And, as Unfogged reminds us, let us not for an instant forget his role as alternate-history thrillerwriter; of which the undoubted tour de force was his description in Saving the Queen of his CIA hero bedding the (alternate universe) queen of England -
"He rose, extended his hand, and brought her silently into the bedroom. She pulled away the covers, dropped her yellow gown, and lay on her back as with her left hand she turned off the bedlight. The flames from the fireplace lit her body with a faint flickering glow. She arched back her neck and pointed her firm breasts up at the ceiling, and he was on her, kissing her softly, saying nothing. Her thighs began to heave, and she said in a whisper, "Now." He entered her smoothly, and suddenly a wild but irresistible thought struck him, fusing pleasure and elation—and satisfaction. He moved in deeply, and came back, and whispered to her, teasingly, tenderly, "One."
And a second,
And third,
Fourth,
Fifth,
Sixth—her excitement was now explicit, demanding, but he exercised superhuman restraint—
Seven…
Eight—she was moaning now with pain—
and, triumphantly, nine!"
As the Unfogged comments pointed out, anyone who thinks six strokes constitute superhuman restraint may have issues, but the really flamingly odd bit was that - and the fact that I remember this from reading the book in the early sixties says something - the irresistible thought in question was a recollection of being caned with nine strokes by a sadistic master at his English boarding school. Buckley presented it as the Yank finally getting an appropriate revenge on the Brits, which is one way to think of sex, and I suppose that there are some other interpretations which are even more unlikeable.
After Saving the Queen his thriller universe dropped pretty well back into the usual one, which I suppose makes it more likely that the alternate universe bit was added in specifically to let him write that scene.
Actually, Paul at 96, that first one's not remotely true; Jeeves pitches Wooster into embarrassing situations frequently, if it's necessary to the scheme then brewing. No, the three laws are
The Three Laws of Valeting
1. A valet shall not assist his master to marry nor shall he, through inaction, allow his master to become married.
2. A valet shall obey his master's instructions except where such obedience would conflict with the first law.
3. A valet shall protect his own employment except where this would conflict with the first or second laws.
From their site, too, I rather like
"If your last name begins with the letter A - Z, contact Dominique at extension 1103."
You'd think they'd be wary of turning away potential customers whose last name began with a Zapf dingbat, but otherwise supremely efficient.
While everybody's here, can I ask a question? How large is the wizarding population in the UK? I read most of the series in bookshops, so tended to skip, but I don't remember a figure being given. I ask because this volume did say, I think, that almost all wizards went to Hogwarts, which would mean that the maximum figure was one graduating class x 100 - and if you divide that hallful by 7 a class can't be much more than 100, making the total population only a couple of thousand at most. Which would seem to make anything selling to wizards- the Weasley brothers company, for example - very much a niche market.
On another point, one should also note that one of the reasons people like Hagrid is that he's the only character coded as proletarian. Very important in England.
One thing nagging at me; how did Arthur Riddle get himself raised to the peerage as Lord Voldemort? Strictly speaking, I suppose,Arthur Riddle, Lord Voldemort. It's definitely not done in England to invent your own distinctions. Is he a life peer? Though I suppose if you intended to live for ever the issue would be moot. The world of magic appears to have a college of heralds, but what about baronets?
I was sorry that more wasn't made of the wedding, as one of the few points that raises the question of where the hell religion has got to in the HP universe. There are attempts, though not very satisfactory ones, to shadow muggle economics and politics, but when it comes to the other prime mover everybody inexplicably appears to be atheists. As someone whose memories of boarding school include church three times every Sunday, this stands out.
And Andy 55, to say that it reads like a novelisation of a film is to underplay considerably the screaming horror that must now be overtaking the person who is presumably already tasked with the screenplay.
1) it's impossibly long;
2) it's impossibly packed;
3) its action sequences are interrupted by frequent gobbets of multi-page plot exposition by Dumbledore, Snape, and practically everybody else.
It's going to have to be a three-parter all by itself.
On the blimps, though, the statistics showing few blimp-protected boats going down may also be due to not sending blimps on the really dangerous runs. In the Atlantic, for example, part of the trick was to sneak past the wolfpacks without them noticing, which would imply not raising your height by a few hundred yards.
I heard about Ford for the first time in the announcement of his death, loved his poem, want more, and that brings me to the WTF moment. Why isn't it all in the one place?
There's no reason any of his ephemera should be lost. If one person of that last 350 commentators (leaving the toroidals out of it, they're busy) will put their hand up they can create a site with his every posting, his every public domain item, most of his occasional poems, anything that won't attract lawsuits, the equivalent of a Victorian Works. Hell, my set of Swift has his marginal annotations in other people's books. His editor's notes?
Who is going to take on a job that combines a hightone hobby with a well-regarded public service? Not me, I have a crusade already and, as I say, I hardly know him. It'll take ten minutes; set up a website with Google, pop a notice into Making Light asking for contributions, and you've got an imperishable temple for the ages.
Praise without works is vain.
