Kitty Wake's blog

Star Trekkin' Across the Universe... in 2009.

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I was tired, grumpy and headachy. The last thing I wanted to do was go out for a movie - particularly as I'd just spent £60 on repairing my glasses. But my parents callously roused me from my slumber and delivered me to the house of a friend who frequently takes me to the cinema to see movies. I still didn't want to go. He'd proposed seeing Star Trek. I responded with the assertion that I'd rather run through the city centre naked, painted blue and shouting "DEATH TO THE ROMANS!" than go and see a movie whose audience would probably be full of Trek nerds. But said friend - Movie Boy, let's call him that - is rather persuasive, and after accidentally letting his dog escape from his house, prompting a frantic and curse-filled chase round the local area, I relented. I had to, to apologise for the dog.

But I insisted on buying popcorn, just in case I didn't like the movie. I was vaguely familiar with Star Trek. My primary school, in one of its stranger decisions, decided that "Star Trekkin'" (see below) was a song we absolutely had to learn during our sing-song lessons. A horde of seven-year-old kids, who had no idea who William Shatner was or what a Klingon is, singing a song made up almost entirely of the famous catchphases of the original series (He's dead, Jim; Ye cannae change the laws of physics; It's life, Jim, but not as we know it, etc). Awww! Then somewhat later, BBC2 decided to put on repeats of Star Trek: The Next Generation right after The Simpsons, and I watched them with a sort of detached amusement. So this is what the Americans had instead of Doctor Who, I thought, as Picard ordered tea off the replicator or Geordi LaForge did Indy Rolls and other manoeuvres which were pretty impressive for a guy who only sees, like, microwaves. Hey, wouldn't you think a guy called "Jean-Luc Picard" would be, you know, French? And not English-with-Yorkshire-idioms? ...And that was it. The Simpsons moved to Channel 4, and well before that BBC2 had replaced Star Trek: TNG with The Fresh Prince of Bel Air (and then Top of the Pops 2, and then bloody Hollyoaks on Channel 4!). Apart from casual encounters whenever I tangentially interacted with the Nerd World (by watching The Big Bang Theory or the like), I forgot it ever existed until Movie Boy took me out to see it.

I won't lie. I was unwilling while driving to the cinema, I was unwilling while waiting to buy popcorn (though at least 75% of my disgust was due to the fact that the girl in front had her hands apparently inside her boyfriend's underpants - I pitied the popcorn seller who had to take their money), I was unwilling while navigating a crowded theatre trying to find a seat while twenty-foot-high adverts for Gillette Razors and Jaguars blared behind me. I was unwilling during the opening sequence. Big space battle. Mass evacuation. Ordered by a captain who knows he's going to die. Oh look, there's a baby being born! How cute! NOT. I know movies are meant to be about action, but you can't just slam a novice, like me for instance, into a space battle with a bunch of angry bald tattooed people with extreme interrogation techniques, can you? And now there was a bit of husband-wife-new baby mushiness, designed, I cynically thought, to appeal to the wives and girlfriends, if there were any, of the Trekkies. I wasn't one of this unwilling periphery audience - now I like a good action-packed space adventure as much as anyone, but frankly, I'm often confused by big-budget explosions and the ham-fisted approach to emotionality used by sci-fi movie-makers. Why, of course girls won't like a film if it doesn't have love and babies in it! You have to have a Y chromosome to enjoy sci-fi! Silly!

Turned out that at least 50% of my problems were down to the fact I didn't know much of anything about Star Trek (the other 50% was due to the fact that I don't like the first fifteen minutes of any movie, due to my chronic confusion at action-packed movie openings). I was all at sea. I had no idea this was meant to be a reboot of the original 60's Star Trek series, which of course I knew nothing about anyway. All I knew was that the scene had changed from "spaceship heading to certain destruction in a black hole or similar space hazard" to "ten-year-old boy driving a car... in the 23rd century". All righty then, it's a weird movie. I can cope with weird movies, can't I? I sat through Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Hey, Nokia's still around in the future. This film's going to be short, I thought; the kid'll never brake in time to avoid the mysterious chasm that's just opened up in the Flattest State in America, Iowa.

Of course he got out in time, escaping a messy but exciting death. That's because the kid was JAMES TIBERIUS KIRK. Who, as you know, is Captain Kirk, and therefore pretty essential to Star Trek. Then we get Spock, an emotionless half-Vulcan child who is bullied by his totally Vulcan classmates. Now bullying is Serious Business - believe me, I know. Vulcan bullying, on the other hand, is more like being victimised by a computer which is desperately trying to emulate a human. I felt guilty giggling, because, you know, poor little Spock is being bullied for having a human mother, but the bullies are debating amongst themselves on how to provoke an emotional reaction from the poor kid in an intensely logical way. If only real bullies were like that; I'd've dropped a Logic Bomb on mine. The bullying doesn't stop there; Vulcan elders don't like Spock the half-human Vulcan either... but he gets his own back by joining Starfleet. Kirk, meanwhile, grows up into a ne'er-do-well who gets involved in a bar fight over a very attractive and intelligent girl... who turns out to be Uhura, a really really smart Starfleet student. Captain Pike recruits Kirk into the Starfleet Academy, along with a depressive, pessimistic recent divorcé doctor. No, not my mother - she isn't divorced, for a start. She's also a woman. And she was a teacher. No, this is Doctor Leonard "Bones" McCoy, the grumpiest man in the 23rd century.

Little did I know it, but they were gathering the original crew together. Life goes on in the Academy - Kirk unsuccessfully pursues Uhura and successfully sleeps with a Green Skinned Space Babe who just happens to be her roommate - until there's some big Space Emergency somehow related to Kirk's dad's demise and a bunch of green cadets are parcelled off into various ships, including the new USS Enterprise. Uhura bargains with her instructor Spock - the First Officer under Captain Pike - to get on it, because she's really, really smart and awesome. On the bridge we meet a new helmsman who drives a Starfleet vessel a lot like I drive a car - forgetting to do something really kind of important, like letting the clutch out or putting the car in a numbered gear. This was Sulu, who was clearly better at fighting with a cool Japanese sword than doing what he was, um, meant to do, like releasing External Inertial Dampeners. But give him a break! He's been summoned - juuuust after his graduation from Starfleet Academy - to pilot Captain Pike's vessel in a possibly world-ending emergency. And then they introduced just the sweetest little Russian whiz-kid ever, Ensign Chekov. Complete with his "nuclear wessels" accent and all that. And how did ne'er-do-well Kirk get on this ship of Really Bright Starfleet Graduates, given that he was prone to messing with computers to win tests? McCoy pretends he's a medical emergency by injected him with some Trek-babble-ariffic vaccine which makes his hands look like Feathers McGraw's chicken disguise.

We're on a Starfleet ship! Now the adventure begins! Now you've either seen this film, or you haven't. (If you haven't, you must be living on a space colony or you just don't like Star Trek, or possibly you've been in a coma.) Suffice to say that by this time in the film I was, surprisingly, totally engrossed. The characters! I loved them! Bits of old Star Trek trivia flashed through my mind - it seemed that I knew much about this nerdiest of subjects as did the chracaters on The Big Bang Theory. And somehow, this wasn't bothering me. "Live Long and Prosper"? You know, that Vulcan hand gesture is kind of cool. And Scotty's babbling away in Trek-nobabble - something about warp core and beaming objects at warp speed! And McCoy protesting that he's a doctor, not prepared to assume any other role! This was all so familiar! And the main plot - some Romulans with a spaceship that violates every health and safety law in the book decide to go and drill through as many planets as possible, thanks to a gross misunderstanding and untimely use of Applied Phlebotinum, and it's up to a hastily thrown-together yet plucky young crew under the non-leadership of Captain Pike (he's too busy being tortured by the aforementioned Romulans to, um, even BE on the Enterprise, poor man) to put an end to the entire thing - seemed oddly... ah... familiar. Not in the sense that I knew what Romulans were. But yes - it was reminding me of stories that I'd read many times before...

About halfway through the film, it struck me that I was watching Hornblower... In Space!. Or maybe Aubrey-Maturin... In Space!. Seriously, you have the hero - he gets women, he gets glory, he has a certain charisma, he's not, apparently, averse to a scrap. And he's the captain of some form of ship travelling through some kind of ocean (because as we all know, space is an ocean. You can only travel in one plane). Kirk is Aubrey. Spock is Maturin, clever sciencey guy who's a bit of an outsider because he's a despised half-breed. And McCoy's just Maturin's medical and emotional side split into another person so we can have a Power Trio on the bridge. Sulu's the ship's master/coxswain-equivalent, Chekov's the very keen, very talented young midshipman who gets promoted to Acting Lieutenant, and Uhura's the competent and skilled signal lieutenant who, vitally, knows Other Languages so the crew get into 37% fewer misunderstandings with foreign craft from different countries/quadrants. And Scotty - gosh, I don't know. Wooden warships don't tend to have much machinery, and they certainly didn't have warp cores (if they did, the Napoleonic wars would have been over in about five minutes). Sorry, Scotty. It's ship's carpenter for you. And the plot? Replace "Romulans" with "French" and "mission to stop several planets from being totally destroyed" with "relentless pursuit/series of small frigate actions/rescue mission for captured officer/mysterious foreign ally" and it's your standard exciting Hornblower, Aubrey/Maturin or Ramage plot. No wonder I loved it.

At the end of the film, sitting next to Movie Boy, I was asked by said companion what I thought of the film. I murmured that I really, really wanted to join Starfleet. Seriously. Equal-opportunity workplace, excitement, my education would be appreciated, unlike in the real world. Why did it have to be fictional? Why couldn't I time-travel to the 2200s and join Starfleet? The answer is, of course, that it's fictional, and Gene Roddenberry deliberately set it 300 years in the future because we're still not all that close to flying in space, wearing pyjamas as quasi-military uniforms, or, for that matter, getting on with each other regardless of skin colour, gender, disability and place of origin. Still, I guess I could freeze myself so that future generations can revive me, bring me up to speed on biological breakthroughs and take me on a bizarrely-shaped spacecraft as a scientific expert... In Space! :) Well, I can dream.

So I'm not going to be able to actually be a Starfleet crew member, but a lot of other people with the same lively ideas as me have built up a massive fandom around Star Trek, ever since the original series aired. It's a bit of a surrogate life for the thwarted real-life Starfleet recruit. Lots of fanfiction, for a start, in addition to the official novels. Fanart, much of it by truly talented people. Star Trek conventions, which I'd heard of before but had always assumed to be populated by people like the Comic Book Guy off The Simpsons. (Now, of course, they're sounding kind of... fun.) Fan films - go one further than a fan fiction; film your own story! Meta disussions. Before the Internet, with is boundless capacity for fan fiction, fanfic was published in printed 'zines, and that was where that most archetypal of Slash pairings, Kirk/Spock, got its start. (At first, after watching the film, I was all ready to spurn that in favour of Kirk/McCoy, but on my second watching of the film, now I see where the Kirk/Spock people are coming from.) And then there's audio plays, cosplay, kink memes, parodies, manga, comics, models, you name it. The dedicated Trek fan is set for life.

And that's nice. I've made the mistake before of falling for media where there's no-one who cares. Captain Harlock comes to mind. (70's anime just isn't cool.) Having a large fandom with your new media interest is kind of like... I don't know, like going to a smart students' summer school. You've instantly got a lot of people you may well bond with because they like something you like. It's like you've got one of those super-special secret languages you made up with your friends when you were seven! You can say "Kirk/Spock st-reboot slash h/c PG-13 kthx amirite?" and you and your three million fannish friends across the globe know exactly what you're talking about. And the outsiders, more importantly, don't. It's Instant Best Friends formula, particularly if you're unluckier than me and don't have flesh-and-blood Trekkie friends.

So now I think I'll move on to my favourite moments. And a short list of complaints. I think I'll have an easier time writing the complaints, not because I secreted hated the movie, but because I'm British and complaining is our national sport.

Complaints:
- MORE LADIES! We get Uhura, Gaila the green chick, a couple of bridge crew mothers, some stoically silent admirals with nametags, and bunches of cadets and redshirts. And yes, I love Uhura, but for a world that usually doesn't give any mind to anything but personal merit, we kind of need more women on the crew, especially the bridge crew. Personally I was in favour of hitting Chekov with a Gender Ray, but... well... didn't want to unleash the furious wrath of the fanboys, y'see... And come on... they could have given Spock's mother a name! She gave birth to the pointy-eared, green-blooded brainiac!
- Why only one green-skinned cadet? All I saw was a sea of flesh-coloured faces, with barely a slate-grey, blue or green complexion in sight. Somebody said that Gaila was probably smuggled (in some spacelike equivalent of an underground railroad) off her planet Orion, where she was nought but a seductive temptress, and so she was very lucky to be able to study at Starfleet at all, and we shouldn't expect more than a very few Orions... but surely there's got to be other green-skinned space babe planets out there? And what about the greyish insectoid cadet? She must've felt lonely. Granted I'd expect a lot of humans at the academy because it's in San Francisco after all, but still, more aliens. It's a multi-planet federation after all!
- Was it me, or was Olsen the Designated Red Shirt British? ("I can't wait to kick some Romulan arse!") Thank you, American film makers. Two British characters and you kill one of them. Admittedly he was a bit crazy, possibly kamikaze, and he was dressed in a red shirt - a death sentence - but how can you kill the guy who wants to kick Romulan arse?
- Kirk is a bit of a cocky jerk, isn't he? And he gets promoted awfully quickly for a guy who was a) in front of an academic tribunal and b) sneaked on board by his best mate. I don't know; maybe Pike just likes him. But personally, I prefer Spock for the leaderly stuff, even if he does look a bit of a geek in his mother's hand-knitted jumper. (OK, I'll give Kirk a bit of a reprieve, given that some of the plot hinges on him deliberately being provocative.
- "Ye cannae change the laws of physics!" Oh, Scotty. Why didn't you say that? I am a bit of an astrophysics geek, prompted in part because I was the best in the school at the subject during my A-levels. (Though I had a stiff competition of, ooh, nineteen other people.) Scotty's right, of course. I can't say much more without spoiling the film, but ye cannae change the laws of physics, nae even in Star Trek. Really. (Even though they do have warp cores and the like.)

