-298

To put it simply: I liked Michelangelo because the obsession and extreme torsion of his figures was so obviously derived from that of Jack Kirby.
        Geoff Dyer "Comics in a Man's Life"



The Venus books were the best: honestly life-changing. Who could resist a book called Pirates of Venus? Corum is better than Elric or Hawkmoon. Venus came before Corum, but was Mars before or after Tatooine? And where did the Shire fit in? Wagner stole the idea of the broken sword from Tolkien, certainly, but did Narsil and Sting come before or after lightsabers?

Before there was Star Wars, there was Planet of the Apes. Before there was Planet of the Apes there was very probably something else. It might, god forgive us, have been the Wombles. (The Wombles were big. Really big. The Wombles were bigger than Harry Potter.)

There was a competition in the Daily Mirror to win a real Planet of the Apes mask, not available in the shops. I desperately wanted to win it. I don't know why I want to be an ape so badly. Possibly I just liked Roddy McDowell's persona? He appears as a villain in one of the Adam West Batmans. "Galen without his makeup" evoked the kind of confused awe normally reserved for Barbary Coast and T.J Hooker.

But mostly Planet of the Apes was a spectacle. Apes riding horses, leather tunics, and lots of cowboys and Indians action. It was a Western, but a Western where you were on the side of the poor humans, confined to their reservations by the oppressive colonial monkeys.

There was a comic. It was a very accurate adaptation of the movie, only they weren't allowed to use Charlton Heston's face. One of the characters said "bloody" and someone takes their clothes off and you see their bum. It was the most grown up thing I had ever read.

I went back and watched the movie again recently but they'd changed everything: added lots of stuff about Darwin and the Scopes monkey trial and a running misanthropic sub-text about anything being better than the human race. That never used to be there. It was all just monkeys with rifles.

Why did the world go Womble-mad? Someone had done something very clever with the design, of course. (Ivor Wood, his name was, who isn't nearly as famous as Oliver Postgate but was probably more popular with actual children.) Rat faces with furry manes. And the idea that that they lived in a real place but were very timid but if you were lucky you might possible spot one is very appealing at a particular age.

There was no preachy subtext. They weren't "recycling". (This was before The Environment.) They were just cuddly scavengers. You never see them but they grab things that you leave behind and make good use of them. Big furry tooth fairies.

There were Womble toys but I didn't want to have a Womble. I don't think I even wanted to be a Womble. I suppose possibly I would like to have met a Womble, or glimpsed one from a distance on Wimbledon Common. But basically, I was just excited by Wombledom. The burrow made of papier mache, the stylized "W", Bernard Cribbens' wonderful voice, the friendly folk rock theme song with the whimsical intro.

Wombles, nineteen seventy three. Planet of the Apes, nineteen seventy four. Star Wars, nineteen seventy eight.

Facts are troublesome. My friend Flash has a vivid memory of seeing the first run of Star Wars, at the Dominion Tottenham Court Road wondering how it could be "Episode IV" and if he had missed something. He knows this to be chronologically impossible: but this doesn't make the memory any less vivid. The BBC showed the whole of Flash Gordon in December 1976 (over the Christmas holiday); followed by Flash Gordon's Trip To Mars in June and Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe the following Christmas. Star Wars was released in the USA in May '77, but no-one in the UK saw it until 1978.

It premiered at Christmas, and there was still a concept of "first run" cinemas where a film ran in one prestige location in London for some weeks, and was only subsequently released to local cinemas. All through 1978, you emerged from Tottenham Court Road tube station to see a huge 3D rendition of the poster above the Dominion cinema. Ben Elton's We Will Rock You has been showing there for the past 12 years. I still walk past it and think of it as The Star Wars Cinema. I didn't see Star Wars there, but my friend Shaun has a grown up cousin who took us to see Battlestar Galactica.

So, thanks to the BBC, every little English boy who saw Star Wars in the spring of 1978, was as familiar with the thirty eight year old movie serial that Lucas was doing a homage to as their father's were. More so. Daddy pointed out it would have been a very lucky boy in 1936 who managed to go to the same cinema 15 weeks in a row.

I saw Star Wars a dozen times in the summer of 1978, and more times than I can count since — 30 or 40 more viewings, I suppose, at least one a year. There are people who don't understand why anyone would watch any film more than once. You already know how it is going to end. Most people who actually like movies think that this attitude has got it backwards. You only enjoy a film on the second viewing; you have to know "how it's going to end" before you can watch it properly. You can't pay attention to the symbolism while you are on the edge of your seat to find out who Rosebud is.

Jonathan says that the hype around big movies nowadays is so vast that he can only really watch them the second time round: the first time, you are so caught up in The Event, desperate to know which rumours were true and which rumours were not true and whether or not there's a post-cred to actually have a good time.

I hope he is wrong. If he is not wrong, then I would need to go and see Desolation of Smaug again, and I am not sure I could survive that.

But to see the same film a dozen time in one summer holiday. That takes a special kind of Crazy.

I once remarked to the editor of Sci-Fi Now that the point of Star Wars is that so much is implied and so little is said so that you seem to be seeing this vast universe out of the corner of your eye. He is kind enough to have implied that this is one of the wisest remarks ever made: at any rate one of the wisest remarks ever made about Star Wars, or at rate one of the wisest remarks ever made about Star Wars by me. But I do think this goes a long way to explain why we watched it so many times. To see the aliens in the Cantina again; to get a proper look at the lightsaber; to memorize the controls on an X-Wing. Watching it over and over to see all the stuff that wasn't actually there.

Everything else followed from that: Star Wars blueprints; attempts to construct life-sized X-Wings out of carboard boxes and lightsabers out of tomato canes. Because when Luke handles the-lightsaber-that-was-his-fathers for the first time, we wanted to reach out, through the screen, and grab it, and keep it forever. Not the lightsaber itself. That moment.

It's a feeling I've never had for anything else. I didn't want to be a Jedi Knight, necessarily; or an X-Wing pilot; or even to be friends with Luke and Han. I just wanted to be there. On the other side of the screen. Inside.

Which is why everything since 1977 has been such a let-down. Walkers and Snowspeeders and Jedi Fighters are all very well, but I want squads of X-Wings and a single blue lightsaber. We've been back to Tatooine, but it's not the Tatooine of our childhood. 

Planet of the Apes had sequels. We can chant their names: Beneath, Escape, Conquest, Battle. But it is fairly obvious that no-one actually wanted to make them. The second film was a 70s Logan's Run dystopia; they added a few grudging apes and then killed Charltan Heston and blew everything up. B movies, C movies, Z movies. The TV series I quite liked was the very last echo of something which had once been quite a good idea. That was how it worked in those days: you expected the sequel to be cheaper and less spectacular than the original. Each Star Wars movie was newer and bigger and louder and more serious than the one before, and in the end they drowned out Star Wars altogether.

Here is a scene from one of the sequels to Star Wars:

"Everything okay back there, Artoo" he called into his pickup. A cheerful beep from the stubby droid locked in position behind the cockpit assured Luke that it was. The destination was the fourth planet out from this star...."

This is from Splinter of the Minds Eye, published only a couple of months after Star Wars hit the UK, and a full two years before Empire Strikes Back. It sends shivers down my spine in a way that Empire Strikes Back never did. I like Emprie Strike Back very much. But this isn't Luke riding a snowbird in Friggia, years after the movie we loved. This is like picking up the thread, seconds or minutes after we dropped it. Luke and Artoo, where they ought to be, in an X-Wing.

So, that's my theory.

We don't want to go back to 1978 and see Star Wars again for the first time. We don't want to experience the sense of wonder we felt when the first Star Destroyer flew over our heads. We want to go back to the moment just after Star Wars finished: when the main march has played and the names of the technical crew are scolling and Grandad is making for the Gents.

A time when Luke and Leia were living in a tree house on the 4th Moon of Yavin and Han and Chewie paid them visits in the Millennium Falcon and there were many, many battles with the Empire still to come. A long time ago. A time that never was. A time we sometimes think we can see out of the corner of our eye.

If you enjoy this kind of thing, the best way of encouraging me to write more is to buy my book.

(The second best way is to buy the Kindle version.)

