The Appliance of Genius

The latest American Hell cartoon couldn't help but make me smile.

'Why are you quoting the toaster?' I asked Brother the Elder earlier, glad that he had done so, as it was only this morning that I'd noticed the label about the actuating lever and thought it was a great sentence.
'It's the appliance of genius,' he said.

There wasn't much I could say to that, so he followed up by saying that he'd just made tea, and to ask me whether I'd seen the original ending to I Am Legend. I hadn't, so immediately clicked on the link he sent. You'd be well advised to do likewise, at least if you've seen the film.

Interesting, eh? Radically different from the film as it stands, certainly, and implicitly closer to the book, in that it makes pretty explicit how the film's vampires see him as a legendary being, hunting them down like a mythical monster or a serial killer. I'm not sure that the film would really have been any better with this ending, though, not least because of the final sequence involving a somewhat confusing bridge.

I was glad to see this anyway, as it happens, as I'd been thinking again the other day about the differences between the film and the book, which I read a few weeks ago in the immediate aftermath of Bleak House. The Cheesemonger was intrigued to hear this when I mentioned it on Saturday, not least because he'd been disappointed by the film, and felt that the film I described was far more interesting than the film he saw.

What was the book like? Very different, was really all I could say. My feeling was that the film's makers had read the book, liked it, summarised it for a producer in one of those ludicrously concise pitches so lethally lampooned in The Player, and been commissioned to make a film based on their pitch rather than on Matheson's brilliant novel.

The novel really is something special. Granted, I'm hardly a connoisseur of either horror or classic science fiction, but I think Stephen King has it spot on when he says that Matheson

'... single-handedly regenerated a stagnant genre, rejecting the conventions of the pulps that were already dying, incorporating sexual impulses and images into his work as Theodore Sturgeon had already begun to do in his science fiction, and writing a series of gut-bucket short stories. What do I remember about them? I remember what they taught me; the same thing that rock’s most recent regenerator, Bruce Springsteen, articulates in one of his songs, no retreat, baby, no surrender. I remember that Matheson would never give ground. When you thought it had to be over, that your nerves couldn’t stand any more, that was when Matheson turned on the afterburners. He wouldn’t quit. He was relentless. The baroque intonations of Lovecraft, the perfervid prose of the pulps, the sexual innuendoes, were all absent. You were faced with so much pure drive that only rereadings showed Matheson’s wit, cleverness, and control.'

The pace alone is stunning, but King's right, there's far more to it than that. It's a jewel, really. A strange one, but a real one for all that.

One of these days I must get round to watching The Last Man on Earth which is conveniently viewable online, having fallen into the public domain somehow. I'm intrigued by the idea of Vincent Price as Robert Neville, or whatever he's called in the film. Not just yet, though; work needs doing.

The Crack is Mighty

It's been a brilliant day.

Bagels and bacon are surely an auspicious start to any day, and as the morning wore on the Blogmother and I headed into central London, getting out by St Paul's, where I wondered at the origins of the charmingly named Knightrider Court before we set off to cross the river to the Tate Modern, one of London's must-sees that I have somehow contrived never to visit.

It took a bit of effort getting there, the Millennium Bridge being closed while a film was being made -- a helicopter seemed to be shooting it from above -- but we eventually made it over, and ambled in, with me hoping that I was going to enjoy the crack. The Brother's a big fan of it -- he specifically went to London for the crack a few months back.

Well, despite all my usual discomfort about modern art, I liked it a lot. To be honest, I'm happier just looking at it, and walking along it, and watching others do the same, and just thinking of it as 'The Crack' than remembering that it's actually called Shibboleth, and is by Doris Salcedo, and is apparently 'addressing a long legacy of racism and colonialism that underlies the modern world.'

This is what I learned at the Tate today. Do not read labels. I'm perfectly capable of enjoying non-representative works of art, but the moment I read what the artist says he or she had in mind I get confused, and anxious, and start staring at whatever the artwork is, just thinking 'Really?'

Anyway, we strolled around the Turbine Hall for a while, and then worked our way around the building, with me feeling a bit embarrassed that I've delayed so long in visiting. Without a doubt the highlight for me was the Juan Muñoz retrospective, all the pieces in which were eerily, unsettlingly beautiful. Curiously, other than that I think my favourite pieces were two paintings by Meredith Frampton, marked by an almost icy precision, a frozen elegance with more than a hint of Van Eyck about them.

Over the Millennium Bridge then -- and how have I never set foot on that before? -- and off to Earl's Court, there to dine at The Troubadour, inspirationally discovered by the Blogmother only the other day. I'm not sure what was the best thing about the place -- the food, the wine, the setting, or the company -- but I was sorry to slip away to mass, leaving my hostess to the delights of coffee and the Sunday Times.

The Oratory would probably have been the nearest Catholic church, but I had no idea what time mass was there, so I reckoned the best thing to do would be to grab a tube to Victoria and go to half five mass at Westminster Cathedral. I was impressed by how packed it was -- sadly, the Pro in Dublin never seems to get crowds like that, except at Christmas. Mass was wonderful, though I must confess that the inevitable side-effects of a heavy Sunday lunch rather meant it took all my efforts to focus during the homily, and afterwards I slipped for a few moments into the Chapel of Saints Gregory and Augustine, where Cardinal Hume is buried.

Although I first visited the Cathedral during my first trip to London, as part of a school tour when I was fifteen, it wasn't until August last that I actually set foot in the church proper; as schoolboys we'd attended mass somewhere in the warren at the back of the building. I was captivated -- enchanted, even -- by the place, by its beauty, its prayerfulness, its grandeur, its solemnity, and its warmth. I think I've spent maybe ten days in London since last summer, and I've visited the cathedral on maybe eight of them.

If the Cathedral is one of my favourite places in London, the Chapel of Saints Gregory and Augustine is my favourite place in the cathedral. The chapel, the theme of which is unsurprisingly the conversion of England, is dominated by Clayton's neo-Gothic mosaics of the two saints. This week's Catholic Herald conveniently answers a question I've long pondered about the depictions. Aidan Bellenger, Abbot of Downside, in a column arguing that we need fewer dioceses and more monasteries, says 'Augustine of Canterbury's missionary props included a beautiful icon of the Lord and the book of the Gospels.'

It's an icon. I'd always wondered why he was depicted carrying a picture of Christ. Is this a conventional attribute for the saint, I'd wondered, like Peter's key and Paul's sword, or even Zeus' thunderbolt and Hermes' staff? Well, leaving aside the fact that saints always point to Jesus, it's certainly intended that way. It seems that when he landed in Kent in 597 AD with his forty monks, he brought with him a cross, a book of Gospels, and an icon. The emphasis on the visual is important, especially in view of how almost all those he was to convert would have been illiterate! That's worth remembering when blowhards like Christopher Hitchens attempt to claim that the defining characteristic of a Christian is having personally read the New Testament. Even allowing for St Jerome's famous assertion that ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ, I'm pretty sure that literacy -- however desirable -- has been demanded of the Faithful. Our Lord never instructed his disciples to write anything, after all -- he told them to baptise, and to teach, and to break bread in memory of him, but he never told them to write a word!

Anyway, I returned back to Earl's Court to rendezvous with my delightful hostess, and settled in with her to watch Brick, an extraordinary film which successfully -- if jarringly -- marries high school dramas with film noir. The Blogmother's a big fan, and I can see why. The director's probably going to be someone well worth watching over the next few years.

And so to bed, as good old Sammy P would say. Tomorrow's going to be busy.

Someone Has To Make A Start

I fear my sleep patterns shall never recover from the last few weeks. Wednesday and Thursday nights saw me sleeping two full nights in a row for the first time since mid-January, and I'd hoped to make it three from three when I finally nestled under the covers last night. Alas, it was not to be, as I'd slept barely three hours when my phone woke me, bearing a transatlantic text from NMRBoy, desperate to know how yesterday's meeting had gone.

