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Penny Dreadful

Posted in Literature, Television with tags , , , , , , , , on October 1, 2024 by telescoper

The other day I was in the local library and walked past the DVD collection on the way to checking out a couple of books. I noticed the boxed set of the first series of Penny Dreadful which was first broadcast in 2014. Ten years is quite a short time for me to catch up with things so I decided to borrow it. I’m glad I did because I thought it was excellent.

It’s hard to describe what Penny Dreadful is about without making it seem absurd, but it’s a horror drama based in Victorian London that features many characters from fiction of that period, including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, and numerous others from Bram Stoker’s Dracula including Professor van Helsing and Mina Harker. There are some originals too: Ethan Chandler, a rodeo performer, and the enigmatic Vanessa Ives. These characters join forces with Malcolm Murray who is attempting to find his daughter Mina (the name of the principal female character in Dracula). Mina is the MacGuffin but the quest to find her is mostly sidelined by other plots.

The title of course refers to the “Penny Dreadful“, a form of cheap fiction that was very popular in Victorian London and which often included a supernatural element, as well as lots of gory violence, as does the TV series. Oscar Wilde’s A Picture of Dorian Gray wasn’t a penny dreadful (nor were Frankenstein and Dracula for that matter) but the mix of characters, both mundane and supernatural, is a very ingenious concoction. It was fun trying to spot the literary references and quotations.

It’s also a bit raunchy in places, although when Dorian Gray was about to get it on with hunky cowboy Ethan Chandler, it cut immediately to the closing credits so, disappointingly, we didn’t see any actual rumpy pumpy.

Anyway, it’s a superb cast including Timothy Dalton as Malcolm Murray, Rory Kinnear as The Creature (from the Frankenstein story), and Eva Green as Vanessa Ives. A young Olly Alexander plays the vampire’s familiar Fenton. It’s beautifully photographed, and the sets are a visual feast for lovers of Victoriana. There are one or two anachronisms in the language and setting, but you have to cut a story like this a bit of slack. For example, the Grand Guignol, which supplies a subplot, was really a Parisian phenomenon.

I’ve seen some criticisms of the plotting, as the episodes don’t really resolve: the next one often starts a new thread rather than tying up the existing loose ends. I didn’t actually mind that at all. It seemed to me that this gives it a dreamlike or rather nightmarish quality.

Anyway, I enjoyed this series a lot and I’ll definitely look out for the other two series, as they may well offer excellent binge viewing during the dark autumn months.

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Murder before Evensong by The Reverend Richard Coles

Posted in Literature, Television with tags , , , , , , , , on July 19, 2024 by telescoper

The Reverend Richard Coles (no relation), former Communard, ordained priest, broadcaster and TV celebrity recently turned his hand to writing murder mysteries. I bought his first crime novel, Murder Before Evensong, featuring Canon Daniel Clement, a couple of years ago but only got around to reading it recently. It caught my eye for two reasons, one that I am quite partial to whodunnits, and the other that I read and enjoyed the first volume of the author’s autobiography, Fathomless Riches, which showed him to be a very good writer.

As you might have guessed, Murder Before Evensong, is a kind of homage to the old-school Agatha Christie village murder typical of the Miss Marple stories. Murder at the Vicarage came immediately to mind when I first saw the book, but the story is not set so far in the past – more eighties than thirties. Richard Coles is also far wittier than Agatha Christie, with a definite touch of PG Wodehouse in his style. When I got into the book it reminded me very much of the original Midsomer Murders novels written by Caroline Graham, which I think are excellent; with somewhat whimsical plots, and populated with somewhat eccentric characters; the long-running TV series has long since run out of ideas, and is now tired and formulaic, but the books on which it is based are very good indeed. Like the original Inspector Barnaby stories, Murder Before Evensong is very funny in places, but less of a parody and more of an affectionate tribute to the genre. Coles also writes movingly about grief, and its effect on a close-knit rural community, no doubt informed by his own personal life and experiences as a parish priest. Canon Clement obviously has a lot of Richard Coles in him, including a love of dachsunds.

It’s difficult to review a murder mystery without giving a way the plot, so I’ll just say that it is well constructed. I narrowed the list of possibilities down to two very early on, and was proven right, but I didn’t really get the motive right.

Anyway, it’s an enjoyable read and recommended for enthusiasts. I gather that more Canon Clement stories are on the way. That reminds me of a line in an episode of Midsomer Murders, when Barnaby is joined by a new Detective Sergeant, just up from London, who is immediately plunged into the investigation of a killing spree. He turns to his Chief Inspector and says words to the effect of ‘For a small village there are a lot of murders around here’ to which Barnaby raises an eyebrow and says ‘Yes, that has been remarked upon…’

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An Leabharlann

Posted in Biographical, History, Irish Language, Literature, Maynooth, Poetry with tags , , , on July 15, 2024 by telescoper

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, over the past year or so I’ve been trying to catch up on my reading. My stack of books I’ve bought but never read is now down to half-a-dozen or so.