Now, that's mighty interesting

The basic principle of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be “undemocratic.” These differences between pupils – for they are obviously and nakedly individual differences – must be disguised. ....At schools, the children who are too stupid or lazy to learn languages and mathematics and elementary science can be set to doing things that children used to do in their spare time. Let, them, for example, make mud pies and call it modelling. But all the time there must be no faintest hint that they are inferior to the children who are at work. Whatever nonsense they are engaged in must have – I believe the English already use the phrase – “parity of esteem.” An even more drastic scheme is not possible. Children who are fit to proceed to a higher class may be artificially kept back, because the others would get a trauma — Beelzebub, what a useful word! – by being left behind. The bright pupil thus remains democratically fettered to his own age group throughout his school career, and a boy who would be capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante sits listening to his coeval’s attempts to spell out A CAT SAT ON A MAT.

Screwtape Proposes a Toast (1959)

One more thing, gentlemen, before I quit. Thomas Jefferson once said that all men are created equal, a phrase that the Yankees and the distaff side of the Executive branch in Washington are fond of hurling at us. There is a tendency in this year of grace 1935 for certain people to use this phrase out of context, to satisfy all conditions. The most ridiculous example I can think of is that the people who run public education promote the stupid and idle along with the industrious – because all men are created equal, educators will gravely tell you, the children left behind suffer terrible feelings of inferiority. We know all men are not created equal in the sense some people would have us believe – some people are smarter than others, some people have more opportunity because they’re born with it, some men make more money than others, some ladies make better cakes than others – some people are born gifted beyond the normal scope of most men.

To Kill A Mockingbird (1960)

“(Harper Lee) goes on and on each time I see her about CS Lewis. She would not miss an opportunity to impersonate CS Lewis, who gave lectures in Oxford when she was there,” said (her) agent.

Guardian, 2015

Hedge: Update

The Mail, Telegraph and Express all back tracked from the original story, stating that no-one is being exhumed and no-one asked for anyone to be exhumed. The leader of the Atheist Community has yet to comment. Mr Kahn has turned out to be "top Banker" as well as a Muslim. 

Where did the exhumation story come from in the first place? The original news item, removed by the local paper after the council published it's rebuttal, but still available on various anti-Muslim hate-sites, was substantially about the hedge. "Council asks to buy back part of gypsy grave plot to grow hedge on; gypsies say no." would probably not have made national news. The Smiths refused to allow the hedge because they didn't think it would make a difference, since Mr Kahn and Mr Smith would still be side-by-side six feet underground. This suggests that they hadn't understood that it was a religious requirement and felt they were being singled out for personal animosity because they were gypsies. ("They want to push us away and hide us.") This happens quite a bit in religious news stories. Cultural protestants just don't get that rules and laws about eating and washing and burying people are a big part of Jew's and Muslim's religion. ("It isn't antisemitic to say that Jewish children have got to eat bacon on Tuesdays or not have any lunch at all, after all, pork is much the same as any other kind of meat. I suppose Christians can say that they don't like sprouts because it's part of their religion, can they?")

When a journalist is dealing with dry, abstract issues, he very often tries to come up with a punchy opening sentence that gives a concrete example of the kind of thing he is talking about. "School kids will be sitting in detention doing extra Latin prep if Tory MP Bufton Tufton has his way..." reads better than "A Member of Parliament today remarked that modern schools should emulate the curriculum and disciplinary practices of his youth." "A Romany family are afraid they might have to exhume a recently buried relative..." might have been a fair, if overheated, opening sentence. But "Romany family face having to..." is how these things come out after being passed through the Quick Quotes Quill. The Smith family are indeed quoted as saying "We don't want any of the bodies exhuming but it looks like that is what might happen": there is no claim that anyone has directly said that this might happen. (Some people might wonder if the reporter got that quote by asking something along the lines of "What would would you say IF they said you had to dig him up".) 

The opening remark was arguably a fair spin on the story: a little over dramatic, but that's what journalism is about. How could the Hinckley Times possibly have known that the national papers would read the first sentence and treat that as the whole story? And how could those national papers possibly have guessed that racists would take them at their word and report the exhumation as if it had already taken place. 

And there is nothing that can be done. "Muslims are always digging up dead Christians" is now another of those things that "everybody knows".

-315

Jan 14: New comic launched

This comic is called, very pointedly Star Wars #1. It is the first Star Wars comic. You may remember other Star Wars comics, but they didn't happen. For the next few weeks, you have in your hands all the Star Wars comics there have ever been. 

It is set after Star Wars but before Empire Strikes Back. There used to be hundreds of Marvel Comics set after Star Wars but before Empire Strikes Back. (Splinter of the Minds Eye is what would have happened after Star Wars if Empires Strikes Back had not happened.) Neither Roy Thomas nor Alan Dean Foster nor George Lucas knew, at that point, what was going to happen. Han Solo meeting bugs bunny and incestuous snogging was as good a guess as any. But none of that happened any more, and this new comic is written with the Benefit of Hindsight. We know big stuff that the character's don't, like who is who's sister and who is who's dad.

Are stories transparent, or opaque? Are we looking at this comic, or looking through it? Is it an attempt to imagine an artifact that never existed, but might conceivably have done: "Star Wars 2" as it might have looked in 1978? Or is it just a window into THER STAR WARS UNIVERSE, informing us of events which must, logically, have happened between the Death Star blowing up and everyone arriving on Hoth. There is quite a bit of time in between: time enough for Han Solo to have gone to a place called Ord Mantell and run into some bounty hunters there.

The thing which made me smile, the one thing that really made me smile, was the opening pages:

p 2 "A Long time ago in a galaxy far, far away..." (blue on black)

p3 "Star Wars" (yellow on black)

p4 "Book 1 - Skywalker Strikes" (yellow on black, crawl shaped.) 

p 5 A bottom-up view of a big space ship flying over the "camera".

That gets me on side straight away. The first 5 pages of the comics looking as much like the first 5 minutes of a hypothetical movie as it is possible for a comic to look.  

The olden days comics didn't try to be film-like; not in that way. They weren't icons back then; they were only movies. Neither the original comic nor the original novel included the phrase "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...". The book said "another galaxy, another time...": the comic's small print said "long ago, in a galaxy far away..." George considered having the "crawl" -- the slanty story-so-far introduction -- for Empire Strikes Back roll over the icy landscape of Hoth. This would have made it even more like Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe. If he had done that, then "scrolly text against a starry backdrop would not be one of the irreducible things which makes Star Wars Star Wars.

Then the ship flies across a big industrial landscape, and the shuttle lands, and Han Solo gets his Big Entrance. This follows, which is to say prefigures, Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi in which the characters are introduced in reverse order of importance. 

The Big Industrial Landscape is not really like anything in Star Wars, but the notion of a whole planet that consists of nothing but weapons factories (with, as it will turn out, a huge rubbish dump all around it) is the sort of thing  we feel that a Star Wars sequel ought to be offering us: desert planet, ice planet, forest planet, factory planet. John Cassaday is the artist and he has the young Harrison Ford's face roughly right. Writer Jason Aaron  has the dialogue spot-on. When Han confronts the Imperial Customs Officers, you can hear the voice he uses on Cloud City pretty much perfectly: 

"We wouldn't want negotiations to start on a sour note, would we?" 

"No...we wouldn't want that."

Later on, Leia asks Han directly why he is still working with the rebellion. It's done as a sort of homage to the Han / Leia love scenes from Empire Strikes Back (which haven't happened yet) right down to Han's facial expressions and there being an interruption just as they are coming to the point. But obviously, this kind of thing can't be developed or resolved without overwriting the movie its quoting from. It is nice to drift back to 1977 and not feel quite sure whether or not we can trust Han Solo.

"Han Shot First" has become a rallying cry for those of us who think that Lucas should have left the Star Wars text intact. But it also, I think, encodes a problem with the whole Saga: that Han is cool when we meet him, because he is dangerous, and becomes progressively less cool as the series goes on, until by Return of the Jedi he's no-one, just a pilot in a snazzy uniform. 

Lucas was, of course, quite free to incorporate the older work, Star Wars, into the newer work Star Wars Episodes I - VI. "The fix up", the novel made of short stories, is a venerable science fictional form. Doc Smith pasted unrelated science fiction stories onto his "Lensemen" canvass; Dune was several novellas before it became one huge novel. Tolkien, mighty Tolkien had to go back and change parts of the Hobbit once he realized that it was part of the huge epic known as the Silmarillion. We don't object to Star Wars being part of the new, bigger work. What we object to is his saying that we shouldn't still be able to watch Star Wars as well. 