Unhappy though I was to have slept so little, my Comrade in Arms deserved to know how things had gone, so I texted him, and he called me, and somehow my throat obliged us both as I described yesterday's meeting at length.

I wished him a good night, and shut my eyes afresh, but sleep was not to bless me this time, and after a futile hour I sat up, rooted in my bag, crawled over to the television, stuck in a disc, and settled in to watch Sophie Scholl: Die Letzten Tage, which I'd picked up for a song yesterday afternoon.

To my shame, I'd never heard of Sophie Scholl until just before Christmas when, on the website of The Times, I watched a marvellous short film of Clive James reading from Cultural Amnesia, his astonishing distellation of a lifetime's reading. I've been dumbstruck since.

Not long after the battle of Stalingrad, the key members of the little resistance group called the White Rose were all arrested. One of them was Sophie Scholl. During the showtrial staged at Hitler's order, she said something apparently simple, but its implications go on unfolding, even into our own time.

'Finally, someone has to make a start. We only said and wrote what many people think. They just don't dare to express it.'

Sophie Scholl was guillotined by the Nazis at Stadelheim prison in Munich of February 22, 1943, at five o'clock in the afternoon. She was but twenty-one years old. In life she had been reserved with strangers but full of fun with those she loved. Without being especially pretty she had radiated a moral beauty that left even her Gestapo interrogators self-consciously shuffling their papers, for once in their benighted lives hoping that the job of killing someone might pass to someone else. If there can be any such thing as a perfect person beyond Jesus Christ and his immediate family, Sophie Scholl was it.

Sophie's brother Hans, the leader of the little resistance group that called itself the White Rose, was already pretty much of a paragon. The Scholl family weren't Jewish and Hans could have had a glittering career as a Nazi. Yet in spite of a standard Third Reich education, including membership of the Hitler Youth, Hans figured out for himself that the regime whose era he had been born into was an abomination.

The only means of resistance open to Hans and his like-minded fellow students was to hold secret meetings, write down their opinions and spread them surreptitiously around. Long before the end, Hans had guessed that even to do so little was bound to mean his death. He died with an unflinching fortitude that would have been exemplary if the Nazis had let anyone except his executioners watch.

You would have thought that to be as good as Hans Scholl was as good as you could get. he did what he did through no compulsion except an inner imperative, in the full knowledge that he would perish horribly if he were caught. Yet if moral integrity can be conceived of as a competition, Sophie left even Hans behind.

Hans tried to keep her ignorant of what he was up to but when she found out she insisted on joining in. Throughout her interrogation, the Gestapo offered her a choice that they did not extend to her brother. They told her that if she recanted she would be allowed to live. She turned them down, and walked without a tremor to the blade. The chief executioner later testified that he had never seen anyone die so bravely as Sophie Scholl. Not a whimper of fear, not a sigh of regret for the beautiful life she might have led. She just glanced up at the steel, put her head down, and she was gone.

Is that you? No, and it isn't me either.

She was probably a saint. Certainly she was noble in her behaviour beyond any standard that we, in normal life, would feel bound to attain or even comfortable to encounter. Yet the world would undoubtedly be a better place if Sophie Scholl were a household name like Anne Frank, another miraculous young woman from the same period. In addition to an image of how life can be affirmed by a helpless victim, we would have an image of how life can be affirmed by someone who didn't have to be a victim at all, but chose to be one because others were.

But part of the sad truth about Sophie Scholl is that nobody remembers a thing she said, and in her last few minutes alive she said nothing at all. If she had said something, the man who bore witness to her bravery would have remembered it.

Johann Reichardt, the executioner who had testified to Sophie's bravery, had seen more than his fair share of executions. He'd begun working at Stadelheim in 1924, and under the Nazi's twelve year reign he'd executed more than three thousand political prisoners; after their downfall he was reinstated and sent to the war-crimes prison at Landsberg, where he hanged Nazis who had been found guilty of crimes against humanity.

So I learned from Annette Dumbach and Jud Newborn's Sophie Scholl & The White Rose, which I read last week, starting it almost as soon as I finished Bleak House. It's a fascinating read which gives full credit to all those other members of the White Rose who are so easily ignored next to Sophie. It reads like a novel, and is packed with all manner of curious observations, such as this remarkable aside about Hans Scholl, Christoph Probst, and Willi Graf:

The rather free and casual style of life of these young men during wartime -- attending concerts, taking fencing lessons, and joining Bach choral societies -- is surprising. Nothing like it happened in the United States during the Second World War, and one would expect even less to find that such freedom and informality existed in Nazi Germany.

The book's one serious flaw, I can't help feeling, though, is that it downplays Sophie's Lutheran faith, something which makes no sense in light of the attention paid to Willi Graf's Catholicism. That's not to say that the authors ignore it altogether, as they most certainly don't. They include extracts from diaries and letters where Sophie's Christianity is clear, and they make a point of describing how -- in her last meeting with her parents, just hours before her execution -- her mother asked her to remember Jesus, and she, with her last recorded words, replied 'Yes, but you too.'

So yes, you'd be a fool to read Sophie Scholl & The White Rose and not realise just how important her faith was to her, but you'd be hard-pressed to realise that she was a Lutheran. Granted, she'd rightly have seen her relationship with Christ as far more significant that her Lutheran confession, but that doesn't change the fact that it's odd that her Lutheranism is played down.

Could a Confectionary Cannae be Coordinated?

There are people out there who think I have too much time, although they're obviously not the same people who realise that I've been escewing sleep every second night for the last few weeks; it's not that I've been worrying or anything, just that Friday's going to be a big day, and I need to get everything ready, well, basically by tomorrow morning.

But anyway, even if I did have too much time on my hands, I'm glad to say that I'd probably not use it building enormous models of the battle of Helm's Deep from The Two Towers or of the battle of Pelennor Fields from The Return of the King.

Or if I did, I probably wouldn't make them from cake and sweets. Look at the cute lickle jelly orks.

I have to admit, this has a certain charm, and this shot of Gandalf and the boys charging down the cliff doesn't look much more ludicrous when rendered in confectionary than it did rendered in computer-generated imagery.

It's got to be cheaper than buying models. Part of me is tempted to try this sometime with some historical battles, like Thermopylae, say, or the battles of Cannae, or Zama, or Lake Trasimene. That last one could be great, actually, like the castle and cabin cakes of my childhood, but on a colossal confectionary theme.

It's Time to Light the Lights

Speaking of puppets, as I was yesterday, Brother the Younger has been badgering me for ages to look up 'Muppet Pulp Fiction' online. Well. I've done so, and you should too. It's hilarious, with some absolutely inspired casting: Dr Teeth as Marcellus Wallace? Bunsen as Winston Wolfe? Sam the Eagle as Captain Koons? Gonzo and Camilla the chicken as Tim Roth's and Amanda Plummer's characters? And then there's Eric Stoltz...

Rob Paul and Eric Myles , the authors of this little gem, have also put online two versions of a CNN piece about the short. It's worth watching to see how and why they made the film before putting it on the internet, there to gather dust for six months before becoming a phenomenon.

I say 'phenomenon' though I should again point out that it's a phenomenon that eluded me until this week.

If that's not enough Muppetational oddness for you, you should check out Overtime. A short film by two French students, it's funny, poignant, a bit disturbing, and really rather beautiful.

I think it's one of the best animations I've ever seen.

You Can't Imagine the Rapture in Store

I must be getting old. I'm missing puns, and bad jokes are drifting past me without me even noticing. I went to see Sweeney Todd a couple of days back, arranging to go for drinks beforehand. A couple of hours before I left the house I got a text from Dublin's most shameless immigrant punster:

'I'll just have a quick shave and a pie for my tea, then I'll be making my way in.'