Now we've got that over with - who and what am I cheering for?
- Well, I did say I wanted to join Starfleet. I was that sucked into the world. I want to put on a blue shirt (science person, natch) and step onto that ship and work. With. Spock. And do exciting things, and survive unimaginable danger, and travel through space (preferably not time - I leave that to the Doctor in the blue box), and, and, and...
- Captain Pike. Look, any bloke who's spent ages being strapped down, tortured by evil bald tattooed people who want to destroy multiple planets, being fed a space scorpion that acts as a combination of a truth serum and a neurodegenerative agent and goodness knows what else, and can still use a phaser accurately... well, he deserves respect.
- Spock. Spock is just... Spocktacular. I want to hug Little Spock. And Adult Spock. And Leonard Nimoy Spock. I'd be jealous of Uhura, if Uhura wasn't ten thousand times more awesome than I am.
- Uhura - see above.
- McCoy. I... um... I kind of like grumpy old men. Although I guess he wasn't actually that old, but he was grumpy enough!
- Sulu and Chekov. Sulu for his retractable katana, and Chekov for being as cute and enthusiastic as a little puppy, except considerably smarter. Also, if you think about it, without Sulu there would be NO FILM.
- Scotty. He's a non-violent Scotsman! And he knows more Trek-no-babble than anyone else!
- The music. Yes, I've downloaded the soundtrack (Amazon are the best about this, by the way. Good price.) If you can listen to the end credits without experiencing some emotional reaction, you're a Vulcan.
- Casual invocation of catchphrases. You can't have Original crew Star Trek without Spock mentioning logic or giving the "Live long and prosper" signal, McCoy telling Spock he's out of his Vulcan mind, Scotty wailing "If I give her any more, she'll blow!". They just needed Chekov claiming something incongruous was invented in Russia, and McCoy saying "He's dead, Jim", and my happiness upon the second viewing would have been complete.
- Kirk is initially a ruffian who makes good. I've mentioned it before - but that's my favourite plot point! It's plot crack to me!
- George Kirk's brave sacrifice at the beginning. Ohhhhh....
- I've now started watching Old School Star Trek - including the original series. It's good. Though some bits I've seen... they make me wonder whether everyone in TV was stoned during the 60s, or whether everyone on TV just wanted the viewers to think they were stoned. It's good though... very good.
- Look, it's just great! Go and see it! Live! Love! Complain! You know it floats your boat!

Linky time. Stuff you should see.... apart from the obvious, like the imdb page.

Memory Alpha - Wiki for Star Trek. Everything, no matter how tangentially related to any of the series, is in there. The HMS Victory gets a mention because Geordi LaForge built a model of it once.

The main Star Trek Livejournal community - has a lot of stuff. I like the My Little Spock Pony.

Every new fandom spawns a kink meme. Frequently naughty (I suggest browing at home), often hilarious and sometimes just amazing. Here's the del.icio.us pages for the fanfiction meme and the art meme for the new film.

Here's another art meme that's safer to browse.

A couple of articles on Cracked. com. Use your discretion...

The Firm - Star Trekkin'

See the song in that video? Yes, I learned to sing it in primary school. It was a UK number 1 for two weeks in 1987, possibly due to mass hysteria or a nationwide conspiracy to be regarded as even more eccentric than usual. Actually, it is pretty funny. Why is everyone a potato?

The Nuclear Wessels?

I have a friend, see? Tchaikovsky boy is his moniker as far as this blog is concerned. Nice kid. Has a healthy interest in Russia. Was very interested when I told him Leonard Nimoy has Ukrainian Ancestry, just like me :) Anyway, he complained that Chekov's accent was totally unrealistic. A) it isn't unrealistic as such, just really hammed up, and B) that was how Walter Koenig did it in the original series, and if you mess with Trek law, then WHAM! you have 50,000 fanboys baying for your blood (or the director's blood). This is a scene from the 4th Star Trek film - in the days when every odd-numbered film was bilge but the even-numbered ones ranged from "watchable" to "great" - where Chekov and Uhura ask a bunch of American where they can find some "Nuclear Wessels" to save some giant space whales or something (the plot sounds like crack). They used real passers-by to film this. Now imagine. It's the 1980s, the Soviets are threatening a nuclear strike, and your country has nuclear weapons of its own. How are you going to react to a guy with a hammed-up Russian accent asking you where he can find "nuclear wessels"?

Star Trek: Redshirts

This is how I, and 98% of the population of the world, knew that Olsen would buy it. Redshirts drop like flies in a conservatory in August.

He's dead, Jim!

"Bones" McCoy's response to the above video.

I've been saving a bunch of these to my Youtube favourites recently. Youtube is a goldmine if you like Star Trek.

Roundhouse - for real, this time

I'm trying a new method here: writing under a time limit. The reason for this is that I don't want to deliberate any more. I discovered Dr. Wicked's Writing Lab when I was doing NaNoWriMo last time, and it was alifesaver in more ways than one. Particularly if you're writing in public. I mean, who wants to hear the sound of an inexpertly played violin when they're trying to construct a semi-coherent plot? (Or, for that matter, a semi-coherent blog entry that will later be transformed into a totally coherent one.) If your impetus includes not subjecting the people who surround you to a screeching violin or an annoying 80s pop song etc., then you have all the more reason to keep your fleet little fingers dancing across the keys.

So. Anyway. Roundhouse. I promised Roundhouse last time. I've watched most of it - but the reason that I didn't watch

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it all will become apparent later. I must start at the beginning. Roundhouse was a kids' show aimed at 8-14-year-olds (all I can say is that the 8-14-year-olds of yesteryear must've been a hell of a lot more sophisticated than today's lily-livered bunch) that aired on Saturday Night Nickelodeon (henceforth abbreviated as SNICK) back in 1992-1994 or thereabouts. It was  funny show. It was a hilarious show. It was fantastic. At least, the first three seasons were. Then 1994 set in along with the continual replacement of cast members, and, well...

It was a sketch show. Every episode followed the same basic format; the cast introduced an issue that would be of terribly important importance to the target audience - something like trying out for a school play or being rubbish at sports or obtaining a pet dog - and then  Mom and Dad would make an appearance. Dad, played by John Crane, was more or-less permanently attached to a motorised armchair which had several Dad-related attachments: a fridge, a grill, and the all-important TV. (The TV is important.) Dad was a sitcom dad. Lazy, incompetent, a sub-par parent all round, but not without the odd moment of kindness. Mom - Shawn Daywalt, as she was in her normal life -  was a different kettle of fish. She kept the family together. (For a start, they would have no income without her, because how far does a 12-year-old's paper round money go?) She cooked, she cleaned, she made sure the kids went to school and kept up with the seemingly endless round of demands inflicted on a young teenager in the 1990s. And then there were the kids, picked semi-randomly from the remaining cast; said kids packed teenage insecurity and teenage confidence into a tightly wound little ball of energy. The show is fun. All I can say is that I'm glad that my parents decided to come back to England before they had me. Not just because Peoria is the closest thing to a living death, at least according to them; because I don't think I could have coped! OK, I realise I am taking all my American cultural cues from a kids' TV show, but still... There'd be a number of sketches and dances and songs around the issue, and then the entire show would be wrapped up with a moral - or, as TV Tropes has it, an Aesop.

So, let's take a random episode. Let's see... let's see. Let's choose the school play episode, season 1. Now school plays don't seem to be terribly popular in England, not in my experience. We had choir, which I participated in for the free trips to the opera and various musicals in London; we had band, which I did not participate in as my tastes in instruments lean towards the stringed, and you were only welcome if you played something useful like the clarinet or saxaphone; but I don't recall a play. Oh, I recall desultory drama lessons, a desperate teacher trying to encourage the students to explore their creative side while the students either ran riot or sat in a shy and sullen silence, trying not to be noticed because who wants to be creative in front of the class bully. (Hmm... maybe that's why we didn't do plays.) But auditions! Here you are, a hormonal teenager who's chronically shy, and nearly all the extracurriculars (apart from, say, chess club) require you to have the confidence to stand up in front of people and do something. Those Americans must be made of sterner stuff. I'd have crashed and burned in that environment.

Forgive my digression. We have a fictional school play. And the story of one young boy who wants to make a career on the stage, starting with treading the boards at his school, depicted as a place of universal torture and comedy approaching wildly from all angles. Actually, it was depicted as a single set, mounted on a movable cart, with a map and a couple of other educational accessories; it was the merest depiction of a school. (Same with the home set, which was basically the kids' bedroom i.e. a portable dump, which doubled as the sitting room. The Anykid Dad's motorised armchair may count as a third set, simply because it had more personality than many of the cast members who came in after Season 1.) I have to mention now that I don't think all the cast members were hired on the basis of their acting ability - they were good dancers, they were good singers, but in many cases the acting was hammed up. Badly. And poorly researched. (Earth to Mark David: no Irishman would say "you bloody git". No human would say "you bloody git".) So it was understandable that there wasn't much actual serious acting going on. The show couldn't have handled it. It would have imploded under the weight of Simply Not Being Much Good. Instead, there were:

- Sketches around the theme of the episode. Some took the form of commercials (see below to find out exactly what can be commercialised). Some were the main 'kid' talking to the often spectacularly unhelpful parents. School sketches, of course. American school, which is still alien to me (though now I'm in my twenties, I will never have to be incarcerated in such an institution). American home life - or at least, American media home life. And, naturally, bunches of kids hanging out together. These sketches frequently segued into...
- Commercials. Yes, this TV show had many, many spoof commercials. Two cast members would hold up a large prop "Cardboardvox" TV, while some other cast members would act out a commercial for a product which fit the theme of the episode. Plenty of appropriately convenient products. These were often the best parts of the show, because they were often incredibly funny - that stuff would never get aired now. F'rinstance, the Racism episode. They had ads for "Talcum X" (made black babies reading to fight against racism at the age of about three months), Apar-Tide (a laundry detergent that encourges you to seperate light and dark clothing - shouldn't you do that anyway if you don't want all your clothes to end up an unfashionable grey?) and... god damn. Would that stuff get televised today without a flood of letters coming in? (For the record, there were black cast members, who were also the ones happily participating in these sketches.) Oh! And since I'm talking about the School Play episode: "Whities" cereal. The cereal that makes you dance like a white person and play golf. (This was before Tiger Woods.) Otherwise, there was The Sympathiser, which chirped sympathetic parent-like phrases at teenagers ignored in favour of a baby sibling, and a series of school notebooks that dealt with 'extracurricular' activities... such as form notes for passing - for the lazy popular person - and endless homework excuses. Very useful...
- Dance "bumpers". I'm not a dancer, due to an extreme lack of coordination. I can only hope that's an appropriate term. Three or Four of the cast members would engage in a 90-second-or-so dance routine near the commercial breaks. (Two commercial breaks in a show whose episodes lasted about 30 minutes! Another reason I'm glad that my parents moved back to Britain and the ad-free BBC. Culturally Ad-free!) These were impressive. And sometimes involved somewhat risque pair-dancing. In a show aimed at the young and unmoulded. Yes, that would have gained a lot of Concerned Parents for America letters too, I bet. This was the section that made me develop mini-crushes on Dominic Lucero and Ivan Dudynsky, the two boys who participated most frequently.
- A song. There was always a song or two. I confess I often didn't watch the songs, apart from the notably funny numbers like the ones in the first-season episode "TV". This was the part where the moral of the show was often delivered; smoke would roll out across the stage (oh come on! It was the early nineties!) and one of the girls (OK, occasionally one of the boys) would sing a heart-rending song that drove home the point of the episode, usually something about being yourself/being happy with the real you - but sometimes a bizarre, thematically-related song about buses, TV, you name it. The first song of the episode would be the light-hearted one; the second was more likely to be the 'serious' one... and the one most likely to date badly.
- "Reprise the theme song and roll the credits!" Want to wrap up a show? Say these eight magic words, and the cast will break whatever character they had and rush to the centre of the stage to reprise the theme song, and the crew will superimpose the credits over the ending dance. Then you can move onto SNICK's next offering. (Oooh, Ren and Stimpy! Clarissa Explains It All!) Unless you say "Reprise the theme song and roll the credits" as an attempt to get out of a sticky and serious situation. That'll leave you all alone with a cricket-chirping background track.

The school play episode featured Jody, the protagonist, pitted against her friend 'Melissa' in the competition for the lead role in the play. Melissa had the secret weapon - Stage Mother! (David Sidoni in drag.) Who will win? Will Jody take advantage of any of the advertised products to get the edge over Stage Mother'd-up Melissa? Will openwindows shun watching the final song videos in favour of checking on Dragoncave dragons?  No, I'm not giving away spoilers. Go and locate the episodes yourself! Watch them all! Rejoice!... at least for a bit.

So the first season - probably the best season. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed cast, lots of new ideas, everyone was smiling at universal studios. The show could go anywhere from there, as the theme song promised. And it did. It covered home life - how to cope with your family and why you shouldn't reject them for a robot family (as the robot family will malfunction in the rain), how to cope with being the new kid at school (just remember you won't be the new kid if another, newer kid arrives; the school community's tricks will all be transferred to him), how to cope if you're picked last for the school sports team (live with it, but remember your sister's the family star now she's on the track team - whatever that is). Even though the props were made of cardboard - and to think some people mock the British for having a show like Doctor Who, which featured quite a lot of polystyrene walls and bubble-wrap monsters - it was good, much better than the fare for the 8-14-year-old set I sometimes catch these days.

I have to say, in a slight interlude, that seeing these episodes of Roundhouse prompted me to join a gym so I could be as athletic and lithe as those dancers, even if I would always be considerably less willing to turn somersaults. See, TV is good for you!