They are doing a plan, which involves infiltrating an Imperial weapons factory. We see Han and the others (we don't know who the others are yet, but they are wearing bounty hunter masks like the one Leia and Lando wore/will wear in Return of the Jedi, so we do really) walk past rows of TIE fighters that robots are working on. This is proper fan boy stuff. It made me smile again.  

There have been any number of ships in Star Wars but they are mostly all just hardware, cool, or not so cool. Even the Millenium Falcon is mostly just cool hardware, but then I suppose the point about the Millenium Falcon is her relatively, ordinary-ness. Not looking like much but having it where it counts is the point of her. I wish there had been more Millenium Falcon. We spend, what, six minutes with her ? It's all in that funny little scene with 3PO and Chewbaca playing chess and Luke learning to use the Force, the point at which our heroes pause for breath and we see them as a family. I wish they had stayed like that forever. I wish there had been five 26 part TV series which started each week with our heroes at home on the Millennium Falcon before they were sent off on some thrilling adventure. But more than lightsabers and Alec Guiness and the Millennium Falcon and golden robots is TIE fighters, ball shaped cockpits with funny hexagonal sails, and X Wings, WWII spitfires with wings that snap into an X shape. I have never been able to explain why the moment when the wings clip from wing shape to X shapes is cool but its the coolest thing in twelve hours of cool things.

They have a plan. "I have a very good feeling about this", say 3PO, and by this point, so do I.

Luke doesn't get as good an entrance as Han. He unmasks with Leia on page 14 when Han reveals his hand; he's squeezed off to the left of the frame, squashed by the next panel. But seeing the three of them together is cool: the first moment when the audience bursts into spontaneous applause. We mentally clap again a few page later; Han and Luke and Leia hiding from the Stormtroopers, guns drawn. (Star Wars was all about Han and Luke and Leia: the sequels seemed deliberately to seperate them.) Note that when Leia punches the Imperial officer, spit and teeth come out of his mouth. That's not a movie moment; not U rated movie moment. That's comic book violence. Alec Guiness told Parky that Star Wars violence was play violence, someone said "bang" and someone else fell over. (He also told he that warned told James Dean to leave his car at home on Sep 30 1955.)

We see Luke repeating Ben Kenobi lines under his breath, and "telepathically" hearing a cry for help from a group of alien slaves. He still looks like Star Wars Luke: if anything, more boyish. Chubby, even. From comics to cereal packets, Mark Hamill's face was always the hardest to capture. He decides to free the slaves, which is the sort of thing you probably do if you are the Last of the Jedi. The partial close up of the lightsaber (page 18) is the sort of thing I would have killed for when I was a nipper.

But notice: on page 18 we see five frames of Luke confronting the slave driver; long thin frames across the page. Frame 4, the close up of Luke, has no background: it's his face on a white space saying "I won't reach for my blaster". (He is going to reach for his lightsaber, of course.) And then on the next page we have six frames, tall thin frames, of the lightsaber blade and the slave drivers whip, and the slave drivers cut-off hand: no figures at all. This is intended to evoke the Obi-Wan chopping the pirates arm off in the Cantina scene — over so quickly that we don't realize what has happened until we see the arm. And then we turn the page and there's a full frame art shot of Luke holding the lightsaber: which is why he didn't get a big build up like Han did — this is his Moment. The opening pages — title crawls and space ships and what not — were pure slight of hand. The drama comes from some (pretty basic, but very competent) panel work.

It's a comic book moment, not a movie. Well. Duh. 

I think I am correct in saying that this is the first time Luke has used the lightsaber that was his father's as a weapon, as opposed to as a toy to practice with. (Of course I am right. There are no other comics.) Should he say: "Gee, I am finally acting like a Jedi: Ben would be proud?" Or is it a mistake to even be thinking like this. Luke is using his lightsaber because Luke is meant to use his lightsaber but the a lightsaber is what the Luke Skywalker action figure comes with? 

A fairly graphic bit of hand slicing, incidentally. Jedi like to chop bits off people, which is presumably why the villains in the prequels had to be robots. Obi-Wan chopped the pirates arm off in the Cantina; Darth Vader is due to chop Luke's hand off in the next movie. 

Speaking of whom...

I like the big build up given to "the negotiator". I honestly wish there had been a caption which said "Dah dah dah - dum da-dah - dum da-dah" when we first see the Imperial Shuttle. This is the Darth Vader of Empire Strikes Back, the Vader who is followed by Stormtroopers and Imperial Marches wherever he goes, not the Vader of Star Wars who is simply Tarkin's henchman. 

Chewbacca obeys Leia when she orders him to kill Darth Vader: as if he is more loyal to the rebellion than to Solo. I like the fact that wookie growls are too big for the speech balloons

In the canonical texts, the Wookie is Han's friend and co-pilot, and that is all we know. In the midrashic commentaries, Han saved Chewie's life, and that means that he has incurred a life-debt: he regards Han as a member of his family and a member of his tribe, forever. But in the prequels, Chewie is very actively a rebel, friends with Yoda, no less. This is an example of more being less: Han and Chewie were cooler when they were a pirate who just happened to have a big furry crewman than when they are quite important cogs in the big story of the rebellion. 

There is dialogue:

Leia: We're in trouble

Han: No, not yet, we can still...

FX: Alam goes off

Han: Now we're in trouble.

Star Wars is cheeky and swashbuckling. No-one is superpowered or superconfident; there is a sense of everyone hanging on by the skin of their bottoms. (Alan Foster gives the made up line "They were in the wrong place at the wrong time; naturally they became heroes" more prominence than the one about it all happening a long time ago.) But there is very little of this in the comic. We're mostly taking it all far too seriously. 

Han plans to escape by borrowing an AT-AT from the factory. When the AT-ATs come over the horizon in Empire Strikes Back they are big and terrible and almost indestructible. You can trip them up with harpoons, which is a bit like shooting a photon torpedo through the weak spot in the dragon's breast-place, but you can't shoot them. So it sort of spoils it if they are also the sort of thing you can just hitch a ride on, which Han knows how to fly. Lightsabers started out being a more elegant weapon from a more elegant age and end up being a really useful boy Scout knife. 

On the other hand, I REALLY want to find out if Han pulls it off.

Luke walks down a corridor and confronts Vader. Ben tells Luke to run. That's the main thing that Ben tells Luke to do. This is, by my counting, at least the fourth time that Luke and Vader have met face to face for the very first time. (But none of those happened. Well, only one of them did.)

I bet it turns out to be a dream. It's a really big deal in Empire Strikes Back that we're seeing Luke meet Vader for the first time, and it's pretty courageous of George to wait two movies before the hero meets the villain. I don't think a comic would be allowed to spoil that. (Anakin is not allowed to meet General Grievous in the Clone Wars cartoon because they meet for the first time Revenge of the Sith, although this is allowed to become a bit too much of a running gag.) 

FAITHFULNESS TO MOVIES, SUPERFICIAL: Nine out of ten.  I didn't spot any howlers. There were no moments when I wanted to say "That's JUST. NOT. STAR. WARS."

FAITHFULNESS TO MOVIES, ON A DEEPER LEVEL: Six out of ten. There is a lot of talk. Some of the violence is violent. There is little banter. Everyone is taking this seriously. No-one is having any fun. The thing it needed, and probably no-one has ever said this before, was Jar Jar Binks. 

If you enjoy this kind of thing, the best way of encouraging me to write more is to buy my book.

(The second best way is to buy the Kindle version)

Hedge

If I am recruiting stock control assistants at my cherry pie factory (which, for the avoidance of doubt, I am not) and let it be known that, all other things being equal, I intend to give the job to the tallest applicant, then I am being sexist. Because most men are taller than most women.

Yes, I know that height is not a gender. And I know that you get tall women and short men. And I am sure that you can think of some particular circumstance where only employing tall people makes sense. Fact remains: if I say "I prefer to employ tall people" I am in effect saying "I prefer to employ men". Even though height is not a gender.