Bizarre English people with their pie obsessions, I thought. Why on earth is he telling me what he's having for dinner? Or even that he's going to shave? Weird.

It was only during the film that I got the joke.

Predictably enough I loved the film, though I'm not sure that it edges out Ed Wood as my favourite Tim Burton film, as it did for Neil Gaiman. I think it probably pushes Big Fish into third place, mind.

It looked fantastic, and I found Depp truly compelling as London's favourite butchering barber. Helena Bonham Carter's take on Mrs Lovett was refreshing, to say the least -- in the show she comes across as utterly amoral, whereas here she's amoral, yes, but more than that she seems damaged. From her first appearance on screen she appears to be barely holding herself together.

Alan Rickman oozed refined menace as Judge Turpin, Timothy Spall was obsequiously brutal as Beadle Bamford, and Sacha Baron Cohen was hilarious as Pirelli, though I rather wondered why his non-Italian alter-ego wasn't Irish as he is in the show. The younger members of the cast were all fine too, and I was particularly impressed by having Anthony played by someone so young; making him obviously as young as Johanna lent their romance a Romeo and Juliet element, and also explained much of his naivety.

On the other hand, I missed quite a few songs -- I could understand their being removed on the grounds that they slowed the story down and made little cinematic sense, but Sondheim's songs aren't gratuitous, and it felt as though the characters were being slimmed down just to speed the plot up. Oddly, I couldn't help but feel that what the film really missed was an interval.

I know, that sounds a bit odd, but think how the first half ends with 'A Little Priest' as the showstopper. First Sondheim takes us through the great anti-climax of the Judge's visit to Todd's parlour, drags us down to the abyss of 'Epiphany', where Todd resolves to turn his rage on all London, and lead us laughing out of the theatre to the puntastic strains of the horrifically hilarious promise by Todd and Mrs Lovett that their partnership will serve anyone -- and to anyone -- at all.

There's no real sense of time at the start of the play's second half. Sure, in a sense 'Johanna' does follow on from 'God, that's good!', but it doesn't really need to. Essentially, what Sondheim does is to hurl us some time into the future -- we've no idea how far, but certainly Todd now has a thriving barbershop and Mrs Lovett has a thriving pie shop. Time has passed, that's the main thing, and that makes sense, because we've left their world for twenty minutes after 'A Little Priest', laughing and gasping about the first half over coffee or gin or ice-cream.

The film doesn't manage that. Instead we go straight from Todd and Lovett's murderously musical contract to Toby calling for our attention, singing the praises of Mrs Lovett's pies. Sure, time has passed, but it doesn't feel that way.

It's only a small gripe, really. When I watch it on DVD, I'll make sure to stop the film and make tea, or maybe have a pie, at the appropriate spot.

The Key to Reserva

Having mentioned Hitchcock parodies the other day, this seems like a good time to point you to this spectacular homage to Hitchcock by Martin Scorsese. I know, it's been floating about online for ages, but there's a chance that some of you won't have seen it. Basically, it's an advert for dubious Spanish sparkling wine, but what an advert!

It purports to be a documentary about a secret project which could have bold repercussions on future film preservation. Supposedly Martin Scorsese has managed to acquired three-and-a-half pages of script from a film that Hitchcock had meant to make, but never did, for some reason, and has resolved to shoot them as the master would have done, to make his own Hitchcock film.

'It's one thing,' he says, 'to preserve a film that's been made. It's another to preserve a film that's not been made.'

Scorsese's clearly having blast in this, whether appearing in the documentary sections or making the mock-Hitchcock film itself, into which he tosses references to North by Northwest, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Vertigo, Rear Window, and surely a few other Hitchcock films that aren't leaping to mind just at the minute.

Even without the references, the homage is spot on, down to the costumes, the hairstyles, the lighting, the sound, and of course the credits. The only thing that's missing is the director himself -- though I wonder if Mr Scorsese is somewhere to be seen in the film.

Hmmmm.

In the Company of Wolves

The other day, talking about Christopher Hitchens, morality, and the 'Golden Rule', I raised the question of whether being nice is the same thing as being good; I might as easily have asked whether it's the same thing as being right. I'm inclined to agree with Little Red in Sondheim's Into the Woods who -- chastened by her experiences -- declares that 'nice is different than good'.

Into the Woods was my introduction to Sondheim, long before I was captivated by Sweeney Todd; a musicologist friend of mine loaned me her copy, after raving about it for months, and washed away all my ingrained contempt towards musicals. Heavily influenced by The Uses of Enchantment, Bruno Bettelheim's fascinating study of the importance of fairy tales, it's immensely clever and really quite hilarious in how it interweaves and interprets the stories of Rapunzel, Jack the Giant Killer, Cinderella, Red Riding Hood, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty to enthralling and enlightening effect. If you ever get an opportunity to see it -- whether in the theatre or in the American Playhouse version -- you shouldn't miss that chance.

Bettelheim's analysis of the Red Riding Hood story is primarily based -- like pretty much all modern retellings -- on 'Little Red-Cap', as the Brothers Grimm version of the tale in entitled. He sees this as a fairy tale for inquistive children who've outgrown 'Hansel and Gretel', and sees its value in how it allows children to give vent to their oedipal fantasies while ensuring that the natural order is ultimately restored.

While it's the Grimm version that interests him most, Bettelheim doesn't ignore the tale's prehistory and devotes special attention to Le Petit Chaperon Rouge, Charles Perrault's 1697 French version of the tale, the earliest published form of the story. Unlike the Grimm version, Perrault's version is a cautionary tale that ends with the girl being devoured. There's no rescue by a woodman, no snipping open of the wolf's belly with a scissors, no filling of the wolf's belly with deadening stones. Nope. The girl and her grandmother are eaten, that being the end of them, and in case Perrault's point isn't blindingly obvious, he hammers it home by tagging on a moral:

Children, especially young ladies – attractive, courteous, and well-bred – do very wrong to listen to strangers, for if they should do so, they may well provide a wolf with dinner. I saw ‘wolf’, for there are various kinds of wolf. There is one kind with an amenable disposition – neither noisy nor hateful nor angry, but tame, obliging, and gentle – who pursues young women in the streets, even into their homes. And alas! Everyone must know that it its these gentle wolves that are the most dangerous wolves of all!

Perrault also seems to have been responsible for introducing the red hood itself to the story; it doesn't appear to have been part of the oral tales from which he drew his Tales of Mother Goose, at least insofar as they can be established, although there was a tale current in the Eleventh Century of a red-capped girl found in the company of wolves.


It seems that Perrault may have toned the story down a bit too, removing elements he apparently deemed unsuitable for his polite audience; this rendering of the tale, taken with just one adjustment from Robert Darnton's The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History, is representative:

Once a little girl was told by her mother to bring some bread and milk to her grandmother. As the girl was walking through the forest, a wolf came up to her and asked where she was going.
"To grandmother's house," she replied.

"Which path are you taking, the path of the pins or the path of the needles?"

"The path of the pins."

So the wolf took the path of the needles and arrived first at the house. He killed grandmother, poured her blood into a bottle, and sliced her flesh onto a platter. Then he got into her nightclothes and waited in bed.

"Knock, knock."

"Come in, my dear."

"Hello, grandmother. I've brought you some bread and milk."

"Have something yourself, my dear. There is meat and wine in the pantry."

So the little girl ate what was offered; and as she did, a little cat said, "Slut! To eat the flesh and drink the blood of your grandmother!"

Then the wolf said, "Undress, and get into bed with me."
"Where shall I put my apron?"

"Throw it on the fire; you won't need it any more."

For each garment -- bodice, skirt, petticoat, and stockings -- the girl asked the same question; and each time the wolf answered, "Throw it on the fire; you won't need it any more."