Second series. Cast change! This prompted an immediate frown. How could they get rid of Dominic Lucero? (Turned out it was no human force. Not even his own.) And Crystal Lewis! Gone, just like that! She wasn't even in the credits, and she was the chick with the great voice, and... and... well, at least we still had the very cute, very blond, reasonably Ukrainian Ivan Dudynsky, with his supposedly badass tattoo. Arguably badass, though, I suppose - it was the Ukrainian trident-like symbol, and depending on how badass you think Ukrainians are (very, if you've read War and Peace), Ivan Dudynsky's badassitude is through the roof (and mine's about halfway up). The show changed a little; at least, it changed for me. It was just a little tiny bit more muted, a little bit less funny (but still way funnier than kids' TV now!). They'd moved on to other subjects. Like Pets, and why twenty-odd-year-olds pretending to be 14 shouldn't own anything more complicated than a sock dog. And Gang Violence, and why TV shows that were otherwise light-hearted - the morals never beat you over the head - shouldn't suddenly get heavy on you. It gives you mood whiplash like whoa. Though I have to say it's infinitely preferable to being totally insipid. No matter how weird Roundhouse got, it never didn't make sense on some level. (Also, this season had the pleasingly appropriate sight of Ivan Dudynsky pretending to deliver newspapers... so I'll recommend it.

Third season. Another cast change! They drafted in a Replacement Hispanic Guy, and a Scrappy. Now I won't mention the actress' name, but she's... how do I say this?... not well-loved by the fandom. I decided to give her a chance. I watched a few episodes of the third season and realised just why she wasn't well-loved. The producers had decided to shove her in the spotlight of every show where she could showcase her minimal acting talent. I'll admit she was a decent singer, but the acting! No! And it was in our faces, every episode, while the other, more talented members of the cast were stuck in the background. Roundhouse also started moving away from its slice-of-life sketches: now they were doing things like parodying The Wizard of Oz. And the Simpsons, which came off as a little Sour Grapes-like. I longed for the glory days of Season One again. Or even Season Two.

Still, I pressed on to Season Four, which had a live episode in it - should be interesting, I thought, comparing this live episode to the ones that were just filmed before a live audience. But I never actually got that far. Some of it was due to just moving on from watching a show which was aimed at people ten years younger than me - only natural. And as the DVDs seemed to be deteriorating in quality, I found myself unable to make out half the dialogue, and combined with iffy picture quality, that was near the limits of my patience. But most of it... well, cast changes again. Three new cast members from my calculations. At least Bad Third-Season actress was gone, but they'd taken on this guy I could only refer to as "Scuzzbucket" because not only could I not identify him from the credit sequence, he just looked scuzzy. Mark David and Ivan Dudynsky managed to rock their earrings and occasional flirtations with facial hair. They looked almost cool, even to my twenty-first century eyes. Scuzzbucket didn't. I watched about four episodes in an increasingly disinterested way (wow, it's amazing how much tapestry work you can get done with a DVD on in the background!) and then ejected the DVD and stored it neatly in a zip DVD case.

Maybe I'll pick it up again sometime. I've started a new tapestry project now. Maybe someday I'll be in the mood for cool dance bumpers and feeling like a kid again. But heaven knows I won't start with Season Four! I'll cosy myself up with Season One and sing along to the TV Head song all over again, and I'll know this for certain - I'll like it. So, I'll say to you, watch it. Especially if you're a Newsies fan - you can binge on Newsies dancers, well, dancing.

Link time, I suppose...

The Easychair Expressway - now I've already linked this, but it deserves to be linked again in a Roundhouse-specific entry. Bit hard to navigate unless you've actually watched the show and know it backwards, but you'll be able to find season guides and link pages with a bit of, um, imaginative clicking.

Where I got the DVDs - Paypal accepted.

Roundhouse screenshots - my album of screenshots. First season only, until I get the impetus to play the DVDs again.

Six of the Best

A little entry. About six little things that don't warrant six big entries. (That Age of Sail entry? Five pages in Word. Admittedly it was covering a whole subgenre, but still...)

roundhouse.jpg

So, first off, a TV show - Roundhouse - which I've fallen in love with after seeing, oh, four episodes or so. I fall easy. Then again, I wouldn't say it's all that hard to fall in love with; a bunch of talented young (in some cases, young-ish) actors, singers and dancers perform comedy sketches that frequently cross the line from painfully true to utterly surreal, and the dances - wow. I'm not much of a dance enthusiast, due to being woefully undercoordinated, but I love them. But funny, always funny. It aired on SNICK in the early 90s, and evidently also came across the pond. The older sister of a friend of mine was evidently a big fan. Of course, she's five years older than me, and well able to appreciate the subtleties of Mark David's Ed McMayonnaise while I was still playing with her discarded My Little Ponies.

The sketches. I've seen, as I said, four episodes*: "You Can't Fire Your Family" (you can, but they'll be replaced by robots which malfunction in the rain), "School Daze" (the blond Ukrainian-American kid is a shoo-in for the less-than-diligent student archetype), "First Date" (bring boxing gloves) and "TV on Trial" (it's entertaining, vulgar, enriching, crass, violent, intelligent, boring, wonderful, and remarkable - it's TV!). And I don't think I've ever laughed so much in my life... unless it was at Sheldon's flowchart for making friends on The Big Bang Theory, but I digress. Sure, it's full of references I don't get, either due to being born at the wrong end of the eighties or making my debut upon this planet  on the wrong side of the Atlantic. And the 90s hair - was it really necessary for Ivan Dudynsky to resemble a mushroom? Still, I can look on it as a sort of time travel trip, a bit of misplaced nostalgia. Man, I wish I'd been just a little older back then...

The Easychair Expressway is probably the best site out there to get your info on the show. Got to say I was quite puzzled when I had to fill out an application form to access the forums, though. I mean, what do you say?

How NOT to Write a Novel: 200 Mistakes to Avoid at All Costs If You Ever Want to Get Published

Howard Mittelmark

Next up, it's How Not To Write A Novel. The day after I got this, I spent a few hours with a friend I'll call Tchaikovsky Boy (he knows who he is) and we spent most of the session when we should have been working on our speed novels laughing at this book. Ahhh... it was painful to read sometimes. I know I've committed more than a few of the sins in there. Description that describes absolutely nothing. A long run-up to anything actually happening in a story. A slight plot (or, in my case, a plot that's far too vague to count as anything more than a plot archetype). And The Cat - I was fond of cats, but really! I agree: in most cases, the cat should be shot (with a tranquilliser dart, admittedly, not a gun) and put into UK quarantine for the full six months, which is more than long enough to complete a narrative. Especially my narratives.

Most of it was hilarious. Things that can be done badly that you've never done yourself are always hilarious. Horndog characters who try to justify themselves, for a start. Flagrantly misused words, written by someone who's fallen in love with their thesaurus but is not having a fling on the side with Ms. Dictionary. A character who's so pathetic they don't evoke feelings of sympathy, they evoke feelings of laughter. And the half-right sex scene, which is memorably described as "like giving someone half a kitten: it's not half as cute as a whole kitten, it's a bloody, horrifying mess". Even if you're not writing for publication, this book is most definitely a must-read.

Beautiful People

Simon Doonan

I just recently finished a new book, Beautiful People. Someone made a 6-episode TV series of it last summer, which was aired at 9.30pm on BBC2. I was instantly addicted. It was campy and funny and it spoke to me. I didn't want to be like the main character, I wanted to be him. Not because he was a gay teenager in dowdy Reading, but because he was a gay teenager with BIG DREAMS in dowdy reading. Admittedly, as far as the series went, the BIG DREAMS had elevated him to the status of New York window dresser, but he was happy, and that was the important thing.

Now the TV show was, I quickly realised, very different to the book. Vague acquaintances, at best. This doesn't mean I hate the book. No, the book's better. this book was so good I adopted it as toilet reading, which is my equivalent of making a toy real in a Velveteen Rabbit-type way. It's a largely joyous memoir (though there's one chapter near the end that made me weep on the bus to Bradford, and trust me, you don't cry on a Bradford bus if you can help it) about coming of age, and by goodness it's hilarious. Campy and funny and moving and vivid, populated by colourful characters like blind Aunt Phyllis and mad Narg and the irrepressible Biddie, it's simply an amazing book.

Zanna, Don't: A Musical Fairytale

Original Broadway Cast

A soundtrack now. I downloaded Zanna, Don't! from iTunes on a whim. I have never seen the musical, and probably never will (not because the UK is that homophobic, it's just that it's not something I see any local theatre group putting on because it's very American. And I don't mean that in a perjorative way; it just references American culture and life a lot and putting on a musical few people grasp the social conventions of would be pointless. This is turning out to be a really long parenthetical statement, so I'll close the brackets) unless I emigrate. I'm convinced that (not seeing the musical on stage) doesn't matter with musicals... after all, the clue's in the first five letters. Music. Is the music good? Does it make you want to get up and sing?

It made me want to get up and sing on the first listen! I love the bouncy little tunes, the tweeting of Cindy the bird (must be a great universe when your best friend is, literally, a bird), the joie de vivre that pervades almost every number... the musical takes place in a world - a city, Heartsville - where everyone is gay, and the few heterosexuals around are subject to heterophobia, and of course it's also a world where birds can befried humans and humans can work magic, and it's a fun world. Apart from the heterophobia. And Zanna, who's a matchmaker type, has that come to bite him in the arse when two of the students in his high school he's paired off with members of their own sex suddenly like each other - and they get the heterophobia. He waves his wand to do a magic spell (side effects include sudden loss of taste and style) to make the world more accepting of heterosexual relationships. Heartsville turns into this world, and suddenly Zanna is unmagical and, worse still, on the outside. And we can never go back to Heartsville, alas. However, there's at least one person out there who still remembers what Heartsville used to be like... I think I might have liked the plot a little more if Zanna hadn't felt compelled to change the world to a heterodominant form for the sake of one heterosexual couple - I mean, who'd do it the other way round? Unless it's meant to show that Zanna's really caring... or really stupid. I don't know. But who watches musicals for a deep and compelling plot? No-one made a musical out of War and Peace, unless I'm tragically underinformed (mind you, they have done Les Miserables). I'm just going to sit back and enjoy the music.

The Producers [DVD] [2005]

I want to be a producer! Or at least, I want to see a producer, preferably two, in a brilliant musical about, er, making a terrible musical. First I'll confess that I can be a bit of an impulse purchaser. I went to the West Yorkshire Playhouse, saw that there was a Producers matinee on in, oh, an hour, and bought a ticket for it. Simple. Fun! Pity I had to go alone, because everyone around me seems to be stuck on the idea that musicals are Not Fun, and definitely Not For Straight Men. Which sucks because of the preponderance of straight men in my life who have this blind spot when it comes to theatre. It's a musical! You can't catch gay! Even if you could, would Zanna, Don't!'s Heartsville be so bad for a bit? And never mind all that - The Producers is possibly the funniest musical ever. Possibly highly offensive as well to some quarters, but even that's part of the hilarity (mostly; I didn't see why the black accountant in the "I Want To Be A Producer" number had to sing in a dialect more appropriate to '68 than '09, but...).

The audience around me were certainly having a lot of fun. This is because Nazis, especially lederhosen-wearing ones, are funny. Hitler is de-terrified by being put on roller skates, made into a tap-dancer, acting as if he had a poker up his rear (actually, are you sure he didn't? That paranoid, erect Nuremburg rally postur suggests there is credence to that theory) and finally making him camp as anything, thanks to our dear obsessed Roger DeBris. But most of all, it's funny because Max Bialystock, along with his new co-producer Leo Bloom, gets the one thing he hasn't had in a long time. A roaring success. Which is, ironically, something he wanted for a long, long time, but right at that moment, it means utter, utter disaster. It serves him right. And we lapped it up. We loved it. And again, this musical has catchy songs (though I can tell you that accidentally turning your iPod volume up to "deafening" when on the Berlin subway is a poor idea), and a plot that makes sense AND isn't trying to convey a serious message (unless the message is "don't try to fail") - which makes it better, at least in my view, than Zanna, Don't!. Question: is there a totally serious musical out there that does well? Les Mis, maybe; its only comic relief are the pantomimish Thenardiers. Still, go and see The Producers: both of the films are good, but seeing it live is even better.

Tchaikovsky: Ballet Suites

Finally, Swan Lake. I went to see this on the advice of a friend I'll call Tchaikovsky Boy; if he ever sees this entry he'll know who he is. Yes, we're back in the theatre again: bums on seats, laddie, bums on seats. I'd been to see precisely one ballet before in my life. It was Romeo and Juliet, by my favourite UKRAINIAN composer, Prokofiev. You know a bit of it. If someone plays you "The March of the Montagues and the Capulets", you will go "Aha! I know this!" If you do not know that piece of music, then, well, damn. I decided it was high time to experiment with the gentler tones of Tchaikovsky.

I wonder if Tchaikovsky would a) have felt happy about this production, which featured a new plotline of homoeroticism or b) have been horrified by what seems to be a screaming acknowledgement of his homosexuality? I mean, back in 19th century Russia, liking other, younger men wasn't exactly something you wanted to shout about. In the end, Tchaikovsky either died of a) cholera entirely due to bad luck or b) self-induced, suicidal cholera (yes, death by diarrhoea); self-induced because someone else had accused him of having an affair with a son of a higher-up somewhere in Russia and that just wouldn't fly. In order to distract the poor main character from his half-princess half-swan lover, or his fiancee who was feeling ignored, the protagonist's best friend, in this production, tried to seduce him. Which I'm sure raised a few eyebrows amongst the audience. I thought it worked, though I'm still not sure whether it's more or less appropriate to have those themes in the work of a man who desperately wished he wasn't gay. Better if it hadn't been an issue for him, but unfortunately you can't fight history (unless you're Doctor Who). The music was so tender and beautiful I lack the words to describe it, apart from the words "tender" and "beautiful". And naturally, being female with a certain heterosexual streak, I enjoyed the view as well. I really must go to more ballets. But not to look at rear ends. It's because of the music. Really. I hope.

There! Six! Next entry'll probably be about Roundhouse in more depth, as I got my DVDs last Thursday and have been watching them ever since. It's already being incubated, so get it soon!

Cleats, Cross Trees and Katzenjammer

I watched Master and Commander for the umpteenth time this week; a friend made me reminisce about my Tall Ships days. I have a whole shelf of books about the British Navy during the Napoleonic wars; I have Seaman Garneray, which I have yet to finish; and I have a zillion books all about Lord Nelson, who is more or less a godlike figure who’s attained almost mythical status here. I mean, we built an immensely tall column/pigeon attractor in the centre of London, which has a 17-foot Nelson (three times as tall as he was in real life) facing France, just in case they get any more Napoleonic ideas. While Hitler made plans to invade Britain (Operation Sealion), he intended to remove the column and erect it in Germany in order to ‘[impressively] underline the German victory’. Notice he didn’t choose, say, Buckingham Palace or St. Paul’s, though I’ll give you that transferring a massive building might have been a tad more difficult that removing a column. No, even the Nazis recognised that we love our one-armed, one-eyed, philandering hero most of all.

