Andrew Hickey

Hey art geeks! Shawn Coss, who has done most of our recent shirt designs has a facebook page where he posts his (occasionally terrifying) art. Check it out!

Yup, it's that time of the year again!

When I sent this rerun to my subscribers a couple of weeks ago, I accidentailly sent it with a copyright date of 2011. Many subscribers thought it was a deliberate joke. I wish I was that smart.

Thanks as always for using my Amazon Affiliate links (US, UK, Canada).

A couple of years ago I wrote a post about the phenomenon of Chinese speakers forgetting how to write characters because of their reliance on Pinyin (i.e., romanization) inputting schemes.  Even those who were once literate in characters notice a distinct regression in their ability to write characters by hand.  For school children who are in the process of learning to write characters, the addiction to electronic devices (computers, cell phones, etc.) that write the characters for them when Pinyin is entered in many cases means that they never do become proficient in writing the characters without the help of their gizmos.

Parents have been agonizing over declining character-writing skills for more than a decade, but now the situation has reached such an alarming stage that educational authorities are beginning to speak of a cultural crisis and are being forced to take decisive action.  Movements springing up in various cities to combat character amnesia / illiteracy are described in articles such as "Literacy drive for gadget-crazy Chinese kids" and "Writing wrongs of 'character amnesia'".
Decrying the loss of cultural heritage that comes from forgetting (or never learning) how to write characters and a consequent alleged estrangement from "the Mother Tongue", these proposals and schemes emphasize two things:  reading texts in Literary Sinitic (Classical Chinese) and calligraphy.  Some of the earlier attempts in this direction went by the name dújīng yùndòng 读经运动 ("Movement for Reading Classics").

So, working together, parents and educational authorities do have a plan, but in my estimation it is the wrong plan, one that will only further drive a wedge between children and the Chinese writing system.  Instead of living, vital, contemporary literature, children are being forced to memorize ancient primers in a dead language and pore over texts like the Zhuang Zi and the Analects that are very difficult to understand, even for classical scholars.

To add insult to injury, the students are often being asked to give up time from their noon recess to focus on these extremely painful and boring tasks, which will certainly not endear them to these "traditional" pursuits, especially considering that their days are already jam-packed with more classes and study / memory sessions than most students in the West would ever tolerate.

So what is the solution?  There are several possibilities.  One is simply to succumb to the machines as an inevitable part of modernity.  I still remember when scientists and engineers were adept at using slide rules; it was integral to the profession to be able to use a slide rule.  When hand-held electronic calculators first appeared, at first purists spurned them as being almost immoral, though they soon became ubiquitous.  Does anyone employ a slide rule now?

Another means for coping with character amnesia is to let students insert Pinyin in character texts when they can't remember how to write various characters.  There are two precedents for that already:  Japanese kana and the pedagogical practices of the Zhùyīn shìzì, tíqián dúxiě 注音识字提前读写 (Phonetically Annotated Character Recognition Speeds Up Reading and Writing) program.  See "How to learn to read Chinese".

Of course, there must be many other ways to ameliorate declining character literacy skills in China, but I will leave it for readers to discuss them in the comments.  One thing is certain:  any initiatives that confuse the Mother Tongue(s) with the writing system are doomed to failure.  I would like to point out that the emphasis on calligraphy and classical elements such as chéngyǔ 成语 ("set phrase", but usually mistranslated as "idiom") of the Confucian Institutes is a good example of inappropriate pedagogy being exported to what are meant to be Mandarin language classrooms for non-natives.

[Thanks to Mark Swofford and John Rohsenow]

Here's a spooky thing to think about this Hallowe'en.

This is The Silence. I'll assume you know about the Silence from watching Doctor Who.


This is Slenderman. Slenderman (Or the Slender Man, if you prefer) is one of those internet memes you either know about or you don't. If you don't, an ideal place to start is this Darklore article by Cat Vincent, along with his follow-up article in the latest volume.



As you can probably guess by looking at the picture, when the Silence first appeared in Doctor Who, people who were familiar with Slenderman thought, 'Blimey, it's Slenderman!' The similarity is remarkable when you consider that, as well as his blank white face, height and his 'men in black' suit, Slenderman was sometimes said to have the ability to make people forget that they had ever seen him - the defining ability of the Silence.

As Cat Vincent's articles explain, Slenderman was an internet meme that rapidly went wild, spreading into videos, Alternative Reality Games, fiction, people's dreams and, if callers to radio shows were to be believed, into reality. This was the creepiest aspect of Slenderman; he was created in the imagination of many, but because he was imagined to be able to cross over into the real world then he was able to do so. He was believed to be a type of tulpa, a thought-form that takes on a more material form.


Those who have read my book The Brandy of the Damned may see a similarity with the character of Orlando Monk. But while Monk is a public domain Trickster/catalyst, Slenderman is a monster - and he is the monster of our age. Frankenstein was the dark shadow of the Age of Enlightenment and Dracula was the dark shadow of the Victorian repression, but Slenderman is the dark shadow of now. He is an emergent property of a distributed network. He's the nightmare of the current world.

Even for those who could never take the idea that he could develop a physical form seriously, he was still more than an idea. He was active. He displayed will.



In my probably-forthcoming book about The KLF, I talk about Doctor Who in the context of Alan Moore's concept of ideaspace (it's that sort of book, don't say I didn't warn you). If you are not familiar with ideaspace, it comes from Moore's interest in whether 'ideas' can be considered to exist in any meaningful sense. Moore takes the view that ideas do exist, and ideaspace is a model he created to understand how they work and how they behave. Ideaspace can be compared to Jung's 'Collective Unconscious', de Chardin's 'Noosphere', or Richard Dawkins' concept of 'memes'. Indeed, Dawkins' memes and Moore's ideaspace can be thought of as roughly the same subject described by two wildly different men with completely different beliefs who arrived in the same place from almost opposite starting positions.

Doctor Who, despite not having an individual creator, has become the most complex and extensive fiction of our time. The TV show is only a fraction of it. It is a never-ending story made up of thousands upon thousands of TV episodes, audio plays, books, comic strips, plays, games, fan-fiction and the like. It has evolved in a way that is exponentially different to any other British fiction from the mid-twentieth century. In ideaspace, then, Doctor Who would be a big deal. If ideaspace behaves like Moore suggests, and if you were to look for evidence that a fiction like Slenderman was behaving like a fiction that was somehow alive, then Doctor Who would be an obvious place to look. So the fact that the Silence popped up in Doctor Who suddenly becomes interesting.



Of course, the rational interpretation of the Slenderman/Silence similarities is that the Silence were inspired by (or, if you prefer, copied from) Slenderman. However, if the rules of Moore's ideaspace have any validity, there is no need for the creators of the Silence to have any conscious knowledge of Slenderman. What we have here, therefore, is a useful little real-world scenario that allows us to test whether Moore's ideaspace works as he suggests that it does.




I'm not, sadly, in a position to quiz Steven Moffat, the initial creator of the Silence, if he was consciously inspired by Slenderman. However I have been able to ask Jason Arnopp, who researched the subject in order to write the 'Designing the Silence' article in the Brilliant Book of Doctor Who 2012. He confirmed that of all the people he spoke to involved in the creation of the Silence, no-one mentioned Slenderman.

According to Arnopp, there was reference in the original script to the face of the Silence being reminiscent of Edvard Munch's The Scream, and this was the starting point for prosthetics designer Neill Gorton's design of the monster's face. The script also referred to the Silence "looming" over The Doctor, so the designers made them tall. The black suit was not in the script, but an outfit was cheaper than a monster body so several outfits were suggested. The 'men in black' suit was chosen to fit with the 1960s American setting of their debut story.


The Silence, then, were not a conscious copy of Slenderman, but emerged in the space created by the creative efforts of a number of different minds. The most rational explanation for the remarkable similarity between the Silence and Slenderman is that it is all just a coincence.

A different explanation is that ideaspace does behave like Moore describes, and that the concept of Slenderman was able to press itself into the fiction of Doctor Who, without any of the creators of the Silence being aware that this was happening.

With this is mind, it is interesting to consider the long extended middle figure of the Silence. This was an innovation from designer Neill Gorton who told Arnopp that the intention behind it was to make the design more alien and creepy, and that extended finger was inspired by the extended middle finger of the Aye-Aye lemur. Gorton told Arnopp that he wasn't quite satisfied with this aspect of the design. "We just didn't get it quite bony enough," he said, "It worked fine in the show, but if we do them again I'll make those strange, long hands even scarier." One curious aspect of Slenderman shown in many illustrations is that his long arms stretch out and become tentacle-like. There was nothing in the script to suggest that long finger that Gorton added, yet he felt an urge to stretch it out, and somehow knew that he hadn't gone far enough and didn't get it quite right.





All of which is suggests that ideaspace may behave like Moore describes, and that the concept of Slenderman had attempted to press itself into the fiction of Doctor Who, without any of the creators of the Silence being aware that this was happening, with a remarkable level of success.

Or in other words, it's evidence that the dark shadow of our age behaves as if it is more alive than a fiction should do. Especially when that fiction that is a monster.

So with that thought - happy Hallowe'en everyone!

Plato The Republic (approx. 375BC)
In which Plato, philosopher and mathematician of Classical Greece, student of Socrates and tutor to Aristotle, author of Socratic dialogues, founder of the Athens Academy and by association - so it might be argued - western philosophy and the entire methodology of modern science, tells us:

When they are young, children should only tackle the amount of philosophic training their age can stand; while they are growing to maturity they should devote a good deal of attention to their bodies, if they are to find them a useful equipment for philosophy. When they are older and their minds begin to mature, their mental training can be intensified.

I suppose this is why it's taken me so long to get around to reading Plato, or at least to reading things which have pointed me in the general direction of reading Plato, these being in no particular order Neal Stephenson's Anathem, Andrew Hickey's Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! and Richard Flowers' Anarchy Rules.

Additionally, having spent a great deal of time immersed in Precolombian Mexican culture, I've come across numerous aspects of Nahua theology bearing apparent comparison with Plato's theory of forms. Said theory very generally holds that each object has an immaterial essence describing its properties in relation to which the physical form is merely an imperfect manifestation. I have long been keen to further the model of Precolombian Mexican cultures as essentially civilised and progressive by some definition, or at least very different to the popular and sanguinary image that Mel Gibson chose to reiterate in his shitty film. My basic theory has it that, for the most part, Mexica and related cultures differed from those of Ancient Greece and Rome only in terms of regional detail and methods by which intellectual achievement was preserved for the benefit of generations to come. Alphabetic script was well adapted to this latter task and so we are able to look back on Greece and Rome with due reverence. On the other hand, Mixteca-Puebla pictographic script was unfortunately less suited to the preservation of philosophical rhetoric, and oral tradition could only  carry so much over to the Postconquest era given the general demonisation of the Prehispanic past, a demonisation which unfortunately continues to this day.

So with this in mind and to get to the point, it seemed like time I made the effort to read Plato rather than relying on what I imagined he might have said.

Plato was the student of Socrates, and many of his dialogues reputedly capture the philosophical discussion of his esteemed tutor and associates, which is handy seeing as Socrates himself never bothered writing any of that stuff down. What we have is therefore, in essence, some blokes talking about stuff for a few hundred pages, although the significance of this should be not underestimated given the topics discussed and the methods by which they are debated. Socratic dialogue approaches a subject - in this case society - and bombards it with questions, rhetorical and otherwise, so as to test its limits and assess relative values until a conclusion can be asserted. It's the basis for the modern scientific approach which favours evidence over supposition, and I guess Greece was either where it began, or at least where it was first described in surviving media.

The Republic builds a perfect society consistent with the values of Socrates, Plato, Glaucon and assorted buddies dropping in for a beer and a chin wag about life and that during the course of the narrative, so aside from what philosophical ideas arise during the course of debate, it's also precedent to Thomas More's Utopia and its kin. Thanks I suspect to Desmond Lee's sympathetic translation and insightful notes, The Republic is nothing like so dry as I feared it might be, and is even illuminating in places. That said, I found it a little difficult to get beyond the formula for this perfect society  delivered as part and parcel with all sorts of crazy shite that suggest not so much the cultural differences of people living in a very different world as a basic failure to understand human nature. Most obviously absurd is the notion of a society which takes infants from their mothers at birth, and which communally raises its children without the supposed weakening influence of familial affection. It's this sort of uninformed idealism which somewhat undermines Plato and his pals as being the enlightened champions of reason to which they clearly aspired, but never mind.

Equally curious - and equally redolent of more recent aspirationally totalitarian states - is the dim view Plato takes of poetry, and seemingly of artistic expression itself:

'...we shall have to follow the example of the lover who renounces a passion that is doing him no good, however hard it may be to do so. Brought up as we have been in our own admirably constituted societies, we are bound to love poetry, and we shall be glad if it proves to have high value and truth; but in the absence of such proof we shall, whenever we listen to it, recite this argument of ours to ourselves as a charm to prevent us falling under the spell of a childish and vulgar passion. Our theme shall be that such poetry has no serious value or claim to truth, and we shall warn its hearers to fear its effects on the constitution of their inner selves, and tell them to adopt the view of poetry we have described.'

I didn't quite get this at first, but then I thought of all those Doctor Who fans insisting on the mighty power of their belovedly brilliant marketing franchise by virtue of everyone else thinking it's brilliantly brilliant so your (sic) just jealous; and thinking of them in respect of all the wonders they'll never experience because, lacking screamingly brilliant jokes about brilliantly wearing a fez and shit, anything not directly related holds no interest. It's that sort of militant resistance to curiosity in respect of anything beyond the immediate object of fixation that I find terrifying, and I guess it put the wind up Plato too.

The Republic is an interesting historical document, and almost certainly fascinating if the Greeks are your thing. Oddly, and rather gratifyingly, it presents a snap shot of a society at an equivalent level of intellectual development to that of Mexico, superior in some respects, markedly inferior in others - which is what I had hoped for, but didn't really anticipate finding. I'm glad I read it, but I'm equally glad that it wasn't longer.

Could it be that the Liberal Democrats, through the influence of Vince Cable, are winning the economic arguments in Cabinet?

Discussing George Osborne's appearance before the Treasury select committee today on the Spectator's Coffee House blog, Isabel Hardman suggests this may be so.

After observing that "by this stage in the Coalition, everyone would have expected at least one major bust-up between George Osborne and Vince Cable," she goes on to say that Osborne's evidence to the committee

suggested that the Chancellor isn’t so much involved in a stand-off with the Business Secretary as he is taking on his point of view. It was significant how many times Osborne had to explain a softening in what were previously hard-and-fast economic rules, and hard-and-fast policies. 

