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@Purofilion  @Barnable   Thanks!  Good, good stuff . . .

My sister’s doing well.  The hospital is only a few blocks away, and I spent the afternoon there with her, cracking up each other and the nurses.  I think she’ll be going home in a day or two; then we start the re-orientation of her eating habits etc., and probably mine too since we two seem to have many of the same weak spots.  We’re just very very lucky that the typical jaw and left-arm pain woke her up, and the EMT’s got her to the hospital very fast: it was 4:30 a.m. on a Sunday morning, no traffic on the 30 mile stretch they had to cover.

Thanks for your good wishes!

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@purofilion  By all means, please do — I’ve heard this composer’s name, but somehow associated him with 17th c France; odd.

Re your teacher’s comment, though, I think a lot of young kids have experienced a broken heart, just not in a romantic context (yet).  I’ve seen recent research concluding that young people, right up through their late twenties, are still adding layers of “insulation” to the axons in their brains and so are still literally wired to *feel* stimuli and emotional responses with a power and immediacy that’s lost later in life.  This was in the context of trying to figure out why young people do idiotically risky and potential life-threatening things that they *know* perfectly well are exactly that.  The idea is that because of their extra-sharp receptivity, risky behavior can be overwhelmingly attractive to them even though rationally they *know* it’s deeply stupid to steer only with their knees at 90 mph, or swim in the irrigation ditch in storm season, etc.  I think the traumas of childhood can be as heart-breaking as any, just not as long lasting as when you’re older because the next wallop to come along is *also* larger than (adult) life; but those early memories stay very sharp, don’t they.

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@lisa  Yeah, on Layer-cake guy, he’s on Karn (I think) and disguised (?) as a Sister, so I think he’s revealed himself and is interrogating the real Sisters in a menacing way about the whereabouts of the Doctor — who may already have left them.  Apparently the Doctor really did have to go someplace else one way or another, because bad guys had already learned that he’s with the Sisters on Karn, and he wouldn’t want the Sisters endangered by continuing to protect him by hiding him.

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@purofilion   I think he’s okay with running, but he started S8 with a deliberately funny run with his arms down and his hands flared out a little, which some people called “the penguin run”; Armando Iannuci, I think, had pointed out that Capaldi tends to come up with a comical run for a comedic character (there’s a clip from TToI, think, of Malcolm Tucker running across an avenue in DC, very knees up and head up, very silly), and even as far back as “Local Hero” there’s a running down a hill away from the camera bit where he’s working his left arm like butter churn.  The penguin run is evident in some early episodes of S8, but I think it faded away as things got more serious.  I was glad to see it go, myself.

Anyway, I *hope* that’s all you saw there, not some real physiological problem — there’s a *lot* of running in DW in general, so he needs to be up for it.  Capaldi commented somewhere that he cancelled his gym membership during the filming of S8 (or maybe 9?) because all the activity on the show keeps him fit, no extra work-outs required.  Just by observation, it’s keeping him thin enough to look positively haggard sometimes, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the “cover” ring might need to be a half-size smaller, just to secure the wedding ring so it doesn’t fly off on its own with the momentum of a vigorous hand-gesture (as I’ve had happen after a weight-shrinking flu).

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LENIN, damn it, not Lenine.

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Oops — just checked, and “Now I’m ready” is on the trailer clip released Sept 10, I think, at about 0:18, and the background is not Karn (at least not what we see of Karn in the Prologue clip), but someplace unidentifiable because the entire background is obscured by a massive soviet poster featuring Lenine in heroic mode.  WTF?  Baffledom.

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@purofilion   Sibelius! — I lived that music as a kid (I mean, a pre-pubescent kid), via my own little tinny-voiced phonograph in my room.  Sibelius was what I found (and Liszt, Rachmaninoff, Brahms, some Tchaikovsky, and others) that helped me to hang onto my own dark tones while the grown-up around me were all telling me that I was a happy little girl, so why wasn’t I smiling all the time?  Love the angry and woeful Romantics?  Damn straight: they saved my sanity.  They kept me true.

 

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@lisa    I’m sticking with Davros. Because I think the Doctor is going to try
again to change history and it maybe likely to be something to do with changing Davros.
The sisters line ‘his servants seek you everywhere’ to me that probably means Daleks?

