Goat in the Machine

Resolved!

2012-01-10T11:14:00.004Z

My ten solemn and life-changing resolutions for 2012:

1) I shall perform every task punctually.

2) I shall no longer allow myself to be distracted by every passing

Power Posting

2011-11-26T10:43:00.000Z

They got the power! - George W Bush and Tony Blair shake hands at a White House press conference. Photo by Paul Morse, for the US Government, via Wikimedia Commons - public domain.

I'm in a triadic mood, and have three thoughts about power:

1) The will to do or make something which will require a lot of power, is a sign of virtue and quality - specifically, the virtue of magnificence. Aquinas's idea that this is ultimately an aspect of fortitude or courage is looking good to me at first blush.

2) The will to make oneself fit to wield a lot of power should one need to, is the sign of a more careful and scrupulous virtue - which feels, to me, like a sort of magnanimity. But it is magnanimity played in a careful and questioning mode, if so, and seems to me intimately linked to fortitude's three companion cardinal virtues - prudence, temperance, and justice.

3) The will to power for itself, as against these, seems to me a psychic form of self-gratification - pleasant and harmless enough in moderation and in private, but neither attractive nor civil to exhibit in public, and depressingly narcissistic and sterile if considered as a vocation.

So magnificence seeks power as a tool to do great things, by which I mean some particular great things which it has the heart and mind to imagine; magnanimity cultivates the skills to wield one's power greatly, by which I mean gracefully instead of grossly; and mere ambition is satisfied with just being a great big power tool. That sounds about right.

What does this say about people who are 'passionate' about attaining the highest levels of power, so that they can deliver 'strong leadership' towards - 'whatever works'?

Lessa's Last Word - for Anne McCaffrey (1926-2011)

2011-11-23T13:19:00.004Z

Anne McCaffrey, whose death is just today announced, was a prolific and widely-beloved author of science fiction and fantasy - perhaps of science fantasy above all.

Her most famous work, and the one dearest to my own heart, is her Dragonriders of Pern series. Its beginning tale, Dragonflight, was one of the books I most badly needed to read on the threshold of my teens; Lessa, its central character, may have offered me my first female viewpoint into which I could sink quite seamlessly. I had the most enormous book-crush on her for a couple of years afterwards, and remain highly prejudiced in her favour. Readers who know what Lessa is like, may draw any deductions they please about my character from these several circumstances.

To these books I also owe: my first encounter with a vision of dragons that was not mine, but was yet close enough to be played upon my heart; my independent discovery of the possibility of fanfiction, and the inspiration that compelled its writing; a great eye-opening to the possibilities of fantasy that didn't fit into familiar moulds of the heroic and epic; and last, by no means least, a world which offered me wholly new kinds of places and characters worth being haunted by.

Without encountering the works of Anne McCaffrey so early on, I should have likely grown up a perceptibly different person - and I don't think the changes would have been to anybody's benefit. For all these things thanks are due, and I give them most heartily now.

Goodbye, Dragon Lady. Fare well; dream long; fly high.

And here is the only other thing I presently know how to say about it.

Lessa's Last Word
"He'll shake me!" she said,
Who shook him into shaking
Their world's mean Alexander from his roost atop High Reaches –
Who shook his heart, and in the aftershock
Their age,
Their ways,
Their me - a small mean singer from an eminence of twelve,
Borne up to be, to love her, in a storm of stone-musk wings –

"He'll shake me!" she protested,
Still shivering from shaking
The wide world's tree for redfruit: new days, new flights of old
Whom she had moved to leave for after times
Their age,
Their ways,
Their selves – that small fierce vision, from a child's height and the sky's –
Spent, shivered, frozen – home, with all the wide world's price on wings!

She shook us, then.

Between our worlds seeps chill.
The breath that bore her flight up's fallen still.

First posted here in the comments on Making Light, where the news caught up with me. A separate commemorative thread for the sharing of thoughts and memories has now been started there. More on io9, and John Scalzi's blog Whatever.

ETA 26/11/11: Replaced a self-destructing metaphor and removed two renegade commas.

Serenade to the Healthists

2011-11-21T12:47:00.003Z

You're the skim in my decaf!
You're my savourless stew!
Keep your water clear -
Leave my beef and beer,
Or I'll Safety Elf you!

This post inspired by the genius practice in Certain Nameless Institutions of: (i) Cooking dishes without salt, so that people can add their own to taste instead of having it imposed upon them; and (ii) playing Hide The Only Salt Cellar, in order to nudge them into getting none at all.

We really have to start taking all these professional health panickers cum grano salis!

The Lombards Have Stormed the Library

2011-11-18T08:20:00.013Z

Part of the Occupy Wall Street encampment's People's Library, after the New York Police Department had confiscated it in their violent nocturnal storming of the camp, and used it according to their pleasure before its lawful owners were permitted to reclaim it.

This picture by Lauren Comito, released under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported Licence.

Lest doubt remain: who are the looters, and who the guardians of Civilization, now?

This picture was brought to you by grace of Hizzoner Michael Bloomberg: Mayor of New York City, Wall Street media magnate, and in no way possessed of any private interest in punishing public impatience with his business cronies and their political bagmen.

All hail the New Alboin, King of the New World Lombards! Or else!

The System's Failing, So This Is No Time to Change It!

2011-11-16T07:51:00.006Z

Senior European politicians discuss how to rekindle the public's love affair with the EU. Struthio camelus, Chay Bar Yotvata, Israel, by MathKnight at Wikimedia Commons. Released under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported Licence.

For the Liberal Democrats in the UK, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg offers a bold response to the current structural crises in the Eurozone and the EU: Please sirs, may we have some more? The BBC reports:

David Cameron said on Monday it was time for the UK to "refashion" its relationship with the EU.

The prime minister argued powers should "ebb back" from Brussels to Westminster as part of "fundamental" future reform

But speaking at a press conference alongside Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, Mr Clegg said only populists and demagogues would benefit if EU leaders disappeared "into a windowless room" to discuss things that no-one understood, at a time when people were worried about their jobs.

Some of us might think that people were right to be worried about entrusting their jobs to the same old truffle-hounds that led us to this dirty big clump of stinkhorns in the first place. But no: apparently the nature of the EU's institutions can have nothing to do with any failure modes of those institutions whatsoever, so those institutions must not be tampered with until they have properly solved our problems.

And some of us might also think that if the highest-level rules binding people's choices of government are things that nobody is expected to understand, and only a small privileged circle meeting in windowless rooms is permitted to influence, then perhaps the people so ruled could use a little more populism than that.

They might flirt with a childish philosophy called 'liberalism', in which people might aspire to know what the supreme laws of their land were, or even to make suggestions about what they found good or bad in them. Of course, if questioning leads to liberalism, liberalism itself too often leads to a radical outgrowth called 'democracy', in which the ignorant herd actually demand the right to consent to their governors or to reject them. I would not suggest that Mr Clegg or his party endorse such a radical position as 'liberal democracy' itself - yet I think he might find some food for thought amongst its demands, if he could descend briefly from his mountaintop to study them.

I guess I must be just a big old populist demagogue, after all!

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland - First Draft

2011-11-15T05:39:00.004Z

Finished! Man, that was a big binge there towards the end. Last chapter and epilogue knocked out this week.

So where do I go from here? Well, the story has changed enough in the telling that what I have before me is the original Crappy First Draft on a number of levels, principally that a number of the things I was originally aiming for in the early chapters didn't happen or happened very differently, so there are consistency and relevance issues out the wazoo.

Another aspect of the Official Crappiness is deliberate - large sections of text are functionally mostly construction lines in this version: passages written to remind me what I was thinking, what alternatives I needed to consider, or just to write myself the hell out of a difficult corner. My particular process requires this to be written actually in-story, in order to keep the narrative flowing - but passages of that kind come sort of pre-marked for editorial attention at the first opportunity. So the final text is liable to be considerably slimmer than the original.

This is good, since the size of the raw draft is about 185,000 words. I'm thinking that something like a third, maybe even a half, of this can be slimmed down in a superior draft that eliminates all ramblings and false starts and fictionalized notes-to-author.

But if Three Katherines of Allingdale is to work as one story, to this I have to add the 42,000 words of The Deed of Katy Elflocks. There's little or no fat on that at all, though there will be some minor tweaks for consistency with the way the setting and story have developed. So my best guess as to the size of the Reader Ready Second Draft comes out at somewhere between 130,000 and 165,000 words. This is kind of chunky for a first novel, and unfortunately the only reasonable breakpoint for splitting it is at that 42K mark, where the story takes a thirty-year break.

Funny old thing, that. The original point of extending the story before doing anything with Katy Elflocks was because the logic of the tale suggested a really neat triptych structure - three roughly equal panels: first Katy's song of a summer, then Kit's story of a fall, and last Kate's winter's tale to round the whole thing off. But Kit's story soon proved to be like the Red Witch of Alland herself: elaborate, tricksy, and far-ranging even for a standalone novel of its own. So here we are, with a very different and asymmetrically divided treatment, the enchantment-shot realistic fantasy of Killer-Kate developing and resolving the themes propounded in the grounded fairy-tale of Katy Elflocks. There'll be work to do, in making that work - but it'll be more than somewhat worthwhile, if I can pull it off.

I'm setting myself a deadline of Easter to have the work out and ready for beta-reading, there being so many grades of cutting and polishing ahead. The rest of this month I'm devoting to the highest-level stuff: grand consistency, major structural and character issues, and generally working on the overview.

In the meantime, here is a nicely evocative but necessarily spoiler-free taste of the Honeywoolf's tale: the final chapter-list for Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland.

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland,

a Winter's Tale

Contents
1. The Black Roots of Langdale
2. Treacher Pike
3. The Disenchanted Woods
4. The Last Mortal Passage
5. Beneath the Sky of Thorns
6. The Red Star's Bale
7. Company out of Song
8. Tally-Clerks and Tigers
9. The Long Lane to Hexhold
10. The Horned Moon in Her Hair
11. A Fairfields Wassail
12. Katy of the Marches
13. The Free Folk in the Dales
14. Langdale Rising
15. Fire and Honey
16. New Braidings along Allwater
17. Winter's Telling
18. Upon the Lightning's Fork
19. Eyes of Storm
20. Cockshut Time
21. The Grey Wolf in the Red Gloaming
22. The Assize before Carrowglaze
23. The Low Road
24. The Torches of Heaven
25. The Sweeping of the Hearth
26. Wolf, Witch, and Widow
27. Mother and Son
28. Three Katherines on the Edge
End-Piece: A Spring-Breakfasting in Newborough

Ye Gods, I love being able to post that!

The Problem of Partisanship

2011-11-12T05:05:00.006Z

In these times of stern need, we must resolve this perennial nuisance once and for all!

Partisanship: When rival oligarchic factions are so occupied with doing down each other, they hardly care how much damage they are doing to the public.

Non-Partisanship: When rival oligarchic factions are so occupied with doing down the public, they hardly care how little damage they are doing to each other.

The US seems to be well into a full-on partisan phase at the moment, whereas the EU is starting to sprout governments of 'national unity' like toadstools on a rotten tree. It will be interesting - in the historical sense that nobody wants to experience up close and personal - to see which mode manages to completely exhaust the public's patience first.

Better hope that, before this occurs, we manage to enter the other possible though unstable phase of government:

Awk Cluck Cluck Cluck Cluck Cluck!: When rival oligarchic factions are so occupied with not being all cast down together and stripped of their ill-gotten swag, they hardly care to how many of the public's easier demands they yield for the moment. Later, they may be too weakened to renege.

This may not work where the main demands involve competencies which a target oligarchy has long excused itself from cultivating, and prevented anybody else from acquiring. It is also vulnerable to the loudest public demands' coming from stupid heads, with Hilarious Consequences. But it is the moment of hope and choice, in a way that picking the liveliest scrapper or uniting behind the blandest fudger are not.

I wonder how ready we all shall be for it, at the turning of the tide? Most of all, I wonder how ready I shall.

Let me not prove a sluggard or a stupid head, come the local hour.

The Red Is in the Green

2011-11-11T12:12:00.005Z

Lest we forget - by striatic at Flickr.com, 2007 - Released under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

This is what came to me, to end this year's silence for the war-dead of all my peoples.

The Red Is in the Green

Remembrance Day 2011

The red is in the green.
The rose is in the grave.
The reason's still unseen
The lead is in the brave.
The cock is on his dunghill.
The dust is on the plain.
The ocean's in my eyes, my love –
But never you again.

No, never you again.
The wind is in my eyes, my dear –
The way it blows is plain.
The plumes are on the princes.
The names adorn the arch
The flesh that drew apart.
The bones are on the march.
The red is in my heart.

"Kate! Katy! Ralph!"

2011-11-09T08:36:00.006Z

Will the Circle Be Unbroken?, by Pentangle - embedded from Youtube.

Another chapter - really two chapters, but the first very slight and little more than a vestibule to the second - of Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland completed. One of the big ones, containing the Family Fight, to which the now Whole-Book Climax was originally little more than an afterthought.

Secrets laid bare, revenge, self-sacrifice, death, yesteryear's pains variously assuaged and renewed, and a monster diplomatic negotiation to get through... this was not one of the easy ones, nor the short. As for doughty old Kate, the Battle of Carrowglaze was japes to this. The back of her nightmares she has broken in close wrestle, at such a cost as one might pay; and the villain in all the Dales who has longest needed killing goes unburied and unmourned, with only snack-happy ravens to appreciate him.

But her confrontation with her own son was never going to go much smoother than Lady Persy's introducing Orestes to dahling Clytemnestra at the Hades All-Achaean Centennial Reunion Dinner; and even once the lad had grown his character in the telling of him, there was no way to understand him completely before I'd actually written this rough passage through. He and she both surprised me several times, and showed me how the impossible-seeming attack on the Big Bad would have to go. No more big revelations now. I understand my characters as well as I'm going to, and I know how the last part of the plot must play out.

(Katy, Good Katy, where are you? That I see now, too; but so long I'd thought to meet you here!)

The immediate political aftermath on the other hand is a lot more transparent and optimistic than I'd envisioned, because it turns out that just about everybody for many miles around has some reason for truly wanting to believe that this settlement will work for them in particular. That works out sufficiently interesting, that I I may extend and dramatize the diffusion of it in the redraft. It will make a better standalone section and pace-governor than this duo's vestibule chapter, which I foresee will be absorbed or eliminated in the fast-approaching rewrite.

Old Thirty-Two

2011-11-01T08:49:00.012Z

Non-setting-specific Kateverse rebel folksong, directed at the Dales-lords, from the desperate and disastrous peasant revolts that were crushed in the days of the Good Witch's great-great-grandfather. It's another of those things the gentry strike out at people for even knowing, and its singing is as sure a sign of imminent explosion as anything between the lowlands and the Edge.

"Old Thirty-Two"

Bleed me red or black my eye –
You can't have water when the well's run dry.
Storm and curse or stomp and beat –
You ate the ox, so there ain't no meat.
Thrash me through, you'll get no grain –
You've had my loaf, and you can't again.
Your siege can speed without my sons –
You spent them all where the black brook runs.
My daughter dear shan't warm your bed –
You stole our coal, she's cold and dead.
Pick the lint from out my coat –
And here's my teeth for your milk-white throat!

"Thirty-two" is the count of human teeth. This ditty is freely made available, under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License, to anybody who judges that they see a good use for it.

ETA 03/11/11:

(1) Apologies for the imbecile and unnoticed rhyming of 'dry' with 'dry' in the first couplet as originally posted.

(2) No, I do not mean to imply that it is time to be biting anybody's throat out, metaphorically or otherwise! But I do think it's well time already to sing songs about peasants' long patience with their masters finally expiring. Anybody who suspects the coronet might fit them, will then be very free to consider whether it is really as becoming as all that.

Stupormarket Sweep

2011-10-30T13:36:00.006Z

Tossco - very little help! - public domain.

Some pious Sunday thoughts, for the Dean and Chapter of my local consumerist cathedral:

1) The customer tannoy is for informing us when you are about to close, or have set fire to your bakery again, or other matters of urgency. It is not for spamming all and sundry with the praises of your latest fancy mobile phone contract. You used to understand this better. Nor, if you persist on breaking into conversation or concentration in this manner, will it induce me to buy crap on autopilot with my brain out of circuit. It will induce me to bugger off!

2) Sharp invisible bits of plastic are even more unwelcome on the packaging of fresh meat than they are under other circumstances.

3) Nobody in the world eats 'meal solutions', except possibly those members of your marketing department who barfed up this dronespeak over your customers under the inspiration of one too many liquid lunches. What are we then, cully - 'consumer problems'? Cease and desist from this twin offence against the people and the language of old England, lest raging mobs be moved to pro-actively roll out a you-oriented kick up the arse solution toot sweet!

Thank you for your attention. We are passionate about improving your merchant service experience, and value your whatever. To hear this message again and again everywhere, just keep right on the way you're going!

Fair Is the Face and Dark Is the Heart

2011-10-26T11:58:00.005+01:00

A poetic dialogue between Incomparable Cleïs and the moralistic philosopher Jeremias from my own Kateverse setting - where this is a translation from an original by the antique lyrist, stateswoman, and Cleïs fangirl Stateira Hetaira. The content is not otherwise universe-specific.

"Fair is the face and dark is the heart,"

a dialogue between Cleïs and Jeremias
Jer. Fair is the face and dark is the heart.
Beauty and grace end with seeming and skin -
Worm and corruption hold revels within.
Fair is the face, ah, but dark is the heart!

Cle. Fair is the face, aye, and dark is the heart.
Charms are our banners in daylight unfurled.
Hearts are the horrors we hide from the world -
Facing it graciously is our kind art.

Jer. Black is the death when white is the urn.
Flies buzz when hypocrites speak the world fair.
Ghosts fester foul as they fear the free air -
Black is the soul, Cleïs: white is the urn!

Cle. Black is our marrow - to light we must turn.
Artful decay brings red wine and rich food,
Fairer for sharing than raw tripes and blood.
Black are our souls, but how brightly they burn!

Jer. Foul is the heart though fair is the face.
Venus' eyes hide the charnel of Mars.
When he breaks through, who'll compare you to stars?
Fair make your heart, ere it shows in your face!

Cle. Foolish is heart that's unfriend to its face.
Brave is the heart that will fight from its hell.
Inwards must find what is fair from their shell:
Learning life's kindness is all our hearts' grace.

Jer. Dark is the heart caught deep in the clay.
Cle. Deck it with flowers, and dance in the day!
Jer. Fair is the face, but the spirit is sin.
Cle. Let it look out, while the stars soak our skin
By the banks of the wide Milky Way...
A Whisper. - Come in -

Sallikin Cloud's Lullaby

2011-10-19T07:27:00.004+01:00

Reproduction of mediaeval cot and rattle c. 1465, from the archaeological site of Walraversijde in Belgium. By user JoJan at Wikimedia Commons, released under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported Licence.

A lullaby from Langdale in the Kateverse. It says quite a lot about the singer, who almost certainly invented these lyrics, but quite a lot more about local conditions before the anti-feudalist Rising.

Sallikin Cloud's Lullaby
Daddy's down the booze hole.
Gods are in the sky.
Everyone who'd hurt you -
None of 'em are nigh.

Squires are in their castle.
Wolves are in their wood.
Walls are round about us -
We are hidden good.

Don't you know I love you?
Don't you know I'm strong?
Nightmare's not to fear, dear,
With your Sis along.

Sleep, you little silly -
I will hold your hand.
Lie all night till daylight,
In a better land!

The Bungle in the Jungle

2011-10-13T10:46:00.004+01:00

Kateverse folksong set in some unspecified region of Melandra. Unfortunately, we learn next to nothing about the local cultures/ civilizations/ inspirations hereby, since neither the Northern narrator nor his Southron companion are exactly all about the culture.

The Bungle in the Jungle
Juba and me, in old Melandree,
We went down by the Wetwood, two rich boys to be.
The Dons only paid us in shavepence and stripes,
And so we jumped ship when our planning was ripened, for
Juba and me, in old Melandree –
A bungle in the jungle like you never did see!

Juba once heard, off a blackbird,
Of vine-strangled cities a promising word,
With cobbles of onyx and tin baths of gold,
And nothing but fancies our hands to withhold from 'em –
He said she said, Thieves should be sped
By rotten bad spirits that drove 'em till dead!

Juba and I said All my eye!
We'd pluck ourselves plenty, or else we'd know why.
He said Man it's dirty, I said Man it's hot,
The men said Bog off, till we paid one a lot to guide
Juba and me, through deep Melandree –
A bungle in the jungle like you never did see!

Thicket and mire hedged our desire.
The food that we'd bought set our arseholes on fire.
The guide said That's funny, but Juba said No,
And I fell down stairs as I amplified, Go away –
I hit my nut on a beam, but
We'd found out the ruins of Idunnowot!

What did we find? Treasure so fine?
Only ten buttloads of boiled plantain wine.
We drank it for sorrow, then drank it for mirth,
Then thought we'd stroll home o'er the pretty green earth (which sucked).
All of us three, up Shitty Tree -
We stumbled through the swamplands like you never did see!