His refusal to rule out replacing the Bank of England’s inflation target with a growth target is the most significant sign of a coalescing between the two men. Osborne told the committee that the current target ‘has served this country well and provided stability’, but he added that he was ‘glad’ the next Bank of England governor Mark Carney was involved in the ‘debate about the future of monetary policy’. Moving to a growth target would be an endorsement of Vince Cable’s focus on growth rather than deficit reduction.

It would not do to get too excited here. Whichever government we have in power for years to come will have to act to reduce the deficit.

Keynesian policies are hard to implement now precisely because the previous government failed to implement them when the economy was doing well by cutting spending or increasing taxes - "taking away the punch bowl", as Chris Huhne used to be fond of quoting.

But if Osborne's remarks today show he has moved on the from the simplicities of his early days as Chancellor, that is to be welcomed.

Hello, readers!

As you know, the holiday season is upon us.  Posting has been light around here of late due to professional obligations, health care issues, and the usual hubbly bubbly of the season, but we should be back in full swing by the start of 2013 with all your favorite features:  impotent political posturing, incomprehensible quasi-’jokes’, and in-depth reviews of things you’ve never heard of.

In the meantime, though, if you’re at a loss for what to give your loved ones, family members, co-workers, or resentful neighbors for Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Ashura, Winter Solstice or Taiwanese Constitution Day, why not consider one of the many fine products and services offered by this very website?  They’ll make your holidays happier, and mine too, because money!

First of all, if you enjoy crime dramas, insightful pop cultural criticism, or photographs of Joe Pesci getting his brains blown out, you are the ideal reader for my book, If You Like The Sopranos.  Plenty of copies are still available from your favorite physical or on-line book retailer, or from the publisher; check out the details here.

If you’d like to read a book that’s funny on purpose, why not consider my short humor collection, Moods from Marbletown?  It’s crammed with highbrow literary comedy of the sort that you might find on much more reputable websites, but it’s not free, and won’t impress your friends.  Unless you’re friends with me!  Which you are!  The funniest thing you’ll read from now until the end of the year, probably, and a flaming pile of bargain to boot.  Buy in paper or electronic form from the publisher, or the usual on-line suspects.

Tired of all this stuff that’s already been written?  Why not sign up for a brand-new, original short story every month, from me to you?  For a mere ten bones, I will craft a piece of short fiction and send it to you in the format of your choosing; for $100, you get an entire year’s worth of short stories, one per month; and for $2,500, I will send you an original piece of writing once a month until one of us dies or the internet stops working.  Details here, or e-mail me:  leonard dot pierce @ gmail dot com.

Do you like eating more than you like reading?  God knows I like eating more than I like writing.  Sometimes I do both at the same time, which accounts for the awful state of my manuscripts.  For fifteen measly dollars, I will craft a special spice mix tailored to your tastes and preferences; twenty gets you more than twice as much.  I also offer menu planning for your parties, festivals, and other social whang-dang-doodles; $20 gets you a six-course menu plan, complete with recipes.  I’ll even come to your house and cook it, for a fee that is surprisingly reasonable for something you’ll never forget, for good or ill.

Are you a writer yourself, or just someone who likes inventing things, founding things, or giving birth to things, but you can never think of the right name?  I offer a professional naming service, which you can use to gain a royalty-free, dynamic and successful-sounding name for your fictional characters ($10), business, arts projects, recipes, inventions, etc. ($20), or pets/children ($40).  Names are important!  Don’t let your corporation/infant make it to the free market/preschool without one! Details here, or e-mail me:  leonard dot pierce @ gmail dot com.

Would you like a special gift for your furry little ‘forever friend’?  Then I can’t help you.  Unless you’d like a rap song written about your pet!  Yes, I will compose a “food rap” for the living creature of your choice for one Andrew Jackson (that is to say, twenty dollars, not an actual person or a dead former president); or a “dis rap” mocking and deriding any individual or group for $30!  And for only fifty bones, I will not only write the rap for you, but record it, and send you the mp3!  Try and get that deal from 50 Cent, or for 50 cents.  Details here, or e-mail me:  leonard dot pierce @ gmail dot com.

Perhaps you are so lazy that you are unwilling to even get up off of your big ass and go to a thrift store to buy some crazy cheap shit that used to belong to someone even lazier than you.  In that case, you’re a man/woman/other after my own heart!  My thrift plunder service gets you a small box of randomly selected items from a second-hand store here in San Antonio delivered to your door for only $20, or, for $30, a large box of even more randomly selected items from a retailer of despair from another town altogether!  Be part of an astonishing experiment in post-modern consumerism.  Details here, or e-mail me:  leonard dot pierce @ gmail dot com.

The holidays are a stressful time, and sometimes you want nothing more than to make your beloved spouse, children, loved ones or significant others fear for their lives and, eventually, go irrevocably insane.  I can even do that for you!  With my unique textual gaslighting service, we’ll work together to transform ordinary household items from your home into terrifying omens of imaginary fear and mysterious terror.  And nothing spells Christmas more than that!  Only $75 for endless psychological hilarity.  Details here, or e-mail me:  leonard dot pierce @ gmail dot com.

Thanks for your kind custom, folks, and happy holidays!

Mirrored from LEONARD PIERCE DOT COM.

Probably the most popular blog post I’ve written in the Business Rusch series appeared in May, 2011. Geared toward traditionally published writers and new writers coming in, “Writing Like It’s 1999” explains how the many truths of publishing from the last century are no longer truths, but myths. The post gets reprinted often. It’s part of my Surviving The Transition book (available in print, ebook or in a new audio edition), and it’s going to be in the British Science Fiction Association’s writing bulletin, Focus, early next year.

Imagine my surprise when I realized that indie writers have ancient myths as well. Because the changes in publishing have happened so quickly—and probably because we live in a world where a smart phone gets outdated within 18 months—things we know to be true about independent publishing aren’t true any more.

Things have changed already and will probably continue to change for the next five years or so. Why five years? Because that’s how long, it seems, for something to get into our consciousness as “normal.”

Those of us who started self-publishing in 2008 or 2009 were at the beginning of a change. We could do things then that we can’t do now. Opportunities existed then that don’t exist now. That doesn’t mean things are worse now; it just means things are different.

In 2009, Dean and I put up our first stories as a lark on Amazon’s Kindle store. In early 2010, I brought a printout to Dean showing how much those stories had sold. They’d hardly sold anything by traditional publishing standards, but they had sold, and because we know a lot about business and the way revenue works, we realized that we had just hit the tip of an exceedingly large iceberg.

We decided, at that point, to get our out-of-print backlist into electronic format.  Dean did most of the work. I did some. We figured the extra money we earned every month would more than pay for the effort it would take to get the backlist up.

Fast forward to December of 2012. Dean still does a lot of the work himself. But we have also started four new companies to handle various things to do with just our indie publishing business, we have employees again (sigh), and we still don’t have our entire backlist up. Why? Because (1), the backlist is too damn big to swallow in one big chunk; (2) we had to redo all of our early efforts due to the changes in electronic delivery systems; (3) we added in print books; (4) we added audio books; and most importantly, (5) we moved most of our frontlist—our new books, anyway (I still sell short stories traditionally)—into indie publishing.

Suddenly—or not so suddenly—we have schedules and marketing plans and more work than Dean, I, and four employees can handle. We just hired someone new, and told her what we had said to our very first employee: You’re doing the work of five people, not because we’ve laid off four other people, but because we haven’t hired them yet. We don’t hire until we can afford someone new (that’s an old lesson that we learned painfully long ago), so we’re perpetually behind. Even so, the work has grown exponentially, and most of that is because of how prolific Dean and I are, and were, and will continue to be.

Now I’m not saying that everyone who indie publishes needs to start four companies. Dean and I did because we’ve run companies in the past, and we could use our skills from owning a traditional publishing company in the past to moving even farther ahead in the future.

As I’ve said in other posts, we’re different from so many writers. We have backlist and an active frontlist, multiple careers and interests, and a different way of doing things. We also like building businesses. We’ve built and sold more than I care to think about.

If I had remained buried in all the changes Dean and I are going through, I wouldn’t have even noticed the shifts that indie publishing is going through. But I try to keep up with the blogosphere and I’m noticing some discontent among the ranks.

Plus, I just had lunch with a well-published friend, a New York Times bestseller, who was on an indie publishing panel at a science fiction convention recently, and was disappointed by his experience. He said he got attacked by the other people on the panel, and I said, “Let me guess, they told you your experience doesn’t count because you have a fan base….” and I went on from there, listing a series of criticisms that made him nod, then laugh in recognition.

Already, we can predict what the criticisms will be. That’s because there are “accepted” ways of doing things, and things that “everyone knows are true,” and all kinds of other nasties out there.

In my “Writing Like It’s 1999” post, I listed the myths, and then I added this sentence: “And you know what? Ten years ago, that was all true.”

Well, in 2009, most of this was true:

•You could put up an e-book with a crappy cover, a low price, and no proofing, and you’d get a lot of eager readers to buy the book.

•You could promote that amateurish-looking book on various web forums, particularly the Kindle Boards, and get enough traction to hit Amazon’s bestseller lists.

•Giving a book away for free, especially on Kindle, would give that book a halo effect when it returned to full price. The sales figures would rise, and the book would, again, hit a bestseller list, if only for a short period of time.

•You didn’t have to market your books to other e-book outlets (what other e-book outlets?) because Amazon was the only important outlet (read: the only outlet people were buying from).

•You couldn’t get your books into print without going to a traditional publisher.

•You needed an agent to handle the foreign/Hollywood rights, because that thicket was impossible to enter without an agent.

•You had to produce everything yourself because there was no one else to help you.

•Indie publishing was relatively scam-free.

•Hardcore readers read e-books; everyone else read traditionally published books.

Everything I wrote above is mostly not true any more. Some of the items were true in 2009 and stopped being true in 2010. Others never were true.

For an example of something that wasn’t true in 2009, you don’t need an agent to sell foreign rights. In fact, you shouldn’t get one to do so. Most of the embezzling that happens with agents happens in the foreign rights area. If you don’t believe me, or you think my experiences with this (at multiple agencies, well respected agencies) are unusual, then look at the lawsuit New York Times bestseller Bill Bryson filed last week. Bryson didn’t get the money he was owed for years.

Hmmm. I can relate.

But how do foreign publishers get in touch with you? Well, you see, there’s this thingie called the internet. And if you have a contact-me button on your website, the foreign publisher will use this thingie called a computer to access your site and hit that contact-me button, and send you an e-mail asking if the such-n-so rights are available just like they would do for your agent. How do you negotiate the contract? Well, hire an IP attorney here in the United States. The attorney will help you look at the contract, which is written in English, and help you understand it. Gosh, maybe you can even write the e-mails back to the foreign publisher all by yourself.

Do U.S. agents market their clients’ books to overseas publishers? Sometimes. If you’re a bestseller.

And if you are, I urge you to again read the terms of Bryson’s lawsuit—and realize what’s happening to him has happened to hundreds of other writers out there, and maybe more than that.

I hate to tell you this, but through that thingie called the internet, you can figure out how to market your own books to foreign publishers. You can even negotiate your own terms via that nice invention called e-mail. And if you don’t want to do the negotiating yourself, well, then you could hire an IP attorney to do it for you. (One thing, though. That attorney will probably use (ahem) e-mail.)

As for Hollywood, well, most folks who work in Hollywood as writers are no longer agented. They have managers, yes, but agents, no. At the last dinner I attended with friends who work in the industry, the agent bashing got so ridiculous that one person who has worked in the industry for 30 years said (and I’m paraphrasing here, but it’s damn near a quote), “It’s to the point that if any writer presents anything through an agent, everyone knows the writer doesn’t understand Hollywood.”

California law regarding agents has gotten so harsh that most wannabe agents move to other parts of the industry. The remaining agents are either naïve, old-fashioned, or make most of their money in New York agenting books.

(Clarification note as per comments below: I wasn’t clear. Even though I’m quoting working writers in Hollywood in this piece, the context of the conversation–and of the various other discussions/experiences I’ve had–have been about selling novels into Hollywood (or short fiction), not about selling screenplays. I’ve only done that a few times, and am in no way an expert, and don’t want to be. I almost never discuss that with the Hollywood friends, except to listen into their discussions. But on selling novels into Hollywood, you don’t need an agent. The agents who moved are agents who specialized in getting book properties to studios. Those former “literary” agents have set up production companies now, because the laws have changed. So, my bad on my own lack of clarity. And thanks to Lee & Gillian for calling me on it.)

How do you get a manager? You don’t. When someone in Hollywood comes to you wanting one of your books, you refuse to talk unless there’s upfront money involved. If there is, hire an IP attorney to help you with the contract. (Are you seeing a pattern here?)

So…the agent myth was a myth in 2009. It just shows how badly writers want to have someone else manage their careers for them. I was about to link to an article on someone else’s blog when the post that writer put up over the weekend stopped me. It had this quote: “I urge new writers who aren’t schooled in business to consider querying agents and smaller publishers before taking the self-publishing plunge.”

Probably the most wrong-headed piece of advice I’ve seen this week. It boils down to this: Know nothing about business? Hire someone to take care of that messy stuff for you rather than learn it yourself.  All that needs to be added is the shoulder-pat combined with: “And don’t worry your pretty little head about that horrible business stuff, dear. You can learn it later.” After you’ve signed legal documents you don’t understand, of course.

Sigh.

That kind of thing really pisses me off. Can you tell?

Here’s what’s going on with indie publishing in December of 2012. It’s no longer in the early-adapter phase. That’s all.

Self- and indie-publishing doesn’t have that awful stigma it had just five years ago. Even the New York Times has reviewed a self-published book, albeit by someone they’ve reviewed before and, if you actually look at the book, you’ll see that it’s beautifully produced.

What happened in 2009 was that very few people had e-readers. Those of us who did were early technology adapters. Savvy tech people have a term for those of us who buy the early gadgets and actually use them. Those tech people call us “beta testers,” because we are. We’re the ones who find the bugs, and let the manufacturer know what works about the product and what doesn’t.

It means that early adapters are much more tolerant when something goes wrong. We understand when the e-book’s print suddenly slides to one side of the page—could be a tech glitch, could be a problem with the file—and we know that perfection isn’t possible yet.

So those early books with the crap-ass covers and the  99 cent price tags? They were worth wading through to find gold.

We also waded because there wasn’t a lot of content available yet in e-books. We explored what was there—and found all kinds of wonderful writers, like Amanda Hocking. We also rediscovered some midlist favorites we’d forgotten because their publishers dropped them.

We all had Kindles because it was the first good e-reader. But you need to wonder how many people who owned Kindles in 2009 still use Kindles as their primary e-reader. I use the Kindle app on my iPad as my primary reader, the Kindle app on my iPhone as my secondary reader, and my Kindle itself (which is an upgrade; my original Kindle bit it in 2011) as my fifth choice. I’ll often read on my computer through a PDF file before I read the Kindle itself these days.