That one disguised as a Sister of Karn, but with a stratified face, says in a sinister tone, “Where is the Doctor?”  I’m guessing that this is one of the “servants” searching everywhere for Capdoc, so whatever sort of being the cloaked figure with the layer-cake face is, the “He” the Doctor is possibly going to see, maybe not til dealing with some other stuff first) it’s the kind of being that the “He” would employ as a servant.  Dalek?  TL?  ???

@bluesqueakpip  I have to admit if I’m wondering if this ‘Prologue’ is actually set near the finale for Series 9. Or maybe near the end of Episode 1 or something.

Yep, I agree — the “Prologue and Meditation” could be from many points in S9.  The possibilities are delightfully endless . . . oh, we are going to have a good time!

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So much good stuff here — !  Happy to have it.  Now I’d like to request any funny/macabre music you’ve got handy — my sister, who lives nearby and is turning 60 in a few weeks, had a coronary event in the early hours of this morning.  She’s okay — in hospital, with a stent, probably going home tomorrow with a stent, meantime wise-cracking the staff into hysterics to keep herself entertained.  I can’t exactly bring her chocolates, but I thought some music might be nice if I can get it off my computer and onto my iPod for her.

 

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@janetteb  He goes off to meditate, but I doubt that he’s really going to do that; he’s going to think out loud, and we’re going to listen in, so we get some idea of how he’s come from that high-spiritied departure with Clara for new adventures at the end of Last Xmas to what looks like hiding, or healing, or whatever, *without* Clara, with the sisterhood of Karn.  Clearly something has happened (Thing A) which is maybe a whole string of things that has led from LC to “The Planet”.

But something *else* (Thing B) has happened more recently leading to a potential and radical change: the Doctor decided whether or not to go and meet the person seeking him so forcefully.  That’s “Did something happen?  Recently?” indicating that his settled state of some sort of lone refuge here brought about by Thing A (possibly a whole series’ worth of adventures) has been breeched by Thing B — about which the Sisterhood knows nothing yet or she wouldn’t be asking him — and that’s shifted the balance so he’s thinking of leaving.

So, first this bit of set-up; then the actual “meditation” that will put us in the picture at least a bit regarding Thing A and also Thing B; and then — there’s a couple of seconds in one of the trailers, #3 I think, where we see the Doctor in this same setting (an underground lake and the surrounding rocky landscape?) and he says, to no one visible, “*Now* I’m ready.”

So yes, @purofilion — this fragment with the Sister is the set-up for the “meditation” that immediately follows it to make up the 10 minutes of this little prequel, and then we’re standing on the cliff’s edge poised for S9, episode 1a to take off on Saturday evening.

 

 

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@mudlark   “The pressure to conform” does show up as a problem with even our current examples of at least *trying* to be a Utopia, meaning Scandinavian countries.  If you read mystery novels from up there . . . also, of course, the failure to achieve this sort of “leveling”, since crime novels show you the elements of failure, exploitation, reactionary destructiveness, etc. as the faults in which crime grows and from which the push-back against utopian policies come.

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@arbutus  “Omelas” was exactly the story I was thinking of when I wrote that.

There’s been some evidence recently that polar bears have begun mating with northern browns (maybe grizzles?) producing blended offspring.  So maybe the great white bears have begun this genetic hiding thing in the face of pretty certain extinction of their present form as white, water-traveling big land predators in an Arctic landscape.   I hope biologists are doing studies of this — so far, I’ve only seen reportage from professional wildlife observers of one sort of another, but without specific genetic studies.  I just think the whole idea is astounding — and that if true, there may be other examples unearthed, once scientists start looking.

I’ll be watching the music thread, then!

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@purofilion  Sorry, my post above on S9 thread was for you (and also @lisa) except that I dropped an “o” out of your @!

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@purfilion  Yes, the voice — that anchored-low, slightly husky, raw-honey voice, that’s something new from him, I also think (though I’ve heard it in some lower-key interviews, and possibly in that “You want my job” speech to Ollie from the end of TToI, when he drops the terrier snarl for a minute).  Even my sister, who goes for a completely different body type (blocky, broad in the face — the ox model, Vincent D’Inofrio (sp?) for example) and not the long-bodied greyhound look that I like (e.g. Jeremy Irons, Capaldi) says, “Well there’s the voice . . . but he looks like vulture!”