With sabbatical drawing to a close,  the next major life even appearing on the horizon is retirement. Since that will involve a considerable reduction in income, and consequently money to buy books, and my house already has quite a lot of books in it, I thought I’d join the local public library so that when I’ve cleared the backlog of bought books, I’ll read books from the library instead.

With that in mind, I just joined the public library on Main Street, Maynooth, which is only about  15 minutes’ walk from my house. It’s a small branch  library but is part of a larger network across County Kildare, with an extensive online catalogue from which one can acquire books on request. All this is free of charge.

Once I got my card, I had a quick look around the Maynooth branch. It has a good collection of classic literature (including poetry) as well as Irish and world history, which will keep me occupied for quite a while. The normal loan  period is 3 weeks, which provides an incentive to read the book reasonably quickly.

I borrowed books in large quantities from public libraries when I was a child. I’m actually looking forward to getting into the library habit again.

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Bloomsday Barcelona

Posted in Barcelona, LGBTQ+, Literature with tags , , , , , , on June 16, 2024 by telescoper

So it’s June 16th which means it is Bloomsday. I looked around for ways to celebrate this day in Barcelona and found that there is a Irish bar on La Rambla called Bloomsday. When I went there, though, I was disappointed to find it not only closed, but apparently abandoned:

Barcelona gets a mention – just one – in James Joyce’s Ulysses:

Noon slumbers. Kevin Egan rolls gunpowder cigarettes through fingers smeared with printer’s ink, sipping his green fairy as Patrice his white. About us gobblers fork spiced beans down their gullets. Un demi sétier! A jet of coffee steam from the burnished caldron. She serves me at his beck. Il est irlandais. Hollandais? Non fromage. Deux irlandais, nous, Irlande, vous savez ah, oui! She thought you wanted a cheese hollandais. Your postprandial, do you know that word? Postprandial. There was a fellow I knew once in Barcelona, queer fellow, used to call it his postprandial. Well: slainte! 

I can confirm that there is no shortage of queer fellows here, but I’ll have to have my lunch before I can have a postprandial but slainte! to you too.

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The Children of Men by P.D. James

Posted in Biographical, Literature with tags , , , , , , , on April 28, 2024 by telescoper

When I finished reading Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James I realized that there was one other book by the same author that I had never read, the dystopian thriller The Children of Men. I bought the above edition about five years ago, but the novel was first published in 1992.

The premise of this story, set in the (then future) 2021 is that, in 1995, for reasons unknown, the entire human race suddenly lost the ability to reproduce. The book makes no attempt to explain the origins of this mass infertility, and it is a conceit that I found very implausible, but I did manage to suspend my disbelief enough to engage with the author’s ideas about what a society without children might be like. That is basically what the first half of the book tries to do. It’s an interesting idea and what develops is not the kind of post-apocalyptic scenario that has been written about many times before.

In 2021 England is ruled by a dictator, called the Warden, by the name of Xan. He happens to be the cousin of the principal protagonist, Theo. The Powers That Be introduce the concept of a Quietus, at which elderly people are forced to commit mass suicide. A penal colony is set up on the Isle of Man where prisoners are dumped and left to fend for themselves. As the population ages, schools and colleges close, buildings are left to decay, and as numbers decrease people are forced to move to larger towns, the only places where services and utilities can be maintained.

One thing that struck me reading this in 2024 is that the author did not foresee any of the technological advances that were to occur between 1995 and 201. The existence of the internet or even mobile phones would have had significant implications for the plot.

The novel is split into two parts, Book 1 (Omega) and Book 2 (Alpha), and the first part is largely devoted to describing the decay and hopelessness of a society without children. I found it rather heavy-handed, with too much sermonizing. While Book 1 verges on a sort of allegory, no doubt inspired by the author’s own Christian faith, n Book 2 the story becomes a well-plotted thriller. After witnessing the horror of a Quietus, Theo joins a small group of dissidents based in Oxford who carry out a campaign to disrupt such events and think that Theo’s relationship to the Warden might be useful in effecting change at the top. As well as being Xan’s cousin, Theo used to work for Government as an adviser to the Warden.

The group is, however, rumbled and its members have to flee into the countryside. Along the way we find that one of their number, a woman by the name of Julian, is pregnant. Fortunately another member of the group, Miriam, is a midwife (although she obviously hasn’t practiced for 25 years). We learn the identify of the father of Julian’s child but not the reason why she has conceived when apparently nobody else on the planet can. Obviously the Alpha in the title of the second book refers to this child. I won’t say how it all finishes, except that the ending is ambiguous.