Juba and me, in old Melandree,
We came back from the Wetwood, poor beggars were we.
We lost blades and britches, the guide lost our pence,
And Juba complains that we still smell intensely bad:
Misery me, in old Melandree –
A bungle in the jungle like you never did see!

The big Southron tough guy whinging incessantly about dirt and bad smells abroad is a well-established trope in my Europeanly bath-sceptical North. The proverbial 'Shitty Tree' is idiomatically Shit Creek, and originally a reference to the impaling stake.

There is no mass slave trade in known areas of the Kateverse; foreign attitudes towards Melandra and Melandrans don't map well onto those displayed towards sub-Saharan Africa and its peoples in our world; and this song's general spirit of, "Let's not go there, it is a silly place!" is wholly typical of its Morgander sources.

Jolly Saturday

2011-10-12T09:27:00.006+01:00

Saturnus, by Polidoro Caldara da Caravaggio (16th century) - public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Kateverse folksong - probably about contemporary with Dame Catherine Tynde, but very definitely not on the same side. People have been burned in Morgander and Selquay for whistling the tune to this revolutionary anthem.

Jolly Saturday
When jolly King Saturday ruled every land,
All men were equal and all men were grand.
Now lords scrap for tinsel where men strove for grain,
And gold blooms from blood where it swelled once from rain,
Oh and hey, hey, King Saturday!
They've thrown us in hell, won't you fetch us away?

When Saturday's children killed Saturday's reign,
Fire on the mountain was drought in the plain.
Every god's bully-boy brawled for a crown:
Trampled the crops and the crop-tenders down,
Oh and hey, hey, King Saturday!
Where are our heroes to fight them today?

Heroes of Hector's day stood against gods:
Heroes of pedigree can't stand for odds.
My lord ain't no Hector - he’s barely a man –
It's high time we showed him what common clay can!
Oh and hey, hey, King Saturday!
We're more than our fathers who failed you, today!

When jolly boys rise up across our fair land,
Saturday's gospel our joy and command,
Peasants and lords shall change pleasure and pain:
Gold shall our fields bloom after red rain,
For it's hey, hey, King Saturday!
They threw you in hell, but we'll fetch you away!

King Saturday is the Titan-God Saturn of the Golden Age. Hector the Hold-Fast of the Kateverse is not our Hector of Troy (though several parallels exist) but a famous champion of the weak, god-bothered, and oppressed. The thumping sexism of this song is partly of its day, but at least equally because Saturnists Have Certain Issues.

As the rest of the song suggests, their ideology is not in every respect a repellent one.

"Lovely Creature of Earth"

2011-10-09T10:09:00.005+01:00

The Meeting on the Turret Stairs, or Hellelil and Hildebrand (1864), by Frederick William Burton. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The end of Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland draws nigh. Just completed the second, unexpectedly long chapter of the Young Duke and his beloved enemy, back at Garcastle waiting for the Grey Wolf to come riding home from Langdale. Now I've blocked in every moment of time: nothing can happen now but the last negotiation to avoid a ruinous war which nobody wants or can be sure how to step back from, and the final culmination of a forty-year family feud. Again and now until the end, my grey-gold Kate must take centre-stage, and bear the weight of the tale on her aching old shoulders, where Katy Elflocks great as the green hills and the black sky cannot. But this Garcastle segment, given wholly to her antagonist the Duke, has been needful, and reshaped parts of the ending I'd long thought set in stone.

And there is that romance that animates it. It is a romance that, even in the moment of its greatest triumph, is not very obviously fortunate in its stars. It is also one without which it would have been hard, mighty hard, to manage the forthcoming descent into the fire.

The final two chapters await, and the epilogue. This backfill has left me six weeks behind my summer schedule, and ahead lie the grand crises of the book. Realistically, I'll do well to get this whole draft completed before December. That will make it almost exactly four years since I got my first idea of it, a true winter's tale from root to crown.

The Cock and the Cat

2011-10-03T09:17:00.007+01:00

Just to make sure that my blogging for this month can only go uphill, here is a shamelessly bogus folksong which the Kateverse would spit out like a bowl of warm mouthwash. I make no excuses for it except a bad fit of what-the-hell.

The Cock and the Cat

There was a cat so sleek and proud,
Her name was Pretty Pussy.
She met a rooster red and loud,
And he was none too wussy.

"Good morrow to thee, Chanticleer,
And step aside before me,
For dost thou flout thy mistress here,
To redder rags she'll claw thee!"

"I am a game and fighting cock,
Nor bow to any moggy,
And if thou'lt meet in battle’s shock,
I'll leave thee red and soggy!"

Then each made good upon their word,
Red cock and ready ratter –
Her lightning claws caught not the bird,
Nor might his spurs come at her.

So she's become a tiger fierce,
Each tooth a savage sabre,
And he a loathly cockatrice,
To end her lively labour.

Then she's become a mirror smart,
And he a stone to smash it,
And she a frost to break its heart,
And he a rain to wash it,

And she a bird to drink the rain,
And he a cat to catch it,
And then they change shapes round again,
And cry, "No more of that shit!"

She rose as maiden clear as stars,
And he as manxome fellow,
And, as bright Venus and red Mars,
Into embrace they fell, O!

Her poniard found his occiput
Just as his shiv her kidney,
So Pretty Pussy down was put,
And Cocky snuffed it, didn’t he?

The moral this was made to show
Is neither cute nor clever –
It's cocks and kitties come and go,
But dickheads are forever!

This was loosely inspired, if such be the term, by The Two Magicians, though the protagonists' agendas here are... predictably divergent.

Mother Mason's Fiddler

2011-09-29T13:06:00.007+01:00

Kateverse folksong from a very late period, beyond which the history starts going round corners I can't follow. Also known as Callimby Wine and The Sailor's Dream; a completely garbled version called Clemmy Hopkins is popular in Starkady. A slow, deceptively mellow lament.

Mother Mason's Fiddler
Left my old mother a twelvemonth ago,
For to go fighting the Following Foe.
Look what I got, Ma, for fighting so fine -
Kazandry copper and Callimby wine!

How my young sweetheart was ardent and proud -
How my plumes waved, as she waved through the crowd!
What have I won for my sweet Clementine?
Kazandry copper and Callimby wine.

Bravely we stood off the Southron seaboard –
Treasure and honour to win with my lord.
Kazandry cannons, they done us up fine.
All is amended with Callimby wine.

Caliph's men saved me, but left me to beg
Round the Bazaar with a stump for a leg.
Old Mother Mason to me took a shine –
Lets me play fiddle for lodgings and wine.

Ma, oh my mammy, I'll never come home:
Save in these wine-dreams, no more can I roam.
Warn my sweet Clemmy she'll never be mine,
Save when I've copper for Callimby wine.

Brothers, oh brothers, take warning by me,
When ameers promise you glory at sea.
Coppers ain't worth mangled limbs and bent spine,
And my folk don’t know no Callimby wine!

Pity me, masters so free and so fine –
Kazandry copper for Callimby wine!

Callimby wine is the northern name for a spiced and addictive liquor, probably containing opiates, often used by Southron doctors to lessen the edge of pain, and by their patients to keep the world away. 'Callimby' is an upland realm many leagues south of coastal Kazandry, the largest and most famous city in the world.

The Following (of Kazander) is the mystically humanist faith of that culture, and resembles Islam about as closely as northern neo-Olympianism resembles Christianity, i.e. not a lot. It admits perforce that the Gods and Titans exist, but feels impelled not so much to worship them as - inspired by the Emperor Cassander's silencing of the oracles - to kick them up the bum.

'Mother Mason' is certainly a blunder for the Kazandrite name Maysun, which fully Occidentalized might be rendered Belle.

Johnny Parr

2011-09-27T12:46:00.004+01:00

Kateverse folksong from the midlands of Morgander. I don't seem to be able to shut off the tap at the moment - possibly I just needed something to cleanse my palate of all the nasty Carterets! A quick merry song that practically cries out to be accompanied on a flute or tin whistle.

Johnny Parr
Good day to you, my young pretty maid,
And tell me who you are?
"Oh, I'm the girl who goes out in the morn
For to wed with Johnny Parr!"

Young Johnny has nor blood nor brawn,
Nor brains to take him far!
"His heart and hand are kind and grand,
So I’ll wed my Johnny Parr!"

Oh tell me, maid, from whence you come,
And who your parents are?
"They're them I left by the light of the moon,
For to wed with Johnny Parr!"

Then give me now your silver ring –
Your day I would not mar,
But the ring when mine is a month of wine,
And I dread not Johnny Parr!

"Oh it's here's my belt, and it's here's my boot,
And my ring shall leave the scar,
For it's Quick-Claw Kit that you stopped, you nit -
And she'll wed her Johnny Parr, she will,
With a ring for Johnny Parr!"

Quick-Claw Kit is a generic stroppy Katherine from the uncouth eastern marches. Name, implied origin, and attitude fit a stereotype of dale and forester women that spread far and wide in the generations following the events of Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland. It wasn't exactly ungrounded.

Fair Lory and Kind Evett

2011-09-27T06:22:00.008+01:00

Kateverse folksong from across the Sea of Stars. This very remote descendant of Carteret hails from the Freegarths of Starkady. That is a tough frontier country, and this interpretation of Kind Yvette is nobody any scoundrel wants to mess with. The tune is ~~pretty much stolen from~~ subtly influenced by our own world's Sovay.

Fair Lory and Kind Evett
Fair Lory calls on Evett her friend,
But she is weeping at journey's end.
Her dress so tattered, her cheeks so torn,
And she lamenting that she was born.
"Oh lovely Lory, why such dismay?"
"As I rode singing by Carter Haye,
A masked man took me in ambuscade -
No more is Lory your merry maid.
I am so hurt I am fain to die.
All doors but death close to such as I!"
"I'll give you hearth, and I'll give you bed,
And your oppressor shall soon be dead.
I'll bring you balm, and I'll feed you brose -
I'll feed your felon to carking crows!"
Evett has put on a veil of mist -
A pretty pistol that never missed -
A knife that nestled where none could see -
Her lips she's poisoned with solany.
"And if your foe I can't find again,
I'll bring my true love and all his men.
No less than I, love, he loves thee well,
And we'll avenge thee in mouth of hell!"
So as Evett rides by Carter Haye,
A hooded villain steps in her way.
"Despoil or die, strumpet, make thy choice!"
She knows her true love then by his voice.
Her pretty pistol she's quickly fired -
It's always struck where her heart's desired.
Its bullet blows back to burst her heart,
And to the good lands she does depart.
Her veil down falls, and he stands as stone.
"Oh Kind Evett, must I live alone?
I will assuage me with savage bliss,
Which you shall bless with a last cold kiss!"
Her lambswool garments he swiftly strips,
And plants a kiss on her chilly lips.
The poison serves her, and serves him well,
And Furies tear him in strips in hell.
The lovely Lory, my mother dear,
She mourned Evett till her final year.
I sing this song as I dig her grave,
And lay her bones by her friend's so brave.
Stars shine down mercy upon us.

Also known as The Planet Pistol, which in Starkady is not nearly so science-fictional a reference as it sounds. Solany is here a poison derived from a plant of the nightshade kind, sometimes used generically to mean 'witchy herbal toxin'. The last line is a solemn local formula.

Dougal Dare-All

2011-09-26T12:09:00.012+01:00

Kateverse folk-song about one of the minor characters in Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland, the Cauldale-born chief of the Fairfields rangers. Slightly fictionalized, and evidently composed in one of the woodland freesteads that flourished immediately after the heyday of the Good Witch Katy. The author seems to have known a good deal about Dougal, but not necessarily to have actually known him.

Dougal Dare-All
"Dougal Dare-All, where awa'?"
"For life ye find me flying.
For lying wi' a bonnie lad,
My laird would see me dying.
He's brent my cot, he's reaped my grain,
My lovely lad done murther -
If ever I come home again,
He'll trouble earth no further!"

"Dougal Dare-All, where awa'?"
"For making manful wedding.
In Candy Country, stock and stone
Do bless our kindly bedding.
A farmer fine, from fields afar,
He's known his share o' sorrow –
The foe whose blade our bliss would mar,
He'll know no more a morrow!"

"Dougal Dare-All, where awa'?"
"For love o' Luckie Triona,
To meet Brown Numpty at his door
And mend his ill demeanour.
His thralls I'll raise, his chains I'll strike,
His knights I'll make to cower –
His head they'll bring me on a pike
Afore they'll brave our power!"

"Dougal Dare-All, where awa'?"
"To turn my hand to farming.
On Catscairn lay my honours all –
No more my mind they're charming.
We've struck away the tyrants' bands,
And dreams left free for making –
From woods-won lands and husband hands,
I'll look no more for waking!"

The song is known only in very corrupt versions outside of its eastern homelands, where it long remained popular, and the customs of old Fairfields long-enduring.

'Luckie Triona' is a Selkish-flavoured by-name for the Good Witch Katy Elflocks - not actually used by Dougal or his comrades. 'Brown Numpty' is a gibe at Sir Humphrey Brownsword, a Northdales castellan of scant popularity - used by Dougal and his contemporaries quite extensively.

Dame Catherine Tynde

2011-09-25T14:50:00.012+01:00

Fantastic Vision, or Asmodea (1819-1823), by Francisco de Goya . Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

A folk-rhyme from the Kateverse. Dame Catriona Tynde (Catherine is a later assimilationist error) was probably a real petty noble who lived in the elvish marches some generations after my tales of the Three Katherines. Being famously liberal to her people in a time of war and doubt, she has soaked up legends of the far more radical and magical Katy Elflocks like a biscuit in a barrel of gravy. Collectors like Charles Newbury customarily omit the third verse as scurrilous and indecent. It certainly reflects Katy's sentiments in the days of her great anarchy: Dame Catriona's own positions, wherever they differed, are about as lost to posterity as the abovementioned soggy biscuit.

Dame Catherine Tynde
"Mine is a lord of a hard flinty will:
Grain of my land must be grist to his mill.
Little but hunger his fees leave behind."
"Share we our bread, then!" says Dame Catherine Tynde.

"Mine is a temper too high and too free:
That would Milady have torn out of me
With the worm's tongue that would speak a man's mind."
"Call us good fellows!" says Catherine Tynde.

"Mine is a body by Nature betrayed,
Turning to man as it ought to a maid.
Where in the world love's content shall I find?"
"Here with fair comrades!" says Catherine Tynde.

"Mine is a spirit that recks not of odds:
Though I'm a lass, I will fight men or Gods -
Strike at the stars, should I find them unkind!"
"Dwell as my daughter!" says Catherine Tynde.

"Mine is the shape of a black woodhouse wight:
Terror I bring to the woodsmen by night.
Who would believe that to good I inclined?"
"Thou dost, and I do!" says Catherine Tynde.

"Mine is the scythe that old customs shall change:
All men I'll level from castle to grange.
See you our world to our vision consigned!"
"See you in Hell, Sam!" says Dame Catherine Tynde.

The last verse refers to the Saturnist revolution across the northern border in Dame Catriona's day - and that really is how she and her followers responded to it. It's hard to explain even the parts I understand of the ideology of the first 'Sammy Saturday', but it bears certain generic resemblances to both Trotskyism and Covenanting Presbyterianism in our world. A dream I had three years ago suggested in the strongest terms that it was, unfortunately, a lot more successful than either.

Buddy Capitalism, Official UK Edition

2011-09-24T05:33:00.005+01:00

Hot lamprey love. Brook lamprey, Lampetra planeri, mating - filmed by YouTube user hvilesteddk.

The UK governing coalition wants to end the bad old days of powerful corporate players being able to have a quiet word at the seventh hole with any minister they wanted a favour off. They know the British public are in no mood for any of that sort of nonsense.

In future, crony capitalism is to become an official Government institution, so that everybody will be able to trust it. The BBC reports:

Plans are under way to give the heads of the UK's 50 top companies a hotline to individual government ministers.

The ministerial "buddies", including Business Secretary Vince Cable, will be just a phone call away for firms like BP, British Gas and GlaxoSmithKline.

The Department for Business said the idea - designed to boost investment - had been welcomed by the companies.

I just bet it has! That'll be two regulations against upstart competitors, an Extra Whopper McSpecial police power against reluctant potential clients, and a bag of Mr Porky Subsidies up the wazoo, to go! Hurry up there boyo, time is money!

Showing special concern for efficiency in these straitened times, Business Secretary and ex-Shell employee Vince Cable is mooted as official buddy to... Shell. But, lest we should smell any rats which absolutely do not exist and are absolutely not whooping it up in the wainscotting, we are reassured that the scheme will:

"fit with the ministerial code of conduct to avoid conflicts and potential conflicts of interest"

and that

"It does not necessarily follow that the best minister to lead on a company would be the one who was most vulnerable to lobbying from that company."

So that's all right, then.

Of course, the loony left are furious. Labour's Shadow Business Secretary John Denham storms that the scheme is:

"...an admission that big companies have completely lost confidence in the ability of government to understand their concerns and priorities".

The horror!

Rumours that the newly-privileged companies are planning to reciprocate this generous public gesture, by accommodating the entire establishment of Parliamentary draughtsmen on secondment schemes to their head offices, cannot at this stage be confirmed.

Carteret

2011-09-23T14:35:00.006+01:00

Sovay, by Shadrack Tye @ The Folkthing, 2011.

Kateverse folksong from the west of Morgander, which corresponds to something a little like northwestern France, and something a deal more like the 'Home Counties' of England.

In Leland Came Calling, I presented the trad 'love test' theme in folksongs with a (probably) happy ending. Even in folksongs, this does not always work out, on account of cruel creepy possessive stalky One True Loves without the brains God gave bastard geese in Ireland are not everybody's cup of cocoa.

Actually, in a statistically representative sample of real traditional folksongs, not much of anything ever works out without death and woe splashing everybody within a five-stanza radius - what with real traditional life in our heroic past tending to suck like Thor trying to empty the Ocean Sea through a mead-horn, and all that! An informal compendium of advice on dealing with said suckitude can be found here, and does not suck in any detectable manner.

Kateverse folk culture is not clearly happier than ours. If there is less pointless disaster in the samples of it I choose to channel, that is purely a reflection of my personal taste.

But taste is a spectrum, and it has a lot of points on it. This was inspired by a sort of random collision between Sovay, Lord Randall, and The Death of Young Andrew, fine songs all three.

Short and sweet as it might be to hear how Sovay dealt with Young Andrew, that song is not this song.

Carteret

Carteret pulls on his boots
And cloak and mask so grim, oh,
To meet his true love on the road,
And see how she will trim, oh!
"Deliver up your silver chain,
Or lose your life opposing,
And every money red and white,
All riches now disclosing!"

Yvette gives freely every jewel,
Her every pound and penny,
And begs Gods' mercy of the rogue,
But he denies her any.
"Deliver up your silken dress,
And dance for rover's pleasure,
And all your body red and white
Shall yield to me its treasure!"

"Oh, I am loved by Carteret,
And he is fifteen of you,
And if you will me spoil and shame,
His sword shall cold reprove you!"
"I give no fig for Carteret,
But I will have his harlot!"
And pale her tears and clothes down fall,
Lest he should bleed her scarlet.

Now Carteret rips off his mask.
"The whore I see thou'dst play me,
Though knowing I should sooner die
Than deed or thought betray thee!"
Then he's betrayed with bitter blade
The heart that dear did love him,
And hacked her flesh for raven’s meat
Who set sweet life above him.

The raging Carteret rides home,
And makes his moan to mother
How foul the fair Yvette did prove.
"Cruel son! Thy gentle lover
Dared shame and pain to win again
To thee. She died no sinner!"
"The mind of honour longs to men -
To thee, to fetch my dinner!"

"Oh, mother, I am sick to die:
The harlot's shade must haunt me
And make a revel in my guts
With fellow-fiends, to taunt me!"
"Nay, son, 'tis only toadstools white
And red are doing for thee.
The kind Yvette I’d not forget,
But only that I bore thee!"

She's laid him under log and stone,
His bitter blade for pillow.
On Carteret's grave, grass grows none.
Yvette's is gold with willow.

Factoids Are Forever

2011-09-21T08:44:00.007+01:00

La mort de Sénèque (The Death of Seneca), by Luca Giordano (1684). Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The trouble with the Internet is that it induces shoddy reading and writing habits, fuelling a toxic cultural bloom of faddishness and factoid-mining; drowning thought in swamping tides of so-called information; and creating a dumbed-down culture of attention-deficient OH CRAP I CAN'T EVEN BE ARSED TO FINISH THIS SENTENCE, you know the drill, there are already 426,879 essays on the Web which can fill in the blanks for you, if you don't know them all by heart already!

(Breaking News: Now 426,880.)

Every time I see this jobbie come bobbing back again, my mind turns to Seneca. Actually it usually turns first to senna-pods, and then to Seneca by a sort of persistent loose association; but it sounds more scholarly and austerely classical the other way, so kindly forget I mentioned it. Anyway, the old Roman offers us a salutary reminder of what Western culture was like before we wilfully flushed our brains down the Intatubez, and I think he well deserves the fresh bay of providing my Billy Quote for the month!

