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While watching House the other day, I was thinking again about the different accents in English-speaking countries. There seems to be a weird non-symmetrical effect in how easy people in one English-speaking country seem to find it to recognise the native accent of another English-speaking country.

For example, Hugh Laurie seems to me to be able to produce quite a convincing American accent (note that my point here is about how easy it is to recognise an accent, not reproduce it, which is much harder). However, as a British-English speaker, it’s perhaps not surprising if I can’t pick up the subtleties of an American-English accent. But many American viewers find his accent very authentic, and are often amazed to find out he’s British. There’s a running gag in Flight of the Conchords about Americans thinking Bret and Jemaine are British rather than New Zealanders. When I went to the States, many people I met thought I was Australian.

It doesn’t seem to by a symmetrical effect. Dick Van Dyke’s wincingly bad Cockney accent in Mary Poppins set a new benchmark for bad accents, but even American actors with reasonably good mimicry skills can be detected¹. Adam Monroe did a pretty good British accent as Takezo Kensei in Heroes, but I could tell immediately that he was not a native British-English speaker before I knew what his nationality was. Other American-English speaking actors who have attempted British-English accents (like Gwyneth Paltrow), have often been quite convincing, but their accent is still detectable to British-English speakers as non-native. Meanwhile, many Australian actors use British-English or American-English accents, and I can’t tell that they are not native speakers.

Note that I’m honestly not getting at Americans here. British people have similar troubles telling a Canadian accent from an American one, or an Australian accent from a New Zealand one. I have particular trouble telling South Africans from New Zealanders, unless the accents are fairly extreme, or the person says particular words (“six” being a handy diagnostic feature). I’m just wondering why — even between pairs of accents — there’s a non-symmetrical effect in how easy either party finds it to recognise the accent of the other. Is it a matter of exposure to the accent? We certainly get a lot of American TV, films and music in Britain. Or is it because we have a wider range of native accents in Britain (I’m not even sure if this is true), so our ears are more highly tuned to detecting differences? It could even be something to do with the time of divergence of the accents from the ancestral stock.

I don’t know what the answer is, but I’m intrigued by the problem.

¹ I’d be interested to know if his accent sounds reasonably authentic to an American-English speaker, though. ↑

I finally managed to get a new amplifier an Audiolab 8000a from ebay. I wired it up last night with my new speaker cables (The Chord Company Carnival Silver Screen) and I’ve been enjoying discovering our music collection again.

As I mentioned in an earlier comment, I’m pretty familiar with this Audiolab model, because my Dad had one for years. In fact, I’d even heard it with my current speakers, because they also used to belong to my Dad. What I wasn’t quite prepared for was how much my old amp must have been deteriorating over the last 6 months or so, because I was blown away by the quality of this amp. It gives an enormous amount of what we audiophiles call ‘wellie’ (a technical term, you understand). So much so that I had to dive for the volume control because I wasn’t prepared for what would come out of the speakers. The volume knob starts at about the 7 o’clock position, and 9 o’clock is more than enough to fill the room. The sound is gloriously transparent, so I can hear the wonderful warm quality of my Rega Planet CD player, as well as the totally different quality of the AR turntable. In short, all the sources sound different, which is just as it should be. The speaker cables probably need a little while to bed down, but I’m very happy with it.

I like a nicely balanced sound, but it is nice to hear properly weighty base again. When I was testing the system out yesterday, I played a few tracks from ‘Knives to the Treble’ by Burning Babylon via the SliMP3. A huge grin spread over my face, and I ran to get Mr. Bsag, dragging him into the living room. “Sit down here and feel the sofa vibrate!” It wasn’t overdone, just very, very deep.

I had a wonderful balti with some friends from work yesterday evening, but I’m still recovering from the enormous quantities of naan we collectively consumed. The balti house we go to in Selly Oak is a brilliant, friendly, low-key place, and does gigantic ‘table’ naans with which to scoop up your balti. Before I’d seen one, I assumed that the name came from the fact that you could share it with your table, but I quickly realised that it is because it is the size of a table. The waiters carry it out on two plates held side by side, but it still hangs right over the edges like a delicious, steaming, edible tablecloth. We made the classic balti house error of thinking that we’d need two of these giants between 6 people, but they were so wonderful (particularly the coriander naan), that we ended up eating it all.