Why? Convenience. I always have an iPad,  an iPhone or my laptop with me. I rarely carry my Kindle any more.

If I can’t get a book on Kindle, I’ll order from the iBookstore or read a epub file from Smashwords or download into my Nook app on the iPad. I don’t care about the delivery system as much as I do about the content. I’ve heard from tablet owners who use the Android-based system that their preferences are the same.

So all of that stuff about hitting the Kindle lists and making a difference on the Kindle, well, it matters less and less these days, because Amazon’s Kindle is not the only player in town. In fact, when you move out of the United States, the Kindle is the least important e-reader. Right now, in the European Union, a major tablet and e-reader war is going on for the Christmas holidays. Every tablet manufacturer is offering a lower and lower and lower price for its product, especially if that manufacturer is tied into a content site like Kobo or the iBookstore.

If you’re playing in a truly international market—and so many of us are—then you really shouldn’t have your epublication eggs in one basket.

The same with your print books. You need a print version. E-book sales are leveling the way that everyone who understands business expected them to. Right now, e-books are still in the 25% range of all books purchased. (I combined a few figures, and nudged upwards because so many e-books aren’t counted by traditional methods. However, more and more traditional methods are counting self-pubbed e-books. If Amazon ever released its sales figures on e-books, we’d be able to have a much more accurate percentage here in the United States.)

Designing print books is much harder than designing e-books, which is no longer as easy as it was. It takes work and a learning curve to have a good book design no matter what you’re doing. (WMG is offering online design classes in 2013, just so you can see what you’re getting into or to improve what you’re already doing.) Once you’ve mastered the learning curve, it takes less time to indie publish.

But there’s always what my friend Scott William Carter calls the wibbow test. Wibbow stands for: Would I Be Better Off Writing? I don’t know about you, but my answer to that one is always yes. Which means, in one form or another, I need to hire out things like book and cover design, uploading, and marketing. It was easier for me and Dean to start a company and hire employees (which also enables us to do Fiction River, the anthology series) than it is for us to hire someone else’s existing business to do this. Remember, though, we have business experience. We’re used to payroll and office management and setting up corporations. Most writers aren’t.

Those writers who, like me, are always better off writing now can hire help. Two years ago, it was enough for me to say that you need to hire someone for a flat fee to do this work for you, like Lucky Bat Books. Now, though, traditional publishing companies have decided to use that flat fee model to screw writers. (And then those same traditional publishers demand a 50% royalty—after you’ve paid the flat fee.)

You want a nice cover for your book? You want to be listed in some rinky-dink catalog that Simon & Schuster puts out? Well, then pay them $25,000 per title. That’s right. A ridiculous amount of money that will get you nothing more than a bunch of empty promises and maybe a beautiful book. (I say maybe because I’ve published upwards of 20 books through S&S, and only a few of them have had covers worth mentioning. Most are awful.)

And as for promotion in their catalogue? It means nothing. The writers they traditionally publish rarely get sales through their current catalog. But you won’t be in the same catalogue as the traditionally published writers. You’ll be in a special catalogue for their new self-publishing venture. Or you’ll be in a special section of the S&S catalogue for folks who have paid that $25,000.  The booksellers won’t look at the special catalogue or the special section, because booksellers aren’t dumb. They’ll know which books were vetted by S&S and which ones weren’t.

Sad. And now I can’t warn you away from bad deals by saying don’t pay a percentage of your future sales to any company. Now I have to tell you this: If you want someone else to do the work on your books, you need to vet that person the way you’d vet a contractor you hire to work on your house.

Yes, you have to think. You have to make choices. And you need to conduct yourself like a business person.

Here’s the thing: From 2008-2010, e-publishing on the early e-readers was a gold rush. And if you look at the history of any gold rush, you’ll see a familiar pattern.

A few people hit it big in an unexpected way. They make a small fortune.  They broadcast the news of that fortune, and then hundreds, if not thousands, of people follow. They hook their horses to their wagons, drop everything, and head to the land of riches, expecting to become millionaires with very little work.

And what happens? Millionaires. Hundreds of them. Only those millionaires don’t get rich panning for gold. They open the supply shops, they serve food to the miners, they supply blue jeans and work boots and equipment, hay for the horses and rooms to rest in at night.

It’s not a coincidence that S&S has opened up an expensive do-it-yourself shop in indie-publishing land. It makes perfect sense. Think of S&S as the chain hotel who heard that there was a fortune to be made by offering rooms to miners who are too tired to pitch their own tents.

There’s gold in them thar hills, folks. And the gold is for business people who know their way around a profit-and-loss statement.

By the way, scammers always show up in the middle of a gold rush. Scammers know they can make a fortune off the ignorant. We’re in the scammer/chain hotel phase of this gold rush.

Pretty soon, you’re going to see sad and angry posts from writers who gave up everything and failed to make more than a few dollars for all their hard work. They followed all the rules. They posted their books as best they could, they Tweeted and Facebooked and blogged about their book until their fingers bled, they lowered the price to 99 cents, they made the book free for a week, they watched the bestseller lists and never ever ever saw their book on it.

They’ll wake up, but they won’t take responsibility for their own work. They’ll claim that everyone lied. Joe Konrath lied. I lied. Dean Wesley Smith lied. We had fan bases that didn’t take into account all the work a new writer has to do to succeed (because, y’know, we never were new writers, and never had to do any of that work, not once. We were grandfathered in or something).

And Amanda Hocking? She got lucky. Someone—the right someone—noticed her book. She wouldn’t have had success otherwise (because, y’know, the fact that she’s a marvelous storyteller who had written a dozen books means nothing).

And everyone else who succeeded? They were lucky too or had fan bases or made up their numbers.

Because those writers whose single book didn’t succeed after they followed all the rules, well, they now know the truth. It wasn’t as easy as it sounded to become a millionaire.

Those writers never realized that Joe and Dean and I were not talking about becoming millionaires or even about becoming famous. We were blogging about an industry in flux that was providing opportunities where those opportunities hadn’t existed before.  Those writers never realized that Amanda Hocking had an amazing amount of product up, and that product was so good that it attracted readers who then spread word of mouth about the books. Those writers never realized that book publishing—even e-book publishing—is a business like almost everything else in a capitalist society.

Here’s the thing, people: Publishing has changed. It continues to change. We’re in the middle of a revolution.

What was true in 2009 isn’t true now.

What’s true now may not be true in 2019.

Only three things will guarantee your success in the modern era.

First, you must write a lot, and you must learn how to write well. Tell a good story. Good stories always triumph. If your single book isn’t selling, well, then, have you considered the fact that it’s not very good? Why in the world would you expect to succeed on an international stage the very first time you try to write a novel?

Do you remember how much work you had to do to learn how to read a novel? It took you years to get to “big” books of more than 20 pages. (Those of you with kids are seeing the pattern right now.) It’s much easier to read a novel than it is to write one. Why do you think that writing a good one is possible on the very first try?

Second, you must have perseverance. You won’t become successful with your first book or your second, and you might not even be successful with your tenth. Plus you’re going to have to keep up with the industry, and keep improving your craft. You’ll have to keep your day job, and put up with all those well-intentioned nay-sayers who tell you to stop wasting your time. You’ll have to believe in yourself enough to stay away from get-rich-quick schemes, and those idiots who charge you a small fortune (like $25,000) to publish just one of your precious (but not quite there yet) novels.

And you need to keep everything you write, from the worst thing you’ve ever written to the latest thing you’ve ever written, either in the mail to publishers or in print through your own small press. Because you have no idea what will take off for you and you never will. Do I know why people buy my books? Yeah, kinda sorta. I know that readers like what I do. If you push me, I might mumble something that I’ve heard from those readers. But do I know, really know, deep down inside? Hell, no. And no professional writer I’ve ever talked to does. We can’t see what makes our writing special because what makes our writing special is our personalities, which to us, are as normal and every day as the air we breathe.

So we finish our work, we improve, we persevere, and we keep our work out in front of readers. In other words, we let the readers decide what’s good and what’s not. And we don’t read reviews (much) and we don’t write for anyone else, and we keep doing what we do because we love it, not because it will make us rich.

The love will get us through those years with no sales. The expectations of riches might not even get us through the week. The love will get us through the difficult writing days. The actuality of riches will send us off playing in the Bahamas.

You want to persevere? Make sure you love writing. If you don’t, do something else.

The third way to guarantee your success in the modern era? Learn business. Here’s the one thing that won’t change. Business is business is business. It follows patterns. It behaves in certain ways.

If publishing weren’t a business, I wouldn’t be able to compare what’s happening now to the Gold Rush. Because selling gold—then and now—is a business. I could have compared publishing to the real estate bubble of the early part of this century. The e-pub revolution created a tiny bubble in publishing that operated the same way as that real estate bubble did for those who rushed into it trying to get rich.

Learn how to handle finances, understand what a good book design is, what the buying habits of customers really are. (“Customers” would be “readers,” folks.) Produce a lot of product. (Write a lot of books.) Understand what you’re selling. (You’re not selling anything; you’re licensing copyright.) Figure out where your markets are. Hire good help as cheaply as possible, and don’t tie yourself to that help. If you hire an employee, make sure you can fire that employee easily. If you hire someone to negotiate a contract, make sure that someone gets paid only for that contract, and nothing more.

Yes, writing novels is a lot of work. Yes, learning the best way for you to publish those novels is a lot of work. Yes, learning how to run a business is a lot of work. Yes, doing all of this while you have a day job elsewhere is a lot of work.

If you do the work, you will eventually become successful. Some of you will get rich very quickly. Some of you won’t. Most of you who stick with this for about ten years—the average time it takes for a writing career (hell, for any small business) to blossom—will make a good living at it. If you do it right, don’t sign your copyrights away, hire the best help, continue to improve, and stick with it.

The rest of you? Those of you who want to get rich quickly? The people who, even now, are about to write to me to tell me that I don’t know what I’m talking about because I have a fan base and I’ve never ever ever had to start from scratch? You folks? I’m talking to you now:

This is a gold rush, and it’s playing out. If you want to get rich quickly, find a new scheme. I’m sure something else is currently making someone rich in a surprising manner. Join that new bandwagon.

Or try this: Gold is selling at $1700 an ounce. I’m sure some of the California mines aren’t entirely played out yet…

A while back, I got taken to task for insulting some members of my audience. And maybe that last remark insults some of you. But believe me, if you took a class from me on writing, you’d hear me say the same thing in person and with a lot more force than you can ever see on the page. I scare people in person. On the page, I’m much milder.

If you want overnight success, this is not the profession for you. If you want a writing career, then learn it. Remember that you’re trying to sell millions of copies of books to millions of readers around the world.

You don’t get to that level simply by writing one novel. It takes practice, practice, practice, learning, learning, learning, and patience, patience, patience.

You have to love writing, or it won’t be worth your time.

And that, my friends, was true in 2009. It is true now. And it will be true in 2019.

I write this business blog every week no matter what’s going on in  my life. I’ve written through illness and fiction deadlines, through horrible life events and some pretty good times. I have offered this blog for free since April of 2009 because I know that some of you can’t afford to pay for the advice.

The only thing I ask is that those of you who can afford a few dollars help fund the blog for everyone else. The blog, like everything else I write, has to earn its own way. If it doesn’t, I’ll stop writing it and go on to more profitable things.  

That said, I enjoy the interactions, the e-mails, the comments, and the community. Those constitute payment as well.

However…if you’ve gotten anything out of this blog today, in the last few weeks or in the last year, and you can afford to drop some change in the virtual tip jar, I would appreciate it.

Thanks!

Click Here to Go To PayPal.

“The Business Rusch: Writing Like It’s 2009” copyright 2012 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

 

I subscribe to a whole bunch of fundie-survivor/recovering fundie blogs. Libby Anne has a terrific list here of the sort I mean, which she describes as “blogs by individuals who grew up in the Christian Patriarchy or Quiverfull movements and have since questioned and left.”

So I’m used to having posts like the one I quote below pop up in my Google Reader, and I was just kind of skimming quickly without noticing specifically which blog this was from:

… this is what The Cult taught: Historically, there is no such thing as a “teenager” — there were children, and then there were adults. A child is a child until he/she reaches puberty, and then he/she is biologically an adult. “Teenagers” are a modern invention, caused by a godless, indulgent consumerist society, family breakdown, peer pressure, advertising and a lack of discipline in childhood.

Therefore, parents could avoid having their children turn into teenagers by raising them correctly, by instilling the fear of God in them, by teaching them to take on as many adult ritual and behavioral responsibilities as possible when they were still young, and by carefully sheltering them from the wider society. …

I hadn’t heard of The Cult before, but I assumed it was the writer’s shorthand for the Bill Gothard gang, which was where I thought I’d heard this bit about teenagers before. I kept reading and tripped over this:

… Because if we sheltered our kids, they would never get the idea that supposedly typical teenage behavior is in any way normal or acceptable, so they would be much less likely to act that way. And if we kept them securely inside our conservative, insular Muslim bubble as much as possible, then community expectations that they act maturely would be constantly reinforced, and it would be that much harder for them to be rebellious “teenagers.”

Muslim? Wait a second … this isn’t No Longer Qivering? I scrolled up to the top and only then did I realize that this was a post from Sober Second Look — a blog much like many other fundamentalist survivor sites, but dealing with liberation and recovery from oppressively patriarchal Muslim fundamentalism rather than from oppressively patriarchal Christian fundamentalism.

Libby Anne had the same reaction to that same post: “My God, They Really Are the Same.”

This is absolutely word for word identical to what I was told growing up in a Christian Patriarchy/Quiverfull evangelical homeschool family. Exactly.

I mean, we’re talking so exact that you could replace a few words – substitute “homeschooling” for “The Cult,” say, and “prayer five times each day, fasting the entire month of Ramadan, and wearing the hijab” with “reading the Bible regularly, praying constantly, and dressing modesty” – and if someone showed it to me I would think I’d read it in No Greater Joy, Above Rubies, a Vision Forum catalog, or any other Christian Patriarchy or Quiverfull magazine.

… So very many of the ideas we were raised on are common to fundamentalism across religions. And yet, we thought we were so very different.

Those similarities are revealing.

Here we have identical gender hierarchies set up with identical approaches to two very different sacred texts. The patriarchal boy Christians and the patriarchal boy Muslims have both selectively gleaned what they needed or wanted from their respective scriptures, and their parallel projects reveal that whatever scripture happens to be the one being mined isn’t really important.

The true religion for PBCs and for their Muslim counterparts is patriarchy itself. Given the choice between patriarchy and the Bible or between patriarchy and the Koran, these boys will choose patriarchy every time.

In other words, their purported allegiance to Christianity or to Islam is just a pretext, not a cause. It is secondary at most, and barely even that. The PBCs and the patriarchal Muslims share the same core religion, and it is neither Christianity nor Islam.