The definitive take on all of this surely has to be the Not the Nine O'Clock News team's Nice Video - Shame About the Song
Another hairball in my throat throughout The Da Vinci Code was the secret doctrine thing. I know that this is one of the tropes in the Lost Treasures genre (Indiana Jones, Lara Croft, etc)- the cult that tends the lost temple through untold aeons and murders anybody who defiles it (and I've always had a bit of a problem working out what was in it for them, too) but there at least the secret McGuffin is supposed to be hidden. In DVC you have the situation where there are the four people who know the big secret [Cocteau could keep a secret? Excuse me! That man never had an unexpressed thought] as to where the bodies are buried and where the last will and testament of Jesus is, yes, but there are also other people like Shakespeare and Walt Disney who are part of the movement but not one of the big four. Skipping over for the moment the lack of fit between either the Shrew or Minnie Mouse and the worship of the eternal feminine, the question that arises is what exactly Will and Walt got to see and/or hear. Was, in other words, a textbook of some kind involved, or was all this handed down orally since 75 AD? Or was there a crib of some sort? Even masons can't remember their funny walks without cribs.
Did the eternal femininists have heresies? Hierarchies? Hieresiarchs? No, that's the detested male way. Then how did they manage to agree what to tell Shakespeare?
To put it another way, was the repressive Catholic church suppressing greenery-yallery ideas generally or an organised (in some way) movement? As it has ritual sex ceremonies, it's presumably a movement;what does the movement believe, and how does it remember the details of its rituals? How does it choose, for example, its Priors? How have they got through two millennia without so much as a songbook in writing?
And if it's in writing, or even if it isn't written but is recited like Homer or Farenheit 415, shouldn't it be the secret? If you were a christian and had the choice of saving the last existing copy of the new testament or a box of holy relics, wouldn't you choose the text over the bones?
If you were of the inner circle, no problem; you're summoned to a deathbed and told "Mary Mag is buried under the Louvre and the Merovingians are descendants of Christ, keep it a secret until you're near death and then pass it on with the same condition" - simple enough to remember. But having enough of a doctrine to be able to sell Walt on it, without telling him the big secret - that's another matter (though I suppose they might just have told him it was anti-communist).
Come on, fellows, let's get back to Dan Brown, shall we? We haven't even started on his chamber of horrors.
At the beginning, remember, the renowned curator has stripped off, drawn a pentagram on his chest, written several anagrams and a list of numbers, and drawn a perfect circle around himself with magic marker while at the same time balancing a tower of bottles on his nose and playing the ukelele, so that
"Sauniere had created a life-size replica of Leonardo Do Vinci's most famous sketch.... Vitruvian man... a perfect circle in which was inscribed a nude male... his arms and legs outstretched in a naked spread eagle."
No, Vitrivian Man doesn't show a spreadeagle, or at least not only a spreadeagle. VM has two of every limb, and thus shows a man in sixteen different possible positions.
Sauniere hadn't replicated it, and couldn't. If you piled two renowned creators in a stack you could just about do it (though even then I think you'd have difficulty maintaining the side-facing foot positions required) but with one Sauniere you have as much ambiguity as with the anagrams; sixteen possible positions would all qualify. I personally see the renowned curator in the left-leg-straight right-leg-45-degrees right-arm-straight left-arm-45-degrees pose. Very Monty Python.
And if he'd created a half-life-size replica, that would be a trick.
Dammit, here I have to defend the man. Barry Ragin said above that “i recall, near the end, the main character walks out into the dusk and admires Venus's shining beauty high in the eastern sky. You can't buy that kind of research anymore, can you?” On doing an inside-the-book check with amazon I find "...in the west, a single point of light glowed brighter than any other. Langdon smiled when he saw it. It was Venus. The ancient Goddess shining down with her steady and patient light. The night was growing cooler, a crisp breeze rolling ..."
He may have changed east to west in the second edition (anybody got a dvc 1st to check?) but I doubt it; after all, he left in “Jacques Saunière despised city driving and owned a car for one destination only-his vacation château in Normandy , north of Paris” when Normandy is damn nearly due west of Paris.
Cooking Sherry revisited
For those curious about the place of cheap sherry in the Anglo-American class system, here is a definite marker;
HOUSTON (Reuters) - A Texas woman has been indicted for criminally negligent homicide for causing her husband's death by giving him a sherry enema, a police detective said on Wednesday.
Tammy Jean Warner, 42, gave Michael Warner two large bottles of sherry on May 21, which raised his blood alcohol level to 0.47 percent, or nearly six times the level considered legally drunk in Texas, police detective Robert Turner in Lake Jackson, Texas, told the Houston Chronicle.
"We're not talking about little bottles here," Turner said. "These were at least 1.5-liter bottles."
Warner, 58, was said to have an alcohol problem and received the wine enema because a throat ailment left him unable to drink the sherry, Turner told the newspaper.
And who could forget
Bart: I got a B in arithmetic.
Army: I got a B in arithmetic.
Bart: Would have got an A but I was sick.
Army: Would have got an A but I was sick.
Bart: We are rubber, you are glue.
Army: We are rubber, you are glue.
Bart: It bounces off of us and sticks to you.