I am quite sure that every Mosque in England has a couple of white converts that it can bring out on special occasions. But it so happens that 90% of British Muslims are of Asian or African heritage. Most English Catholic churches are disproportionately full of people whose grandparents came over from the Emerald Isle and Anglican pews are disproportionately occupied by white English bottoms. That's just very much the way these things go. Excellent argument for not having faith schools, but that's not the subject of today's discussion.

If one spots that a particular club is being regularly singled out for criticism where other similar clubs are not, one might say: "Well, it just so happens that nearly all the members of that club have dark coloured skin but I'm sure that's just a crazy irrelevant coincidence."

Or one might say "The reason that club is being singled out is that so many of it's members have dark skins. The people who go on and on about that particular club are, consciously or unconsciously, intentionally or unintentionally, racists."

*

On Feb 5 the Hinkley Times ran a news story under the headline Dispute Over Grave Plot After Burial of Gypsy. It was a very sad story out of which no-one came very well. It seems to go like this.

There is a municipal cemetery in Leicestershire. Some people -- the French, for example, and some Americans -- believe that if something is run by the state it has to be non-religious, in the sense of religion being prohibited. But this was a non-religious cemetery in the English sense: anyone of any religion could be buried there, there was a chapel that would do equally well as a church or a synagogue or a humanist meeting hall, and they did their best to accommodate different funeral traditions.

If you have never had to arrange a funeral, you may not know that you have to buy a piece of land in the cemetery to bury your loved-one in. You actually generally purchase a plot that will do for several funerals. This makes it pretty expensive, one reason why cremations are more fashionable nowadays. (In the case of a cremation, you merely rent a flower bed.) This particular cemetery seems to have had the policy of always selling families the next plot that was available: there was no question of segregating it into, say, Jewish and Christian quarters.

A Romany family purchased a large piece of land, as a family plot. The first person buried in it was an elderly gentleman with a large number of children and grandchildren -- and a very large funeral, with an astonishing number of floral tributes. The family wanted this particular plot because it the patriarch could be buried facing his home, which is a gypsy tradition.

However, it transpired that there had already been a burial on the adjacent plot, by a Muslim family. Islamic tradition says that you should be buried facing Mecca, and the cemetery had arranged this. But here comes the problem. Muslim tradition also says that Muslims shouldn't be buried alongside non-Muslims. This isn't a teaching of the Koran, and practice varies, but it was what this particular family wanted. The cemetery did the sensible thing and asked the gypsy family if they would consider selling the plot back to the cemetery and buying a different one, but they said no, dug their heels in, and went ahead with the funeral.

I think we have to read between the lines slightly here, but we can probably understand the Romany family's point of view. The settled community has never been welcoming of travelers: even some of my nicest and least racist friends have been known to remark that if you see how much rubbish gets left behind these damn tinkers etc etc etc. So I imagine that just about the worst thing you could do to a gypsy family a couple of days before a funeral is to try to, er, move them on.

Now it gets really complicated. According to the account printed in the local newspaper, the Romany family were asked, a few days after the funeral, if they would consider an exhumation and reburial. They not unnaturally told the council, and I paraphrase here, to fuck off. And that would seem to be the end of the matter: you can't exhume a body without permission from the next of kin. A little distressing to receive the request in the first place, but no harm done.

However the local council categorically deny that any request for an exhumation was ever made. "An inaccurate, divisive and inflammatory article printed in The Hinckley Times appeared to indicate that Burbage Parish Council has considered the exhumation of a person recently interred at Burbage Cemetery – this is totally untrue and without foundation." 

Which ever version you choose to believe -- and someone is evidently not telling the whole truth -- a mistake has been made. You would think that people in the death business would know about Muslim funeral customs, and would have warned the Muslim family that they had no control over who would be buried next to them. If the cemetery promised to leave a space between the two plots and then didn't, it's the Muslims who have the right to be aggrieved. You could take the whole thing as a lovely metaphor for secularism: how do you fit two contrasting beliefs into one space without doing any favours to either. How much, in a very real sense "space" should you allow? The cemetery proposed the most English solution that it is possible to imagine. They asked if they might put a hedge between the two graves. 

I expect you know what happened next. The original news item didn't major on the Muslim aspect of the story. "Dispute over grave plots after burial of gypsy" is a fairly neutral description, even if, "gypsy" isn't the preferred term. But within a couple of days the national media had got their fangs into it, and it became all about the -- wholly fictional -- exhumation.

Daily Mail: "Gypsy Man's Body Could Be Exhumed Because He Was Buried Next To A Muslim".

Daily Mirror "Grieving Family Asked To Move Grandad's Grave Away From Muslim Buried Nearby Because He is Non-Believer"

Daily Telegraph: "Grandfathers body could be exhumed after relatives of Muslim buried alongside complain that he was an unbeliever."

And then off into the wilder shores of the internet: "You won't believe what a Muslim family want!" "Tolerant Muslims demand this Grandfather's body be moved" and my favourite "Muslims Can Have Your Body Exhumed Now."

A fairly nuanced story about a dispute between two religious traditions has transformed into one in which the poor Romany victims are going to have to fight "tooth and nail" in the "highest court in the land" to prevent a local council digging up a corpse at the behest of Muslims. The council had already issued a rebuttal: no request for an exhumation had been made. The local paper had withdrawn the story from their website. But this makes now difference: an increasingly fictional version of the story is now all over the national press. The comments attached to some of the online reports are enough to make one feel physically ill: "Enough is enough. Outlaw Islam, Nuke Mecca" "FFS I've had about enough hearing what the Muslims want.....Not their country, so they need to get over it."

What first drew my attention to the story was a comment on Twitter, which put an exceptionally nasty spin on the whole thing: 

"They are going to dig up Grandpa's grave to please the Muslims."

Virtually nothing in this iteration of the story is true. It is no longer a request: the grave is quite definitely being dug up. We are not being asked to imagine "they", whoever "they" are coming down on a particular side in a rather messy dispute. We are just being asked to imagine that "they" woke up one morning and said "How can we please Muslims. I know. Let's go and disinter a Catholic." (And it's not to please one particular group of justifiably aggrieved Muslims. It's to please Muslims in general. Who are, as we all know, an undifferentiated blob.) 

Where was this posted? Where else but on the Twitter Feed of the Leader of England's Atheist Community. In case we didn't understand the point, one of his minions stepped up to the crease and explained  "So, even in death, the great leveler, Muslims expect special treatment." (*)

Some people, including the Atheist Community Leader, think that religion means something like "a theory about the origins of life on earth, now disproved". But "feelings about what happens to someone when they die; the ceremonies and rituals you perform around dead bodies" might be a much better starting point. If we were all Rational, I suppose we would leave our dead relative bodies out for the bin men, who would harvest any transplantable organs and dispose of the rest hygienically. I believe that around the turn of the 20th century there was a humanist fad for doing exactly this. But it never caught on. Fewer people want traditional Anglican funeral services, but they have invented replaced them with their own ceremonies: scattering a person's ashes in a place that they loved, or paying a great deal of money to have them shot into space in a rocket. Since, I guess, 1989 the tradition of creating a shrine close to the place where a person died has taken off: every busy road as a sad collection of flowers, cards and teddy bears somewhere near it. And lots of people have magical beliefs and practices that they couldn't, in the cold light of day, justify. The belief that a person should be buried near members of his own community and the belief that a corpse should under no circumstances be disturbed are both equally "religious" beliefs. From the Atheist point of view, worrying about whether dead people are dug up and worrying about who they are buried near are both equally mad. The Atheist Community Leader is a man who purports not to understand why anyone could possibly object to people throwing bacon at synagogues. But he appears to unqualifiedly endorse one set of beliefs (not disturbing dead bodies) while repudiating the other set (burying Muslims near Muslims.)  He doesn't even perceive that this is dispute between religions. He regards it as the arbitrary demand of one community for special treatment.

But that's what happens: even to the most rational and skeptical of us. The superstitions of our tribe are not superstitions, but the neutral, incontestable, rock-bottom values of humanity. Whereas the superstitions of your tribe are arbitrary demands that we shouldn't make any attempt to accommodate.

 "I've had about enough hearing what the Muslims want.....Not their country, so they need to get over it." Not their country. Not their country.

But this is okay and not racist at all. Because Islam is not a race.