Think of this patriarchal religion like Q, the hypothetical lost Gospel source whose existence we can deduce from studying the Synoptic Gospels.

The first three books of the New Testament — Matthew, Mark and Luke — share a bunch of parallel passages. We’re pretty sure that Mark was written first, and that it was later used as source material by the authors of Matthew and Luke in putting together their later, longer accounts.

That’s easy to see from reading all three books. Chunks of Mark can be found repeated verbatim, or with very slight changes, in both Matthew and Luke.

But there are also other parallel passages in Matthew and Luke that do not come from Mark. That might mean that Matthew copied them from Luke or that Luke copied them from Matthew, but that isn’t what scholars who have closely studied the earliest manuscripts think. They think instead that Matthew and Luke were also both using some other common source — “Q” — which they both drew on in the same way they both drew on Mark’s Gospel.

We have Mark, but we don’t have Q. All we know of it is what we can infer from those identical passages appearing in Matthew and Luke.

So think of patriarchal religion as being like Q. We can’t study it directly because its devotees all pretend they’re actually adherents of some other religion. They pretend to be Christians or they pretend to be Muslims, but really their main allegiance lies with this hidden religion of patriarchy.

We can examine this hidden religion the same way we can examine Q, by studying the parallels — the identical dogmas and rules and teachings shared by patriarchal Christians, patriarchal Muslims, patriarchal Jews, patriarchal Pagans, patriarchal Hindus and even patriarchal atheists.

They claim allegiance to so many different texts and traditions, yet they all wind up in the same place. And the closer I look at these supposedly disparate patriarchal boys across lines of religion, the more I find myself saying just what Libby Anne said, “My God, they really are the same.”

There was more, of course. Prof. Piotr Dembowski of the University of Maryland, talking about how difficult it had been to crack the GRM. Someone else from Simon Fraser, reporting that something like Firebrand (“it’s always hard to tell when dealing with encrypted genes”) was showing up in some microbe — Bacteroides thetasomethingorother — that lived exclusively in the human gut (“Small mercies, actually. If it was viable in, say, E. coli, everything from puppies to pigeons would be pooping fire and brimstone by now, heh heh.”) The obligatory hastily-called press conference at which a GreenHex spokesman attested to the absurdity of the latest allegations (“These algae were designed for the warm, wet, methane-rich conditions of our anaerobic reactors, not the human digestive system!”), and that even if Firebrand had got out it couldn’t possibly have persisted in the wild for anywhere near the year-and-a-half since GreenHex had phased out their lagoon operations and gone 100% closed-loop. Which was briefly reassuring, until some statistician from the University of fucking Buzzkill showed up to witter on about the myth of the perfect failsafe, and how any industry scaling up fast enough to replace fossil fuels in less than two decades would probably be dealing with a couple dozen accidents a day even if it hadn’t built its entire operation on a product that self-replicated.

Some of you may remember a fiblet I posted a few months back, a very rough first-cut excerpt of a story I was writing for MIT Technology Review[1]; something about people spontaneously combusting as an unfortunate side-effect of an biofuel industry that, in the face of catastrophic climate change, might have been rushed to mass production a wee bit before all the bugs had been worked out. I really had to work on the details for that one. It was easy enough to imagine engineered cyanobacteria escaping from a leaky bioreactor somewhere; lateral transfer would suffice to explain how plasmids built for the production of biofuel might get into the Spirulina that tinted Starbuck’s new heath-conscious “Shamrock Smoothies”. But how to limit the incendiary results exclusively to humans? Once that code got loose, why wouldn’t everything with a GI tract be squirting fire out its ass? (In hindsight, that might have been a better story; a world in which any random critter might burst into flames without warning would be a nicely hyperbolic metaphor for global warming. But something like that would also be impossible to cover up, and the focus of “Firebrand” involved the day-to-day bureaucracy of explaining away human sponcoms as isolated acts of terrorism, or an unfortunate side-effect of drinking unregulated alcoholic beverages imported from Poland.)

I googled my fingers off, trying to find some kind of microbe that lived in the human gut and nowhere else. I found a couple of references attesting to the fact that lateral transmission between bacteria and cyanobacters wasn’t completely off the wall. I figured that random wind-borne transmission could get the ball rolling in terms of moving the source code from A to B. It was a bit of a stretch, but it held together well enough for the purposes of a four thousand word story.

Only now I can read all about the burgeoning bioenergy field in the current issue of New Scientist (for the next eight days at least, at which point the article disappears behind a paywall). ”Biofuel that’s better than carbon neutral” describes a number of promising young start-ups based on the use of engineered cyanobacteria, and tells me that at least one of them — Bio Fuel Systems Inc., out of Spain — squeezes “blue petroleum” from its colonies and then

“sells its high-value algal by-products as nutritional supplements, such as omega-3 fatty acids.”

All that arcane research and rationalization. All those steps to justify the transmission of engineered algal genes from reactor to rectum. All for naught.

The industry is already feeding the stuff to us directly.

Apocalypse. It’s so much easier in the real world.

Way back in the beginning of 2012 when I started doing this cover pose thing, the idea was to take the poses many female characters are contorted into for book covers, and to find a way to highlight exactly how ridiculous and impractical they were. And also to have fun. I definitely wanted it to be fun. I followed up with a continuation of the discussion, looking at the fact that yes, men are sexualized and objectified too, but not in the same ways. Men’s poses are almost always less physically awkward, more “action-ready,” and more powerful.

When I started the Aicardi Syndrome Foundation cover pose fundraiser, I saw it as 1) a way to take something fun and do more of it while supporting a great cause, and 2) a way to continue pointing out problematic poses on our book covers.

The trouble is, I didn’t spend much time introducing and contextualizing the Cover Pose Tradition at the start of the fundraiser. And when we did the first Scalzi/Hines pose-off, while I plugged the fundraiser, I didn’t provide any context at all for why we were doing this.

For my regular readers, that shouldn’t be a problem. But the Scalzi/Hines piece got a lot of press from places like Fark and Boing-Boing, meaning a lot of folks came in and saw two SF/F authors dressing up/posing like women for charity. And some of the reaction began to shift from, “I say, those poses seem remarkably impractical, and how exactly does one do that without dislocating one’s ankle?” to “Hey, guys dressing or posing like girls are both ugly and hilarious!”

This is on me. My blog, my fundraiser, my responsibility. It’s not like I’m unaware of John’s internet appeal and the likely results of our pose-off. (Though even so, the response was bigger than I could have imagined, and I appreciate that - thank you.) But I was caught up in the excitement of raising a lot of money for a good cause, and the flat-out fun of competing with a goofy and good-natured friend. So I didn’t think enough about how this might all come across, nor did I take the time to introduce and contextualize what we were doing.

I apologize for that mistake.

Both John and I had fun with this. Speaking for myself, I want you to laugh at the absurdity of these poses. Sure, one of the reasons I use props like butter knives and giant teddy bears is because I’m cheap and don’t want to pay for real props. But another reason is that I want to encourage the laughter.

I can handle good-natured ribbing, too. I know that when I post these pictures, I can expect an email from my brother asking me to reimburse him for another five years of therapy. I know where that’s coming from, and I’ll get him back soon enough.

But if you’re laughing because you’re a straight guy and therefore must declare all male bodies brain-searingly ugly? If you’re laughing because you think a man in a dress is funny and should be mocked? In other words, if you’re laughing because of various aspects of ingrained sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and other discriminatory nonsense? Then you’ve missed the point so badly it’s not even funny.

For the record, John Scalzi is damned sexy. He’s a smart, funny, and yes, good-looking man. For me, what makes his cover pose pic great is his obvious humor and self-confidence. Do I want to hop into bed with him? Well, not really. For one thing, I’m straight. For another, his wife would kick my ass. (Or else she’d want to watch, and then there would be performance anxiety issues, and I’m dealing with enough pressure these days.) And of course, I have leg stubble that would probably make it less pleasant for both of us. But I can look at that picture, grin, and say, “Yeah, that’s a man who rolled well in the Charisma department.”

So please do me a favor. Step back and ask yourself what exactly you’re laughing at, and where that’s coming from. ‘Cause I’m starting to see some rather problematic reactions out there.

And for my part, I apologize again, and will work to do a better job introducing and contextualizing the rest of these poses.

Thanks.

Officially, around 241,000 people in England and Wales listed their religion as "other" on last year's Census form, the results of which were released yesterday.  This doesn't include the 177,000 self-declared Jedi, who are counted separately (the Census people assume, for some reason, that it's not a proper religion).  In 2001 there were 390,000 Jedi Knights, who were put down as No Religion, as were people who called themselves atheists, humanists and even heathens.  This was problematic because many, perhaps most, "Heathens" are followers of Norse gods rather than atheists.  This year, following a campaign, Heathens were listed as "Other religion".  Otherwise, the figures were calculated in much the same way.

The total represents a big increase on the 151,00 Others in 2001 - even allowing for the misidentified Heathens.  It mirrors, almost exactly, the percentage increase in those of No Religion, which rose from under 15% to over 25%.  It's up by two thirds.  It's a smaller increase, in both absolute and percentage terms, than Buddhism has enjoyed - Buddhists leapfrogged Others to go from 144,000 to 248,000, an increase of 72%.  It also trails behind Islam, up 75%.  But Islam's increase can largely be attributed to immigration and birthrate.  It's dramatic when set against the huge fall in Christianity (down from 72% to 59%), the modest rise in numbers of Hindus and Sikhs and the flatlining Jews.

But Others is a hodgepodge sort of category.  The raw figures are here, with Jedi and various non-believers mixed in.  I've grouped them into categories to produce what I hope is a more easily assessed picture.

The largest group is the Pagans: more 56,000 using that term alone, to which I've added Wicca (11,766), Druid (4,189) and assorted Heathens, Pantheists, shamans and witches.  This gives a total of 78,675 for England and Wales.  Add another 251 if you think that "reconstructionist" refers to that type of Paganism that aims to recreate the ancient worship of pagan gods (devotees of Zeus and Athena, for example).  In the 2001 census there were approximately declared 40,000 pagans in England and Wales (as far as I can tell, this was the combined figure for all varieties of pagan nomenclature).  The figure for Scotland was around 2,000.  So at almost 80,000 Pagan numbers have almost doubled over the past ten years; at least it's the case that twice as many people are now willing to identify as such. 

The next group are people I call religious freelancers: people who make up their own beliefs, picking and choosing from various traditions, or who prefer to describe their religion in particular philosophical terms.  Linda Woodhead's research suggests that a high proportion of the population views religion in this personal way, perhaps combining vague Christian belief with New Age ideas, angels and the like.  But relatively few are sufficiently self-conscious about it to explain their beliefs in the Census.  A mere 698 put down "New Age", for example.  But combining them with those who put "mixed religion", "spiritual", "believe in God", "I have my own belief system", "deist" and the like I get a figure of 47,091.

Then come the Spiritualists.  There are more than 39,000 of those.

I wasn't sure what to do about the 1,893 Satanists, some of whom may well have been joking (in which case there's probably an overlap with the 6,242 adherents of the Church of Heavy Metal).  For comparison, there are just 502 Occultists and just 184 Thelemites (followers of Aleister Crowley).

If you lump all these categories together as "New Age, Paganism and alternative religion", you get a total of 166,000.  This may be an artificial exercise, however, given the wide variety of ideas and levels of structural and doctrinal coherence, ranging from independent thinkers to the highly organised Spirtualist Church.

The Category "Others" also includes well-established faiths, some of great antiquity, others just about long-enough established to count as "proper" religions.  These can be broken down as follows:

Minority Indian religions:

Jain: 20,288
Ravidassia: 11,058
Total: 31,346

Baha'i: 5,021

Traditional Chinese Religion:
Taoist: 4144
Chinese: 182
Confucian: 124
Total: 4450
(I suspect that the majority of UK Chinese put themselves down as Buddhists or Christians)

Zoroastrianism: 4,105
Shinto: 1075
Druze: 515
Traditional African, Voodoo, Animist: 1290
Native American Church: 127

The grand total of "minor faiths" is 47,929: well behind the number of pagans and very similar to that for the religious freelancers.  No Mormons are listed, incidentally.  I assume that all the Mormons described themselves as Christians.

Finally, New Religious Movements, some of which come under the rubric of cults.  By far the largest (and certainly no cult) is Rastafarianism, with 7,906 adherents, more than the Baha'i, Zoroastrianism or all the traditional Chinese faiths combined.  The others that make the list are: Scientology (2418), Moonies (452), Brahma Kumari (442), Eckankar (379).  This brings a total of 11,597, or just 3691 if you exclude the Rastafarians.

There are some notable omissions.  The Census may have had a cut-off below which religious affiliations were simply not recorded; or perhaps some religionists are just too shy to out themselves.  No UFO cultists are listed: no Raelians or Aetherians.  Nor do we find any adherents of the Church of All Worlds, the free love movement inspired by the writings of Robert A Heinlein.  No Heretics, either, which is a particular disappointment. And where, but where, are the Pastafarians?  His Supreme Noodliness is sure to be mightily offended.

© 2013 Heresy Corner, all rights reserved.

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December 12th, 2012: What are you doing Monday night? Hopefully it's coming to The Beguiling, Hark A Vagrant!, A Softer World, Bravest Warriors, Adventure Time and Dinosaur Comics holiday party! Me and Kate and Joey and Emily will be there AND there will be a secret Santa gift exchange! It's the third time we've done this and it's always lots of fun. You should come! – Ryan

Here’s an interesting theory for what is going wrong with the economy, summarised in this FT Alphaville blog article [(free) registration required]. The article is well worth reading and includes lots of useful links.

The theory goes something like this. Originally, it was predicted that, as robots and computers took over more of the hard jobs, we would move to a more leisure-oriented society. Then economists forgot about that idea. And now they have remembered it again – but not in a good way.

Technological advance is causing abundance which depresses prices and threatens the return on capital. So the incumbent interests threatened by this trend have an increasing incentive to impose artificial scarcity. They are rationing new ideas by exploiting and extending the system of patents. As market power becomes more concentrated, incumbents are better able to stifle innovation and raise rents on the ideas they own. This ‘idea monopolisation’ has become a hugely counter-productive force in the economy. And this trend is manifest in the growth of companies that don’t produce anything but exist solely on the revenue of their patents.

“So, robot and technology power is reducing the natural employment rate. But rather than our subsidising those who have lost jobs to technology, so as to spread that manna wealth that’s literally dropped onto the surface of the earth at no-one’s physical disadvantage, companies are using monopoly power to extort rents on the capital that is creating all that free wealth.

That’s why inequality is rising.

As technology proceeds in a patent-obsessed world, the fruits of innovation flow to the owners of the capital and invention, forming a whole new rentier class. The financial assets/debts that back the innovation technology, meanwhile, get disproportionally valuable as their purchasing power gets completely out of whack with the output they radically accelerate.”