Army: It bounces off of us and sticks to you.
Bart: Sound off.
Army: One! Two!
Bart: Sound off!
Army: Three!! Four!!
Bart: In English class I did the best.
Army: In English class I did the best.
Bart: Because I cheated on the test.
Army: Because I cheated on the test.
Bart: Sound off.
Army: One! Two!
Bart: I can't hear you!
Army: Three!! Four!!
Bart: We are happy, we are merry.
Army: We are happy, we are merry.
Bart: We got a rhyming dictionary.
Army: We got a rhyming dictionary.
Bart: Sound off.
Army: One! Two!
Bart: One more time!
Army: Three! Four!
Bart: Bring it on home now!
Army: One! Two! Three! Four!
One! Two! ... Three-Four!
For those who have found themselves with a text-stuffed mummy in the cupboard, help is at hand:
News Archives: Latest
Subject: Stasi
Posted By: Editor
Date Posted: June 18, 2003, 8:57 PM
The Times (London)
June 17, 2003, Tuesday
SECTION: Overseas news; 15
HEADLINE: Swift solution to Stasi's jigsaw puzzle of secrets
BYLINE: Roger Boyes in Berlin
THE remaining secrets of the East German Stasi, torn into shreds and stored in 16,000 sacks, may soon be pieced together by a new computer software program.
Designed to solve the world's biggest jigsaw puzzle, the program could shed light on love affairs between agents and Nato secretaries, contract murders and even the recruitment of foreign academics by one of the most thorough of the Communist secret police forces.
In the dying days of the East German state, agents at the Magdeburg archives were ordered by Erich Mielke, the head of the Stasi, to destroy tens of thousands of personal files. But the East German shredding machines were not up to the job and local officials could not organise the transport needed to create a huge bonfire of secrets on the outskirts of town.
Instead they tore each page into neat quarters and stuffed them into 16,000 brown paper sacks. After the Berlin Wall fell, Stasi headquarters were stormed by East Germans and the sacks were taken to a former refugee centre in Zirndorf in Bavaria. There, with painstaking thoroughness, about 50 civil servants have taken eight years to put together the destroyed files from 300 sacks. Fragments of paper are spread across large desks, much as one would solve a jigsaw puzzle: names, handwriting and signatures are matched. At the present rate, the authorities say, it will take another 450 years to process the remaining sacks.
The Berlin Frauenhofer Institute of Production Facilities and Construction Technology, however, has worked out a software program that will match the paper fragments and order them correctly according to the various secret police operations.
The files stretch back several decades. The advantage of the new program is clear: if the documents can be reconstructed in months rather than decades, outstanding murder or treason cases can be solved and the guilty brought to trial. Victims of the Stasi will also be able to lodge compensation claims and seek rehabilitation.
The pieces of paper are scanned electronically, then fed into the system. The program is being refined and a prototype should be ready for use by October. Then the German parliament has to decide whether to pay for it.
That could prove troublesome. When the German parliament first initiated the search for an appropriate software program 2 years ago, members of the former Communist Party of Democratic Socialism opposed it. The party no longer plays a significant role in parliament, but political analysts say that mainstream parties might also try to block the computer plan.
Some of the reconstituted files are likely to contain records of conversations between Western politicians and the East German authorities from the detente years of the late 1960s to the 1980s. Neither the Social Democrats nor the Christian Democrats (who ruled Germany between 1982 and 1998) have a strong interest in such revelations.
But the sacks should provide remarkable insights for historians, who are still trying to unravel the precise relationship between the East and West German states.
Old East German spymasters, in need of cash, are increasingly offering up the names of their foreign recruits; the name of one Scottish woman, hired as a spy in West Berlin in 1980, was disclosed at the weekend.
Helen Anderson was a secretary working at the American military headquarters in Berlin who was persuaded by her secret agent boyfriend to reveal Allied secrets in the name of peace for 12 years. Ms Anderson, who now lives in Arbroath, has since said that she has no regrets about her activities.
But these piecemeal revelations often mask more than they reveal. Despite a number of new books about key events in East German history, the facts are still opaque.
Fifty years ago today, for example, East Berlin workers held a protest march that was crushed violently by Soviet troops. A road that led to the Brandenburg Gate, at the Berlin Wall, was renamed June 17 Street in defiance of the Communist state.
Memorial services, wreath-laying and historical tours are planned. However, there is still no agreement on whether the march was the beginning of a genuine rebellion against Communist rule.
Still many details are unclear: the number of deaths was estimated at between 25 and 300 and the fate of many of the prisoners is still murky, as is the relationship between the Soviet and East German security forces. The torn Stasi files could provide a clue to this and to many other supposedly defining historical moments.
MILES OF FILES
By 1989 the Stasi employed 91,000 staff and 174,000 informers, one spy for every 60 citizens. They kept files on four million East Germans, 25 per cent of the population Under a law passed in 1992, people can inspect the files held on them by the Stasi. More than 1.7 million have done so Stasi archives house 123km (76 miles) of files, dating from 1949 Public organisations have the right to check whether people were informers before employing them. There have been 1.5 million such applications since 1992
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