(*) I suspect that this is what the whole thing comes down to, actually. In a neutral space like a secular cemetery, Muslim and Christian feelings get the same amount of attention paid to them. But Christians are used to have more attention paid to their feelings. So to white cultural Christians, paying any attention at all to the wishes of Muslims amounts to doing them special favours. The local council are said to have "bent over backwards" to accommodate Muslim feelings, where what they actually seem to have done is tried very hard to come up with a compromise. The expression "bending over backwards to accommodate Muslims" is almost as much of a Common Sense Brigade dog whistle as "Political Correctness Gone Mad."











If you want me to write more of this kind of thing, the best thing you can do is buy one of my books...

-365

Dec 18: Names of Characters Revealed as Vintage Digital Trading Cards.

Yes: I remember Star Wars Trading Cards. They were very much a thing.

A very American thing. Tiny little Bazooka Joe bubblegums with tiny little cartoon strips, which weren't funny and were full of references to "principals" and "coaches" and "baseball" and "kids" who formed "gangs" in "alleys" near "fire hydrants". I suppose that an American child would have been just as puzzled by the Beano. If you collected 10,000 or 100,000 strips you could trade them in for a gift. I don't know if anyone ever did. I don't know if the offer even worked in the UK, although I did get a club membership goody bag, with a plastic ring which was already too small for my fingers. It was meant to whistle. You were meant to communicate with other members of the gang using morse code.  

American comics still had tiny small ads for novelties inside the front covers and I believed in every single one of them: the disc that would allow you to hypnotize people; the giant robot that obeyed your commands. Plans for a giant robot, I think it was. In the long decade between Turnabout Intruder and V'Ger, Star Trek was such a small thing that memorabilia was being flogged alongside sea monkeys and live (guaranteed) sea horses: a replica Tricorder (I suppose the Aurora snap together kit); cuddly Tribbles; rubber Spock ears. The tenth anniversary of the original series conveniently fell in 1976 and could therefore be referred to as the Tennial. (The US Bicentennial was very nearly as big as the Queen's Silver Jubilee.) There was a silver plated medallion to commemorate it. It must, I suppose, have been very very easy to commission silver plated medallions. One of the first pieces of merchandize I ever saw advertised was a silver plated Spider-Man medallion. If I had bought it, then by now it would be worth very little.

I could conceive of saving up a pound and somehow turning it into two dollars and somehow sending it to America and getting a life size model of the Star Ship Enterprise (with real warp drive) months later via boat-mail. There were mythical aunts with American bank accounts, and legendary documents called International Reply Coupons. (This was before Paypal.) But collecting a thousand pieces of bubble gum was too far fetched even for me.

Bubble gum was almost as prohibited as tobacco at school. Cigarettes killed you, but bubble gum made a mess under the desk, stuck to people's shows, and spread diseases. You could be slapped for possessing either, although no-one ever was. Chewing gum was somewhat different. Grown ups chewed chewing gum. It was and is sold in serious little packets as if it was headache tablets or condoms. Bubblegum came in colorful "hey-kids!" packaging. It would kill you if you swallowed it; choke you to death; stay in your stomach for the rest of your life. And there was something not quite nice about a sweet that you put in your mouth in order to spit it out again. No-one minded about the Great British Gobstopper.

I suppose that at one time, cards had been given away free with gum; and as time went by the gum got less and less important and the cards got more and more important and you ended with five picture cards that came with a small flat strip of bubblegum that turned to powder in your mouth. Football cards were different. No gum in football cards, so far as I remember, although possibly if you collected enough you could trade them in for a toasted sandwich. (*) I remember sheets of stickers as well. Dozens of tiny stamp sized stickers one, not on any particular theme, just things that might come in useful to a ten year old boy: "Top Secret"; "We Hate School";  "No Girls Allowed". Like gum, it felt thrillingly naughty even to handle one because a friend of a friend in a different class had definitely been slapped for putting one on text book.

Just before there were Star Wars cards, there were Marvel Comics cards. It sort of bothered me that people who were not Marvel Comics fans were allowed to collect them. There was one golden play time when a cool kid with a big collection challenged me to name all the characters, which I could do easily, and everyone was (for about an hour) un-ironically impressed. But then Star Wars happened. No-one had seen Star Wars, because it wasn't out yet, although I had read both the book and the comic, which put me at some advantage. I had a few cards; some of the cool kids with more money had complete sets. Someone had his collection stolen and for two days all the grown ups went completely insane. Our form teacher inspected everyone's desk and our year head -- can I be making this up? -- cancelled lessons to question everyone one at a time about the location of the cards. "It doesn't make any difference to me if it's twenty picture cards or 20 blocks of gold that had been stolen, I will not have a thief in my form." I suppose they had agreed in advance to massively over-react to the first instance of stealing so as to put across the impression that they took stealing very seriously indeed. I don't remember if the cards were found or if anyone got slapped.

Did one of those cards really have a photo of Biggs on it? But there would have been nothing very surprising about seeing a photo of Biggs on a card in 1977. He is not in the film. But "not being in the film" and "not being in Star Wars" were still two different things. Star Wars was a comic first; and then a book; and then a series of picture cards; and possibly a set of free gifts in cereal packets; and certainly a series of action figures. The Force Blade has a much greater claim to being the real lightsaber than any replica or schematic or freeze frame still from the movie. Because that's what we knew about and that's what cool kids with money owned. The film is now all we have left, which is why it hurts so much when Lucas messes with it. But Star Wars is quite unrecoverable. And Star Wars was never a movie. The picture cards and action figures are where these characters lived.

*

Mr Abrams decided to reveal the names of the character in the Star Wars VII trailer in the form of retro style picture cards which no one aged under 50 will really understand. This is a good thing, in that Abrams wants to play with nostalgia; and a bad thing, in the sense that he sees Star Wars as a collection of dead relics to be venerated, not a living tradition to be continued.

These are our First Glimpses of characters who please George please please we will grow to know and love like Luke and Leia and Jar-Jar and Pooh and Piglet and all of the others.

* It might have been that the robot was just a bit of hardware. But in fact she is "BB-8". (Does that mean that she is not an R2 unit, or just that her name is Artoo Beebee?)

* It have been that the face in the X-Wing was just Red 9, standing by. But in fact he is someone called Poe Dameron.

* The girl on the speeder bike is Rey.

* The scared Stormtrooper is Finn.

"Rey" and "Finn". Don't have last names. If we had been told that they were called Rey Skywalker or Finn Solo, that would give us massive, massive hints about the plot. Which is why I am going to bet that that is indeed what they are called. Poe Dameron would be an odd name for Skyalker or Solo descendant. And the guy with the funny lightsaber is Kylo Renn, which is just a name: not Darth Renn or Darth Kylo or Kylo Renn Skywalker.

Obviously, none of this tells us anything whatsoever. But we can enjoy chewing on a bit of sickly-sweet retro-nostalgia.

If you enjoy this kind of thing, the best way of encouraging me to write more is to buy my book.

The second best way is to buy the kindle version.

(*) Think about it.

-385

28 Dec 2014 - Trailer for Star Wars Episode VII released.

[PLACEHOLDER] 

Wombles; Little and Large; Treasury Edition; weekly comic; action figures; glow in the dark swords; all subsequent movies, and indeed all subsequent life something of an anti-climax.

[FULL DISCLOSURE]

I refer to Mr Abrams previous attempt to revamp a much loved science fiction franchise with the word "star" in the title only as The Abomination, and did not go and see the second one.

I thought Episode I was quite good, but a bit of a let down, when I first saw it, and have not significantly changed my mind since. I do not feel that the director made it out of personal animosity to me, as some people I believe do.

The TV cartoon series I positively like. 

[COMMENTARY]

0.10 Black screen, sound effects, leading to 

0.14 Desert scene. The trailer for Episode I started with an unfamiliar image of gungans walking through reeds,  but with the unmistakable "Luke Skywalker theme" telling us where we were. This one relies on the fact that Tunisian Desert says Star Wars without any aural clues. And it is not self-conscious about being Star Wars: there is not attempt to disguise itself as the Seven Samurai. 