The scholar Didymus wrote four thousand books. I would pity him if he'd read as many useless works. Among them you find enquiries into Homer's birthplace, Aeneas's real mother, whether Anacreon was more of a womanizer than a drunk, whether Sappho was a prostitute, and other things worth forgetting if you knew them. Go on, tell me that life is not long!

Leland Came Calling

2011-09-19T09:02:00.009+01:00

Kateverse folk-song, from the middle counties of Morgander in which none of my stories have so far been set. Lively, rollicking, and good to whistle.

Leland Came Calling
Leland came calling, Jankin did ride
All through the spinney to meet with his bride.
Out from a hazelnut jumped a brown maid –
"Jankin the bold, lay me down in the shade!"
"Fianced I be,
Maid of the tree –
Under the hazels, I'll lay not with thee!"

"Lord shall be true when he's loved of the land:
Carly of Coldstone shall well understand.
Kiss of my lips, as the sun shall thy grain:
Till of my ground, that thine swell up with rain!"
"Thanks be to thee,
Maid of the tree –
Sweet be thy price, yet we may not agree!"

"If thou art thankless, and kiss not my mouth,
Hard shall thine hunger in famine and drouth.
If thou wilt come but to Carly's cold womb,
Naught shalt thou find there but dust of thy tomb!"
"Bale be to thee,
Maid of the tree –
Die thou or I, ere thy curses I see!"

"Jankin of Leland, now lay down thy knife!
Carly of Coldstone shall love thee for life.
Woe that I doubted, that well was I loved!
Constant of all lusty men thou art proved.
Carly I be,
Heart-fast to thee –
Under the hazels, come lay down with me!"

The Garden of Proserpine

2011-09-18T09:15:00.009+01:00

Swinburne looks to Proserpine across the Black River of Souls.
Source works:
Algernon Charles Swinburne, by William Bell Scott, between 1850 and 1870.
Proserpine, by Dante Gabriel Rosetti, 1873-77.

By Algernon Charles Swinburne, a dude not lacking in either spirit or... issues. Poisonously lovely.

The Garden of Proserpine

Here, where the world is quiet;
Here, where all trouble seems
Dead winds' and spent waves' riot
In doubtful dreams of dreams;
I watch the green field growing
For reaping folk and sowing,
For harvest-time and mowing,
A sleepy world of streams.

I am tired of tears and laughter,
And men that laugh and weep,
Of what may came hereafter
For men that sow to reap:
I am weary of days and hours,
Blown buds of barren flowers,
Desires and dreams and powers
And everything but sleep.

Here life has death for neighbour,
And far from eye or ear
Wan waves and wet winds labour,
Weak ships and spirits steer;
They drive adrift, and whither
They wot not who make thither;
But no such winds blow hither,
And no such things grow here.

No growth of moor or coppice,
No heather-flower or vine
But bloomless buds of poppies,
Green grapes of Proserpine.
Pale beds of blowing rushes
Where no leaf blooms or blushes
Save this whereout she crushes
For dead men deadly wine.

Pale, without name or number,
In fruitless fields of corn,
They bow themselves and slumber
All night till light is born;
And like a soul belated,
In hell and heaven unmated,
By cloud and mist abated
Comes out of darkness, morn.

Though one were strong as seven,
He too with death shall dwell,
Nor wake with wings in heaven,
Nor weep for pains in hell;
Though one were fair as roses,
His beauty clouds and closes;
And well though love reposes,
In the end, it is not well.

Pale, beyond porch and portal,
Crowned with calm leaves, she stands
Who gathers all things mortal
With cold immortal hands;
Her languid lips are sweeter
Than love's who fears to greet her
To men that mix and meet her
From many times and lands.

She waits for each and other,
She waits for all men born;
Forgets the earth her mother,
The life of fruits and corn;
And spring and seed and swallow
Take wing for her and follow
Where summer song rings hollow
And flowers are put to scorn.

There go the loves that wither,
The old loves with wearier wings;
And all dead years draw thither,
And all disastrous things;
Dead dreams of days forsaken,
Blind buds that snows have shaken,
Wild leaves that winds have taken,
Red strays of ruined springs.

We are not sure of sorrow,
And joy was never sure;
Today will die tomorrow;
Time stoops to no man's lure;
And love, grown faint and fretful,
With lips but half regretful
Sighs, and with eyes forgetful
Weeps that no loves endure.

From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no man lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.

Then star nor sun shall waken,
Nor any change of light;
Nor sound of waters shaken,
Nor any sound or sight;
Nor wintry nor vernal,
Nor days, nor things diurnal;
Only the sleep eternal
In an eternal night.

Like the thought that one can bail out on life at any time if one so chooses, in my more morbid moods I find this kind of thing a sort of rock bottom of comfort: a little poppy-juice that one may take to recover oneself for the works of life in the lovely light of the phoenix morning, and for the long glad stand against the uttermost Night.

A clever modern shilling shocker of the Steampunk kind - The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack - featuring Swinburne and Sir Richard Burton as its eccentric protagonists, has been rather well executed by Mark Hodder, who is now well into the sequels, and displaying samples of his alt-Victorian wares on his website.

Controversial Controversy Controverted

2011-09-14T12:52:00.004+01:00

Wayland R Good, spokesgoat for quality-of-life campaign group CABBAGE*, yesterday faxed me a press release which I am churning to avoid doing any tedious and expensive investigative journalism. "For immediate release!" he declared. "The ordinary working English-speaking peoples demand a complete moratorium on the word 'controversial', on the grounds that it now conveys precisely as much content as writing the noun it qualifies in ALL CAPS!"

Mr Good asks us to consider the following three popular media senses of the word:

1) Controversial cleric Lucifer Hayter was criticized yesterday for demanding the death penalty for unrepentant redheads. In this case, 'controversial' signifies "hateful whackaloon whose opinions you care about, why would that be, eh?"

2) Controversial reality star Amy Anooki was yesterday branded a crap singer by Bollocks Bill from Notting Hill. In this case, 'controversial' equates to "somebody vaguely notorious, who does not excite universal admiration, which you care about because why exactly, eh?"

3) Controversial boffin Hick Hawkins yesterday rubbished campaigners' concerns that algebra may be a long-game Muslim ploy to keep Western schoolboys so busy with homework, they'll be too weedy to fight back when the jihadis arrive, chiz chiz! In this case, 'controversial' signifies "unimpressed by hateful whackaloon whose opinions you care about, why would that be, eh?"

In none of these cases - so Good claims - is the 'controversy' ever evaluated, because that would be Unjournalistic, and also would raise the question of why there is almost nothing present to bear evaluation.

Further, the only constant he can detect across these senses of 'controversial' appears to be the "there's an argument here which you care about, because I say so!" part.

"There's no place for such an empty, manipulative word in modern journalism!" Good insists. But he admits this might be a controversial position. "I asked Bill from Notting Hill what he thought about it," he recalls, as I phone him to see if I can blag a banana daiquiri out of running this story, "and he said it sounded like absolute bollocks!"

*Complete Authority for Billygoats Bullshitting About Generally Everything

What's in Our Heads? What's in Our Heads?

2011-09-11T10:34:00.008+01:00

So it's the eleventh of the ninth of the eleventh, and the big news here in the West is that ten years ago, some fucking fuckers fucked us up. That's not news, that's necromancy!

I suppose it's at least appropriate to the necromantic sympathies of the culprits.

Here are some good thoughts on how not to let them eat our brains:

What is true, no two men know by Abi Sutherland at Making Light - Against the use of anniversaries to drill us in media narratives by ritual repetition, so that our memories are worn smooth and our tears irrigate other people's estates.

The Way the Present Was by Jim Henley at Unqualified Offerings, via Patrick Nielsen Hayden at ML again - Uncomfortable truths about our own related complicity in the War Story, or at any rate the complicity of people like the author, and also people like me.

Bollywood vs. Jihad by Shikha Dalmia at Reason.com - On the kind of heavily Muslim counter-attack against death's partisans that neither mosques nor media will be trumpeting very loud, fighting back with dirty sexy lively kitsch; and why the necro boys must fear it worse than death by drone.

Damn the pornography of grief. Damn the pride of pundits. Damn the dead-eyed machismo that would rather prevent one murder by coolly fighting to death, than a hundred by messily fucking for life. Damn them all to the past, forgive them, and forget them; except only to remember how we fell for them - that we may not fall for those tricks so easily again.

End the long war; make Caesar render back unto everybody what was never Caesar's to begin with; come home to civilization, however we each conceive it, and do not pick clashes that we do not need or understand with people who are not gunning for us already. Fellows and friends, we can do this!

In our hearts, in our hearts, we're still living...

In the House of the Waxing Weasel

2011-09-10T08:57:00.009+01:00

Sometimes, our glorious leaders leave a goal so wide open that even a down-on-his-luck end-of-the-pier comedian would be ashamed to take advantage of it. Luckily, I am no such comedian.

Brought to my attention in a Metro fluff-piece yesterday, the original scoop seems to have been scored on June 6th by political blogger Mark Wallace. The plot goes like this:

1) Francis Boulle creates www.sexymp.co.uk, a site which aims to create "a fun and memorable tool to help the British public get to know their Members of Parliament" by - generating randomly paired pictures, and asking them which politician they would rather have sex with. The results are then used to generate shaggability wrankings for the whole disorderly House. Figures for which politicians people think they have already been more screwed by, are outside the remit of this forward-looking enterprise.

2) The PICT (Parliamentary Information, Communication and Technology) office feels compelled to block access to the site from the Palace of Westminster, where it has become an overnight sensation. Suspicion runs rampant that MPs were wasting too much time voting for themselves.

Yes, O Children of Albion, your leaders do give a toss!

A classic American demonstration of this fundamental civic virtue is celebrated by the Foremen in this catchy little ditty. It is most massively unsafe for work...

...except, of course, for those who are presently self-employed.

Edgar-a-Woods

2011-09-09T09:28:00.010+01:00

Kateverse folksong, about a middle-aged farmer from Langdale who led the notable Levermoss band in the Rising. More distinguished for care, canniness, and steadfastness than any extraordinary fighting ability, he appears briefly as a very minor character in Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland. On his own homeground, he is a major folk hero, and his compatriots are probably right that the whole enterprise would have failed in its darkest hour without him.

Edgar-a-Woods
Edgar, Edgar, rise from your bed!
Edgar, bold and free,
Tell me what you saw with the dawn,
When they come from the high country?
"I looked east, where hope was least,
And I saw a ragged throng –
With a witch that crept, and a cat that leapt,
And a mind that made mine strong!"

Edgar, Edgar, turn from your plough!
Edgar, bold and grim,
Tell me what you saw in the noon,
And the word you have for him?
"I looked south, in the wild boar’s mouth,
And I saw my master's gate,
With a gallows high for the likes of I,
And a heart that made mine hate!"

Edgar, Edgar, stride from the woods!
Edgar, bold and proud,
Tell me what you made in the mirk,
When the Sun was laid in shroud?
"In northern moss, in grief and loss,
I lay with my beaten band,
Till we ran with the cat and the dog to the hog,
And I fought him hand and hand!"

Edgar, Edgar, speak from the shade!
Edgar, bold and grey,
Tell me what you glimpse in the gloam
Now the pig, he has passed away?
"I look back, to the River black,
And I see that I spent my life
For a cause as good as a poor man could,
And a tale I can bring to my wife.
A cause as good as a poor man could –
But it’s time I was home to my wife!"

I'm glad I could give him something of his own at last.

"Something Real. Something Wrong."

2011-09-07T21:55:00.002+01:00

Älvalek, or Dancing Elves, by August Malmström (1866). Via Berig at Wikimedia Commons - public domain.

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland completes its 24th chapter, of the 27 and epilogue now projected. This section looks at the shadow cast in Allingdale by the Battle of Carrowglaze and all that attended it. Even for her friends and family and partisans, What Katy Did shows in a far more alarming light from this vantage. And this has not been our heroes' chapter. It has belonged to the more sympathetic of their enemies.

The Young Duke is always slipping into and out of my grasp as I write him, because his character seems at once so recognizable and so alien to my own. His new guest, the Vestal Abbess, is quite a new thing in this telling. She is profoundly opposed to most of the things Katy Elflocks or I hold dear. Cold, ascetic, single-heartedly devoted to divine Authorities who appear considerably less decent than herself, and unshakeably convinced that faerie and all enchanting arts are both sinful and horribly dangerous, she is not a very obvious person for me to like.

And yet withal she is strong courage, frank charity, hard wisdom, and a very dry and humane humour, all in one compact and embarrassingly puffin-like package. She is what I and my heroes must have now, if we are going to make it to the right true end of this tale: somebody who can set herself against our ways for reasons proper neither to knave, naïf, or noddy.

Her thinking is as hierarchical as a ziggurat. Her religious insight is a nightmare. Her politics is a paralysis. Her sacred hearth sheds as pallid a light on its world as ever gleamed off cold marble. She can’t solve any of the master-problems of the Bonfire Arc, either.

And yet my darling anarch Katy and I have got such terrible things so wrong, that the old cultist gets plumb right! We never dreamed, when we set out, how a wild a wind we were going to set blowing. Still and all, we must follow it now to the last storm's breaking.

Soror Ursula, ora pro nobis!

Ruby Wine

2011-09-06T17:16:00.005+01:00

St Cecilia, by Peter Paul Rubens (1640). The original of this digital image can be found here at the Mataev family's mighty Olga's Gallery, the online art museum. Well worth a browse, or several.

Kateverse lyric, attributed to Sergeant Tray of the Mountain Kingdom - a companion of Clare the Crafty in her great quest, posthumously and inaccurately known as Trajan the Troubadour. Its very sprightly tune has had me breaking out in silly grins all day.

Ruby Wine

A legionnaire alone, and a goose without a bone –
Which is more use to Zoya?
A pick without a mine, and no cup to hold the wine –
What are we like now, Zoya?

A foe no clay can kill, and a friend with mere goodwill –
That is our lot, dear Zoya!
A battle I can't fight, and a kissless cold goodnight,
Are not what I like now, Zoya.

A blade no longer young, and a clacking foreign tongue –
A mighty small host for Zoya!
A quest no mind can frame, and a hope without a name,
Are what we have got, my Zoya.

The Mountains' lovely Life be a saltmarsh-strider's wife?
I’ve heard things stranger, Zoya.
A beaky lowland girl came to clutter up my world –
You got the last laugh, Zoya!

We’ve had our summer's fun, and the part you played is done –
Bravely as rubies, Zoya!
I'll cross this little lake, for to hunt that little drake.
All men are mortal, Zoya.

The lady addressed is Princess Zoya the Bountiful of the Mountain Kingdom, who gets a brief mention in The Deed of Katy Elflocks, and is a significant secondary character in the unwritten events that lead from that tale to Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland. Zoya looks rather like St Cecilia in the Rubens painting: fat, beautiful, opulent, affectionate, and distracted. She is not a candidate for sainthood in religions that bandy about phrases like "the world, the flesh, and the devil". She gets underestimated a lot, though never by Tray, and eventually not by anybody else who has shared a truly serious venture with her, either.

Most of the songs attributed to Tray were fathered on him after the regrettable incident with the dragon, but this one has the ring of true coin.

Hasta la Vista, Customer!

2011-09-04T14:47:00.011+01:00

There's a piece of sad overseer facetiousness which is very rife in the UK at present. Every other where you go that is open to the public, some professional Peeping Tom will have put up a cheery poster to remind you:

SMILE PLEASE - YOU'RE ON CAMERA!

So I saw one of these signs smirking out at eye-level from the Tesco video racks today; and when I had finished discreetly coughing up my spleen, I thought about it some more. And it occurred to me that we very likely have two wildly incompatible visions at play, here.

I think the managers who order these damn things expect the poor chestnut to lighten the tone of the warning, and make it less officious and sinister. So I imagine them hearing their words come out with a sort of cheeky chirpy cockney barrow-boy breeziness; or, failing that, at least with the sort of office joviality that informs one and all that

YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE MAD TO WORK HERE, BUT IT HELPS!!!

It certainly helps explain many an office's customer service, but I digress.

When I saw that sign in Tesco, the voice I heard it in sounded more like Arnold Schwartzenegger's in a cheesy film, where he is exercising his wit along some such lines as:

DON'T BE AN ASSHOLE ABOUT THIS, ASSHOLE!

Which I feel in my bowels is... not the tone one wants to be taking pre-emptively with one's clients.

In fact, I think one might better redeploy these jolly old signs to somewhere they will cause less public offence, because the light of day shall no longer illumine them.

Red Red Robin

2011-09-03T20:29:00.009+01:00

One from the musical sock drawer.

Red Red Robin

Old Robin Hood did a power of good
to the starving and the poor:
Shared out lords' gold with the sick and the old,
and that was against the law.
Now Robin Hood was a great Earl's son,
a man of high degree -
But he hated the wrong and the greed of the strong,
so off to the woods ran he!
He hated the wrong and the greed of the strong,
so off to the woods ran he!

Big Little John was a man of his hands,
he was six foot six in his socks.
But to mighty men of wealth and lands,
he was scarce the worth of an ox.
The Squire caught him a-poaching,
and swore he would stretch his neck -
John knocked the Squire into Hellfire choir,
and off to the woods, by heck!
John knocked the Squire into Hellfire choir,
and off to the woods, by heck!

*

Old King Dick with the wild beast's heart
Was roaring in the South,
His glory fed with the poor boy's bread,
And the mite from the widow's mouth,
Poor paynim boys to slaughter,
And exalt the Holy Rood -
Rob took his taxes back to the land,
And God knows, that was good!

*

Fat Friar Tuck, he lived by his luck,
and he pushed it good and hard,
With wine and women and meat and song,
for Tuck was a Goliard.
To make him wear an hair-shirt,
and preach to the poor's annoy,
The Abbot and the Pope, they never had an hope,
so off to the woods with joy!
The Abbot and the Pope, they never had an hope,
so off to the woods with joy!

Lady Marianne was to wed a nobleman,
and his name was Gisborne Guy,
But she got a hot tip he was kinky for the whip,
and the housemaids on the sly.
And he liked his droit de seigneur,
and the screams in the long cornstalks -
So she off with his balls, and quits his halls,
and off to the woods she walks!
She off with his balls, and quits his halls,
and off to the woods she walks!

*

Old King Dick was a bit of a prick,
And Saladin stuffed him well,
So he took it on the wing, till a German king
Locked him up in a dungeon cell.
Young Prince John put the big squeeze on,
Till the bloody red ransom came.
It was nicked by the Hood, but it weren't no good -
Dick come back just the same!

*

The freest folk in England
then flocked to the greenwood hall,
To the Green Man and the Lady,
to fight for their rights and all.
The Sheriff's men would have undone them,
but found they could not prevail -
They got shot at by Scarlett, sat on by Tuck,
and satired by Allan-a-Dale.
They got shot at by Scarlett, sat on by Tuck,
and satired by Allan-a-Dale.*

Then the spears and swords of the knights and lords
come out for Robin Hood,
And he took it on the run, till a no-good nun
let out his dear heart's blood.
He shoots an arrow in the air,
we bury him where it flies -
The Church left the poor folk all in the lurch,
sing ho for a big surprise!
The Church left the poor folk all in the lurch,
sing ho for a big surprise!

*

Rob was slain: so soon was the maniac
By the Church anoint.
The arrow that smote the Lionheart's throat
Was his kingship's brightest point.
But the Green Man and the Lady
Will return when the need is most,
With a hey for the jolly fosters,
And a health to Robin's ghost!

(Mine's a pint!)

* Their fates don't improve when the song is sung quickly.

A Song of Stacey's

2011-09-01T18:40:00.000+01:00

"He never said he was a God..."
He never said he was a God: not that man, not that man,
Who caught the grey world like a boy’s ball,
And pitched it back, laughing, to you –
You, the pale flame before the dawn came.
Incomparable, fairest and best ,
Can you not warm me now?

They howl how they are Gods – all those lads, all those lads,
Who catch up our cities like glass lamps,
And smash them in flames on the stone –
Those boys with the parts of strong men.
I change my circle for a sphere of rule.
Will you not bring my cup?

I should think myself a Goddess – this old girl, this old girl –
If I caught your grey glance like a lover,
And pitched myself into your flame.
I would throw off the world like a worn dress.
Incomparable, phantom and lost,
You have put your damn foot through my lyre!

In the Kateverse, this is Joan Greycote's translation of a famous poem of antiquity: one of the last songs composed by the legendary Stateira Hetaira - much later dubbed 'Stacey the Singer' - during her brief tenure as tyrant of the Vesper Isles.

In our world, Stateira was mostly inspired by Sappho, though they are not really all that alike; and this poem, by one of the great Mytilenian's most famous compositions. Here is the burning original, with a whole firework-show of translations.

The tune, like most of Stateira's and all of Sappho's, has been lost; which first is fortunate from my point of view as the author, since I am certainly not competent to compose even a shadow of it.

The lady being addressed is Incomparable Cleïs, consort of Stateira's friend and sponsor, all-conquering Emperor Cassander.

In our world, Sappho's mother and daughter are both supposed to have been called Cleïs. In the Kateverse, 'Stacey' and 'Cleyse' are not related nor even, in life, particularly close; and the missing muse is at least a generation Stateira's senior. But as the shades and bloody clouds close in, the poet remembers a young girl's vision of Aphrodite come down to joke and dance with the throng, in days of terror and delight when all things good or evil seemed possible, and not the long murdering night only.