The fascination with real-life figures naturally led to an interest in ‘tall ships/Age of Sail’ genre fiction. I never thought I’d be into genre fiction – I’ve read two crime novels in my life (both of which featured an old Mozart as the main character), I claim I’m allergic to swords-and-elves fantasy fiction (I’m not too into most aspects of fantasy, to be honest), and my sci-fi collection is mainly limited to Doctor Who novels and a couple of John Wyndhams. I have never seen Star Wars, and I predict that it's about 10 minutes until someone calls me deprived. But Age of Sail hit the spot. There’s just something about creaking timbers, salt horse, bobstays, spankerbooms, sextants, gold-trimmed uniforms and sea battles that does it for me. There’s a defined world that doesn’t need to be endlessly set up in every boo – if I want information, I can go and buy a reference book. I find it easier to engage in events that are plausible – don’t ask me why. There’s something satisfying about the closed environment of a ship; it can be a psychologically intriguing setting, hundreds of men in one tiny space. You can sail a lot further on a ship than you can march them – and you don’t have to stop for dinner, come to that.

And there’s a good deal of this Age of Sail fiction – enough for the voracious reader. There are twenty-one Aubrey-Maturin stories; eighteen Nicholas Ramage stories; twenty-nine Richard Bolitho stories (though I’ll warn you now that he dies in the middle and is replaced by his nephew Adam Pascoe). There are eleven Horatio Hornblower books, and fourteen Nathaniel Drinkwater novels. And those are just the series I’m familiar with.

They’re often not quite the best writing in the world, but frankly I’m the sort of person who would trade the entire oevure of, say, JRR Tolkien for just one action-packed Richard Bolitho book. This is because
a) I have actually succeeded in making my way through many of those books, whereas trying to read Lord of the Rings was like swimming through fudge and
b) as far as I know, Alexander Kent (or Douglas Reeman, however you prefer to call him) hasn’t become a godlike figure, with fans who can’t understand why anyone wouldn’t adore the books. Not that all Lord of the Rings fans are like that – most are sane and intelligent – but I’ve run into enough Internet crazies.
   
Like all genres, Age of Sail has its tropes.
1)    The Lonely Hero. Your hero is, in the novels I’ve read, invariably an officer. There’s a good reason for that – it allows him to have some measure of control over his own destiny, more than any rating could have. If he doesn’t first appear as a captain, he’ll become one in short order – and then he can be in charge of a whole ship, choose to engage – or not engage – the enemy, have the power of life and death (or disorder) over a few hundred souls. The downside of that is that he remains isolated. Which suits Hornblower fine; he appears to be disdainful of all of humanity save for Captain Pellew and his second wife Barbara. But this doesn’t suit all captains; therefore there’s:
2)    The Friend. Every hero has his sidekick. Lucky Jack Aubrey has Stephen Maturin – a rather unusual example as Maturin is a doctor/naturalist/spy, not any sort of seaman. Richard Bolitho had Martyn Dancer, then he has Thomas Herrick, who proves to be far more durable, dying in bits rather than all at once. Drinkwater has Quilhampton, another companion with certain bodily deficiencies. Hornblower has William Bush, who he seems to regard as one would the family’s old and flatulent Labrador. (Seriously, the guy would have been so much happier if only he could have brought along Barbara.) Ramage doesn’t have friends so much as a posse, but he’s also unusual in that he doesn’t have any…
3)    Angst. As I just mentioned, Ramage doesn’t angst. He doesn’t worry. He’s refreshingly happy, and why shouldn’t he be? He’s rich, he’s noble, he has a fan club wiling to . Bolitho has an embarrassing failure of an older brother and has to live up to his father’s reputation. Drinkwater is a hard-bitten bloke, a tough taskmaster. Aubrey – well, he seems to be pretty equable even when he’s on the run from creditors, shipwrecked on a distant island. (But let something happen to Stephen, and…!) And finally dear old Hornblower – he’s racked with self-doubt, he’s quite the misanthrope, he hates himself and he hates music. Poor sod.
4)    Nelson. I suspect he’s the reason that Age of Sail fiction is so popular, and why there seem to be about 5000 more series than I’ve read. Nelson gave Hornblower his first name – because it’s not enough to give chromically low self-esteem, he’s got to have an embarrassing name. It’s funny, because Hornblower never gets to meet him. He does get to direct the guy’s funeral, though. Aubrey loves Nelson, as does Ramage. Ramage gets to meet Nelson and take part in the battle of Trafalgar, presumably because he’s just so damn lucky. Bolitho I will refrain to comment upon, as there are so many one-armed men in those books even Nelson blends in. Drinkwater – well, there’s a book called 1805, which I think says it all.

Goodness, Ramage sounds like a bit of a Mary Sue. But I don’t think he is; for one, he cheerfully acknowledges all the blessings fortune has given him. For the second point, he proactively does things; he’s an action hero. Which makes the books exciting to read, if nothing else.

I used not to be a fan of the Aubrey-Maturin books. I watched the film when it came out on DVD (to this day, one of my greatest regrets is that I never saw it on the big screen) and was immediately hooked. Obviously, the first solution to getting more (because it’s like a drug, all this genre fiction, don’t you know) was to read the Aubrey-Maturin books. So I shelled out for Master and Commander under the impression that it’d be just like the film, and I could judge the other aspects of the books better if I was already familiar with the plot of one.

I discovered that the storyline of the film – even the lines – had been cobbled together from many books, and that the actual book titled “Master and Commander” bore very little resemblance to the film. Moreover, Jack only had two ways of saying things. He “said” them, or he “cried” an order or suchlike. I was not a fan of the pseudo-archaic style. These books are supposed to be fun, damn it! I want an easy read, like the other books!

However, recently I came into a whole pile of the books: God bless English marketplaces. I picked up Clarissa Oakes, and damn me if I didn’t love it; I read half of it in a café eating an all-day breakfast, and the other half in my bedroom next to a cup of Horlicks. Two activities that are very much underrated when it comes to reading. I was hooked – and I realised you don’t need a sprinkling of said-bookisms when reading a book, nor do you need a BIG SEA BATTLE to make an Age of Sail book worth reading.

I’ve got about six of the books now, and I’m currently looking forward to reading The Fortune of War – because any book that contains the phrase “The wombat’s eaten your second-best scraper” (IIRC) has to be good.

But for all my tastes have changed in Age of Sail literature, I’ve never stopped liking the actual film. I shelled out for the two-disc special edition when a friend borrowed my one-disc edition and kept it for a very long time. And I don’t normally watch extras, because I confess I have little interest in how films were shot, or finding out what the director has to say, or what life was like for the actors behind the scenes. I want the finished product, not the artifice behind it – particularly in the case of Master and Commander, because it is so good you can lose yourself in it. Two hours of bliss, thinking alternately “I wish I was on the Surprise” and “Christ, I’m glad I’m not on there. Splinters! That poor boy’s arm! Wait, who eats the face of a pig?”

The plot’s slight, I’ll admit that – so slight that I barely noticed it. Man on ship with friend. Man wants French ship, friend wants flightless cormorant. Man gets French ship (come on, like it’d happen any other way with a captain known as ‘Lucky Jack’)… and what of the flightless cormorant…? Also, being stuck in close quarters is really, really trying. That’s it. It’s hardly a plot at all, it’s just some stuff that happens of a small wooden ship.

The film struck me as less of a tightly-woven narrative than a series of scenes on board a sailing ship in 1805 – and yet I don’t think it suffers for that at all. Unless you get confused as to how there’s a man sitting on a ship’s head with icicles hanging off it in one scene and, not so long afterwards, the entire ship’s company is in shirtsleeves, miserable with an intolerably calm heat. (Some people are just… sticklers.)

Perhaps it’s a set of personal stories, instead. The origin of Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin’s friendship is not explained – why should a naval captain, always subject to the ‘requirements of the service’, form an attachment to a multilingual doctor/naturalist/spy? Well, if you’ll watch the film, you’ll see. They play music for violin and cello together, they’ve each got someone to confide in, they just work. (Of course, if you read the book Master and Commander you’ll have a better idea, but I digress.)

There’s also the poor unfortunate midshipman Hollom – nearly 30 and sadly lacking in any sort of leadership skills – so of course he suffers in the closed environment of a ship. Midshipman Blakeney starts off asleep on watch – evidently no-one likes to disturb him as he’s both a Lord and very cute – and ends up being a kind of ‘fighting naturalist’ in his own words. And that situation might never have arisen had he not lost his arm in the first major battle; he wouldn’t have spent so much time in Maturin’s cabin amongst the books and specimens. Midshipman Calamy starts of competent and ends up competenter – and ends up like a good deal of naval officers both competent and brave. Tis to glory we steer, indeed.

The film does a remarkably good job of portraying everyday life on a crowded ship without doing anything irritatingly Ramage-like. If you’ve ever read a Ramage book, there’s bound to be a few stretches where Ramage and/or his fan club engage in “As you know, Bob” type conversations about how they’re going to haul a ship’s cannon up a fifty-foot cliff or pay for the ship to be painted in the Nelson chequer (both actual examples). But even though Aubrey explains exactly what they’re doing during one scene – it doesn’t feel like that one bit. Because action is the order of the day on this ship. Big budget for the film, too. OK, so it wasn’t, to my knowledge, actually filmed in the Galapagos. And a big budget doesn’t necessarily make a good film – there’ve been some record stinkers made when the film-makers have spent a zillion pounds on explosions and gourmet danishes and about 25p (37 US cents – what on earth happened to the exchange rate?) on writers who can make a coherent narrative. Like I said, this film doesn’t have a particularly compelling plot; it’s character-driven. If you plop a decent bunch of characters into a fairly interesting setting, you’ll get a half-decent film, at least, and you can make it at least 25% more decent and compelling by taking the time to name your 18-pounders and make sure the rope weave is right on the bosun’s rattan cat. (In addition, getting the weave right doesn't require extensive Ramage-like explanations.) If you try to do that with boring characters, you get a polished turd, possibly with a little glitter on it. And no matter how sparkly a poo is, no-one – except Twilight fans – will want it near them.

So the film isn’t a sparkly nothing – it has heart. A nebulous quality for a movie sure enough, but any movie needs heart. Unless it has explosions.

And Age of Sail fiction – whether it’s on screen or on paper – has both: that’s why I’m ever so happy with it, and why my ever-growing collection of the fiction will have a home in my room forever.

For Old Time's Sake - Newsies! (Guilty Pleasure?)

Newsies (Collector's Edition)

Look, let’s get one thing straight. I’m a girl, and I’m allowed to have my guilty pleasures. This includes the Disney movies Newsies, which was unpopular upon its release (despite its cast mostly made up of cute dancing boys) but has since gained a cult following amongst people like… well, people like me, mainly for its preponderance of cute dancing boys.

I owe my enjoyment of this film to the Internet, sweet Internet. The movie was released in 1992, when I was six years old. (Incidentally, I spent that summer in Florida but don’t remember a sniff of the Newsies movie. Should I have noticed it at Disneyland? In any case, my attention was more taken by getting a photo with Mickey Mouse and marvelling at how large Americans have it. Everything was great - apart from the chocolate.) At the time I was interested in dinosaurs. My soon-to-be favourite movie was Jurassic Park. Maybe Newsies was just aimed at the wrong audience. I don’t imagine so many little kiddos were that interested in strike action in 1899 New York when they could be watching brightly animated fare like, say, The Lion King or The Little Mermaid. But it was a Disney movie, so anyone who’d understand why the newsboys’ strike took place and could see past the grey-and-brown setting to appreciate the plot, choreography, cute boys, what have you, would quite possibly be turned off by the magic castle logo.

And let’s face it. It’s far from a classic. It’s a musical for a start. Seemingly almost anyone with a Y chromosome hates musicals on principle, even those who like ballet (as I found out to my chagrin). It's a bit, um, cheesy. The acting isn’t great. The script is decidedly odd in some places – why on earth does Pulitzer (Robert Duvall) swear vengeance upon those newsboys who “dare to EEEEEEEE”? (Direct quote, swear to God.) And goodness knows why they stuck Ann-Margret in there. Long before I saw Newsies, I saw Tommy – as in the film of The Who’s rock opera. I thought of her as Roger Daltrey’s crazy mum, frolicking in a bed full of chocolate and baked beans bought by her deaf, dumb and blind son’s pinballing talent. Anyway, in Newsies she sings my two least favourite songs in the movie. “My Lovey-Dovey Baby” deserves all it gets, which is a Golden Raspberry if I remember correctly. There's a character - David's sister - who was pretty obviously shoehorned in so that it didn't look like Jack and David were attempting to get in each other's pants. It didn't work. They look like they'd make the perfect couple. Now perhaps if they'd been allowed to share a kiss at the end, the movie would have done better... but we can't do that with Disney, can we?

Still, it had to get its following somehow, and this is how I propose it earned it. I’m not going to say the obvious answer (cute boys attract teenage girls) and the second most obvious answer (Jack and David BELONG TOGETHER... in fanfiction, at least). I think it’s got heart. The newsies look out for each other. Jack Kelly, the main character, makes some bad choices… but then he makes some good ones. I cheered for him (the plotline of roguish character making good appeals to me; you could call it one of my fictional kinks). The line “When you got a hundred voices singing, who can hear a lousy whistle blow?” warms my heart. I also found myself laughing at it – just listen to what the newsies say in the background. All in all, I simply think it’s a very sweet movie. Despite all the cheesiness and dodgy acting, it's just plain fun.

And the songs. Oh boy the songs. They’re catchy. So catchy that I’ve had, lessay, a rather awkward incident when I ended up singing “Carrying the Banner” in public because it was the only way I could think of to get it out of my head. (Though it was less awkward than the time I sang the theme tune to “The Family Ness” in the centre of Nuremburg. Why are the songs of my childhood TV-watching years so catchy?) I have most of the songs on my iPod. It’s because of this that I bizarrely associate Newsies songs with attempting to leave the black hole that is the transport network allowing – or rather not allowing – you to leave Stuttgart, of all places.