When I saw Star Wars my head was full of Flash Gordon, or possibly I stuffed my head full of Flash Gordon because of Star Wars, and I felt that each film ought to be set on one of those mono-ecological kingdoms: the ice world, the city in the sky; the swamp world; the forest world. But more and more everything seemed to be about the desert world. (And they spoiled the desert world in Phantom Menace by making it big — huge Ben Hur arenas where it should have been bored farm boys racing each other to the canyon and back. It's a backwater. If there's a bright center to the universe etc etc etc.) Our first image confirms that It's All About The Desert World. Star Wars is about Tatooine and Tatooine is about Star Wars. 

0.20 Dark brown voice: "There has been an awakening; have you felt it." It doesn't sound like Yoda, and it isn't British enough to be Obi-Wan. I have no idea what "an awakening" could be: perhaps it means a new, powerful Jedi has come on the scene. (When Obi-Wan taught Luke to use the Force, could this have been described as an Awakening?)

0.23 Black man in stormtrooper gear pops up, looking perturbed. (This is John Boyega, an actor. There is no clue about his role, apart from the fact that he is playing a perturbed stormtrooper, or a perturbed man pretending to be a stormtrooper. Is he perturbed because he as just Awakened, or because he has just encountered someone who has Awakened?) 

In the original movies, we never saw a Stormtrooper take its helmet off, although Luke and Han spent the middle act in uniforms. In the Clone Wars period, "clone troopers", who are all clones of Jango Fett, are goodies; it is assumed (though we've never out and out been told) that the stormtroopers in the original films are clone troopers repurposed to be baddies by the Empire. This guy does not appear to be a Jango-Clone ... he doesn't look like the troopers do in the cartoon, at any rate.

0.29 A droid whizzing past some hardware. It is whistling like R2D2. The hardware isn't anything specific, although one of vehicles looks slightly like the tiny little ship that gets eaten by a Star Destroyer at the beginning of Episode I.  

The scene looks quite like Star Wars, grimy and run-down like the original films, not shiny and boring like the prequels.

0.39 Shots of Stormtroopers in a vehicle of some kind: presumably about to "parachute" down onto some alien planet. 

Sinking feelings: that technique of showing you a glimpse of what is happening before it blacks out, of everything being pressed together and claustrophobic works well in Battlestar Galactica and Alien and things which are meant to feel a bit like the real military would if it was in space, but is a poor match to A Long Time Ago In A Galaxy Far Far Away. The Abomination took something shiny and happy and 1960s and made it dark and cynical and crap. But surely if he hated Star Wars the way he hated Star Trek, Disney wouldn't have let him lose on their expensive new toys?

0.42  A young woman wearing a costume indistinguishable from Leia's in Episode VI, shooting across Tatooine in a vehicle strongly reminiscent of the speeder-bike from that movie. (This is presumably "Rachel" the 17 year old orphan who learned to make her way in a tough, dangerous town -- the role for which Lucasfilms did an open casting call in 2012.) This pretty much confirms what we guessed already: that "Rachel" is the "Leia" stand-in (and that "Tom", the other role they had open auditions for, is the surrogate Luke.)

.The TV Tropes website coins the phrase "flanderisation" to refer to the process whereby a character in a long running series becomes defined by one single characteristic. (In the first season of the Simpsons, Ned Flanders had a number of personality traits, one of which was church going. By season 6 he was The Comedy Christian.) The Clone Wars TV series shows signs of flanderisation: a small number of scenes and images from the movies are replayed over and over, as if they define the genre, which arguably they do. (The room falls silent, the music drops, we hear breathing and the swish of a light saber activating in a corridor. We see face shots of six pilots checking in with their calls signs in quick succession. I haven't seen Rebels yet, but the trailer is a close pastiche of the iconic opening seconds of Episode IV.) In my essay Little Orphan Anakin I noted that the iconography of Amidala in Episode 2 was so similar to that of Princess Leia in Episode IV as to effectively amalgamate the two characters. 

0.48 Amphibious X-Wings: and why not. Note that it only takes, what, half a second to allude to the seminal "Red 6, standing by!" sequence in Episode IV.

1.00 "The Dark Side...and the Light". The croaky voice makes one wonder if perchance it could be a revivified Emperor who is speaking the narration. 

The phrase "The Dark Side and the Light" tells us literally nothing about the movie; it's almost as if a Sherlock Holmes film had the tag-line "the detective must solve...a mystery". (I don't know if the two bits of speech are meant to run together, so it goes "There has been an awakening? Have you felt it: the dark side and the light?") 

I am not sure about the cruciform lightsabre. To me, what is and should be cool about skiffy is going back and seeing the same bits of hardware over and over again; the same phasers, the same jaunting belts; the same lightsabers. But I suppose we are committed to newer and cooler weapons in each episode and we've done the double-headed sword in Episode I. 

The lightsaber is red. In the Original Trilogy, the goody's lightsabers had blue blades and the baddy's lightsabers had red blades. So perhaps this person stumbling through the dark snowy forest is the baddie. His cloak slightly calls to mind Luke Skywalker at the beginning of Return of the Jedi, meaning that I can't quite shake the thought that the plot of the new trilogy might involve Luke having turned to the Dark Side. 

That had better not be Vader breathing we can hear in the background. 

1.10 Woot! Woot! Millennium Falcon. Woot! Woot! Proper TIE Fighters. 

Obviously the big big big problem with the prequels was that you couldn't have any of the really cool iconic stuff from the real movies; which made it harder and harder for us to grab hold of any part of the film and say "yes, that looks like Star Wars." One doesn't want to wibble too far the other way: Empire introduced AT-AT walkers and Jedi introduced those three winged shuttle craft, after all; there's no point in a series of sequels which just repeat images from Star Wars over and over again. But it's pretty sly to make a trailer which contains all of the cool stuff from the original trilogy (plus some stuff with strong Original Trilogy overtones). It's like it's saying — not quite sure about the prequels — that's fine...this one will be like coming home. 

Is that water the Falcon is flying over in the first seconds of the shot? Would that be the same lake the X-Wings are skimming? Does that mean that someone Tatooine is no longer all desert? (The latter Dune novels involved introducing water onto Arakis, didn't it?)

[CONCLUSION]

This doesn't tell us anything that we couldn't already have guessed, but we didn't expect it too. 

It's set partly on Tatooine; it's got X-Wings and the Millennium falcon in it; there's an evil Jedi with a cruciform sword; one of the main characters spends some of the movie in a stormtrooper uniform, and another is a dead ringer for Leia-Amidala. 

Nothing contradicts the default rumor, that this is basically going to go back to draft one of The Star Wars, two Jedi kids going to rescue their father from the baddies. I'd guess "Rachel" and "Tom" are the children of Leia and Han, though probably not the Jaina and Jacen of the now non-canonical Extended Universe. They are ignorant of each other's existence, and for some reason think their parents are dead. Uncle Luke has recently Gone Over To The Dark Side; but his Nephew and Niece "awaken" to the Force and set out separately to bring him back to the Light. 

It all looks quite a lot like Star Wars, and there's nothing to suggest that Abrams is going to take the piss out of whole franchise, as he arguably did in the abomination. 

Those of us who care about Star Wars can probably feel cautiously optimistic. Those who don't are going to have a tedious twelve months.








I wrote a book about Star Wars. I think it's the best thing I've done. 

How To Make The Bible Mean Whatever You Want It to Mean

In his Christmas column, the Guardian's tame religious pundit, Giles Fraser, asserts that Christianity is a radical, anti-establishment religion. Those in authority do not like it, because it involves the belief that there is a higher authority than the king. 

I think that this is probably the kind of thing you would expect a Church of England vicar writing in the Guardian to say. It's not completely true and it's not completely false. Historically, religion has been a tool in the hands of those in charge just about as often as it has been a thorn in their flesh. Fraser may think that conservative, establishment clerics are not true Christians. But they could say the same about him, and do, very frequently.

In support of his thesis, Rev. Fraser asks us to look at Jesus. As soon Jesus was born King Herod was trying to have him killed, because he could see that a divine king would be a threat to his earthly kingdom. And in the end, the Romans had the grown up baby-Jesus crucified because they saw his radical kingship as a threat to empire and emperor.

