In July 1973, accused murderer Karen Skrayp walked free when the forensic evidence against her was found to be inconclusive. Skrayp had been arrested when her alleged victim's hairs were found stuck to her sharpened dentures. Though the hairs clearly belonged to the victim, forensic tests demonstrated that they shared most of their genetic make-up with polyethylene bottles used for carbonated drinks such as 7-UP, E-Cola and Fizzy Gravy. A murder conviction could not be brought against Skrayp who got off with a fine for the lesser crime of unlawful aggression toward a brand trademark.
The case highlighted a serious environmental problem. Due to the abundance of food preservatives and plastics entering the food chain, people were slowly turning into potentially indestructible 'living dolls'. Indeed, several exhumations showed that cadavers were not decomposing. Human decay rates were slowing to that of discarded bubble wrap or a Wombles lunch box.
Scarfolk Council was the first to suggest that church graveyards and crematoria be converted into mass human recycling centres. It proposed that recently deceased relatives be placed into pork-coloured dustbins to be collected bi-monthly for recycling. Human remains would be rendered into drinking straws, lifelike plastic models of children for barren couples, and religious figurines for the intellectually barren. One man, Jack Powers, became so famous for the particularly high plastic content in his body that when he died he was made into his own series of eponymous action figures.
A council booklet published in 1979 (see below) proposed that parents treat their children as early as possible so that by the time they are grown up they are already partially putrefied.
Growing up near New Orleans in the 70s and 80s, when the police force there was one of the most corrupt in the country, I learned to at the very least distrust police. I had some run-ins with them that I’m surprised didn’t end by having the shit beaten out of me. Baton Rouge wasn’t much better. But eventually I grew up, met some cops, and realized that the experiences I had were not all of the story.
As a tax-paying adult, I like having police officers around. I like that there’s someone trying to keep the peace, that there’s somewhere I can go when things aren’t right. I live in a city with a fair amount of gang and drug activity (mostly fueled by fauxhemian white kids from Northampton coming here to buy their drugs) and know that the police here have their hands full. I’ve heard about it first-hand from my friend Dan. I have other friends who are cops (one in New Orleans, which has done a lot of housecleaning since I left there) and now a relative. To say I “hate cops” would be completely untrue.
That said, I think there’s some ground between “all cops are fascist pigs” and “maybe we shouldn’t choke people to death or shoot 12-year old kids 2 seconds after arriving on the scene”. The police have a tough job, this is true, but it’s still a job, they still have bosses, and they’re still people. They can, and do, make mistakes. Unfortunately, due to the nature of their job and their tools, their mistakes are often fatal for someone.
Obviously no citizen or officer wants those mistakes made. Yet there doesn’t seem to be a real desire to do anything about them other than say, “Well, you know, shit happens.”
The blue wall that is built around these events, this idea of supporting all police at all times no matter the situation, is not helpful to anyone. Like it or not, the police are responsible to the civilians; they aren’t our masters. Demanding that no one criticize the heroes in blue under any circumstances, and closing ranks against anyone who does only serves to make the situation far worse. You can’t fix a problem you refuse to allow to be acknowledged. Nor is it helpful to assume that in every case an officer is always justified in his or her actions and deserves “the benefit of the doubt” every time. The benefit of the doubt is earned when you have demonstrated good faith, not because you demand fealty.
The protest by NYPD officers against Mayor de Blasio begs the question: if you don’t support the Mayor or the citizens, who do you support? Who do you think you answer to? The idea that people protesting the Michael Brown and Eric Garner grand jury verdicts are responsible for the murders of Officers Ramos and Liu implies a connection of intent that these same officers don’t allow when considering the rash of police killings of unarmed black men. In other words, it’s okay to perceive a pattern of discrimination against police officers, but it’s off limits and dangerous to apply that same analysis to actions by those officers. It’s okay for police to protest perceived discrimination of them, but protesting perceived discrimination by them will result in blood on one’s hands.
We should just shut up and let police do whatever they want, and not worry our pretty little heads about how it’s done. After all, they are the law, which means anything they do is, by definition, legal. We want them on that wall. We need them on that wall. They do the dirty work we don’t want to admit needs doing.
That’s the attitude many of these officers seem to have, and it’s more than a little troubling. Do we really want a police force that has contempt for the citizens it supposedly serves? Did we forget that the “want them on that wall” bit is from a character in a movie who is a bad guy and is covering up a murder? Did we forget that Judge Dredd is intended to be a parody and cautionary tale?
Trust and respect are two-way streets. Both sides have responsibilities here. The citizenry need to give the police the ability to do the jobs they’re hired to do. The police need to understand they aren’t above the law they’re sworn to uphold. Just as the police are charged with bringing justice to citizens who break the law, they too must be allowed to be brought to justice when they break the law. Refusing to even acknowledge the possibility of wrongdoing, of not even bothering to have a trial just to hash out what happened, doesn’t build trust, it builds resentment on both sides. The blue wall of solidarity and unquestioned support does not support police officers, it undermines their abilities and authority.
The first election where I got to pick a governor for Louisiana was between David Duke and Edwin Edwards in 1991. It’s a small wonder that I’ve never gotten too zazzed about voting.
This was just after Duke stopped being just Louisiana’s filthy secret and stepped out onto the national stage, In 1989 he screwed up: until then his primary source of income was running in and losing elections. In 1989, however, he inadvertently won an election and suddenly realized he might have to actually work. His victory got him nationwide notoriety, and he decided he liked attention more than he hated punching a clock, so he decided to aim for Baton Rouge instead. Fortunately, he lost to “the crook”. He then went back to regularly losing elections again, until he could make a living just plain getting money from racists by speaking and forming clubs with his friends.
One of those friends, at least tangentially, seems to be Republican Congressman Steve Scalise, who spoke at one of Duke’s events in 2002. There are a lot of things to be said about the shocking revelation that GOP talking points mixed well with racists, but what I’m getting the biggest kick out of is this particular excuse as to how this wacky mix-up happened.
When Scalise was asked by the Times-Picayune how he came to appear at the conference, he cited his staff, saying he had only one person working for him at the time. “When someone called and asked me to speak, I would go,” he said. “If I knew today what they were about, I wouldn’t go.”
Representative Steve King (R-IA) confirms this, saying, “understanding that Scalise probably wasn’t staffed thoroughly, I could understand how something like this happened”.
You see, the problem was, he had only one staff member at the time. This is seen as a legit excuse: how could he possibly know this was a bunch of neo-Nazis and they were bad? He only had one guy who could help him figure that out! I can’t think of someone I’d rather have in Congress than a guy who needs several handlers around him or else god knows what foolishness he’s likely to do. You see, the problem was, he had only one staff member at the time. “He only had one person to tell him White Supremacists are bad,” says his colleague. “You usually need at least five or six.” Presumably, after King finished defending Scalise’s integrity with this excuse, he was stopped by several aides from sticking his hand in a blender.
When Duke ran in 1991 we saw “DUKE Governor” signs everywhere, which was disheartening. Even moreso was after he lost, when the signs continued to appear, only now they read “DUKE Country”. That was the place where I came from, and all of us who were around then and remember it have had to carry that with them. Scalise is only three years older than me, so he for hell sure knows who David Duke is, even without a large staff to remind him.
January 8th, 2015: Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #1 is out now! It has been really well received so THANK YOU EVERYONE, I'm glad you like our comic about a someone who has all the powers of both squirrel and girl!
Talking about the Monarchy in Britain is generally a bit like talking about the weather. No matter how odd it might be, it is simply there, a fact of life. It may seem a rather foolish institution, but it has survived into the twenty-first century for two reasons: the strength of character of Elizabeth II, sanctified by her long reign; and the lack of appeal of an alternative presidential system. This second is usually expressed as "you wouldn't want [insert the name of a party politician who is widely disliked, but nonetheless popular on their own side] as President now would you?".
There usually follows some bunkum about the monarchy being "good for tourism", as though the important constitutional role of head of state should be decided by backpackers or overweight Americans in leisure wear. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the Queen remains both respected and popular, and for as long as she remains on the throne, the future of the system she embodies is largely dictated by her.
Nevertheless, the growing scandal concerning Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, is beginning to ask wider questions than simply the details of the allegations against the rather oafish Prince himself.
In a sense, we have been here before, the Prince has a whole host of bad decisions behind him, from his questionable business dealings to the unusual relationship he has had with his ex-wife, a woman who appears to have even less good judgement than he does. It is quite possible that even were the allegations are true- and they are categorically denied by Buckingham Palace- the Prince himself still did not commit a crime, given that the woman at the centre of the allegations may have been above the age of consent at the time the Prince might have become involved with her.
Unfortunately for the Prince, even if the specific allegations were false, the spectacularly poor judgement and the unrelenting self indulgence that is highlighted in the relationship between the Prince and Mr. Epstein does ring rather true. On the few occasions I have met the Prince or attended events where he has been a guest of honour, I have been struck by his determination to do what he wants, irrespective of the convenience of others. Nor is the Duke of York unique in the Royal family. The late Princess Margaret was famously haughty and she too flirted with scandal. Then, of course there is the matter of Edward VIII, who- as his own father had predicted- "ruined himself within a year".
It is clear that a new monarch would do things differently from Elizabeth II, what is not yet clear is how these inevitable changes will work within the rather fragile constitutional framework of the UK. "Conventions" and "soundings" are all very well in an age of deference and secrecy, but in the age of the 24-news cycle the nuances are lost to megaphone democracy. How will the Prince of Wales, with his decided and public opinions be able to keep silent? He clearly does not keep silent in his role as one of the five counsellors of state, but his positions have not generally been made public.
The fact is that many would be surprised to learn how much power the monarch, and indeed the royal family, still holds. They have retained a central constitutional role, and have strongly resisted any reduction in their power, or even their influence. That situation has been tolerable during the long reign of Elizabeth II, because now so few can even remember any other monarch. Yet at 88, it is also true that the Queen is being forced to reduce her own activity, and so changes are coming sooner, even should her reign continue for several more years.
As we see the appalling judgement of Prince Andrew- himself a Counsellor of state- thrown into such sharp relief, I think it is now essential to consider the impact of a royal house who might not- shall we say- live up to the standards set by Queen Elizabeth. The stability of the British constitutional monarchy has rested on the personality of a Queen who is generally recognized as a good monarch. For the institution to survive, it will need to learn to cope with more "human" occupants of the throne.
The 2015 election may create new ground in terms of the electoral part of the constitution, but it is not just the franchise and the Parliament that needs review. It is clear that a future constitutional convention will need to consider the powers and role of the Monarchy too.
If we let the system continue unchanged, then instead of the gentle rain we have grown used to, the weather for the Monarchy could grow very stormy indeed.
[Bella Andre]’s a naturally fast writer — on average she churns out four to six books a year — and she released the first one in June 2011.
Before we get to the reason I’m telling you about that sentence, let me say one thing that might or might not be related: There’s a slight snobby tone to EW’s romance article. What’s that all about? The magazine’s called EntertainmentWeekly, not The New York Times Book Review.EW sings the praises of The Walking Dead and video games, and everything in between, for heaven’s sake, but somehow romance fiction doesn’t meet the high standards of entertainment?
I’m not, really. It’s a common sentence from any media that covers books. And I’m not even objecting to the entire sentence. Bella Andre does write fast by most writers’ standards, and she does so comfortably.
What I’m objecting to is the phrase “churned out.”
It’s become a cliché. Any writer who writes fast “churns out” material. Or she “cranks out” or “pounds out” whatever it is that she writes. Because clearly, no writer who writes fast can think about what she writes.
There are other implications in that phrase. The material “churned out” isn’t very good. It’s also an exact copy of what has come before. It has no real value, primarily because of the speed with which the writer “churns” the material out.
In the olden days of traditional publishing, those of us who “churned out” a lot of books did so under a lot of pen names. Here’s how it worked in my case: Kristine Kathryn Rusch might, at best, put out two books per year; Kris Nelscott one every two years; and Kristine Grayson one every six months.
Most reviewers never noticed all the short stories or blog posts or nonfiction. Only a handful of people (including my agents back when I was stupid enough to hire them) knew that I wrote under other pen names as well.
While reading a midlist thriller novel in bed one night several years ago, I laughed so hard that I woke Dean up. What made me laugh? The author’s bio, which stated that the byline of the novel I was reading was a pen name for a “well-known #1 New York Times bestselling author.” Ballsy and hysterical. That writer wrote so many books that his publisher refused to publish them all under his bestselling name.
Or maybe the publisher never got a chance. Because I later discovered who the author in question was (and that’s why I’m not naming the book here), and discovered that the author had nearly a dozen pen names, and kept them all quiet—except for that coy little bio for at least one of them.
In the opening to Bag of Bones, Stephen King writes that his main character, a bestselling novelist, kept one novel in the drawer for every novel he published, since his publisher was demanding that he not publish more than one book per year.
Think about this, people: How many other industries that have megaselling products demand that the producer of popular, high-quality material slow down? What happened to providing the consumers with what they wanted?
When Nora Roberts started out, she was fortunate to begin with Harlequin, which could publish as many books as she produced. She stayed with Harlequin even after she moved to a bigger publisher (Bantam) for a once-per-year hardcover, which then became a once-per-year hardcover and twice-a-year mass market paper, and then became twice-a-year hardcovers and three-times-a-year mass market paper, and finally, she had a big fight with Harlequin, and started up the J.D. Robb pen name (twice per year) and her publisher (by then, Putnam) threw in the towel. The publisher finally agreed that Nora could put out a lot of books. But not the publisher’s other writers.
Her speed didn’t matter to that publisher because the publisher had no expectation of quality based on the genre. As we all know, and Entertainment Weekly’s snobby tone confirms, romance is trash anyway. No one expects quality fiction from writers who crank out cookie-cutter books for women.
You think I’m kidding, right? I’m not. I’m old enough to have read the trade journals as romance got its start as a genre, as the Romance Writers of America fought for recognition from publishers, as romance readers who slowly realized that they were marketing force that had a lot of clout.
Romance has a lot of respect now compared to thirty years ago—and still writers see phrases like “churned out” and that slightly school-boyish tone that every Literary Critic uses when discussing romance.
It’s about love and mushy stuff. It can’t be good. It might include kissing and touching and actual irony-free emotion. Anyone can churn out that crap if they put their minds to it. But most people are sensible enough to want respectability instead of…whatever it is that these romance people have.
Oh, yeah. Money.
And readers.
Who actually like the books.
I have taken exception to that snobbish attitude for my entire career. I’ve written essay after essay about it in all kinds of journals and magazines. I’ve written some business blogs on it too.
Back when I was writing those essays, the attitude was merely annoying. Savvy writers could get past it with the judicious use of pen names, and make not just a living, but a substantial living. As in earning mid-six figures or more, simply by hiding the fact that the fast writers wrote more than one book per year.
That snobbish attitude has always been harmful to writers who wanted to make a living. But in my mind, that snobbery always went hand-in-hand with a desire to be recognized over a desire to have a full-time writing career. The writers who wanted to make a living figured out how to handle the respectability argument while “churning out” a lot of books. The writers who wanted respectability and labored over each word never left their day jobs.
Now, however, that snobbish attitude has become actively harmful to writers. Most of the ways that books sell to readers have broken down. The traditional publishing systems have lost their impact. The old-fashioned way that publishers advertised books—that one-size-fits-all method—no longer works. Bookstores don’t window titles much any more, if a reader can find a brick-and-mortar bookstore that sells new titles within driving distance of home.
Because books are available all the time, rather than for only a few months, readers pay less attention to release dates than ever before. It’s always been the case that readers would get to a book when they felt like reading it, but in the past, readers had to buy the book when they saw it, because they might never find a copy again.