I’m a real balti convert. They are very easy-going, comforting places. They are generally small, very simply decorated and offer good, cheap food. Most don’t have an alcohol licence, but they are very happy for you to buy wine or beer from an off-licence and bring it in, and they don’t charge corkage. There are always hundreds of different baltis on the menu, but since they all follow the same balti template (meat/fish/vegetables/paneer in sauce) and come in the same iron pan, it feels very egalitarian. The dishes differ a bit in their spicing or components, and you can usually ask for other ingredients to be added if you like, but you can be pretty confident that you’ll enjoy what you get. And sharing a naan the size of a table is always fun.

Several months ago I watched both Pan’s Labyrinth and Tideland within a few weeks of each other. They have some notable parallels, and are both quite disturbing explorations of the imaginative worlds of children. I meant to write a piece about this, but for various reasons it ended up on the back burner for a long time until I saw an interview with Guillermo del Toro (the director of Pan’s Labyrinth) in a documentary about fantasy writing and films, and it reminded me that I’d never got around to it.

I suspect that one of the reasons I dragged my heels a bit was because I found both films deeply disturbing (in different ways), and rather harrowing to watch. Don’t get me wrong — I think they’re both great films, but they aren’t easy viewing by any means.

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I’ve finally signed up at last.fm. I don’t know why I resisted for so long, but the increase in the numbers of full tracks that they feature was certainly an encouragement . I do sometimes listen to the radio stations at work when I’m away from my main iTunes library, but I’m mainly interested in it as a way of discovering new artists. A ‘similar artists’ station turned up ‘Iron & Wine’, who I had never heard of before. I liked him (yes, it is just a ‘him’ rather than a ‘they’) so much that I bought ‘The Shepherd’s Dog’ recently, as you can see from my recently scrobbled tracks.

It’s also interesting to look back at your listening habits. It isn’t completely characteristic of all my music listening, because I also listen to CDs on the stereo downstairs, but I seem to oscillate between fairly random playlists of a wide range of my collection and intensively listening to a few albums straight through. I’m in the latter mode right now, it seems.

I haven’t really done anything with the social side of last.fm yet (if you’re on there and think you might enjoy my musical tastes, do point me to your username), and I wish that the player integrated with iTunes rather than using a standalone player, but otherwise I’m liking it a lot.

I’d been meaning to write about a Channel 4 series (now finished) called City of Vice. As usual, I’m too late in writing about it to allow you to watch it, but there was one particular puzzle in the film that I haven’t quite solved, so I decided to ask the Lazy Web if anyone knows the answer.

City of Vice tells the story of the establishment of the Bow Street Runners in the 18th Century (the forerunners — no pun intended — of the modern Metropolitan Police) by novelist and playwright Henry Fielding, and his half-brother John. The Fieldings were Magistrates and were keen to enforce justice, without the corruption of the thief takers¹. It was a brilliant — if rather too realistically gruesome — series, apparently based on records of the time.

One thing intrigued me, though; John Fielding — who was blind — was shown wearing a black ribbon like a headband on his brow. That seems to be a genuine detail rather than a TV embellishment, as you can see from this portrait. It was never alluded to in the series, but I had two possible explanations.

1. It was some kind of strap to hold his wig on straight, if he had trouble keeping it straight. That doesn’t sound like a good explanation to me, because I’m sure he could feel the canvas edges of the wig with his hands and tell if they were level.
2. It was some kind of symbol of his blindness, so that others could accommodate his needs without needing to ask him if he was blind.

I like the second explanation better, but it raises a lot of questions. There isn’t much point in a symbol unless it is fairly universally understood, so was this standard practice in the Georgian period? John used a cane, but it was similar to the kind any Gentleman might carry, and he didn’t seem to use it feel his way around, so some other symbol might have been useful. Why did the black band above the eyes symbolise blindness, rather than any other symbol? If it wasn’t widespread, and was his own idiosyncrasy, what was the point of it?

I’ve done a cursory search, and found that Joel Segal had noticed the same thing, but I haven’t found any authoritative and definitive answers. So, are there any historians specialising in the issue of disability in the 18th Century out there?