And yes… I have seen the movie. Taped it off TV, despite the advice of the Mail on Saturday TV guide. (What the hell do they know? Lacklustre? What? Two stars? They're all men, aren't they?) Of course, I can’t find the tape now, but Youtube came to the rescue and I recently watched it for old time’s sake – and to see some cute boys doing backflips and hanging off balconies and jumping impossibly high. Like you do.

All that dancing seems pretty odd in a story based on real events. News boys existed. Some of them lived at home with their families and sold papers to earn a bit extra; some of them lived at lodging houses like the one in the movie, or slept rough (which is what “carrying the banner” is; it has very little to do with hawking headlines). They bought papers twice a day, two for 1 cent, sold them for one cent each, and used the money they made to eat and pay for lodging. Hard life. So they were all a bit miffed when the paper prices were raised, because they quite liked such activities as eating and having the odd glass of sarsaparilla and going off to the odd vaudeville show (come on, they earned it!) They had a strike, held rallies, and eventually it was agreed that although the pries wouldn’t be lowered to previous levels, they could sell back all the papers they didn’t sell to the vendors for the price they paid for them. A benefit they didn’t have before, they’d have to eat the papers instead. You might notice that this is different from the movie ending, where the newsies get just what they want (and Pulitzer has a conniption; in real life he just has a yacht).

So yeah, some bigwig at Disney decided to make a film based on these events, which definitely had the potential to be interesting – it was originally pitched as a drama, then they added some songs to it, and some dances, and the result was a high-budget film that, tragically, very few people wanted to watch. As I’ve said (or at least implied), it’s a pity, because it’s not a bad movie; I just think they didn’t know who on earth they were marketing it to. Perhaps if they’d thought of the obvious “Girls fancy Christian Bale!” angle, it would have done better at the time and I wouldn’t be unable to get a Region 2 DVD of the movie. But, then, Youtube. Because where else, linked to the movie, would you be able to find Kevin Stea (the guy who played Swifty, the pink-shirted Chinese newsie - the only Chienese newsie in New York, apparently) filming the cast’s bums with his video recorder?! And trust me, the rear ends of dancing boys are a pleasure to behold, as I know from my ballet-attending sessions. A blonde boy of Ukrainian descent picking his nose, maybe not so much, but it happens.

And related to that, there’s also Blood Drips on Newsies Square. Let’s just say that Kevin Stea’s camera got around in the early 90s, even though it must’ve been the size of a briefcase (from my fading memories of said time period). It's a terrifying tale of mass murder, or it would be if it wasn't a comedy. Instead it's a hilarious tale of incredibly hammed-up mass murder. The credits are written in felt tip.

Link time, I suppose. You can look up the IMDB page yourself – and the Amazon page, unless you’re too lazy to scroll to the top to click on the pic.

Newsies Part 1 - incidentally they cut it a bit for TV, so, well, you're luckier than me! Oh, let me emphasize - if you like it, do try and purchase the DVD unless you're totally broke (can't afford either the DVD or another DVD player that'll actually play Region 1 DVDs, us poor schmucks in Region 2 are SOL). Amazon has the Region 1 version, assuming you're not currently boycotting it.

Blood Drips on Newsies Square - Part 1 - you can find the other two parts with, oh, two clicks.

Newsies Backstage Part 1 - goofing around with Kevin Stea. Two other parts.

A really good site about the historical background! - by someone called L. D. Henson, all hail her.

You were looking for Jack/David? - yeah, well, you'll find a lot of that (and various other pairings)

A picture I made - Newsies Who's Who - OK, I'm a nerdy nerd nerd. I can identify all the newsies! (If the name of a newsie is in red, it means that there was really a newsie by that name - or a similar one - back in 1899. I got the information from the historical site above. I wonder what you have to do to get the nickname Bumlets?) The insets of the newsies not in the pic were taken from screenshots from this screencap site. The big picture was floating around the internet.

Oh, if you're a UK Newsies fan, please comment! I'm all alone!

Monsieur Batignole

Told you I’d eventually get around to commenting on a film. This one seems to be very slightly more in my comfort zone than the others I’ve watched recently: The Day The Earth Stood Still (popcorn fodder, though the special effects were kind of cool), Defiance (a film during which I felt uncomfortable eating popcorn at all) and Downfall (it’s about the last few days in Hitler’s bunker – enough said. Think messy and frequent suicides; feel your eyes open in horror).

And The Breakfast Club, which is a) zeitgeisty and b) before my time zeitgeisty. I don’t feel comfortable commenting on it too much for that reason, though I will say I enjoyed it. Besides, it’s a film that’s been parodied everywhere. Twice on Family Guy alone, to my knowledge. It’s too well-known for me to feel comfortable having an opinion on it beyond “I liked it”, and I doubt it’s going to enter into the realm of media that really strikes a chord with me. Still, let’s say… 4 ½ out of 5 stars.

Monsieur Batignole

So what is this film that I’ve watched and liked? It’s a French film, which I watched in German because my French isn’t all that great. (I’d need subtitles, and besides, watching it in German is good for me.) It’s called Monsieur Batignole, and the titular character is a small-time butcher who’s muddling along during the Occupation of France, doing rather well, considering, getting a lot of business out of the Germans. They even give him a van… which has been seized from a Jewish tradesman and painted over. He has connections to them through his ‘future son-in-law’, Pierre-Jean, a slimy, odious little man who looks like Hitler with glasses, reads Au pilori and writes for Je suis partout – he is, after all, an ardent anti-Semitic collaborationist.

One day, he kinda-sorta-indvertently gets the Jewish family – the Bernsteins – who live in the apartments above his arrested, as they attempt to ‘go on holiday’ i.e. escape to Switzerland. (Quick history lesson: the film takes place in the summer of 1942, and starts the very day before Parisian Jews started to be taken away to the Velodrome, from where they’d be dispatched to concentration camps.) He experiences a twinge of guilt, but his family quash that. They get to buy the Bernstein’s lovely flat – once all the nice furniture and sundries have been confiscated and catalogued – and hold a party for the SS… They’re moving up in the world, and Madame Batignole is very pleased indeed.

And during the party, Simon Bernstein – the younger son in the Jewish family – arrives at the door of the old family apartment, having escaped from the Velodrome. Luckily, the first person who meets him at the door is Monsieur Batignole, who’s stirred enough at first to give Simon a hiding place for one night – and then he’s got to go somewhere else, seriously. OK, he can have some food, a drink, and a bucket for ablutions, too… and the Cohen children, Simon’s cousins, can stay for a little bit… but then they really have to go, honest.

Monsieur Batignole grows rather fond of the children, though he’s not entirely comfortable with his new task – it’s extremely dangerous, and his family are beginning to get suspicious of all the subterfuges he resorts to to justify going down to the cold room every so often. The tension increases…

To go any further would spoil the film. So I’ll write in white. Hopefully I have the plot points right.

Batignole goes down to the cellar once too often; Pierre-Jean and Batignole’s daughter follow him down there, where they discover the three children. Pierre-Jean orders the children upstairs and threatens Batignole with a cleaver for daring to shelter Jewish children. Batignole ends up turning the cleaver on Jean-Pierre, killing him.

There’s only one way forward now – it’s the way to Switzerland. Batignole pawns a Renoir from the Bernstein’s collection (he steals one of their requisitioned possessions from the Nazis) to pay for the children’s passports, and bids his daughter farewell. He’s not sure if he’ll make it back.

One fine day, Batignole sets out; three children in tow, and a bag containing, oh, thousands of francs over his shoulder. The journey doesn’t go quite as smoothly as he’d probably like; once, when he leaves the train carriage, Simon identifies him as a doctor. Which wouldn’t be a problem, except it comes back to bite him in the rear when an SS officer at the eastern border of France dislocates his leg and a fellow-passenger flags him down…

After they leave the train and approach the border, they’re tired and hungry, and eventually find their way to a farmhouse. Batignole finds himself rather happy there – and quite taken with the lady of the house, whose husband is off in the army. (They have a brief dalliance.) The children get on well with her son, but the relationship between Batignole and Simon is becoming simultaneously more familial and more strained. (After all, Batignole did kind of get his whole family arrested…) Particularly when they forget their false names…

Simon decides he’s going to get to Switzerland, even if no-one else is. The farmer’s son tells him that his brother is in the Resistance and owns a gun, so of course he’s perfectly placed to spirit some Jewish children out of the country. The next day they meet in a café, where Simon name-drops some obviously Jewish names and talks about Yom Kippur, at which point the nice gentleman at the next table slams down his paper and arrests the poor boy, confiscating the shoulder-bag full of dosh. And what does the Resistance member do? He runs away.

Batignole completes his metamorphosis; he enters the police station and tries to talk the policemen round – to the point where he states that he is Jewish and also quite harmless. Simon, who’s been hustled into an office, distracts the policeman for long enough for Batignole to place a well-aimed blow to the groin of the bad cop; the good cop throws them the bag of money and Batignole and Simon escape to the local church, where the priest hides them in his vestment wardrobe and quite happily lies to the police.

Batignole and the children leave the next day. They bid farewell t the farmer’s wife and son before the priest leads them to the border. Batignole kisses the children on the forehead, ushers them into Switzerland and prepares to return to the village with the priest, before deciding, at the very last minute, he can’t leave the children, and the film ends with Batignole and the children heading off into the verdant hills of der Schweiz. Two captions over the scene of the man and the children walking across the field state that Simon and his cousins never found their parents… but Batignole stayed with them in Switzerland until the end of the war. Small-scale shopkeeper to small-scale – but extraordinary – hero.

End spoilers!

I was iffy about the film at first. I bought it two years ago. Impulse buy at Mueller’s, or whatever the big orange Bavarian department store Boots-equivalent is called. I watched about halfway through the movie, and then I realised I had to leave to catch my train to Bayreuth because I desperately wanted to see what attracted Wagner to the place. (Answer: I have no idea – it was cold and wet and inexplicably had a fifteen-foot fibreglass dinosaur – I jest not – in the middle of an otherwise traditional Bavarian square. No tram service, either. I did buy the best Bratwurst I’d ever eaten from a melancholy-looking, bearded, obese man in a small plastic hut, though, so be assured it had redeeming features.)

After I came back from the trip, I didn’t watch it for ages and then fell into that discouraging mode where I realised that I didn’t quite remember enough of the movie to be able to pick up where I left off, and I remembered enough of the movie to not be willing to watch the first half again. Then my computer broke and I couldn’t watch DVDs at all. So it was only yesterday that I slid the DVD into my computer drive again and decided to give it another go.

I loved it! Because of the main character, for a start. He starts off as the Everyman of Paris – a guy who just wants the Germans to be ‘correct’ in their occupation of his country, they’ll be gone one day, you see. As I say, he’s also doing quite well out of the Germans, and he’s anti-Semitic to a point. The reason the Bernsteins get deported is because Batignole buttonholes Dr. Bernstein in his apartment, accusing him of stealing a ham. Why not blame the Jewish guy? Everyone else would – after all, there’s nothing stopping him from selling the meat on the black market if he’s not going to eat it. And that diversion is long enough for Pierre-Jean to call the Gestapo to have the family arrested and deported. It sounds unlikely that a man like this could, three-quarters of an hour later (in real time – in film time, it’s about a week long), risk his life for the same people he’s been so prejudiced against before. I guess it’s the first time he examined his life – and as Socrates said, the unexamined life is not worth living.
   
I loved the characterisation of all the French people in the story, overall. Too many times, the French have either been cast as 100% brave resistance heroes (then why did they have their country invaded in the first place?) or as “cheese-eating surrender monkeys”, as Groundskeeper Willie would have it. (No prizes for guessing why I disagree with that comment.) Pierre-Jean is clearly The Bad Guy, worse than the German Nazis because he’s a Frenchman trying to crawl up their arses. But the rest of them? There’s a Resistance member who doesn’t seem to be all that brave when it comes to the crunch, and there’s plenty of people who find out they do have what it takes when it comes to said crunch. And in the middle there’s people who are just trying to keep their heads down and hope the Nazis get out of Paris ASAP while taking as much advantage of the situation as they can. As did many people. Neither outright collaborators or big brave underground Resistance fighters… well, what would YOU do if that happened to your country? Think about it. What would you do if you either had to hide someone in your attic and potentially get in a lot of trouble (we’re talking death penalty here, quick or slow, not your choice) or send that person to their certain death and remain perfectly safe yourself? Would you be brave enough to risk everything?
   
The film ended, I feel, in exactly the right spot. I wanted more when the credits came up, but I realised that adding more might ruin it. It’s a little on the short side for a film – about 100 minutes, including the credits (during which it is revealed that all the skinned rabbits portrayed in the film were eaten by the cast), but it’s well-paced. I wasn’t bored for a single moment. In fact, I got so caught up in the story that I ended up painfully whispering “Simon, you idiot!” to the poor boy every time he slipped up, before realising that the story was not only long-past, but fictional. If I find myself offering advice to the characters, I count it as an involving film.
   
There’s certain similarities to Life is Beautiful (another foreign film which I had to watch in German – I don’t know a word of Italian beyond what is needed to play music). Two clear acts, both take place during the Second World War and involve the persecution of the Jewish people, and both have what seems like incongruous humour. I think that last aspect was better-handled in Life is Beautiful, which starts off with a funny (if hackneyed) opening comedy scene. You know what tone the film is setting. It took me an embarrassingly long time, however, to get that Monsieur Batignole was also meant to be a comedy of sorts. Up until a spoilered scene, in fact, revealed up there in that sea of white, which seemed bizarrely incongruous before a little lightbulb appeared above my head and I remembered some more subtle jokes (as well as Pierre-Jean’s entirely unsubtle characterisation, which was also incongruous because he’s so morally unambiguous). It could have done a better job of mixing genres.
   
But on the whole, I think it’s a valuable addition to my DVD collection, and boy am I glad to have made that impulse buy now. I can’t believe it only took, oh, two years to get around to watching it. I urge you to purchase it now, preferably in your native language so you aren’t pausing the DVD every so often and typing words into the LEO dictionary. That spoils the flow of a movie, I find. But all the same I thought it a lovely and interesting film. Long live the little heroes.

