Too long in the dark

Polly Churchill is worried. She's stuck in London in 1940, and the handy time-travel doohickeys that are supposed to take her back to the mid-21st century aren't working. She's afraid she, or her friends, may have changed the space-time continuum and caused the Allies to lose World War Two.

(I am indebted to TV Tropes for giving me a piece of terminology to understand this phenomenon: Godwin's Law of Time Travel - "As the amount of time-traveling you do increases, the probability of Hitler winning World War II approaches one." [1])

Polly is, of course, being silly. As she would have known if she'd read To Say Nothing of the Dog and Doomsday Book: historians can't change the past like that, even if they try. The past remains the past, even when you're in it. Changes can be propagated forward, only if they're so insignificant that nobody from your own time would have noticed them - you can, for instance, place some newspaper ads in the 1940s, which may then be spotted by your colleagues 120 years later. But you can't change the course of known history.

Polly may be excused for not knowing this - she's only a postgrad student. For James Dunworthy, however - the head of time travel research in Oxford throughout the 2060s - there's no excuse. Why, after two full-length novels and several short stories, he should still be propounding this nonsense about "the continuum breaking down" is beyond me.

This train of thought somewhat mars my enjoyment of Connie Willis's marathon opus, Blackout/All Clear. Which is a shame, because there's a really good book in here somewhere. (Only one, mind you. The 'two volumes' thing is quite unnecessary.)

Connie Willis does her usual stellar job of establishing sympathetic central characters, a strong supporting cast, and the fretful, fatigued atmosphere of wartime Britain. She's done a lot of research, and it shows. She has, however, left some irritating holes in her blanket of authenticity. For instance, her British characters consistently give dates in the modern American format (e.g. "May fourth", rather than "the fourth of May" or even "May the fourth", either of which would be more natural).

Willis wanted to write a book about the everyday heroism of ordinary people that won the war:

about Dunkirk and ration books and D-Day and V-1 rockets, about tube shelters and Bletchley Park and gas masks and stirrup pumps and Christmas pantomimes and cows and crossword puzzles and the deception campaign. And mostly the book's about all the people who "did their bit" to save the world from Hitler...

And at that, she's done well. Her account of wartime Britain is detailed, sympathetic and absorbing. If viewed as a collection of narratives about people who experienced evacuation, blackouts, shelters, rationing, Dunkirk, the Blitz, the V1s, and the daily expectation of loss and grief - it's a masterpiece. Where it falls down is in the time-travel narrative that ties these little human-interest stories into a coherent tale. While that story has its high points (mostly centred around St Paul's Cathedral), it's much, much too drawn-out to be sustained by its basic premises.

The result is that, when I'd finished reading, not only were my withers (quite sincerely) wrung by the prolonged hardship endured by my forebears, but I felt I'd accomplished no mean feat of endurance of my own. Which feels like an unworthy thought, but that's the price of honesty.

Overall rating: B-. Good, but should have been better.

[1] Incidentally, if anyone with a TV Tropes login is reading this: the above-linked page, at the time of writing, incorrectly states that events in To Say Nothing of the Dog cause the Nazis to win the war. This is completely untrue - that fear is raised at one point, but the whole point of the book is to demonstrate just how resilient history is - the ridiculous lengths it can go to, if necessary, to make sure it turns out right.

The impulsive economy

Scott Adams has a glum view of the outlook for authors and other creative-artist types in the coming decades. He sums it up as his theory of content value: "As our ability to search for media content improves, the economic value of that content will approach zero."

I predict that the profession known as "author" will be retired to history in my lifetime, like blacksmith and cowboy. In the future, everyone will be a writer, and some will be better and more prolific than others. But no one will pay to read what anyone else creates. People might someday write entire books - and good ones - for the benefit of their own publicity, such as to promote themselves as consultants, lecturers, or the like. But no one born today is the next multi-best-selling author. That job won't exist.

Adams isn't the only one predicting the death of Old Media. There's been a bull market in such predictions anytime this past fifteen years. The argument goes: since "content" is essentially free (on the internet), the only reasons people are still paying for it all boil down to inertia, and that won't last forever.

While I have enormous respect for Adams (and other prophets who've said the same thing), I think they're working from a fundamentally flawed mental model.

The flaw dates right back to the economics we learned in school, where a consumer has $whatever to spend, and divides it up into 'budgets' - $something for necessities, $something for savings, $whatever's left for luxuries/discretionary spending. Within that "discretionary" budget - the theory goes - they make rational decisions based on what will give them the greatest satisfaction ("utility") for the $.