Yah, well; strokes and folks.  But she watched this new bit, seen above, and I think she might be wavering . . . I’m not saying another word to her on the subject.  Curiosity and the draw of that voice might bring her round (if I can just keep my yap shut long enough).  You never know.

The “Meditation” is supposed to be broadcast in the US on BBCA on this Friday evening, setting up S9 episode 1 on Saturday.  My phone will be off the hook for a while.

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@mudlark   The Bone Clock has acquired a very good reputation; thanks for reminding of my intention of reading it.

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@purofilion   Yes, excellent: longer scenes and single takes give you breathing time.  I think if the actors are good enough, susceptible viewers breathe with them, which puts us right into the scene in an intimate way that feeds perception, rather than just the satisfaction of being entertained (though that, too, one hopes).  It’s like with reading, experienced readers often have a narrative voice that runs in the mind and that responds to the punctuation, given or implied, that tells them where to breathe.

Well, with really good stories, that’s how it works for me.  And that’s why one stage of the final polish of a story is to read it aloud to myself, making sure the breathing flows and doesn’t get hung up on the wrong punctuation, or on obscurity that makes the internal voice pause and say, “Huh?  What can *that* mean?”

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@levram   So true; happiness isn’t a story.  For a story, you need drama; for drama, you need challenges, not contentment.  That’s why SF writers rarely write Utopias — they turn into travelogs: “This is how we do our agriculture, so that the right foods are produced in the right quantities by people happy to spend their days weeding, hand-pollinating, etc.”  “This our school, where we teach how bad the old days were, and how to value all your classmates.”  Etc.  People who write Utopian stories usually write them in order to dig until the find the weak point in the system, where something is deeply unfair, exploitative, or doomed by the passage of time.  Even comedies need challenges: look at comic opera or operetta: everything is dandy, we all love our class system full of happy peasants and silly aristocrats, but Beppo, here, is miserable because he’s in love with Angelina, and she is promised to another!

Misery make a story go because it demands resolution into something less miserable.  You can even succeed with a story about *not* succeeding (Les Miserables, for instance).  But you need that challenge, to get your characters up off their arises in the first place.

 

 

 

 

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@arbutus  On modern music — I have a theory that when “serious” music went academic, becoming all about structure and math and producing the weirdest pitches and runs possible, the actual creative impulse in composers migrated to other venues where people would still listen to it and be enthusiastic about it or meh: film and TV scores; popular music groups deliberately incorporating symphonic or chamber elements recognizable by their sound, not some math formula; music for computer games; and things I haven’t thought of or remembered.  Endangered wolves in the northeast survive by cross-breeding with coyotes, emerging again when people are gone and there’s more big game around; endangered classical forms in music perhaps survive by cross-breeding with more popular forms and hiding themselves there until it’s save to come out . . .

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@mudlark  Thanks!  Just lost my grip there a bit, in the excitement — !

@bluesqueakpip  It’s the Portable CD Player of Rassilon.

Okay, it’s official: I love you.

 

 

 

 

 

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I’m trying to ramp my expectations down so I can actually pay attention to what happens on the screen — I think it’s going to be a hell of a great season, which will of course terribly disappoint the people who get their jollies by complaining about whatever the episodes should have been instead of what they are (“criticism”, weird idea of).

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@lisa  Yes, Old Clara was clearly in her eighties at least, and told the Doctor that 62 years had passed since they’d parted company at the end of DiH.  And yes, whoever asked, she still had the Dream crab on her face when the Doctor first removed the thing, revealing her (shocking to us, but not to him) old face.  So you’re saying that their “second chance” is built not on real experience of 62 years having passed, but a shared dream of 62 years having passed and a dream-resolution (in the Arctic and in Clara’s bedroom) of the mutual lies in the cafe scene at the end of DiH.  So everything that happened in Last Xmas was crab-induced dream experience until Clara “wakes up” the second time with her real-time young face again?

Then the last real thing prior to that (before the equally real final moment of Last Xmas) is — the Doctor leaving in the Tardis and Clara walking away, at the end of DiH; and the next real thing for both of them is “Am I young?!” and off they go for their second chance.