So, even if readers didn’t read the book for a year or more, readers still had to buy it in that limited time window.
Not any longer. Readers can make a note of the title, realize it’s been published, and buy it days or hours or minutes before reading it. That really changes the way that the publishing industry markets books—or should.
It hasn’t yet, entirely, anyway. But the industry is starting to get a clue.
Event books, the ones that publishers convinced the media to promote, are no longer events. The numbers to become a bestseller are much, much lower than they were as little as seven years ago.
Lists matter, but less and less as readers discover their books in other ways.
And one of the major ways that readers discover a book? E-mail alerts or notifications that scroll across the reader’s favorite online retailing site—alerts and notifications tailored to that reader.
No longer do we all get notification of the top five books on the New York Times bestseller list. Now, we get science fiction (if that’s what we read) or romance or mystery. We get notifications about our favorite author’s latest book, not the latest release from some author whose work we would never, ever, ever read.
What provokes those bots to let a reader know about an author? Publication of her latest work. The bots always send readers a note that an author they have bought before (through that retailer) has released a new book.
The reader might not buy that book immediately, but the book might go on a wish list. It might be put in reserve until the reader has the cash to order or the time to read.
Another change in the way people buy books also has to do with unlimited availability. All readers indulged in binge reading of a new-to-them author, but in the past, that binge reading was combined with treasure hunting.
Whenever I discovered a new writer whose work I liked, I’d read what was easily available, then I’d go to the library to see what it had. Libraries never had the complete oeuvre because, like bookstores, they have limited shelf space. So I’d dig through every used bookstore in every town I visited until I got each and every book by that author.
Or as close to each and every book as I could get.
Other readers did the same.
Now, readers can order every book that a favorite author has written, whether that author has written five books or hundreds. That fear writers have, the fear that readers won’t respect the work if it doesn’t take years to complete, is silly when looked at from a reader’s perspective.
Readers want to escape from their lives for a few hours. They might want to read a beautiful well-written slow-moving literary novel or they might want to read a fast-paced hard-to-believe thriller. But readers want the book when they’re ready to relax. If they liked that book, they want another by the same author. The author becomes a known quantity, and the reader wants more.
Binge-reading has become an all-consuming activity, just like binge-watching. And the best way to get noticed as a writer is to publish enough to enable your readers to binge for a weekend.
But the idea of writing a lot is the opposite of the way that most writers are trained. Writers are told to slow down, think about every word, consider every sentence. Writers are taught to forget story because story is something that hack writers do.
Hack writers can “churn” out words because words are unimportant to them.
Real writers write so slowly that they might only compose a paragraph per day.
Real writers who have day jobs and who still believe myths spouted in the 19th century.
Real 19th century writers who are still read today, like Charles Dickens or Louisa May Alcott, got paid by the word, so they wrote a lot of words, for a lot of publications. These writers wrote fast long hand, and they “churned out” a lot of stories we no longer read.
But they also “churned out” stories that all of us still read.
That little phrase, “churned out,” holds so much disrespect. Deadly disrespect, because writers who hear that phrase—and use it themselves—won’t be able to survive in this new world.
The 21st century is not leisurely, although we have more leisure time than ever. Can you remember the name of the “important” literary novel of five years ago? Ten? Without looking it up? I didn’t think so.
Yet, I can still name the important literary novels of forty years ago, because they got all the press, and I do mean all the press.
It’s impossible to get all of the press now. The best way to get attention is to give your readers what they want. If they like your work, they want more of it.
If they want more of it, the only person who can give them more is you.
And the only way to do that is to write a lot, whatever that means for you.
One sure way to teach yourself to write at a comfortable pace is to clean up your language. Watch every word. Make sure you’re using the right phrase—when you’re talking about writing.
Clean “churned out” from your vocabulary. Don’t say you “cranked out” a novel. Don’t apologize for writing fast. Don’t tell anyone how long it took to finish a novel.
Write and release.
The only people who judge fiction writers for how fast they write are people to whom reading isn’t something they do for enjoyment but for prestige. They want to impress others with their literary acumen.
I don’t know about you, but I want readers who get lost in the story, not readers who have already determined that I’m a hack because I don’t write at the proper speed or in the proper genre or with the proper attention to language.
Enjoy your writing. Take as much—or as little—time as you like to compose your stories.
Because how you created the story doesn’t matter. How much readers enjoy the story does. Readers don’t care if it took you one week to write that story or fifteen years. All readers want is escape.
And it’s your job to provide it.
Contrary to popular opinion, I do not crank out these blogs. I think about them for weeks, maybe months, maybe years, before ever committing a word to paper.
I also make things up for a living.
Clearly, I’m blogging again. Blogging does not pay the bills, though, so if you’re enjoying the blogs, please leave a tip on the way out.(And yes, White Mist Mountain is my company.)
What you're about to read (I assume) appeared on this here blog on November 17, 2004. At the time I wrote it, I don't think I'd met a gent who is now a good friend, Steve Stoliar. Steve has done many things as a writer and performer but the main thing most folks want to know about are the years when he worked as a personal assistant to Groucho Marx. And the reason I may have met him before I wrote what follows is that I paid a brief visit to the home of Groucho Marx during the period when Steve worked there. I don't recall meeting him there then and he doesn't recall meeting me…but I met a bunch of people that afternoon before I had a brief, sad conversation with Groucho, and Steve may have been among them. I wasn't paying a lot of attention to anyone besides The One, The Only…
By the way: If you want to know what it was like in Groucho's house then, in Mr. Marx's declining years and the period when the infamous Erin Fleming became infamous, I highly recommended Steve's book, Raised Eyebrows. It will raise, among other things, your eyebrows.
And the reason I mention Steve is that he's the guy who led the campaign that got Animal Crackers released to the general public. This article is how I managed to see it even before he did that wonderful thing…
Animal Crackers, which was the Marx Brothers' second real feature, is included in The Marx Brothers Silver Screen Collection, a new boxed set of five films on DVD. These are wonderful movies, though I'm going to hold off on giving an enthusiastic recommendation of this release until I actually receive my copy and run some of them. More than one Marx aficionado has informed me that Universal did no restoration work on the films; that we get the same mediocre transfers we've endured for years on home video. I have not verified that for myself but you may want to hold off ordering this one. If you don't, here's a link to purchase it from Amazon. I'm sure the copies are watchable but they're apparently not, as some of us were hoping, upgrades from what we already have.
I single out Animal Crackers not because it's the best of the five in this set but because I can recall a time, not so long ago,when you couldn't see this movie, let alone own a legal copy of it to show in our very own little living room.
In the seventies, there was a craze locally (and I imagine, in many cities) for Marx Brothers movies in theaters. They were on TV often but it was better to see them in a theater with a big screen and an audience, and many local movie houses made that possible. While in college, I dragged most of my dates, at one time or other, to see A Night at the Opera or Duck Soup or A Day at the Races or even — testing one young lady's endurance — A Night in Casablanca. We saw all of them…except Animal Crackers.
Animal Crackers was unavailable due to some contractual problem that stemmed from its having started life as a Broadway play.Apparently, the Paramount lawyers had acquired the rights for a finite period of time — forty years, someone told me — and could no longer exhibit the film. Despite the fact that the other Marx movies were big rental items again, someone at Universal (which had acquired the Paramount Marx Brothers films) didn't feel it was cost-efficient to go back to whoever controlled the rights and reacquire them.
By around 1972, some friends of mine and I had all the major, available Marx Brothers movies pretty well committed to memory so we were dying to see the one, elusive specimen. That was when an acquaintance tipped me that a small theater in Westwood was going to flout the law, risk it all for moviedom, and run a 16mm print of Animal Crackers the following Saturday night. The name of the movie, he told me, would not be advertised. It would just say "Marx Brothers Film Festival." In fact, the title of the movie was not to be mentioned anywhere since the theater owner was super-paranoid about Universal lawyers suing him into oblivion. The acquaintance said, "If you were to call him up and ask him if he's showing Animal Crackers, he'd probably cancel the whole thing." Naturally, my buddies and I had to go.
I have never purchased illegal drugs but I'm guessing the experience is not unlike what we went through that evening. We arrived early, knocked on the box office window and the first thing the man who answered asked us was, "Who sent you?" He was eventually satisfied with my answer but all through it, his eyes darted about, checking the street, looking to see if any police were spying. His theater turned out to be a small screening room in the back of a travel agency. There were less than 50 seats and the movie projector — which was one of those clunky jobs they used to show us hygiene films in high school — was in the same room with us. The same guy who took our money threaded the projector and as he did,someone asked which movie he was about to run. Even though everyone present knew, and even though we'd be seeing the main title in about three minutes, he still replied, "Oh, one of their best. You'll see."
As it turned out, we didn't think it was one the Marx Brothers' best but we were still glad we saw it, if only so we could lord it over friends who hadn't. Chatting with other Groucho-Harpo-Chico fans (we knew no Zeppo fans), we'd make a point of saying things like, "Yes, that was very much like that scene in Animal Crackers…oh, sorry. I forgot you haven't seen it!" A few years later, when Universal finally cleared the rights and re-released the movie, some of us lost an important point of status. And of course, nowadays, it's easy not just to see the film but to own it.
I enjoy having all of them in my little library where I can watch one whenever I want to…but I must admit I don't enjoy them as much on a home TV screen. Most comedy movies need an audience, of course, but some need it more than others. What the Marx Brothers movies need is not just a crowd but the kind of crowds we had at a lot of those early-seventies screenings. They were full of people who loved the brothers, knew something about their films…and were, in general, a hipper and happier crowd than most. It was great to sit there and laugh among such people. I wouldn't mind if Universal Home Video didn't improve the image quality of their DVDs if they could just find a way to package one of those audiences with the set.
So, despite months of people consistently saying it’s a bad idea, the Liberal Democrat leadership has confirmed today that Danny Alexander will be the party’s main spokesperson on Treasury issues for the election campaign, while Vince Cable will be restricted to commenting purely on BIS matters. Some people are claiming that this is no big deal, as those are related to their Cabinet positions, while others are not very happy.
The point here is that this isn’t a case of two people doing the same jobs they’ve been doing for the last few years. This is the announcement of the party’s key election team, the ones who’ll be dragged out to do the morning press conferences and the rounds of the TV and radio studios, as well as the ones who’ll have to debate their counterparts from other parties. These are key election campaigning roles, not ministerial government ones.
Mario Cuomo’s recent death has reminded me of his old phrase about the difference between the two: ‘you campaign in poetry, you govern in prose.’ You may have to make compromises if and when you get into government, but in the campaign you don’t. You show the best of yourself, put forward all your best policies and argue for them as strongly as you can.
The economy is going to be a central issue of this election, and the treasury spokespeople are likely going to be the most called-on for press appearances of all of them. The Liberal Democrats need someone in there who’s good at those sort of media appearances, not someone whose previous appearances in the media have been more reminiscent of Ben Swain from The Thick Of It than a polished and confident media performer. The job of being a party’s spokesperson – and implied candidate for that position afterwards – in an election campaign is not the same as being a minister. (If it is, those arguing for Danny Alexander should explain why Tim Farron is the chief voice on foreign affairs, another high profile role, despite having little Parliamentary experience in the area)
Regardless of the issue of how much distance and independence on economic policy the man who’s sat alongside George Osborne for almost five years can claim, an election campaign needs the party’s best given the most high=profile jobs so they can communicate the party’s policy to the media. To not give the most high-profile and frontline role on the economy to the party’s best-known and most respected voice on economics is foolish and hampers the party’s ability to campaign.
(UPDATE: I changed the title of the post, because the original one was far too long)
Standard disclaimer: I’m not a researcher in this field, I’m not board-certified as a full psychiatrist yet, and what I remember of biochemistry is limited to being pretty sure there’s something called a “Krebs cycle” involved somewhere. That having been said:
This is pretty legit.
Start with From inflammation to sickness and depression, Dantzer et al (2008), who note that being sick makes you feel lousy [citation needed]. Drawing upon evolutionary psychology, they theorize this is an adaptive response to make sick people stay in bed (or cave, or wherever) so the body can focus all of its energy on healing. A lot of sickness behavior – being tired, not wanting to do anything, not eating, not wanting to hang around other people – seems kind of like mini-depression.
All of this stuff is regulated by chemicals called cytokines, which are released by immune cells that have noticed an injury or infection or something. They are often compared to a body-wide “red alert” sending the message “sickness detected, everyone to battle stations”. This response is closely linked to the idea of “inflammation”, the classic example of which is the locally infected area that has turned red and puffy. Most inflammatory cytokines handle the immune response directly, but a few of them – especially interleukin-1B and tumor necrosis factor alpha – cause this depression-like sickness behavior. It is noted that:
In general, animals injected with IL-1ß or TNF-a stay in a corner of their home cage in a hunched posture and show little or no interest in their physical and social environment unless they are stimulated. Specifically, they show decreased motor activity, social withdrawal, reduced food and water intake, increased slow-wave sleep and altered cognition
Here are some other suspicious facts about depression and inflammation:
– Exercise, good diet and sleep reduce inflammation; they also help depression.
– Stress increases inflammation and is a known trigger for depression.
– Rates of depression are increasing over time, with the condition seemingly very rare in pre-modern non-Westernized societies. This is commonly attributed to the atomization and hectic pace of modern life. But levels of inflammation are also increasing over time, probably because we have a terrible diet that disrupts the gut microbiota that are supposed to be symbioting with the immune system. Could this be another one of the things we think are social that turn out to be biological?
– SSRI antidepressants, like most medications, have about five zillion effects. One of the effects is to reduce the level of inflammatory cytokines in the body. Is it possible that this is why they work, and all of this stuff about serotonin receptors in the brain is a gigantic red herring?
– It’s always been a very curious piece of trivia that treating depression comorbid with heart disease significantly decreases your chances of dying from the heart disease. People just sort of nod their heads and say “You know, mind-body connection”. But inflammation is known to be implicated in cardiovascular disease. If treating depression is a form of lowering inflammation, this would make perfect sense.
– Rates of depression are much higher in sick people. Cancer patients are especially famous for this. No one gets too surprised here, because having cancer is hella depressing. But it’s always been interesting (to me at least) that as far as we can tell, antidepressants treat cancer-induced depression just as well as any other type. Are antidepressants just that good? Or is the link between cancer being sad and cancer causing depression only part of the story, with the other part being that the body’s immune response to cancer causes inflammatory cytokine release, which antidepressants can help manage?
– Along with cancer, depression is common in many other less immediately emotion-provoking illnesses like rheumatoid arthritis and diabetes. The common thread among these illnesses is inflammation.
– Inflammation changes the activity level of the enzyme indoleamine 2,3 dioxygenase. This enzyme produces kynurenines which interact with the NMDA receptor, a neurotransmitter receptor implicated in depression and various other psychiatric diseases (in case your first question upon learning about this pathway is the same as mine: yes, kynurenines got their name because they were first found in dog urine).
– Sometimes doctors treat diseases like hepatitis by injecting artificial cytokines to make the immune system realize the threat and ramp up into action. Cytokine administration treatments very commonly cause depression as a side effect. This depression can be treated with standard antidepressants.
– Also, it turns out we can just check and people with depression have more cytokines.
There’s also some evidence against the theory. People with depression have more cytokines, but it’s one of those wishy-washy “Well, if you get a large enough sample size, you’ll see a trend” style relationships, rather than “this one weird trick lets you infallibly produce depression”.
But for me the strongest evidence against is a general feeling that it’s very easy to get lots of convincing evidence for a theory in medicine whether or not it’s true.
