers

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This is “The Resurrection of the Soldiers” by Stanley Spencer and it’s the first thing you see as you enter Sandham Memorial Chapel. It takes up the entire altar wall. No photography allowed so I scanned a postcard, but the real thing I could look at for hours.

The walls are lined with these grotesque (in the artistic sense), blank faced paintings of Spencer’s war experiences: little emotion gets through via the faces but the body languages and the distortions make up for it. On either side the paintings lead inexorably to the Resurrection. The last painting before it on the left shows men in the trenches emerging from their foxholes at the start of another day – but even some of them are glancing over their shoulder towards it, as if aware something amazing is going on which they will get to in due course, having first got through the next 24 hours. Or not.

We’ve all seen paintings of the Last Days and all that: God’s somewhat smug elect with eyes raised adoringly to Heaven, the other lot all descending down unto gleeful demons and pitchforks. But even among the upward-bound crowd, the glorious crowd of witnesses, I’ve never had the feeling of any kind of relationship between them other than that they all made the right life choices (or possibly the right death choices).

But here we see a crowd of men who didn’t have time for thought-out choices; they lived and died together very suddenly, knocked flat by the full brutality of modern warfare, and the first thing they see on being raised up again is each other. Being British they shake hands in a rather po-faced way: “What ho, Pongo. Heard you bought it at the Somme. Jolly good show.” But judge it by the context of the times, the 1920s, and you immediately see what it’s getting at. The Resurrection isn’t just a box-ticking exercise to round off God’s plan for mankind: it’s personal and awe inspiring.

Having shook, they all trudge off to present their crosses to Christ, who looks rather surprised at the gesture. “What, for me?”

There’s probably theological significance in this chap at Christ’s feet, studying the image on the cross rather than the living original behind him. I’m wondering if he can’t quite believe it yet: he’s taken on board the theology, he knows what’s happening but can’t quite make the leap from the theory to the practical. Well, no one’s rushing him – he has all the time in … um … the world.

The colours are dull, the people are brutal and ugly, but I find more hope in Spencer’s Resurrection of the Soldiers than in a thousand of Michelangelo’s.