Joan Greycote was probably an associate of Rogatyn de Ville, who more or less answers to our Villon.

The Barnyards of Delgaty

2011-08-30T09:13:00.003+01:00

I was taught a sanitized version of this Scottish bothy ballad at primary school. One of the less comprehensible parts of the sanitary process involved respelling it 'Delgatee' and relocating it from Aberdeenshire to East Anglia. Whaaa?

Lyrics here, via Rampant Scotland's song page.

Brother Nerd, Sister Geek

2011-08-29T06:58:00.003+01:00

Via Fred Clark on Slacktivist, College Humor have a video out on YouTube positing that Religious People Are Nerds. Fred, who is both a religious person and a self-styled nerd, thinks it's true, funny, and even making an important point that goes way beyond the reach of its slapstick. Here we go:

I am, of course, as much a nerd as the next gunner on the canon crew. I can tell you anything you should somehow want to know about Castamir's rôle in the Kinslaying, or Traken sociology, or the several myths hung upon the rainy Pleiades. This definitely makes me a nerd within the meaning of the act, to which I can only respond: Preach it, brother!

Unlike Fred, I am an infidel nerd, a passionate agnostic. But after I watched this video, something interesting occurred to me.

I can also tell you - not necessarily anything, but almost certainly more than, you want to know - about the homoousion and what happened when an iota got into it, or the fire of Tertullian, or the fannish speculations around those sinister goings-on in the land of Nod. Yes, I was born into a rootedly Christian culture, and there is no good reason for my unbelief to make Christian things alien to me. But these are things that most Christians, in my experience, neither know, nor suffer any significant deprivation thereby.

There is only one possible conclusion. I am a bit of a religious nerd in general, and an enormous Christian nerd in particular.

Truly, these men and women are my neigh-

Excuse me. Must rush off now.

Jehovah's Witness at the door!

Charles Johnson on Free-Market Anti-Capitalism

2011-08-25T08:19:00.007+01:00

Some excellent guest blogging going on at Bleeding Heart Libertarians from Charles "Rad Geek" Johnson - on the governmental oppression and public injustice at the roots of Capitalism As She Is Spoke, and the great moats of bullshit in which her defenders and opponents alike are wont to flounder:

Libertarian Anticapitalism

I’m Against Free Trade Agreements Because I’m For Free Trade

One of the good bits about these articles is the high general calibre of the discussion in the comments, with responses running the gamut from right-wing anarcho-capitalism to a sternly statist leftism. BHL in general is distinctly academically oriented, which has its own drawbacks but certainly cuts down on the noisemaking and trollery.

Johnson's philosophy is not exactly mine, but it drinks in a lot of the same boozers.

More Anarchism, Please - Less Anarchy, Thanks!

2011-08-23T07:56:00.006+01:00

Anarchists are widely unpopular, because of a pervading suspicion that they are for some reason in favour of anarchy. Since people seldom notice anarchy around them except when it expresses itself as rioting mobs, feuding warlords, and/or general social collapse, they understandably dislike it quite a lot.

So, not being complete looneys, do most anarchists. This is because anarchists who are not looneys are committed to anarchism much more than they are eager for anarchy. There is quite a big difference.

Full-spectrum anarchy is easily, if often bloodily, achieved in any given society. One simply, and simplistically, smashes existing bosses without replacing their authority.

Anarchism is a much harder project, necessarily approached much more with words than with swords. Just as monarchism is the not entirely satisfactory attempt to solve social problems by putting them all in the hands of a hereditary boss or king, anarchism is the commitment to solve social problems without benefit of any bosses whatsoever.

Getting those solutions up and running, and persuading people to buy into them - in a word, making the bosses unnecessary - has got to come before smashing the bosses, or even forcing them all to storm off in a snit. Otherwise, what you invite is merely a gloves-off scramble amongst the powered-up dregs of society to become the New Boss. Unless the Old Boss was very bad indeed, that is only going to be the same old same old, with a double order of mayhem and blood ketchup on the side. You know, pretty much like your bog-standard progressive or reactionary revolution on the pro-government side. Everybody who responds with, "Do. Not. WANT!" is absolutely right to do so.

In a society which is already successfully anarchist, anarchy will no longer be anything to fear.

But in a society which is, for example, basically monarchist in its customs, institutions, and instincts, anarchy will be simply sacking the king, and then getting trampled into the mud as the dukes duke it out all over us.

In today's corporate republics, the likely tramplers would be big corporations, religious crusaders, organized criminals, and orphaned security forces. And we would still have government at the end of it - more government, and worse government, in most places. The painstaking, backbreaking, kindly toil of the working anarchist - feeding the hungry mouth, filling the hopeless heart, teaching the defenceless body emergency first aid and krav maga, and so forth - is not yet ripe for the harvest, if it will ever be so. It is barely even begun.

This is the reason why, though philosophically every bit as much of an anarchist as Mahatma Gandhi, I usually call myself a libertarian. I think that dominance hierarchies in general, and government by sovereign bosses in particular, are abominably rotten solutions to almost any problem imaginable. But we have yet to see stable anarchist solutions emerge, and we have yet to convince practically anyone that they are even desirable. Those jobs are going to have to be pretty well accomplished before a dream of anarchy can bloom into anything in the waking world but the red flames of terror.

We will know when and if anarchism has really got to grip with its defining problems, when we start hearing conversations like this down the pub:

MILDER: It's total anarchy in the streets today! Nice, innit?

MULDER: Yeah. Mind you, it was absolute government after the Chelsea game on Saturday!

Adam Smith Is Angry

2011-08-16T07:48:00.005+01:00

Today's Goat Quote arrives via a specially splenetic post from Kevin Carson, who is characteristically unimpressed with pro-corporate politicians' pretensions to champion - or even to tolerate - anything resembling a free market.

To their complaints that their usefully acquisitive rich pals are being oppressed and envied all over the shop, Carson offers this alternative estimate of them from the Father of Free-Market Thinking himself, in the much-cited and seldom-read 'Bible of Capitalism':

All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.

- Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book III, Chapter IV.

The Invisible Hand of the market is fine by me. But it would be well for the rich bloke trying to pick my pocket on the sly, to understand that he is not what I mean by it!

Dies Irae, Dies Iller

2011-08-12T12:43:00.003+01:00

From the Wikipedia article on Thomas of Celano's great plainchant Dies Irae, I have found myself being wickedly astray, according I suppose to the predestined doom of all goats:

It turns out that the notorious Ambrose Bierce - author, amongst other works, of the spectacularly cynical Devil's Dictionary - once found himself moved to commit the following translation from Carcosa. Via The Poor Blogger:

Dies Irae (trans. Ambrose Bierce):
Day of Satan's painful duty!
Earth shall vanish, hot and sooty;
So says Virtue, so says Beauty.

Ah! what terror shall be shaping
When the Judge the truth's undraping--
Cats from every bag escaping!

Now the trumpet's invocation
Calls the dead to condemnation;
All receive an invitation.

Death and Nature now are quaking,
And the late lamented, waking,
In their breezy shrouds are shaking.

Lo! the Ledger's leaves are stirring,
And the Clerk, to them referring,
Makes it awkward for the erring.

When the Judge appears in session,
We shall all attend confession,
Loudly preaching non-suppression.

How shall I then make romances
Mitigating circumstances?
Even the just must take their chances.

King whose majesty amazes,
Save thou him who sings thy praises;
Fountain, quench my private blazes.

Pray remember, sacred Saviour,
Mine the playful hand that gave your
Death-blow. Pardon such behavior.

Seeking me, fatigue assailed thee,
Calvary's outlook naught availed thee;
Now 'twere cruel if I failed thee.

Righteous judge and learnèd brother,
Pray thy prejudices smother
Ere we meet to try each other.

Sighs of guilt my conscience gushes,
And my face vermilion flushes;
Spare me for my pretty blushes.

Thief and harlot, when repenting,
Thou forgavest--complimenting
Me with sign of like relenting.

If too bold is my petition
I'll receive with due submission
My dismissal--from perdition.

When thy sheep thou hast selected
From the goats, may I, respected,
Stand amongst them undetected.

When offenders are indited,
And with trial-flames ignited,
Elsewhere I'll attend if cited.

Ashen-hearted, prone and prayerful,
When of death I see the air full,
Lest I perish too be careful.

On that day of lamentation,
When, to enjoy the conflagration,
Men come forth, O be not cruel:
Spare me, Lord--make them thy fuel.

Bad, bad man.

If Only, and Also -

2011-08-04T15:25:00.004+01:00

One of my long-term favourite blogs is Teresa & Patrick Nielsen Hayden's Making Light - a mostly-fannish, mostly-liberal watering-hole, around which the most amazingly various, erudite, and just plain convivial community of guests and commenters has grown up. This has not occurred, or been maintained, by accident.

As a libertarian, no less than as somebody who lives in the world among men and women, I'm deeply interested in the nature, care, and feeding of voluntary communities. Making Light, in its long and mostly distinguished avoidance of the classical failure modes of online society, has often given me much nourishing food for thought on these matters. Also, it is a good deal of fun.

The fun and the community mechanics of this fluorosphericity are now combined in a highly recommended virtuoso thread, begun by ML moderator Abi Sutherland when she reposted an exchange between her and Chris Clarke for the public benefit. The topic was web social dynamics. The medium was pastiche of classic poetry. The result was absolutely bloody hilarious, especially when the regular commenters began responding to this soft and unmistakable sound of a gauntlet landing on the dusty ground. Read! Read! Read it all!

Unlike Abi, and several of the other Regular Light Cavalry, I'm not capable of improvising poetry at a conversational pace, even online. In the course of the festivities, though, I did manage eventually to scrape together my own thoughts on these things into a suitable form. I'm quite proud of the result, which I repost herebelow. My point of departure is an old favourite of mine, Rudyard Kipling's now legendary If -.

If Only -
If you can keep your shit when all about you
Are losing theirs like senna-scarfing fools,
If when goodwill and patience have run out, you
Can plainly keep, nor lawyer, common rules;
If you can pause before the fatal posting,
Or lacking context, won't give way to rage,
Or having beef, take counsel before roasting,
And yet don't come it like the Web's Great Sage:

If you can draw - and not draw just for eyeballs;
If you can link - and not make links your aim;
If you can comment justly till the sky falls,
And, heaven-scarred, rise up, nor rise in flame;
If you can dare admit your heart's truth spoken
Slipped in your hand to slice a harmless face,
And neither double down, nor slink off broken,
But make amends with gallantry and grace;

If you can take your hard-won reputation
And chance it on a very devil's choice,
And weather patiently all indignation
Before you'll channel someone else's voice;
If you can drive off dolt and bore and spammer
With gnome or weeding-hoe or witty verse;
If you can make like Thor with your ban-hammer
With those who only speak to make sound worse;

If you can take young trolls and show them reason,
Or shine with stars - nor grow too high and proud,
Or ride your hobby-horse, but in good season;
If passion moves your posts, BUT NONE TOO LOUD;
If you can fill the Infinite September
With thirty days of making song and light,
Yours is a gaff its guests shall long remember,
And - which is more - pls lnk t my cl st.

Many thanks to Mr Kipling, and to Abi and the whole Fluorospherical crew, for supplying the inspiration and the occasion between them!

Calpurnia Janowick's Song

2011-08-01T11:33:00.009+01:00

Calpurnia Janowick's Song
Our loved ones blow away upon the wind.
They are reborn into this world by grief.
We miss them, know them, taste them, take them in,
Until with each surrender, every known goodbye,
They mould the soul and body of our selves
A little more to them, to that we loved:
With every sorrow we embrace, they learn
To live again - dear love, to live again!

In empty worlds of babble and bad books,
Grief is a healthy stage, a psychic purge,
A blister burst, a mental enema -
A dark leg of our Journey to ourselves;
And these are true words, love, and they bring death.
Grief is not shameful, not a test, a trip,
Nor least of all, salubrious exercise!
When grief becomes a duty or a phase,
Each true, specific sorrow comes off cheap,
And one we love haunts us and hurts no more -
And they are not reborn, oh, love! are not reborn
Into the coward, lost and empty souls
Churned out by shrinking therapies and writers of bad books.
A lesson comes, a homily, then pull-together time:
The bitterest belittled, we can share a tasteless sweet.

Taste all my sweets, beloved, as I would taste all yours.
Weep. Walk. Sing. Curse. Laugh, cry, mind no reason
Except these reasons, means, ends: You, and I,
And life again, dear love - our life again!
And joy, my love, forever: joy, grief, joy.

Don't ever wear a mask, my love; nor suffer me
To hide my tenderness away from you,
But let us court and love until the dark,
And, dancing soul to soul, you in me, I in you,
Do all and all that mortal we may do,
To be reborn, my love - to be reborn!

This is a real poem from a fictional book: King Sorrow, by Lena Rushwell.

Lena is a major secondary character in a very long and overstuffed SF novel which I was writing through ~~2001~~ 1996 [Good gravy! Time flies!], before it finally ran into the sand - teaching me several important things about rhythm and plot in the process. She is a far better storyteller (and, mostly, a nicer human being) than I am ever likely to be; and her voice is not much like mine, though on a very good day I can sort of emulate her in short bursts.

After my grandad died, I had neither words, nor any tears that did me much good, until Lena tapped me on the shoulder and insisted on writing this through me. I have no idea of what its context may be in King Sorrow. In Lena's world, she is writing this shortly after her ex-lover has been mindblasted into a coma by a phenomenon in which she most militantly does not believe, under circumstances which she strongly suspects she helped set up.

There is the material for several books in the Kitchen Sink Yarn, one or more of which I may someday excavate from the general rubble. Had I but world enough and time... Still, I should like to work with Lena again, if I could ever arrange a clear shot at it.

Her other novels are Turkish Stone, a lyrical eco-thriller which I have neither the desire nor the skill to write; and Camilla Kinnison's Dance, a literary space-opera and sequel to E E 'Doc' Smith's classic Lensman series, which I very much wish I could write, and about which I may possibly know more detail than is entirely good for me.

A Tale of Katy in the Night

2011-07-30T09:42:00.008+01:00

From Charles Newbury's Fairy Tales from the Old Marches, written some short centuries after the events of Three Katherines of Allingdale:

"...I do not say, that if a very good Child shall break the bread of Drizzle Mill today, she shall find stars in it; nor that if a very bad one durst climb Featherhowe without his Parents' leave, his hopes and dreams shall now burst out of his heart to find them better nests to dwell in. For in the World's grey age we are grown mighty sagacious and wise; and by once learning to lug dirty coals in a fire-wagon, we prove at once that nobody ever outraced the wind on a yellow mare, nor made the sea that is the sky break in thunder upon our daily hills.

"As for the Good Witch Katy, the hero or helper of so many of these tales, the learned Doctors will say now that she was one person, next that she was two or three; again that she never lived, or else that she must have been only the wise Dame Catriona Tynde, and here is the address where the tradesmen's bills found her. On nothing will they agree, save that she was not a Witch; or if she was, she was not Good; and in any case she did not amend everything, because nothing can ever be amended. And who grows old and schoolmasterly enough, he may search their dusty books all his life and hope to judge the right of it.

"But for myself, I confess very simply that there is an Elfland, and that stars shine out of loaves of bread, and hopes take wing out of broken hearts - which great courage and grace unlooked-for may yet amend in time. These things the old Wives and rambling Storytellers of the East Country remember, if more respectable Folk do not; and for those yet young and simple of soul I have collected the best of these ancient tales and fashioned them politely, so that the charms and wisdom in them shall not remain the Peasant's portion only. For as the other tale reminds us, Gentlefolk have neglected charm and wisdom once before - and rains of red coals we then got for it.

"These small tales are not that stern tale. They are only my own poor mortal door to Elfland that is eternal; and in She who weaves in and out of them, I venture that Young and Old alike may find their best and safest Guide to that fairest and most perilous of countries.

"Charles Newbury, Esq.,
Latham, 1684 Anno Victoris Orbis."

A Tale of Katy in the Night
Hush, my little darling,
And back to bed you creep!
"The Red Fox rides the sallow Moon
And hunts me through my sleep!"

A comet's not a fox, my love.
The Moon is not her horse.
"But Lackland with his dead stag's head
Comes storming through the gorse!"

You sleep in down, not gorse, my love.
Who was not, will not come.
"But frightful Fireguard calls me back -
Oh, hear her devil's drum!"

Your heart is not a drum, my love,
Nor you a knight of old,
But if you cuddle quiet and close,
You'll hear the tale told

How one kind careful serving-girl
Did master all the three -
So if you chance to dream again,
You'll be as brave as she!

*

"Hush, my darling mother -
It's off to bed I go
To dream I walk with Katy in
The lands of long ago!"

"All Things Coming Home"

2011-07-29T09:40:00.007+01:00

Now fully into the terminal Bonfire Arc of Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland. This was supposed, from the beginning, to be one chapter of Kate's final personal and political showdown in Alland, followed by a chapter of my united protagonists' showdown with the Big Bad. Details had already been much modified by circumstances.

But the rhythm has also been modified, now I come up to it, by the much-changed rhythm of the overall tale. A structure that was reasonable in an eight-chapter novella is not necessarily transferable to a two-dozen-chapter novel. Also, after the clash and fury of the fall of Carrowglaze, it makes neither emotional nor practical sense to hop directly to a dinner-date with Nemesis. Lastly - though this story has always been about things done by and for ordinary people, with and without heroes - it has grown in the telling to be much more about the secondary and tertiary characters themselves, from its original sharp focus on the larger-than-life Kate and Luke.

For all of these reasons, it wasn't too surprising that I found myself devoting a chapter to the aftermath of the rebels' victory, or using it to bring onstage some of the stuff I'd previously meant only to summarize in the epilogue.

And so a descending chapter of mists, and squawling kicky children, and the clatter of the Great Chain of Being falling link-cut onto the rocks below the Green Hill. In a world where certain stars really have shot madly from their spheres to put their spokes in, the aristocrats' survivors can't very well be blamed for feeling that the joint order of natural and civil law is being overthrown in mere apocalypse, and chaos in every sense is truly coming again. Nor the great majority of their conquerors, for feeling on a similar basis that a new heaven and a new earth is much more nearly within their grasp than is ever humanly possible, even on the marches of Elfland.

E M W Tillyard's The Elizabethan World Picture has been an invaluable resource for me in wrapping my head around some of the fundamental assumptions with which Kate and her contemporaries were raised, though they haven't imbibed their version from either Christianity at all or Greek philosophy as such. I wish I'd come across it a lot sooner.

In this chapter it is also seen how there are other militant rejectionists among the common people than those who look to the Good Witch Katy; and that even worse systems than divinely-sanctioned aristocracy can be arranged for, if only a body will try hard enough.

But all that is Luke's problem for now. Old Kate of Fairfields - once the masterful Golden Margravine of Alland, and now the Northdale revolutionaries' Grey Wolf in the Red Gloaming - is coming home for the last time to the castle where she was born; and her long lifetime's worth of chickens flies shoulder-close behind her.

What I didn't expect was that now I'd need to jump back in time, and spend another chapter setting up her reception from the point of view of her friends and foes at Garcastle. This, though, is what it will take, to make the final confrontation work.

As Kate and Luke have come to discover over the course of this story, it really isn't all about them any more.

Foundationhead

2011-07-04T20:48:00.006+01:00

Books I Will Very Probably Neither Read Nor Write III... the Search for Shame!

Foundationhead

The United Stars of Amalthea Were Falling!

For twelve thousand years, Man had proudly straddled the Milky Way Galaxy, dominating a million million worlds through a brilliantly uncompromising Code handed down unchanged¹ from the U**A's arch-human First Founder.

But nothing lasts forever. The glaucous telempathic hordes of the Magellanic Clouds are swarming over the space border, diluting the values that made Amalthea great in an unstoppable flood™ of groupthink and irresponsibly menial labour. The Honest Engine Insurance Co. - once the bouncy rubber backstop of the enterprise society that went boldly where no men had gone before – has degenerated into a vast populist pyramid scheme, looting ever more cheekily where no bugger ever bugged a businessman erenow. The once-proud Überdollar is now printed on perforated rolls, its promise to pay present gold replaced by a Union adjuration to wash one's hands after use. The anthropoid termites have gnawed their way through the Founder's edifice at last!

One woman's searing vision pierces the clouds of complacency, and sees through to the thousand-year Long Night of barbarism ahead. One woman - Doctor Professor Mirandola Raven – sets up two Galactic Gullies, hidden from the incompetent and the ill-willing, to which the few brave and able spirits abiding in the Union shall withdraw. By these heroic 'Gullivers', via her meticulously detailed Great Blueprint, must the Second Foundation of Civilization be accomplished!

The price will be high – a Long Night extended to 30,000 years by the withdrawal of every soaring soul who can tie their own shoelaces without instructions in triplicate from a superior. But 'Doc' 'Prof' 'Randy' Raven has the moral courage to impose it.

Do YOU have the moral courage to read of it?