Twenty years ago, everyone was super-convinced that depression was caused by low serotonin levels. We found that depressed people on average had lower serotonin levels than non-depressed people. We found that giving people drugs that increased serotonin treated depression. We did lots of studies proving serotonin was a vital chemical that regulated mood. We found that genes affecting serotonin-related proteins were linked to depression. We did PET scans that found abnormally high levels of activity in serotonin-related enzymes in the brains of depressed people. It was all very convincing. And right now everyone’s pretty sure it’s wrong.
Ten years ago, everyone was super-convinced that depression was caused by under-secretion of the neuro-hormone BDNF and subsequent decline in hippocampal neurogenesis. It was dutifully found that depressed people had less BDNF than everyone else, and less hippocampal neurogenesis. Exercise, sleep, good diet, and all the other things that help depression were found to also raise levels of BDNF. Chemical pathways were trotted out by which effective antidepressants would probably raise BDNF levels. I think this theory is still very popular, but for the inflammation theory to be right someone will either have to disprove this one or tie it together with some theory of why inflammation decreases BDNF or low BDNF increases inflammation or something else. I do see some evidence that this is true, but to fully integrate the theories is going to take a lot more than that.
And these are just the two most recent and most famous. We have Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of depression, lots of people studying dysregulation of the hypothalamopituitaryadrenocortical axis, some pointers to dysregulation in the second messenger system, et cetera. All of these theories have great evidence.
Point is, now we have another theory that neatly explains how depression starts, how antidepressants work, why diet and exercise are good for you, and all the things all the other theories explained. Maybe the third time’s the charm?
A lot of the things in the body are really complex. Inflammation definitely affects serotonin – the indoleamine 2,3 dioxygenase enzyme acts on serotonin’s immediate precursor. It affects BDNF levels, as above, which in turn affect hippocampal neurogenesis. The hypothalamopituitaryadrenocortical axis releases cortisol, which downregulates the immune system and decreases the action of inflammatory cytokines. All of the anxiety-inducing life events and intrapsychic conflicts and secret desires to marry your mother that Freud thought caused depression produce a lot of stress, which both releases cortisol and reduces normal ability to regulate inflammatory response.
So basically all of these systems are intimately interconnected, and probably before this is done with researchers will find five more systems intimately interconnected with all of these. It might be that inflammation is the master system which causes a cascade of events in all of the others. It might be that one of the others is the master system. It might be that depression is a collection of multiple different diseases, and some are caused by one thing and others by another. It might be that looking for a “master system” is silly and that the true mathematical relationship between all of these things is such a chaotic process that all you can say is that they all stumbled together into the wrong attractor point and things deteriorated from there.
Anyway, all this is for much smarter people than me to figure out. The question I’m most interested in: can we treat depression by giving people anti-inflammatory drugs?
The answer seems to be: it depends how strongly you object to getting a heart attack.
Aspirin is a great anti-inflammatory drug. It’s pretty safe in adults (except for a small risk of GI bleeding) and it decreases risk of cardiovascular disease and cancer as well. If you could treat depression with aspirin, you’d be home free. However, the most convincing review I have seen for aspirin is unimpressed. It points out that some trials have shown negative effects for aspirin, and that long-term use of aspirin can increase intestinal permeability which decreases ability to regulation inflammation which is the opposite of what we want. Right now there isn’t much evidence on this issue, but what there is isn’t promising.
On the other hand, if ten percent of Americans are on SSRIs right now, and there are 1.5 million heart attacks per year in the US, and celecoxib increases that by 33%, then switching everyone from SSRI to celecoxib would cause…quick Fermi calculation…ignore interactions…50,000 extra heart attacks per year. Ouch.
Celecoxib is a good drug for its indicated uses, which involve treating chronic pain conditions that nothing else can treat safely. But it’s hardly something I’d want to start giving to every depressed patient who walks into a psychiatrist’s office. Maybe as a third line or fourth line drug for desperate people. But then, we already have plenty of good third-line and fourth-line drugs for desperate people. You want strong psychiatric medication and aren’t too concerned about the state of your cardiovascular system? Here, have an antipsychotic!
So in conclusion, I think the inflammatory hypothesis of depression is very likely part of the picture. Whether it’s the main part of the picture or just somewhere in the background remains to be seen, but for now it looks encouraging. Anti-inflammatory drugs do seem to treat depression, which is a point in the theory’s favor, but right now the only one that has strong evidence behind it has side effects that make it undesirable for most people. There’s a lot of room to hope that in the future researchers will learn more about exactly how this cytokine thing works and be able to design antidepressant drugs that target the appropriate cytokines directly. Until then, your best bets are the anti-inflammatory mainstays: good diet, good sleep, plenty of exercise, low stress levels, and all the other things we already know work.
Patrick McLoughlin was struggling on the Today programme this morning. He was asked why the train operating companies are allowed to get away with operating ticket machines that do not offer customers the cheapest fare for their journey.
For some odd reason - he is a politician in election year, after all - he was unwilling to offer any sort of populist attack on these companies and just floundered.
Then he thought of a clinching argument and you could hear the confidence return to his voice. You can't just turn up at an airport and buy a ticket on the day of travel, so why should you be able to do so on the railways?
If anyone had put forward this argument when the railways were being privatised in the last years of John Major's premiership they would have been laughed at.
Why should we run the railway industry like the airline industry? It certainly would not have encouraged anyone to support privatisation.
That this argument is now taken so seriously, and is even regarded by some as conclusive, is further evidence for George Ritzer's 'McDonaldization' theory, which I have blogged about before.
This holds that, far from increasing human freedom, the rise of corporate power requires us to behave in ever more circumscribed ways.
So, while it suits the train operating companies to run the railways as though they are airlines, it is not in the interests of their customers.
I will admit that some railway services have improved greatly since privatisation, but then so the public subsidy given to the railways has greatly increased over the same period.
Those two facts must, at least to some extent, be connected.
The Doctor and Felix came to the village of Once on New Years' Eve. Or rather, they came to where the village of Once had once been.
"Where is it?" asked Felix in his lilting German accent, staring into the empty valley beyond the copse in which they stood.
The Doctor tipped her head forwards slightly, to let accumulated snow tumble from the crown and brim of her battered, crumpled old top hat.
"Exactly," she said.
The village had disappeared years ago, she told him.
"Well," she continued, her words turning to steam in the cold air, "nobody knows exactly when it happened... or should I say when it, the village I mean, stopped happening."
It had taken a few months of accumulated surprises and puzzlements and disappointments and silences and ominous remarks before the conscious realisation had gradually dawned upon the people in the surrounding villages that the village of Once was no longer there.
"The government realised pretty quickly of course," continued the Doctor, "because the people in Once stopped paying their taxes. But the government kept quiet about it, in case it gave any other villages ideas. As best as anyone can make out, the village vanished from existence somewhere between Christmas and New Years, 1849."
"I suppose it has become one of those perennial mysteries," suggested Felix in his perfect schoolboy English, "like the Mary Celeste? "
"Umm, not really," said the Doctor, "You see, hierarchical cultures actually have a very low tolerance for mysteries that are genuinely mysterious. They prefer prosaic mysteries. The Mary Celeste, for instance. I mean it's odd certainly, but the broad outlines of it aren't all that challenging to any common sense ideas about how the world works. The ship was discovered with the crew and passengers gone. Obviously, then, they left. The reason why they left may be obscure, but the essential mechanism of the event is comprehensible enough. They left. People can, and will, do that. But an entire village physically vanishing, structures and roads and farm animals and all..." she smiled wryly "...that's a bit different. That sort of thing just doesn't happen. Or rather, it does happen, but it's - if you'll pardon me - vanishingly rare. When it happens, people get very nervous. It undermines their sense of reality. Human beings disappearing, that's one thing. But property? That's another. Especially in England."
Felix chuckled. "So this is one of those mysteries that polite English people do not talk about."
(The Doctor, by the way, genuinely doesn't know what happened on board the Mary Celeste. It's one of the strange things about the Doctor's life: we know a lot more about some of the events in it than she does.)
They left the shelter of the copse and walked until they reached the bottom of the empty valley. Their feet crunched in the snow, and ice-blue moonlight pooled in the caverns of their footprints.
Felix began to have a very strange sense that he was following a road that he could not see, passing houses that were almost - but not quite - visible.
He suddenly became aware of how cold he was. How his toes were stinging with the cold even inside his boots. How numb his fingers were. He hunched over in his greatcoat and plunged his hands into his armpits. It was like being back in the trenches.
The Doctor didn't seem to notice the cold, or how it was affecting Felix. She wore her threadbare astrakhan jacket buttoned up, but that meant nothing. She wore it like that whatever the weather.
"So how can an entire village just disappear?" he asked in an attempt to chivvy the Doctor along a bit, "Structures and roads and farm animals and all?"
"A surprising question," said the Doctor, "coming from someone who's actually been in villages that stopped existing the same day."
"That's war," said Felix sadly, who had met the Doctor at a football match in No-Man's-Land on Christmas Day 1914. She had played defensive midfield, and had impressed him by tackling him with great ferocity as he made a bid for the two trenchcoats bundled on the ground nearest the British lines. The bruises on his shins had taken almost a fortnight to fade.
"This might be sign of a war too," said the Doctor. "The universe is like a battlefield sometimes. Great powers struggling with each other for reasons incomprehensible to the little people who get caught in the rain of shells..."
"So a... a shell, fired as part of some astral conflict, went astray and this poor little innocent village became a casualty, just because it happened to be near the front line?"
Felix felt depressed by this idea. Could it really be that the entire universe worked according to the same horrible rules as that war from which he had just escaped?
The Doctor didn't answer. She seemed to have withdrawn into sad reflections of her own.
"Nobody ever tried to rebuild, then?" asked Felix nervously, "Or start a new village? It seems a waste. Such a fertile valley - in the warm months, I mean. A stream..." he pointed to a frozen crick, and then gestured around "...and good farming land..."
He knew about things like this. He was a country boy himself, born and bred in a little village not unlike Once must have been. Not unlike that village in Belgium...
"Another interesting aspect of the matter," said the Doctor ruminatively, "this peculiarly decorous refusal of anyone to reclaim the valley, or even to acknowledge that anything was ever here. You'll notice that there's no memorial. Nothing. And we're in..." she consulted her fob watch "...1962 now, so more than enough time has passed for people to feel as though the lost village of Once warrants some form of commemoration."
Felix was becoming distinctly unnerved. He felt as though he was surrounded by people, people who could only just be sensed in the corner of his eye, people who were not to be seen when he turned to look at them. He caught himself having to suppress little jumps of panic every time he sensed an invisible wall or door, or an unseen human presence near him.
He felt ashamed of his weakness. He hadn't been a nervous person a few months ago. The war had done it. But plenty of his comrades in the trenches had coped without becoming nervous wrecks.
He wondered if the presences around him were the ghosts of the annihilated villagers from long ago. He wondered if he could sense them because they had died in a war, and he was a soldier. Did that mean that they could sense him in return?
He became aware that the Doctor was watching him.
"I'm all right," he said.
She came over to him and threaded one of her arms through one of his.
"Cold?" she asked.
"No," he said, shaking his head solemnly even as his teeth chattered.
"Good," laughed the Doctor. Then, in a serious voice: "You can feel it too, can't you?"
Felix looked up at her. She was much taller than him.
"I'm not imagining it then?"
"No," she said.
"You expected it?"
"Yes."
He looked down. She'd been testing him again, or using him to test a conclusion of hers that she hadn't told him about. He didn't know how he felt about this. At best, it made him feel like an instrument. At worst, like a sheep being sent across a minefield.
"We may as well go back to the TARDIS," said the Doctor suddenly, "We've learned all we can here."
"What have we learnt?" asked Felix, who didn't feel any more wise than when they'd arrived - just colder.
"That the village is still here," she said. "Or rather... the village isn't here or not here. It's more complicated than that. But it has, at least, left traces. Traces that are sensible to human beings. That answers one question anyway. A question you asked earlier. The question of why nobody ever built here, or erected a memorial. People sensed that they'd be building on top of... or commemorating... something that was, in some way, still there. The people who came here sensed the village around them, just like you did. Of course, the past is always still around us... but more so here than in other places."
"So are we going to investigate?" asked Felix, who knew the Doctor well enough already to know the answer.
The Doctor nodded.
"How?" asked Felix.
The Doctor said nothing. She just started leading him out of the valley. They trod in their own footprints on the way back to the wood.
The TARDIS was in a tree. A grand, grave, elder-statesman of a horse chestnut. Winter had turned it into a thing of gaunt, rattling, bony arms. It looked like a snow-muffled riot of skeletons. The TARDIS doors were set into its trunk, their blue blending seamlessly at the edges with the green and the grey and the brown of the gnarled bark. The Doctor flourished her jangly mess of keys around the keyhole, and she and Felix clambered inside.
A few moments later, by their time, they emerged. They had just walked out of a moonlit night; now they emerged into a morning flooded with low sunlight. The tree was younger and smaller now, less grave and angry-looking, but just as skeletal. It was still winter, but a winter 113 years earlier than the one through which they'd just walked. Snow from 1962 fell from their boots into the snow of 1849. When the warmer weather came, it would all melt into the same puddles and then sink into the same earth. When the Doctor and her friends travel, water and dust and seeds and air will travel with them. The future and the past mingle and melt into each other, and cross-fertilise.
Felix was soon looking out from the edge of the same copse into the same valley. But this time, Once was there, cradled in the valley like eggs in a nest.
"By spending Christmas 1849 in the village of Once," said the Doctor quietly, gathering a stray garland of hair out of her face and tucking it back up under the brim of her hat. "New Years too perhaps. We'll see how it goes."
"Will I be welcome?" asked Felix.
"You should be a hit," said the Doctor, "if there's one thing Germans are good at - besides classical music and critiques of political economy - it's Christmas."
The disciples of Tony Blair exist in a strange situation, uncommon to previous followers of former British Prime Ministers. Unlike his predecessors, Blair left office while he was still relatively young and has hovered around the edges of British politics, with his followers still clearly hoping for his glorious return. For all the fervent belief of the Thatcherites, they never seriously expected her to make a comeback, but Blair’s still younger than several 20th century Prime Ministers were when they began the job. One can envisage him and the remaining true Blairite believers awaiting that time when a nation turns its eyes back to him and begs him to return at our hour of need.
Part of this process is the occasional hagiography of the Blair era from political commentators you’d expect to know better. Andrew Rawnsley’s today’s example, yet somehow managing to omit the word ‘moral’ before ‘vacuum’ in a description of Blair’s legacy to British politics. However, it’s the usual contention that Blair had a unique ability to get people’s support that no one currently has, and was thus solely responsible for Labour’s post-97 successes.
There’s a myth put about by the Blairites that without him, Labour would never have won the 1997 election. While he may have had some influence on the size of the majority they won, to claim Labour couldn’t have won without him is, to use the technical term, utter bollocks. Claims like this forget just how toxic the Tories had become before Blair became leader and the general sense of national mourning that followed the death of John Smith. The Private Eye cover here is just an example of that – a sense that the country had lost the inevitable next Prime Minister. The job of any Labour leader post-92 was to hold their nerve, avoid any big errors and walk into Downing Street at the end of the process. Those that claim Blair delivered this victory need to explain how any other potential Labour leader wouldn’t have managed it, rather than pointing to his good fortune at being in the right place at the right time to benefit from it.
In a historical context, his victories weren’t as impressive as the encomiums like to portray them as either. It’s always worth remembering that the largest number of votes received by a party in a UK general election was by John Major’s Conservatives in 1992 and that Blair’s landslides were symptoms of a flawed electoral system that couldn’t cope with multi-party politics rather than any ringing endorsement of him. (For example, Labour received fewer votes in 2001 than they did in 1992) His supposedly great triumphs were the result of Labour being able to take best advantage of having a plurality of an electorate whose old allegiances were breaking down, not the ringing endorsement of the masses some would have you believe.