But wait a moment. How do we know that Herod tried to kill baby-Jesus? From the prologue to Matthew's Gospel. Wise Men from the East know that a king has been born because there's a new star in the sky; they head for the palace because that's a good place to look for a king; when there is no king there; they check out Bethlehem because that's where Jewish kings are usually born. Herod gets scared and orders a cull of all the babies in Bethlehem but baby-Jesus is whisked away to Egypt in the nick of time. The story isn't in Luke; it isn't anywhere else in the New Testament and it certainly isn't mentioned by any secular historian, even ones who hate Herod and would quite like to attribute a massacre to him. And it feels a bit too much like Harry Potter for comfort. The consensus is that it is not historically true. It's folklore, mythology: a story. (*)

Only the most tedious kind of pedant hears the question "How many sheep did Noah take onto the ark?"(**) and thinks that "None! Because there was no Ark and no Noah and no sheep! It's a made up story!" is a clever answer. It very probably is a story; but it's one of the stories which it is the job of Christian priests to tell and retell and explain. It is perfectly reasonable to assume that when Giles Fraser says "Herod tried to murder the child born in Royal David's city" we are supposed to hear an unstated "in the story..." at the beginning of the sentence. In the story Herod murdered the children because baby Jesus was a rival King. In the story Mary and Joseph ran away to Egypt. In the story the Romans killed Jesus because he was a subversive. 

Except that they didn't. Not in any of the four stories in the Bible. "In the story" it's the religious authorities who turn against Jesus: because he appears to be preaching sacrilege; because he appears to be threatening the Temple; because he was claiming to be Messiah without doing any of the things Messiahs are meant to do. "In the story" the the chief Priests, the teachers of the law, and the pharisees collude with Judas Iscariot to arrest Jesus. "In the story" they have to persuade the forces of occupation to have him killed. "In the story"—in one of the four stories, at any rate—the Roman Governor repeatedly says that he doesn't think Jesus has done anything wrong. 

So where does Rev. Fraser's notion that Jesus was killed by Romans for political reasons come from?

Some people are not content to just say "in the story". Some people want to read between the lines and infer what "must have" "really" happened. Some of those people think that the story in which the religious authorities had Jesus killed is an after-the-fact anti-Semitic slur. The story of Jesus being killed as an anti-Roman rebel is a bit of a hard sell if you are proselytizing in Rome. So someone (Constantine, probably: Giles Fraser blames everything on Constantine) came up with a different story, one in which the Jews are the baddies and the Romans are exonerated. Some people think it's a nasty story. It has certainly provided the pretext for a lot of anti-Semitism.

Let's reserve judgment about whether this theory is correct. Let's also hold back from wondering how you conduct an Easter service if you think the Passion story in the New Testament is a work of fiction, and nasty fiction, at that. The point which interests me right now is the ease with which a religious writer can move from talking about a story which is in the Bible, but which practically everyone thinks is folklore, to talking about a story which is not in the Bible but which some scholars think may be closer to what really happened, without giving the slightest indication that he's moved from one kind of story to another.

Perhaps Fraser himself regards the evidence for the "historical Jesus" as so overwhelming that he has long since discarded the Jesus of the Gospels in favour of the historical reconstruction. Perhaps, indeed, he has forgotten that there ever was any evidence: perhaps he has moved for so long in academic circles that to him "Jesus" means "the Jesus of historical reconstructions" and he has forgotten that it ever meant anything else. Maybe, when he looks at a passage which says "the chief priests and the teachers of the law were looking for some sly way to arrest Jesus and kill him" (Mark 14:1) he sees "the Romans realized Jesus was a threat to Imperial power." Maybe he's trying to throw some relatively benign dust in our eyes. Maybe he thinks that the story of how the Priests conspired with Judas to kill Jesus is so horrid that it can't be true. Perhaps he hopes that if he repeats the story about how the Roman's killed the revolutionary Jesus often enough, it will become the story which "everybody knows", in the same way that everybody knows that Three Kings followed the star to Bethlehem.  

Or perhaps his illustrations from the life of Jesus are really nothing more than blustering woo. Jesus is neither the character in the stories we have; nor the hypothetical figure historians think they can infer. He's just a place holder for "whatever Giles Fraser believes this week". Anti authoritarianism is good; Jesus is good; therefore Jesus is an anti authoritarian. No-one asks "what would Jesus do" unless they already know the answer.

It is this kind of thing which has caused so many of choir to which Fraser should be preaching to lose patience with the institutional church; even to the extent of muttering words like "post-evangelical" and "modernist". We have all, over the years, been told things by clergymen which couldn't possibly survive any even moderately engaged reading of the Good Book. This has made us suspect that some of them either haven't read the Bible (unlikely) or that they have read it but are relying on the fact that we haven't, and never will. This leaves us with an unpalatable choice between the crazies who have read the story and insist it all really happened, stars and whales and arks and all; and the professionals who were never very interested in the story to start with.  

(*) The Pope points out that in the first century, Bethlehem really was a Little Town. If it only had a population of a few hundred, then "all the babies" might only amount to five or six, not the thousands and thousands of later myths.
(**) Seven. Or possibly fourteen.


BUY MY BOOK or the Pope will spank you. 

Looks Like a Dave Sim Hand

So, Andrew, when are you going to start blogging again?

Over the last few months of 2014 this blog was causing me more unhappiness than fun.  I found myself taking down an extended essay on Richard Dawkins and (for different reasons) a short piece about Star Wars because I wasn't able to deal with the criticism they came in for. Some of the things which happened made me feel physically unwell and unable to sleep. The "limits of good taste in comedy" piece never went up at all; even the epigram had people telling me I'd gone insane. Yeah, in retrospect, starting a piece on offensiveness by saying something incredibly offensive wasn't the cleverest idea I ever had. And of course, that was last year, when it was all political correctness and trigger warnings; and this is this year when words are only marks on paper and can't hurt anyone and no-one has any right not to be offended. I'm doing it again, aren't I? 

And there's the problem. I think I'm sometimes quite interesting and sometimes quite funny. More interesting than mumble-mumble-mumble but less interesting than Philip Sandifer, say. But in order to sometimes be quite interesting I have to give myself permission to free-associate wildly and see where I end up. If I feel I have to rein myself in I never get started. 

All of us struggle with the voices in our head saying "how dare you think anyone cares about anything you have to say?" "what are you wasting your time writing about that for when you could be writing about this?" "this thing isn't nearly as good as that other thing, I should give up if I were you". But nowadays the little voices appear in little boxes underneath your essay. The little voices saying you are brilliant would be just as problematic if you believed in them, but no-one sensible does. A musician I admire once thanked me for being honest about his record. That pleased me. 

That's one reason why I've enjoyed the new thing of podcasting so much; it's just off the cuff conversation and folk music doesn't have the bullshit associated with it that the other fandoms do. If you like my blogging, I wish you would listen to it. It's only "about" folk music to the degree that one my "Doctor Who" articles are "about" Doctor Who. Some people think that it isn't kosher to listen to a review of a gig you didn't go to because why would you be interested in gigs you didn't go to; and some people, in fact, some of the same people, think it isn't kosher to listen to a review of a gig you did go to because you already know what happened so why would you want to know what happened?

A vicar once told me that he was very pleased when someone told him that they didn't agree with his sermon. That probably meant that they had listened to it. 

Remember Natalie? Buddhist lady who wants everyone to write. Her advise is to just sit down and write. Not to be confused with Dorothea; Freudian lady who wants everyone to write. Her advise is to just sit down and write. Or indeed Julia, hippy lady who wants everyone to write, whose advise is to just sit down and write. I gave my copy of Brenda away. I think that she thought that the best thing was to just sit down and write, but in a terribly middle-class about it. Dorothea thought that if you just let yourself go, then your Right Brain would automatically say brilliant things through you. Natalie thought that if you just let yourself go, then your Wild Mind would automatically say brilliant things through you. Julia thinks that if you just let yourself go, then God will say automatically say brilliant things through you. (This works even if you don't believe in God.) 

There is something to be said for this kind of stuff. The Higher Power thing is as necessary for us writers as it is for you alcoholics; not as a theory about how evolution happened but as a way of not answering the question "Whats writing for?" "It's kind of like meditation" "It's kind of like psychoanalysis" and "It's kind of like praying" are the closest things to answers anyone is likely to come up with. 

But she did us all a lot of harm. She told us that it was all about sitting down and letting words flow out like endless rain into a paper cup, and that there was nowhere you could be that wasn't where you were meant to be. You don't become a swordsman by years of study and training; it's not skill and experience and technical knowledge that makes you a great pilot. It's all a matter of faith. Just switch off your conscious self and act on instinct.