In this mighty epic of the Gullivers' first millennium, thrill along with the bold men, passionate women, and uplifted wolverines who hectically trade, fight, orate, and dynatomite their way towards a ruggedly handsome tomorrow – relying only on wit, vision, might, and ravishingly didactic AI emulations of Doctor Professor Raven her ineluctable self!²

Will Mankind ever be free to follow her soaring and intricate master-plan to the unprintable limits of liberty?

¹ You Will Be Free!, 57pp, $30 hardback, available separately from all bookshops of validly independent judgement. Buy It = Because.

² Objectively Verified Solutions to Raven Crises, #1-16 – full texts separately available, cloth binding, $20 ea.

AND DON'T MISS: Coming soon, Objectively Verified Solution to Raven Crisis #17: So, Plagiarists Perverted Your Terraforming Protocol?

Arab Spring, Western Fail

2011-06-29T05:43:00.001+01:00

Books I Will Very Probably Neither Read Nor Write II... the Reflux!

ARAB SPRING, WESTERN FALL

or

Eurabia If You Want To!

"But... but...!" spluttered curvaceous, blonde, adorably liberal ace reporter Lola Langsam, wondering in a treacherous corner of her mind how this infuriating bigot could possibly look so hunksome at half past arsed o'clock into the sadcase shift at the Turk's Head. "The Arab peoples are rising up at last, and seizing democracy, freedom, and equality for themselves! What's not to like?"

"Indeed... Ms... Langsam." He allowed a flash of martial amusement to cross his saturnine countenance. Damn, but these leather-jacketed beer-connoisseur polymaths old enough to be my father are hot! Concentrate, Lola, damn you! You're not a woman tonight, you're a professional! "And have you ever considered... who they're seizing it from? And why they might want to do that?"

"W-why," she stammered uncertainly, "from the dictators, surely...?"

"Come, come, you know better than that. They don't have those things - they couldn't, and still boss their rackets. Cut the PC, girl - think!"

The truth detonated in her brain like an incontinent suicide bomber. "From - from us?!?"

"Yes, Ms Langsam. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. Once we've exported all our values to North Africa - where, by the way," he waved his hand jovially, "history says they don't work - we won't have any left for ourselves! That's when their fifth column here will go to work, and at that point - " He smiled his cocky (stop that!), infuriating, mercurial smile, " - it's game over for us, nice civilization you had there, see you Dhimmi! Still," he added, with an openly venereal flash of his eyes, whose precise effect on Lola was unprintable even in a modern and realistic techno-thriller, "I'm sure you'd look charming in harem pants!"

"Knickers to that!" she flared spiritedly, but quickly sobered. "But, Mr... Dick... if they can do that... however can we beat them?"

"That's the hard part," said Richard Large, rising, and tossing off the remains of his Mangold's Old Weaselwaxer with nonchalant ease. "A few places - like this - are still safe. The volatilized ethanol repels them. But we haven't got much time, and there's only one way to stop the flood. What we've got here is a plain old case of Intellectual Property Theft, and there's only ever been one answer to that!"

"You mean - " She faltered, but set her jaw and willed herself to accept the starkly inevitable. "Lawyers?!"

"Nope," he said. "Good old-fashioned DRM. And that's where you come in... Lola!"

"But... but... Dick, you know that only works pre-release, on digital media you already control!" She struggled to contain her tempestuous disappointment. "Even then, it's trivially breakable! As everybody knows, back in the Noughties, when Sony - "

"Teach your grandmother to suck eggs, Lol!" he cracked. "That's true in classical computing. What we need here is nonlocal effects - lock down one copy of an idea, lock all. And that means - "

"Quantum computing!" she shot back, with unerring womanly intuition. "But that means - !" she added, with the quick Celtic insight of her exotic Galician grandmother - !

His grin was mad, bad, and dangerous to know. "Got it in one, doll," he gloated, his Wylfa-mutated Holyhead dialect breaking through his mask of urbane manly cosmopolitanism and all those jobses. "Professor Layla Ali, your old - friend - from college." Lola felt herself blush a charming scarlet. And those Roger Moore eyebrows of his, don't get me started! "If anything can do the job, it's her QT69I Entanglatron - and if anybody in this rotten can of beans can find her, it's you. We've got seventy-two hours before critical moral field collapse in Paris. Are you... in with me?"

"Yes," she breathed, almost breathlessly. "Dick, Dick, Dick, I'd rather die than live in some horrid patriarchy! And Layla can't have changed so - she isn't like the others - we'll both be in with you, all the way, I know it!" He channelled Roger Moore again. She wondered if she could ever, ever get tired of that. "No!" she warned spunkily. "Don't even think about it!"

But her vivid memories of mysterious, perverse, hot-blooded Layla, and that quick Celtic second sight again, were thrilling wicked premonitions across her nerves, like the sort of dream it would be deeply inappropriate to even admit to having - let alone seeing pp236-249, thereafter passim.

Ignoring temptation, all business now, she click-clacked on her D4X5 hyperresilin-tipped Jimmy Choos to the back exit, ahead of the wolfish Welshman. Outside in the Official Dirty Nasty Smoking Losers' dustbin alley, they paused. The odour of discarded kebab, now redolent of a new and sinister spectrum of terrors, rose up to challenge her proudly flaring nostrils.

"We'll skewer 'em yet!" she quipped. "Let's takedown some Barbary IP Pirate!"

Not That Old Gag Again!

2011-06-24T11:31:00.002+01:00

Frank La Rue, the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression, has been lambasting

the ways in which States are increasingly censoring information online, namely through: arbitrary blocking or filtering of content; criminalization of legitimate expression; imposition of intermediary liability; disconnecting users from Internet access, including on the basis of intellectual property rights law; cyberattacks; and inadequate protection of the right to privacy and data protection.

- UN General Assembly, Human Rights Council, Report of the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression.

My emphasis and in-text links. The disconnection agenda, in particular, is being chiefly promoted by politicians and IP-owner groups in nominally free countries - unless we count its recent shotgun implementation by certain genocidal tyrants tottering in the wind of the Arab Spring.

The BBC reports the following knee-jerk response from the UK Government to the appearance of its own Digital ~~Enclosure~~ Economy Act in Mr La Rue's sights:

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport said that "there are counter-balancing rights, including to Intellectual Property, and Government must set the balance in a fair and proportionate way", pointing out that another basic right - the right to own property - is being flouted when copyrights are broken in this way.

Pointing out, my pointy end!

If I have a right not to be libelled in a newspaper, it does not follow that I have the right to take away their access to printing presses by accusing them of writing naughtiness. If I have a right to walk down the street without some wanker following me and screaming "Wanker!" at me, it does not follow that I have the right to demand that the nearest copper padlock a gag over anybody's mouth. Nor does any noise a Government makes about 'defending my rights' give them any business at all to start the press-smashers or gob-stoppers rolling.

The Government that asserts its sovereign right to shut its people up on the say-so of its cronies, is the Government that's telling its people that the time for talking is past.

As President "Democracy is Governments conquering the Internetz lol!" Sarkozy himself sees very clearly where the beam is not in his own eye, that's bound to end up well for everybody!

I think it is going to be better for everybody if we Just Keep Talking. Mr La Rue's report is a timely reminder to the members of the Masters' Club who commissioned it - and none so bad a point of departure, for the rest of us who want to deliver our own.

And lest we forget, some of the goodies in this tussle:

UK: Open Rights Group
USA (and international): Electronic Frontier Foundation

As a Brit, and sort of a computer guy into the bargain, it's probably past time I did something useful for the former. Let this be the occasion!

Billy Boy Rocks: Farai Chansoneta Nueva

2011-06-23T20:12:00.004+01:00

Oh, wow! H/t Dr Richard Scott Nokes at Unlocked Wordhoard:

Attributed to the early troubadour Guilhèm de Peitieus, that is Guillaume de Poitiers or Duke Guillame IX d'Aquitaine - though it is alleged to represent such a change of direction towards courtly love from his previous fratboy spirit, that its authenticity has been questioned.

Is this good, or what?

To a Mistress Dying

2011-06-22T08:04:00.004+01:00

This one has always sent cold thrills running down my spine since I first met it.

To a Mistress Dying

by Sir William Davenant
Lover.
YOUR beauty, ripe and calm and fresh
As eastern summers are,
Must now, forsaking time and flesh,
Add light to some small star.

Philosopher.
Whilst she yet lives, were stars decay'd,
Their light by hers relief might find;
But Death will lead her to a shade
Where Love is cold and Beauty blind.

Lover.
Lovers, whose priests all poets are,
Think every mistress, when she dies,
Is changed at least into a star:
And who dares doubt the poets wise?

Philosopher.
But ask not bodies doom'd to die
To what abode they go;
Since Knowledge is but Sorrow's spy,
It is not safe to know.

Sir William Davenant (~1606 - 1668) was a poet, playwright, and theatrical producer of much colour and adventure. The actual godson and tenuously rumoured natural son of Shakespeare, he became Poet Laureate in 1638; got into all the political trouble you could shake a ramrod at through his activities in the king's cause during the Civil War; staged purportedly the first English opera, The Siege of Rhodes, in his house during the height of the Puritan ascendancy; and was still writing and producing in full spate shortly before his death. John Dryden collaborated with him, and later succeeded him as Laureate, for whatever that particular bay may be worth.

It seems to me that there is a lot going on in this poem, beneath its conventionally morbid surface, and the more often I read it, the more humane ironies and sinister ambiguities I find myself reading into it.

Is it really the lover, or the philosopher, who is nearer feeling the woman's death as a catastrophe just like his own?

Of Necessary Words, and Words Needless

2011-06-17T10:46:00.009+01:00

Fred Clark, the excellent liberal Christian blogger and hellhound-shooer who writes at Slacktivist, has posted a particularly fine article on the uses and abuses of evangelism, Use Words If Necessary. It has plenty to say that holds just as good even for readers who, like me, are no flavour of Christian at all, and dislike being 'evangelized' quite a lot. A taster, from the sub-sections:

1. Evangelism is hospitality.
"Hospitality means opening up your life to share it with others..."

2. Evangelism requires relationship.
"Without relationship, it’s not really evangelism, merely sales..."

3. Listen.
"Like improv, evangelism is usually more about listening than it is about talking..."

4. Your story is not an argument.
"...the only way to tell a better story and still have it be your story is to start living a better story..."

5. Disciples, not merely converts
"'Therefore go and convert all nations,' Jesus did not say... He spent three years working to make 12 disciples and, for all that, he still only had a success rate of 91.6 percent..."

Pure brilliance. Really worth reading, for anybody who ever feels the urge to convince anybody else on any of the Big Questions at all.

And I fancy these rules might apply to political enthusiasms, no less than to religious ones.

Yes, there is an obvious problem with this. Since politics is ultimately about dominance structures and who gets - or doesn't get - to coerce whom, there are clear issues with making oneself as vulnerable on that territory as Clarkian evangelism would seem to require. And there is undoubtably something squicky about the idea of treating politics more like a religion than it tends to get treated already.

But might that instinct not just be putting the cart before the horse?

Might the very problems Clark tilts at in Use Words not be better described as, "Religion's getting a pass for treating itself far too much like politics, already?"

Welcome. Community. Listening. Honesty. - And that final special quality which I find hard to put one word to, but which cares more to kindle a kind of agency, than to foster a kind of compliance. Aren't these fair starting-points for trying to spread ideas about how fellow-humans might, in fact, successfully live together?

I'm a libertarian, for Pete's sake! I partake in a movement which is supposed to be all about agency, persuasion, diversity of mind, and humility of method. And then I read an article like this, and I think about the approaches I see and hear used to promote my ideals. Or some of those I've employed myself.

I measure the one against the other, and find the comparison just the tiniest bit sobering.

The Last Chant of Black Mchachi

2011-06-15T11:07:00.011+01:00

A Kateverse poem rather than a song, in that there is no melody associated with it. This one has a very definite author: the Melandran mercenary champion known to Luke as Black Mchachi, who fought and fell beside him and El Alegroso at the fatal battle of Dazaama Beach. There's a suggestion in Killer-Kate that he knew her before this - not necessarily from conflicts in which they were on the same side.

One very cartoony way to look at the Dazaama backstory is as follows: Don Quixote leads a Spanish/Moorish alliance against the Satanist slavers of Carthage, but is betrayed by his countrymen in his hour of victory, and goes down fighting at impossible odds at the head of a small loyal following, led by a really dodgy Ivanhoe and a legendary sub-Saharan Amazon. That isn't any too close, but it's about as close as we're going to get without telling the full story - something I have no present plans to do. It's one of Luke's defining experiences during his long exile, however.

This is Mchachi's last chant before that battle - or rather, a second-hand translation of the 'Southron' she spoke it in, which is also not her native tongue. Several things emerge even through this filter. Firstly, as per my previous suspicions, not only is 'Black' just something unimaginative alt-Mediterranean types call her, but so is 'Mchachi' itself. Secondly, the subsequent ratfinkery of the allied Dons seems... not to have been something capable of surprising her. Thirdly, she's bringing a set of seriously foreign assumptions to the party, and some of the words used here plainly do not mean what we usually think they mean in English.

The Last Chant of Black Mchachi
"Big Black Girl," they call me, ohoú! ohoú!
Because I will not spill my name and my soul and my making
Like water over a dirty threshing-room floor.

I am the lioness who shakes off the dust.
My spear-arm bears up fifty muses.
My mind is a myriad knives.
By our blades are men's nations divided.

"Their death-wound," they call me, ohoú! ohoú!
Whenever I scrawl some red culture
On some hide that shall never be cured.

Last year I was stronger and swifter.
I have braided my hair with iron wires.
I will go with the greybeard against tiresome pawn-takers,
Before we have too much in common!

Drink my soul to the dregs, when you hear me.
I am – [you cannot say this] – bare-backed, shield-fronted, laughing last below Tanash,
Come to slake these hot sands of Dazaama.

"Big Black Girl," they called me, ohoú!
"Their death-wound," they call me, ohoú! ohoú!
"Dead," they will call me, ohoú! ohoú!
When I am the breath on the tongue of a spear.
- Let’s give them something to sing of.

'Melandra' is an almost content-free Northern geographical term meaning, more or less, 'Blackmansland'. The word here rendered as 'culture' could almost as well have been translated either 'inspiration' or 'civilization'. I still know only a very little about the particular civilization/inspiration/culture from which she hails, and practically nothing about its neighbours. Also, I am much too ignorant about several important real-world matters to yet see it save through the foggiest of airs, around the edges of my main story. It does have to be seen, though.

A last possible implication of the chant, which I quite like, is that one thing the champion prefers her actual intimates to call her is a close equivalent of 'Dusty'.

"Up Bill! Up Scythe!"

2011-06-14T09:25:00.005+01:00

The Battle of Carrowglaze and its aftermath is finished, and with it the Rising Arc of Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland.

This was a hard and horrid chapter to write. The book's rock bottom came in the middle of it, and only after crawling down to that could I race towards the ending. Light dawned this morning on the stricken field, and I and my heroes have seen all we and Katy have wrought.

Langdale is freed, and the heart of the lords' power there shattered forever. Indeed, the high farms of Langdalehead and the ragged margins of the mid-dale are almost Katy's country already. But Langdale was weakest as well as worst of the great Northdale lordships - and there has been such a price for it, in so many kinds of coin! Nobody but all folk's enemy can afford another such victory as this one.

So the Bonfire Arc begins, and the final triumph over both lordship and cavorting, ravening curse must be sought by means other than war. Stirring as the campaign has been, I think I shall not very much miss it.

Nor even shall trumpet-voiced blood-spattered Kate, who greets a new day unhoped-for with the first and last love of her life; and, for very ruth and pity, weeps her fill at last.

The Ballad of Clare the Crafty

2011-06-13T13:59:00.011+01:00

Sort of a Kateverse folksong, though it bears all the hallmarks of politically-aware courtly origins. Princess Clare the Crafty is Luke's brilliant diplomatist sister from The Deed of Katy Elflocks - a witty machiavel so sharp that whole careers have been based on waiting for her to cut herself, though few of them very long ones. This tells of the events about twenty years before Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland, which led to our heroes' separate downfalls back when they were rather more villainous than they are now. It is a terse, formalized, and highly romantic account of the scamathon/quest which led to Clare's being styled The Rescuer of Realms in later literature, and which I have utterly failed to get into story form ever. Her whereabouts at the time of the current tale are not known.

The Ballad of Clare the Crafty
I am a princess swift and keen
And unto you apply.
My brother’s bride is cast from court,
Since he was done to die.
And if that you will lend your aid,
Your curse I'll soon decay.
"O I will ward your tender friend,
But you must ride away!"

I am a princess bold and wise
And do your grace beseech.
Your daughter's suitors waste your lands
And do your substance leech.
So if to them you'll set my quest,
Their passions soon I'll spend.
"O first you must the wildfire tame
Before we call you friend!"

I am a princess sere with care
And cindered to my soul.
The dragon flies before my host –
My love, he lies a coal.
And I have set three peoples free,
And all their might I bring
To scour the witch from out our land,
And crown your son our King!

"The grocer's daughter I was born:
The Green Rose I will be,
And crown the King beneath my heart
With deeds deserving thee!
O Clare, as clear as morning air,
What sister such has been?
So royally hast thou sacrificed,
That men should call me Queen!"

Aye, royally Clare hath spilled her cup,
For Caroline our Queen!

Neither Clare nor Caro talk or think like this, but that's politics and praise-songs for you. The real Clare's most salient characteristic is probably her ability to checkmate you at chess, while you still think you are playing poker.

A Hero of Damascus (Now with Extra Tossweasel)

2011-05-04T08:40:00.005+01:00

After all the kerfuffle about a villain who died, here is Amina A.'s report of a hero who lived, from her blog A Gay Girl in Damascus. (Hat tip: Michael O'Hare, at The Reality-Based Community.)

My father, the hero

Any further words from me are beside the point, except these: read it, that your heart should sing.

UPDATE 13/06/11: This story is not in fact true, being part of a long-running hoax perpetrated wholly or partly by one Tom MacMaster, whose aggressive bogo-apology upon being rumbled may be discovered here. Fuck you very much, Tommo!

H/T James Nicoll, who also provided links to the unmasking, and to the reactions of some of the people our ungay ungirl not in Damascus has, in fact, done a deal of no good to.

Bin Bag

2011-05-02T12:38:00.005+01:00

Osama bin Laden has finally listened to public opinion and gone to hell, with US military assistance. Or if he is as wrong about the existence of hell as he was about everything else, he has at least gone down to Davy Jones, to which his slayers immediately consigned his carcass - which made me wonder a bit, and has been explained thusly:

US media reports said that the body was buried at sea to conform with Islamic practice of a burial within 24 hours and to prevent any grave becoming a shrine.

I do not wish anybody, not even Osama bin Laden and his blood-mad acolytes, in hell; but I am glad he has vacated my planet, and I won't say that often about anybody.

This was, if truly reported, no mean deed and no bad one. It was also not remotely worth the endless stream of mean and bad deeds that have led up to it over the last decade. It's hard to see how anything could be - the killing of one beaten, hate-hollowed, crazy-crafty butcher is way down the scale of "good things to warp a world-spanning civilization around". But now at least it's done, may we also be excused the warping, and call off the re-enactment of the Soviet Union's suicide dive into Afghan occupations? In fact, may we please call off the rolling War on Randoms altogether?

Because if this won't serve as a marker for the West to flip its default mode back from permanent State of War Emergency to approximate civil peace, I can't imagine what would. Let it end here, with the rubbish just got rid of.

Bring my neighbours home. Leave the strangers alone. We're done, or we never will be.

The Wedding Song-and-Dance

2011-05-01T08:00:00.004+01:00

How should a genial Tortoise Anarchist celebrate the fact that a guy and a gal got married the other day, and most of us got a holiday out of it? Well, it is certainly better to shut everything down to celebrate the wedding of harmless folk, than it is for the more usual reasons of Imperial progress or plutocratic shock-and-awe. Moreover, I am quite the booster of marriage, and in these unstable times when its very existence across the Western world stands under threat from officious government meddling, I think we ought to call a greater Art than any of mine to its aid.

So here are some ladies having some proper Mayish fun, singing two epithalamia or wedding-songs and a free bonus hymn to Aphrodite, in a merry recreation of the heyday of their author, called the Tenth Muse: honey-smiling, violet-weaving Sappho of Mytilene.

Fair Baltimore, the Beautiful City

2011-04-28T21:47:00.006+01:00

This is the Hot Corn Band's excellent version of The Baltimore Fire, commemorating the devastation of that city in 1904. H L Mencken escaped becoming a crispy critter by a whisker. I first encountered this song on the awesome US/Canadian collaborative folk album, The McGarrigle Hour.

There is some doubt traditionally pretended as to whether the conflagration directly killed anybody at all; but although the death toll was remarkably low, the 'no dead' claim turns out to be very much of the "But few of any sort, and none of name" variety. No prizes for guessing the race of the charred corpse later pulled from the harbour - presumably dead of fright, or suicide, or independently spontaneous combustion, or something like that. Bah!