Great; I’ll take it, and thanks!

Ichi

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@arbutus  — well, John Cage’s argument is a simple and strong one — “If I put a frame around it, that makes it art”, with the frame being the recital hall, no musicians necessary (Warhol, with his soup cans, argues the same).  But that vast perspective leads into impossible places where art and philosophy overlap in waffle-y ways.  It’s kind of like that foreground/background stuff: I know at some level that anything is art if you are *looking* at it as art.  Um.  And?  Um.   Luckily, in the foreground I keep my favorite music, books, and pictures and my “arguments”, such as they are, for why they’re “good” rather than “bad” or “mediocre”.  Even though all that stuff shifts around with time and cultural styles etc. we can still have fun discussing our respective collections and rationales.  The background truth, though, remains what it was, as far as I can see.

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Um, somebody? Have the episode by episode discussions of S8 gone someplace new here?  They used to be listed on the  home page, I think, but now the only way I can find, say, “Flatline” is if somebody else has posted there recently and their post shows up on the “Activity” page.  ??

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It’s too much for me, guys.  I hope S9 will settle this question right off the bat: how much of the end of S8 (including Last Xmas) was real, and how much was dreaming?  The answer is crucial to where we go from here.

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Jones continues to be a witless snob; okay, long as I don’t have to read his stuff.  Gods, can you imagine T. Pratchett trying to sound like Henry James, of all people?  To please stuffy little mouthpieces like J. Jones?   Anybody here read any Henry James recently?  Yes, it’s art, sometimes, and for some people.  For others it’s a dreary school assignment; they’d prefer “Small Gods”.  Which is also art, if you think (as I often do) that art is how artistic people communicate their personal perceptions of the world for others to respond to, or not, as they choose.

Aesthetic choices vary with personal taste, the times, predominant styles, and tons of other stuff, but I think the underlying artistic purpose is constant: I want you to see some of what I see, feel some of what I feel, understand some of what my life has taught me — even if you shrug and move on, or toss my book across the room, or spray graffiti on my carved stones, or (best) set to work making some art that answers mine.  Henry James did that for readers, sometimes still does; Terry Pratchett did that, maybe more effectively, for more people of our time, and still does.  Does that make one better, a producer of “higher” art, than the other?  According to how many (or how few) readers read each one after he’s dead?   After he’s been dead for a century or more?  In 2075?  What?

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@pedant @purofilion  The whole saga is about loss, once you’re grown up enough to see it (the writers certainly do — they’re all roughly of middle age, aren’t they?).  Anything you lose is gone forever, because of Time’s Arrow and whatsis’s river that you can’t step in twice; except that as the Doctor + companion, you can go back for a do-over and try to get it right this time.  Only anything you gain that way, or any other way, you subsequently lose again one way or another.  Entropy rules.

A time traveler with a huge lifespan would have to be aware of this, unless he were stupid, rigid-minded, or just too young to have noticed yet.  The Doctor, knowing it very well, must operate on a double level (foreground: he saves people — background: they’ll all die sometime anyway) in order to act at all.  Same for humans: we all know that we will die, and memories of us will die, and given sufficient time anything we accomplished will die too.  So we choose a conscious setting for our minds, “this thing is very important to do right now/for the next generation/for the defense of Truth etc.” and pretend not to *know* about Entropy (or that Entropy doesn’t exist or matter because some religious construct defeats or abolishes it), because otherwise there’d be no point in doing anything beyond just following the animal instincts of our bodies until the bodies keel over and die.

The reason, IMO, that “Doctor Who” doesn’t remain at the level of, say, “Lost in Space” (an old kids’  adventure show about a Robinson Crusoe type family and an silly villain), is that the Doctor can see Time in its full expanse.  Compared to the almost infinite stretch of time (“almost”, assuming a beginning and maybe inferring an ending), it doesn’t matter whether the Doctor can live five thousand years, or twenty thousand.  Loss will happen, all along the way and of course at the end.

Maybe that’s what a Time Lord should be: not someone who can control time (the Doctor certainly can’t) or somehow live outside it, but someone who can acknowledge the reality of Entropy, and still rocket around performing heroic deeds of passionate conviction.  He’d be a Lord of Time by being lord of his own darkest awareness and the fears that come with it, not letting those things stop him.  His heroism is the courage to act and care whether his actions are “good” or not (even though in the long run, all is always lost).