Bad Book Habits

I have many. First, the bad book habits I don't have. I don't crack spines (something that will drive me beserk; it's also the reason I only lend out my more pre-loved books), I don't dog-ear pages. I don't use a highlighter pen on actual books. Or a real pen, for that matter, unless I'm writing a note in the front of books I give as presents that ensure that the receiver can never palm them off on someone else. One I read about someone who, instead of using a bookmark, ripped out the pages of books as he read them. I didn't just wince, I cringed. And then I went to hug my enormous illustrated copy of Heine's Buch der Lieder. No-one will ever hurt my books.

No, I have three less devastating physical Bad Book Habits.

1) Leaving them in my handbag while I merrily trip around town. This is the number one reason why my favourite books end up looking a mess. The plastic stuff they put on the cover wrinkles and gets grubby, a bit like an ageing plaster (and by ageing I mean more than, oh, three hours old). The corners near the spine get gently crushed. There's an impression of my purse logo in the front or back cover. And then there's an impression of my head in a bog wall somewhere in one of many, many Yorkshire city centres. One more book (in this case, my well-travelled copy of And There Was Light) has battle scars. It's all my fault. Alas.

2) Taking books into the toilet and/or bathroom. Face it, they're pretty boring places. Nothing whiles away the time like a good book when you're engaged in necessary bodily maintenance activities, particularly if you, like me, have feet dextrous enough to hold a sponge. Unfortunately, my hands have once or twice inexplicably failed in their duty during a particularly hot bath, and a book has fallen face-first in the water. It produces an interesting crinkly effect in the pages but also renders the book unclosable. Farewell to thee, Notes from a Big Country. (NB. I have not yet suffered any similar incident with a toilet bowl, but I did once place the book on the tank, only to have it fall off at a crucial moment. I deftly trapped the book between my head and the tank, and extracted it with a grace perfected by my yoga habit. However, no bowl contact. Thank goodness.)

3) Unusual bookmarks. I took a trip through War and Peace again, and frankly I was appalled. Pierre's conversion to Freemasonry was marked by an aqua blue Penguin wrapper with an expiry date sometime last millennium. A piece of string heralded Boris' visit to Tilsit. The Rostov's flight from Moscow had an Andalusian postcard (dated 1996 or so) to commemerate it. A book about Tchaikovsky's personal life was even worse. Viscount wrappers, lots of 'em. I don't know what it is about neurotic, homosexual Russian composers who wrote some really killer music and had an unhealthy interest in teenage boys that made me want to eat mint fondant biscuits, but there were thirteen of them in there in addition to a note recommending I read Resistance by Anita Shreve and an opera ticket to see The Barber of Seville. The book, needless to say, smelt like a biscuit tin.

To be fair, yes, there was a lovely cat-themed bookmark in The Water Babies and a jaunty plastic Siamese with bendy legs wrapped around a page in Three Men In A Boat, but I must say, in my youth, I must have owned about 700 bookmarks and yet I still used biscuit wrappers and airline napkins. The law governing this must be some variation of Sod's law. Whenever I need an actual bookmark because I've found a fascinating book passage, there's nothing to hand but a pipe cleaner or discarded clothes label. Whenever I've just bought a nice shiny bookmark, I put it randomly in a nice-looking book so I can admire it, and then when I need it it looks like it might already in use.

I have to mention at this point that the most kick-ass bookmark I've used is a peacock quill - for the flamboyant and/or eccentric reader.

And on to bad reading habits:

4) Forgetting about books. I have a ton of books. At least, I can confidently say I own enough books to balance out my weight on a scale, and I intend to increase the number of books I own (because God knows the alternative is unthinkable as long as chocolate exists) until I am flung off the scale entirely like the projectile of a trebuchet - where the counterweight is entirely books.

This also makes it very easy to forget about books. I have so many they all blend together, and I'd love to know why every single book set on the continent during WWII has the same colour scheme. They are all brown; they blend into one another. Now I know I've read Children of Freedom by Marc Levy, but did I read the aforementioned Resistance (I did... I think)? I've read the first half of Suite Francaise twice for this reason, because I took two very similar-looking, similarly-themed books to Vienna with me and the panic that ensued when I couldn't find my hotel made me forget which one I'd read.

The other pernicious influence is The Internet, which explains why I have been finishing fewer books recently. Why devote energy to reading one book when I could read, like, a million blogs? Or hopping round Youtube. (I love Youtube. I started out watching a video of Itzhak Perlman playing some Tchaikovsky piece, which linked to him on Sesame Street - what a wonderful program it was! - and I thought "Hmm... yes, I do vaguely remember some chap with crutches playing Beethoven on the violin. Beethoven! Heavenly! I loved Sesame Street, you know. I wonder if they've got that pinball animation, recently rehashed on Family Guy where Stewie was in the bubble, that they always used to play?". Upshot was, three hours later I was watching a video of a cat sitting serenely on an automated vacuum cleaner in action.) I mean, how can a book compete with a breakdancing toddler or the Christmas episode of Mr Bean? It can and it must. So it will. Because I don't ever remember feeling that heartbroken when Youtube told me that Gabelstaplerfahren was no longer available, whereas, like I said, seeing a mutilated book almost reduces me to tears.

5) Buying books and not reading them. I think this relates to something that Chris Baty, the inventor of Nanowrimo, said. I bought his book about completing Nano, and in the part about writing lists of what you do and don't like in novels, he mentioned the 'literature-as-self-improvement' concept. Basically, people buy literature they don't enjoy because they think that, like Bran Flakes, if they aren't enjoying it, it must be good for them. Rubbish, sez he. Books are there to be enjoyed. They're entertainment.

Sadly, that message hasn't even filtered down to me, yet. I still buy stuff based on the idea that everyone's read this, it's a Penguin Classic, I can't possibly be considered well-read if I don't read this - and remain ill-read and £2 poorer for having shelled out on a book I have not yet read. Lessee... I bought The Go-Between by L P Hartley, and still haven't read it. At least not past "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there". Which is, if you didn't know, the first sentence. At least I don't do this with books I buy new - that would be a phenomenal waste of dosh - but it is so frustrating to realise I've read all my 'literary kink' fiction first - i.e. the fun stuff that features a theme I enjoy reading about, and now I've got to read something with an orange cover.

I'm not saying I hate all the classics, or that I think I won't enjoy reading the Hartley book. But... many of them are just not my thing, and I wish I could admit that. Same with more modern books that everyone else has read and I feel I have to read to keep up with the Joneses. Lord of the sodding Rings, for a start. I tried and failed to read it. I think I have an allergy to fantasy names. Fred = good, Frodo = bad. And Chocolat, by Joanne Harris. A friend of mine's mother said I might like it. I might still like it, but unfortunately it's on the bottom of a very tall pile of books I am disinclined to dismantle. And one of these days I swear I will read The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (I liked the TV special), but as yet...

6) Style over substance. Skim reading. To me, these issues amount to the same thing. If I find an author whose writing style I love, I'll read almost anything I can find written in that style. (Same with artists, for that matter - I'd rather have a mediocre Friedrich than a really good Rembrandt or Picasso. Caspar David F rocks my socks, and that's an end to it. Should it be?) I used to be a lot worse about this. Style was all that mattered when I was six. I loved Watership Down because I was reading a really long book, really really long, and it had all these pretty descriptions of nature and the rabbits had OMG their own language!!... so obviously I didn't get anything like the blazing obvious World War II parallels. And when I read the book again when I was a teenager, I got it. And I think I got a lot more out of it when I was eighteen, and supposedly 'too old' for the book (there's more rant fuel), than when I was a perhaps-precocious kid. I technically knew how to read - that is, translate those funny page-squiggles into words with some sort of meaning - but I didn't know how to read a book. I could read how to not incinerate myself instantly with an oven, but the finer (or cruder) nuances of the human soul? Totally lost on me.

7) Kink reading. Not what you might think. Basically, what I mean by 'kink' reading is choosing books based on just one element, regardless of quality. As I sense that this entry is approaching truly gargangtuan proportions, this concept is pretty much covered in the Wittgenstein entry with my ill-considered purchase of The Crown Prince - the 'kink' is obviously the presence of Paul Wittgenstein.

All right, NEXT time I'll talk about a book I've actually finished, or a film I've watched, or a piece of music I've particularly enjoyed.

Books I Have Never Finished

There! There, I've made a new year's resolution. Finish books. I have to finish every single book I buy before I can buy any new ones. OK, if it's in a second-hand book that might not be there next time, I can buy it. Or, come to think of it, if it's a really cool book in Borders or Waterstones, I can also buy it. Or if it's a book that's in print but only findable on Amazon, then...

That was a non-starter of a resolution. Or was it? To hell with the rule of not-being-able-to-buy-new-books without finishing-all-those-I-already-own. I could leave that rule to the video games (pernicious; can you ever truly finish Pokemon? But then, Pokemon is pretty fun). I'd just finish my books. So to that end I invested in some WH Smiths sticky notes. Four colours.

Yellow: Untouched - books I've not really opened.
Orange: Partial - books I've read anything up to 80% of and then discarded for no particular reason.
Green: Can't Remember - any books which I really don't remember reading. I also put one on Lady Chatterley's Lover because I wanted an excuse to read it again.
Pink: Never - this tag went on only one book. Twilight. It would have been a partial if I'd wanted to pick it up again, but frankly I'd rather do a bowel resection on myself with a chainsaw.

So I spent an hour writing out little labels and sticking them merrily on books, including the ones on the shelf above my bed. I went to bed a couple of hours after this endeavour.

And when I woke up, I woke up covered in little sticky notes. The one on my forehead read "can't remember"; formerly appended to Peter Duck (I love Arthur Ransome!), it now neatly covered my forehead scar and served as a badge of my bad memory. (If I had a good memory, why do you think I'd need the stickers?)

Let's take a look at some of my labelled books, shall we? A trip down memory lane - or what's left of it - to see what I didn't finish and why. No pictures. I only add books I liked to my library (OK, I added one book I hated, to make a point. My blog, I can break the rules), and I either can't get pictures or I want to reserve judgement on these books until I've read them. I didn't hate any of them, nor did any disgust me (if any did, it wasn't the writer's fault) so I'm loath to opine before I've actually read them in their entirity.

The Princess Bride, by William Goldman - bought during a caffieneated carouse through the Waterstones in Leeds. People keep on saying it's good - internet people with their memes. My experience with the excreable The Perks of Being a Wallflower should have taught me better about trusting memetically recommended books.

It's not that I don't like the first 40 pages of the book, though; I just felt that it didn't live up to the hype. It's not grabbing my attention. I can shelve it easily. I've got more interesting books to read. I'll get round to it one day, I suppose. Until then I'll let it catch a little dust, mature a bit.

An autobiography of Prokofiev - this was an impulse buy in York. I had no idea that the composer Sergei Prokofiev wrote his memoirs; I bought it for the novelty value, not intending to read it quite yet. This was before I discovered that the train schedule in York was set by a sadist bent on making me spend £3 on a mediocre hot chocolate which had to last me an hour. It tasted like dregs. To try and forget that I looked like a bag lady - I had many bags with me and I was wearing a bobble hat with ear flaps, which was warm but made me look dorky - I started to read Prokofiev's book.

I was pleasantly surprised. Not only was I getting a first-hand look into an interesting composer's head (I do love Prokofiev), but he was an engaging writer. Not bad for someone who grew up to look just like a geography teacher. I really think Russian composers lost something in the appearance when they decided not to have beards any more. But Prkofiev comes across as a charming young man. He had a lovely childhood in the Ukraine, then he went to the Conservatory in St. Petersburg (IIRC), and... well, that's where I dropped it. Why?

Because the train pulled into Leeds and it was time to get off, go home and have some decent hot chocolate while beating up a lot of video game characters in Super Smash Bros. Brawl.

I have 40 pages left of this book and I'll have to read them before I forget what happened in the previous ones.

What One Sees without Eyes - another Jacques Lusseyran book which I've had since I was seventeen. To put it succintly, I just... didn't... understand it. Too deep for me, who's used to proteins and cell biology and such like. It does say in the intro that the essays in the book were originally speeches, and I think hearing them would work out better. Also, people laugh at the title of the book, or I get into a conversation about the French Resistance, and yes, there was a teenager in charge of part of it, and yes, he was also blind, and yes, he survived Buchenwald -

"But HOW?!" they ask.

"Russians," I say, for that is the answer in the book.

And then I've got to get off a bus, or back to work, or go somewhere else, and I end up not reading the book. Between that and my own moronicity, that's why I never finished. I have read parts of it, which is unfortunate. I hate reading parts because I never forget them - I have a Solomon Shereshevsky-like memory for book parts - so when I try to read the whole, later, I get disrupted. But this time, and I swear it, my resolve will win through.

Fatherland, by Robert Harris - I ordered this while I was still living in Germany and was desperate for English-language books to read (reading German is, for me, not a task to be done while tired). It's in quite a different genre to my usual reading; IIRC, it's a crime-thriller type thing set in an alternate universe where the Nazis won and are obsessed with measuring head circumferences and nose lengths to determine whether someone is Slavic, Jewish or Aryan. (I never quite understood how this might work, ever. Would it not be possible to be both Slavic AND Jewish? And I can tell you that there are quite a lot of blonde-haired blue-eyed Eastern Europeans out there... never mind that the whole exercise does precisely sweet FA to tell you anything about a person.) I recall that the main character is a lowly police detective - I think - and there's some murders and he travels on a train at some point and he's not very happy with the whole Nazi thing. I think - it's been about 18 months since I last made an attempt on the book, and I know just why. I was more interested in the alt-history than the actual crime plot. I really should broaden my horizons, though. I'll get to it at some point.

The Meme Machine, by Susan Blackmore - Fascinating pop science read, one teensy problem - I dropped the book and the cover permanently creased, and the book now looks tatty. I'm shallow. I've read most of it, I know. I really need to get over my prejudice against tatty books, because goodness knows my first copy of And There Was Light looks like it's been in The Great Bag Occupation Rivalry wars (there's an imprint of my glasses in the back cover; the glasses won in a pyrrhic victory), but at least And There Was Light doesn't have a massive crease in the front cover!! (It might soon, I lent it to a friend. A male friend. Hope he's careful, or else...) And again, I own a lot of tatty previously enjoyed books - why is it that people seem to previously enjoy books by messing up the spine and cracking the poor book open? - so I shouldn't have anything wrong with tattifying books myself, but it does feel like a self-betrayal. I was always taught to respect possessions, both mine and other people's, so I feel guilty when I hurt a book, break its wings.