At his peak, Blair and New Labour were more popular than any leaders and parties are now, but that’s not exactly a difficult achievement. The trend in British general elections since the 70s has been a slow decline in the vote going to the big two parties, masked by an electoral system that protects them. Tony Blair’s just another point of data on that long downhill trend, where Labour’s decline was hidden by the absolute collapse of the Conservatives. To act as those resurrecting him would bring those times back is to ignore longer-term trends in favour of some Great Man theory of history, ignoring the luck of good timing and claiming it was skill instead.
Our community spends a lot of time in mourning, but today I am angry. A lot of us are angry. Some of that anger is being focussed at Leelah’s parents for putting her into profoundly damaging conversion therapy.
However, before sending Leelah to one of these nasty pieces of work, Leelah’s parents presumably talked to them, and the conversion therapist assured them that their therapy could “fix” their child and turn Leelah into the dutiful straight cisgender son they wanted. That the trans feelings could be “cured”.
We know these are lies. We have known for a long time that conversion therapy, whether it be aimed at changing gender identity or sexuality does not work.
We also now know that if a trans person has stated the need to transition, and things are done to block them, there is a better than evens chance that they will try to kill themselves.
These are not opinions, these are established facts. They’re facts that any medical practitioner working with trans people has a professional duty to know. They need to know their patients are vulnerable. They need to know conversion therapy doesn’t work. They need to know their patients are suicide risks if not handled carefully.
And yet someone presumably told Leelah’s parents none of this.
Why would someone do that? I can think of only three reasons.
The first is that they know that what they are saying is a lie, but they don’t care. They are selling lies. They are a fraud.
The second is that they haven’t bothered to find out what the best practice for counselling trans people is, because they don’t care. They are negligent.
The third, and perhaps kindest interpretation, is that they are in over their heads, that it simply never occurs to them that they should learn about how to counsel trans people before doing it. They are incompetent.
Conversion therapists are either fraudulent, negligent or incompetent. There doesn’t seem to be any other explanation.
Now in other areas of medicine, say if I need surgery for a broken leg, there are laws and regulations to ensure that if my surgeon is fraudulent, if they have faked credentials, they can go to prison. If they are negligent, if they turn up to work drunk, they can go to prison. If they are incompetent, they can be struck off.
Fraudulent, negligent, incompetent; in most areas of medicine you would not be allowed to practice, and yet it seems any charlatan can walk in off the street and set themselves up as a conversion therapist. They’re not subject to legal consequences if they are fraudulent or negligent. There is no overseeing body to sanction them if they are incompetent. They operate in a regulatory vacuum.
This isn’t good enough. These people are killing our young people through their fraudulence, their negligence, their incompetence. The lawmakers and regulators who should be stopping them are not.
Leelah’s dying wish was that we work to make these things better. A good start would be to stop frauds and charlatans from pushing trans people into suicide through fraudulent, negligent and incompetent therapy that is worse than useless, and if they do, to ensure that they face justice for it. I, for one, intend to make our lawmakers try.
Consider the following bizarre potential outcomes for the 2015 general election:
The SNP romp home, winning well over 20 seats. The Green Party also do the best they’ve ever done, gaining 5% of the national vote. Yet the latter party only win a single seat despite getting a higher UK share of the vote than the former.
UKIP do the best they’ve ever achieved in a general election, with 16% of the vote. They only win around half a dozen seats however. The Lib Dems meanwhile creep home with just 15% of the vote, yet hold onto over 20 seats.
Labour gets slightly fewer votes than the Conservatives. Despite this poor performance, they win more seats than their opponent. Their total vote share hovers at around 60% of the vote, the lowest combined score since 1918.
No single party gains a majority. More than that, no two party majority is possible, with the exception of a Labour-Conservative coalition.
I’m not suggesting that all of these outcomes are going to happen, merely that at this point in time they are all feasible. If they do all happen at once, it will be the perfect storm of electoral outcomes which will put our single member plurality voting system (“SMP”)* under greater strain than it has ever known.
This has in fact been a long time in coming. The reality is that “two party politics” is a historical quirk that has only enjoyed a very brief period of popularity. The modern political party as we now regard it didn’t even exist when the Third Reform Act was passed in 1884 enfranchising most men over the age of 21. 16 years later the Labour Party was born and we had decades of 3+ party politics until the Liberals pretty much gave up the ghost in the 1930s and 40s. In 1951, two party politics reached its apex with the combined Labour-Conservative vote reaching 96.8% but by 1974 that was down to 75.1% and in long term decline.
We can see this trend by looking at how the gap between Effective Number of Parties (“ENP”) by votes and seats has widened over the last 70 years (ENP is an academic concept used to estimate the number of parties active in an election according to their relative strengths). As you can see, the disparity between votes and seats has widened almost inexorably.
Effective Number of Parties by UK General Elections, 1945-2010 (Gallagher, Michael, 2014. Election indices dataset at http://www.tcd.ie/Political_Science/staff/michael_gallagher/ElSystems/index.php, accessed 1 January 2015).
Indeed, it is also worth bearing in mind that the voting system itself was stitched up to reinforce this hegemony. SMP is not, in fact, the only voting system to have been used in a House of Commons election. Multi member constituencies were quite common for urban areas at first, and university seats were elected using Single Transferable Vote from 1917 until 1950. You can see how, in the first decade after single member constituencies were universally adopted in 1950, the disparity between votes and seats actually got worse. By contrast, if we had not gone down that route, it seems likely that UK elections would have done a better job at reflecting votes cast.
Josep Colomer asserts that as political systems embrace multi-party politics, they tend to drift inexorably towards proportional representation.
A crucial point, however, is that coordination failures can be relatively more frequent under majoritarian electoral systems, especially for the costs of information transmission, bargaining, and implementation of agreements among previously separate organizations, as well as the induction of strategic votes in favor of the larger candidacies. With coordination failures, people will waste significant amounts of votes, voters’ dissatisfaction with the real working of the electoral system may increase, and large numbers of losing politicians are also likely to use voters’ dissatisfaction and their own exclusion, defeat or under-representation to develop political pressures in favor of changing to more proportional electoral rules.
In other words, eventually the ability to “do politics” using a majoritarian system becomes increasingly difficult as more parties become effective agents within the system. He goes on to suggest that “above 4 ENPs, establishing or maintaining a majority rule electoral system would be highly risky for the incumbent largest party, and possibly not feasible either due to pressures for an alternative change supported by a majority of votes.”
Sadly Colomer doesn’t actually tell us how this switch will happen, but we are already seeing the current system falling apart. Of all the potential outcomes I listed at the top of this article, the biggest problem from a governance point of view is that difficulty we might encounter in forming a government. In 2010 (and despite the more fruity speculation by some), the arithmetical logic behind the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition was quite straightforward: there was simply no other way to form a two party coalition, apart from a Conservative-Labour one of course. Despite some sunny optimism about the viability of a Labour-LD-SNP-Unionist government, the fact is that such a rainbow would have been incredibly hard to maintain.
A lot of political commentators have asserted that the outcome of the 2015 general election is impossible to predict. They are only half right. It’s actually quite clear which way people are going to vote; what is unpredictable is a voting system that is so poorly suited to its purpose that the numbers that it chews out could go anywhere. That this doesn’t lead more people than it does to declare that it is time to pick another system is a sad testament of how badly let down our media and politicians are letting us down.
After the 2011 AV referendum, the No campaign declared the matter of the voting system settled for a generation. The 2014 Scottish independence referendum has already demonstrated to us how such things are rarely that simple, and it seems likely to me that the debate over whether SMP is any longer fit for purpose will kick off in a big way after this year’s election. At least, it will among the public. The question is whether civil society and the media will join that throng or allow it to peter out. It can’t be left to the Electoral Reform Society and Unlock Democracy to make the case.
And how will the political class respond? Will they embrace the tide of history in the way that they did eventually over the Reform Acts and female suffrage, or will they continue to resist it? I hope they’ll take the pragmatic, former option; if they don’t we could be looking at decades of instability. For me, it’s the only truly interesting question about this year’s general election; until we have a system which in some way reflects the settled will of the people, everything else will just be a case of rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.
* Personally I prefer to refer to the UK voting system as “single member plurality” and not “first past the post”. This is for several reasons. Firstly, it is a simple fact that it better describes the actual system: we have single member constituencies and you win by getting the plurality (largest share of the vote). “First past the post” on the other hand doesn’t actually describe how the system works at all – ironically, to the extent that it describes anything, it better describes the Alternative Vote system/instant run-off voting which actually has a “winning post” (50%). Secondly, it is the internationally recognised description of the system; the UK loves its quirky and confusing names for voting systems (Additional Member System instead of Multi Member Proportional for example), and it is a fairly contemptible bit of British chauvinism. Thirdly, I think that allowing the supporters of SMP to use their preferred, familiar term puts them at an advantage as all other voting systems sound alien and technical in comparison. That’s nonsense, and I don’t think we should allow them the privilege.
In that other great Irish exploration of the experience of death, Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, the protagonist endures an afterlife built on the principle of recursion. Having murdered a man to fund a quixotic and obscure self-published project – I can only sympathise – he finds himself subject to a string of comical and terrifying events which, the novel implies, he will repeat in minor variation for eternity.
What does this have to do with Westlife’s bizarre Christmas Number One cover of Terry Jacks’ “Seasons In The Sun”, which brings the curtain down on the 1990s, and on the 20th Century’s charts? Only that, as the band tightened their apparent grip on pop, a dark suspicion grew that we had all been stranded in a recursive process – that time had looped round to the 1970s, an era of novelty hits, holiday imports, and doe-eyed crooners. Or even the 50s, when groomed, polite and stifling boys had made the pop running quite as much as rock’n’roll had. The style has changed a little since 1952 – gospel, doo-wop and soul are in Westlife’s mix, however faintly, and light opera is no longer a pop aspiration – but the manner has not. Between the first number one and the 844th, the level of smarm is depressingly constant.
To say that is only to repeat something which became obvious very early on in the Popular project – that the set of uses people find for pop singles stays largely the same. Dancing, loving, self-definition, and souvenirs – that covers eighty percent of it, I’d say. And that’s fine – the game is in the detail of each variation. What seemed different about Westlife was that they were so desperate to smooth out and file off such detail: occasionally, more often in their videos, you’d catch onto something that fixed them in time, but their records rarely had any such grain to them.
What wasn’t clear in 1999 was how the unbearable blankness of Westlife was only one version of a question set to haunt Popular for the next decade or more: what, exactly, does Simon Cowell like about music? What does he think pop should be? In his choices of what to promote and record, Cowell – still a backstage figure at this point – gives a strong impression that he thinks rock music was, all in all, a bad idea, that the most natural and profitable form of pop is the kind of light entertainment represented by big-voiced stars and impresarios, or at the sophisticated end bandleaders and crooners. If Westlife do hark back to 50s pop, I suspect it was partly instinctive.
Cover versions are a very obvious strategy for the group, and one that paid off at once: after “Flying Without Wings” had scraped a number one, “Seasons” and “I Have A Dream” did the job at Christmas easily, and held on for several weeks. The covers chosen for this single represent how the light entertainment tradition survived into the 1970s – they are the decade at its soggiest and broadest. “I Have A Dream”, children’s choir and all, is ABBA’s worst single – from an album where they sound wrong-footed by disco, second-guessing themselves, and then breaking their unsteady flow with this relative clunker. It sounds like it was a commission – UNICEF, or Children In Need before the fact – but as far as I know it’s just Benny and Bjorn trusting, as usual, that their melodic gifts will redeem their cornier impulses. For once, they get it wrong.
It’s pretty, though, and Frida – battening the hatches of faith to keep out the winter darkness of late ABBA – is as magnificent as ever. But Westlife’s version is no abomination. The inevitable boyband ad libs find a new, more celebratory, take on the song, breaking down the slight church hall prissiness in ABBA’s verses. Though in a song where almost every note is oversung, there’s no longer anything special about the original’s one beautiful moment, the held “I believe….in angels”.
But wait a minute. “I Have A Dream” is about finding strength in faith, but specifically the strength to conquer and meet the fear of death: “When I know the time is right for me, I’ll cross the stream”. Which brings us to “Seasons In The Sun”, in which, on the eve of the Millennium, Westlife conjure their own apocalypse by bringing the death ballad back to the UK charts. If it’s a startling move on the band’s part, it’s made even weirder by the professional gusto with which the lads approach “Seasons”. If “I Want It That Way” cut up boyband song lyrics to prove that resonance in them came from texture not text, “Seasons In The Sun” goes the only possible step further: after a sombre first minute or so, the fog of instrumental blarney clears, the group shake off their long faces and “Seasons”’ boyband moves run exactly against its supposed ‘meaning’. Lines about loss and death are sung in the precise way any love song would be: “Goodbah Michelle it’s hard to diy-iy-iy!”. Even Terry Jacks’ smash-and-grab job on Brel didn’t go that far.
Factor in the song’s own recursive stairway to heaven – those monstrous, tiered key changes piping you further up and further in to Simon’s Country – and you have a song that’s almost as awesomely wrong-headed as “The Millennium Prayer”. And this is how, despite Cowell’s efforts, pop music can fight back against his attempts to reduce it and iron out its creases. The seven weeks of Cliff and Westlife are, you could fairly claim, the darkest hour we have faced so far: two records where self-satisfied calculation meets cack-handed execution. They are terrible singles. And still some kind of oddness, some novelty, can poke through, even in Cowell’s home territory, the micro-managed world of Westlife. We had never heard Auld Lang Syne spliced with The Lord’s Prayer before. We have never heard a death ballad flambéed in insincerity, boyband style, either. It turns out that hearing these things is stupid and awful. But they are new. The charts can survive stupid and awful: predictability, the endless loop of pop’s Cowellian afterlife, will be the real enemy in the years to come.
Popular will return on February 1st. Let’s all meet up for the year 2000.
You had every faith in me. You knew I would do it, didn’t you? Secretly I thought I would back out of this trip at the last moment. Too daunting for one such as I! However, I did not let my nerves get the better of me. And suddenly there I was, all alone, aboard the SS Utopia, in the dock at Southampton. Ready to sail the oceans at last and see the world. I don’t know how I had the courage to set off like that, but somehow I did.
If I’d known what was coming, would I still have done it? I had no idea how brave I was going to have to be.
When the steward manhandled my bags all the way to my First Class cabin, he was full of reassurances. Blandishments, I would call them. How the sea would be calm and as smooth as a newly-made bed; how no storms were expected during our seven-night journey. But then, I expect they are used to soothing the nerves of first-time passengers like myself. Only a year after the ghastly tragedy of the Titanic – God rest their souls – I suppose most travellers experience qualms as they set sail upon vessels such as the SS Utopia, no matter how luxurious.
Why did I ever think an Atlantic passage would be something I’d enjoy?
I was rather fretful, Nellie. I sat up in my nicely appointed room and I couldn’t sleep at all during my first night at sea. I listened to the ship’s groaning, and panicked at every slight movement. I couldn’t help wondering whether this trip of mine was such a good idea after all.
Only a month before, I had finally decided to throw caution to the wind. As you yourself pointed out, I’d hardly been anywhere in the world. Now that I found myself without employment or ties, it seemed the opportune moment for a lady of even my advanced years to sally forth into the wider world. Your enthusiastic goading worked, my dear sister. And so I went off in search of the New World, all alone.
But at the outset I couldn’t help wondering: what if I had bitten off more than I could chew?
