That Was The Week That Was...
Mar. 13th, 2011 07:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearThursday:
Dave and I went to the 9th annual Douglas Adams Memorial Lecture, given by the wonderful Brian Cox. The title of the lecture was "The Universe and Why We Should Explore It" but it had rather more to do with particle physics and the LHC than anything else. Only Brian Cox could ever make particle physics interesting to me (sorry, Ryan!), and very interesting it was, if a little mind-boggling for a poor scientifically-challenged English graduate like me.
Friday:
I stayed up till nearly 2am to finish The Black Company by Glen Cook. It was a fairly standard mercenary company fantasy story, with the relatively unusual aspect that the titular company were not exactly heroic white hats. The first person narrative helped in getting closer to the protagonist, and also managed to portray the other members of the company in a sympathetic light. It was clear from the outset that the company had its own internal honour code and the sense of family was a strong theme throughout. It was refreshing to spend time with characters like these - when they decided they wanted out of their current contract, they arranged for an assassin to kill the man they were being paid to protect. When the assassin failed, they killed their employer themselves and pretended that the assassin had actually succeeded. In their twisted world view, it was deemed better that they be seen to fail in their commission than to break a contract.
The protagonist was honest about the company's priorities and lack of a moral compass, but had several things to say to defend his comrades at least to a certain extent:
"War is a cruel business, prosecuted by cruel men. The gods know the Black Company are no cherubim. But there are limits."
"There are no self-proclaimed villains, only regiments of self-proclaimed saints. Victorious historians rule where good and evil lies." Saturday:
Sunday:
Dave and I went to the 9th annual Douglas Adams Memorial Lecture, given by the wonderful Brian Cox. The title of the lecture was "The Universe and Why We Should Explore It" but it had rather more to do with particle physics and the LHC than anything else. Only Brian Cox could ever make particle physics interesting to me (sorry, Ryan!), and very interesting it was, if a little mind-boggling for a poor scientifically-challenged English graduate like me.
Friday:
I stayed up till nearly 2am to finish The Black Company by Glen Cook. It was a fairly standard mercenary company fantasy story, with the relatively unusual aspect that the titular company were not exactly heroic white hats. The first person narrative helped in getting closer to the protagonist, and also managed to portray the other members of the company in a sympathetic light. It was clear from the outset that the company had its own internal honour code and the sense of family was a strong theme throughout. It was refreshing to spend time with characters like these - when they decided they wanted out of their current contract, they arranged for an assassin to kill the man they were being paid to protect. When the assassin failed, they killed their employer themselves and pretended that the assassin had actually succeeded. In their twisted world view, it was deemed better that they be seen to fail in their commission than to break a contract.
The protagonist was honest about the company's priorities and lack of a moral compass, but had several things to say to defend his comrades at least to a certain extent:
"War is a cruel business, prosecuted by cruel men. The gods know the Black Company are no cherubim. But there are limits."
"There are no self-proclaimed villains, only regiments of self-proclaimed saints. Victorious historians rule where good and evil lies."
It was made more than clear as the story progressed that the armies on the side of supposed good were no better than the Black Company's supposedly evil employers, which resulted in a little difficulty in deciding who to root for. Obviously, the company itself housed the "heroes" of the book, and the conflict became a bit more clear cut towards the end, when they struck out on their own.
The narrative tended to skip the details of the battles, which suited me fine, as I generally find endless descriptions of infantry conflicts both unpleasant and tedious. This book focused mostly on the over-riding politics and individual characterisation, which was really good. The narrative also had the interesting aspect that it was presented as the protagonist recording the Annals of the company's exploits. This meant it switched back and forth between past and present tense, as he caught up to the present moment. It also provide more suspense than you would usually get from a first person narrative as, at any given point, the narrator only knew what had happened in the period up to when he was writing the entry. The timeline would then skip forwards until his next entry when he would record what happened next. It was a very effective device.
I do plan to get more of the books in this series, as it was intriguing, exciting and well written, which characters I would happily spend more time with.
For reasons that remain unclear, this scientifically-challenged English Graduate spent Saturday afternoon volunteering at The Big Bang Fair at the Excel Centre in Docklands. I was officially supposed to be providing Competitor Care for the entrants in The National Science and Engineering Competition. However, by Saturday afternoon, they'd been on their stalls for two and a half days already, and really didn't need any looking after. There were rather more volunteers than were strictly needed as well (which showed excellent planning), so I didn't actually have that much in the way of useful things to do. Dave had come along too (his official shift was on Thursday, but he decided to come back with me to see more of the fair) so he showed me round all the exhibits and questioned various of the competitors about their projects, which made the whole thing much more interesting for me than it would have been if I'd been on my own. Towards the end of the day, we begged the volunteer co-ordinator for something worthwhile to do, and did some market research for one of the shows, trying to get visitors to fill in questionnaires as they came out. This was much more in my field of expertise, though I wasn't particularly successful. Still, it made it feel more like I'd had a purpose in being there, and the organisers were very grateful for our help.
When we arrived home, we watched Nausicaa, an early Myazaki film recommended by coldjwplay, which turned out to be good fun. It was helped by an excellent voice cast (Patrick Stewart and Edward James Olmos stood out in particular) and lots of excitement, though the giant Cthuloid insects were pretty disturbing. It was a stirring tale of human destructive tendencies and the importance of living in harmony with nature, with added airship battles, plucky peasants going up against invading tanks, and many, many very impressive displays of facial hair.
Sunday:
This morning, I finished The Cat Who Turned On And Off, by Lilian Jackson Braun - the third in the series and basically a rehash of the first two, this time revolving around the antiques industry, as opposed to art or interior decorating. Lots of fun, though - these books will most definitely prove excellent fillers, as long as I leave a big enough gap between reading them, so that their repetitive nature doesn't get boring.
Then, this afternoon, I watched my current DVD rental - Velvet Goldmine. It certainly wasn't the best film in the world, but any film that has Ewan McGregor in black nail varnish deflowering not only Jonathan Rhys Meyers but also Christian Bale is always going to appeal to me on a certain level. It was supposedly about the death of glam rock, but it was mostly made up of very attractive actors prancing around in quite terrifying costumes, gradually disappearing into the mythos they created around themselves. Pleasantly diverting, but not exactly intellectually stimulating or particularly emotive.