Isn’t that what the Doctor originally objected to on Gallifrey — that knowing all, the TLs proscribed “interfering” to make things better?  Okay, that’s me done.  Gonna take a walk.

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@purofilion  Even in the Christmas Special there was a terrible pathos: Clara, still under the influence of the ‘face huggers’ believed she’d lived a fortunate life of travel and teaching: learning to fly planes, visiting every country on the planet. Luckily (perhaps) the Doctor brought her back to the present, to her youth, but what dangers lie ahead for her? Perhaps worse dangers and fears than what her faux memories intended in Last Christmas.

But how much of “Last Xmas” was dreams?  I thought the 62 yrs of Old Clara’s life were real, until the Doctor went back in time and turned those years (lived by both of them, apart from each other) into an alternative-reality dead end that could never happen.  But I admit, I’m still very hazy about what was real (if anything) of “Las Xmas”, what was dreams, and at what point dreams and reality parted company.

 

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“Did something happen?”

“No.”

“Was it recent?”

“Yes.”

What a hook!

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@purofilion  Yes, I live in New Mexico — we came here in 1970 from New York, stayed ever since.  I was at the local SF convention, small until George Martin flew into the stratosphere with GoT; he came on Saturday, mobs of orderly and excited fans, some good panel discussions.  An SF convention *ought* to be a Festival of Dangerous Ideas, but rarely is, and never with public recognition — it’s just SF, you know, kids’ stuff, action films, and trivia.  Says a culture that’s out taking photos of Pluto using space-faring robots . . .

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@whisht  Or colonies of living things that the Tardis transports but keeps hidden from the Doctor for its own reasons (our current refugee crisis comes to mind — maybe refugees the Doctor doesn’t approve of).  Why not?  Since they went to the trouble of establishing the Tardis as a personality, with goals of its own and immense powers of self-transformation and internal rearrangement, why not put it into play more in story plots and arcs?  The writers made it into a character — maybe it’s got projects of its own, from which the Doctor’s requirements distract it from time to time (as it were), so you wouldn’t have to use it like an independent character all the time (some stories might get too cluttered), but when you want to — well, anything goes, until events establish rules, eh?

I’m probably interested in this because I’m reading an Iain Banks novel of The Culture, which is full of sentient machines and their desires and friendships etc.

 

 

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@purofilion  One of the elements of the show that I’ve seen exploited with glee and imagination in some fanfic is the enormousness of the interior of the Tardis and its changing variety, since some writers have the Tardis adding and shifting variously purposed “rooms” around more or less at will.  Does that happen in the show?  Is most of the Tardis held in a state of potentiality, actualized and de-actualized in bits as needed, so the mass of the entire thingie is never fully materialized?  Doctor: “I’ve got a swimming pool around here someplace” (I think that’s an actual line, but no idea from where) would mean either that the Doctor could set off from the bridge in any direction, and the Tardis would manifest a swimming pool down the corridor and little lights lighting the way with labels, “This way to the swimming pool”; or that the Doctor never bothers looking for the swimming pool because it’s a fixed part of the Tardis, shown in the floor (?) plans, and lies two or three leagues west of the Bridge because the Tardis is so huge, and by the time you got there you’d be ready for dinner instead . . . ?  Something as crass as moving sidewalks, to get around?  Segways?

Heck, aliens (of some kind that the Tardis likes the company of, or has been bamboozled by) could have colonized whole “wings” of the Tardis, and you’d never know because you never *get* to that Italian hill village tucked away in sector 20, or pod 90, or whatever — ?

I’m seeing the Tardis from the outside, inside my head that is, as a cloud of mostly unrealized potential space and purpose that extends a sort of pseudopod with the Bridge chamber at the end of it to the surface of a planet so as not to flatten the place.  Kind of like a dialog bubble in a comic book, with the little spike that connects it to whichever character is speaking serving as the extension that ends in the Tardis as entry-point and command outpost to the whole thing.

Maybe I should just go back to sleep.  It’s 1:45 a.m. September 10 here in New Mexico.  But maybe much more is known about the Tardis through BF and the books and all?  I’ve got no time for any of that, so I wouldn’t know.