*
You will be glad to know that I ventured forth on the third day of sailing. What a thrill it was to be out on the deck once the wind had died down. How I marvelled at that blue expanse of sky and sea, with absolutely nothing to mar the view. I took a brisk walk all around the SS Utopia and suddenly started feeling very much more comfortable than I had at first.
I saw my friendly steward and he showed me where breakfast was being served. I nibbled on a crumpet and sipped some rather superior tea and felt quite content, sitting alone. Lovely silver, I must say. And the tablecloths were beautifully pressed.
Such luxury! Who would have thought I would be enjoying such riches? Only the generosity of my erstwhile employer could have brought me here. That dear man. Though, as you have rightly pointed out, sister, I deserved every penny of my severance pay. My years as his housekeeper were not uneventful, and sometimes they were downright terrifying. One never knew who would be turning up to consult with him in his sitting room. Traipsing muck up and down my stair carpet. Murderers and poisoners and suchlike. I was in far more danger than I think I ever knew about. But bless him, anyhow, and I hope he’s doing well tending his hornets and bees in Sussex. I had an extra spoonful of delicious honey on my last crumpet in honour of my ex-employer and his current charges.
Then I saw that I had attracted the attention of a gentleman at the next table. He, too, was eating alone, a clean-shaven, hawk-faced chap wearing evening dress for breakfast. He was peering at me over his pince-nez, so I shot him one of my basilisk stares – you know the ones, dear Nellie – and he disappeared once more behind his Times. Honestly! A Peeping Tom. And in First Class, too.
I wondered who he was. Quite a dapper gent.
*
That night I attended a concert wearing my dressiest gown and, as you promised, I soon fell into company. I was set upon by some women from the north country. Bradford, they informed me. The wives of some manufacturers of woollen garments. There was talk of mills and some such. I told them that I have a sister in North Yorkshire, on the very coast, and they made interested noises, all the way through the programme of light classics.
The small orchestra was tuneful and energetic, and I couldn’t help but be reminded of the band that bravely played on as the Titanic went down to her ignominious end. A gloom crept over me. And it wasn’t helped by those fussy Yorkshire women and their urgent quizzing, which began during a medley of waltzes. As you know, Strauss always makes me queasy, and that feeling wasn’t helped by the realization that these blowsy types had learned from shipboard gossip of my name and previous occupation.
They were avid for details of what it must have been like, keeping house for “the Great Man himself”, as they styled him. Well, I could have told them a tale or two about the messy and dirty circumstances in which that Great Man liked to languish, given half a chance. I could have told them about gunshots and smashed windows in the early watches of the night. But I thought – why bother? I don’t need the friendship of this gaggle of nosey parkers. I am on this trip to find a new life. Not to dwell upon the vicissitudes of the old.
I slipped out during a break for refreshments and returned to my cabin. I got somewhat lost as I traipsed down those endless corridors, and that was when I came upon that man again. The one who had been staring as I broke my fast. Perhaps, I thought, he too knew of my connection to the Great Detective. It was galling, really, to have been nothing but an invisible helpmeet all my life and yet then, when I could have done with some peace, to be drawing unwanted attention like this.
I clapped eyes on him as he came creeping out of a door clearly marked ‘crew only’. The pointy-nosed cove was still in the same jacket as he had worn that very morning, and he had a suspicious look about him. Evidently he had been poking about down in the bowels of the Utopia, up to no good. In one hand he was clutching a fearsomely pointed stick. This he quickly hid behind his back as I coughed loudly and swept past him in my formal gown: my magenta with the whalebone support and the seed pearl embroidery. You admired it, Nellie, remember?
He bade me good evening and I gave him another of my stares.
He was, I thought then, not a very nice gentleman. I have a keen sense of villainy, of course, due to my many years in Balcomb Street. As you know, I can tell at a glance what’s lurking in the murkiness of a man’s soul. You, my dear sister, could do with some of that perspicacity yourself.
Do look after yourself, in that seaside resort of yours. I am so far away and feel uncomfortable because I can’t advise you if you start making a fool of yourself again. You were never very shrewd when it came to the male sex and their heinous desires.
I decided to take to my bed as the tossing sea turned rough and everything started to roll to the rhythm of awful Strauss.
*
There we were in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. There was nothing to see, in whichever direction one looked. Never had I had so little to do, or had so few concerns. It was a strangely liberating feeling, marred only by the suspicion that the Titanic must have been hereabouts when disaster struck. Also, by the dread I felt for reaching our destination. Oh yes, indeed, I had dreamed about this holiday and experiencing the New World for a long time. But, really, what did I think would happen there? I was all alone, Nellie. With no one at all to share those new sights and experiences with. I found myself thinking about the years ahead – and wondering what I might fill them with. I am no longer needed, Nellie. I am redundant in every sense.
Well, obviously I came to my senses and saw that it was no good carrying on like that. Neither of us was brought up to wallow in feelings of desperation. And so it was that, determined to clear my head of all this foolish anguish, I took my daily constitutional, five times round the deck of our ship. I nodded and smiled to those passengers whose faces had become familiar in those past few days; I paused to examine the ship’s daily manifest; and I watched some elderly gentlemen playing a doddering game of quoits. And then, as I reached the very prow of our vessel, I was interrupted in my reverie by that same pale-faced chap with the pointed nose. That day he was in a green velvet smoking jacket, and I had the instant impression that he had planned this interception.
He opened his mouth to explain himself, but I wasn’t having any of it. I waved him off and tried to bustle past. I felt a bit foolish running away, but a woman alone can’t take too many chances. There he was, rabbiting on about why he’d been carrying that sharpened stick and sneaking about, and I tried to tell him I just didn’t care. But then he said it. He said it in such a sharp, commanding voice: ‘Mrs Martha Danby. Please let me explain.’
I turned round to look at him, amazed that he knew who I was. He was glaring at me with these steely grey eyes. Then I thought, well, anyone can look at the ship’s passenger list, can’t they?
He stepped forward and I was holding my breath. The sun was bright on his slicked-back white hair. I did think him a tad attractive, Nellie, for an older gent. But I didn’t want to let that show. He was burbling on about carrying pointed sticks and knives… Heavens! He opened up his jacket to show me that, stitched into the silk lining, he had a deadly array of hunting knives and more of those pointed sticks.
I boggled at him, Nellie. This was a very oddly-equipped gentleman. He was telling me that I had nothing to fear. His job was to protect ladies like myself. This was why he was armed so fearsomely. It was his role in this world to combat evil and the forces of darkness, wherever he was. Even aboard a luxury sailing vessel like this one.
Forces of darkness, I thought. Here we go again. Well, Nellie, I swiftly made my excuses and hastened to leave. I don’t know why he’d decided I needed to see his arsenal out there on the prow, but I wasn’t going to hang around.
‘Wait!’ he cried out. And then he asked me, urgently, whether I wasn’t in fact the very same Mrs Martha Danby who had worked for so many years as housekeeper to the esteemed Mr Nightshade Jones of 221b Balcomb Street.
Graciously, I gave the nod. ‘And Mr Wilson, too,’ I added. Folk tend to leave out the good doctor, but I was at his beck and call, as well. And this polite gentleman with the stakes and knives nodded thoughtfully. He’d come over all funny at the mere thought of Mr Jones. I wondered if he was an acquaintance or something… or worse… an enemy! A deadly enemy who had waited in the shadows until he could get this helpless female housekeeper alone…
He told me had conceived the greatest respect for my employers and myself. And then he introduced himself, rather charmingly, I thought. His name is Doctor Abraham Van Halfing. A Doctor, I thought, Nellie! A doctor of medicine and he’s got a PhD in ancient folklore and a Chair in Metaphysics to boot. Not that I know what a Chair in Metaphysics is, but it sounds rather grand.
I allowed him to take me in to lunch and we had a fine time of it, Nellie. He ate very little himself, but ordered all sorts of delicacies that he thought I ought to try. What a cultivated chap! Calling out for things in French without a qualm. Things that I didn’t even recognize. It was like Manna from Heaven, Nellie. It was like ambrosia or something. And all the while this dapper gentleman told me all about his scientific investigations. Not that I followed a word. Terribly well-groomed, he was.
He walked me back to my cabin and the sea was a little wilder, so I had a rolling gait as we made our way through the narrow corridors. Nothing to do with the crisp German wines he’d insisted I sample. However, I did feel slightly tipsy and perhaps over-stimulated by the company and the attention I’d received. I was much in need of my afternoon nap as we rounded the last corner before my door. I was fiddling in my clutch bag for my key just as that friendly steward I mentioned to you came walking past us.
The ship lurched, and I clutched the brass rail and dropped my key. At that very moment I saw that Doctor Van Halfing – my gallant companion – had produced, from inside his velvet jacket one of his sharpened sticks. I gave a shriek. I thought he was about to impale me, Nellie.
But he swung himself round and plunged that weapon straight into my steward. The stake went into the clean white breast of his jacket. Right into his heart. The sailor looked amazed and he gave a horrible, gurgling scream. And then POOF. He exploded into a shower of grey particles, which dropped to the carpet outside my cabin door.
Abraham Van Halfing was still holding his stake. He looked grimly satisfied. ‘These evil creatures are everywhere, Mrs Danby. And that is why I am always quiveringly alert.
Eleazar Misael Perez Cabrera sleeps in the music room at Shadow Rock United Church of Christ in north Phoenix.
Spiral notebooks lean between shelving cubes along one wall. Black and tan filing cabinets line another. A piano stands opposite Cabrera’s twin bed.
He has stayed there since Nov. 17.
The church has become his home, his sanctuary. But for how much longer? He shrugs. The 31-year-old Guatemalan immigrant knows this at least: He is safe.
Cabrera and Shadow Rock Church are part of a growing movement of activist congregation leaders who believe the United States has violated human rights by deporting millions of immigrants to unsafe countries and separating families.
They have opened spare rooms, kitchens and bathrooms to immigrants who fear deportation and to pressure authorities to pass reform that provides more comprehensive paths to citizenship.
And, generally, those immigrants are safe from deportation as long as they don’t leave the church. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has a policy that discourages agents from conducting arrests at places of worship, schools or hospitals.
This has echoes of the Sanctuary movement of the 1980s, when American churches sheltered refugees from the proxy wars of Central America. But the roots of the idea are far, far older than that.
Charles Laughton and Maureen O’Hara as Quasimodo and Esmeralda in “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” (1939).
The idea of sacred spaces as refuge is an ancient one. We can find it in the Hebrew scriptures, in the laws establishing cities and places of refuge for the persecuted and for the guilty alike. And in medieval times, churches often served as such places of safety for those fleeing death, imprisonment or exile (provided, of course, that those seeking refuge were not fleeing death, imprisonment or exile at the hands of the church).
The idea is embedded in our language, in the way the word “sanctuary” has evolved to mean both a sacred space and a refuge or preserve. Christians gather in the sanctuaries of churches, places set apart for worship. We also establish sanctuaries for wildlife, places set apart to preserve that which is threatened.
The long history of this idea of sanctuary surfaced this summer in Ferguson, Missouri, when police raided a school building adjacent to St. Mark’s Church that the church had set apart as a “safe haven” for protesters following the killing of Michael Brown. That incident raised odd echoes of the ancient practice as reports attached great implicit importance to the question of whether police had ventured into the holy ground of the church itself or just into the proximate property that was not itself a “sanctuary.”
Sanctuary has always been a murky, tangled concept. These places of refuge lack any tangible power to enforce their claim as safe spaces. Thus while the right or rite of sanctuary exists as a challenge to the power of the Powers That Be and a reminder of their limits, that right is also dependent on the consent of the powerful. In the story above, Eleazar Cabrera isn’t protected by law, but by custom. (The name of the church — Shadow Rock — is evocative. The shelter of sanctuary may not be so much from the strength of a rock, but from the idea of its shadow.)
Sanctuary is, in one sense, a powerful expression of the separation of church and state, but it is also, in a sense, a reflection of their inevitable entanglement. The concept also raises a fascinating question of cause and effect: Are sacred spaces recognized as refuges because they are sacred? Or are they sacred because they are recognized as places of refuge? Are they able to stand against the Powers That Be because they are holy? Or are they holy because they stand against the Powers That Be?
At its best, I think, the idea of sanctuary embodies the best of the church. It can be a refuge, a safe place for those who have no where else to turn. It can be a place that defends the otherwise defenseless. The needy and desperate should be able to flee to the church for refuge — to pound on its door, crying “Sanctuary,” and to be welcomed in and given shelter.
But the beauty of that is, sadly, shown more in its absence than in its actuality. The story of Shadow Rock and its rescue of Eleazar Cabrera stands out because it is exceptional.
This hopeful story of sanctuary stands in stark contrast to the heartbreaking story of Leelah Alcorn, a 17-year-old transgender girl in Ohio for whom the church was anything but a sanctuary, refuge, shelter or safe haven.
The sanctuary that turned away this child was not a sanctuary at all. It was not a sacred space. It was, and is, unholy.
Aaronson still doesn't get it, but he's clearly TRYING to get it.
Two weeks ago, prompted by a commenter named Amy, I wrote by far the most personal thing I’ve ever made public—what’s now being referred to in some places as just “comment 171.” My thinking was: I’m giving up a privacy that I won’t regain for as long as I live, opening myself to ridicule, doing the blog equivalent of a queen-and-two-rook sacrifice. But at least—and this is what matters—no one will ever again be able to question the depth of my feminist ideals. Not after they understand how I clung to those ideals through a decade when I wanted to die. And any teenage male nerds who read this blog, and who find themselves in a similar hole, will know that they too can get out without giving up on feminism. Surely that’s a message any decent person could get behind?
Alas, I was overoptimistic. Twitter is now abuzz with people accusing me of holding precisely the barbaric attitudes that my story was all about resisting, defeating, and escaping, even when life throws you into those nasty attitudes’ gravity well, even when it tests you as most of your critics will never be tested. Many of the tweets are full of the courageous clucks of those who speak for justice as long as they’re pretty sure their friends will agree with them: wow just wow, so sad how he totes doesn’t get it, expletives in place of arguments. This whole affair makes me despair of the power of language to convey human reality—or at least, of my own ability to use language for that end. I took the most dramatic, almost self-immolating step I could to get people to see me as I was, rather than according to some preexisting mental template of a “privileged, entitled, elite male scientist.” And many responded by pressing down the template all the more firmly, twisting my words until they fit, and then congratulating each other for their bravery in doing so.
Here, of course, these twitterers (and redditors and facebookers) inadvertently helped make my argument for me. Does anyone still not understand the sort of paralyzing fear that I endured as a teenager, that millions of other nerds endure, and that I tried to explain in the comment—the fear that civilized people will condemn you as soon as they find out who you really are (even if the truth seems far from uncommonly bad), that your only escape is to hide or lie?
Thankfully, not everyone responded with snarls. Throughout the past two weeks, I’ve been getting regular emails from shy nerds who thanked me profusely for sharing as I did, for giving them hope for their own lives, and for articulating a life-crushing problem that anyone who’s spent a day among STEM nerds knows perfectly well, but that no one acknowledges in polite company. I owe the writers of those emails more than they owe me, since they’re the ones who convinced me that on balance, I did the right thing.
I’m equally grateful to have gotten some interesting, compassionate responses from feminist women. The most striking was that of Laurie Penny in the New Statesman—a response that others of Penny’s views should study, if they want to understand how to win hearts and change minds.
I do not intend for a moment to minimise Aaronson’s suffering. Having been a lonely, anxious, horny young person who hated herself and was bullied I can categorically say that it is an awful place to be. I have seen responses to nerd anti-feminism along the lines of ‘being bullied at school doesn’t make you oppressed.’ Maybe it’s not a vector of oppression in the same way, but it’s not nothing. It burns. It takes a long time to heal.