In other words, a rentier class of patent owners is hoarding ideas and extorting extravagant rents. Consequently wealth is concentrating instead of spreading outwards. Which is why those people who have been moved involuntarily into a ‘leisure-oriented society’ are finding they do not have the income to go with it. Perhaps that is why, as George Osborne alleges, they keep the curtains closed.

When I was an undergraduate the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall were still in existence. And in those days how people responded to repression in the Soviet bloc seemed to me a good pointer to a their moral worth.

Though outright admiration for the Soviet Union - "All them cornfields, and ballet in the evenings" as Peter Sellers' Fred Kite put it in I'm All Right Jack - was rare by then, there were plenty on the left who argued that we should engage with the Warsaw Pact powers and played down questions of human rights.

So, while Jim Callaghan was prime minister, Romanian-built locomotives began to appear on Britain's railways.

In those days, admittedly, Nicolae Ceausescu was supposed to be the great liberal hope of Eastern Europe. The leader of the British Liberal Party David Steel even gave him a labrador. The dictator named it Corbu.

But it remains an uncomfortable fact that you were far more likely to find articles about human rights abuse in the Soviet Union in the Spectator than you were in the New Statesman. I seem to recall that you could even subscribe to a scheme that distributed the Spectator behind the Iron Curtain.

The Conservatives had their blind spots - there were plenty of them who were happy to support Apartheid South Africa - but this history gave me some hope that the Coalition would be more respectful of our liberties than Blair and Brown had been.

Especially when the Coalition agreement said:

We will be strong in defence of freedom. The Government believes that the British state has become too authoritarian, and that over the past decade it has abused and eroded fundamental human freedoms and historic civil liberties. We need to restore the rights of individuals in the face of encroaching state power, in keeping with Britain’s tradition of freedom and fairness.

But when you read Theresa May's absurd comments in support of her Communications Data Bill you can see that these hopes of the Conservatives have come to nothing.

Here she is taking to the Sun:

“The people who say they’re against this bill need to look victims of serious crime, terrorism and child sex offences in the eye and tell them why they’re not prepared to give the police the powers they need to protect the public. 

“Anybody who is against this bill is putting politics before people’s lives. 

“We would certainly see criminals going free as a result of this. 

“There will be paedophiles who will not be identified and it will reduce our ability to deal with this serious organised crime.”

You can say that May is too keen to appeal to her party's right wing or lacks the strength to stand up to the security establishment.

But her thuggish attitude to her liberties do remind me strongly of the mind-set that ruled the Soviet Union - and not a little of the briefing we Lib Dem bloggers were given when this bill first appeared. I am very glad to see Nick Clegg has now had second, better thoughts on it.

Could it be that Theresa May is a Soviet sleeper - an agent put in place when she was but a schoolgirl?

Can any among you remember Theresa May's schooldays? Were there perhaps pictures of Leonid Brezhnev on the dormitory wall? When the other girls were playing hockey was she poring over Soviet coal production figures?

Did she - and this would be the clincher - have a signed photograph of Corbu?

Again, I should mention that it's the holiday season, and that both my most recent book (US, UK, Canada) and my 2013 Calendar (US, UK) would make great gifts. Really, almost anything purchased using my Amazon Affiliate links (US, UK, Canada) would!

People who like this blog and in particular this entry are essentially certain to enjoy JMR Higgs's new book KLF: Chaos Magic Music Money, which is, by his description, "a story about The KLF, Robert Anton Wilson, Dada, Alan Moore, punk, Discordianism, Carl Jung, magic, Ken Campbell, rave, Situationism and the alchemical properties of Doctor Who." See? Right up your alley if you're reading this. The book is announced here, with links to where you can buy it in the US or UK.

The Cartmel-Virgin era began with overt and self-conscious parallels to the work of Alan Moore. Actually, that might be a little strong. Let’s try this: Andrew Cartmel was a comics fan, and he stole from the best. Sylvester McCoy’s audition piece, itself spun into the bulk of Mel’s departure scene in Dragonfire, was directly inspired by Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen. And much of Cartmel’s tenure as script editor can be read straightforwardly as an attempt to do Alan Moore’s Doctor Who. Given this, it’s a surprisingly honest one that understood what Moore was actually doing on a level beyond “he was adding lots of sex and violence to what were ostensibly children’s stories.” But in most accounts that’s where Alan Moore drops out of the Doctor Who story, replaced by Neil Gaiman, whose Sandman ran more or less concurrently with the New Adventures and was an overt influence.

This is, for the most part, because Alan Moore’s career took a bit of a strange turn in the late 1980s. Following a dispute over payment and rights to Watchmen Moore stopped accepting new work for DC Comics, simply seeing out his existing contract to finish V for Vendetta, which he did in 1989. Instead he began working independently, starting with the publication of AARGH! in 1988 under his own Mad Love imprint. That was also the imprint under which he published Big Numbers in 1990, an aborted magnum opus about a shopping center in Northampton and fractals. This was, unfortunately, characteristic of his work in the period - although some shorter and self-contained pieces such as “Brought to Light” and A Small Killing made it out, his other two big works from the period had what can only be described as convoluted publication histories. Lost Girls, his pornographic work with future-wife Melinda Gebbie, saw some issues published in 1991-92 before vanishing for fifteen years. From Hell had an only slightly smoother ride, managing to get all ten chapters out over the course of five years and three publishers.

The latter of these is, to say the least, a transitional work for Moore. From Hell’s memorable fourth chapter, published in 1991, was inspired in part by the psychogeographic work of Iain Sinclair, with whom Moore struck up a friendship that is almost certainly the most important creative influence of his later career. It is also in that chapter that Moore wrote that “the only place gods inarguably exist is in our minds where they are real beyond refute, in all their grandeur and monstrosity.” Moore later said that upon writing this line he patted himself on the back a bit, thinking it terribly clever, and then realized that, more than being clever, it was absolutely true and he was going to have to completely reconfigure his entire life and belief system. Accordingly, on his fortieth birthday, five days before Doctor Who’s thirtieth anniversary, Alan Moore declared himself a practicing ceremonial magician and began worshipping a fraudulent Roman snake god named Glycon. He then spent the mid-to-late nineties putting out some of the weakest work of his career for Image Comics in an attempt to see if he could write for the nineties American comics market while, on the side, publishing his phenomenally strange and alienating novel Voice of the Fire and, from 1994-2001, doing a series of spoken word performances under the banner of The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels. None of this material is typically viewed as in the least bit inspirational to much of Doctor Who.

This is, however, largely erroneous. Alan Moore’s excursion into the occult was never all that far from Doctor Who. The themes of Big Numbers, with the individual lives of ordinary people in Northampton reflecting and paralleling the structures of the larger society, point straight at the central concerns of Paul Cornell, Kate Orman, and late-career Andrew Cartmel. And his overtly occult work ties in perfectly with the themes of So Vile a Sin and The Room With No Doors. On top of this, the five spoken word pieces are among the most direct influences on this blog. So since we did Moore five entries into the McCoy era, let’s do him again as we begin to wrap these threads up, looking specifically at these five spoken word pieces.

The earliest of them, itself titled The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels, sets the tone and pattern for all five of the pieces. It stems from a 1994 performance at the St. Bride Foundation Institute and Library. After a pleasantly unnerving opening track in which a carnival barker implores listeners to enter the eponymous theatre, containing as it does “curiosities to suit your every inclination, demonstrations and displays, unique sensations, and a previously unimagined sexual extremity included in the modest cover fee.” This descends into a repeated chant that they are going to “wake the snake,” at which point the performance proper begins.

The piece begins with a walking tour of London, or, rather, the imagined London - the psychological landscape of memory, history, and myth that we hold inside our heads. (“When we are not in London,” Moore intones, “this apparition is our only London.”) Large portions of this initial section are simply reworkings of From Hell’s fourth chapter, in turn nicked by me for the bits of my Invasion post about St. Paul’s Cathedral. But instead of tracing the path of the Ripper murders Moore winds his way towards St. Bride’s church, the place where the performance itself took place, and finally into the very room in which the audience sits. Here Moore pulls his transition, the switch between the two acts of this performance, inquiring whether, if the room itself possesses an imaginary dimension, mustn’t too the very people within it?

And from here Moore makes the step that is crucial to understanding everything within this blog. If there is such a thing as imaginary spaces, he proposes, there must also be such a thing as a space of imagination. This is his concept of ideaspace - the imaginary landscape of imagination itself, treatable as geography but nevertheless ephemeral. The exploration of this makes up the latter half of the performance as Moore works upwards towards more abstracted and terrifying presences. If we treat the psyche as a landscape, Moore asks, what might live within it? Here he introduces three figures - the Enochian Angel of the Seventh Aethyr, consisting largely of a transcript of Edward Kelly’s summoning of said angel for John Dee, the Demon Regent Asmodeus, a palindromic monologue that I, having no actual ideas of my own, reskinned as the caption for my Logopolis entry, and finally his God and Master, the serpent Glycon. And then he takes a step further into transcendence, suggesting that if, in fact, the universe is understandable only through our perceptions of it that there is such a thing as the absolute unity of all things and…

Then he kind of loses it, actually It’s a first draft, to be fair. His first attempt at a magickal working, and he doesn’t quite stick the ending. It’s all very moving and compelling, but it does not quite cohere. The piece, as a whole, shows the traits common of first works - the over-eager rush to cram everything in and to show off one’s ambition. That The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels contains both the Asmodeus palindrome and the ostentatiously clever “Litvinoff’s Book” section, a monologue about the Cray twins done in stereo with the two voices moving out of sync and then back in, the monologue itself playing at gratuitous length with images of dualisms and pairs, speaks volumes.

Moore’s next performance, The Birth Caul, was in late 1995 at the Old County Court in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. This one is altogether more successful, and one of the two to be adapted into comic versions by Eddie Campbell, Moore’s From Hell collaborator. The Birth Caul benefits from what was most excessively lacking in The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels, namely a sense of tight focus. Moore works entirely within the scale of his own childhood, using the image of his mother’s birth caul, found among her things when they were being sorted after her death a few months before the performance, to regress backwards from the present moment of the performance towards the primordial state whose mythology is bound up in Moore’s chosen talisman. It is an outright piece of psychochronography, walking against chronology through

In some ways The Birth Caul is directly opposite much of the New Adventures. Where they treat language as the condition that Death interrupts, Moore treats language itself as a sort of death - the framing of the social order that positions us endlessly as small, meaningless pieces of a larger machine. From what he calls “the world’s blunt engine,” the callous and grueling reception we are granted when we make our first attempts at adulthood, back through the endlessly circumscribed rebellions of our teenage years and to the soft totalitarianism of school Moore traces the constraints of the social order and how they wear away at the self. The monologue comes to its anguished head as he describes the savage acts of bullying he was subject to as a child, crying out that it was there that “he learned the words” necessary to conform and respond to such attacks. From there he winds back further, to the very cusp of his own use of language, imagining and reconstructing himself as an infant who has just become aware of the idea of “I,” and who is immediately traumatized by the lack of understanding of himself immediately prior to this moment. And finally he penetrates the moment of birth and language, entering the primordial unity from which the individual is severed.

But let us be more precise in our accounts of things here. In Moore’s conception it is language and history that severs us from the unity of namelessness. In Orman’s conception it is Death that eats our names and leaves us forgotten. These are not different processes so much as they are different perspectives, with Moore writing from within the perspective that Orman would recognize as Death. We ought remember, then, that even as the Doctor resists Death he does not suggest for a moment that Death ought be abolished. Nor does Moore advocate for suicide or the abandonment of life. What we have is an altogether more complex situation in which Death and Time are inexorably entwined. Note that the abandonment of ourselves upon the world’s blunt engine is just as much a loss of identity as the primordial unity. What matters - what The Birth Caul spends the bulk of its time on - is the flickering tension of ourself as we are suspended between the twin oblivions of Death and Time.

The problem is that The Birth Caul remains largely pessimistic. It simply traverses the span of these two oblivions before losing itself and all identity into the primordial. For all of its aesthetic effectiveness - and it is a far, far stronger piece than The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels - it is much more of a dead end conceptually. Its transcendence is negative, finding hope only in the potential from which language stems. It is profound, but profound in a silent, sublime way that permits no productive speech or response.

Moore’s third working, The Highbury Working, came almost exactly two years later in, as one might expect, the Higbury region of London. The piece is the most overtly psychogeographical of Moore’s performances. Moore starts with a withering assessment of Highbury as a place of cultural and historical power, describing it as “one more metropolitan collapsar faced with dreamtime relegation… Highbury wasn’t at Death’s door, it was halfway down Death’s passage, hanging up its coat. An anecdote-free zone. No serial murders, no ghosts, it didn’t even merit bold type in the A to Z. You might as well be on the moon.” From there Moore sets out to redeem the place.

The material concerns of the piece are mirrored in the comparative sedateness of its structure. Unlike the virtuoso formalism of The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels or even the winding regression of The Birth Caul, The Highbury Working plays it straight. Four sections, each divided into two tracks, working up straightforwardly through the standard Aristotelean/magickal elements from Earth to Fire. Moore works through the drug-soaked and hedonistic histories of Highbury, finding in it a taut, neurotic splendor of genius on the brink of cracking. And then, in glorious fiat, he declares the Angel Highbury, the redemptive moment in which all of Highbury’s ghosts are freed to revel joyoushly in its imagined streets, “crushingly beautiful, and there because we say she is.”

The Highbury Working is in some ways the most forgettable of Moore’s five pieces - certainly it’s the one that I’ve listened to the fewest number of times. Its ambitions are particularly limited and focused, and there’s an overproduced feel to the soundscape that feels as though it’s covering up an inferior monologue on Moore’s part, which, to be fair, it kind of is. But while the piece is not Moore’s strongest its relative simplicity allows him to crystalize and clarify some key ideas. The link between the lowly excesses of sex and drugs and the divine fire of the Angel Highbury is a crucial theme gestured at in The Birth Caul but unrealized within its downbeat ending. The act of raw creation, calling the Angel into being through no means other than the declaration of her, finds a solution to the dead-end of The Birth Caul’s void. There are the beginnings of his later and more complete formulation of magick’s status as an art in “Fossil Angels” here. Perhaps most significantly, Moore seems to find a measure of grounding and a way to move forward, locating something transcendent in the muck of the everyday instead of merely at the poles of oblivion upon which it is suspended.