¹ If you had property stolen, you could contact the thief takers. If you paid them, they would ‘make enquiries’ and — miraculously — your property would be mysteriously ‘found’, though there would be no sign of the thieves themselves. Hmm. ↑

This Sunday, my Mum and I took part in the ‘Singalong with the CBSO’ event. I took part in 2005 and thoroughly enjoyed it, and Mum and I both went along in 2006, because she enjoys singing too. This year’s piece was Carmina Burana by Carl Orff. If you’re not a fan of Classical music, you probably know at least once movement from either the Old Spice advert or The Omen, depending on your age and cultural tastes. It’s one of those Classical pieces which a lot of aficionados look down their noses at, but I think it’s wonderful, particularly if you see it performed live, or — even better — if you sing it.

There are a nice mixture of movements, including jolly, bawdy songs about drinking, pretty, lyrical pieces, and even a very strange song from the viewpoint of a depressed roasted swan on a spit who is about to be eaten. There’s plenty of orchestral colour too, with two pianos, plenty of timpani, bells and even something that sounded like a football rattle. But you can’t get away from the fact that ‘O Fortuna’ (the aforementioned advert/horror film music) is the real star of the show.

Even if the association hadn’t already been forged in my mind by the Old Spice advert, singing O Fortuna is a lot like surfing. If you’re singing it with about 2,000 other people as we were on Sunday, it’s like surfing one of those monster waves off the coast of Hawaii, where you have to get towed on to the wave by a jetski.

As you are travelling out to the wave, it opens with a few big, slow chords. They seem pretty impressive at the time, but it’s nothing to what comes later, when you’re right up close to the wave. Then, as you’re towed into position, there is a soft, staccato passage where the choir sings in unison. Gradually, this builds in volume and tension as the parts of the choir spread out on the scale, and you see the gigantic wave you’re going to ride. Just when you think you can’t stand the excitement any longer, you let go of the tow rope, stand up on your board, and tip over the lip to career down the mountainous face of the wave. Ten kinds of orchestral and choral hell break out as the Symphony Hall is filled with 2,000 voices giving it some serious vocal welly, booming timpani and a full orchestra having a blast. As the wave starts breaking behind you, you gradually coast to a halt on a chaotic turmoil of unwinding music, desperately trying to sustain the long, last note as the adrenaline knocks all the breath out of you.

Phew. Woohoo! Can we do it again? Luckily, we get to do just that, because the theme is reprised at the end of Carmina Burana.

I meant to blog about this long before Christmas, but didn’t get around to it: a group of Lakota declared that they were unilaterally withdrawing from all treaties with the US, so that they are no longer citizens of the United States. The group explain their reasons for doing so on their site, and certainly it seems that they have every justification for doing so. The Federal government never properly honoured the the treaties, and for the past 150 years or so, the Lakota people (and other First Nation people) have been gradually impoverished, marginalised and denied access to parts of their land. I’m no lawyer, but there also seem to be legal provisions for such an action within US and UN law.

The original declaration implied that there was widespread support within the Lakota Nation. They posed the intriguing notion that an area within five States of the US (North and South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming and Nebraska) would become an independent nation within a state, with powers to issue passports, their own currency and raise (or not raise) their own taxes. It also implied that anyone living within the five states (Lakota or not) would be welcome to join their new nation.

The practical issues are formidable. How will this new independent nation generate power and income, organise its currency and trade with the rest of the US, or police its borders, particularly since it is currently so impoverished? However, another issue has surfaced since December of last year: it is unclear how much support the proposal has. A breakaway group calling itself ‘Lakota Oyate’ has emerged, and claims to “represent the people’s voice in reclaiming freedom”. Elsewhere on the web, allegations have been made that the Republic of Lakotah, lead by Russell Means (Oyate Wacinyapin), does not have widespread support, and has not consulted Lakota Elders or Tribal Presidents. In a response to an email from a Lakota man from Rosebud Reservation, Russell argues that Tribal Presidents are part of the US Federal system:

We did not ask the permission of the US authorities disguised as tribal leaders. They like the existing system. They are in power, and they get to keep that power by begging to Washington for crumbs for our people.

Perhaps there’s some truth in that, but it seems to me that the movement will not be successful unless it has widespread local support and legitimacy.

It’s an interesting situation, and I certainly wish the Lakota well in their struggle to take back control of their own lives from the Federal Government, which seems completely indifferent to them. The thing which shocked me most was reading the statistics about the level of poverty on Lakota reservations. Male Lakota life expectancy is reportedly only 44 years, which would be dreadful for a developing country, but is unbelievable for a community within one of the most prosperous countries in the world. I’m not surprised that some Lakota feel that they couldn’t do a worse job of looking after their own people than the US Government.