 

 

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@purofilion  So good, on the virtues of ItFotN — yes.  I like it better now than I did originally.  The lighting and the setting remind me strongly of the way my artist dad illustrated the kid-books he worked on for Little Golden Books — the shifting dapple of light that shows up best in watercolors by a deft hand, and the sparkling atmosphere that this evokes.  The kids reminded me of what it was like to be a kid attending to kid-things while the grown ups, sometimes seeming tall as trees themselves, wove their own impenetrable purposes among themselves but also enclosing (protecting, caging) us.  I’m reading a YA novel by a colleague here who began as an illustrator and is now writing as well, and it has some of that rapid shimmer to it, so maybe these things are bleeding together for me.  Especially since she has packs of convincingly lively and impudent children pelting through the story six ways from Sunday, dappling it with brightness themselves.

Season 9 is almost upon us; and I have a good, good book to read and help promote.  Good times, happy night!

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@purofilion  In the case of Mr. Rochester, I’d say in reality he’d be about as attractive a romantic partner as any arrogant, self-centered putz flaunting his romantical locks (that will surely never fall out) while  and casually, coldly confident of his general dominance.  What he gains by getting his comeuppance for his bad behavior (losing his home and being blinded and partially crippled) isn’t virtue, but humility.  Jane was the humble but forthright dependent.  Now *he* is reduced to humble dependency, which at least has the potentiality to develop in him virtues similar to Jane’s — at least if you subscribe to the Victorian delusion that suffering ennobles, a handy justification for not bothering helping actual sufferers.  In my experience, suffering is just as likely to leave sufferers prone to spreading pain to others as best they can (misery loves company), at least for a time.

Been out sick, all, but finally feeling human again and trying to catch up a bit — meantime welcome, new members!

ichi

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@purofilion Jeez, I actually *forgot* that odd switch in meanings of “public school’ and “private school” — I have either a cold, an actual flu-bug, and have been sleeping for days, only getting up to feed the cats and go buy soup. So, some people here have seen the Magician’s Apprentice, and must now keep mum until after public release on the 19th? Oh, poor yous — my hear bleeds for ya! Grrr! But never mind — I’ve got my ticket for the 3-D recap on the 15th, and after that it’s just a short canter home to the 19th.

On schools — the (defunct) one I taught at was wonderful and quirky; nobody blinked an eye when I had my 9th grade core class read “Gods, Graves, and Scholars” for an Ancient History unit, or turn The Odyssey into a (black and white) graphic novel.  I hear from my kids now and then — Henry W., who looked exactly like one of those little Sumerian figurines and is now a psychiatrist in Manhattan, and T.F., who went the flower child route and now lives on some sort of commune in New England and pops up on my fb page now and then, for example.  My gods, we had a roaring good time!  If not for them, I would never have come across (in my prep reading) one of those poems from the Ancient World (in this case, Sumeria) that starts, more or less, “Why are the children of today so feckless and disrespectful?  And as for the life of the intellect — !”  Well, we can all fill in the gaps.

My husband went to one of the “posh”, expensive schools, and last time we went to a reunion, some fool in a straw boater and blue blazer stood up and harangued us all about how the “White race” (!) and its virtues are being swamped by tides of immigrants; he’d read a book, you see.  Nobody told him to can it, although the air was thick with discreet embarrassment, and eventually he ran down and sat down.  Stevie loved the place, in memory anyway, and was completely oblivious and impervious to the racist/classist poisons on offer there, along with an excellent traditional upper class education.

Hell. Off topic, and, worse, eyes are closing again; back later!

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@purofilion   The private school I taught in was a bit of a special case; no uniforms, that’s for sure.  It was in Manhattan, at the north end of Central Park, bordering Harlem, and it was pretty bare bones.  Most of the staff were old commies, as I recall, and most had had careers in the “real world” (the maths guy had been a printer, had gone back to school to get his ed degree, e.g.).  Most of them were older than the norm, and all the ones I knew had passion in plenty.  The school had originally been the student-teaching “model” school attached to NYU, I think, and I was placed there for my teaching term by the NYU School of Ed.  The kids were mostly West Side professional people’s kids and scholarship kids from the neighborhood, not the children of the rich.  They were smart, funny kids who taught me why the Vietnam war was a terrible mistake.  So it was an unusual place, nothing like your standard prep outfit (although most of our kids did go on to college).