This leads us in neatly to Moore’s fourth piece, in April of 1999: Snakes and Ladders, performed at Conway Hall in Red Lion Square in Holburn. Of the five pieces, this is, I think, fairly clearly the best. On a basic level it’s a simple Kabbalistic ascent from Malkuth to Tiphareth (“simple,” he says), or, if you want it in marginally more concrete terms, sections 10, 32, 9, 25, and 6 of the Logopolis post. On a broader level, it’s an act of dizzying hubris that makes The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels look pleasantly restrained. Moore weaves the psychogeography of Holburn, his Kabbalistic structure, the creation of the universe, and the life of Arthur Machen together in a study of divine ascension. But this latter choice provides the grounding focus that The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels lacked. Everything within the piece is grounded in the death of Machen’s wife and his account of his psychological turmoil in its aftermath.

Moore uses this visceral confrontation with death to frame a piece that runs continual interference between the two poles set out by The Birth Caul. On the one hand he retains the psychogeographic grounding of The Higbury Working, a variation on the web of social circumstance that The Birth Caul struggled against, while on the other his narrative of the creation of the universe and of life evokes nothing so much as The Birth Caul’s final plunge into the primordial. But in Snakes and Ladders Moore finally manages an answer to these challenges: “clay looks on clay, and understands that it is beautiful. Through us, the cosmos gazes on itself, adores itself, breaks its own heart. Through us, matter stares slack-jawed at its own star-dusted countenance and knows, incredulously, that it knows.”

On one level this is simply a restatement of the end of The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels, where our perceptions and interiority come to define the universe. But instead of being framed purely in terms of the act of magic it is this time framed in terms of the universe itself. Moore holds to this approach in later work - in an issue of Dodgem Logic he writes:

There is, of course, always the possibility that we’re alone. If the first seeds of life arrived from somewhere else with comet-dust, as in Fred Hoyle’s Panspermia hypothesis, then we should shortly find at least their remnants in the water-ice deposits that most probably exist upon Earth’s moon or on the planet Mars. In the absence of such a discovery we could only conclude that life developed locally, and lacking a full understanding of the processes by which inert and lifeless chemicals connected accidentally to form amino acids, RNA and DNA, we cannot possibly begin to calculate the odds of such a lucky chain of circumstances happening spontaneously elsewhere. While our universe is very large it is by no means infinite, and without knowing the exact means by which life originated or the probability of such a thing occurring there would seem a reasonable chance that there is not so much the first scrap of moss abiding anywhere beyond the confines of this planet. 

If that were to be the case, bearing in mind that as yet we possess no proof that it is not, then that would surely place our species under a compelling biological responsibility to be less lackadaisical regarding our continuing existence. After all, if we allow our world to be made uninhabitable, an unending toxic gas-storm in the mode of Venus, then it may be more than our own intermittently annoying species that we are consigning to oblivion. It may be that we leave our whole continuum an empty, echoing immensity that exists only for a dozen or so billion years between its pyrotechnic start and icy finish or incendiary collapse, completely unobserved and without meaning, as if it were never there at all.

The endless dance of history and oblivion that constitutes our fragile existences, then, amounts to nothing so much as the Panopticon through which the universe is allowed such notions of Time and Death in the first place. This is the Holmesian conception of the Time Lords writ large. “As above, so below” is true because it is only below, where the entire cosmos is nailed to mere matter, that above can be observed from and thus conceptualized. “If there is to be progress,” Moore intones, “there must be sex. There must be death, and all Earth’s children, all the myriad creatures must destroy each other to survive. Into mortality and evolution we descend.” And so in the searing fire of Arthur Machen watching his wife, Amy, slip away to a long illness we find the secrets of creation itself: the transcendent within the mundane.

The middle passage of Snakes and Ladders follows this train of thought further, exploring once again the landscape of Ideaspace first broached in The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels. The realm of imaginations and fictions in which all attempts to frame and capture this flickering moment. Circumscribed by history’s oppressive language and the onrushing erasure of death, we create and invent, trying desperately to frame the infinite, to capture it, to see it in the first place. Our fictions and ideas are the observations that render the universe seen, observed, and meaningful. But there is more than that. As Moore puts it, “the written page becomes too frail a barrier. Things start to tear their way through from the other side, almost as if the realms of waking substance and of fantasy were not two separate worlds at all.” Moore recounts his own visitation by John Constantine, who once stepped from the shadows and whispered the ultimate secret of magic into his ear.

If this is so, then, we have at last our framing of Time’s Champion. Himself an idea, a mere fiction - a story, even, he is that process through which Time transmutes from the grinding lead engines of eternity into the gold of significance. Nameless and thus untouchable by Death, his name, as Orman has it, broken “into thirty-eight tiny pieces” and scattered throughout the universe in the forms of his friends and companions. “And once they went their separate ways,” Orman writes, “his name continued to grow within them, and made them into something better, something bigger, than they were before. Or just something different.” The Doctor, his name already eaten, providing for us safety in the slow tempering of time.

Moore’s fifth and final working is Angel Passage, performed another two years later at an evening of readings and performances in honor of William Blake. It is good, but brief - a fleeting forty minutes that feels like an epilogue to an already completed work. He reached his peak in 1999 with Snakes and Ladders, at least within this form. The look at Blake is just wrapping things up. A footnote, or a small passion project without wider ambition. Two things about it suggest the broad figure of an explanation. First is the date. Angel Passage was done in February of 2001, while Snakes and Ladders was done in April of 1999. Moore, it seems, is at his best when staring the eschaton in the face. As he says in Snakes and Ladders, “these are the fretful margins of the twentieth century, the boomtown’s ragged edge, out past the sink estates, the human landfill, where the wheelchair access paving quakes, gives way like sphagnum moss beneath our feet. It’s 1999, less like a date than a number we resort to in emergencies. Pre-packaged in its National Front bunting, its millennial mummy-wraps, the zeitgeist yawns, as echoing and hollow as the Greenwich dome.”

A masterful bit of millennial paranoia, that. But it reveals a larger truth about Moore’s work: he is, at his heart, eschatological. As only a child of the fifties, sixties, and seventies can be, he relates to the future in terms of its end. His spoken word pieces, brilliant fire as they are, work only in the meandering run-up to that great odometer rollover of the millennium. Lose that onrushing moment of certainty and the fragile moment they arise from dissipates. Which brings us to the second aspect of Angel Passage: the fact that Blake, for his part, exists in relationship not with the eschaton but with Eternity.

There are, of course, broadly speaking two approaches to magick to be had. The first is the eschatological approach from which Moore’s more ceremonial tradition derives - an approach in which we approach some distinct transformative event. But there is also the cyclic approach, in which instead of approaching an ending we progress through an endless process, coming back around to the same point. The Wiccan and Druidic approaches - both well enmeshed in Britain’s occult heritage - both take this view, as, for that matter, does Buddhism, itself well enmeshed in Doctor Who’s heritage. Blake’s Eternity, in many ways, can be read as a cycle of infinite shortness.

What if, then, we turned to a more cyclic version of Moore’s approach. A story that never ceases, but goes on forever, regenerating itself. A story that is told for fifty years straight, constantly refining itself and, more importantly, us. One that makes the dizzying leap from dull and brutish matter to the vaulted skies of infinity. A story whose endless chanting quietly holds up a corner of the universe, a Lamed Wufnik unaware of just what it is. It simply tells itself, and in doing so sees the vast scope of everything. A mistranslation, then. Not Time’s Champion.

Eternity’s Champion.

Appendix


Well, it's obviously a mess, but.
There is a famous story about a Catholic and a Jew who wanted to get married. The local Priest didn't think Catholic boys should marry Jews, and the local Rabbi certainly didn't think that Jewish girls should marry anyone other than Jews. However, the local Vicar thought that it was his job to marry anyone in his parish who wanted to get married, regardless of their faith, so he married them. 
Anyone who ever read the Dandy knows that the longest word in the English language isn't "antidisestablishmentarianism", it's "smiles".
Some Anglican clergy have genuine, sincere, theological beliefs that marriage is something which can only occur between a man and a woman. I realize that territorial battle lines have been drawn, and you either have to see these people as martyrs or homophobes, when they are mostly neither. The point isn't whether they are right, the point is that it's really what they think.
It is very easy to write a law which says "so far as the state is concerned, marriage is now between any two people regardless of sex, but naturally, the Seventh Day Adventists and the Wesleyan Holiness people don't have to marry two men if they don't want to, any more than they have to marry two people who they don't think are sufficiently Wesleyan, sufficiently Holy or sufficiently Adventurous." The state has no interest in what ceremonies are performed by particular sects. 
But it is very difficult for the law to say "marriage is now between any two people, but individual clergy of the established church don't have to marry two ladies if they don't want" because the whole point of the established church is that it will marry anybody, christen anybody, and bury anybody who asks them do. (It prefers that the parents of the people it christens so some signs of understanding the Anglican teaching on baptism, and that the people it buries are dead.) 
So, as someone with some background in games design, the proposed law which says that any sect is free to conduct same sex weddings if they want to, no sect has to conduct same sex weddings if it doesn't want to, and the established church isn't allowed to even if it does want to is actually a brilliant manoeuvre  given that the rules of the game are where they are. If we didn't have establishment, then the situation wouldn't arise, but we do, and we're stuck with it, because Dave and Ed and Nick love basking in the reflected glory of the Queen, and any suggestion that we might change the Queen's job description would be denounced as treason by the people who really run the country (Murdoch and Dacre.)
It's still a mess, though. I still think we should go for the Hamlet option...

From this morning's New York Times:

"Nationally, about 17 percent of children under 20 are obese, or about 12.5 million people, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which defines childhood obesity as a body mass index at or above the 95th percentile for children of the same age and sex."

There must be some explanation for this.  Comments definitely open.

GONK

If today's proposals go through, gay couples wishing to formalise their relationships will soon be able to choose between marriage and civil partnerships.  But for heterosexual couples there will be no such option - it will be marriage or nothing.  So how does the government attempt to justify this flagrant discrimination?  It doesn't.

The official response to this year's consultation, released today (pdf), admits that the majority of those who expressed an opinion argued that civil partnership should be extended to all, while others thought that equality could be achieved by abolishing civil partnerships altogether.  It notes the "concern" contained in the Church of England's response that allowing civil marriage for same sex couples without allowing civil partnership for heterosexuals would be "legally unsustainable." It points to a submission from transsexual representatives, who drew attention to an anomaly that would result: if one partner in a civil partership legally changed sex, they would be forced to marry, whereas if one partner in a marriage changed sex they could stay married.  But it is unmoved: "We remain unconvinced that extending civil partnerships to opposite sex couples is a necessary change. We will therefore be retaining civil partnerships for same-sex couples only."

It's not clear how they reached this conclusion, since there are clearly many people who do want to have civil partnerships, as the government acknowledges.  The statement is a remarkable piece of doublethink:

When civil partnerships were introduced in 2005, they were created to allow equivalent access to rights, responsibilities and protections for same-sex couples to those afforded by marriage. They were not intended or designed as an alternative to marriage. Therefore, we do not believe that they should now be seen as an alternative to marriage for opposite sex couples.

Opposite sex couples currently have access to marriage, either via a civil or religious ceremony, which is both legally and socially recognised. We understand that not all opposite sex couples wish to marry, but that decision is theirs to make and they have the option to do so if they wish. Through the responses received to this consultation, it has not been made clear what detriment opposite sex couples suffer by not having access to civil partnerships.

The "detriment" they suffer is simple: the inability to contract a civil partnership, which they may see as preferable to marriage.  Until now, gay couples have suffered an equal detriment.  They couldn't get married, even if they preferred it to a civil partnership.  So, although there was discrimination, it went both ways.  It balanced out (sort of).  Now there's imbalance, and that's a "detriment" in anyone's lexicon.

The government is in a logical mess here.  Either civil partnership and marriage are equivalent, in which case there's no need to have equal marriage; or the two are distinct, in which case both should be open to all or else there should only be one type of legally recognised union.  Why retain civil partnerships for gay people?  Here's the government case:

Since their introduction in December 2005, over 50,000 civil partnerships have been registered. Civil partnerships are not available to opposite sex couples and legislation specifies other prohibitions on who can form civil partnerships, for example, siblings. But differences remain and at the time of introduction it was clear that civil partnerships were distinct from marriage.

So the two are not the same.  It's not just a matter of language.

Having taken the range of views into account, we intend to proceed with the proposals in the consultation document to retain civil partnerships for same-sex couples only, including continuing to allow civil partnerships on religious premises. This is because we acknowledge the important role that these unions play in the lives of many couples. Civil partnerships are a well-understood union, which have been become part of people’s everyday lives and society in general. We see little benefit from removing them.

If civil partnerships are well-understood, and part of "society in general", it is wholly illogical not to extend them to "society in general".  It's true that they began as the gay alternative to marriage (largely, let's remember, it was a way of answering religious objections to same-sex marriage by saying "it isn't marriage").  But in retaining them now, the government is confirming, and strengthening, their different status from marriage.

In support of maintaining the option of civil partnership for gay couples, the government quotes the Law Society:

It would be unfair and legally tenuous for those couples to be faced with the choice of either being married or no longer being in a formalised relationship. We can see no practical benefit in dissolving civil partnerships.

But the Society also responded to the question of equal civil partnerships.  The statement doesn't appear in the government response, so here it is:

The Law Society believes that not opening up civil partnerships would constitute discrimination against heterosexual couples by denying them equal access.

We cannot see any reason why civil partnerships should not be open to heterosexual couples who want to formalise their union without the connotations that the term ‘marriage’ can bring. The issue is equal access and non-discrimination. We therefore disagree with this proposal.

The government has completely failed to address, let alone answer, the question of how banning heterosexual couples from civil partnerships will accord with equality and human rights legislation.  The Law Society response, as well as that from the Church of England, suggests strongly that making such a case would be very difficult.  I'd love to see the government's legal advice on this issue, but so far it hasn't been produced. 

So what arguments does the government have?  The first is that the change is "not necessary", a point that would apply equally to same-sex marriage itself.  Except that what the government actually means is that they don't think it's necessary "to open up civil partnerships to opposite sex couples in order to enable same-sex couples to get married."  The consultation, it's argued, was only concerned with that narrow question - this despite the fact that the question about heterosexual civil partnership (HCP) was asked.  The government also contends that extending civil partnership to opposite-sex couples would involve "a wider process of reform."  It wouldn't.  It would just involve more people.

When I last wrote on this issue I suggested that the real reason for not allowing HCP was that it was afraid of being seen to "undermine marriage":

On the face of it, and despite the Pope's paranoia, allowing more people to get married will not undermine the institution. It will make it stronger. But allowing more people to not get married, yet escape the legal discrimination that still exists against informal cohabitation, might well undermine marriage. It would no longer have much attraction to those who lacked a religious or cultural commitment to it; it would have a powerful, and perhaps in time more popular, rival.