The great tragic fault shown up by this fire was the complete lack of standardization in firefighting equipment specs, so that neighbouring forces couldn't fit their equipments to Baltimore hydrants when they arrived to help. As I understand it, this seems to have been chiefly an issue of every local government laying down different specifications, with a side-helping of patent law abuse by certain equipment providers who thought their interest lay in mutual incompatibility with all competitors. After the resulting visit from Nemesis, a national standard was installed.

I know of nothing so numbingly fair and savagely terrifying as wildfire, and this song has always hit me at the very base of my spine.

The Last Courtship

2011-04-26T13:55:00.006+01:00

Kateverse folksong, whose protagonists are extremely loosely based on those of Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland, at the very beginning of that story. This one grew purely out of its music, as I came into work this morning. It seems to have been written some generations later, as its heroes begin to unravel into archetype and folk-memory.

Since my vocal rendition of it would be no kindness, I've embedded Emmylou Harris's version of Love Still Remains instead. The original and sublime version of that song is, by one of those phenomenal coincidences that would be scoffed at mercilessly in any story, due to a late great folksinger actually named Kate Wolf. Anybody less like Katherine the Golden of Alland - the Kate on this mountainside, later called the Grey Wolf in the Red Gloaming - it is very nearly impossible to imagine.

The Last Courtship

Kate was a beggar that housed on the hill.
The cold wind did whip her and the dewdrops did chill.
Up come a young man so strong and so fair.
He said, "Oh my Kate of the shining gold hair,
Come away, come away – come with me today!
For too long I’ve been gone, and too short did I stay.
Fly the years, fall the tears - nothing constant has proved
But your beauty, the same
As the first day I loved!"

Kate made her answer in mortal surprise:
"The long desert roads have flung sand in your eyes!
Steeped in old sin am I, shrivelled and tanned,
And my chaplet is changed for a murderer's brand.
I am old, I am grey, and my joints creak today,
And the damsel is dead that a prince bore away.
Full of years, dry of tears, little children I scare –
But the brave boy I loved
Has not changed by a hair!"

"Kate," cried the soldier, "how can you not know
My sinews are shrunken, my stride rusted slow?
Scar-striped and bloody from every foul feast
Of ravens, I'm grown less a boy than a beast.
Never say – never say, you are like me today!
You are all the light left, since my feet ran astray.
Full of youth, full of truth, is the ring in your voice –
And the rash lad you knew
Is repenting his choice!"

Kate led the soldier away by the hand.
Together they roved to a red sunrise strand.
Damsel undaunted took prince to her mate,
And his arms were unwithered that held golden Kate.
Gone away – gone away! Where they wander today,
By the bright stream or the black stream, no mortal may say.
Each to each, all in all, by the light of his eyes,
And the spring of her strength
Till the last of Spring dies.

Many variants (notably Killer-Kate Came Courting, in which she takes the initiative; The Spoilt Lovers, which leaves out the last verse; and Willy and Nancy, prevalent in the western counties, in which they are well on the way to becoming Generic Folksong Couple) are known in its native setting. A clear fossil of the original events is preserved accidentally in the ambiguous lyric

...And the damsel is dead that a prince bore away

which, read rightly, refers to the incident in The Deed of Katy Elflocks twenty years previously, where the Margravine Katherine carried the young Prince away a-horseback from an ignominious death. The reverse and more conventional reading of this line never, despite the dearest wishes of both heroes, in fact occurred.

The Gods in the Heather

2011-04-17T07:28:00.005+01:00

A Kateverse folksong, of Morgan the Man and his struggle with the would-be gods of Cassander's Diadochi. Bold, brilliant, insanely loyal and intoxicatingly charismatic; riddling and maddening; something like his culture's King Arthur, and just a bit like its Robin Hood... I still haven't got much more of a handle on him than his inheritors have twenty generations later. I did discover yesterday that the hostile and severely ill nation next door to his Morgander was founded by his favourite son, Rhuvawn. Morgan's pronounced allergy to deity seems to have taken an unfortunate turn there.

This song hints at where it came from.

The Gods in the Heather
August Lord Summer with piper and drummer
Preached he was God, at the point of his spear.
Otho Lord Winter said "Stick it right into
The place where no Sun shines, 'cause I'm the God here!"

Grey geese are flying, wild harps are crying.
Summer or Winter, to bow or to ban?
Sailor or Singer or Thunderbolt-Flinger?
Who will you worship now, Morgan the Man?

Morgan said, "Worship's in deeds that are manful.
Prayer is for ears that are dear in the night.
Who'd be a God, when the World-Winner would not?
I'll send 'em word with the goose-feather's flight!"

Red swords are falling, wild horns are calling,
Summer and Winter are trampling his tents.
All Gods together, they hunt him through heather -
Manhood in men must be mortal offence!

Morgan defeated, each God stabs his fellows,
Backwards and sideways, like such fellows do.
Deep in the valleys, mortality rallies,
And men come to Morgan in comradeship true.

Grey geese are flying, wild harps are crying.
August we reap, and old Otho we scan,
Flying through heather from grey goose's feather,
And good men together with Morgan the Man -
All men together with Morgan the Man!

Diadochi references:

August Lord Summer is the would-be Octavian/Augustus figure, the successor to Cassander's legionary general Romolo Aquila. He claimed to be the New Apollo.

Otho Lord Winter is an interpretation of the northern warlock-king associated with Mercury and Wednesday. This episode is conspicuously absent from his own myth-cycle.

'Sailor' is certainly the Navarch Phaon, alias Sailor Flash, who claimed to be the son and heir of Neptune.

'Singer' is probably Stateira Hetaira, alias Stacey the Singer. Famous poet and briefly tyrant in the far West, who loved Venus but never claimed to be Her. Long dead before the events of this song took place.

'Thunderbolt-Flinger' is Anthony Fulmen, alias Tony Thunderbolt and Ranty Tanty, who claimed to be Jupiter incarnate. Defeated by August, he fled far away to the South shortly before August, Otho, and their unspecified allies launched their holy alliance against the impertinently mortal Morgan.

"My Prince, We Are Coming."

2011-04-11T09:14:00.003+01:00

"Bill and scythe! Bill and scythe, and the grey wolf in the red gloaming!"

One of my hardest chapters has come to its end, and Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland is drawing to its close too. The next chapter is the fulfilment of the Rising arc, with the great and grievous battle before Castle Carrowglaze.

I'm not so happy with this first sketch of the way Kate rouses the demoralized rag-tag rebel army to its last fatal effort. The run-up to it was better than I'd hoped - Kate has changed so much, and she kindles such a different quality of loyalty now that she is herself such a blaze of it. She won over somebody I'd thought impossibly fireproof, almost by the way.

But precisely because she has changed in the living and the telling, the climactic scene stumbled for the vision I first had of it three years ago. Part of her rôle now belongs to Fiery Younger Sister, and there's another character who's hefted a much bigger part of the burden onto her slender shoulders than I'd looked for. Still, in the end, Kate's terrible speech lacks the clarion directness I need from it. It is divided and diverted between my new vision of it and the old ingrained one. There is no amending that until the whole tale is completed, and redrafted from the start in full knowledge of what she is and what she must become.

In the old story, this is the place where kindly sensible Katy Elflocks was wrong, and fell heroic Golden Kate was right at last. No longer so. This Kate knows that not only is Katy her true cause, but is enormously wiser than she is, even in this matter - and yet, because the people and times are what they are, the only way to save anything from disaster is her own cockeyed way. And this Kate is not grimly and righteously vindicated, but burning inwardly that it is her own stupid old tricks that must save both her new loves and her old.

So it is unexpectedly like Katy in the first of all their tales that she fares down into Langdale at last, with neither hope nor pride remaining, nor any need for either.

And to the Dull Tower Kate Fireguard came.

And the devil whistles the marching-tune, over the blue unremembered hills.

Three chapters and one epilogue to go.

Whene'er I Bib the Wine Down

2011-04-09T07:32:00.004+01:00

Whene'er I bib the wine down,
Asleepe drop all my cares.
A fig for fret,
A fig for sweat,
A fig care I for cares.
Sith death must come, though I say nay,
Why grieve my life's days with all affaires?

Come, bib we then the wine down
Of Bacchus faire to see;
For alway while we bibbing be,
Asleepe drop all our cares.

- Anacreonta xxv, translated for Duke Corsus's use in The Worm Ouroboros by E R Eddison.

PUBLICK HEALTHE ADVERTIZEMENT! A Doctor of Physick Saieth: This evill Counsell schol bring yowe naught but swift Frenzie, long sicknesse, and soddeyne DEATH with small Lamentation to yr Neighbors. Nor thinke to escape the Rioters' Penaltie through vild Sotte-Weed nor yet those mad Reefers! Yt is scarce endurable, livable, nother Sosteynable, O Prince, that sich Poysones be nott Taxed and Tayled to the arse-bone, for the better sustenaunce of Mee and my Leechis!

When the Smallest State Is the Worst State

2011-04-05T13:05:00.012+01:00

"L'État, c'est moi." - Louis XIV of France (allegedly).

Revolution, Baby!

2011-04-01T10:39:00.004+01:00

Shocked by the power of Charlie Stross's recent pithy debunking of libertarianism -

Arguments from libertarianism are as flawed as arguments from Leninism. (Both ideologies prescribe behaviour based on an elegant and consistent model of human behaviour and relationships ... which is, unfortunately, wrong.)

I have been forced to re-assess my beliefs from the ground up, and have ended with an even stronger conclusion than his. Leninism and libertarianism must be considered, in any really rigorous visualization of the Cosmic All, as the very same meta-ideology of social rationalism, with different starting assumptions. How shall we test these starting assumptions against one another? Obviously, in the marketplace of ideas. Now, Leninism in various forms has enthralled - and I do mean enthralled - literally billions of the world's bodies and minds over the last short century. Libertarianism is lucky to get three guys, no gal, and the pub cat to discuss easement rights over a pie and a pint at the Bricklayer's Arms every third Wednesday.

Clearly, then, if I believe in the power of rational self-interest as expressed by revealed preferences, I must concede that people reasonable enough to accept social rationalism more freely choose Leninism. So Leninism is more libertarian than libertarianism is, and if I am a real libertarian I must accept Leninism. But now I am a Leninist, I notice that social rationalism is an inviolate scientific historical truth, and that bourgeois revisionist attempts to undermine it must be tirelessly rebutted by megabytes of tiresome blogposts and truckloads of dialectically material machine-guns. So the inevitable political synthesis is for my recent leftward drift to culminate in the absolute subsumption of bourgeois libertarianism into proletarian democratic centralism with digital characteristics!

For the revolutionary, class consciousness only exists as expressed in decisive political action. Accordingly, this morning I joined the 2ting Popular Front Online, and we shall just be rallying the digital proletariat to seize the commanding heights of the New Economy, as soon as we have thrashed out the process for oversight of elections to the Svoburo's Standing Orders Committee.

We is in ur MMORPGs, organizin ur AIs.

Monsters of the Web, unite! You have nothing to lose but your dungeons!

Evil Dictators Turn Tanks on Jesus

2011-03-28T13:07:00.007+01:00

Say it ain't so, Joe! Via Cop in the Hood:

Sheriff Joe Arpaio rolled out the tanks to take down a man suspected of cockfighting.

West Valley residents in the neighborhood are crying foul after armored vehicles, including a tank, rolled into their neighborhood to make the bust.

- KHPO Phoenix.

Action demihero Steven Seagal was riding on top of the tank. The suspect, a lone man named Jesús Llovera with no history of owning weapons, unsurprisingly offered no resistance. The tank drove through a wall, and the steely-eyed guardians of the peace valiantly slew 115 potentially dangerous chickens.

Speaking of chickens, Sheriff's Office spokesman Sgt Jesse Spurgin promises to repeat such tactics wherever they fear suspects might be armed. Unless I misunderstand Arizona greatly, I guess this means the tanks will be pretty permanently out on the streets of Maricopa County for the immediate future.

Why am I not surprised?

The Hunting of the Boar

2011-03-18T20:08:00.004Z

Kateverse folk song from Langdale, very close in time and place to the part of the story I'm working on now. The peasants are revolting, and this time they mean business.

The Hunting of the Boar
Did you hunt the Blue Boar's park
On the night the stars went dark?
Did you fight or did you run,
Jolly John, my lusty son?
"Father, father, don't you fear -
Mine the strength behind the spear
That did make the boar's blood gout
On the night the stars blew out!"

Lizzy Fizz, where did you roam
On the night the cat came home?
Don't you fear what men will say,
Now you've spent the night away?
"Men will say and men will sing,
Mine the stone and mine the sling
That did crack Sir Lionel's crown
When he took the tiger down!"

Beggar Bill, you'll answer none
Questions more beneath the Sun.
On their spears the fairies bring
You in state like any king!
"Shaft that for the Lackland sped,
Freely Bill took in his stead.
Now his soul with skylarks flies -
Sun and Moon weigh down his eyes!"

John and Liz and Beggar Bill
Knocked the hog from off his hill.
Matt and Watkin, Moll and Hugh,
Lent their hands, and so did you!
"Never more to lords we bow!
When they raise their whip-hands now,
Like the grey wolves we will come -
And we'll bring their bacon home!"

Freedom and Feminism

2011-03-18T12:31:00.007Z

Here is an excellent open letter to men from Cluegirl, the blogger of Just a Baker Street Muse at LiveJournal. It advocates strong feminism as a necessary, and even obvious, consequence of liking and respecting men in general.

An open letter to the men of America and the world, on the subject of my feminism.

Most of her arguments can be flipped over to explain my own feminist sympathies. I was brought up to be a gentleman - English working-class variant - in most of the senses Cluegirl expresses in her article. How far I succeed may be questionable: whether I should try is not a question permitted by my code.

The minimum that could possibly require, is that I ought to oppose sexism. The reason I, too, identify as a feminist - in however dissident, wild, and woolly a way - is that when I look at the actual world about me, I simply don't see mere gender-blindness as being much more of a solution to patriarchal oppression than setting up a totally equal Total Equality Commission to rule all the insufficiently equal people's lives for them. For the dirt is ground under the fingernails, the stupidity soaked into the brain... That is the way, with systems of thought and status that run down to the roots of a culture.

To suppose formal equality under the rules would make this kind of oppression vanish, is pie in the sky of the highest order. A State-worshipper has at least the excuse of believing that government has only to say to an abuse "go!", and it goeth. A government-sceptic who believes no such thing - has no such excuse, either. Society doesn't, and shouldn't, just do what it's told to. Society bloody well enacts what the people in it believe. If a lot of us were acting on stupid, cowardly, contemptuous, oppressive beliefs before the laws that expressed them were changed, so will a lot of us be afterwards.

Including, sometimes, those of us who palm ourselves on having rejected the rotten old laws. Yes, even those of us who think of ourselves as thoroughgoing libertarians and non-sexists. Certainly observation doesn't acquit me of dirty fingernails and marinated brain.

So the beliefs themselves have to be attacked, and arguments like Cluegirl's are one fine way to get at them without attacking the believers.

Is attacking the rotten assumptions a libertarian act in itself, though? Libertarianism and feminism don't generally have a good rep for getting along well together. If government isn't enforcing bad assumptions on people, a libertarian might say, why bring politics to bear on them? To which a feminist might retort, with equal incomprehension and suspicion: if libertarianism isn't about breaking dominance hierarchies, it's a rum kind of liberty it believes in!

To me, the feminist challenge is more nearly right. Institutionalized domination and violence don't spring fully-formed from the brow of Leviathan. It was Leviathan that sprang up from all that crap in the first place. And if you leave the crap in place, then you may do all the smiting you like, but you will still end up with Leviathan by some other name. Which is not much of an improvement, even if it ends up being your name. Maybe especially not then!

Roderick Long and Charles 'Rad Geek' Johnson have examined this tension at much greater and more scholarly length here:

Libertarians often conclude that gender roles must not be oppressive since many women accept them; but they do not analogously treat the fact that most citizens accept the legitimacy of governmental compulsion as a reason to question its oppressive character; on the contrary, they see their task as one of consciousness-raising and demystification, or, in the Marxian phrase, plucking the flowers from the chains to expose their character as chains.

- Libertarian Feminism: Can This Marriage Be Saved?
- Roderick Long & Charles Johnson, 2005.

A great deal to chew on in that one, which the Open letter and subsequent discussion in comments moved me to read and think upon anew.

For Saint Charity

2011-03-15T13:05:00.006Z

So I was listening to some table-talk at what is more than nominally a Christian institution, and one guy was complaining to the other that their flock kept trying to weasel out of joining in one of these charity benefit activities the management had thought up. It wasn't very much money to participate, and the funds were going to causes like Japanese earthquake relief, and they'd suggested plainly to their flock that reluctance was really a bit rubbish under the circumstances. Yet the reluctance continued. What was that all about, eh?

It would have been shockingly rude to tell them what popped into my head at once, nor am I convinced my diagnosis was correct. But what I felt like saying was,

"Maybe it's about their being young and naïve, and taking what they hear in Chapel too seriously. Might they have got it into their heads that charitable giving ought to be spontaneous, and liberal, and secret? That they thought that paying a set fee, in obedience to authoritative nagging, to an impersonal bundle of causes, for the privilege of effectively spending all day wearing a cool! whacky! clown suit emblazoned with the words I GAVE SOME STUFF TO CHARITY - wasn't something they ought to do at all? What if this isn't a sign that they're worse meaner people than you thought them? Couldn't it just as well be a sign that they're brighter and fairer and better?"

Of course that would be goatlike rather than sheepish behaviour, and far be it from charity to be associated with anything as random as grace! But I like to think that, for some of the hoof-draggers at least, there is wild lightfoot dancing going on in places the herders aren't looking.

I can't honestly leave this post without admitting that - given how I feel about these things - I don't find my own charitable record over the past year very much to congratulate myself about. Meh!

Privacy Rights Through Police Disappearances?

2011-03-15T09:50:00.004Z

The media could be prevented from naming people arrested by the police but not yet charged, the attorney general has told the BBC.

The excuse is that newspapers trash innocents' reputations and poison the possibility of fair trials, by their sensationalist coverage of arrests. Anybody who followed the recent treatment of the Joanna Yeates murder - in which her landlord was arrested in the early investigation, and then virtually convicted in the gutter Press of being an obvious murderer, on the self-evident grounds of his being a literate egghead with unfashionable hair - will know exactly what the Attorney General is complaining about. And he is right to do so. (Another man is now awaiting trial for that killing.)

But allowing the police to arrest anybody anyhow, without the public's being allowed to hear who they have snatched and why, until they are quite finished - has certain obvious consequences which Mr Grieve must either not have considered, or have considered all too carefully.

Let's not go there, sunshine!

Mots du Jour: Half Past Arsed

2011-03-14T19:30:00.004Z

Occasionally I invent a new phrase because I badly need it.

Half past arsed, n. An unspecified small hour of the night, at which it is pointless or undesirable to be conscious. Compare arsed; half-arsed; arsing about.

Usage:

(1) "I've been up since half past arsed, and I'm sodding well shattered!" (The hour was so ridiculous, I can't be arsed to specify it. And possibly couldn't even be arsed to check it at the time.)

(2) "I rolled in at half past arsed and spent an hour surfing for cat videos." (The hour was so incapacitating, my options were limited to arsing about, or attempting constructive action in a futilely half-arsed fashion.)

And thus, with every humble brush-stroke each diligent artist adds, the great landscape of the English language grows a little more expressive and refined.

Is There a Wanker in the Court?

2011-03-11T14:07:00.005Z

Sir Fred Goodwin is a man who may - or may not - have been much in the UK news at some time, for doing something or other. It is difficult, or at least legally dangerous, to say whether or what. Indeed, one wonders under these circumstances how much of recent UK political history can be discussed at all without falling in criminal contempt of court. It is especially hard to say, because it may also be criminal to say whether these historical details are criminal, or why, or what about them would be criminal and what not.

What, what, what?

Fortunately, the law of Parliamentary privilege allows all media to report on things said in the House of Commons. John Hemming, Liberal Democrat MP:

"In a secret hearing Fred Goodwin has obtained a super-injunction preventing him being identified as a banker.

"Will the government have a debate or a statement on freedom of speech and whether there's one rule for the rich like Fred Goodwin and one rule for the poor?"

A super-injunction forbids not only the reporting of the matters named in it, but also reporting the terms or the very existence of the injunction itself. No direct scrutiny is possible, and their political propriety can only be discussed in an informed way by special dispensation of the parliamentary classes. Their existence and use by rich people and corporations to make any damn thing pertaining to them de facto state secrets might make any election's democratic credentials somewhat suspect, since nobody has any way of knowing which important people's activities are allowable subjects for discussion, or whether the law is being administered honestly.

A respectable and mostly useless solution is to write very general, very severe letters of complaint to our alleged representatives about them. A dangerous and thoroughly implausible solution is to whip up hundred-thousand strong angry mobs in the streets, demanding to know what unspeakable practices amongst the elite these shut-up-about-everything rent-a-gag rules are currently protecting.

The workable and pleasantly civil solution is to exploit the Streisand Effect. In this direction, Charlie Stross has contributed his personal opinion that Fred Goodwin is a wanker. He wonders if this might grow so popular a view, that Fred Goodwin might become the top Google hit for the word 'wanker' for some time to come. But on the basis of what we are allowed to know, we ought fairly to consider: is he right? Is it fair to call Fred Goodwin a wanker?