In that case, why would anyone spend their limited $ on something that they could get for free? It's - not rational.

And that model is well and good. But it's based on a fundamental assumption that just isn't true in real life: that the consumer is on a budget.

Oh, of course they are in a sense. Big-picture wise. They live where they can afford to live, the clothes they wear and the consumer goods they possess and the car they drive - these things are dictated, in large part, by their income. But for the small stuff - for books, magazines, movies, fast food, drinks - there is no exact limit to their spending. If they overspend one month, all that means is that they put off buying that big-screen TV for another month. It's not a decision they'll even notice making.

In general, the only time they'll set a fixed weekly budget is when they're driven to it by a crisis - unemployment, baby, divorce or whatever - and when the crisis is past, they'll abandon the budget just as soon as they think they can get away with it.

What this means is that a significant part of people's spending is not so much "discretionary" as "impulsive". And getting one's hands on that money is not about offering them the most attractive package for their money, compared with your competitors. It's about persuading them to give you some money.

Not much money. The best business models for this part of the economy, I think, are those that take small amounts, but take them frequently. A coffee shop is a good example (occupying the same niche that pubs have, by and large, been taxed out of).

Another is mobile phones. The operators have only recently realised that their market falls into this category, which is why they're now frantically marketing "packages" designed to subsidise heavy users at the expense of lighter ones - so that each individual customer only sees bills that are just small enough not to sweat about - because if the bill is small enough, then the provider can live happily in that "impulse" segment where spending isn't scrutinised at all.

In the digital economy, Apple has built the most successful business model of the past decade on this insight. Everyone knows that paying money for music, online, is entirely optional - there are lots of ways to hear that music for free, many of them entirely legal. But if you price it as an "impulse" buy, and make the process easy enough, then an awful lot of people will succumb to that impulse. In other words: you can compete with "free".

Within that impulsive proportion of their spending, people don't "spend" all their money to get the best possible "utility" for their limited resources. They spend it to feel better about themselves. From the providers' point of view, they're pretty much giving it away; the trick is to get them to give it to you rather than, say, Coca-Cola.

And this is the key to how authors are going to survive in the next couple of decades. It's not about "selling" a product. It's an exercise in persuasion. Make people want to give you money - to give a talk, shake your hand and collect your autograph, put your picture in a magazine, subscribe to your latest writings, convert you into a TV series or a range of coffee mug slogans, go to bed with you... whatever. Or even to have a small bundle of paper with your name and your words printed on it, to sit on their coffee table and lend to their friends and read wherever and whenever they like, unlike electronic devices which are too bulky, and too fragile, to use in many environments. We could call it "a book".

Translation and transformation

It's official: Jesus was a godless commie.

The Conservative Bible Project aims to "retranslate" the Bible in "conservative" terms and language. (I can't help thinking that producing a new translation is just about the least "conservative" thing it's possible to do to the Bible, but I guess that's just because I speak English.)

This "retranslation" is to use the King James Version as a "baseline", chiefly because the KJV is out of copyright. ("It could be used as the baseline for developing a conservative translation without requiring a license or any fees", explain the instigators. "Also", they neglect to continue, "it doesn't require any actual knowledge of ancient languages, so we're not reliant on a bunch of 'scholars' to do the work for us. What we're after here is ideological purity - 'accuracy' is overrated anyway.") So volunteers are being asked to "translate" the KJV into modern "conservative" English. (I don't think I've ever used so many quotation marks in one story before. That's a reflection of just how far these people have debased the language, how they have made whores of so many innocent words.)

It's been done, guys. It's called the New King James Version.

But the KJV isn't conservative enough, apparently. It contains such subversive liberal lines as Luke 23:34:

Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.

This verse is apparently "a liberal corruption of the original", "a favorite [quotation] of liberals", and "should not appear in a conservative Bible".

Since the Conservative Bible Project is so keen on "translation", let's try translating that sentiment into plain English:

We think the author is lying. It's not as if the text is divinely inspired, after all.

I don't know if they haven't thought it through, or if they're simply planning to lie through their teeth, later on, about how they arrived at their "translation".

Then they talk about the parable of the "dishonest" manager. They criticise the liberal New International Version translation of Luke 16:8: "The master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly". But, they say, "being dishonestly shrewd is not an admirable trait".

Let's see how the beloved KJV renders that passage, shall we?

And the lord commended the unjust steward, because he had done wisely

I don't really see how that helps. If "dishonest shrewdness" is "not admirable", is "unjust wisdom" any better?

The CBP suggests the word "resourcefully" in place of "shrewdly". Because "dishonest resourcefulness", of course, is an absolutely admirable trait.