It died some time in the eighties, I think, combined with another dying private school.  This was during the bottoming out of NYC, when everyone with kids who could flee to the suburbs did so.  I was gone by then, but I do miss the place.  There’s no argument to make, actually; it was small, but great, and flourished in its time.  I was proud to be a part of it — but even then, living in a one-room apartment on W. 86 on a salary of $7,500 a year was a dead end.  If there are any school like it anywhere still, I’d love to know about it.

Anyway, I’m very glad to hear that your tough schools in Brisbane had what you’d been looking for — public rather than private schools, I’m assuming?

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@purofilion   Okay, you’re right; and I did read some Big Books back in college etc., and enjoyed them.  But lately, I’ve had no urge to return to them for a re-read, or pick up a Tom Wolfe novel for the first time.  Might have something to do with, um, the prospect before me, now that I’m in my mid-seventies.  When I was a student teacher, my Master Teacher was a guy who re-read “Moby Dick” every year.  He was crazy, but also brilliant, the kind of teacher you only find (at Secondary level) in a private school, I think.  I have no idea what I learned from him, but I think I learned a lot.  On the other hand, I have no idea what I learned from reading “Moby Dick”, either, but probably . . .

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@arbutus  Sounds to me as if Jones is an elitist goon, doing a bit of very conscious shit-stirring just for the hell of it.  Well, now *he’ll* never get knighted — the Queen is a Pratchett fan.

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@missy  Maybe he was thinking, “Wow, that sure felt better than when Clara nearly smacked my head off inside that Dalek!  Must have a chat with her about this, sometime when we’re not busy liberating a dungeon.”

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@purofilion  Might be Proudhon, might not be; wouldn’t want to jump to conclusions . . . Darned if I know!  I’ll look it up sometime *when I’m not catching a god damned cold*!  I think I picked up a cold at the convention — will go tend to trying to fight it off, but I think it’s already got a solid hold.

I won’t do 600.  If you can’t tell your story in half of that length, IMO you are *probably* a pretentious, self-indulgent blatherer in love with the “sound” of your own words and in desperate want of a strict, sharp-minded editor ruthlessly wielding a red pencil.  Or even a really good author full of wonderful ideas that get buried in unnecessary floods of repetition, side-issues, explanation, etc.  As for me as a reader, why slog through one 600 page tome, when in the same limited supply of time I could read 4-6 books full of different ideas and perceptions, by authors with a better sense of how to use language to communicate rather than impress?  Or maybe I’m just too impatient . . .

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@lisa  That arched gateway stands in what looks like a depopulated war zone, with the TARDIS knocked or landed crookedly next to it (but with its top light still on and no visible damage.  But what we see through the archway is a daytime desert, all sunlight, sand, and rock — not, it seems to me, a very hostile prospect in its own right, not a refuge from the gloomy foreground.  I read that instant as a look into an abandoned transfer-point, no longer in use because it doesn’t get you anywhere better than where you are already.

Unless, of course, the desert is an illusion, or a momentary stepping stone to yet another transfer, to something better.

Or, the whole system is kaput, battered to bits or self-destroyed, leaving gateways to ruin everywhere and noting but . . .

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@whisht  Oh, no apologies, please!  You are addressing a champion forgetter here, so no complaints either way — though humor and music are surely always welcome (I read “painful humor” as laughing til your belly aches).

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@mudlark  Thanks for the recce; I’ll check it out.  Mieville is brilliant, passionately political, and well worth his reputation, so it’s bound to be worth a try.  If Embassytown is an early work of his, it might be more attractive to me; I think Mieville, an uncommon writer, has followed the common path of writing bigger, longer, more baroque books with time, a trend that generally puts me off.  It always feels like padding a story and showing off to me, although taking on more complex issues is a perfectly valid reason to write that way, so I’m just speaking from my own limitations here.  But I’ve always been (or anyway seen myself as) a writer about the glories of the garden, not a writer about the intricate beauties of the stained-glass door through which one sees the garden.

Jonathan Jones sounds like an agent provocateur as well as a bloody idiot, ‘scuse my French.  How old is this guy?  Not a youngster, I’ll bet, since foolish as young people can be, there really is no fool like an old fool.  He only deprives himself of joy, while spray-painting himself with concrete  in public.