Feminism, however, is not to blame for making life hell for ‘shy, nerdy men.’ Patriarchy is to blame for that. It is a real shame that Aaronson picked up Dworkin rather than any of the many feminist theorists and writers who manage to combine raw rage with refusal to resort to sexual shame as an instructive tool. Weaponised shame- male, female or other- has no place in any feminism I subscribe to. Ironically, Aronson [sic] actually writes a lot like Dworkin- he writes from pain felt and relived and wrenched from the intimate core of himself, and because of that his writing is powerfully honest, but also flawed …
What fascinates me about Aaronson’s piece, in which there was such raw, honest suffering, was that there was not one mention of women in any respect other than how they might relieve him from his pain by taking pity, or educating him differently. And Aaronson is not a misogynist. Aaronson is obviously a compassionate, well-meaning and highly intelligent man [damn straight—SA]
I’ll have more to say about Penny’s arguments in a later post—where I agree and where I part ways from her—but there’s one factual point I should clear up now. When I started writing comment 171, I filled it with anecdotes from the happier part of my life (roughly, from age 24 onward): the part where I finally became able to ask; where women, with a frequency that I couldn’t have imagined as a teenager, actually answered ‘yes'; and where I got to learn about their own fears and insecurities and quirks. In the earlier draft, I also wrote about my wife’s experiences as a woman in computer science, which differed from Amy’s in some crucial ways. But then I removed it all, for a simple reason: because while I have the right to bare my own soul on my blog, I don’t have the right to bare other people’s unless they want me to.
Without further ado, and for the benefit of the world’s Twitterariat, I’m now just going to state nine of my core beliefs.
1. I believe that women are authors of their own stories, that they don’t exist merely to please men, that they are not homogeneous, that they’re not slot machines that ‘pay out’ but only if you say the right things. I don’t want my two-year-old daughter to grow up to be anyone else’s property, and I’m happy that she won’t. And I’d hope all this would no more need to be said, than (say) that Gentiles shouldn’t be slaughtered to use their blood in making matzo.
2. I believe everyone’s story should be listened to—and concretely, that everyone should feel 300% welcome to participate in my comments section. I don’t promise to agree with you, but I promise to try to engage your ideas thoughtfully, whether you’re a man, woman, child, AI-bot, or unusually-bright keyboard-pecking chicken. Indeed, I spend a nontrivial fraction of my life doing exactly that (well, not so much with chickens).
3. I believe no one has the right to anyone else’s sexual affections. I believe establishing this principle was one of the triumphs of modern civilization.
4. I believe women who go into male-dominated fields like math, CS, and physics deserve praise, encouragement, and support. But that’s putting the point too tepidly: if I get to pick 100 people (unrelated to me) to put onto a spaceship as the earth is being destroyed, I start thinking immediately about six or seven of my female colleagues in complexity and quantum computing. And no, Twitter: not because being female, they could help repopulate the species. Just because they’re great people.
5. I believe there still exist men who think women are inferior, that they have no business in science, that they’re good only for sandwich-making and sex. Though I don’t consider it legally practicable, as a moral matter I’d be fine if every such man were thrown in prison for life.
6. I believe that even if they don’t hold views anything like the above (as, overwhelmingly, they don’t), there might be nerdy males who unintentionally behave in ways that tend to drive some women away from science. I believe this is a complicated problem best approached with charity: we want win-win solutions, where no one is made to feel despised because of who they are. Toward that end, I believe open, honest communication (as I’ve been trying to foster on this blog) is essential.
7. I believe that no one should be ashamed of inborn sexual desires: not straight men, not straight women, not gays, not lesbians, not even pedophiles (though in the last case, there might really be no moral solution other than a lifetime of unfulfilled longing). Indeed, I’ve always felt a special kinship with gays and lesbians, precisely because the sense of having to hide from the world, of being hissed at for a sexual makeup that you never chose, is one that I can relate to on a visceral level. This is one reason why I’ve staunchly supported gay marriage since adolescence, when it was still radical. It’s also why the tragedy of Alan Turing, of his court-ordered chemical castration and subsequent suicide, was one of the formative influences of my life.
8. I believe that “the problem of the nerdy heterosexual male” is surely one of the worst social problems today that you can’t even acknowledge as being a problem—the more so, if you weight the problems by how likely academics like me are to know the sufferers and to feel a personal stake in helping them. How to help all the young male nerds I meet who suffer from this problem, in a way that passes feminist muster, and that triggers the world’s sympathy rather than outrage, is a problem that interests me as much as P vs. NP, and that right now seems about equally hard.
9. I believe that, just as there are shy, nerdy men, there are also shy, nerdy women, who likewise suffer from feeling unwanted, sexually invisible, or ashamed to express their desires. On top of that, these women also have additional difficulties that come with being women! At the same time, I also think there are crucial differences between the two cases—at least in the world as it currently exists—which might make the shy-nerdy-male problem vastly harder to solve than the shy-nerdy-female one. Those differences, and my advice for shy nerdy females, will be the subject of another post. (That’s the thing about blogging: in for a penny, in for a post.)
Update (Dec. 31): I struggle always to be ready to change my views in light of new arguments and evidence. After reflecting on the many thoughtful comments here, there are two concessions that I’m now willing to make.
The first concession is that, as Laurie Penny maintained, my problems weren’t caused by feminism, but rather by the Patriarchy. One thing I’ve learned these last few days is that, as many people use it, the notion of “Patriarchy” is sufficiently elastic as to encompass almost anything about the relations between the sexes that is, or has ever been, bad or messed up—regardless of who benefits, who’s hurt, or who instigated it. So if you tell such a person that your problem was not caused by the Patriarchy, it’s as if you’ve told a pious person that a certain evil wasn’t the Devil’s handiwork: the person has trouble even parsing what you said, since within her framework, “evil” and “Devil-caused” are close to synonymous. If you want to be understood, far better just to agree that it was Beelzebub and be done with it. This might sound facetious, but it’s really not: I believe in the principle of always adopting the other side’s terms of reference, whenever doing so will facilitate understanding and not sacrifice what actually matters to you.
Smash the Patriarchy!
The second concession is that, all my life, I’ve benefited from male privilege, white privilege, and straight privilege. I would only add that, for some time, I was about as miserable as it’s possible for a person to be, so that in an instant, I would’ve traded all three privileges for the privilege of not being miserable. And if, as some suggested, there are many women, blacks, and gays who would’ve gladly accepted the other side of that trade—well then, so much the better for all of us, I guess. “Privilege” simply struck me as a pompous, cumbersome way to describe such situations: why not just say that person A’s life stinks in this way, and person B’s stinks in that way? If they’re not actively bothering each other, then why do we also need to spread person A’s stink over to person B and vice versa, by claiming they’re each “privileged” by not having the other one’s?
However, I now understand why so many people became so attached to that word: if I won’t use it, they think it means I think that sexism, racism, and homophobia don’t exist, rather than just that I think people fixated on a really bad way to talk about these problems.
Update (Jan. 1): Yesterday I gave a seminar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Since I’d been spending all my time dealing with comment-171-gate, I showed up with no slides, no notes, no anything—just me and the whiteboard. But for an hour and a half, I got to forget entirely about the thousands of people on the Internet I’d never met who were now calling me an asshole because of wild, “postmodernist” misreadings of a blog comment, which twisted what I said (and meant) into its exact opposite, building up a fake-Scott-Aaronson onto whom the ax-grinders could project all of their own bogeymen. For 90 minutes I got to forget all that, and just throw myself into separations between randomized and quantum query complexity. It was the most cathartic lecture of my life. And in the near future, I’d like more such catharses. Someday I’ll say more about the inexhaustibly-fascinating topic of nerds and sex—and in particular, I’ll write the promised post about shy female nerds—but not now. This will be my last post on the subject for a while.
On balance, I don’t regret having shared my story—because it prompted an epic discussion; because I learned so much from the dozens of other nerd coming-of-age stories that it drew out, similar to mine but also different; because what I learned will change the way I talk about these issues in the future; and most of all, because so many people, men and also some women, emailed me to say how my speaking out gave them hope for their own lives. But I do regret a few rhetorical flourishes, which I should have known might be misread maliciously, though I could never have guessed how maliciously. I never meant to minimize the suffering of other people, nor to deny that many others have had things as bad or worse than I did (again, how does one even compare?). I meant only that, if we’re going to discuss how to change the culture of STEM fields, or design sexual-conduct policies to minimize suffering, then I request a seat at the table not as the “white male powerful oppressor figure,” but as someone who also suffered something atypically extreme, overcame it, and gained relevant knowledge that way. I never meant to suggest that anyone else should leave the table.
To the people who tweeted that female MIT students should now be afraid to take classes with me: please check out the beautiful blog post by Yan, a female student who did take 6.045 with me. See also this by Lisa Danz and this by Chelsea Voss.
More broadly: thank you to everyone who sent me messages of support, but especially to all the female mathematicians and scientists who did so. I take great solace from the fact that, of all the women and men whose contributions to the world I had respected beforehand, not one (to my knowledge) reacted to this affair in a mean-spirited way.
Happy New Year, everyone. May 2015 be a year of compassion and understanding.
Update (Jan. 2): If you’ve been following this at all, then please, please, please read Scott Alexander’s tour-de-force post. To understand what it was like for me to read this, after all I’ve been through the past few days, try to imagine Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, the American Declaration of Independence, John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women, and Clarence Darrow’s closing arguments in the Scopes trial all rolled into one, except with you as the protagonist. Reason and emotion are traditionally imagined as opposites, but that’s never seemed entirely right to me: while, yes, part of reason is learning how to separate out emotion, I never experience such intense emotion as when, like with Alexander’s piece, I see reason finally taking a stand, reason used to face down a thousand bullies and as a fulcrum to move the world.
Update (Jan. 13): Please check out this beautiful Quora answer by Jean Yang, a PhD student in MIT CSAIL. She’s answering the question: “What do you think of Scott Aaronson’s comment #171 and the subsequent posts?”
More generally, I’ve been thrilled by the almost-unanimously positive reactions that I’ve been getting these past two weeks from women in STEM fields, even as so many people outside STEM have responded with incomprehension and cruelty. Witnessing that pattern has—if possible—made me even more of a supporter and admirer of STEM women than I was before this thing started.
Q: What constraints dictate the length of works of fiction?
A: Same as any other product: money and time …
The most familiar form of fiction in the English-language publishing world, today, is a stand-alone bound book containing a novel. (Perhaps the second most familiar form is the series novel, which recycles characters of a setting from earlier works, optionally continuing to unfold a multi-book story or hitting a reset button between novels, as with some TV serials.)
A typical modern novel is in the range 85,000-140,000 words. But there’s nothing inevitable about this. The shortest work of fiction I ever wrote and sold was seven words long; the longest was 196,000 words. I’ve written plenty of short stories, in the 3000-8000 word range, novelettes (8000-18,000 words), and novellas (20,000-45,000 words). (Anything longer than a novella is a “short novel” and deeply unfashionable these days, at least in adult genre fiction, which seems to be sold by the kilogram.)
One would think that it’s so much easier to write a 5000 word short story (it can sometimes be done in a day) than a novel (it can sometimes take years) that they should be commoner. But trade fiction authors who write for a living seem to focus exclusively on novels, to the point where some of us don’t write short fiction at all. Why is this? Stay with me below the cut and I’ll try to give you a [highly subjective, personal, biased] explanation.
Genre science fiction in the US literary tradition has its roots in the era of the pulp magazines, from roughly 1920 to roughly 1955. (The British SF/F field evolved similarly, so I’m going to use the US field as my reference point.) These were the main supply of mass-market fiction to the general public in the days before television, when reading a short story was a viable form of mass entertainment, and consequently there was a relatively fertile market for short fiction up to novella length. In addition, many of these magazines serialized novels: it was as serials that Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” and E. E. “Doc” Smith’s “The Skylark of Space” were originally published, among others.
For a while, during this period, it was possible to earn a living (not a very good living) churning out pulp fiction in short formats. It’s how Robert Heinlein supplemented his navy pension in the 1930s; it’s how many of the later-great authors first gained their audiences. But it was never a good living, and in the 1950s the bottom fell out of the pulp market—the distribution channel itself largely dried up and blew away, a victim of structural inefficiencies and competition from other entertainment media. The number of SF titles on sale crashed, and the number of copies each sold also crashed. Luckily for the writers a new medium was emerging: the mass market paperback, distributed via the same wholesale channel as the pulp magazines and sold through supermarkets and drugstore wire-racks. These paperbacks were typically short by modern standards: in some cases they provided a market for novellas (25,000 words and up—Ace Doubles consisted of two novellas, printed and bound back-to-back and upside-down relative to one another, making a single book).
The market for short fiction gradually recovered somewhat. In addition to the surviving SF magazines (now repackaged as digest-format paperback monthlies) anthologies emerged as a market. But after 1955 it was never again truly possible to earn a living writing short stories (although this may be changing thanks to the e-publishing format shift—it’s increasingly possible to publish stand-alone shorter works, or to start up a curatorial e-periodical or “web magazine” as the hip young folks call them). And the readership profile of the remaining magazines slowly began to creep upwards, as new readers discovered SF via the paperback book rather than the pulp magazine. With this upward trending demographic profile, the SF magazines entered a protracted, generational spiral of dwindling sales: today they still exist, but nobody would call a US newsstand magazine with monthly sales of 10,000-15,000 copies a success story.
A side-effect of dwindling sales is that the fixed overheads of running a magazine (the editor’s pay check) remains the same but there’s less money to go around. Consequently, pay rates for short fiction stagnated from the late 1950s onwards. 2 cents/word was a decent wage in 1955—it was $20 for a thousand words, so $80-500 for a short story or novelette. But the monthly magazines were still paying 5 cents/word in the late 1990s! This was pin money. It was a symbolic reward. It would cover your postage and office supplies bill—if you were frugal.
There is some sign of a recovery in this area since the mid-00s. I can point to a couple of high-end web based markets whose peak rate (for “name” authors) is 50 cents/word; at $500/thousand words they’re actually competitive with newspaper op-ed writing. But in general, novels pay much better than short fiction. A 100,000 word mid-list novel that reaps a $10,000 advance has netted the author 10 cents/word, and because it’s a single articulated narrative the author hasn’t had to re-start from scratch with new characters, ideas, and settings every 5-10,000 words. 100,000 words of novel are much easier to write than 100,000 words of short stories.
Anyway.
This is by way of explaining that, from the perspective of an ordinary working writer (who is trying to earn a living), short stories are good for three things:
Learning the trade
Advertising your wares
Fun and experimentation
First, learning the trade. If it’s your ambition to write novels, why would you start with short stories? Many people don’t; it’s a peculiarity of the SF/F field that we have this tradition of starting with shorter works (because, unlike the mainstream genre categories, we had some surviving markets for them). But I think if you want to write, diving in and trying to start with a novel is asking for trouble. Novels are complex beasts and if you write one you have to be able to keep track of a whole bunch of different narrative structures that overlap, on different levels: the plot arc, character development, thematic elements, and so on. (For a whistle-stop tour of these items I’d strongly recommend one book: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by some guy called Stephen King, who obviously thinks he knows something about putting together novels.)
Short stories are short. Consequently, you can’t cram everything in. As Isaac Asimov observed, short stories are about what you leave out—and the shorter the format, the more things you can safely ignore. This makes them an ideal learning vehicle. You can write a 2000 word character study in an hour or an afternoon. Someone else can read it in 3-10 minutes. It’s not demanding. You can show it to other readers and other writers and they can dip their toe in the water and tell you what they think without the sinking feeling that comes from receiving a 500 page doorstep, or a megabyte of prose.