While the consultation response doesn't quite admit this, it does perhaps let the cat out of the bag with this:

A number of organisations, including the Hindu Forum, indicated they did not think that civil partnerships should be available to opposite sex couples. Manchester Rabbinical Council felt that allowing more people to enter a legal relationship other than marriage would weaken marriage further. The Catholic Bishops Conference of England and Wales stated that “it does not give recognition to any other partnerships or legal unions as having an ethical or legal equivalence with marriage. The Church opposes … extending civil partnerships to opposite sex couples who can marry”.

This chimes with David Cameron's repeated assertions that he supports gay marriage because he supports marriage, and that allowing same-sex marriage would strengthen the institution.  He thinks that marriage that is open to all couples would prove more popular.  Perhaps he even believes that marriage equality would strengthen its attractiveness to heterosexuals.  He might even be right.  But "you've got no choice" is a poor argument to offer on behalf of marriage, especially if a minority of couples do have a choice and many are choosing to get married.  In any case, I suspect this mean-spirited piece of moralising will backfire.  If equal civil partnership isn't added to the bill, I can't see how it will survive the inevitable legal challenge.  Would any lawyer like to explain how it might?

© 2013 Heresy Corner, all rights reserved.

I just had a very quick initial scan of the Government’s response to the Equal Marriage consultation. (PDF Link) Headline issues of particular interest to Bi and Trans folk are as follows:

Civil partnerships will be retained, but open to same-sex couples only. This is disappointing, as it’s effectively giving same-sex couples more rights than mixed-sex couples. There is a legal challenge in the works already to try to open this up to mixed-sex couples, and presumably that will now go ahead.

Civil Partnerships (CPs) can be converted into marriages, either for transition or just because a couple wishes to do so. This will be required for those transitioning but already in a CP, because mixed-sex CPs will not be allowed. Conversion due to transition will become part of the Gender Recognition process, but will require written consent of the spouse as well as the transitioning person. Once an interim Gender Recognition Certificate has been obtained, the choice is either to convert to marriage or go through the current system and annul the existing marriage.

The handling of paperwork on transition, e.g. would a replacement marriage certificate be issued still showing the initial marriage date, is still up for discussion.

In an announcement that I know will upset a great many people, marriages stolen under the old system of forced-divorce will not be reinstated.

Interestingly, 3% of respondents indirectly stated they were Trans and married, a surprisingly high proportion. Another 3% were identified as being spouses. In both cases, 79% of people said they would like to use the option to retain their existing marriage.

Opposite sex couples will continue to be able to annul their marriage on the grounds of non-consummation. This may be of particular interest to some non-op Trans folk as well as other groups, such as those with disabilities where consummation is physically impossible and both people knew it when they got married.

And finally, the one you’ll no doubt read in the mainstream sources: Religious (Not just civil, as I’d initially thought from earlier statements) marriage in religious premises will be allowed as long as both the minister and the wider church agree to it.

Mississippi John Hurt, Discovery: The Rebirth of Mississippi John Hurt (Spring Fed Records, 2011)

Cow Hookin’ Blues : Interview: John & Jessie Hurt (by Tom Hoskins) : Nobody’s Business : Casey Jones : Stack O’Lee : Richland Woman Blues : Coffee Blues : Do Lord, Remember Me : Take My Hand : Candy Man : Waiting for You : Conversation : A Song for Mr. Clark : Got the Blues : Let the Mermaids Flirt with Me : Ain’t Nobody But You : Pallet on the Floor : Spike Driver Blues : Preaching on the Old Campground / Glory Glory : Louis Collins / End of session

Recorded March 3, 1963, Avalon, Mississippi
Playing time 68:17

John Smith Hurt (1892–1966), Mississippi John Hurt, was a guitarist and singer from the hamlet of Avalon, Mississippi. Recommended to a recording agent by the fiddler Willie Narmour, Hurt recorded thirteen sides for Okeh Records in 1928, twelve of which were issued. He then returned to life as a farm laborer in Mississippi. Harry Smith included two of Hurt’s 1928 recordings, “Frankie” and “Spike Driver Blues,” in Folkways’s Anthology of American Folk Music (1952), the rich and strange compendium of pre-WWII rural black and white revenants that would shape the folk boom of the 1960s. (Listening to the Anthology, it is impossible to believe that its musicians lived on the same planet as, say, Bing Crosby and Kate Smith, much less in the same country.) Hurt’s two Anthology sides contain, in a curious way, the twin appeals of his music for later audiences: “Spike Driver Blues” is a piece that might make any fairly competent player think I can do that, while “Frankie” is the work of a master guitarist. The one recording puts the music of the past within fairly easy reach; the other puts the would-be performer to a task that, if accomplished, will dazzle. The story goes that Andrés Segovia, listening to “Frankie,” believed it to be the work of two guitarists.

Hurt was rediscovered in 1963. “Rediscovery” was a curious phenomenon of the early 1960s (and a crucial part of my musical education). The word describes the efforts of record collectors who found, against long odds, some of the great blues musicians of the 1920s and ’30s, men whose scantly documented lives would seem to have defied any possibility of retrieval. “Rediscovery” was a phenomenon with troubling implications: in some cases, the finders became keepers, tying rediscovered musicians to publishing and recording contracts of dubious merit. The words of Hurt’s “Avalon Blues” — “Avalon’s my hometown, always on my mind” — and an old map led Tom Hoskins to Hurt’s shotgun shack on March 2, 1963. The rest was musical history: several years of modest fame for Hurt followed, along with deep affection from young folk audiences. And hundreds if not thousands of guitarists figured out how to fingerpick by listening to Hurt’s recordings. The elements of his style — solid, unvarying bass, lightly syncopated figures on the upper strings — are everywhere.¹

These recordings give us John Hurt in the circumstances in which he must so often have made music — in a parlor, singing for, and sometimes with, family members (present are Hurt’s wife and ex-wife, his ex-wife’s sister, and two grandchildren). Hurt didn’t own a guitar at the time; playing Hoskins’s Gibson, he is is a bit plodding and insistent, not nearly as nimble as he would be on later recordings. His attempt at “Candy Man” falters: the chops just aren’t there yet. He is in good voice despite a cold: there must have been much singing in this house through the years, guitar or no guitar. To listen to these recordings is to hear Hurt in two worlds at once: the one a world of private jokes and laughter and the occasional rooster, the other a world in which he was hardly at ease but, it seems, game. The recording ends with talk of having to go feed Mr. Perkins’s cows. Less than five months later, Hurt was playing the Newport Folk Festival.

My debt to John Hurt’s music is large and unpayable. To hear these recordings, now available for the first time, is to discover that music all over again.

Related posts
Mississippi John Hurt
Mississippi John Hurt for Chevy

¹ Listen, for instance, to the Beatles’ “Julia” with Hurt in mind.
You’re reading a post from Michael Leddy’s blog Orange Crate Art. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 License.

Last week the Home Secretary claimed that anyone who opposes the Draft Communications Data Bill, dubbed the Snoopers Charter, was supporting paedophiles and terrorists.

She argued, “Criminals, terrorists and paedophiles will want MPs to vote against this bill. Victims of crime, police and the public will want them to vote for it. It’s a question of whose side you’re on.”

We’ve heard that argument before. Tony Blair used similar arguments to support 90 day detention without trial, ID cards and invading Iraq.

They were misleading then, and they are misleading now. But they are the signs of someone without rational argument to make.

The Bill gives huge powers to the Home Secretary to require information to be kept about every phone call you make, text you send, facebook image you like, and anything else. Whether you communicate by Skype, Twitter, World of Warcraft in-game mail or post, she wanted to have the powers to access information about it.

We as a party said no. Nick insisted that the Bill not be pushed through Parliament, but be published and discussed, to see if it was the right thing to do – and since then, I and (Lord) Paul Strasberger have been sitting on a cross-party cross-house Committee, going through it carefully.

Today, we have published a unanimous report on the Bill.

I’ve written an article for the Independent on it – it says:

We have gone through the Home Office proposals – and the results are damning. The Bill as it is simply cannot proceed.

… the Home Office proposals go way beyond the current rules with virtually no safeguards, asking for powers for the Home Secretary to insist on any information about any communications being kept, via secret notices.

Our committee has looked into this, and concludes ‘the draft Bill pays insufficient attention to the duty to respect the right to privacy, and goes much further than it need or should’.

It was shocking to me just how little effort the Home Office made to work through their proposals with the mobile phone companies and the Facebooks and the Googles. They didn’t bother to consult properly, assuming that discussions they’d had in 2009 on similar proposals by the Labour government would suffice. And they failed to talk through the details with the Commissioners here in the UK who would have to supervise the system.

These proposals are incredibly expensive too. The Home Office estimate is that they would cost a huge £1.8 billion, and the Committee had little faith that the cost would stay there, given the experience of other IT projects. It beggars belief that this amount of money was being committed with so little evidence at a time like this.

And while the Home Office claimed there would be large financial benefits, they were entirely incapable of providing evidence that this would be the case. As the report says ‘the estimated net benefit figure is fanciful and misleading’ and ‘none of our witnesses could provide specific evidence of significant numbers of lives saved to date’.

The Committee also heard of how broadly the powers would be used. While the Home Secretary claimed in the Sun that ‘Only suspected terrorists, paedophiles or serious criminals will be investigated’, the truth is as that it could also be used for speeding offences, flytipping and things as vague as being in ‘the interests of the economic well-being of the United Kingdom’. We are all suspects under this bill.

Towards the end of the evidence sessions, we began to get a bit more of an understanding of what the Home Office actually want. For example, proper IP address matching would allow the existing system to work better. We could look at measures such as that, but only with proper safeguards.

However what the Home Office asked for was indeed a snoopers charter, which we were asked to support with virtually no evidence.

The Bill in its current form simply cannot proceed. We must find a way forward which increases current safeguards, is narrower in scope and has a far better understanding of the technical challenges we face.

Our lives are moving online. It would be ridiculous for the Government to be given a blanket power to watch over us, just as it would be ridiculous for us to stop the Government from ever accessing any communications data. The proposals got the balance between liberty and security utterly wrong.

If the Home Office wants to fiddle with online surveillance, they have to give us evidence that it’s needed, they have to provide a costed policy, they have to improve the existing system under RIPA and they have to bring in strict and proper safeguards.

As Nick said today, “We cannot proceed with this bill and we have to go back to the drawing board.”

* Julian Huppert is Liberal Democrat MP for Cambridge.

Via Gareth Epps, and also reported here, it looks like there’s even more evidence building up to show how George Osborne’s ‘shares for rights’ (or employee ownership, to give the official name) is going to cause a lot more problems than it solves. (Indeed, I’m not sure that it’s solving any actual problems)

I’ve concentrated before on the issues this could have for people at the lower end of the pay scale – those likely to be forced to give up employment protection in exchange for a bunch of shares that could well turn out to be worthless when they’re dismissed. The reports today look at the higher end of the scale, where the up to £50,000 in shares that people can take in exchange for their rights could well be a very useful way for them to dodge Capital Gains Tax. This could cost up to £1bn in lost tax revenue, with the report pointing out that this would become part of regular ‘tax planning’ for accountants. Is this the real reason for pushing this in the face of so much opposition? Finding a new tax dodge for the rich?

As Gareth says:

This presents Liberal Democrats, who have been queuing up to rubbish Osborne’s plans too, with a dilemma. Should they hasten the demise of this unloved piece of legislation? Or should they indulge in a spectator sport, as the Beecroft-lite plan is attacked from every angle until even Osborne himself admits it makes no sense?

In the longer game of Coalition engagement and disengagement, there is actually much to be said for the latter approach. The Bill of which shares for rights is part has a long way to go through Parliament, and while it would be sensible for Liberal Democrats to formally signal the party’s view of it, there is potentially more to be gained for leaving this dogma-driven plan hanging out to dry.

That seems like a good idea, but the problem is that this also has the BIS Department’s fingerprints all over it – maybe even more so than the Treasury – and both Vince Cable and Jo Swinson have given support for it. Any attacks on it are going to be targeted at Liberal Democrat ministers as much as they are at George Osborne, and we’ll be just as associated with it. Letting it carry on through Parliament could give it an irresistible momentum to pass – especially if it’s tied in with other proposals – and we should be working to kill it off as quickly as possible.

RMS writes on Canonical's controversial decision to forward local Ubuntu searches to third parties. One way or another there are big privacy implications.

Sunday:

Everything about the seminal Dalek story "Dalek" tells us that THAT Dalek has to die at the end. It cannot live with itself. It has started to have FEELINGS. It has started to CHANGE. And if you CHANGE from being the supreme life-form, then you're turning into something that must be exterminated.

But, on the OTHER fluffy foot, it don't half explain away a lot of COINCIDENCES if the Emperor who fell through time to escape the Time War and the one solitary Dalek who fell through time to escape the Time War are one and the same Dalek.

For ONE Dalek to "fall through time" and escape the Time War is a mythic and poignant reflection of the Doctor's own plight: one Dalek, one Time Lord. For one MORE Dalek to fall through time seems like CARELESSNESS, as Lady Bracknell might put it. AND for one of those Daleks to be the Emperor... it's a coincidence too far.

The TRUTH of the end of "Dalek" depends on the Dalek killing itself. Given the opportunity to say “I told you you would make a good Dalek”, the Emperor does not do so, nor does he address Rose directly at any time, and you would expect the Dalek from “Dalek” to do that.

But the first ever (cough cough Russell says so) Doctor Who season finale (cough cough Barry Letts and the Dæmons doesn't count. Or Barry Letts and all the other ones. Or The Final End of the Daleks. Or The Chucking Away The Key To Time. Or The Universe Being Eaten By Entropy. Or…) "THE PARTING OF THE WAYS" just makes so much more SENSE if the last Dalek and the Emperor Dalek are the SAME Dalek that maybe that's what we should be allowed to assume.

Not least because a Dalek Emperor obsessed with early Twenty-First Century reality games would make SO much more sense if he was also the Dalek who absorbed all of the Internet while busting out of Mr van Statten's Metaltron cage.

But the idea of RELIGION ought to be as ALIEN to the Daleks as Anne Robinson, and yet the "BAD DOGGIE" Daleks have gotten that ol' time worship in a BAD way.


It seems surprising, with titles like "Genesis", "Resurrection" and "Revelation", that we haven't encountered Dalek Religion before.

It's not like Doctor Who doesn't DO "god".

You may note that the first "lost" Doctor Who story (i.e. written but NOT used) was "The Masters of Luxor" – which is all about religion. And religious confrontations were central to several of the early "historicals": "The Aztecs", "The Crusades" and "The Massacre" all look at the impact of religion on political conflicts, though thankfully Dr Who never makes any crushingly banal remarks about one or other religion being RIGHT or – worse – TRUE. (Let us just gloss over any implications from the already-dreadful "Planet of the Dead", shall we?)