When the girl got into bed, she said, "Oh, grandmother! How hairy you are!"

"It's to keep me warmer, my dear."

"Oh, grandmother! What big shoulders you have!"

"It's for better carrying firewood, my dear."

"Oh, grandmother! What long nails you have!"

"It's for scratching myself better, my dear."

"Oh, grandmother! What big teeth you have!"

"It's for eating you better, my dear."

And he ate her.

Darnton has the girl taking the path of the needles rather than the path of the pins, but Bettelheim notes that early versions of the story describe the girl choosing the path of the pins, and explain the significance of the choice by saying that it is easier to fasten things together with pins than to sew them together with needles; as such the girl is choosing the pleasure principle over the reality principle, and suffers accordingly.

I first read this version of the story in a slightly abridged form in Neil Gaiman's Sandman comic, as told by Gilbert -- Gaiman's Chestertonian embodiment of a very special place -- to Rose Walker, the heroine of The Doll's House. It's apparently a pretty accurate reflection of the story as it was told among the peasantry of Eighteenth Century France, at around the same time as Perrault's somewhat sanitised version was gaining popularity among the literate classes; you'll probably have been rather startled both its cannibalistic element and by what Darnton describes as 'the strip-tease prelude to the devouring of the girl'.


Marina Warner, in From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers, notes that other retellings seem to preserve a different tradition again. She describes how some versions indeed have the wolf tricking the girl into eating the flesh and drinking the blood of her grandmother, but with the girl refusing to get into bed with the wolf, saying that she needs to relieve herself. The wolf encourages her to join her anyway, saying she can relieve herself in the bed, but as the girl persists in her refusal he ties her to the bed post with a long cord that allows her to leave the cottage but go no further; once outside, the girl undoes the knot and escapes.

Warner makes much of how the wolf takes the place of the grandmother in the story, eschewing Bettelheim's psychoanalyical interpretation to point out that both the wolf and the grandmother are marginal figures in the story: both dwell in the woods away from people and are in need of food. This parallel seems to reflect and embody the peasant fantasies of early modern Europe, where the werewolf was a male counterpart to the female witch or crone.

If you've seen The Brotherhood of the Wolf, you might be familiar with the story of the 'Beast of Gévaudan', upon which the film is loosely based. The Beast terrorised a part of south-central France between 1764 and 1767, killing at least sixty people. More than a hundred years later, Robert Louis Stevenson described it as 'the Napoleon Bonaparte of wolves':

What a career was his! He lived ten months at free quarters in Gévaudan and Vivarais; he ate women and children and ‘shepherdesses celebrated for their beauty’; he pursued armed horsemen; he has been seen at broad noonday chasing a post-chaise and outrider along the king’s high-road, and chaise and outrider fleeing before him at the gallop. He was placarded like a political offender, and ten thousand francs were offered for his head. And yet, when he was shot and sent to Versailles, behold! a common wolf, and even small for that.

It's not surprising that the locals had been so terrified, and indeed superstitious. The nightmare of the loup-garou -- the werewolf -- was deeply embedded in the collective psyche of the peasantry of early modern France. Throughout the Sixteenth Century, with the countryside apparently being plagued by lycanthropic attacks, thousands of people were accused of being werewolves. Although torture was often used to educe confessions, there were cases where the evidence against the accused was clear in relation to charges of murder and cannibalism, albeit not to association with wolves!

The whole phenomenon, strikingly similar to the witch-trials that were so common throughout Europe at the time, petered out after it was decreed in a 1603 trial that 'the change of shape existed only in the disorganised brain of the insane'. With lycanthropy now seen as a delusion rather than a real supernatural phenomenon, werewolves faded from the French courtroom, but they clearly remained fixed in the French popular imagination, being trasmitted down through the centuries through folklore, fairy tales, films, and even parlour games.

'Blondes Make the Best Victims'

One snowy night years ago, when a girl I rather fancied at the time was foolishly wearing some decidedly inappropriate high-heeled strappy shoes, one of my friends related to me with great enthusiasm and an excess of detail the entirety of 'Think Fast, Father Ted' while we blundered about in the January snow. I'd not seen Ted at the time, and I'm afraid my friend's description didn't whet my appetite any.

Curiously enough, when I finally got round to seeing Ted for the first time, that was the very first episode I happened to stumble upon. I wasn't exactly swept away by it; Dermot and Ardle were great as Ted and Dougal, and Pauline McGlynn was fine as Mrs Doyle, but why the hell was Frank Kelly being wasted -- in so many senses -- as Jack? I was to be a few years before I changed my mind on Ted, and started to appreciate just how good it was, although even now I'm not convinced by Jack. I still think he's the one weak point in the series, but I rate its strengths rather higher now than I did at the time.

In the summer of 2006 I worked my way through the whole series, watching an episode each day while I ate my lunch, or listening to a commentary while I was cooking; this had the rather odd side-effect of reviving my Irish accent to the point where people took to asking me whether I'd been home at any point. No, I'd grin, I've just been watching lots of Father Ted.

You might remember my mentioning the commentaries the other day, when I was talking about RTE's brilliant Art Lives documentary on Graham Linehan. I described them as a 'comedy masterclass', and I'd really hold to that: aside from being very funny, listening to them and thinking about the episodes teaches an immense amount about the structure and timing of comedy, about the sitcom as a form, about the transformation of a written script into a full show, and about how actors realise and reinterpret the writers' vision.

'Think Fast, Father Ted' has a scene where the priests' car is -- for no apparent reason whatsover -- attacked by a flock of birds. In the commentary, Graham remarks that:

Arthur was obsessed with The Birds. He’s still obsessed with The Birds, ‘cause the special effects look so bad in it, and it’s considered such a classic. It’s just such an odd film in many ways. But, there’s a scene where there’s some schoolchildren running down the street and the birds are attacking in the background: it looks really fake, and Arthur just really wanted to have birds attacking them. Actually he specifically wanted that shot - he wanted that shot - and I didn’t really know what he was getting at, and neither did, y’know, neither did anyone else working on it, so he never quite got what he was after, and I felt bad because suddenly one day I saw it - I saw The Birds - and I thought, y’know, I had seen it but I hadn’t quite grasped what he was after, and I saw The Birds, and I thought, ‘Aww, okay. It’s the running really fast and the obvious fakeness in the background, and the camera slightly at a low angle looking up, and all this, and I didn’t realise he meant exactly exactly like The Birds.’

Arthur evidently carried his obsession for Hitchcock's apocalyptic fantasy over to Big Train; a few years back in Manchester I remember being nearly sick laughing at his brilliant parody 'Alfred Hitchcock's The Working Class'. It's absolutely spot on, right down to Simon Pegg being briefly replaced with an egregiously fake dummy.

Of course, The Birds is a film that's almost too easy to imitate; it's so distinctive in its look and tone, and contains so many unforgettable moments. It's hardly suprising then, that it was so perfectly drawn on in 'A Streetcar Named Marge', surely one of the best films in what really looks like the Golden Age of The Simpsons. You must have seen the scene towards the end of episode, where Homer goes to retrieve Maggie from the Ayn Rand School for Tots, only to walk into a room with every surface covered in babies, the only soundbeing that of hundreds of babies all sucking on their soothers; he gently picks up his daughter and then backs out of the room, and as he leaves the building Alfred Hitchcock can be seen strolling past, walking a couple of dogs. It's pretty much a shot-for-shot homage to The Birds.

I couldn't help but think of all this yesterday afternoon, looking out my window to refresh my eyes, tired from being glued to the screen: in the garden, and the adjoining gardens, and on the telephone wires, were hundreds of birds. There was at least half a dozen magpies, several jackdaws, a few starlings, a handful of jackdaws, a thrush or two, a blackbird, too many crows, and far too many terns for my liking.