Short stories therefore lend themselves to workshopping and learning and training, so they may not be very commercial, but they’re bloody useful all the same (and it’s no accident that while I sold my first short stories in the mid-1980s it took another decade before I could produce a readable novel, and another few years after that before I was firing on all cylinders).
Secondly, Advertising your wares. This probably doesn’t require any explanation, but: because short stories are short and easy to read, there’s a low threshold to uptake. It’s much easier to try out a new author by reading a short story than by diving into a trilogy. Or to try out the world on an on-going series by reading a single story. (Quick: how many of you first began reading my Laundry Files series after you stumbled across a short story in that setting?)
Importantly, among the folks who read short stories to discover new authors this way are numerous editors. If you’re an editor, one way to build a reputation in your field is to discover the next big thing. And because the next big thing probably starts out writing short fiction, that’s where a lot of the smart novel editors keep a weather eye pointed. If someone appears out of nowhere and begins grabbing Hugo nominations for short fiction, then the manuscript of their first novel lands in your inbox, you pay attention.
Thirdly, Fun and experimentation. When you’re writing novels for a living, your income stream for months or years in advance depends on getting the current project right. You are writing to a deadline, and novels are big and cumbersome: wrestling one into a new shape can take weeks or months. So there’s a natural tendency to be extremely conservative with your writing style, to avoid big risks. (Examples of “big risk”: writing a police procedural in multi-viewpoint second person present tense. Or using a highly unreliable narrative viewpoint who is basically lying to the reader, with the intention that the reader will eventually smell a rat and begin to interpret the real story hidden in the background. And so on.)
Short fiction is short. If you’ve got a few spare days you can push out a novelette that does something so radical and experimental with language that it would have an editor reaching for the smelling salts if you did it at novel length. (Unless it’s the late 1960s and your name is Brian Aldiss). A handful of readers will appreciate it, you’ll get your stationary and printer consumables paid for, and you might win a shiny award from those who care. Meanwhile, you’ll have learned whether or not something works, and you can use it later in your bread and butter novels. (Personal example: Bit Rot. I had an invitation to do a far-future space opera story for an anthology. I had a universe lying around, under-used, from “Saturn’s Children”. I wanted to see if there was any life left in it, so I wrote this short story. Yes, it was still viable: I could still work in it. So then I knew I could use it as the setting for “Neptune’s Brood”.)
Finally, I have mentioned the existence of format shifts, when an entire wholesale/retail distribution chain goes away and a new one emerges, causing a shift in the type of work that authors are paid to write. A huge side-effect of the ebook shift is the sudden resurgence of the novella, a format that was previously in eclipse. A novella is a month’s work: a gamble, but if you take a month off to play with one between books, you’re probably not going to starve—you’ll just have to work harder to make up time. Novellas are too short to bind and sell as novels in their own right (with a few exceptions—notably signed limited edition numbered hardcover runs that don’t get discounted down to peanut husks by Amazon), but they thrive as ebooks at a price point between $0.99 and $2.99. And they’re taking off these days, in numbers and in readership. So I find that, interestingly, the novella seems to be a natural overlap point between a format I can get experimental with and one that can pay its own way.
But in general, if you were wondering why I don’t write short fiction much (if ever) these days, the reason is simple: I’m not learning the basics of the trade, and I don’t need to work for chickenfeed to advertise my wares. Fun and experimentation is still valid, but I’m in the happy position of having been given so much scope to experiment in my novel-length work that I seldom need to go there. And so, this is why many (but not all) working novelists start out as short story writers but seem to go off the boil after a few books.
The tale begins with a baby calf named Rudolph born to what is assumed to be a typical reindeer family. Immediately we recognize that this is no typical Hollywood tale. As we all know, male reindeer lose their antlers in late fall, but female retain throughout the Christmas season. By making Rudolph, Donner (the head of the family), and all of Santa’s reindeer female, the film makes a strong departure from the androcentric status quo.
The new baby girl fills the house with joy until the parents discovered the calf to be quite queer—Rudolph had a red nose that glowed. Initially ashamed, Donner drew on a very functional and literal cover-up of mud and clay to hide the nose. It is believed this was for the good of the calf as this story was set in a pretty cruel place—a place where even Santa was unkind and unaccepting of differences.
Spring training comes along with masculinity classes for Rudolph. This was a highlight of the story for me. It was nice to see time was taken to demonstrate that gender is socially constructed and masculinity is learned. Girls can do anything that boys can do and our young protagonist was exceptional, even best in the class.
However, the mud and clay would be an impermanent fix. Rudolph’s glowing nose was revealed during play and the names and bullying began. In fact the bullying was even legitimated by the coach. With such an unaccepting family and community, Rudolph runs away.
Meanwhile, in (one of) Santa’s workshops, an elf named Hermey was having a Jerry McGuire day. Hermey, perhaps the most relatable character to mainstream American society, was questioning the system. Hermey wanted to do what made him happy. He wanted to be a dentist. Working in an assembly line factory with long hours and no dental was not living the dream. Hermey decides he is a Dentist and also sets out alone.
Unsurprisingly, Rudolph and Hermey run into each other on the path out of town, also called loneliness. After a day in the polar wilderness they meet another queer named Yukon Cornelius who is always in search of gold or silver.
The three misfits then encounter the abominable snow monster. “Mean and nasty,” he “hates everything about Christmas.” Clearly, his teeth and wide reaching claws are designed to compel compliance with the social order. White, male, and against magic for the masses, this character is clearly intended to represent the kyriarchy, the system meant to uphold the intersecting oppressions of class, race, and gender. The movie’s central challenge is set: smash the kyriarchy.
The group initially retreats, only to find themselves on The Island of Misfit Toys where they are greeted by a flamboyant Charlie-in-the-box. It is here Hermey and Rudolph begin to dream of having an accepting place and we see the strong desire for a community. Surely, if dolls with low esteem, pink fire trucks, and trains with square wheels can be free of oppression, they can too.
Emboldened, the trio now returns to kill the kyriarchy. Using the never fail logic that bacon trumps all meats, Hermey makes like a pig to get the abominable snow monster’s attention. Once the snow monster steps out of the cave, Yukon knocks him out by dropping a boulder on his head; Hermey pulls out all his teeth in a symbolic and literal de-fanging.
Yukon pushes the monster off a cliff, but he falls, too. This is the most symbolic part of the tale, as the group has bonded together to kill the kyriarchy but not without some loss. The message is clear: if we build alliances, we can take down the power elite, but there will be sacrifices.
I will not ruin the end of the tale for you, only to say that Rudolph does in fact save Christmas, but it is by demonstrating value to the man—Santa. Once Santa sees Rudolph and his misfit friends as an asset he de-identifies at least slightly with the kyriarchy. For now, Christmas town was a cheerful place. A small battle had been worn.
Overall, Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer gets two thumbs up!
It is sure to become a classic tale of systems of oppression and privilege, stigma, and the struggle for self-acceptance. In Rudolph, difference can be good. It was quite progressive with its message advocating inclusivity, alliance, and dissent against systems of power. I love the commentary on the lack of queer community organizing and the role of misfits in fighting capitalism and the power elite. It took on some hot button issues in nuanced ways, especially the policing various classes of citizens and the importance of open carry laws.
It also took some big risks related to casting. It was gender progressive and, outside of the binary, we have at least two characters that blur sex categories. Clarice, for example, presents as feminine and female pronouns are employed with her, yet she has no antlers in late winter. While Hermey dresses like the male elves, but he has swooping blonde hair and a small nose like the female elves.
For years to come, Rudolph will no doubt be a wonderful conversation starter for both awkward and fun winter gatherings alike.
D’Lane R. Compton, PhD is a lover of all things antler, feather, and fur. An associate professor of sociology at the University of New Orleans with a background in social psychology, methodology, and a little bit of demography, she is usually thinking about food, country roads, stigma, queer nooks and places, sneakers and hipster subcultures. You can follow her on twitter.
Carswell’s going over some old ground here, as it’s close to the message of his victory speech after the Clacton by-election. It’s pretty much the credo of the libertarian wing of the party (the second wave of Alex Harrowell’s three UKIPs) and it’s interesting that Carswell feels that now is the time to restate that. Amidst all the speculation about who might be UKIP#s candidate in which seat, and which seats they might win, Carswell holding Clacton appears to be something everyone is assuming. Given that relative security, is he taking the opportunity to play a longer game?
The problem for Carswell is that libertarianism is still about as popular now as it was when the first wave of libertarians started trying to ally themselves with UKIP, and I think we can safely assume – given what we’ve seen of them – that their latest wave of recruits aren’t teeming with libertarians. However, there are a number of people who want a libertarian UKIP amongst wealthy donors and the right-wing commentariat. Yet again, we’re back to the interesting effects of the UKIP leadership electoral system. To make Carswell leader, they don’t need 50% of the party to support him, just one vote more than the rest of them get. By building up his profile now and trying to drag a few more libertarians into the fold (and I think we can assume Carswell’s leadership campaign, when it happens, will be pretty well funded), he becomes a much more credible candidate. He can afford to take the time now to raise his profile, and hope it pays off when the time comes.
This was originally posted on this site on Friday, January 13, 2006…
I had a whole batch of errands to run today…
Stop #1: My ATM. I complete the transaction and head for my car when I suddenly hear my name yelled. A woman I do not recognize runs up to me and begins hugging me and smothering me with kisses. Finally noticing my clueless expression (well, more clueless than usual), she informs me she is Kris, who worked as the second P.A. (i.e., the writers' secretary) on a show I wrote in 1982. She does not blame me for not knowing who she is because not only has so much time passed but she has also changed her hair color, lost sixty pounds and had her nose made smaller and her bustline made bigger. We have a nice conversation and Kris tells me that she hopes to see me again some day. She has more plastic surgery and another hair color adjustment planned so she says she'll make sure and tell me it's her.
Stop #2: Electronics Shop #1. I want to buy a pair of wireless headphones to plug into my new TV set so I stop at a store that should have some. They do not. The salesguy looks at me very strangely…as if there's something very odd about me wanting wireless headphones. I shall have to go elsewhere but before I do, lunch would be nice.
Stop #3: A Small Sandwich Stop. I go in and order a small sandwich. The lady behind the counter gives me the same kind of odd look and I think, "What is it with people today?" She says she'll bring my order to my table. Later, when she does, she summons up the courage to ask me, "Do you know you have lipstick all over your face?" Oh, so that's why the guy at the Electronics Shop looked at me that way.
Stop #4: The Men's Room of the Small Sandwich Shop. A look in the mirror confirms that I am streaked like an Apache in a bad western. Why do they make lipstick that doesn't stick to lips and why does Kris purchase it? She has every right to change her appearance but did she have to change mine? I seem to have also gotten a few big crimson streaks on my shirt so, figuring it's better to be wet than red, I remove the shirt, wash those parts of it, wash my face, put the shirt back on and depart.
Stop #5: A Sav-On Drug Store. I go in and purchase a few items. At the checkout line, the cashier gives me the same odd look. Since I know I don't have lipstick all over my face, I ask her what's so odd. She says, "Your shirt." I look down and realize that I have misbuttoned my shirt. The top button is in the second buttonhole from the top and all the others are off one. It is embarrassing to realize that I am 53 years old and apparently unable to dress myself.
Stop #6: The Men's Room of the Sav-On Drug Store. I discover it's worse than I thought because when I tucked my shirt in back in the Men's Room of the Small Sandwich Shop, I got the shirt tail caught in the zipper of my pants. I zip it down and the shirt gets further ensnarled and then I can't move the zipper up or down. I spend a good five minutes in a toilet stall straining and grunting before I finally disengage shirt from fly. During this, others are coming in to use the urinals outside the stall and I can only imagine what they think is going on in there.
Stop #7: Electronics Shop #2. I ask a salesguy if they carry wireless headphones. This salesguy gives me the same odd look as the salesguy at the first Electronics Shop. I ask this one why he's looking at me that way. He says, "Nobody uses wireless headphones any more." I think from now on, I stay home and order everything through Amazon. Including my small sandwiches.
Here's an example of one reason (of many) that some women decline to file reports when they're raped…
Bill Cosby has reportedly hired private investigators in order to dig up dirt on his alleged rape victims and discredit them. The American comedian, who has been fighting an onslaught of accusations that he sexually assaulted more than two dozen women over many years, had paid six-figure fees to investigators to find information, the Fox News reported. Sources confirmed that Cosby, through his Hollywood attorney Martin Singer, was implementing a scorched-earth strategy in which anything negative in his accusers' pasts was fair game.
If they could turn up proof that one of Cosby's accusers had a history of filing bogus rape charges, that might be relevant. But it's probably going to be more like, "So-and-So was arrested for shoplifting a bracelet when she was thirteen so you can't believe her when she claims Cosby raped her eleven years later."
Everything about the above story may be untrue. He may not be spending six figures to dig up dirt and I can't imagine where any reporter would have gotten the thing about "fair game." But just the fact that this might be done to any woman who was raped will scare many of them off. And then years later, if they finally get up the courage to report it, some will say, "If it was true, why did she wait so long?"
In December 1987 the Pet Shop Boys released “Always On My Mind”, a cover of the song made famous by Elvis Presley and Willie Nelson. It became the Christmas Number One that year. Almost a year later, they released Introspective, their third album, whose fifth track is a nine-minute version of “Always On My Mind”, including an acid house inspired breakdown that features Neil Tennant rapping. Introspective marks, in Tennant’s words, the end of the band’s “imperial phase”, where virtually anything they tried came off and was commercially successful. It charted at number two, behind U2’s Rattle And Hum.
Sixteen years later, at the end of a Freaky Trigger pub crawl, someone said that “Always On My Mind/In My House” was the best record of all time, and around a dozen of us agreed, or at least did not disagree, and that installed it at number one on our list, a list, we promised, that we would write up for the website over the course of 2005. And so we all went home the merrier for it.
And ten years after that, here we are.
The song: 00’39-02’53
When I wrote about “Always On My Mind” for Popular – giving it a 10 – I suggested the flash and bombast of the Pet Shop Boys’ synth arrangement preserved the song’s humility. I think I was mistaken about that. Neil Tennant isn’t gloating about his neglect of his lover, but he isn’t humble or regretful either. His reading of “Always On My Mind” preserves the admission at the expense of contrition: he is laying out the facts as he sees them, but even at this late stage he will not commit himself. Fortunately, the song has already done it for him: the crashing, swaggering synth riff that defines the Pet Shop Boys’ cover leaves you in no doubt which way Tennant is jumping.
But on this extended version, the riff is discarded, and Tennant’s wonderfully considered vocal holds the spotlight by itself. This time, he’s more thoughtful, more equivocal. And he has been across the whole album. Introspective is called that because that’s what the songs are like – “the Smiths you can dance to”, a winking Pet Shop Boy said to Record Mirror – but what the record is often about is autonomy: the will and fantasy and loneliness of living your life however you choose. As the opening song puts it, “I could leave you, say goodbye. I could love you if I try, and I could, and left to my own devices I probably would” – the desire here is for the fact of the choice, not its making. And on Introspective’s extended version of “Left To My Own Devices”, Tennant is faced with that choice, and smiles, and simply rejects the decision itself, stepping out of the song’s binary into a final-verse dreamscape where all his imagined possibilities mix into each other.