The fugitives-on-the-run part of the story in Book 2 is very well crafted and genuinely exciting, but the pregnancy adds yet another level of implausibility to a plot that seemed to me already very contrived. Although it is a page-turner I found it ultimately unsatisfying.

P.S. I understand there is a film based on the book, but I haven’t seen it.

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Come in, Barcelona…

Posted in Architecture, Barcelona, Biographical, Books with tags , , , on October 14, 2023 by telescoper

I think I’ve settled in pretty well now. I went for a longish walk this morning and didn’t once have to use Google Maps to find out where I was! It’s a bit cooler today (although still 25°C) so a bit more comfortable walking around. Temperatures are forecast to drop to about 21°C tomorrow, and there’s even a forecast for rain. I might even change out of my shorts!

I’ve been here almost three weeks now, and in my apartment for one. It does feel like I’ve been here longer, actually, but I suppose that’s because so many nice and interesting things have happened.

Anyway, on my way around I dropped in at Come In, a very good English-language bookshop. You can see how good it is by the quality of the books it sells…

It has a very wide range: new books and classics, fiction and non-fiction, and books for children. I suspect quite a few of its sales are to students of English, as well as tourists and migrants such as myself. It’s definitely worth a visit if you’re here. The staff are very friendly and helpful too. I bought a couple of items there, of which more anon.

Oh, and I also passed by La Casa Milà, which is quite close to my place of residence…

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The Self on the Shelf

Posted in Biographical, Books with tags , on September 12, 2021 by telescoper
Financial Times Weekend Edition

In this Weekend’s Financial Times there is an article (above) about why some of us find it hard to throw away old books. This range home to me because the work involved in packing and shipping my possessions to Ireland recently would have been considerably reduced had I thrown away my books, all 25 boxes of them. The removers who did the packing mentioned that they dislike packing books because it takes so long. You have to use small boxes otherwise they are too heavy to shift but mainly it’s because books aren’t all the same size so it can be awkward to pack them efficiently.

Anyway, it would have been a lot easier not to have bothered moving them and , but I just find it very difficult throw books away. So there they are on my shelves (or part of them).

They’re arranged somewhat randomly because I just put them wherever they would fit. This is the packing problem in reverse: it’s hard to organize books by theme or author when they can differ so much in dimension that they don’t fit. For this reason I tend to arrange books by height but I can usually remember the size and cover colour so I can find them quite quickly.

The various gaps are because some books are currently on loan friends while another is on my bedside cabinet (as I realized when I was unpacking that I hadn’t read it yet and am now doing so).

My house in Maynooth came equipped with a large selection of bookshelves. Above you see half the shelves in my sitting room. The hallway is also lined with built-in bookcases; the spare room has a set of similar shelves and my study has four standalone bookcases (of the ‘Billy’ variety, for those of you familiar with Ikea). I also have a small bookcase unit in the kitchen in which I keep cookery and gardening books. All of these are full (or nearly full). That amounts to well over a thousand books altogether – and no, they’re not mainly dictionaries.

So why do I have so many books?

The FT article hits on some of the reasons. There are definitely some that I consult regularly, for different reasons. Reference books such as dictionaries are obvious examples. I also have quite a few old maths and physics textbooks which I keep because they’re useful sources of homework problems and exam questions. I dip into poetry books quite regularly too as one can read a couple of poems at a time; I have a habit of putting a volume of poetry in my pocket when I travel on the bus or train. Quite a few of these and other books have scribbles in the margins, another habit of mine.

Other books I keep because they remind me of the experience of reading them. Just as you might keep a souvenir of a visit to a foreign land, a book is a memento of a journey of the mind. That doesn’t explain however why I tend to keep books I’ve read but didn’t enjoy!

Among the other ideas suggested in the FT article is that a library of books is that they are statement of identity or even a form of bragging: you display them to impress visitors to your house with your intellect and erudition. I don’t think that works for me, though, as I don’t have many visitors and didn’t even before the pandemic. In any case I think most people aren’t likely to be “impressed” by stacks of books – they’re more likely to think you’re a weirdo.

But there’s another reason missed by the analysis in the Financial Times and that is that books actually look quite nice on shelves. Covering a wall in that way saves you the bother of having to paint it!

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Marginalia

Posted in Cute Problems, Education, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , on August 12, 2020 by telescoper

While this morning’s repeat exams were going on I was leafing through an old second-hand text book, one of many I have acquired over the years looking for nice problems and worked examples. The good thing about old books is that solutions to the problems are usually not available on the internet, unlike modern ones. The book concerned this morning is a classic: Statics by Horace Lamb, which you can still get via Cambridge University Press. I have the first edition, published in 1912.