I was only glad there weren't any seagulls.

The Quest for the Comedian's Finger

Well, I'm back, as a certain portly hobbit once said, having tramped his way across the world without losing an ounce, a metabolic feat that can only be explained if we recognise elf-toast as being the most calorific form of carbohydrate yet imagined. Not for Sam Gamgee that proto-Atkins diet so spectacularly pioneered by Gollum, forgetting the taste of bread, living on fish and flesh alone, a diet of pure protein that lost him all his cuddly Hobbit-fat and rendered him the skeletal and somewhat peculiar smelling creature we all know and love.

Er, yes, so I'm back, as I was saying, having essayed yesterday into the Irish midlands for the first time in years, spending my first ever night in Longford.

I was visiting friends who to my shame I've not seen since the morning after their wedding in September 2004, an event at which I let down the side in a rather distinctive and thoroughly embarrassing fashion. I'd been asked some months beforehand if I'd perform photographic duties on the day, and nervously did so, terrified that I'd somehow screw up. Several hours of worrying followed on from a rather long night before the wedding with the groom, and were topped off by a heavy -- albeit thoroughly splendid -- meal which involved an abundance of beef and more than a smidgeon of wine. Devoid of any energy at all, I slipped off with my then frau, thinking that I'd just lie down for half an hour or so, and then, invigorated, I'd rejoin the festivities and party till the early hours. This was at around eight in the evening.

I woke at half one.

Herself hadn't woken me, presumably thinking that I clearly needed the sleep, but thoughtful though this was it left me with a terrible dilemma: clearly everyone would have assumed that we'd been off up to no good, so should we return to face the inevitable -- and thoroughly unjustified -- slagging? In the end, I decided against it, and instead after a full night's sleep braved the ridicule at breakfast.

I've not seen my friends since the breakfast, so was all to glad to hastily fill my overnight bag and hop on the Ballina bus at the Spa Hotel, scene of far too much teenage disgrace, heading out west.

The journey was rather fun, not least because I'd hardly settled into my seat before I was glimpsing the Wonderful Barn and Connolly's Folly, two of the most striking landmarks in my neck of the woods.

The Wonderful Barn must surely be the most peculiar structure within easy cycling range of my house: it's an Eighteenth Century grain silo on the edge of the Castletown Estate, apparently built in 1743 to give idle tenant farmers something to do during a famine, and with two smaller but similarly conical dovecotes nearby.

There must have been a spate of this sort of thing at the time, as it seems that Churchtown's Bottle Tower is only a year or so older, apparently dating from 1742. Oddly, I keep reading both that the Bottle Tower is older than the Wonderful Barn and that its builder, Major Hall, built it in imitation of the bigger folly. Both barns were built as relief works on Connolly estates, so I'm inclined to suspect that the Bottle Tower was modelled on plans for the then unbuilt Wonderful Barn.

Sorry, discrepancies with dates really bother me.

Anyway, on then through Mullingar and Edgeworthstown to Longford, which seems a lot jollier than I remember it. Saint Mel's cathedral looks far less sinister than it did when I was last passing through, on the way back from Mayo, and the Temperance Hall looks remarkable cheerful. I'm told that even the old courthouse has lost its menacing air of gothic dilapidation. Apparently it's been done up.

From Longford then I was driven to Kenagh, there to admire the house and delight in how little my friends had changed in the last three years, despite their having being joined by two very tiny daughters, one of whom, despite being over a year old, is still as bald as an egg. A slightly fuzzy egg, I must concede, but an egg nonetheless.

We ended the night watching Adam and Paul, which was introduced to me as being 'like Laurel and Hardy on heroin'. Telling the story of a day in the lives of two Dublin junkies, friends since childhood, it was one of the funniest, bleakest, and at times shockingly beautiful films I've seen in a long time. It's really rather remarkable.

Mass in the morning so in the local church, where to my bemusement the priest seemed to make a point of leaving me till last at Communion. Hmmm.

And then with time's winged chariot hurrying near, it was away for me after a fill of toast and tea, with a quick and tempting drive round the neighbourhood first, the highlight surely being the house where Dave Allen lived during the Emergency, and the ruined mill across the road where he lost his finger in the summer of 1941.

My friend often wondered whether the crushed fingertip was ever retrieved, and if not whether it's still there to be found. I suspect there could be a sinister Irish reworking of Blue Velvet on the agenda...

Attending the tale of Sweeney Todd, rather than watching the Watchmen

One of the topics that came up after the Murder Mystery dinner the other evening was the coming Watchmen film, with the prospect of it being met with much muttering and shaking of heads. Pretty much everyone agreed that there's no way this is going to work, even if Dave Gibbons seems to be having a blast on the set, marvelling at how his creations are being brought to life. Leaving aside the fact that purely in terms of structure and storytelling, Zak Snyder's surely not the man to attempt this, I'm with the jaundiced Terry Gilliams on this one in a broader sense:

This nightmare began back in 1988 or 89 when Joel Silver, the producer of Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, The Matrix suggested that we make a film of the Watchmen. "The what?" I said. He thrust a fat hardback comic book in my hand and said read. I read. I loved.

But how to make a film of a masterpiece? Always a problem. So far no one has made a good version of War and Peace, and to me Watchmen is the W and P of comics ... sorry, graphic novels.

I sat down with Charles McKeown, my writing partner on Baron Munchausen and Brazil, to squeeze out a script. Time passed. Frustration increased. How do you condense this monster book into a 2 - 2½ hour film? What goes? What stays? Therein lies the problem. I talked to Alan Moore. He didn't know how to do it. He seemed relieved that i had taken on the responsibility of fucking up his work rather than leaving it to him. I suggested perhaps a 5 part mini series would be better. I still believe that.

With every bit of narrative tightening, we were losing character detail... and without their neuroses and complex relationships the characters were becoming more like normal run-of-the-mill-quirky-super-heroes. There wasn't time to tell all their stories. The Comedian was reduced to someone who dies at the beginning. That's all, just a convenient corpse to kick off the action. None of this was satisfying to me. I was wasn't happy with our results.

By now, actors were fluttering around Watchmen like crazed moths beating at a dirty street lamp. Robin Williams was keen to play Rorschach. Was that Richard Gere knocking on the door? The pressure on me was building. Thank god, Joel solved the problem. he failed to convince the studios to hand over enough money to make the film. Brilliant! I was saved! And, perhaps, Watchmen as well!

Certain works should be left alone... in their original form. Everything does not have to become a movie. Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy was alwats best in its original manifestation... a radio show.

So forget about the movie. Ley your imagination animate the characters. Do your own sound effects. Your own camera moves. Dave Gibbons' artwork is perfect. From my first reading of Watchmen, it felt like a movie. Why does it have to be a movie?

Think of what will have to be lost. Is it worth it?

That's from Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman, in case you're curious. If you read William Goldman's Adventures in the Screen Trade, or better yet in this context, the chapter on Absolute Power in Which Lie Did I Tell?, you'll get a terrifyingly vivid picture of just the kind of butchery that will need to be done to Watchmen in order to turn it into a credible film. I just can't see anyone managing that.

That's not to say that butchery is always a bad thing when it comes to making films, I must admit. After all, it seems that the Sweeney Todd that shall be hitting British and Irish screens in a month or so has had more than the odd note shaved off it; Sondheim wasn't remotely precious about his masterpiece, fully recognising that it would need serious surgery to become truly cinematic, and as a result from what I can gather barely ten songs are performed in anything even close to their stage versions.