This book was never finished out of pure guilt.

To sum up, there are many reasons I never finished. Boredom, the fact that designated reading time came to an end, my blockheadedness (and the fact that the book title of this book invites derision, poor Jacques), genre... uh... boredom, I guess, and finally guilt. But these books are my books, so I will finish them one day. Promise.

The House of Wittgenstein

Hello! Sorry I haven't updated in, well, months. Life. But it's amazing how much better you feel when you have a good clearout. I've done my room, I've removed all the unsuitable bookmarks from my copy of War and Peace (nothing like a decade-old penguin wrapper to make you feel just a little queasy - I replaced it with a slip of paper informing me that yes, Pierre does become a freemason), I looked under my bed. That was a treasure trove of rubbish. Now there's a box of theatre programmes, a box full of German postcards telling me how to make Sachertorte and that Franz Schubert liked playing charades on holiday, some sketchbooks and my craft box. I reorganised my shelves so all my CDs are on view and I don't have a desk covered in book piles, I threw out all nonfunctional pens, I labelled books with sticky labels so I know if I've read them or not. Then I moved on to the playroom and filled boxes full of books and toys to be given away, though I will never give up my Lego (partly because I still like building big mansions, partly because I used to taste lego bricks and use them as nasal probes - my nose was three bumps deep at five) or the Beano annuals. Now I'm clearing out a barely-used bedroom. I discovered a photograph of my father and mother on a date, when they were younger than I am now. My mother was devastatingly pretty; my father looked like a dork with a tie wider than his body and a side parting. Their parents are there. My mother's parents look displeased; my maternal grandfather looks especially disappointed. I also found some of their seventies clothes - laugh riot.

So now I have my books on my shelves in a nice tidy bedroom, I can sit down and read again.

A quick factoid for my fellow trivia collectors. In Iowa, it is illegal for a one-armed pianist to charge for his or her performances.

“Are there really so many one-armed pianists that this needs to be a law?” you ask. Well… I don’t know. Either there are a whole lot of one-armed pianists with opportunistic agents, looking to make a quick buck round Des Moines et al., or Paul Wittgenstein turned up once and cleaned them all out.

You ask again. (Unless you’ve read Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks – it’s a big seller this Christmas) “Who is this?” A notoriously arsey (Benjamin Britten described him as a sourpuss; Benjamin Britten is more polite than I would have been) one-armed pianist with a famous philosopher for a younger brother, that’s who he was. And I just read a whole book about them, so given my usual style of discussing books I’ll make sure you know as much as possible about their dysfunctional family. The Wittgensteins may have looked, on the surface, like a bunch of prosperous Viennese industrialists, but underneath there were catastrophic sibling fall-outs, guilt over poorly disguised homosexuality, suicide… Think the Berry family in Hotel New Hampshire, plus the Simpsons, multiply by a factor of The Troubled Political Situation in Early 20th Century Germany/Austria/round there… and that’s the Wittgensteins.

Or such is the impression I got from reading this book. I’ve got the feeling I was supposed to get some deeper meaning from the book. Then I realised that the reason I didn’t get whatever urged the author to write it was the same reason I favoured the sciences from when I was sixteen. (That, and a younger acquaintance revealed to me that he had to read Ulysses over Christmas recently. Ulysses! No-one reads that! Do they?) My relationship with the written word has never been deep. I came to terms with that some time ago and decided to ignore those silly “100 books you must read before you can consider yourself a member of the middle class” lists, more commonly known as “100 books you must read before you die” lists, and read whatever sounded interesting to me.

The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War

Alexander Waugh

It was interesting, too. Mainly because the author decided to cast Paul Wittgenstein as the hero of the family. It was either a hard choice (His brother was Ludwig Wittgenstein! Ludwig Wittgenstein!!) or a very easy one (He’s clearly the least crazy member, though when the ‘least crazy’ member of the family is the one who went swimming in the sea during thunderstorms to prove that he wasn’t that disabled, then the bar’s lowered quite a bit). Whatever his reasons, it was pleasing. I’ve always liked music. Let the pianist be the hero. I can understand pianists; they like music too. Now philosophers… Put it like this, I gave up on Sophie’s World when Gaarder got to Hume. So when given a choice between the pianist and the philosopher, I’m going for the pianist every time. Especially is said pianist is a guy who loses an arm and then decides that he’s still going to be a pianist, because that? That takes balls. So I can forgive Paul Wittgenstein for rejecting a Prokofiev piano concerto written for him in half a sentence. He was an interesting man.

So he was born into a very rich family – big house in the middle of Vienna, Brahms popped round every Tuesday for a tinkle on the piano or somesuch, massive art collection, and lots of piano lessons, especially for Paul. The patriarch, Karl Wittgenstein, was a demanding father – drove three of his sons to eventual suicide, leaving the last two, Paul and ‘Lucki’ Ludwig, to carry on the family name. (Not in Ludwig’s case. He was gay.) Ludwig went to study in Cambridge, and Paul stayed in Vienna and made his debut as a pianist in 1913.

June next year, Gavrilo Princip shot the Archduke of Austro-Hungary. War broke out. The Wittgenstein boys were called up to fight for Germany/Austria, and off they went. And in one of those stunningly cruel twists of fate – I mean, if God has a sense of humour, he’s Frankie Boyle crossed with that weird kid you knew at primary who pulled legs off spiders for fun – two months later, Paul was leading a patrol somewhere in Poland when he had his right elbow shattered by a rifle bullet. Medical science being not so good, the only solution was amputation. War being also not so good, about three seconds post-amputation the Russians invaded the field hospital and took everyone prisoner. And you thought you were having a bad week.

In that situation, it’s sink or swim, or more accurately for Paul Wittgenstein, ‘suicide like your older brothers or learn how to play the piano with the left hand’. Paul chose option 2. During a year of being shuttled round POW camps in Russia (including one with particularly horrific conditions, including random horsewhippings and solitary confinement for making jokes), he refined his technique by playing on a keyboard marked out in chalk on a crate top, and occasionally a real piano when he could get at one. And eventually, Pope Benedict XV (I wondered when the previous Pope Ben was around, and if he looked like he ate babies too – he doesn’t, by the way) manage to pull some strings to get officers repatriated, and back came Paul. Near the end of 1915. It took that long.

Now there was a composer who hung round the Wittgenstein place like he’d been adopted. There’s a bust of him near the old Konvikt school in Vienna, and his name was Josef Labor; he was old and blind and lively-haired and wrote exactly the sort of music that appealed to Paul, enabling him to make a comeback. And when Labor eventually pegged out, Paul simply used his giant bank balance (one of the things that made him immensely attractive to women, along from his handsome face, his mad piano skills and his empty sleeve) to pay lots and lots of other composers to write music for him. Ravel. Prokofiev. Britten. Korngold. Strauss. And he was very successful in his profession.

It didn’t seem to matter at first when one of Ludwig’s old classmates – a chap called Adolf – was made the German chancellor. He was doing a lot better than Ludwig, who made a hobby out of self-flagellation, often accompanied by his boyfriends, in between writing his philosophical works. Paul was giving piano lessons at the time, and fell in love with one of his pupils, Hilde, (whose father was incidentally younger than Paul himself), whom he impregnated almost immediately judging by the date of birth of their first child. They got on very well.

But then there was the Anschluss. Ludwig meandered off to England – again. (After all, the philosophers were talkative and the boys were ever so pretty.) Paul and the rest of the Wittgensteins were still in Vienna. The NSDAP ordered them to fly a Hakenkreuz flag above Casa Wittgenstein, so Paul apologised to all his pupils profusely when they came over for lessons. And only then did the Nazis check out the Wittgenstein family tree...

Paul, Ludwig et al had been brought up Catholic, with a bit of the old Viennese anti-Semitism going on in the backs of their brains. Their parents had been Christians too. The grandparents – well, three of them had started out Jewish, so by the twisted Nazi logic that suddenly meant that Paul and his siblings were also Jewish. And therefore they were all-of-a-sudden persona non grata (or whatever the plural of that is). Some of Paul’s more… ardent students just stopped coming now they knew their teacher was Jewish, and he got fired from his official music-teaching job and rendered unable to perform in public. But worse was to come for Paul. He was now guilty of Rassenschande – race defilement – as his pretty young girlfriend had now borne him a second little girl, and in a stunning illustration of the complete stupidity of the “Who’s Jewish now?” laws, the older girl wasn’t counted as Jewish, but the younger one was, simply by virtue of their dates of birth. Oh, and by this time, they’d forbidden him to fly the Nazi flag as he was now “Jewish”, which must have been the only thing about the whole mess that was OK by him.

His siblings weren’t making matters any easier. Paul was frantic – they were apathetic, and just wanted to stay put and pretend the whole thing wasn’t happening by bribing the Nazis to stay away. So Paul upped and left, packing his own suitcase for the very first time in his life and heading off to America. Alone. Not because he wanted to abandon his girlfriend and children (as Germans, they’d be safer there than he would be), but because he had to get out of the country. The country that he’d once fought for – losing his arm in the process – now rejected him because of some distant ancestors’ religion. I mean, to me, this is fucking nuts. But it made sense to a frightening amount of people way back in the late thirties, so off went Paul, sans family, girlfriend and kids, to America.

Eventually Hilde and the kids joined him, he wrote a lot of letters to the German government so that his siblings would be regarded as “Mischlinge” – half-Jews – and would only have to pay a lot of money to the Nazis to not be shipped off to a concentration camp, and eventually he settled down in New York, started performing again and giving lessons and made a few recordings. But he never talked to his siblings again – that was how bad it got between them. Not even Ludwig. Alas. And finally he went and died of prostate cancer, in the days before there were public awareness campaigns to go to the doctor if you’re a man over fifty and have difficulty urinating. Just like Ludwig.

So I guess if you were a Wittgenstein, it’s cancer or suicide. (In my family it’s heart disease… but it’s important to note that for 200 years before I was born there were no other females, so with the decreased female incidence of heart disease I will hopefully live more-or-less forever.) Thank goodness this one was cancer!

I mentioned Paul Wittgenstein made recordings. I downloaded one after a lot of Googling – cost me £5 but I figured it was worth it, just so that I could listen to a pianist who definitely wasn’t cheating when playing Ravel’s concerto. That’s the best piano piece written for Wittgenstein. It’s angry. It’s beautiful. It’s everything I want out of a good piano concerto. And I’ve definitely heard better recordings than Wittgenstein’s. To be fair, the recording was made when he practically had one foot in the grave – or at any rate when he wasn’t in the full flush of his one-handed piano playing career. Apparently he was magnificent in his prime, but bootlegging concerts in the early 30s wasn’t really possible. So I ended up listening to a recording made in the 1950s. My goodness, he pounds on the keys in a way that would make Ravel rotate in his grave so rapidly that the resulting kinetic energy, if transformed into electrical energy, could power the street lamps of Paris for a year.

OK, I’m drawing the long bow. I listened to it again after a couple of days of not reading about Mr. Wittgenstein, and you know what? I liked it better. It’s hard to believe that the piano is being played by a guy with just a left hand, but then again I suspect that was what both Ravel and Wittgenstein were going for. Wittgenstein was a proud man and a serious musician – judging by the book – and would have rather died than become a sideshow attraction. And Ravel delivered the goods – a piano concerto that couldn’t have been any more difficult or more virtuosic if it had been written for two hands. It’s just a shame that Wittgenstein didn’t have the technique to match his courage. Because, let’s face it, you have to have balls (I mean that in the purely metaphorical sense) to decide that you’re going to be a concert pianist in the first place, let alone one with just the one arm. And apparently some people went to Wittgenstein’s concerts and came out blissfully unaware that the pianist had an empty right sleeve – exactly his aim.

As I went on through the CD – there were some pieces by Max Reger, a forgettable composer; an arrangement of a Schubert Lied that would have made old Franz do acrobatics with his eyebrows, and Brahms’ arrangement of the Bach chaconne written for Clara Schumann after she hurt her right hand but wanted to keep practising – I decided he wasn’t so bad after all. Definitely listenable. Interesting is about as far as I’m willing to go, to be brutally honest. Thing is, I was forewarned, and although Wittgenstein was very good for a one-armed pianist, had he been slightly, shall we say, luckier in the Great War, he’d be a complete nonentity as a two-armed pianist, at least in my opinion. And had he been an impoverished one-armed pianist, he’d be naught but a piteous curiousity. Thank goodness we can leave history the way it is, and make Paul Wittgenstein fortunate!

There’s also a romance novel written about Paul Wittgenstein, about being the operative word. I located the book – The Crown Prince by John Barchilon - in a second-hand bookshop and secreted it in the middle of some other books in order not to embarrass myself – not that I have anything against romance novels, but it looked like one of the family sagas my mother is addicted to. She can’t read a book unless it’s written in a pedestrian style and written by someone who had a remarkably shitty life.

It’s… ah, well. See, I think I might have quite enjoyed it either if the author had attempted to stick to the facts of Paul’s life (below I will list what is correct and what drove me nuts), or if the author had not used Paul’s name. Smashing a rather melodramatic made-up story into a real person’s name just doesn’t sit well with me at all. After all, the book’s story wasn’t exactly boring; it’s no Twilight. There was a war on and everything, and a plot of sorts, and the author, far from chickening out on climaxes, seemed to enjoy them rather too much. And there’s sex in it, some of it rather fetishist-like (I recall thinking “Wait, wouldn’t that hurt? What about his phantom limb?”). If the writing style hadn’t been so stilted in some places (and not used Paul Wittgenstein’s name) it would have been an OK read. After all, I grasped from Smart Bitches Trashy Books that it’s not often you get a disabled hero in your average romance, and women are throwing themselves at this guy.

But Paul Wittgenstein led an interesting enough life anyway. He was alive, once, and I believe at least some of his children still are (and able to boast “Ludwig Wittgenstein was my uncle”.) He had musical tastes and a well-documented career and he was part of the Wittgenstein family, and it would, I think, have behoved the author to take notice of that. I am speaking mildly at this point. I read most of the book with a WTF expression on my face – Andy Hamilton-style eyebrows, the works.