It’s intoxicating – an old rock dream of total individual freedom seductively re-stated as a promise of pop music. A promise – or so I heard it at 15, very ready for such things – that pop contains doors. Doors which, if you bolt through them at the right time, on the right day, could simply upend the way you see the world, by rejecting false choices and connecting impossible things: “Che Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat” – whyever not? Great pop music is forever being confronted by sentences that start “Great pop music is…” and try and throw a rope around it. “Left To My Own Devices” tells me that pop (or love, or people) are defined instead by how they shrug off or wriggle out of definitions.
That was one song, and at the other end of the album, “Always On My Mind/In My House” picks up the same threads, more darkly. Without the riff to bring Tennant’s decision home, he can lose himself in equivocation again: “Maybe I didn’t love you quite as much as I could,” he’s singing, but his unruffled tone is saying… and maybe that doesn’t matter. But the difference between “Devices” and “Always” is that in the former I hardly notice the “you” it’s sung to, I’m as giddy as the song is about its celebration of possibilities. “Always On My Mind/In My House”, though, is haunted by its wounded “you”, who is paying the price for the singer’s indulgent indecision. We can be, to ourselves, as undefined as we like: sometimes other people need us to be fixed.
Tennant makes the opposing case. It’s not enough. The song collapses around him.
The rap: 02’53 – 03’49
The way we worked out the greatest songs of all time was simple. We sat round a table, drinking. Someone named a song. If someone seconded it, it was put to a veto. If enough vetoed, it was off the list. Otherwise, it was on. Once we had a hundred songs, the list was over, and the final named record was number one. It seemed as honest a method of making a list as the usual ways, one as likely to reward happy memories or well-timed jokes as acknowledged classics.
One of the things that is favoured when you make a list that way, in the pub, are moments that can be easily imitated, in the pub. Neil Tennant’s rap on “Always On My Mind/In My House” is such a moment. In the plan of the record and its emotional journey that I’m outlining, it has a place – a list of excuses for inattention that the production, speeding and slowing, turning Tennant’s speech into a calliope ride, seems to mock. In the Pet Shop Boys’ career it has a precedent too – it’s an extension of “The Sound Of The Atom Splitting”, their theatrically disturbing surrealist B-Side.
None of that matters next to the pleasure of putting on a funny deep voice and going “You were AWLWAYS” like a slowed-down record. It’s silly, as befits the greatest song of all time.
The breakdown: 03’49 – 05’22
It’s the end of 1988, the dying days of it, that odd slice after Christmas and before New Years. I’m in my room, listening to a cassette of Introspective that I copied off a friend. The album is a few minutes too long for half a C90, so the final track, “It’s Alright”, cuts off. I don’t mind that as much as I should, because in 1988 I don’t understand “It’s Alright”. A cover of a house music track by Sterling Void, the man with the greatest name of all time, it sounds corny and repetitive to me.
But for thousands of people Sterling Void, and musicians like him, are one of those doors that open up in pop and rewrite the shape of their world. A few miles outside my bedroom is the M25 London Orbital motorway, opened two years earlier. On it, British pop music is changing nightly. The looped road means that convoys of cars can move around it at speed, looking for illegal warehouse parties, getting instructions at service stations or on new mobile phones that keep them an hour or two ahead of the police. The house and techno music played at them (and in clubs, and in fields) has begun its irreversible transformation of British pop.
The Pet Shop Boys – born out of a shared love of clubbing, remixes, import 12”s – looked well placed to take advantage of this new world. Instead, they never really meshed with it. The roots of their work were in Hi-NRG, synthpop, Freestyle, italo – the melange of post-disco dance musics where smart, direct lyrics and strong pop songwriting could thrive. The blissful structural explorations of house and techno – its repetition, its long breakdowns, the different ways it used vocals – drew on other parts of clubbing history and culture. Like pub rockers when punk came along, the Pet Shop Boys almost fitted in, but that almost could suddenly seem glaring.
I assumed, perhaps, that Introspective was the Pet Shop Boys making house music. It’s not: it’s the Pet Shop Boys responding to house music, trying to fit some of its ideas to their template. The breakdown of “Always On My Mind / In My House” is the best example of this. An acid bassline underneath a mournful orchestral melody, leading into an angry thicket of programmed drums, and then the whole thing repeats. It’s unsteady, more a travelogue than a groove, and it sounds little like any contemporary club music. The template is still the extended pop 12” mixes of the mid 80s – by remixers like Francis Kevorkian or Jellybean Benitez. Even so it feels like a house-inspired version of those, because of the dark bassline, the pitched-up squeaks of “You were always!”, and because while it sounds eventful now, back then this middle stretch of the song seemed forbidding, alien even, in its minimalism.
All this is knowledge applied in hindsight. It’s 1988. The new world is propagating imperfectly, and has not reached my bedroom. The magazines I read are other schoolboys’ copies of Q and Record Collector, which have no interest in orbital raves. They lead me to Morrissey and REM at best, U2 and Pink Floyd at worst. I start the Second Summer Of Love exploring classic rock, sometimes with enthusiasm, increasingly with duty. Then I discover the Smiths – a door to bolt through, a name to call myself. I like indie music. By the end of the year I’m an evangelist, drunk on new rules and prejudices. But my friend has the new Pet Shop Boys album, and offers to tape it for me. We used to listen to Actually together, but that was long ago, all the way back in 1987, when I was 14 not 15, and I still liked pop, not indie. I’ve made my choice.
The drop: 5’22 – 5’30
I’m wrong.
The triumph: 5’30-6’46
The riff – and with that sudden shunt of synthesiser at 5’22 the whole of “Always On My Mind / In My House” is revealed as an extended exercise in delaying it – doesn’t just define this Pet Shop Boys cover version. It defines their entire, storied, “Imperial phase”. I once spent a whole Pitchfork column trying to throw a rope around the term “Imperial phase”: I suspect it wriggled free. But the point of them, it seems to me, isn’t just that the stuff you always do well becomes absurdly popular, it’s that the stuff you stretch for, and risk, comes off too. So while a relatively mediocre Pet Shop Boys single like “Heart” reaching Number One is the sign of an Imperial Phase, so too is the band invading the rock canon, at Christmas, with an Elvis cover and a video of clips from a surrealist film they’ve made, and it seeming like perfect, swashbuckling sense. And this also is a promise of pop music: it can make any decision you take seem the right one.
“Always On My Mind/In My House” is not part of the phase, by Neil Tennant’s own definition. “Domino Dancing”, the melancholy lead single from Introspective, was the Pet Shop Boys stretching once again – two uptight Brits making Latin synthpop – and it failed: it staggered into the Top 10. The game was up. So this uproarious minute of music, the riff rampaging through the song, synthesisers squealing and drum machines crashing around it, is a victory lap and farewell to the brief moment of British pop when the Pet Shop Boys were in charge of it. They will go their separate ways now, the Pet Shop Boys becoming a band that can release songs like “Left To My Own Devices”, “Being Boring”, “Can You Forgive Her?”, and “Se A Vida E”, an occasional, clever counterpoint to the rest of whatever pop is doing. But in this minute, this bubble of pop, they will always reign. Wasn’t it fun?
The Resolution: 6’46 – 8’11
Meanwhile there’s a song to finish – one last go-around for “Always On My Mind”, this time closer to its hit single version, with the riff appended, once again making Tennant’s choice obvious. The seductive refusal of decision in “Left To My Own Devices” finds its balance, the tune finds its breakdown, and the album can proceed to its happy ending. As can this list.
It’s 1988. The thing about pop music, when you’re 15, is that its doors open all the bloody time. Years later, month-long obsessions or beliefs seem like eras. Was there a time when I disapproved of pop music, on the say-so of Morrissey or Roger Waters or some spanner on the front of the NME? There was, but it didn’t last. I’d like to say the moment I heard “Always On My Mind/In My House” killed it, but things are rarely so neat. Still, it was a moment – I rewound it again and again, playing the whole album or just that track or just that minute or two. After it, I could not honestly stake a position where I disliked pop music. Within it, I could trace the outlines of other doors, into house and disco, and a world where the glorious return of the riff wasn’t a great pop trick, but a first principle of making and building music.
The Coda: 8’11 – 9’04
It’s the most liminal time of the year. The days between Christmas and New Year are, if left unfilled, an unsatisfying appendix, like the minute or so of unadorned beats you find sometimes at the end of dance tracks, a residual tail for the mixer to match the next record to. Christmas is the year’s natural climax, New Year its natural beginning. The space in between is an equivocal season, something left hanging like an unresolved decision, or an unfinished list.
So we – a very specific we, the list-makers – fill it up, coming together every December 29th to go to pubs, catch up, talk nonsense, and occasionally in former years make lists of things to write about. Why lists? Because we were sad old nerds, obviously. But also, we liked – or at least, I liked, and I’m the one stuck writing this – the conceit that this unfixed time of year, and the magic of the pub, was a good time to make arbitrary decisions, like naming the greatest records, and accept the challenge of one day writing as if those decisions were right.
And now the list is finished. Something else can be the greatest record of all time. Not everyone who started reading the list is still reading, not everyone who made the list is still with us. I’m going to post this, put on my coat, go to the hospital, and then eventually go to the pub, because it’s December 29th and that’s what I do. Perhaps I’ll see you there.
“The impulse behind this “10″ is probably the same as the impulse of the “10″ for “Atomic” – whether it’s a cover version or not, important or not, this does what I need a pop record to do, perfectly and reliably. When you start saying “it needs something extra to be a 10″, what you’re doing is saying that joy on its own can’t be enough. I object to this idea. That objection can get misinterpreted as a hedonistic philosophy – that joy is always enough, pleasure above everything in criticism – but it’s not: of course pop can act in ways beyond simply ‘being pop’, how boring if it couldn’t! But I wouldn’t be much of a pop fan if I didn’t think that sometimes simply being pop IS enough to get the highest praise I can give.”
“I think it’s going to be alright.”
So, authors, you’ll all remember when, in the middle of the Amazon-Hachette spit-fight, I noted that Amazon isn’t your friend, it’s a business entity with its own goals, which may only tangentially align with yours (and the same goes for Hachette)?
For much of the last year, mainstream novelists were furious that Amazon was discouraging the sale of some titles in its confrontation with the publisher Hachette over ebooks.
Now self-published writers, who owe much of their audience to the retailer’s publishing platform, are unhappy.
One problem is too much competition. But a new complaint is about Kindle Unlimited, a new Amazon subscription service that offers access to 700,000 books — both selfpublished and traditionally published — for $9.99 a month.
It may bring in readers, but the writers say they earn less. And in interviews and online forums, they have voiced their complaints.
Part of the issue, as I understand it, is that the payment Amazon doles out to many self-published folks who participate in Kindle Unlimited comes not from the percentage of a sale price, but from a slice of a pot of money Amazon decides to offer, called the KDP Select Global Fund. Here’s how it works, from the Amazon FAQ on the matter:
We base the calculation of your share of the KDP Select Global Fund by how often Kindle Unlimited customers choose and read more than 10% of your book, and Kindle Owners’ Lending Library customers download your book. We compare these numbers to how often all participating KDP Select titles were chosen. For example, if the monthly global fund amount is $1,000,000, all participating KDP titles were read 300,000 times, and customers read your book 1,500 times, you will earn 0.5% (1,500/300,000 = 0.5%), or $5,000 for that month.
However, as Amazon gets to select the size of the pot, and the share of the pot is contingent on performance relative to other titles, how much that cut is can fluctuate substantially, as is noted in the article. The article also notes that as the cut is the same for any read (i.e., a short story and a Rothfuss-sized epic novel are the same in the eye of the Kindle Unlimited clicker), authors are chopping up larger books into several files, or writing books as serials (looks like The Human Division was on target for that model).
Given the nature of the payment game here, this is a rational response, but it’s a short term solution at best, as it explodes the number of titles in Kindle Unlimited (and commensurately the number of titles read). As more authors catch on that particular trick, the less useful it will be for everyone. And while Amazon says it will tweak the size of the pot “to make participation in KDP Select a compelling option for authors and publishers,” inasmuch as self-published authors are already griping about how much revenue they’ve lost, the question becomes whether it will ever become a genuinely compelling option.
(Note well that these terms are as I understand it currently only for the majority of self-published authors. Publishers, who have more leverage on Amazon’s business, and certain (very few) high-profile self-published authors, are able to make deals that resemble traditional payment/royalty deals. They are not in the same payment pot as the hundreds of thousands of self-published authors, and they are not enjoined by exclusivity, as the majority of self-published authors are. Which if my understanding is correct is certainly an interesting point of data for those self-published authors.)
Does this make Amazon’s subscription scheme, or Amazon itself, evil? Nope. It does reinforce the point that Amazon has its own plans, which are not really about helping authors, per se. Its plans center on being the one single place everyone buys anything, ever. A $9.99 all-you-can-eat reading subscription plan with titles exclusive to Amazon is a fine way to lock consumers in the Amazon ecosystem. That’s Amazon’s job: to get and keep consumers’ business. It’s also the job of Oyster and Smashwords and other places that are also trying to make a go of the all-you-can-eat book subscription thing. What’s also their job: Getting the product that will enable them to reach their goals, and getting the product as cheaply as possible.
That said, the thing to actively dislike about the Kindle Unlimited “payment from a pot” plan is the fact that it and any other plan like it absolutely and unambiguously make writing and publishing a zero-sum game. In traditional publishing, your success as an author does not limit my success — the potential pool of money is so large as to be effectively unlimited, and one’s payment is independent of any other purchase a consumer might make, or what any other reader might read.
In the Kindle Unlimited scheme, the pool of money available to authors is strictly limited by a corporation whose purposes, short- and long-term, are not necessarily aligned with the authors’, and every time someone with a Kindle Unlimited account reads another author’s work, every other authors’ share of the pot becomes that much smaller. In the traditional publishing model, it’s in my interest to encourage readers to read other authors, because people who read more buy more books — the proverbial tide lifts all boats. In the Kindle Unlimited model, the more authors you and everyone else reads, the less I can potentially earn. And ultimately, there’s a cap on how much I can earn — a cap imposed by Amazon, or whoever else is in charge of the “pot.” As an author, I won’t be able to ever earn more than Amazon wants me to (especially if Amazon requires my title to be exclusive).
So: Evil? No. Good for authors? Let’s just say I’m not entirely convinced. And neither, it seems, are these self-published authors. Good for them. I genuinely wish them the best of luck getting Amazon (and others) to pay them what the market will bear, and not just what Amazon wants to pay.
Send to Kindle
So, despite months of people consistently saying it’s a bad idea, the Liberal Democrat leadership has confirmed today that Danny Alexander will be the party’s main spokesperson on Treasury issues for the election campaign, while Vince Cable will be restricted to commenting purely on BIS matters. Some people are claiming that this is no big deal, as those are related to their Cabinet positions, while others are not very happy.
There’s a myth put about by the Blairites that without him, Labour would never have won the 1997 election. While he may have had some influence on the size of the majority they won, to claim Labour couldn’t have won without him is, to use the technical term, utter bollocks. Claims like this forget just how toxic the Tories had become before Blair became leader and the general sense of national mourning that followed the death of John Smith. The Private Eye cover here is just an example of that – a sense that the country had lost the inevitable next Prime Minister. The job of any Labour leader post-92 was to hold their nerve, avoid any big errors and walk into Downing Street at the end of the process. Those that claim Blair delivered this victory need to explain how any other potential Labour leader wouldn’t have managed it, rather than pointing to his good fortune at being in the right place at the right time to benefit from it.
In that other great Irish exploration of the experience of death, Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, the protagonist endures an afterlife built on the principle of recursion. Having murdered a man to fund a quixotic and obscure self-published project – I can only sympathise – he finds himself subject to a string of comical and terrifying events which, the novel implies, he will repeat in minor variation for eternity.
The intro: 00’00 – 00’39