Then it criticises "liberal" translations for using "liberal" language - words like "comrade", "labourer", "fellow", instead of good "conservative" words like "volunteer". ("Comrade"? Not used at all in the KJV, NKJV or the much-reviled NIV, but occurs a horrifying three times in the English Standard Version, apparently.)

I hate to break it to them, but "volunteer" isn't a synonym for any of those: it's a separate word with a distinct meaning. You can't just go switching it in because you like the sound of it.

Actually, scratch that. Of course you can do that, it's the work of moments with any word processor. But it's not "translation".

Part of me is struck with doubt. Part of me feels that an exercise this shameless can only be a false-flag project by liberals who have infiltrated the conservative Christian movement. But then I reflect on some of the Christian conservatives I've encountered, and I ask myself: Would I really put this past them? And the answer is "no".

So purely for experiment, let's try a passage for myself. Here's James 5:1-4 in the King James Version:

Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you.
Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten.
Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days.
Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth.

Clearly a massive liberal interpolation there. Let's try rendering it more faithfully to the spirit:

Look here, you welfare dependents, you should be crying, because you'll get yours. Your money is undeserved and you can't afford new fashions. Your income drops in real terms every year, and it serves you right, it's meant to incentivise you into showing some initiative; you thought you could scrape and save to survive. But now the debt collectors are at your door, the people who have provided services to you in good faith want to be paid, and the businessmen have the ear of the powers that be.

There, not so hard. All you have to do is let your "conservative" training rape your soul and bludgeon your conscience into a bloody pulp, and let the hatred flow through.

The Muslims don't have this trouble...

Pride and Prejudice. No, really.

So, I was talking to a friend the other day about republishing classic, i.e. out-of-copyright, literature. And he, with an unerring talent for going off at the most ridiculous tangent, hit upon the idea of summarising it.

And so, for the benefit of time-pressed (or lazy) Eng Lit students everywhere, I present the first in a series of Classics, As Summarised by Microsoft Word.

Summary
by Jane Austen

"Bingley."

Elizabeth felt Jane's pleasure. "Never, sir."

Mr. Darcy bowed.

"Miss Elizabeth Bennet."

"Miss Elizabeth Bennet!" repeated Miss Bingley. "CAROLINE BINGLEY"

Elizabeth silently attended her.

"How strange!" cried Elizabeth. Mr. Collins then returned to Elizabeth.

Elizabeth was in agonies. Elizabeth replied that it was. Oh, sister! Poor Jane! Elizabeth made no answer. Elizabeth looked surprised. "FITZWILLIAM DARCY"

"Oh, no!" said Elizabeth. Elizabeth was distressed. Elizabeth was delighted. "LYDIA BENNET."

"Oh! Elizabeth read on:

Well! "Mr. Darcy!" repeated Elizabeth, in utter amazement.

Elizabeth smiled.

"If! Darcy mentioned his letter. Mr. Darcy! Dear, dear Lizzy. "Dearest Jane!

Now, I don't know about you, but I think some of the subplots and character nuances are slightly obscured in this 100-word rendition. You need to read between the lines somewhat, to do justice to the high comedy and acute social observation of the original. So here, for the completists among us, is the 500-word version:

Summary
By Jane Austen

"Bingley."

Elizabeth felt Jane's pleasure. "Never, sir."

Mr. Darcy bowed.

"Mr. Darcy is all politeness," said Elizabeth, smiling.

Elizabeth looked archly, and turned away. Mr. Darcy replied with great intrepidity:

"Miss Elizabeth Bennet."

"Miss Elizabeth Bennet!" repeated Miss Bingley. "MY DEAR FRIEND,--

"CAROLINE BINGLEY"

Elizabeth silently attended her.

I thought Miss Elizabeth Bennet looked remarkably well when she came into the room this morning. "All young ladies accomplished! "Removed!" cried Bingley. Do not you, Darcy?"

"Your humility, Mr. Bingley," said Elizabeth, "must disarm reproof."

shocking!" cried Miss Bingley. "Mr. Darcy is not to be laughed at!" cried Elizabeth. Elizabeth turned away to hide a smile.

Mrs. Bennet's eyes sparkled. "Dear Sir,--

"WILLIAM COLLINS"

Elizabeth could not but look surprised.

"How strange!" cried Elizabeth. This information made Elizabeth smile, as she thought of poor Miss Bingley. Elizabeth felt herself completely taken in. "Insolent girl!" said Elizabeth to herself. Mr. Collins then returned to Elizabeth.

Elizabeth now began to revive.