Having seen the show four times on stage at this point, and with a DVD and a couple of CDs of it floating around, I obviously have an absurd amount invested in the film working, so Neil Gaiman's verdict was more than a little encouraging, especially with his own weakness for the show:

I took the family to see Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd last night, which I absolutely loved (even down to a couple of grace notes, the St Dunstan's market and the Bell Court street sign -- in the earliest versions of the Penny Dreadful, Sweeney's shop was part of St Dunstan's Church and Mrs Lovett's was around the corner, in Bell Yard). I even loved Johnny Depp's early-Bowie-when-he-was-still-doing-Anthony-Newley singing style. (At least until, on the way out, I found myself trying to imagine a blood-spattered Sweeney Todd singing "The Laughing Gnome" as he waited for customers, and was unable to explain to anyone else why this was funny.) I think it just edged out Ed Wood as my favourite Tim Burton movie.

Ed Wood is a masterpiece in its own right, of course, a hilarious, poignant, heartbreaking masterpiece, so for Neil to regard this as eclipsing that is high praise. I've been looking at some clips over at the New York Times site, and they just fill me with delight. You should check them out. Really. This looks as though it's very very very good indeed.

'We may be through with the past...

... but the past ain't through with us.'

So says Philip Baker Hall's character Jimmy Gator in Magnolia, surely not merely the finest film of 1999, but one of the most astounding films in recent memory, up there with The Lives of Others, To Live, and Kieślowski's Three Colours trilogy. If you haven't seen it, and aren't easily offended, you should really rectify this lapse: it's one of the most accomplished and profound films I've ever seen.

I couldn't help but think of it yesterday afternoon, when I checked my sitemeter; I do this pretty often, not to keep track of how many people are reading, but because there are one or two people who I'd rather weren't reading and it's useful to keep tabs.

Anyway, so I checked the sitemeter yesterday afternoon, having come back from a wonderful evening, night, and indeed morning, and saw this:

Sorry, you probably can't see the problematic bit in that, so I'll zoom in a bit closer:

Yes, you're not imagining that. At twenty past eight last night, or twenty past nine in France, someone in France was looking up NMRBoy on the web, and then, having had a good gawk at my comrade in arms' site, crawled right through the google result list to have a look at this site, arriving -- ironically enough -- on a post about Black Dossier entitled 'Is Big Brother Watching You... Even Now?'

On New Year's Eve.

If you know either NMRBoy or me, and are any way familiar with our history over the past couple of years, it'll not be too difficult to guess who's been looking us up, not least because we only know a couple of people who live in France, and one of them was home in England over the Christmas. It'll have been someone who both of us had regarded as a good friend for several years, who was terribly misled by someone into believing horrible things of us, who -- sucked into the madness -- spread nasty lies and rumours herself, and who I haven't heard from since she sent me a nasty e-mail just over a year ago. I first learned of that e-mail not by reading it, but because several friends -- some of whom I'd not heard from in years -- called me to ask whether I'd received it and if I was okay, my erstwhile friend having hit 'reply all' and fired her missive to everyone on my mailing list.

They weren't impressed. The terms 'witch' and 'sad cow' were used.

So yes, I think it'll have been her. Not for the first time either. That's just my opinion, granted, but I'm pretty sure it's right.

Oddly, I don't bear any grudges about what happened a year and a half ago, although it took me a very long time to forgive her behaviour. In truth, I just feel sorry for her now, and think that in some ways she was as much a victim as we were, having been misled as she was, her protective tendencies having been so cruelly twisted, having been tricked into turning on people who had seen her as a friend. Seeing her crawling our blogs on New Year's Eve brought that powerfully home.

I was off at a friend's house, sharing in the most entertaining New Year's celebration I've enjoyed on Irish soil in years, while far away in France she was hovering on the internet checking to see what we'd written. Didn't she have anything better to be doing with her time, on New Year's Eve of all nights?

I keep thinking to contact her, to ask after her -- because recently she did something which I admire, and which I wish her luck in -- but I reckon there's a danger that might just pour fuel on near-dead embers.

Let sleeping dogs lie, and all that.

Here below, to live is to change...

And so 2007 ends. It's been a quiet year in a lot of ways, certainly less tumultuous than 2006, thank God. I'm off to wrap it up at a friends' house in a few minutes. We're having a murder mystery dinner. I have narrowly escaped having to go in drag. There are some ways one really shouldn't start a new year, after all.


I was struck the other day by a passage in Father Martin Tierney's article in this week's Irish Catholic -- I'm rarely caught by Fr Tierney's column, but this one was a little different.

We come to the end of another year.
John Moriarty, the philosopher, was asked in a radio interview: 'are you happy?'
'That's not the question,' answered John.
'So what is the question?' asked the interviewer.
'The question is -- "have I grown?"'
If we have grown in holiness, wisdom, charity, and patience, this has been a good year.

Have I grown? It's a good question, and I really don't know the answer, though I think I have. I hope so, at any rate.

Certainly I've done so in how I've handled the ongoing mess in my life I tend to refer to as 'the War', and in terms of the decisions I've made regarding leaving academia and taking a new path. As for which path I'll follow, there are a couple of options that are foremost in my mind, and one of my main tasks in the next year will involve discerning which one's for me. I have hopes, but we don't always get what we want.

So what has the old year held? Well, I haven't got the work done I'd hoped to do, but then the war has rather been my priority -- justice needs to be done, I'm afraid, and to be seen to be done, and people need to be protected, so I've had to leave my own interests aside to focus on that. Yes, I know that my studies, my career, and my life have all been hurt in ways by this, but really, what option have I had? Could I have let things go, and still be who I am? And even if I could, should I?

Other than that, how does the year stack up?


Sister the Elder got married, and a new Brother-in-Law and a new niece joined the clan. Sister the Elder's wedding saw the Gargoyle clan in one exact spot for the first time in nearly ten years; once the photos were taken we dispersed, though not very far. Brother the Elder returned from America, and though I'd rather he hadn't had to come home, it's good to have him around.

Several of my friends enriched the world by bringing new people into it, though so far I've encountered only one of the offspring, who I'll be seeing again this evening; with luck I'll see the others soon enough. Two of my closest friends got together, following my nudging one of them into action. With nearly a year down, things are still going well, which pleases me more than I can say.

I had a lovely trip to Greece, where I tramped around battlefield after battlefield, renewed old friendships, spoke to one of my dearest friends while on the site of the 300's last stand, revisited a hill where my eyes filled with tears for the only time all year, and consumed far too much alcohol and not nearly enough octopus. And on the way back I had a decidedly strange night in Zurich.

I spent a few wonderful summer days in London, on the way there hearing a marvellous quote from Mother Teresa that has stayed in my head since, challenging me as much as it consoles. London was magical, with me seeing my niece for my first time, staying with one of the most attractive girls I know and lunching with another, catching up with a very old friend, falling in love with Westminster Cathedral, and saying goodbye for now to three people -- all of whom mean the world to me in very different ways, and none of whom I've seen since.

(I haven't had my hair cut since that week. This is a coincidence, I assure you, and since my barber offered me a charity haircut when I bumped into him on Christmas Eve, I shall probably be rectifying this soon enough. Five months of growth, would, I feel, be extravagant.)

I fixed a portrait that I'd been unhappy with last year and gave it to its subject, and managed my first ever mass-produced Christmas card, and smiled to see how my cartoons had been acknowledged in my old school's fiftieth anniversary yearbook. I made my radio debut, which was fun, and is still online if you know where to look, and I marvelled at the discovery that people are still buying my book.

I let my old blog die with a whimper, and started this one with rather more sense of what I was doing than I ever had with my old one. If nothing else, I think I deserve some plaudits for the colour scheme. I've started a couple of other blogs too, but I'm keeping them under wraps unless things turn really nasty in the war. It does no harm to have a few nuclear options.

Speaking of which, I visited the Oireachtas, and addressed a very old acquaintance as Deputy, and just a week or so ago I addressed an old friend and travelling buddy as Counsellor. Times have changed; all these things were new to me. Also for the first time, I made the front page of a newspaper; considering my story was on the front page the reporter did a remarkably discreet job in relating my vindication.