Well, a banker who hollowed out a successful bank and stuck the taxpayer with the bill would be, in my opinion, a bit of a wanker. But nobody can call Fred Goodwin a banker, so Eeyore the Law exonerates Fred Goodwin of being a wanker there.

However, somebody who corrupts the few democratic safeguards that really exist by simply removing whole topics from permissible discussion is certainly, to this anti-legalist libertarian, behaving badly. I don't feel well-disposed to the judge or lawyers who assisted at these shenanigans - yet they might, conceivably, be considered as prisoners of their professional duty in this. One person did have an inarguable choice. Therefore I definitely disapprove of Fred Goodwin, because here he meets my definition of a bad citizen. But bad citizenry alone would not make Fred Goodwin a wanker.

However... Fred Goodwin, by his own hand, is seeking to make himself a happier man, in a manner which requires society at large to look pointedly away from him until he is quite finished. Nor will this effort prove fruitful.

So I must join Charlie in his conviction that, in the fullest metaphorical sense, Fred Goodwin is indeed being a complete wanker!

Wobbly Social Pyramids

2011-03-09T20:28:00.007Z

The Wobblies, or Industrial Workers of the World, are one of those movements whose cultural presence mightily outweighs any direct political success they have ever achieved. Wobbly propaganda, especially in song, is often downright brilliant. Here is a classic graphical example, from their newspaper the Industrial Worker in 1911, illustrating the 'Pyramid of the Capitalist System':

Or, as I might just as well call it, the Pyramid of the State System. (As pretty much anarcho-syndicalists, I doubt the IWW would grudge me that point, however radically we might differ on other matters.) To clarify, here are two conventional visions of the Good Society, with the boundaries of the State marked in red and of private life in blue.

The Right Good Society - a well-ordered civil society, free under the guard of a virtuous small government:

The Left Good Society - an egalitarian civil society, equitable under the guidance of an inclusive and well-ordered government:

It is easy to see which is freer and which more equal!

And in a spirit of positive political engagement, here is something more like my own social vision:

Where Denial Ain't Just a River

2011-03-09T11:14:00.004Z

From the violent attacks on the International Women's Day march in Egypt, the voice of reaction speaks a whole worldview with one eloquent demand:

"Women were caught in the middle and groped," witness Ahmad Awadalla said. "When I tried to defend them they said, 'Why are you defending women? Are you queer?'"

My emphasis added.

Back to your mummies' shroud-strings, necro boys!

One Hand Is Not the Other

2011-03-07T11:31:00.000Z

As a rule, I don't think there's much to choose between the parties of conventional Left and Right that alternate in power within Western democracies like the UK or the USA. Here follows a short reflection on why I usually think that's right - and where I'm coming to think it's systemically wrong.

The 'Left' oligarchic strategy is to use State power to make one's fortune and those of one's corporate cronies, on the pretext of defending the people from wicked domineering plutocrats. Thus, via Social Democracy, is a golden mean steered between the idealistic dreams of the civic temple and the competent selfishness of the market. We then reach a moderate and inclusive compromise between the little pig who went to market and the little pig who lacked roast beef.

The 'Right' oligarchic strategy is to use one's fortune and those of one's corporate cronies to purchase the powers of the State, on the pretext of defending the people from wicked domineering bureaucrats. Thus, via One Nation Conservatism, is a golden mean steered between the chaotic virtue of civil society and the decisive competence of the executive. The two little pigs reach their moderate and inclusive compromise again, only more of the beef gets sold and less of it gets doled out by order.

All this statesmanship is widely admired until somebody notices that both pigs are in either case toes on the same foot, and are frankly taking the piss all the way home. This discovery is technically referred to as extremism, anarchism, nihilism, communist cant, fascist demagoguery, or irresponsible and cynical journalism which cannot stand in a free or civilized country. My own preference is for the shorter term 'DUH!'.

Whenever I begin to be so politically certain that the word 'DUH!' sounds like a telling argument, I also begin to wonder what I am missing. (Well, duh...!) So I ask myself: are the violent partisan feelings between Liebour and ConDem, Dim-o-crats and Rethuglicans, &c., ad naus., really just a combination of public dupery and the genuinely different interests of the faction-fighters' present client groups? Is it only the natural viciousness of Tweedledee and Tweedledum scrapping to be Lord of the Rattle, or could the two factions have predictably, radically different characteristics?

I think they do, and I think I noticed this a long time before this notion finally took coherent shape in my brain. It isn't just that their constituencies have different interests and values - most of those, after all, are going to end up shafted anyway, since the oligarchs' common interests are convergent and much more important. Rather, it's that both the starting endowments of each faction, and the respective natures of their shticks, necessarily twist each into a shape that cannot be superimposed on the other. That is, it isn't just that the left hand is on the left and the right on the right; it is also that a left hand would be a left hand wherever you put it, and vice versa.

Short form: the Left forces people into the tent, the Right forces people out. The Left looks for breadth of domination, the Right for depth. The Left seeks strategic quantity, the Right strategic quality. Each uses methods of the other as far as is possible - which is why, at the very extremes of method and domination, the two power-strategies really can become indistinguishable - but, generally speaking, each is more comfortable and effective with its own speciality.

So, as a general rule, I expect more nannying, hyper-regulation for its own sake, and attempts to sap and destroy unplanned civil society in toto from the Left. Everyone must be in the tent, and subjected in all things to the Ringmaster and his clowns. Only a few criminals and maniacs ought to operate outside the great plan, and the fewer is really the better. And amongst the Masses, at least, equality is truly part of that plan.

From the Right, though, the tactic is very different. One builds up the smallest safe block of supporters, finds the most profitably vulnerable group to attack, and then rallies the rest to drive it from the tent and grab its stuff. It is not really that important whether everybody agrees with you or not. Conflict, and the need it generates for concentrated authority, is most of the point: the spoils of war, and of keeping every minority competing to bribe you not to be the target of the next attack, is the rest of it. So inequality even amongst the Masses is part of that plan: it creates both their division and your strategic opportunities.

So when the Left attain power I fear mostly surveillance, inquisition, and control; when the Right, violence, reaction, and dehumanization. Similar levels of crap, but differently distributed. With the left, ubiquity of oppression, and a real wish to eliminate dissent; with the right, selective intensity of oppression, and a real need for dissenters to destroy. Experience with the relatively very mild forms of oppression prevalent in contemporary Britain informs my instinct that it swings like this. Under Thatcher I was a great deal more worried that my friends would get their heads broken for being specific targets; under Blair, that they would be randomly harassed, shaken down, or denounced for non-crimes by professional sin-sniffers. I think most of us were more oppressed under Blair. But I think the many who were oppressed under Thatcher at all would have generally been stark bloody insane to prefer her. And - the modern UK is not, mostly, a very oppressive polity at all.

Neither the conscription of Leftist power-methods, nor the internecine strife of Rightist ones, are compatible with civilization. You cannot choose one above the other. If you do, and it wins, eventually its masters will grow so powerful that they can deploy all the tactics of both. It does not matter whether they are southpaws or right-handers by nature, once the rest of us are reeling on the ropes!

All you can do is have tactics prepared against both, and civil methods of both Left (solidarity and commonality) and Right (specialization and concentration) ambidextrously at hand to promote the desired alternatives. I have a lot more thinking to do on those points!

Only in Silence the Word

2011-03-04T11:16:00.004Z

"For a word to be spoken," Ged answered slowly, "there must be silence. Before, and after."

- A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K Le Guin.

As a wordsmith, I think a lot about words: their meanings, their shapes, their combinations and transformations and ambiguities. And I think, too, of all the many things that can be done with nothing more than these small marks and sounds. Or not so small: one single name can have lively instances in billions of minds at once, all across the Terrestrial globe. But the hardest thing of all to read rightly, when it comes to words, is the silence into which they are spoken.

If silence were only the negative space against which the words were defined, it would still be different for every saying. But it is not so. There are ominous silences and relaxed ones, companionable silences and desolate ones, even clear silences and noisy ones. And each one bears on the mood and the meaning of the words spoken into it.

There are the silences we control as audiences: the lives and the stances and the moods we bring to the tale, before we are ready to hear it. There are the silences middlemen control, or may wish to: the production qualities of a book, the restriction of a movie to a sumptuous picture palace, the jailbreaking of a digital work for anybody to experience however they can. There are the silences we control as speakers: the lulls in the action, the things pointedly not said, the details left to the audience's gut or imagination. And behind them all, the endless and incalculable silence of which no clear thing can be said, except that it is as various and lively as the vacuum state of space itself.

Half the power of a word is in the silence it is spoken to. Half the craft of words is creating as much of the right silence as possible, at every moment, to speak the next one into. Yes, you can call it context and a crying positive thing, but in the end, what it sounds like is the silence the word is falling into. Its tacitness is the most important single thing about it.

And so sometimes - I very much doubt that it is often enough - instead of fretting over what the next words I need to write must be, I will only read through a good part of my writing without planning, without searching; only sounding the silence I have come to, until I hear it so clearly that my new words nearly speak themselves into it.

I don't know how many other writers do something like this, or think of it this way if they do. What I do know is that it's a good way for me to stop getting hung up on things that don't really matter, or aren't really true.

That is about as well as I can now explain it, before all the words run out.

Liberty Free Libertarianism: Taxing Yourself Elected

2011-03-03T12:39:00.013Z

Here's a hardy perennial weed in conservative and right-libertarian commentary: disenfranchise net recipients of tax moneys, so as to remove the temptation for everybody to ruin everybody else by trying to vote themselves rich.

The standard arguments against this are obvious, and just as obviously don't convince the arguers. So I want to make an argument I haven't heard before, which must just naturally convince all pro-market anti-government folk as no other argument could. Their proposal is almost guaranteed to entrench monolithic Big Government and collectivized service provision forever, unless one supposes the complete benignity of the government!

Follow the purely political logic, as government-sceptics rightly do in other cases. What sort of government could and would enact such a proposal? Clearly, a government which didn't expect public sector workers to vote in its favour. It will be now pretty much certain of re-election next time around, since in a modern society that makes a very large proportion of the opposition vote thrown into the dustbin. Unless...

...unless the government starts shedding public sector jobs, or doing anything at all that will make room for the discontented and displaced workers in the franchise-bearing private sector. Enemies stuck on benefits or in dead-end make-work public sector jobs are good enemies from this government's point of view! Alas, the evil does not end there.

Popular with workers in Sector X? Legislate non-monetary advantages for that industry, or find ways to nudge or force private persons to use its services. Mandatory electricity-style fees payable by residents towards 'competing, private' security utilities, anybody? (Does the company that battens off my electricity bills either generate or distribute actual electricity? By thunder, it does not!)

Unpopular with workers in Sector Y? Make it impossible to make a legitimate profit in it without the aid of government subsidies to "help Y meet the tough but fair standards of 21st-Century civilization". Proceed by the quickest road to whatever degree of nationalization knocks out the despised ones' franchise. In extreme cases, just kill the industry altogether and import the necessaries.

Always make sure nominal charges and prices are high for people in precarious or low-end jobs, so that they will need in-work benefits exceeding their official tax contributions in order to make ends meet. Indirect taxes on the goods they consume are a good wheeze for this, since the immediate payer is some corporation or other. Sales taxes with onerous rules for proof, tardy payment, and fearsome penalties for mistakes might work nearly as well. The targets still end up paying the money which is later recycled back to them in benefits, but it only shows up on the books to their discredit. Eureka!

Rinse and repeat for a while, and what you have is a self-perpetuating enfranchised aristocracy, to whom everybody else is for accounting and voting purposes beholden. The boundaries of nomenklatura command-and-control and of mere crony capitalism are about as meaningful as they get to be in decadent Marxism-Leninism, and whether the resulting economy is more nearly communist or fascist is a nice question for people who care whether the stick-up artist is dressed more like Superman or Batman.

This is not a prediction of dire doom. This is a description of the direct incentives obtaining for any 'democratic' politician who starts disenfranchising tax-takers.

Of course, not all politicians are rats. They may act nobly, wisely, and against their own selfish interests. They may even do so collectively. Such things are not impossible.

But, "Vote for these shiny policies, since their advocates will surely govern nobly, wisely, and impartially!" is not a libertarian, or even an honestly conservative, position to assume. It is assuming quite another position altogether. So even if disenfranchisement were intellectually coherent or just - which I dispute vehemently - there is nothing at the end of it but a chaotic and forcibly collectivized bag of snakes.

If the unlimited democratic franchise is bad for liberty, any form of government-controlled franchise is inherently going to be a hundred times worse! How this can be hard for any government-sceptic to understand, I have no idea whatsoever.

Baa! A Mission Statement?!

2011-03-02T04:57:00.005Z

What I think of corporate clack is no secret. However, O goats, I've just committed myself to this blog for another year, and I find myself wanting to expand its presence a bit. This requires a short description of What It's All About, of a more helpful nature to prospective readers than, "Hey, whatever I select!"

And now and then it's good to mull over What It's All About, anyway.

This is my first whack at a blurb, manifesto, or what-you-may-call it, for purposes of giving strangers the flavour of my meanderings and a clue as to whether they'll like it:

[Categories: Writing, Politics, Arts]

Fantasy as if common people counted. Freedom as a banquet not a diet. Life as a stream too strong for narrow channels. Humour, curiosity, creativity, pratfalls; the kindly and the sorrowful and the shiny. Playing the goat as the great antidote to sheepishness.

Yes, this is arguably about more than just the blog. Even so.

Any thoughts?

Land of My Father's

2011-03-01T18:20:00.005Z

Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Sant! A happy St David's Day to one and all. The daffodils are out here as they ought to be.

My father was a half-Welsh Englishman, whose heart was caught in childhood by the South Welsh countryside of his mother's people. A clever, streetwise, and mind-hungry Londoner for most of his life, he could never forget, nor yet love the buzzing city; and when he got a welcome chance to retire early on good terms, he spent his last decade with my mother in that ancient matrix of Welshness, Ynys Môn that the Norsemen made Anglesey, between the Mountains and the Sea.

And I am English, and of London - but my second tribal affiliation, by birth and choice, is even as his. And as Wales is called the land of song, let this be a day for it!

It must be a small tribe or a rigid nation that has only one true song of it. Wales, like any nation Stated or otherwise, has of course its official anthem. It is called Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau, or Land of My Fathers; though, being a full-on anthem, it is a bit too jingo to have been a song of my father's too. It is about splendid patriots and fell traitors, purity and the ancient tongue and the bards who defend their Muse against the long false defeat until their fingers bleed down their harpstrings. Katherine Jenkins sings the song of the Welsh nation and its dauntless champions here.

Then again, there is Sosban Fach, which means but is never called Little Saucepan. My grandmother knew this A Lot, and it would have been a much bigger surprise if she hadn't. It is about saucepans, sickness, kids, cats, and drinking too much 'tea'. Ray Gravell, Wyn Lodwick and the Band sing the song of the Welsh people and their harried homemakers here.

Sosban Fach is specially associated with the rugby teams around Llanelli, which used not to be behindhand in the manufacture of cheap saucepans. This is the very last singing of it down at their old ground of Stradey Park.

Hey, DJ! Where's the Sosban?

And finally, there is that other quintessentially Welsh Muse, Max Boyce, who I was amazed to discover is actually slightly my father's junior. Dad did not speak Welsh until his last decade, or sing in it ever. When he and I used to go boozing in my much younger days, of a sufficiently merry evening this was the song which would burst forth lustily from the Cymric springs of his soul.

Too-ral-ay addy, until the next time!

Maple of the Whitewoods

2011-02-28T06:29:00.005Z

Kateverse folk song. This one is from further afield than usual, hailing from the Freegarths of Starkady across the western ocean. Something like Vinland, something like the Russias, and something like the old Euro-American colonies, the Freegarths are the source of dragon-weed, dyes, spices, and tall tales told to credulous Easterners. I have one half-finished fairy-story set there, and it appears to be told by a credulous Easterner.

Starkady is Large. This is a wanderer's song from one of the colonies that don't do serfdom, and it's a little bit country. It came to me as I was taking a much-needed Sunday constitutional. I passed by a tousled cedar that was young and natty in my childhood, and Elizabeth Moon's fictional marching-song Cedars of the Valley began to play in my head. This very different ditty was the eventual upshot. It's sung quite fast, to some kind of plucky stringed instrument.

Maple of the Whitewoods

Maple of the Whitewoods, with honey in your sap,
Your camps are mighty cosy, but I miss my true love's lap!
Leshy of the maples, don't lead my feet to roam -
Your blizzards I can bear 'em, but my love is cold at home -
Ayoh, ayah!

Redwood of the Skyfalls, you rise to heaven's shore.
You tempt me to rise with you, but she tempts me all the more!
Leshy of the redwoods, don't lose me in the sky -
Your angels I can hear 'em, but I hear my true love sigh -
Ayoh, ayah!

Nyssa of the Gaygroves, with colours out of mind,
All wonders wind around you, but my love and I are twined!
Leshy of the nyssas, don't bind me with your charms -
Your planets I can hold 'em, but they ain't my lover's arms -
Ayoh, ayah!

Stonewood of the Badlands, the tree that stands a tomb,
Your shades are mighty scary, but I've dared a deeper gloom!
Leshy of the stonewoods, if you should drink my soul,
My love will come with all her kin, and smash you all to coal!
Ayoh, ayah!

Birch beneath my homeyard, the birch I love the best,
My flight has been a long one, but I'm coming back to nest!
Lady of the birches, as silver-sweet as they,
I'll bring our marriage-portion, and I'll never more away -
Ayoh, ayah!

Where are the equivalent of the American First Nations, or for that matter the Central Asian nomadic cultures, in Starkady? Loosely speaking, they exist and it's complicated. Most of what I think I know about them is probably wrong.

Nyssa is the black tupelo, or something very like it. I made that the vernacular name because it scans, and because it makes sense in a world once conquered by a guy with a Greek name, and in no way because I am any kind of raving fanboy. Planets is here a purely Starkadian concept which I nearly translated, less happily, as dreamworlds or visions. It would sound exactly as weird to any of the characters in my existing stories as it does to us.

What Is WICAWIWI and What Is Wrong With It?

2011-02-27T10:35:00.007Z

Via Making Light, I've just happened upon Philip E Agre's fascinating 2004 essay, What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It?

I disagree strongly with more than half of what it says, starting with its definition of conservatism as the goal of aristocratic domination rather than the method of political humility, and going on from there. This foundational mistake would in most cases be a sinker, since it tends to dismiss the natural possibility of driving a wedge between those who defend unwarranted privilege on the one hand, and those who merely object to grabbing a fresh bunch with the other. Nonetheless, Agre partially recoups this ground later with provoking takes on the connection between real democracy and real entrepreneurship; the radical, statist, and partial agenda of the US 'conservative' political mainstream; and the self-destructive tendency for his fellow-liberals to fall into aristocratic habits of authoritarianism and complacency even where they are not, in fact, possessed either of actual authority, or of anything else to be complacent about.

I see one grave omission - a complete failure to address the existence of that half-governmental half-corporate official class, which ranges from harried clerks to powerful ministers and jet-setting executives, and whose membership and interests are quite distinct from those of the 'common people', 'merchants', and 'aristocrats' who dominate Agre's analysis. This is unfortunate, since this class of ruling stewards and regulators pretty much dominates modern Western society. To see them as workers, entrepreneurs, and leaders at best, or lackeys, plutocrats, and aristocrats at worst is not exactly false. It is, however, to miss their fundamental unity. The official class has a collective interest in more ascribed representation (by them) and less autonomous democracy (by those on whose 'behalf' they act), a tension in which Agre otherwise takes a lively and sceptical interest. I think his conclusions might have been stronger and better - i.e. more like my own - had he examined this cause of the tension more closely.

On another and related point, Agre does outstandingly well - for a pro-government liberal - in highlighting and debunking all sides' attempts to confound any form of external government with 'society', 'the people', or even 'democracy'.

And there is much more - much more, indeed, than I can begin to seriously convey in a hit-and-run blog post. It is that rarity, an unabashedly partisan liberal/Democratic think-piece which is well worth reading for liberals, conservatives, and anarchists alike. I heartily recommend it, and shall continue to meditate on its lessons over the coming week.

"Played!"

2011-02-20T14:30:00.004Z

Finished the Chapter of Snares in Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland. My heroes have wound up on the wrong side of too many of the traps and counter-traps that snapped shut there. Now begins the fierce rush to the climax. Every hope seems either lost or clinging on by its fingernails. Worse, the clearest remaining one looks remarkably like a deep-down betrayal, if you forget to squint hard and take the better view of it.

Most of my characters don't feel much in the mood to do so - and squinting to view things in the Correct Light is not something I like to be asked to do as a reader, let alone to demand of my audience. True, I don't much care for a story where the author chases their characters into a stinking moral quagmire and then ambushes all the margins to stop them getting out. I prefer the arrangement of wild grace or inspiration or chance, whether pitiably missed (as in classic tragedy) or most gloriously seized (as in the high comedy or tragicomedy I love best). But even in heroic comedy, the characters ought at least to get the chance to show what path their feet were set on otherwise.