Elizabeth was in agonies. Elizabeth replied that it was. Charlotte's reply was spared by the entrance of Jane and Elizabeth.

Mr. Collins!"

Elizabeth took an opportunity of thanking her. Neither Jane nor Elizabeth were comfortable on this subject. "My dear Jane!" exclaimed Elizabeth, "you are too good. Oh, sister! Poor Jane! "Elizabeth, you are not serious now."

_that_ abominable Mr. Darcy! Elizabeth shook her head over this letter. Elizabeth's courage did not fail her. Lady Catherine then observed,

Your younger sisters must be very young?"

Elizabeth immediately began playing again. Elizabeth made no answer. Elizabeth looked surprised. Elizabeth was surprised, but said not a word. Elizabeth's astonishment was beyond expression. The pause was to Elizabeth's feelings dreadful. "FITZWILLIAM DARCY"

Lady Catherine seemed resigned. "Poor Wickham! Jane was not happy. Poor little Lizzy! "Oh, no!" said Elizabeth. Elizabeth was distressed. Elizabeth was delighted. "Does that young lady know Mr. Darcy?"

Elizabeth coloured, and said: "A little."

Elizabeth almost stared at her. Elizabeth answered only by a slight bow. Darcy was fixed in astonishment. Darcy made no answer. Elizabeth soon observed, and instantly understood it. "I do indeed," replied Elizabeth, colouring. From Elizabeth's thoughts it was never absent. "Not yet," replied Jane.

"LYDIA BENNET."

"Oh! Elizabeth impatiently caught it from his hand. Elizabeth read on:

GARDINER."

"My dear, dear Lydia!" she cried. My dear, dear Lydia! Well! Mrs. Wickham! Elizabeth was disgusted, and even Miss Bennet was shocked. Jane was distressed. Elizabeth could bear it no longer. "Mr. Darcy!" repeated Elizabeth, in utter amazement.

"Exceedingly well. Mr. Bingley arrived. Jane looked at Elizabeth with surprise and concern. Elizabeth dared not lift up her eyes. Elizabeth smiled. Elizabeth was forced to go.

"I suspected as much," replied Elizabeth. Elizabeth replied very concisely that she was.

Elizabeth looked with unaffected astonishment.

"If! No, never. Lady Catherine seemed pleased.

"Oh!" cried Elizabeth, "I am excessively diverted. Darcy mentioned his letter. Mr. Darcy! Dear, dear Lizzy. "Dearest Jane! "DEAR SIR,

Elizabeth will soon be the wife of Mr. Darcy.

The blind Watchmen-maker

(Spoiler-free review.)

Alan Moore famously considers his creations - all of them - unfilmable. Having watched the latest, much-touted effort, I think I see what he means.

It's easy to see why Hollywood loves to adapt comic books. After all, the original artist has already done not only the scriptwriting but also the visualisation, much of the hard work of costume and lighting design, and quite a lot of the photographic direction. You might think this would make the two media a good match.

But somehow it never quite comes together. Comic-book movie adaptations have run the gamut from acknowledged disasters (The Hulk, Catwoman, Daredevil, Batman & Robin) to merely lacklustre movies. I really wanted to like such massively hyped efforts as The Dark Knight, Spiderman, V for Vendetta - but I really didn't. And after watching Watchmen, I think I know why.

The story of Watchmen - the book - unfolds like a magnificent origami decoration. It's told in an intricate non-linear structure to which the medium is beautifully adapted - cutting and chopping between storylines is not merely smooth, it's practically inevitable. At the end of each chapter there are several pages of dense text to read, creating background and atmosphere for the main story. There's a whole story within a story - one (very) minor character spends his time reading comic books at a newsstand, and we also get to enjoy the adventure story he's reading as a bonus. And Moore skilfully weaves all these strands - even the comic-book story, which is a rattling good yarn with pirates and sharks, death and undeath and insanity - into the baroque tapestry that is the Watchmen Experience.

The movie takes some of these same threads, and tries to string them together into an epic of naïve idealism versus entrenched, institutional corruption. Somehow, the multi-dimensional tale of the book has been reduced to a cliché. The budget may be bigger than Mr Smith Goes to Washington, but the story really isn't, not any more.

In the reducing process, it's succeeded in making the story dull. There's simply not enough left to fill 163 minutes. Jimmy Stewart took just over two hours, and frankly even he drags sometimes.

Here, the action scenes and the sex scenes take on far inflated importance. Take, for instance, the episode where two of our heroes (in plain clothes) get ambushed by muggers. In the book, the fight scene fills a total of five frames, interspersed with wordy frames of Dr Manhattan's fateful TV appearance. In the movie, we're treated to what feels like a full minute of choreographed, gratuitously brutal violence. Evidently the producers felt the story was dragging at this point.