I love Jacques Tati. Almost nothing cheers me up as quickly as watching one of his films, which is odd really, given that Tati was a very visual, physical comedian, and that isn’t normally the kind of thing I enjoy. But I just have to watch a few minutes of Monsieur Hulot walking — leaning forward, as if into a stiff headwind — and I’m in fits of laughter.

I’ve seen ‘Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday’ many times, but recently we’ve rented some of his other films, and watched ‘Playtime’ last night. It wasn’t a success when first released, and eventually bankrupted Tati, because he spent a fortune building what amounted to an entire town for the set. For those reasons, I wasn’t sure that I would enjoy it as much as the other films, but I thought it was wonderful.

Tati films contain very little in the way of plot, but the plot of Playtime — such as it is — concerns the efforts of Monsieur Hulot to meet someone in an enormous modern office block. In this film, as in most of the others, Hulot is a kind of passive entropy generator. The world starts out clean and ordered, but when Hulot comes on the scene he unwittingly sets up a chain of events which result in chaos, by doing nothing more than wandering around in a benevolent but bewildered fashion.

It’s particularly clear in Playtime that this is a good thing: the clean, modern world depicted at the start of the film is sterile and alienating to humans. We see an elderly porter trying to contact the man Hulot has come to meet using a high-tech bank of switches and lights. It takes him several minutes of tentatively pressing buttons (getting incomprehensible patterns of flashing lights and beeps in return) before he actually manages to communicate with a person. The building is so vast and uniform that Hulot gets hopelessly lost within a short while of arriving. Considering it was made in the 60s, Playtime feels like a modern, satirical film about the perils of modern architecture and technology. When things start to unravel later in the film, the world feels like a much warmer and more friendly place, partly because the chaos means that people actually talk to one another.

There are some wonderfully clever visual puns in the film. A group of female American tourists are all wearing floral hats, and at the restaurant, a waiter appears to be watering their hats with champagne. The film is supposed to be set in Paris, but it is so modern and anonymous that it could be anywhere. However, occasionally when characters open the ubiquitous glass doors, they see the Eiffel Tower, or some other landmark reflected in the door. There’s also a brilliant joke about a patent ‘silent’ door, being shown at a kind of Ideal Home Exhibition. For complicated reasons, the Director of the company believes that Hulot is the man who has been rifling through their office doors, and shouts at him for his presumption before flouncing off through his silent door, slamming it — completely noiselessly — behind him. I’m going to have to watch it again soon, because I’m sure that there were probably lots of jokes I missed.

On Saturday, we visited an exhibition at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham of Japanese woodblock prints by Utagawa Hiroshige. Being a printmaker himself, Mr. Bsag is very interested in any kind of prints, and I love Japanese art of all kinds. It was a great exhibition, with some really stunning pieces of work in it.

Most of the prints were the kinds of compositions that you tend to associate with Japanese art: the paper is usually oriented in ‘portrait’ format, and often very tall and thin, with a view from above of a distant landscape. Many contain fields or forests in the foreground, a body of water of some kind in the middle distance, and mountains in the background. They are precise and beautifully composed, often with diagonal lines leading your eyes back and forth across the paper from the bottom to the top.

However, some of the pieces were very unusual in composition, and I loved them for their boldness. Hiroshige often placed a very large object right in the foreground of the picture, letting our eye travel past it to see the background. So, for example, there is one print in which a wooden pillar forms the left edge of the image, with a large paper lantern in the top right, and we can see a street beyond. Another print of a plum tree has the trunk and blossom of the tree almost filling the very near foreground, and you can just glimpse people walking past in the background. Van Gogh was evidently also an admirer of this print, and produced a version of it in oils.

A few prints show scenes of the interiors of houses, or holiday gatherings beside the sea, and in them Hiroshige places people in the frame so that they are literally cut off by the edge of the painting. It gives the prints an intriguing feeling, as if you are missing some of the story, and makes you keen to find out what is going on. They feel strikingly modern.

I’ve never been to the Ikon before (despite living in Birmingham for 3 years now!), but I liked it a lot. It has an old façade (Edwardian or Victorian, I think), but a very open, modern interior. There’s a glass lift inside a glass window on the outside of the building, so that you can look at the outside as you ride in the lift. There’s also an audio installation in the lift by Martin Creed. ‘Work #409’ is a piece “For lift and choir of bass, tenor, alto and soprano voices”, performed by Ex Cathedra. As the lift ascends, they sing an ascending scale, with a descending scale for the lift descent. We don’t normally travel in lifts for just a couple of floors, but it was so much fun listening to the choir providing a soundtrack to our short journey that we went up and down a few times. If you try it yourselves, I recommend descending from floor 2 to the ground floor for the best sonic experience!