And for all my thoughts of old friends, I made some fine new ones too, especially one cloak-and-dagger evening where truths were told. Along the way I've helped celebrate a few birthdays in style, and bestowed a couple of Claddagh rings to mark two angels' comings of age, telling them what they mean. If I've returned even the tiniest amount of the kindness, the patience, the generosity, the love, and the loyalty that's been shown to me over the last couple of years then I'll have done some good.

Not enough, I know. But some.


I've spent much of the last year making feeble progress with Bleak House, but have along the way -- aside from academic books and sundry bits of the Bible -- read The Names by Don DeLillo, Neil Gaiman's Fragile Things, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Jesus of Nazareth by Pope Benedict XVI, Rome Sweet Home, Letter and Spirit, and Reasons to Believe, all by Scott Hahn, Persian Fire by Tom Holland, John Nagl's Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, By What Authority? and Making Senses of Scripture by Mark Shea, The 33 Strategies of War by Robert Greene, Garry Kasparov's How Life Imitates Chess, Heroic Leadership by Chris Lowney, Ethan M. Rasiel's The McKinsey Way, William Poundstone's How Would You Move Mount Fuji?, Bryan Talbot's Alice in Sunderland, The Complete Bone by Jeff Smith, Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier, Larry Gonick's The Cartoon History of the Modern World, Volume 1, and John Wagner, Alan Grant, and Carlos Ezquerra's Strontium Dog Casefiles, Volume 1. I've also reread Donna Tartt's The Secret History, and The Man Who was Thursday, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, Orthodoxy, and The Everlasting Man, all by G.K. Chesterton.

I graced the cinema with my presence eighteen times, making this my most cinematic year in quite a while, taking in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, London to Brighton, The Maltese Falcon, Into Great Silence, Black Book, Perfume, The Man Who Would Be King, Blood Diamond, 300, Amazing Grace, Spider-Man 3, Magicians, The Lives of Others, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Stardust, Beowulf, and I Am Legend. It's an obvious call, but just as Pan's Labyrinth was my favourite film of 2006, so The Lives of Others was the film that impressed me most in the last year.

I'm afraid that a peculiar combination of necessity and opportunity saw me going to a concert alone for my first time, to see Ani DiFranco in what used to be The Red Box. It was the sixth time for me to see her play, and I was delighted to see that she hadn't lost her touch.

I also wound up seeing Henry V on my own too, enraptured for the best part of three hours in Manchester's Exchange Theatre. Don Pasquale in the RDS was rather more of a group outing, as were Julius Caesar in the Abbey and both trips to the breathtaking gate production of Sweeney Todd. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead was a delight in Manchester's Library, as was The Tempest in the Royal Exchange. I'm afraid that The Vortex was just as uninspiring as my Fairy Blogmother had warned me it would be, while Things of Dry Hours proved rather surprising, not least in how it developed in the second half.

Oh, and then there was Alton Towers.


Any regrets? Quite a few actually, but barring my failures to finish my thesis or to master straight-razor shaving, not getting to see The Police or Ireland play in Croke Park, seeing only one decidedly uninspiring football match all year, and not managing to meet up with Josh and Clare anywhere, I think they'll be staying strictly offline, except to say that insofar as I can do anything about them next year, I plan to do so.

This is my site! I can fix this!

There was a line in 'Voyage of the Damned', the Christmas episode of Doctor Who, where one of the characters remarked to the Doctor:

'Of all the people to survive, he's not the one you would have chosen, is he? But if you could chose, Doctor, if you could decide who lives and who dies -- that would make you a monster.'

There is, of course, a fine line between heroes and monsters, as I've discussed already here. This idea which was central to the Christmas episode of Doctor Who, strikes me in retrospect as having been curiously underplayed I Am Legend, which I saw -- and enjoyed -- last night.

Based on Richard Matheson's 1954 novel of the same name, I Am Legend has already been filmed twice, but I'm afraid that having neither read the book nor seen Vincent Price and Charlton Heston do their respective things in The Last Man on Earth and The Omega Man, I wasn't really sure what to expect from the new film. Sure, I had a vague notion of Will Smith being the last real human left alive in a world where some kind of plague had turned everyone else into vampires, but while that's pretty much the premise of the film it didn't really prepare me for what unfolded.

Obviously owing an immense amount to 28 Days Later, a film which itself owes more than a little to Matheson's novel, the film is almost wholly set in 2012 on a feral Manhattan island, cut off from the mainland, where for three years a military virologist named Robert Neville has lived alone with just his dog for company, somehow immune to a virus that has almost totally annihilated mankind.

90 per cent of those who contracted the virus when it developed in 2009 had died; almost all the survivors had mutated into rabid monsters with a craving for living flesh and a marked aversion to daylight.

As far as he knows, Neville is the only normal human left alive in the world, although this doesn't stop him from sending out a daily radio signal to whoever might be listening, and every day waiting where he promises to wait, in the vain hope of meeting just one other survivor. His days are dedicated -- when he's not picking corn in Central Park or hunting deer in Times Square -- to a seemingly endless quest to identify what it is that makes him immune, and by replicating that immunity to somehow cure the mutations and save humanity from what it's become.

Although there are quite a few glitches in the script, especially towards the end where some things really don't quite add up, it's a fascinating idea, beautifully executed in the main, with a handful of real jump-out-of-your-seat moments and some nice touches -- I rather liked the wind turbines of the final shot. It's particularly interesting in how it meditates on the notion of the importance of hope, with Neville being like Chesterton's dedicated sentinel at an unknown watch, but it seems that it strays radically from Matheson's book, especially in the sense of how Neville is a 'legend'.

It seems that Matheson's book, set in California rather than New York, features rather more conventional vampires and a third grouping, humans termed 'the still living' who are indistinguishable from the vampires themselves. Unable to distinguish predators from prey, Matheson's Neville kills both groups indiscriminately, becoming a mythical monster to them, the 'legend' of the title.

It's a shame that this aspect of the story was abandoned in the movie, as it would surely have added layers of depth to a film that already goes somewhat beyond typical holiday blockbuster fare. Well, that's not quite fair, as the theme isn't so much abandoned as transferred. Unlike in the book, the film's plague has been caused by an attempt to cure cancer through the creation of a manipulated strain of the virus that causes measles. Instead of Neville becoming a monster through usurping God's power of life and death, this dubious distinction is bestowed on poor Dr Krippin, Emma Thompson's well-meaning scientist who in an attempt to save the world created the mutant virus and unleashed Hell on Earth.

(I know, as a warning against scientists who might be tempted to play God, it's rather melodramatic; I'm just saying that the theme's not quite absent from the film.)

Aside from the eerily beautiful shots of New York being reclaimed by the wild -- albeit improbably quickly -- the film's main strength is Will Smith himself, who puts in a fine performance in an atypically grim role.

Through much of the film Neville comes across as a somewhat Quixotic character, as pathetic as he is noble, reliving the same day every day, following the same patterns, slowly going mad but with his madness keeping him sane, his obsessive-compulsive patterns creating a boundary of civilization and order between him and the monstrously depraved -- albeit smarter and better organised than Neville realises -- remnants of humanity. His quest to cure the virus seems pointless, as even were he to succeed in replicating his immunity, what hope would he really have of redeeming humanity?

Does he know this? Does he realise the futility of his mission? Is he staying put out of a sense of duty, or out of a sense of arrogance, or purely out of obsession? His constant mantra is 'I can fix this!', which -- driven though it is by both necessity and obligation -- might smack of hubris were it not for the fact that, well, he kind of does.

There's a lesson there somewhere. It's an interesting film. I just wish they'd taken an extra two minutes or so to fill in those annoying holes in the plot.