Advice: If you’ve read this far, don’t make the Crown Prince purchase. Unless you really want Andy Hamilton-style eyebrows. But buy the House of Wittgenstein book, if you would like to reassure yourself that your family is indeed quite normal compared to some.

The House of Wittgenstein

Hello! Sorry I haven't updated in, well, months. Life. But it's amazing how much better you feel when you have a good clearout. I've done my room, I've removed all the unsuitable bookmarks from my copy of War and Peace (nothing like a decade-old penguin wrapper to make you feel just a little queasy - I replaced it with a slip of paper informing me that yes, Pierre does become a freemason), I looked under my bed. That was a treasure trove of rubbish. Now there's a box of theatre programmes, a box full of German postcards telling me how to make Sachertorte and that Franz Schubert liked playing charades on holiday, some sketchbooks and my craft box. I reorganised my shelves so all my CDs are on view and I don't have a desk covered in book piles, I threw out all nonfunctional pens, I labelled books with sticky labels so I know if I've read them or not. Then I moved on to the playroom and filled boxes full of books and toys to be given away, though I will never give up my Lego (partly because I still like building big mansions, partly because I used to taste lego bricks and use them as nasal probes - my nose was three bumps deep at five) or the Beano annuals. Now I'm clearing out a barely-used bedroom. I discovered a photograph of my father and mother on a date, when they were younger than I am now. My mother was devastatingly pretty; my father looked like a dork with a tie wider than his body and a side parting. Their parents are there. My mother's parents look displeased; my maternal grandfather looks especially disappointed. I also found some of their seventies clothes - laugh riot.

So now I have my books on my shelves in a nice tidy bedroom, I can sit down and read again.

A quick factoid for my fellow trivia collectors. In Iowa, it is illegal for a one-armed pianist to charge for his or her performances.

“Are there really so many one-armed pianists that this needs to be a law?” you ask. Well… I don’t know. Either there are a whole lot of one-armed pianists with opportunistic agents, looking to make a quick buck round Des Moines et al., or Paul Wittgenstein turned up once and cleaned them all out.

You ask again. (Unless you’ve read Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks – it’s a big seller this Christmas) “Who is this?” A notoriously arsey (Benjamin Britten described him as a sourpuss; Benjamin Britten is more polite than I would have been) one-armed pianist with a famous philosopher for a younger brother, that’s who he was. And I just read a whole book about them, so given my usual style of discussing books I’ll make sure you know as much as possible about their dysfunctional family. The Wittgensteins may have looked, on the surface, like a bunch of prosperous Viennese industrialists, but underneath there were catastrophic sibling fall-outs, guilt over poorly disguised homosexuality, suicide… Think the Berry family in Hotel New Hampshire, plus the Simpsons, multiply by a factor of The Troubled Political Situation in Early 20th Century Germany/Austria/round there… and that’s the Wittgensteins.

Or such is the impression I got from reading this book. I’ve got the feeling I was supposed to get some deeper meaning from the book. Then I realised that the reason I didn’t get whatever urged the author to write it was the same reason I favoured the sciences from when I was sixteen. (That, and a younger acquaintance revealed to me that he had to read Ulysses over Christmas recently. Ulysses! No-one reads that! Do they?) My relationship with the written word has never been deep. I came to terms with that some time ago and decided to ignore those silly “100 books you must read before you can consider yourself a member of the middle class” lists, more commonly known as “100 books you must read before you die” lists, and read whatever sounded interesting to me.

The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War

Alexander Waugh

It was interesting, too. Mainly because the author decided to cast Paul Wittgenstein as the hero of the family. It was either a hard choice (His brother was Ludwig Wittgenstein! Ludwig Wittgenstein!!) or a very easy one (He’s clearly the least crazy member, though when the ‘least crazy’ member of the family is the one who went swimming in the sea during thunderstorms to prove that he wasn’t that disabled, then the bar’s lowered quite a bit). Whatever his reasons, it was pleasing. I’ve always liked music. Let the pianist be the hero. I can understand pianists; they like music too. Now philosophers… Put it like this, I gave up on Sophie’s World when Gaarder got to Hume. So when given a choice between the pianist and the philosopher, I’m going for the pianist every time. Especially is said pianist is a guy who loses an arm and then decides that he’s still going to be a pianist, because that? That takes balls. So I can forgive Paul Wittgenstein for rejecting a Prokofiev piano concerto written for him in half a sentence. He was an interesting man.

So he was born into a very rich family – big house in the middle of Vienna, Brahms popped round every Tuesday for a tinkle on the piano or somesuch, massive art collection, and lots of piano lessons, especially for Paul. The patriarch, Karl Wittgenstein, was a demanding father – drove three of his sons to eventual suicide, leaving the last two, Paul and ‘Lucki’ Ludwig, to carry on the family name. (Not in Ludwig’s case. He was gay.) Ludwig went to study in Cambridge, and Paul stayed in Vienna and made his debut as a pianist in 1913.

June next year, Gavrilo Princip shot the Archduke of Austro-Hungary. War broke out. The Wittgenstein boys were called up to fight for Germany/Austria, and off they went. And in one of those stunningly cruel twists of fate – I mean, if God has a sense of humour, he’s Frankie Boyle crossed with that weird kid you knew at primary who pulled legs off spiders for fun – two months later, Paul was leading a patrol somewhere in Poland when he had his right elbow shattered by a rifle bullet. Medical science being not so good, the only solution was amputation. War being also not so good, about three seconds post-amputation the Russians invaded the field hospital and took everyone prisoner. And you thought you were having a bad week.

In that situation, it’s sink or swim, or more accurately for Paul Wittgenstein, ‘suicide like your older brothers or learn how to play the piano with the left hand’. Paul chose option 2. During a year of being shuttled round POW camps in Russia (including one with particularly horrific conditions, including random horsewhippings and solitary confinement for making jokes), he refined his technique by playing on a keyboard marked out in chalk on a crate top, and occasionally a real piano when he could get at one. And eventually, Pope Benedict XV (I wondered when the previous Pope Ben was around, and if he looked like he ate babies too – he doesn’t, by the way) manage to pull some strings to get officers repatriated, and back came Paul. Near the end of 1915. It took that long.

Now there was a composer who hung round the Wittgenstein place like he’d been adopted. There’s a bust of him near the old Konvikt school in Vienna, and his name was Josef Labor; he was old and blind and lively-haired and wrote exactly the sort of music that appealed to Paul, enabling him to make a comeback. And when Labor eventually pegged out, Paul simply used his giant bank balance (one of the things that made him immensely attractive to women, along from his handsome face, his mad piano skills and his empty sleeve) to pay lots and lots of other composers to write music for him. Ravel. Prokofiev. Britten. Korngold. Strauss. And he was very successful in his profession.

It didn’t seem to matter at first when one of Ludwig’s old classmates – a chap called Adolf – was made the German chancellor. He was doing a lot better than Ludwig, who made a hobby out of self-flagellation, often accompanied by his boyfriends, in between writing his philosophical works. Paul was giving piano lessons at the time, and fell in love with one of his pupils, Hilde, (whose father was incidentally younger than Paul himself), whom he impregnated almost immediately judging by the date of birth of their first child. They got on very well.

But then there was the Anschluss. Ludwig meandered off to England – again. (After all, the philosophers were talkative and the boys were ever so pretty.) Paul and the rest of the Wittgensteins were still in Vienna. The NSDAP ordered them to fly a Hakenkreuz flag above Casa Wittgenstein, so Paul apologised to all his pupils profusely when they came over for lessons. And only then did the Nazis check out the Wittgenstein family tree...

Paul, Ludwig et al had been brought up Catholic, with a bit of the old Viennese anti-Semitism going on in the backs of their brains. Their parents had been Christians too. The grandparents – well, three of them had started out Jewish, so by the twisted Nazi logic that suddenly meant that Paul and his siblings were also Jewish. And therefore they were all-of-a-sudden persona non grata (or whatever the plural of that is). Some of Paul’s more… ardent students just stopped coming now they knew their teacher was Jewish, and he got fired from his official music-teaching job and rendered unable to perform in public. But worse was to come for Paul. He was now guilty of Rassenschande – race defilement – as his pretty young girlfriend had now borne him a second little girl, and in a stunning illustration of the complete stupidity of the “Who’s Jewish now?” laws, the older girl wasn’t counted as Jewish, but the younger one was, simply by virtue of their dates of birth. Oh, and by this time, they’d forbidden him to fly the Nazi flag as he was now “Jewish”, which must have been the only thing about the whole mess that was OK by him.

His siblings weren’t making matters any easier. Paul was frantic – they were apathetic, and just wanted to stay put and pretend the whole thing wasn’t happening by bribing the Nazis to stay away. So Paul upped and left, packing his own suitcase for the very first time in his life and heading off to America. Alone. Not because he wanted to abandon his girlfriend and children (as Germans, they’d be safer there than he would be), but because he had to get out of the country. The country that he’d once fought for – losing his arm in the process – now rejected him because of some distant ancestors’ religion. I mean, to me, this is fucking nuts. But it made sense to a frightening amount of people way back in the late thirties, so off went Paul, sans family, girlfriend and kids, to America.

Eventually Hilde and the kids joined him, he wrote a lot of letters to the German government so that his siblings would be regarded as “Mischlinge” – half-Jews – and would only have to pay a lot of money to the Nazis to not be shipped off to a concentration camp, and eventually he settled down in New York, started performing again and giving lessons and made a few recordings. But he never talked to his siblings again – that was how bad it got between them. Not even Ludwig. Alas. And finally he went and died of prostate cancer, in the days before there were public awareness campaigns to go to the doctor if you’re a man over fifty and have difficulty urinating. Just like Ludwig.

So I guess if you were a Wittgenstein, it’s cancer or suicide. (In my family it’s heart disease… but it’s important to note that for 200 years before I was born there were no other females, so with the decreased female incidence of heart disease I will hopefully live more-or-less forever.) Thank goodness this one was cancer!

I mentioned Paul Wittgenstein made recordings. I downloaded one after a lot of Googling – cost me £5 but I figured it was worth it, just so that I could listen to a pianist who definitely wasn’t cheating when playing Ravel’s concerto. That’s the best piano piece written for Wittgenstein. It’s angry. It’s beautiful. It’s everything I want out of a good piano concerto. And I’ve definitely heard better recordings than Wittgenstein’s. To be fair, the recording was made when he practically had one foot in the grave – or at any rate when he wasn’t in the full flush of his one-handed piano playing career. Apparently he was magnificent in his prime, but bootlegging concerts in the early 30s wasn’t really possible. So I ended up listening to a recording made in the 1950s. My goodness, he pounds on the keys in a way that would make Ravel rotate in his grave so rapidly that the resulting kinetic energy, if transformed into electrical energy, could power the street lamps of Paris for a year.

OK, I’m drawing the long bow. I listened to it again after a couple of days of not reading about Mr. Wittgenstein, and you know what? I liked it better. It’s hard to believe that the piano is being played by a guy with just a left hand, but then again I suspect that was what both Ravel and Wittgenstein were going for. Wittgenstein was a proud man and a serious musician – judging by the book – and would have rather died than become a sideshow attraction. And Ravel delivered the goods – a piano concerto that couldn’t have been any more difficult or more virtuosic if it had been written for two hands. It’s just a shame that Wittgenstein didn’t have the technique to match his courage. Because, let’s face it, you have to have balls (I mean that in the purely metaphorical sense) to decide that you’re going to be a concert pianist in the first place, let alone one with just the one arm. And apparently some people went to Wittgenstein’s concerts and came out blissfully unaware that the pianist had an empty right sleeve – exactly his aim.

As I went on through the CD – there were some pieces by Max Reger, a forgettable composer; an arrangement of a Schubert Lied that would have made old Franz do acrobatics with his eyebrows, and Brahms’ arrangement of the Bach chaconne written for Clara Schumann after she hurt her right hand but wanted to keep practising – I decided he wasn’t so bad after all. Definitely listenable. Interesting is about as far as I’m willing to go, to be brutally honest. Thing is, I was forewarned, and although Wittgenstein was very good for a one-armed pianist, had he been slightly, shall we say, luckier in the Great War, he’d be a complete nonentity as a two-armed pianist, at least in my opinion. And had he been an impoverished one-armed pianist, he’d be naught but a piteous curiousity. Thank goodness we can leave history the way it is, and make Paul Wittgenstein fortunate!

There’s also a romance novel written about Paul Wittgenstein, about being the operative word. I located the book – The Crown Prince by John Barchilon - in a second-hand bookshop and secreted it in the middle of some other books in order not to embarrass myself – not that I have anything against romance novels, but it looked like one of the family sagas my mother is addicted to. She can’t read a book unless it’s written in a pedestrian style and written by someone who had a remarkably shitty life.

It’s… ah, well. See, I think I might have quite enjoyed it either if the author had attempted to stick to the facts of Paul’s life (below I will list what is correct and what drove me nuts), or if the author had not used Paul’s name. Smashing a rather melodramatic made-up story into a real person’s name just doesn’t sit well with me at all. After all, the book’s story wasn’t exactly boring; it’s no Twilight. There was a war on and everything, and a plot of sorts, and the author, far from chickening out on climaxes, seemed to enjoy them rather too much. And there’s sex in it, some of it rather fetishist-like (I recall thinking “Wait, wouldn’t that hurt? What about his phantom limb?”). If the writing style hadn’t been so stilted in some places (and not used Paul Wittgenstein’s name) it would have been an OK read. After all, I grasped from Smart Bitches Trashy Books that it’s not often you get a disabled hero in your average romance, and women are throwing themselves at this guy.

But Paul Wittgenstein led an interesting enough life anyway. He was alive, once, and I believe at least some of his children still are (and able to boast “Ludwig Wittgenstein was my uncle”.) He had musical tastes and a well-documented career and he was part of the Wittgenstein family, and it would, I think, have behoved the author to take notice of that. I am speaking mildly at this point. I read most of the book with a WTF expression on my face – Andy Hamilton-style eyebrows, the works.

Advice: If you’ve read this far, don’t make the Crown Prince purchase. Unless you really want Andy Hamilton-style eyebrows. But buy the House of Wittgenstein book, if you would like to reassure yourself that your family is indeed quite normal compared to some.