I was less keen on another piece which is on the glass wall next to the lift. I forgot to note who it was by, but it’s called ‘Imaginary Landscape’ and is comprised of vinyl lettering on the window, with lines referencing objects or colours which do not exist. So there are lines pointing to invisible Herons (and their Latin name), or a particular shade of yellow. Like many conceptual pieces, I found that it was vaguely amusing for a couple of minutes, but once you’d got the joke, there wasn’t much more to say about it.

However, it did make me think that art is the only field in which you could get away with that kind of thing. I was fantasising about submitting a manuscript to a journal with the headings printed for each section (‘Methods and materials’, ‘Results’ and so on), but no text beneath the headings, and an empty figure with an arrow referencing “Highly significant result which will change the course of biology”. At the bottom would be the line:

I CAN HAZ NATUR PAYPR NOW?¹

¹ This is LOLCat language, in case you are wondering. ↑

Happy New Year, everyone! I know I’m a day late, but what’s a day between friends?

I’ve taken a couple of extra leave days, so I’m not back at work until next Monday, and I’m enjoying just pottering around, and trying to shake off a weird bug I seem to have picked up. I had one of those days today where you start off with the intention of fixing one small thing, and end up putting a whole host of things right by accident.

It started with my long-disconnected SliMP3 player. When we moved into our new house, I didn’t get around to connecting up the SliMP3 player, for a number of very dull reasons, but partly because I didn’t have a long enough Ethernet cable. (I know: it’s a classic GTD situation of not having the right next action written down…) It’s only taken a year, but I finally got around to finding a cable and fixing the other impediments and hooking that sucker up. They are beautifully simple devices, so the configuration was fairly straight-forward, except that I’d forgotten that in the interval between last using it and now, I’d converted most of my iTunes library to AAC format from MP3. My player can’t transcode AAC on the hardware (I believe some of the new players can do it), but the server software can convert AAC on the fly to MP3 and play that. Except that I needed LAME installed, so all I got was a ‘Can’t play file’ message. After a quick install of LAME all was well. Except that the horrible distortion I’ve noticed intermittently in my audio system downstairs was really ruining my enjoyment of listening to the SliMP3.

So I decided to see if I could track down the problem. We have a very noisy mains electrical system in our house, and the boiler controller is a particularly bad source of noise. I’d assumed when I heard the distortion before that it was the boiler switch, but today I was listening with the heating system off, and it was still distorted. I checked cable connections, tightened speaker terminals and swapped out power strips, all to no avail. Just when I was beginning to despair of being able to find the source of the problem, I noticed that when I listened with my ear to each speaker in turn, the left was producing all of the distortion. Checking the speaker cable to that speaker carefully, I found that the insulation had cracked, exposing the wire. Aha! Fifteen minutes of pottering in the garage looking for my wire strippers, and some cutting back of the cable, and the distortion had gone. Now I could sit back and listen to my SliMP3 player.

But now I noticed that there were huge numbers of mislabelled files cluttering up the artist listing, making it hard to chose the artists I wanted to listen to. I then felt compelled to go into iTunes and clear up the database, getting rid of some temporary files, and naming everything properly with the correct metadata.

By the time I came downstairs to finally listen to my distortion-free, nicely organised music, it was time for tea. Seriously, where did the day go?

We were on our own for Christmas and Boxing Day this year, so we had a couple of quiet days. After a hectic time at the tail end of this year, it was great to just stop and do very little. On Christmas Day itself, we cooked a crackingly good dinner (salmon en croute, in case you were wondering, with stir-fried carrots and sprouts and roast potatoes and parsnips), opened some presents and watched Doctor Who.