The series benefits very strongly from the Buddhist input of Mr Barry Letts during his time as producer, cleverly camouflaged by Uncle Terry's rather more secular desire to tell a decent adventure story. The camouflage is actually IMPORTANT, because it stops the message becoming too preachy (something the then lead's soliloquies rarely avoid!). Interestingly, this period is "book-ended" with a couple of "When Buddhists Go BAD"-type stories: the first of the two Yeti stories with Mr Dr Mighty Trout features zen-powered robot baddies and festering corruption in the heart of a Buddhist temple, while the swansong for Mr Dr Twerpee sees Buddhist demons coming to life in a "meditation centre". And we'll come back to those spiders in a minute.

Meanwhile, religion is also very central to Mr Philip "von" Hinchcliffe's conception of the series. Along with lashings of Hammer Horror. But this is BAD religion as the series moves to place itself more overtly on the side of SCIENCE and SCEPTICISM and against SUPERSTITION.

This is where we see the start of a strong Doctor Who trope: the cult of stupid humans – The Brotherhood of Demnos, the Tribe of Tesh, or the Tong of the Black Scorpion, say, not to mention the Trogs of the Underworld or those nitwits in "The Stones of Blood" – who are fooled into believing an ALIEN or MAD COMPUTER or TIME TRAVELLER is a deity.

And the Doctor will take down "gods" from Sutekh to the Ragnarok 'n' roll band with the solid implication that (a) they are FAKES and (b) people who've fallen under their thrall are at best DUPES and at worst, actually EVIL too.
Plus there's the possibility that Mr the White Guardian, assuming we ever actually meet him, is god. Or possibly a mental derangement. (see "Mystery #12: Who sends the Doctor after the Key to Time.")

Alien-wise, though, we just don't get a lot of religious practise.

Merely to pick on the Doctor Who aliens who actually HAVE cultures: the Sontarans, Ice Warriors, and Silurians (yes, I KNOW they're not strictly ALIENS) all appear to have godless cultures. Or at least ones where their gods do not crop up in day to day use. The Draconians don't either until they get one, retrospectively, in "The Satan Pit". Nor do the Axons, Zygons, Kraals, Krynoids, Kraags, or Kinda (though they, at least, have good reason to be wary…). Neither do the Terileptils, who take the time to build gaudy androids but not a belief system. While if the Tractators worship anything, it's the Gravis. And the idea of the logical Cybermen doing anything so emotional as "faith" ought to be ridiculous (although "ridiculous" seems to be standard operating procedure for the Cybermen half the time).

On the other fluffy foot, the Eight-Legs of Metebelis III (I said we'd come back to them) DO seem to have a genuine religious devotion to their "Great One" (who at least TRIES to make herself omnipotent!) while, going right back to the Mr Dr Billy era again, the Menoptera of "The Web Planet" have their temples of light while the Zarbi have some kind of relationship with the pretty-nearly-all-powerful Animus. Maybe it's something to do with SPIDERS.

And interestingly the OGRONS – of all people! – have a "god" in the form of the rarely-seen "Giant Ogron Bollock Monster" [see "Mystery #21: Frontier in Space… What Happened Next?"]. "Interestingly" because of course this is IN a Dalek story!

(There's also something IRONIC about the ARCH-CAPITALIST Sil being a RARE theist with his appeals to the Great God Morgo.)

As for the Time Lords... the evidence is MIXED. On screen, we never get a HINT of religion, unless the Dark Tower of Rassilon counts (in the sense that they have SOME sort of ritual for burial [as do the Morestrans]). But the books have presented us with both the idea of Time Lord gods – Death, Time, etc – AND that the Time Lords may BE gods, or at least are seen as gods or godlike – see "Faction Paradox: The Book of the War" and everything connected with it.

In a way, the DOCTOR WHO FANS turned the Time Lords into gods before the series ever thought of doing it, and hence the OUTRAGE at "The Deadly Assassin" lifting the curtain on them, as it were.

Of course the idea that Dr Who himself IS god, or "a" god, is one that has only had a noticeable push in the post-2005 stories. Aside from a brief flirtation with casting the Doctor as the DEVIL in "The Face of Evil", the idea that Dr Who actually "was god" was first seeded in the Andrew Cartmel years but, of course, producer John Nathan-Turner vetoed coming out and SAYING any such thing. That didn't stop the notion worming its way through a number of "New Adventures" – there's one particularly lovely scene where one character, who believes the Doctor to be a wizard, mocks Ace for accepting him as "an alien" with "technology" as if that EXPLAINS him. All of which leads to all that "lonely god" shtick from the year five billion and then with crushing inevitability to the Mister Moffster and the anti-Doctor "religion" of the Silence (and taking for granted that he can pull random powers out of his fluffy bottom).

So we seem to have a bit of a DIVIDE between HUMANS – who DO do religion, but religion is BAD, except maybe Buddhism except when that goes bad too, but we only take a pop at made-up cults and certainly never the "big two" – and ALIENS who don't do religion at all unless it's to dupe some poor saps who are usually human.

So why would the DALEKS suddenly go all "worship him, worship him"?

To be fair, it's not IMPOSSIBLE that Dalek religion has been there all along. The CULTURAL aspects of Dalek society usually get LOST in among all the running away and getting exterminated. We have, for example, only glimpsed Dalek POETRY and Dalek OPERA in a couple of "New Adventures" books. Truly too broad and too deep for the small screen. But they DO have a sense of AESTHETICS (whatever they may say to the Cybermen in "Doomsday"), even if their spaceship design tends to be pretty straight out of the Nineteen Fifties (by way of the Big Book of Pie Dishes. Mmm, pie), and their cities are largely EXPRESSIONIST structures in METAL, rather like their casings (Tellytubby-era New Dalek Paradigm not included, obviously). There’s even a statue in their very first story. It’s by the lift. Then down it.

The nearest to a Dalek religious experience, though, comes in Big Fish spin-off series "I Davros". This is a bit of a train wreck, in spite of the always-excellent Terry Molloy's best efforts, because doing "I Claudius of the Daleks" with a cast of four was never, ever going to work even if the scripts didn't end up exterminated under the weight of clichés. And the "twist" ending is SO BAD, so CACK-HANDEDLY MISCONCEIVED that you will want a go with the Brigadier's Brain Rubbers.

But... there is ONE bit in there where Mr Davros reveals to his new BFF Nyder the "Book of Predictions", written in the extinct tongue of the Dals. The last line says "...and on that day, men (Dals) will become as gods (Dal-eks)".

I will give them some credit for that: that rather nicely explains Mr Davros' state of mind when he decides to call his Mark III travel machine a "Dalek" and where he got the name FROM – AND why he is so shocked to hear Mr Dr Tom call it a Dalek before anyone's been told.

And, of course, it DOES segue nicely into Mad Dave's MOST FAMOUSEST soliloquy:

"Yes, I WOULD do it! That power would set me up above the GODS!"

Which tells us that at least the IDEA of "gods" exists inside of Davros's microwaved noodle.

(And, incidentally, reminds me that, similarly, Chessene O' the Franzine Grig – aka Servalan au Bacofoil – also put herself up to be up among the gods so the Androgums or the Third Zone have 'em, too.)

Sure, it's a very SIDEYWAYS bit of the canon, but it does very much fit with everything we already know about the Daleks. They've ALWAYS had a bit of a GOD COMPLEX – they’re always shouting about being the SUPREME BEINGS – and of course they are actually IMMORTAL.

Seriously, there are several stories – several of them from the Big Fish audio people, it's true, but it is at least IMPLICIT in "The Power of the Daleks" and also Davros' survival in "Destiny of the Daleks", and then "Resurrection of the Daleks" before he as good as comes out and SAYS it in "Revelation of the Daleks" – that Daleks are actually IMMORTAL. That is, they can live forever, barring accidents. And by "accidents" we usually mean "Acts of Ka Faraq Gatri" or, as you can probably guess, "the one that is called the Doc-Tor".

(Of course, that means we have to cast a sideways glance at Reproduction of the Daleks. The idea of Dalek SNOGGAGE is almost literally UNTHINKABLE, but fortunately the clues seem to add up to them all being CLONED from an original genetic bank, specifically the first bunch of Daleks that Mr Davros unleashes in "Genesis...". But NOT the NEW and IMPROVED versions living in the incubation room (who get EXPLODED). "The Parting of the Ways" itself implies that Daleks are grown from single cells, as does "Journey's End", and the failed genetic experiments in "Daleks in Manhattan" show that the Cult of Skaro at least TRIED cloning themselves but something went wrong – so there are either limits to the process OR (and more likely) the Cult's SPECIAL BREEDING includes something to stop them making more of themselves. After all, more THINKING Daleks was what got the Emperor into trouble in "Evil...")

So there's a good chance that Mr Davros programmed his Daleks to think of themselves as a race of GODS. And actually, a whole SPECIES that thinks it's Sutekh would go a ways to explaining the "let's kill everything in the Universe" attitude.

But why would OTHER "gods" start worshipping one of their own, no matter HOW big his casing?

Of course, the OBVIOUS answer is that these are NOT really Daleks.

THESE "Daleks" are actually made from HUMANS (something Mr Davros first tried in "Revelation of the Daleks"). So in a way this is REALLY another "cult of gullible dumb humans who have been convinced by a MAD, ALIEN, TIME TRAVELLER that it is GOD."

Because they used to be US, and are now LITERALLY our afterlife! The Emperor even SAYS it will be his HEAVEN – and he's got his saucer all full of CHOIRS of the departed praising him. The NUTTER. Let's hope they don't SING!

And it's hardly news that the EMPEROR would think he is god.

He already thinks he comes from a RACE of gods and then on top of that to be the ONLY SURVIVOR (whether or not the Emperor is the Dalek who met Rose near Salt Lake City) of a War that annihilates every other possible candidate for godhood...


To get all META-TEXTUAL for a minute, the Daleks ALREADY exist as a representation of ONE idea, namely INTOLERANCE, or more blatantly RACISM. Bringing in RELIGION too would make them a literally MIXED METAPHOR.

Where Mr Russell gets away with this in the new series is because real-world events have MOVED ON. The ultimate icon of intolerance USED to be the fascist war machine represented by LITERAL fascist war machines. But in our post-September 11th World, the new intolerance is the religious fundamentalist. So the Daleks MOVE with the TIMES and get religion.

Add to this the twist that these Daleks are really Human, and we get the subtle satire that religion has mentally and physically deformed them into MONSTERS.


So where did the Daleks GET the idea of religion?

Well, YOU try finding yourself in Utah and plug "supreme beings of the universe" into Google and see what happens!

Or, how do you solve a problem like Mark Littlewood? 2012 began with Liberal Democrat Voice criticised first because the shortlist for its “Liberal Voice of the Year” included only one woman, and then because someone many people didn’t like won. The two problems with this are that the shortlist emerged from nominations people submitted, with only one woman receiving enough from readers; and that the winner arose from votes cast on the site. So if you want a better nominations line-up, right now, this week only, is the time to tell LDV (and to then affect the winner, vote).

The other problem with the Liberal Voice of the Year award is that, of course, it’s designed to promote pluralism… And, as the rather unfortunate comment war when the last winner was announced demonstrates, nothing promotes tribalism like a call for pluralism. To be shortlisted, a person must not only receive at least a certain number of nominations from readers, showing at least some support to start with, but be a non-Lib Dem who’s advanced liberalism in the past 12 months. And if they’re not a Lib Dem (let alone if they are), by definition not everyone’s going to think they’re a Liberal. And complain. Mark’s win only provoked this in an exaggerated form, as he’s both a former Lib Dem and one associated with a particular branch of the Liberal family (some might say the mad aunt in the attic, but remember, there weren’t enough women nominations). Belated congratulations to Mark. I personally didn’t vote for him, but neither was I outraged by his victory, even if he has owed me money for more than two years now (if you’re reading, Mark, remember: you may have had a Pyrrhic victory, but a bet’s a bet).

So, What Can You Do?

If you want more women on the next shortlist, or more Liberals to your own sort of taste, or (ideally) both, nominations are only open this week (prompted via their readers’ survey, though I’m sure you can just email them). So think of some good candidates, and send them in. Then, if they’re shortlisted and you want them to win, why not spend the first two weeks of January – when the votes are a-clicking – writing promotional pieces to big up your candidate? Each year, a list appears, and plenty of people don’t know who they are until the missiles start firing when the ‘wrong’ one wins. Though, incidentally, as far as women candidates go, though this year’s shortlist didn’t promise much, in the previous four years two of the winners had been women, so the voters can share a little of the praise. Though I personally like 2012’s sole woman entrant, it looked like despite the complaints no-one was rallying round the sole woman, in theory a big advantage in a first-past-the-post election (and, LDV, that is in your gift to change, unlike the names or the result). She got just 4%.

It might even be an idea, if you have a brilliant nomination, to write a piece extolling their virtues today, and encourage everyone you know to nominate her or him, so they get to the starting gate this time.

Anyway, I didn’t join in the slanging match over Lib Dem Voice’s treatment of women this January, perhaps because this January I was too busy putting my head in my hands at Steven Moffat’s in Sherlock. Hurrah! An independent, sexually confident lesbian character! Plus, a faithfully non-villainous version of a famous character from the original stories who’s always traduced by every single ‘reimagining’ into an evil villain, because an independent, sexually confident woman who fascinates Sherlock must be evil. And, being a naturist, I wasn’t even going to complain about her being naked for extra Moffatitillation. That’s how happy I was until three-quarters of the way into A Scandal in Belgravia, when the non-villain was revealed as evil, and the lesbian fell for Sherlock, and the independent woman needed rescuing by our (male, if thankfully not butch) hero. Oh, Mr Moffat. If only all your writing was as honest and plausible as Lesbian Spank Inferno.

But I digress. I’ve already done the ‘chiding Lib Dem Voice over the Blogger of the Year Award’ thing, so this time I’m chiding you, dear reader. If you didn’t like last year’s choices, why not get your act together? Lib Dem Voice don’t rig the nominations or the vote. But you can, if you try! Be creative.

Personally, I’m good at writing an argument, but poor at choosing a hero. So I don’t have a whole series of ready-made nominations to start you off. I’ve racked my brain, and – having followed US politics obsessively for much of the year – here are, at least, two, for balance both women and both from a rather different branch of liberalism to Mark. What do you think of Senator-elect Elizabeth Warren, who was responsible for the only defeat of an incumbent Senator (rather than incumbent party) this year, and whose populist economic message in effect defined the whole Democratic campaign this time? Or Senator-elect Tammy Baldwin, the first out lesbian – or, indeed, the first out LGBT person of any description – ever elected to the US Senate? Can you do better? Get thinking.


The other alternative that springs to mind is, of course, one that on two counts is probably ineligible: a sister party of the Liberal Democrats, within the UK, with many members in common, and a group rather than an individual. But when, today, Liberals are under potentially deadly repeated physical attack from fascist thugs on the streets of the UK, they are Liberal heroes.

You can support them at the Alliance Party website.