Looking through I was somewhat alarmed to see what had been pencilled in some of the margins:

Of course anyone who has been to India knows that the swastika isn’t necessarily a Nazi symbol: you find it all over the place in the Indian sub-continent, where it is used as a symbol for good luck. I remember being given a very nice conference bag in Pune many years ago with a swastika on it. I didn’t use it back home, of course.

The first owner of the copy of Statics that I have was acquired in 1913 by a J.H.C (or G) Lindesay of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. I know because he/she inscribed their name in the front. That doesn’t look to me like an Indian name, but I think it’s a fair bet that the book passed through many hands before reaching me and that one of the past owners was Indian. I haven’t tried any of the problems marked with the swastika, but perhaps they are difficult – hence the `good luck’ symbol? I notice though that the symbol at the bottom of the page has a chirality different from the others. Is this significant, I wonder?

All of which irrelevance reminded me of an discussion I’ve had with a number of people about whether they like to scribble in the margins of their books, or whether they believe this practice to be a form of sacrilege.

I’ll put my cards on the table  straightaway. I like to annotate my books – especially the technical ones – and some of them have extensive commentaries written in them. I also like to mark up poems that I read; that helps me greatly to understand the structure. I don’t have a problem with scribbling in margins because I think that’s what margins are for. Why else would they be there?

This is a famous example – a page from Newton’s Principia, annotated by Leibniz:

dsc00469

Some of my friends and fellow academics, however, regard such actions as scandalous and seem to think books should be venerated in their pristine state.  Others probably find little use for printed books given the plethora of digitial resources now available online or via Kindles etc so this is not an issue..

I’m interested to see what the divergence of opinions is in with regard to the practice of writing in books, so here’s a poll for you to express your opinion:

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Marginal Notes – Are You For Or Against?

Posted in Books, History with tags , , , , on November 19, 2014 by telescoper

At the weekend I was listening to a programme on Radio 3 part of which was about the rise of the foreign language phrasebook over the last three or four centuries. It was a fascinating discussion, not least because it reminded me of an old Victorian English-Hindi phrasebook I found in a bookship in Pune (India). The book was intended for the use of well-to-do British ladies  and the phrases presumably chosen to reflect their likely needs as they travelled about India. I opened the book at random and found a translation of “Doctor, please help me. I am suffering from severe constipation”. In my experience as a Westerner travelling in India, constipation was the least of my worries…

Anyway, the real point of posting about this is that some of the old phrasebooks which were used to illustrate the programme had been heavily annotated by their owners. That reminded me of an discussion I’ve had with a number of people about whether they like to scribble in the margins of their books, or whether they believe this practice to be a form of sacrilege.

I’ll put my cards on the table  straightaway. I like to annotate my books – especially the technical ones – and some of them have extensive commentaries written in them. I also like to mark up poems that I read; that helps me greatly to understand the structure. I don’t have a problem with scribbling in margins because I think that’s what margins are for.Why else would they be there?

This is a famous example – a page from Newton’s Principia, annotated by Leibniz:

dsc00469

Some of my fellow academics, however, regard such actions as scandalous and seem to think books should be venerated in their pristine state.  Others probably find little use for printed books given the plethora of digitial resources now available online or via Kindles etc so this is not an issue..

I’m interested to see what the divergence of opinions is in with regard to the practice of writing in books, so here’s a poll for you to express your opinion:

11 Comments »

Nice work if you can get it..

Posted in Books, Talks and Reviews with tags , , , on September 19, 2008 by telescoper

I’ve just discovered that my review of Steven Weinberg’s new book “Cosmology” has been published today in the American journal Science. ( I think the link will only work if you or your institution has a subscription to the magazine.) It’s quite a nice job getting to review books like this, not because you get paid a lot (in fact, usually you don’t get paid at all), but because you get a free copy of the book and there is a clear incentive to read it. Reviews themselves are quite easy to do, as they’re usually only around a thousand words so don’t take more than an hour or so to rattle off.

The case of this particular book is quite unusual, thought, because Science usually only includes reviews of popular-level books, and this one is very technical. However, because Weinberg is such an eminent and well known physicist and this work is a long-awaited update of his classic Gravitation and Cosmology (published in 1972), it makes an interest subject for a review even if it is probably impossible for a non-specialist to actually read and understand all of it. It’s definitely not for the mathematically faint-hearted. In the review I stayed off the mathematical details and tried to explain how this book exemplifies the changes that have taken place in cosmology over the past thirty or forty years. Anyway, as you will see if you read the review, I liked the updated book a lot but I think it’s definitely for connoisseurs rather than absolute beginners.

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