While we were eating dinner, and for a while afterwards, we listened to a World Routes which Mr. Bsag had recorded from Radio 3 earlier in the month, in which the presenter Lucy Duran travels to Georgia to listen to the traditional polyphonic choral music. I’ve been a fan of Georgian music for a long time, but the live recordings (if you’ll forgive the tautology) in the programme were incredibly good. While we were eating, we heard a couple of hymns by the St. Panteleimon Chanters (their name gloriously close to Lyra’s daemon, you notice) recorded at a funeral. That might sound an oddly depressing soundtrack to Christmas, but it was beautiful, ethereal, peaceful music, and far from depressing. In fact, it almost made me want to convert to Orthodox Christianity and move to Georgia, just to have the St. Panteleimon Chanters sing at my funeral. The only slight flaw in that cunning plan is, of course, that I wouldn’t get to hear the music at my own funeral.

They moved on to the traditional ‘table songs’ of the Tusheti region, which is my favourite Georgian style. This included some live recordings of the Tsinandali choir which blew me away. While I listened to their music with a huge lump in my throat, I tried to think what their music reminded me of. It was on the edge of my mind, but when it popped to the forefront, I was rather surprised: their music is like a wolf pack howling. That sounds like an insult, but actually I mean it as the highest praise. Like a wolf howl, there are shifting pitches, voices supporting and intertwining with one another. And like a wolf howl, it speaks to you of joy, longing, sorrow, exultation, fear, power and a wildness that immediately raises the hairs on your neck, and fills the night with electricity. It was a very special experience to hear the recording, so I can’t imagine how powerful it must have been like to be there and hear it live.

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I’ve got a secret liking for Heston Blumenthal’s ‘In Search of Perfection’ cookery show on TV. On the one hand, I’m somewhat appalled by his sheer profligacy with energy and ingredients in order to produce a very small quantity of fancy food. On the other hand, it’s hard not to be drawn in by his enthusiasm, and by his scientific approach to creating what he regards as the perfect dish.

Given the season, it was inevitable that this week’s programme was about creating the perfect Christmas meal. While most people feel pretty daring if they try cooking a goose for Christmas dinner, rather than the staid old turkey, Heston — as usual — took culinary daring to a new level. He was determined to have a first course (after the wafer that smelt of babies) containing gold, frankincense and myrrh, stubbornly refusing to accept (until the last minute) that myrrh actually tastes pretty awful, and is bitter as hell. Obviously he doesn’t pay attention to the lyrics of Christmas carols. He reluctantly admitted defeat on that one, and whittled the myrrh twigs into teaspoons to stir the frankincense tea with, but you could tell that he felt it was cheating.

Each of his dishes seems to take about a week to complete, in 43 easy steps, some of which require vacuum pumps, liquid nitrogen or an edible, heat-proof gel that sounds distinctly unappetising. He must have a carbon footprint the size of China: he travelled to Siberia (which, incidentally, looked absolutely ravishing) for 2 pints of reindeer milk to make into ice cream, and many of the 43 easy steps for each dish seem to require boiling something for 5 hours.

The funniest part (though not for the geese involved, I’m sure) was his attempt to raise geese in a calm, stress-free environment, feeding them on pine needle-laced food to impart a Christmassy flavour to the meat. I’m sure he’s right that meat from calm, unstressed animals tastes better, but I’m not so sure that chasing two geese around a field, holding them in a very awkward and unpractised manner, and then isolating them in an unfamiliar stable away from all their mates is the best way to produce a serene Anserine environment. When Heston ¹ placed the goose in a very flimsy enclosure within the stable, it evidently presciently decided that Something Was Terribly Wrong, and immediately bust out of the enclosure to make a break for the safety of the field and its flock mates.

¹ For some reason, he held his goose gingerly away from his body as if it was an unexploded bomb. ↑

Reading a review in the Guardian of The Golden Compass — the film adaptation of the first part of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials (HDM) trilogy — I was not sure whether to be excited or appalled. I’m a massive fan of Pullman’s work, and HDM is one of my favourite books of all time. Despite ostensibly being books for children, they are as rich, subtle, disturbing, intriguing, exciting, and many-layered as any adult book you are likely to find. Even after reading them twice, there are still aspects I don’t fully understand or that I wonder about, and that’s exactly the way it should be.

ThoughtBadger and I had a brief conversation about this in the comments for my review of the last Harry Potter book, so I know I’m not the only one who feels a certain dread about the films. One of the things which troubled me most about the review by Peter Bradshaw was when he said, “…to this non-Pullman-reader, the claims often made on behalf of his legend about striking a blow for rationalism against religious authoritarianism don’t precisely hold up.” He also describes the film as “deeply conservative”. If they didn’t capture the fierce, rebellious exhortation for everyone to think for themselves, use their own intelligence and live this life, rather than hoping for a life hereafter, then the film will be a terrible failure. It’s true that the books only gradually reveal the full import of what Dust is over the course of the trilogy, rather than at the start, but I hope that they didn’t miss the point completely.