It comes all comes back to that damn movie. Everything always comes back to that damn movie.

I was once at a church meeting, and someone said "shall we plan a structure for the Easter meditation, or shall we just allow God to lead us." Quick as a flash the Vicar (a different Vicar) said "Why, don't you think God can lead through planning and preparation?"

Who was it who said that the greatest impediment to a religious revival in England today is the fact that the word "Vicars" rhymes with "Knickers"?

Even Neil is in on the stunt: see him only the other day saying that either you can make the process of writing unnecessarily complicated or you can just sit down and write. But that's not the question the clueless newbie is asking. The clueless newbie is asking what this mysterious "just writing" thing involves. Does the Neil really just sit at his desk and produce words all day and eventually realize that he has pooed out a book? Well, okay, that might very well apply to Ocean at the End of the Lane, but Sandman and American Gods and the spider one show signs of him having taken some trouble over them. And that's all the clueless newbie wants to hear.

I heard Robin Hobb at Worldcon, a very good writer impressively uncontaminated by silly notion of Making Good Art. She has kids and animals and a busy life, but her characters are always in her mind, and in odd moments she writes down a few sentences about what happens to them next. At the end of the day, when she has time to herself, she types up that day's notes. Eventually she has the draft of a novel. I don't believe that I could ever write like that; for me it's about the sensation of typing, of getting lost in a huge swirly labyrinth of me and feeling that my fingers are much, much cleverer than I am: but it's the kind of thing the newbie wants to hear. What "Just write" and "Make Good Art" are really saying is "Oh, it's mysterious and ineffable and I can't put it into words."

I once read a book by John Braine. I think he was the man who wrote Room at the Top, which I have never read, and nrbrt intend to. He said that you write a novel in two stages: first draft; synopsis; final draft. First of all you sat down and batter out your novel making it all up as you go along; and then you read it, summarized it, fiddled around until the plot actually made sense, and then you rewrote it, and sent that second draft off to the publisher. I believe in that much more than I believe in all those cork boards with pins telling you what colour eyes the heroine has and the name of her second favorite citrus fruit. 

If I had spent more time with that and less time with The Way of Becoming a Wild Writer things might have turned out differently. The Internet didn't help very much, either. 

It's like we've discovered a new drug; and the only options we can think of are total abstinence or lotus eaters indulgence. We were the first, and as it happened, the last, generation of "TV natives". Our parents thought of TV as something of an impostor in the living room. Do you really need pictures on the radio? You surely can't be going to sit and watch TV all day? But we weren't "watching" TV, staring passively at it. It wasn't like that. TV was a place. It was the place we lived in. It was where everything happened. And even if what was happening that day wasn't anything you cared about, like the election or football or a documentary on barrel organs -- you had to go there because it was where all your imaginary friends hung out. 

That is why Jimmy Savile is so uniquely traumatic. Not just because he was a child molester; or because he was a prolific child molester; or even a famous prolific child molester. He was an absolutely central part of the place where we all lived called Television. It was never really clear what it was that he did, but he was almost certain to be on hand when you dropped by. The revelation that he was only in it for the under age sex has rather poisoned the whole thing retrospectively.

The next generation neither sit google eyed in front of Blue Peter and Songs of Praise; nor do they fear TV as a mind sucking alien. It's just a thing that delivers content. They still Watch Telly in the sense that we still Go To The Pictures, but telly isn't for them what it was for us any more than cinema is for us what it was for Grandpa. They can handle the Internet. We can't. Oh, there are a few old people who don't see the point of it and are pretty sure it will all blow over in a few weeks anyway and who write articles for the Guardian about how they survived a whole afternoon without their mobile phone. There were people in the Olden Days who had sworn terrible oaths that they would never allow a TV into their house. (My Uncle Bill refused to have a television, I believe for socialist reasons. My Aunty Laura, more sensibly, had one but refused to actually switch it on.) But most of us are more like middle-aged men in the first and as it turned out only age of TV, slumped in front of our screens with the Radio Times on one knee and the TV Times on the other knee. O-mi-gud we can sit here and watch movies and porn and music and porn and sport and porn and comics and porn all day long and never leave our desks again, and now Apple has invented a little baby one that we can take to bed like a hot water bottle and hug like a teddy bear. It's me who is intoxicated by Marvel Unlimited (I only bought my IPad for Marvel Unlimited started) like a junkie mainlining ecstasy because o-mi-god I can read every single issue of Captain America and I have to do that as quickly as possible so I can read every single issue of the Fantastic Four. The digital natives aren't excited by this stuff: why wouldn't you be able to read a 40 year old comic if that's what floats your bag. It must be one the internet somewhere?

I am not worried about little toddlers running their finger over the front page of the Guardian in the hope that it will make the pictures get bigger. I am not worried about bigger kids who think that "doing their homework" means cutting and pasting a paragraph from Wikipedia without reading it first. I am much more worried about the ones who have found an HTML version of Pong or Space Invader on their Dad's laptop. They are ancient games, not very good to begin with. World of Warcraft or Minecraft well; yes of course. A Dungeons & Dragons game that goes on forever with an infinite number of little metal figures that you don't have to paint; a box of Lego you literally never get to the bottom of. Who wouldn't be addicted to that. But it sometimes seems as if anything which keeps finger twitching and eyes vaguely focused on a glowy thing does the job just as well.

"Just write". And once we have just written, just publish. And a lot of our creative power is spent just writing on Twitter, just writing on Facebook, just writing on Usenet. Ha. I am the only person in the whole world who remembers what Usenet even was.. C.S Lewis left 2,000 pages of unpublished letters. T.S Eliot is up to volume 5, but he hasn't been dead quite as long. 

I could announce that I am giving up blogging and writing a book about, oh, the peritext of Jackson's Lord of the Rings or a novel about, oh, 1980s comprehensive schools, sexual repression, and the first edition of Dungeons & Dragons. I promise I won't although I am quite pleased to have finally found an excuse to use the word peritext. But even if I did start a Project I would be confronted by Page 1, Chapter 1 and suddenly start doodling away about a thing I read in the paper about Mary Magdalene and political correctness, and nothing would happen. 

Before you ask: I have precious little to say about Peter Capaldi, and will probably get around to saying it eventually. I think that the thing that Russell Davies turned Doctor Who into — a dating comedy about a series of women so preternaturally perfect that almighty god falls in love with them — while a perfectly good premise for a show is not the premise for a show which terribly interests me. Matt Smith was so luminously brilliant that for three years I was prepared to pretend that I hadn't noticed the problem. Take him away and what you are left with is nothing I care very much about.

"Oh, but Peter Capaldi is excellent."

Yes. I absolutely accept that Peter Capaldi is an excellent choice to play the romantic lead in this sci-fi dating comedy. I'm just not quite sure what the Cybermen were there for.

"Ah, but Doctor Who has been many different things over the years; you don't specially like the thing it is now; but you are bound to like the thing it is next, or the thing it will be after that."

Well, no; no, I don't think so. "Rose" set the template for what New Who is about so brilliantly and so perfectly that eight years later we are still watching a series of variations on a theme, Nothing short of cancellation and eighteen years off air is likely to erase that. Our early instincts were right. Billie Piper destroyed Doctor Who: not because she was terrible but because she was wonderful. 

So anyway.

Episodic collections of essays that might eventually get gathered into books are where it's at. For the time being. Probably. And since I've made the pact with the demon internet I suppose this is where they will continue to happen. Mostly. I have a few ideas about what collections I'm working towards. Hopefully that will become clear over the next day or three. But one thing I am doing, I'm afraid, is leaving the comments mostly switched off. This was the advise of the cleverest person I know, and I am very much afraid he was right.



"Yeah" he sighed "I don't know any writer who's happy. But what else is there to do?"
Natalie Goldberg - "Thunder and Lightening."

Folk Buddies Episode 35: It's Cliched To Be Cynical At Christmas

Mulled wine; mulled cider; kittens; mince pies in the shape of Christmas trees; terrible, terrible Christmas records: these are a few of the Folkbuddies favourite things.

Caution: May contain me singing.

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Playlist (naughty)


Playlist (nice)

Hilarious and Fun and Crazy and Awesome

you could probably still get a copy for Christmas, if you hurry


i'll sign it for you if you ask me nicely...