And they were right. Their error was in thinking that the fight would improve matters.

In a vain attempt to soften Alan Moore's righteous wrath, the producers have tried to follow the source material slavishly (with a few notable exceptions). The thing is: what works on the page, doesn't work on film.



Back to the abovementioned fight scene, for instance. On paper, the fraction of a second it takes to glance at the fight before getting back to the interview contrasts with the time it takes to read the speech frames. The effect is that you're reading the speech while looking at the fight. But rather than running the speech over the silent film of the fight, here the director - with a devastating failure of imagination - literally cuts between scenes.

Laborious. Tedious. Dull.

Many of the more memorable lines are lifted directly from the book. That's fine, except that half the time the actors don't seem to understand their own lines. In a comic book, the words and the artwork are used to create the character. Onscreen it's the actor who creates the character, and sometimes the words no longer fit.

I call this "Christina Ricci syndrome", after her memorably detached performance in Sleepy Hollow. The characters of Dan Dreiberg and Adrian Veidt, in particular, suffer from it: two major figures who simply don't seem to be in the same movie as everyone else.

(And what is it with Dreiberg's glasses? An eight-digit f/x budget, and they still can't make it look like the lenses actually refract light?)

Where the script does depart from the book, it makes matters worse. Now that the Cold War is a fading memory, the film feels it has to go to great lengths to Recreate the Era of Nuclear Paranoia. In doing so, it is both gratuitous - every channel and every paper is filled with end-is-nigh doom-mongering - and intellectually dishonest (fielding Richard Nixon, as a president who has somehow weathered not merely Watergate but also the 22nd amendment - as all-round scapegoat and shorthand for unchecked corruption). Thus this part of the story is reduced from an imaginative fable to a political cheap shot - and a very dated one at that.

Another failure: in the book, Laurie (Silk Spectre II) smokes. (That's why she accidentally fires off Arcimedes' flamethrower - she mistakes it for a cigarette lighter.) In the movie, she doesn't smoke, and just presses the button for the hell of it. It wouldn't be a big deal, except that the movie makes it so by sticking so closely to the appearance, costume and words of the characters in every other respect. Now, of course, it's practically illegal for a sympathetic character in a movie to smoke; but this was the 80s, and that's the era the film is supposed to be capturing.

I wish Zack Snyder, who pleased a lot of people with 300, had shown just a little more courage and cut out some of the back story. Who cares about the involved history of the Minutemen, the Comedian, Silk Spectre, and all the heroes who died long before the story begins? Let it go. If you can cut out the undead pirates, you can cut that too. In the book it adds depth and weight. Onscreen it's just confusing and distracting.

Lots of people, mostly I'm guessing those who don't even remember the 1980s, seem to like this movie. That probably means Snyder will get to make more. God help us.

Rags to rags

So all the buzz now is about Slumdog Millionaire. I haven't seen it yet, and I'm not entirely sure I want to.

It's always nice to see a non-Hollywood movie getting this kind of hype. It'd be even nicer if the movie itself were a bit less Hollywood in plot. Unregarded lowly schmoe comes into incredible good fortune? Pur-leeze. It's a story that was old when Charles Dickens was cranking it out.

Another way of putting it would be to say that it's an updated version of a timeless classic story. As, let's face it, what isn't? We've all heard the argument that there are only N basic plotlines, where N is anything from three to sixty-something. But the lowly-guy-makes-good story is ancient by anyone's standards. It's embedded very deeply in our culture.

And, I've decided I don't like it there.

Rags-to-riches stories make us feel good. They're inspiring. But they're also oppressive: they preach the value that it's okay for billions of people to live in abject misery, because a vanishingly tiny fraction of them will escape it... and if they can do it, anyone can do it.

And to a point, that's true. Anyone can do it, with sufficient luck. But not everyone can get that lucky. There just aren't enough winning lottery tickets to go round. And for every slumdog millionaire who gets to have a movie made of their life, there are tens of thousands who live and die in the same misery they were born in.

"Stories are not, on the whole, interested in swineherds who remain swineherds, and poor and humble shoemakers whose destiny is to die slightly poorer and much humbler." -- Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad.

I think that's why I like Thomas Hardy. Jude the Obscure is a tale of wasted potential; our hero constantly tries and fails to better himself, living out a life of high drama and deep tragedy without ever making a ripple in the world. That's a hero I can relate to.

But this "rags to riches" myth is endorsing poverty. And it's so unnecessary.