I’m worried about the characterisations, too: according to Peter Bradshaw, Lord Asriel is a “gallant hero”. One of the brilliant things about HDM is that none of the characters are entirely good or evil (or even what they seem at first), but rather real people with complex emotions, personalities and motivations. From the start in the book, Asriel is a very ambiguous character, and far from being a gallant hero. He’s an adventurer, and appears to be on the side of good, but he’s ruthless, arrogant and seemingly out for personal glory. Mrs. Coulter is also not purely evil at all, though she is rather chilling in the first book. From the clips I’ve seen, Lyra (played by Dakota Blue Richards) appears to be rather a delicate, wistful child, which is a million miles away from the way I see Lyra.

At the start of the book, Lyra is a tough, independent tomboy, running over the rooftops of Oxford colleges, and starting fights with local kids. She’s fierce, brave and scruffy, and has a tendency to lie to get her way or to talk up her own achievements. But she is also deeply empathetic to the feelings of those around her, and has a strong sense of natural justice. At one point in the first book, she unselfconsciously puts herself into a situation which horrifies and disgusts the adults around her, purely to provide what comfort she can for a boy in a terrible situation. Iorek Byrnison (the armoured bear) rebukes the adults hanging back where Lyra jumps in, because he shares Lyra’s deep sense of honour and justice, and the importance of keeping one’s word. Throughout the books, the things she has to go through make her more serious, and she loses her innocence. In short she grows up, which is one of the themes of the series — what does it mean to be an adult? Pullman’s thesis (I think) is that the mythical expulsion from the Garden of Eden was the best thing that ever happened to us¹ — that losing our innocence and gaining knowledge about ourselves and the world around us is a precious, important thing, and not something to be mourned.

I could ramble on about HDM for ages. Just the other day, I was thinking about how skilfully and subtly he shows us what it might be like to have a part of your spirit² as a separate, external being. Daemons in HDM are not airy, ghostly things, but warm and solid animal-formed beings. They can speak, and people and their daemons have discussions and even arguments over what is the right thing to do. But a daemon isn’t a kind of magical conscience like Jimminy Cricket; neither a person nor their daemon have all the answers, but they must come to understand the world together through discussion and joint experience. The remarkable thing is that Pullman describes this thing which is very far outside our experience in such a natural and vivid way that you feel rather lonely without a daemon of your own by the end.

The mainstream cinemas around here are pretty dire, so I’d probably wait until this came out on DVD anyway, but if anyone else goes to see the film (particularly anyone who loves the books), I’d be curious to know what you think of it. I might summon up the courage to watch it if it’s not a total travesty.

¹ Since I don’t believe in this, I think of it as a metaphor. ↑

² The closest word I can get to his idea of a daemon, but it’s not quite right. ↑

There’s a really cracking documentary about photography on BBC Four at the moment, called Genius of Photography. The first programme looked at the historical origins of different photographic methods, and the social and artistic changes that it brought about. Like all good documentaries, it told me some things I didn’t know before, and made me think about photography in a slightly different way.

For example, they explained the process of making daguerreotypes, and showed some examples, both from the 19th Century and contemporary images. I knew the name, but had never really considered how they were made. You have to expose a mirror-polished silver plate coated with a layer of silver halide to light, and then you exhibit the original plate after developing and fixing the image. Daguerreotypes are really the antithesis of modern, digital photography. The equipment is expensive and cumbersome, the developing and fixing process is labour intensive, not to mention the fact that it involves mercury vapour, for added peril. It requires a lot of skill, and to cap it all, you can’t reproduce the image: the plate is the image, and cannot be duplicated or printed. But boy, are they beautiful.

I’d only ever seen still images of daguerreotypes, but watching film of people holding them, and seeing the images from different angles, you get a much better impression of their almost three-dimensional appearance than you do from a still reproduction. They also showed some contemporary daguerreotypes (you can see some lovely examples by Jerry Spagnoli here) which were really stunning, with a beautiful tonal range and an odd feeling of intimacy. Perhaps it’s partly their rarity, uniqueness and the craft that has to go into making them that makes them feel so special.