Grant them that. Then the author's defining the less-evil-seeming road they began down as, by Word of God, the good one, is for me a corruption of taste if not graver things. Giving characters a 'hard choice' and then having the good or wise ones take the author's road, whilst the bad or foolish ones take the low one, is an easy authorial choice which is almost always to be resisted. If it's a morally hard choice, then good and wise characters who are genuinely different from each other will probably divide around it like a river around a rock - quite irrespective of whether one of the channels be also more attractive to bottom-feeders or not. Characters in their capacities as heroes and as bottom-feeders are judging by wholly independent criteria!

So now I have some Good Guys sticking to faith and hope and heart, and one major Good Guy going with reason and romance and a heart in certain ways yet wider. They leaning on principle, she on likely consequences. I have my own opinions that way, but I'll fail on my terms if I demand the reader share them. The fact is, either way could work famously or fail infamously, but the odds aren't looking good whatever happens.

Which is where, choices being cast now, the glimmer of grace comes in.

Since the Gods of the Kateverse are those lovely laddies and lassies who smirk down from Olympus, we know it isn't coming from them. No, my battered and broke-hearted old terror Kate is going to have to roll her own, beyond hope or reason or heroism itself. This is the day, even before I knew it would come, that she of all people was made for.

To get that right - is my modest work for the next chapter.

EU're Right and We're Wrong

2011-02-17T12:02:00.005Z

I'm no lover of the European Union, but I will say this when I see it.

The UK Parliament has voted overwhelmingly against compliance with a ~~European Court of Justice~~ European Court of Human Rights ruling, demanding we cease to disenfranchise all imprisoned convicts. This has been hailed in the more nationalist sections of the Press as a famous victory for Parliamentary sovereignty, which I suppose it kind of is. But what a dud cause to waste a costly victory on!

There is a democratic argument for this. Parliament is, for once, actually in tune with the people, and there is no popular appetite for extending the franchise to a bunch of villains. The villainous constituency in our democracy is generally considered to be quite amply represented already*. Given the will of a clear majority of the public, who are local grandees or foreign lawyers to overrule it?

But this is the one issue on which there is really no excuse for a democracy to care about the will of the majority at all! If the right to vote itself is up for majority decision, that is not democracy: it is a membership vote amongst an arbitrarily self-selecting club. For instance, the Good and Democratic Conservative/LibDem Coalition represents, by the conventional democratic fiction, a 59% majority of the British population, whereas the Evil Outgoing ZanuLiebour Regime won only 29% of the vote. If the Good Coalition were to decide democratically, speaking for Society, that proven Evil voters had forfeited their franchise by their dastardly collaboration with subversive would-be dictators, I think we might all be asking some very hard questions of them round about now.

That it would be politically bad and also unjust goes (for me) without saying; but that it would be also undemocratic, and that even with the full consent of 71% 'Society' has no logical business to disrepresent the naughty 29% whilst still claiming to be anything but a power-bloc, is I think quite as important. Nor could the 99% of 'moderate' party voters get to do the same to the voters of 'extremist subversive' ones. Democracy that is a withdrawable club privilege is no democracy at all: or if democracy at all, it is a Saturnist democracy, whose civic fathers reserve the right to gobble up any inconvenient births in their cradles.

So we dispense with the easy argument: that the majority of people-who-count, even if it is also the majority of people-at-large, has the arbitrary democratic right to define who gets to count towards the democratic majority at all.

The second, and seemingly much harder, argument, is that the majority still has the right to define impartial qualifications for the franchise - such as that anybody who claims their right to decide the laws, must also agree to be bound by them. This derives from the very popular notion of the Social Contract, about which I admit to the gravest reservations. But one needn't be an anti-social nutcase like me to appreciate the hidden harm in this stricture on democracy.

The simple problem is this. If people can be made political non-persons for breaking a rule, that provides a very strong incentive for politicians to pass frivolous laws targeting groups unlikely to vote for them, or to enforce general laws capriciously against the same targets.

Is it really a co-incidence that the USA, where control of the franchise has so long been such a core issue of partisan contention, has now achieved a mass imprisonment rate exceeding that of your bog-standard Communist dictatorship? Or that so many of the heinous crimes justifying such disenfranchisement, turn out to be victimless crimes against nobody but the State's offended Lifestyle Censor?

I suggest that, in countries where imprisonment leads to disenfranchisement, there will be a built-in demand amongst the authorities to create crimes which exist for the sole purpose of securing convictions - and an increased reluctance to enforce any laws against their own client groups. When both the manufacture of arbitary crimes and the vitiation of useful laws are made more politically profitable, then by so much will the whole rule of law be systematically and needlessly corrupted.

If we were to move towards the American States' nakedly vicious practices of massive sentences for trivial infractions and post-imprisonment disenfranchisement of felons, can we doubt that they would bring American levels of malicious legalism and selective enforcement in their train?

And if that's the case, what's wrong with removing an existing incentive to oppression and corruption? Isn't it more likely to weaken a powerful and concentrated interest for evil, at the trivial expense of enhancing a weak and dispersed one?

- No, in the end it will not make very much difference for whom Jack Clubs in Wormwood Scrubs votes, or whether he's allowed to, or whether once allowed he can be bothered. But it might just make some useful difference to how his brother Jack Suit votes in Westminster!

Correction 20/02/11: Just pointed out to me in comments that it was the Council of Europe's European Court of Human Rights, not the EU's European Court of Justice, that made the ruling. We can quite confidently expect the ECJ to follow the ECHR if the case ends up there too, but this has not happened yet - which means that I, and my crap pun, have jumped the gun entirely.

We apologize for the earlier shortage of reading comprehension upon our part, which was due to circumstances within our control. Mea culpa.

*Not all of the people in any of these categories are, by any means, villainous. And nor are all prisoners.

Cassilda's Song

2011-02-15T21:16:00.005Z

One of the strangest and most haunting tales of cosmic horror ever, I think, written, lies in and between the short stories of Robert W Chambers' 1895 collection, The King in Yellow. Inspired by Ambrose Bierce and itself one of the great inspirations for H P Lovecraft's unhallowed, polymorphously blasphemous Cthulhu Mythos - ahem! - its central pieces tell of a play which must not be read and cannot, we must hope, be performed. We know very little about the play itself, except that the first act is supposed to be treacherously innocent and banal, and the sugared bait for the unimaginable second.

Cassilda, Camilla, and the occulted and tattered King have been fictional acquaintances of mine since my early teens. One of the few scraps of the first act we possess is Cassilda's Song, of the - her? - lost city, Carcosa the sad and wonderful and damned. It has never entirely gone out of my head. This morning I had occasion to look up the words.

Then I discovered that YouTube is crawling with settings of her song to music - several available commercially, or performed in public concert. Most of these, alas, are shouty rocky metally things, appropriate to the elegiac and courtly tones of Cassilda in much the same way that Meat Loaf is an appropriate actor to play the part of Christina Rossetti. The Heaven If version, especially, seems so completely disconnected from the sense of the words, that the lyrics might easily be replaced by those of Sosban Fach or Abide with Me or You Sexy Thing without loss of effect. But I digress.

One of these interpretations is not like the others. This is the Stormclouds' version, from their concept album The King in Yellow. It is published by Rainfall Records and Books, a very eldritch-cosmic-abomination-friendly organization altogether. And I can imagine Cassilda singing this!

Cassilda's Song
Along the shore the cloud waves break,
The twin suns sink beneath the lake,
The shadows lengthen
In Carcosa.

Strange is the night where black stars rise,
And strange moons circle through the skies
But stranger still is
Lost Carcosa.

Songs that the Hyades shall sing,
Where flap the tatters of the King,
Must die unheard in
Dim Carcosa.

Song of my soul, my voice is dead;
Die thou, unsung, as tears unshed
Shall dry and die in
Lost Carcosa.

- Robert W Chambers, The King in Yellow

I Love the Sound of Freedom in the Morning!

2011-02-12T07:37:00.006Z

Mubarak's fallen away into the textbooks, and the new day dawns at last. What will it bring? We don't know. But come joy come sorrow by evening - and there is always some evening sorrow at last - for now, here comes the Sun!

Translation from Afro-Europe International Blog:

I went down and I said I am not coming back, and I wrote on every street wall that I am not coming back.

All barriers have been broken down, our weapon was our dream, and the future is crystal clear to us, we have been waiting for a long time, we are still searching for our place, we keep searching for a place we belong too, in every corner in our country.

The sound of freedom is calling, in every street corner in our country, the sound of freedom is calling..

We will re-write history, if you are one of us, join us and don't stop us from fulfilling our dream.

- Sout Al Horeya, that is The Sound of Freedom, by Amir Eid.

Performance: Vocals by Hany Adel and Amir Eid. Guitar: Hawary. Keyboard: Sherif Mostafa. Video: Moustafa Fahmy, Mohamed Khalifa, and Mohamed Shaker.

Some large-minded and clear-eyed thoughts on people power and the Egyptian/Tunisian revolutions from Roderick T Long, here.

Learning to Read

2011-02-11T13:21:00.007Z

Via commenter CnNaevius at Ta-Nehisi Coates' Atlantic magazine blog, here's a poem by the African-American abolitionist, suffragist, poet, and novelist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911), to whom I am just now introduced.

For lovers of books and liberty everywhere.

Learning to Read
Very soon the Yankee teachers
Came down and set up school;
But, oh! how the Rebs did hate it, —
It was agin’ their rule.

Our masters always tried to hide
Book learning from our eyes;
Knowledge did’nt agree with slavery —
’Twould make us all too wise.

But some of us would try to steal
A little from the book.
And put the words together,
And learn by hook or crook.

I remember Uncle Caldwell,
Who took pot liquor fat
And greased the pages of his book,
And hid it in his hat.

And had his master ever seen
The leaves upon his head,
He’d have thought them greasy papers,
But nothing to be read.

And there was Mr. Turner’s Ben,
Who heard the children spell,
And picked the words right up by heart,
And learned to read ’em well.

Well, the Northern folks kept sending
The Yankee teachers down;
And they stood right up and helped us,
Though Rebs did sneer and frown.

And I longed to read my Bible,
For precious words it said;
But when I begun to learn it,
Folks just shook their heads,

And said there is no use trying,
Oh! Chloe, you’re too late;
But as I was rising sixty,
I had no time to wait.

So I got a pair of glasses,
And straight to work I went,
And never stopped till I could read
The hymns and Testament.

Then I got a little cabin
A place to call my own—
And I felt independent
As the queen upon her throne.

Harper was also an ardent prohibitionist, but nobody in this cockeyed world is perfect. And it is all too easy and horrible to conjecture why she might have judged prohibition a really, really good idea - walking those roads she was walking.

Tea Partiers Nearly 25% as Libertarian as Democrats, Pride Ensues?

2011-02-10T08:43:00.006Z

Back in the USSA:

Total Democrats voting against Patriot Act citizen surveillance extension: 122/193 = 63.2%
Tea Party Caucus Republicans voting against same: 8/54 = 15.4%
Total Republicans voting against same: 26/236 = 11.0%
Non-Tea Party Republicans voting against same: 18/~~184~~ 182 = ~~9.8~~ 9.9%
President Barack Obamas (D) opposed to same: 0/1 = 0%.

More liberty, vicar?

Lucy Locket Lost Her Pocket...

2011-02-09T12:42:00.006Z

...Kitty Fisher found it.

Probably because Kitty Fisher had lots of friends in the circles that get to pick folks' pocketses, whereas Lucy Locket is only some poor working girl about whom nobody important knows or cares.

These thoughts are inspired by a killer Goat Quote from Guido Fawkes today (hat tip: Samizdata.net), concerning the current UK hoo-hah about large numbers of perfectly genuine charities being in danger of closing, due to... a withdrawal of their Government funding? Say what? Sez Guido:

A charity that relies in the main part on taxes is no more a charity than a prostitute is your girlfriend.

Well, quite. "Give me money or go to prison!" can be called many things, and may be defended in many ways. "This is charity!" belongs under neither heading.

Guido is, I think, quite at sea with his Tory-friendly interpretation of Big Dave's Big Society buzzword. I remember his beloved Thatcherism rather well, and whilst many of Mrs T's criticisms of state socialism still ring true today, so do no few of Cheerful Charlie Marx's criticisms of free-y industrial capitalism; and he can whistle for my sympathies, too. The Thatcher regime in its day had no objection at all to a Big State where it came to the Big People's interests, and was often almost commendably open about the matter. I have considered including such a commendation herein, but unfortunately this pixel is too large to write it on with any pretence of good housekeeping.

If the Tory Party really wanted to promote charity, it would be getting the hell out of the way of it, and knocking down some of the costs and prohibitions and privileges the State currently puts there. Stupid Planning Tricks; long waits for permission for public action, combined with onerous fees for asking it; and taxing everyone for community facilities so as to hire them out at 'market rates' to those who can either afford them or blag yet another big grant from everyone's taxes for the purpose, all come to mind as candidates for the Big Society's Big Chopper.

But sweet charity is not what a ruling elite wants. There is small gain in being Lady Bountiful when every rag-tag-and-bobtail is overflowing with bounty too. They want Edmund Burke's little platoons indeed - so long as they deploy themselves according to the commands of the Great General! Little bands of bolshy merry men, roistering maenads, and holy fools sharing bread with the hungry without first cutting their lords' spawn a generous slice, are and will remain wholly surplus to requirements.

The good hope for the Little Platoons is not that they will rally behind the Great General to help him win the War on Everything - but that they might be emboldened to mutiny, for love of Lucy Locket!

People, Not Those People!

2011-02-08T08:23:00.006Z

When anybody suggests introducing the market into anything, a common outraged cry is,

"People, not profits!"

And given the sort of markets masters generally like to introduce into things, those angry voices will often have a point. Nor is it, on the face of it, unreasonable to feel that there are some matters far too humanly important to leave to the whims of rich, conceited, bean-counting money-grubbers, shoddily representing the interests of ten thousand faceless pension funds, and somewhat more accountably representing the interests of their own fellows in boardroom and golf-club.

But if that's true, it makes little sense to me how that outcry always seems to translate as, "State, not private!" "The collective, not individuals!" "The Just People, not just people!"

Sweet Lady Liberty, why?

For all these things so human and important, why is it then such a good idea to leave them to the whims of rich, conceited, news-spinning power-grabbers, shoddily representing the interests of ten thousand faceless voting blocks, and somewhat more accountably representing the interests of their own fellows in boardroom and bunker?

Or perhaps I have that wrong. Perhaps the real idea is that all truly precious things should be subject only to the ultimate whims of rich, conceited, target-gaming mandarins, shoddily representing the interests of ten million helpless clients, and somewhat more accountably representing the interests of their own fellows in boardroom and bureaucracy?

Or perhaps - just perhaps - those of us whom even these humane proposals still leave malcontent, should come up with a new cry of our own:

"People, not power!"

And whoever will join me in that one - why, for sure they may count me their brother!

"She Will Walk the Milky Way and Old Time."

2011-02-07T11:44:00.007Z

The strangest chapter of Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland yet: viewpoints from Golden Kate and Luke as usual, but also Elegant Elder Sister, Fiery Younger Sister, Bonecold Refugee, Hero-Father... All that came of the great stroke in the last chapter, seen through every kind of eye. And the merely human enemies, in Allingdale too, have been busily making up for lost time.

Time. Time and things timeless...

It is a most grievous and ruinous thing (who hasn't known it, believe me!) to lose a beloved parent to mortality. But what if the fear were a worse one than that? What if one might lose them so utterly, that between one moment and the next, all fond memories of them might have slipped away into childish make-believe, and the truth have always been that they were a god, or a devil, or a vain and babbling drunken braggart? Or what if, living and dying down elvish roads, in their death at one iron's point they might cease ever to have lived at all, and become only a romantic tale told of twenty fleshly folk?

Easy and perilous, in dancing its daggered glades and hawking with its haggard lightnings, to forget what Faerie, in all the worlds, was always - and why time there carves out no refuge.

In the country where stories turn truths, what must truths be?

Katy. Katy. Come home.

Mayn't We Indeed, My Masters?

2011-02-05T11:14:00.006Z

David Cameron's Tory-LibDem coalition makes a great deal of bigger society and smaller government. Compared to New Labour's vision of a nation as one big-tent panopticon reformatory, with themselves and their hangers-on as a sort of screwy oligarchy, the Cameroons are not even talking the total toot on that one.

On the other hand, my poems have better scansion and smaller bathos than those of William McGonagall, and it will be a sad day when I expect to be carried shoulder-high through the streets because of it!

So what is their latest wizard wheeze to mend our State-spoiled society, as only its traditional owners have the nous and the right to do?

I know! Let's replace the traditional British May Day celebrations of spring, with a made-up festival of State-worship to cheer us through the blustering storms of October!

Kick the commons and lift the lords! Stop the dances and start the press-gangs! Down with cocks and up with cannons! Leave your lover and fuck the French! Kill unruly Spring, and bring the bloody Fall!

Oh, my country may bring you a Fall to sing about yet, cully.

In the Hollow of the Night

2011-02-04T12:42:00.004Z

This I wrote some time ago, and have now forgotten who originally inspired it. In certain moods I am a bit like a male version of this myself. Sapphire the Sorceress, one of my favourite ongoing characters, is a lot like this, all the time, and people tend to misunderstand her to the marrow. One of these days, I'll finish some tale of her for which there is some imaginable market.

In the Hollow of the Night
In the silence and the dark
Hearts of flint may strike a spark,
And the wind from off the whinny moor may blow a smacking kiss.
Will you try to draw them in -
Knives of stone and knives of whin?
Will you call the frost around your fire, and think she’ll call it bliss?
Though she loves the whirling world
As she lies about it curled,
Cuddled silvery in starlight - she'll not love you by the barlight
But she'll sing
Of the salt and wasted years she's been warmed to mud and tears
By the friendships that she's chilled
And the parties that she's killed.
Will you walk her glinting ways awhile, and share a cup of quiet?
If a whisper in your ear
Bade you leave your barmy beer,
Would you get your coat, and learn how air and stone will hold their riot?
Minds of steel may love aright
In the hollow of the night.

...Alternatively, I will best-seller me such stupendous best-sellers that anyone will publish anything I subsequently offer that is in a plausible human language - even Sapphire's seventeen-canto Epic Doggerel, A Piece of the Sky. This may however take some small time, and sundry unforeseeable events may delay it even further.

The World on Maltby Edge

2011-02-03T10:21:00.005Z

Return of the Kateverse folksongs!

This one was clearly composed about the time of the final climax of Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland, from which I remain my usual four or five chapters away. Not everybody who has issues with the aristocrats is thrilled to find the Dales on the edge of a popular and distinctly elf-touched revolution. To judge by his language and sentiments, the author is an educated and conservative townsman, who could really do without having the reasonable world overturned in torch-flame and star-fire.

The World on Maltby Edge
Three red suns awake the East.
Loafer's most and lord is least.
Shepherds, flock behind your Beast -
Katy's banners flying!
Knights will beg and beggars ride.
Woman wanders, man must bide.
Saturn reaps the Fenny Side -
The world's turned upside down now!

Foes do good and friends do hurt.
Healer waves the bloody shirt.
Oaf eat beef and earl eat dirt -
The world’s turned upside down now!
Tales are truth and sooth is lies.
Tailor strikes and soldier flies.
Witches walk the stormy skies -
Katy's banners flying!

Grey wolf howls in crimson gloam.
Elf-horns cry, and gods keep mum.
Quick fall cold, and dead march home -
Katy's banners flying!
Lift the earth and sink the sun.
Whore and holy speak as one.
Duke and drab crack hearts on stone -
The world's turned upside down now!

Old days die on Maltby Edge.
Dream is doom, and play is pledge.
Honest tongues may well allege
The world's turned upside down now!
Will it totter ere it turn?
Will we marry, will we burn?
Must we hail, or durst we spurn
Katy's banners flying?

Why can't we have piecemeal, moderate, sensible advances? Don't these people realize they are playing into the hands of Dead Saturn and the Great Levellers?!?

I know where the guy's coming from, though.

Slightly Foxed

2011-02-02T13:10:00.003Z

Despite all my best resolutions, another of my Katherines has escaped into the wild. Today and for no particular reason I wrote a complete solo Kit Fox story, The Wave That Broke on the Ingerfell, treating of an apocryphal but entirely characteristic adventure of that ~~evil~~ ~~wicked~~ exceptionally dodgy witch in the little northern lordship of Haggersdale.

It is loosely based on The Cock and Hen That Went to the Dovrefell - a trivial Norse beast-fable I recently bumped into in Dasent, and which is familiar to English-speaking nurseries as Chicken Little. The nature of this story is that substantial portions of it almost literally wrote themselves.

But since this is a tale of Kit Fox, my version is longer, ruder, and turns on an incredibly petty scam that gets more than slightly out of hand. And since her rôle in my current novel Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland is... somewhat harrowing to contemplate... this light-hearted tale from her younger days was an absolute delight to get my paws on.

I shall be releasing the final draft on April 23rd, as my annual contribution to International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day. I was wondering what I was going to do for that!