Visiting the Jedi Library

I couldn't help but get rather disheartened last week by the news that Terry Pratchett has been diagnosed as suffering from a form of early onset Alzheimer's. It's gloomy news, though the fact that he's confidently working on two new books is encouraging, as is his observation that

This should be interpreted as 'I am not dead'. I will, of course, be dead at some future point, as will everybody else. For me, this maybe further off than you think - it's too soon to tell. I know it's a very human thing to say "Is there anything I can do", but in this case I would only entertain offers from very high-end experts in brain chemistry.

Among Pratchett's ideas, one of my favourite has long been that of 'L-Space', the notion that all libraries and even bookshops are somehow linked as being a separate dimension in their own right; as a frustrated academic, I've often wished this were the case, not least when waiting for an inter-library loan to come through.

I've been having trouble with libraries a lot lately, especially in Manchester, but finally today I attained my own Holy Grail in being granted access to Dublin's best library. And no, I don't mean the Chester Beatty Library, because magnificent though it is, it's more a museum than a working library.


The library of Trinity College, or the University of Dublin if you want to be fancy, is a copyright library, entitled to claim a copy of anything published in Ireland or the United Kingdom. In practice it doesn't even come close to claiming all it could, of course, not least because there's no way it could store everything, but it gets enough for free.

The most impressive part of the library in my books is the Long Room, which I reckon as one of the five or six most important spots in any trip to Dublin. You're probably familiar with it, in a way.

Take a look at the pictures. Do they look familiar? No? Well, can you spot the differences? Yes, well done, the one on the right has light-coloured busts and dusty books while the one on the left has dark-coloured busts and, um, glowing books.

Or putting it another way, one is the Jedi Library where Obi wan Kenobi hunts in vain for a missing planet in the feebly named Attack of the Clones, while the other is Trinity's Long Room.

It might help if you looked at them in colour. Colour sometimes matters, after all.

Amusingly, when this was first brought to light, Lucasfilm appears to have maintained that it was entirely coincidental, with a spokesman for George Lucas having said that 'it is totally untrue that there is any connection between the scene in Attack of the Clones and Trinity College'. I think Trinity dropped the case in the end, though I can't for the life of me see why. I mean, you don't need to be an architect to spot the similarities here: I recognised the Jedi library as the Long Room the moment I saw it in the cinema!

I'd easily rate the Long Room among the three or four most important rooms to be visited by any guest in Dublin, and if it catches your imagination I'm sure you'll be glad to know that plenty of other cities -- Manchester among them, as it happens -- have their own beautiful libraries gently awaiting awestruck bibliophiles to come and marvel like Belle.


I was alerted a few weeks back to the Facebook group for girls who would marry Disney's Beast just to get a library like his out of the deal. I guess if you're to be married for anything other than love it might as well be for books. After all, the idea of having someone gasp with a mixture of envy, admiration, and desire on seeing how many books you've got has a certain charm.

Mind, I'm probably biased. My bibliophilia is well attested, and I've long passed the 2,000 book threshold which Augustine Birrell laid down a century or so back as the benchmark for a basic private library:

Libraries are not made ; they grow. Your first two thousand volumes present no difficulty, and cost astonishingly little money. Given £400 and five years, and an ordinary man can in the ordinary course, without undue haste or putting any pressure upon his taste, surround himself with this number of books, all in his own language, and thenceforth have at least one place in the world in which it is possible to be happy. But pride is still out of the question. To be proud of having two thousand books would be absurd. You might as well be proud of having two top-coats. After your first two thousand difficulty begins, but until you have ten thousand volumes the less you say the better. Then you may begin to speak.

I've passed that threshold, mind, but not be far. I'm a long way from Birrell's 10,000 books. Hmmm. I should probably stop talking.

Careful Now! Down With This Sort of Thing!

I gather the hoo-ha in America about The Golden Compass is continuing apace. I'm not sure it's worth the effort, though, not least because it rather sounds as though for all its superficial glamour, the film is both clunky and dull, a clear victim of studio tinkering rendered sterile by the decision to tone down the anti-religious themes that drive the books. Maria Farrell on Crooked Timber, coming at it from the stance of someone who was 'fully prepared to love it,' left the cinema bitterly disappointed at the downplaying of the story's materialist and existentialist themes:

They are the engine of the books, just as an unattractive, flawed and female lead character with an inborn knack for rallying society’s outcasts is the heart. Cutting out the central and challenging ideas of the books infantilises the viewers. Without them, HDM is just another in the current wave of fantasy films aimed an audience of children and adults, appealing to the lowest common denominator of both. The current crop of fantasy films is purely a function of the development of CGI and its associated technologies’ ability to render the worlds the stories live in. Now the fantasy classics, old and new, are being consumed in a single binge-sitting, along with junk food pastiches like Spiderwick, Harry Potter and Eregon. But the concentration of capital needed to make these films is still enormous, (The budget for The Golden Compass was double that of The Fellowship of the Ring.) which means they can’t be made without a firmly mainstream audience in mind.

Peter Hitchens, approaching the film from a rather less sympathetic angle, agrees, noting that when the anti-religious agenda is toned down the story is reduced to 'a series of incidents and events which make very little sense'. Considering that it's not exactly meeting with critical acclaim -- Rotten Tomatoes has it at only 43% Fresh -- you might wonder whether the movie's more vocal opponents in America are really justified in objecting quite so vociferously.

After all, there's surely a possibility that by protesting as they are, they're simply giving it free publicity, drawing attention to a film that -- if it's as dull as the reviews suggest -- might well just fade into obscurity if left to its own devices.

You should all be familiar at this point with the classic Father Ted episode 'The Passion of Saint Tibulus', where Ted and Dougal's protests about a blasphemous film merely intrigue the faithful of Craggy Island, turning a film that would surely have sank without trace into a box-office hit. No? Well, you can watch a bit of it here if you're interested.

Yes, I know Ted isn't exactly reliable in its depiction of 1990s Ireland -- and you wouldn't believe the number of times I've had to explain that to a couple of my English friends, at least one of whom was convinced that Ted was intended as serious social commentary -- but the point still stands, I think.

I suppose it might be argued that there's a moral objection to protest against this sort of thing, even should such protests prove counterproductive, as the film's American opponents fear that the film might lead children to Pullman's books, in turn leading them away from the belief that there might be more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in Mr Pullman's philosophy.

I'm not convinced though. My feeling is that the smartest way for parents to handle stuff like this, if they're bothered, is to join their children in watching the film or reading the books, and then to talk through the issues raised with their children. I have a feeling that simply talking to children about this stuff might be rather more sensible and decidedly more productive than just banning it.

If parents feel they might need guidance themselves in such matters, there's a short book available on the topic with the rather catchy title of Pied Piper of Atheism. I suspect it's pretty decent. Sandra Miesel, one of the authors, co-wrote a book on The Da Vinci Code a few years back which I found a measured, thorough, and thoughtful affair when I read it a few months ago. If Pied Piper is even close to being as good it's surely worth a look.


It is worth remembering too, amongst all the noise and hysteria, that Rowan Williams, the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, has opined that Pullman's books could be profitably studied in religious education classes in school. He has a point. After all, if there's one thing that Pullman and his loudest critics can surely agree on it is this: religion matters.

Whatever about their difficulties across the Atlantic, the biggest challenge facing the churches in England and indeed throughout Europe is simple apathy. People don't care about religion. They don't see that it is significant in any way, that the questions religion poses and the answers it proposes could have any relevance to their lives.

Pullman's books could well prove a trumpet blast to rouse them from that slumber, giving the churches an opportunity to say that yes, religion does matter, but for reasons far different than those put forward in His Dark Materials.

'Test everything; hold fast what is good,' as the man says.