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@janetteb Deftly done indeed!  I always thought it best not to trust that Kropotkin — I bet *he* had property (I do, so I know the feeling of knowing better but being unable, for many reasons all as good as any, to do damn all about it).  Such is life here on the physical plane — impossible to perfect, or even fix up a bit, it seems.  Even the Doctor cannot beat entropy, and I ain’t him.

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@mudlark  I haven’t read the Mieville book — definitely should.  I got well into some of the later work before I realized that it really isn’t for me — way to baroque in ways that just turn me off (too many fiddly bits — I go more for stripped down, myself; it’s probably that damned impatience again!).

As for the STFU feminists, hell, maybe they’re mostly pretty young — or maybe even more pissed off than my cohort was back in the seventies because of how backward and under attack everything is now.  I just hate to see them passing up really good work because somebody in their outfit poked some holes in it (that are to a great extent only holes at all from a narrow, squinty, outraged point of view that short-circuits serious thinking hard and for yourself).  I believe Valente began writing with SF/supernatural romances, which she might have to defend pretty hard in gender terms if they were criticized this way now . . .

In any event, at least she has the option of growing up sufficiently to look back and see what sort of deeper-level work her one-size-fits-all prejudices cost her — or, on the other hand, not.

 

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@arbutus   I really appreciated his cold, calm survivalist attitude in the face of Ross’s death – there is no one with whom to plead or argue, so he doesn’t waste time sobbing but takes steps to save the rest of them. I loved his absolute lack of filters. I realize that these things are what many people found off-putting, but I actually warmed to them

Yes!  A cold and bracing breeze, that was, a real waker-upper.  Not sure I loved it, but I certainly did appreciate it.

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@janetteb  Thanks, but I’m just rephrasing the Russian guy — Kropotkin? — who said it so much more succinctly:  “Property is theft”.  He was right then, and he’s still right, for all the good it will ever do.

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@arbutus  Too sad, but that’s f**king capitalism for you — wherever the god damn super rich vultures see something that people are enjoying, they swoop in and grab that thing, suck all the quality out of it (quality is expensive, after all; junk is cheaper to make), and then sell it back to people under a new label and double the price.  Quality for us is converted into more money for them.  It’s the economics of evil elves: they replace the gold of quality with changelings made of shit, salting away the difference in value in untaxable bank accounts off-shore, or in the next big project designed to obliterate the next quality target for profit.

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@missy   No Tardis in sight at the con — except on t-shirts and the like — but it was fun anyway.  I did a couple of panels (one on SF/F cliches we’d like to see done away with for good, like the robots desperate to become human, the aliens who *all* fall hard for Beethoven and/or punk rock even though their entire sensory system is supposedly completely different than ours, and deserted alien ships that humans somehow know *exactly* how to operate as soon as they step onto the “bridge” (*must* every ship have a bridge, for starters?).  Then one on political systems (theirs and ours) among supernaturals (vampires, werewolves, everybody but those dumb damn zombies), which got serious because of the attempted take-over of the Hugo Awards a couple of weeks ago by a reactionary splinter group of SF authors (the “Sad” or “Rabid Puppies”), so that was fun and interesting as well.  Saw some old friends, chatted a bit, came home to sleep a lot.

And there goes another year.

Oh, yes, a young feminist firebrand, Catherine Valente, threw off a random sneer at DW, faulting it for what I guess was the departure of Donna the companion — “. . . and the woman who acquires so much of the lead man’s mental powers that it’s going to drive her crazy, so they just take it all back so she can go on living  her limited life” or something like that.  I didn’t bother trying to discuss it — the whole discussion was in full swing and I didn’t want to de-rail it, and she was one of the GOH’s, so there was no way to have a quiet conversation somewhere — but I’m sure she’s one of the STFUmoffat gang, so no point.

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@missy   I love it too.  It has a for-the-kids flavor that I like just fine, still having a fair amount of kid alive in me.

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@purofilion  That’s how I feel about the TL’s — good riddance.  There has to be lots more to Gallifrey than that lot, for the Doctor to give a damn one way or the other whether he ever gets back there or not, seems to me.

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