Of keyboards, cruft and eyelashes

One of the downsides of having an Apple keyboard is the way the white keys show the dirt and the transparent front shows all the crap trapped underneath. Finally fed up with the filth, I opted to take mine to pieces and clean the key caps with a nailbrush — they'll pop off if you lever the gently — only to discover the answer to one of life's great mysteries. I now know where eyelashes go when they detach themselves: they go and live in computer keyboards. So much for that old myth about them going off to grant wishes. Stupid lazy pieces of hair.

No Future for You, Part 1

Despite swearing off monthlies in favour of trades, I've found myself forced to pick up Buffy: Series 8 as it comes out, just because it's so insanely great. The most recent issue, six, finds Brian K Vaughan taking over writerly duties from Joss, whilst JW moves over to Brian's old stamping ground on Runaways, both of which feature cover art by Jo Chen. What an incestuous world it is. Anyways, the latest greatest features the first part of a story which focuses on Giles' attempts to recruit Faith to help with slayer problem. According to all the signs, auguries and soothsayers, including the Great Bearded Wizard of Northampton, there's a crazy English aristo-slayer who's going to destroy the world and F-girl is the only one up to the job. Despite an initial lack of enthusiasm, Giles gradually brings Faith round saying,

Do you honestly think you're the first person to have stumbled upon the notion of rebellion? You and I aren't so unalike. But those who refuse to pay the piper during our adolescence have a responsibility to should the most unpleasant costs of adulthood.

I love it. It give an in to why Giles is kinda uptight and big on the whole duty thing, but it also give Faith a convincing reason to trust him and buy into what he's asking her to do. Something tells me that things are going to be safe in the hands of BKV.

The Honor of the Queen

Following on from last months re-read, I've moved on to the next novel in David Weber's Honorverse series, The Honor of the Queen.

At a party to celebrate the recommissioning of HMS Fearless, the replacement for the ship that got pounded into scrap at the end of On Basilisk Station, Honor discovers she's being tapped to escort a convoy to Casca, with a pause en route to drop off a diplomatic mission on Grayson. But, all is not as simple as it first seems: Grayson is a relatively backward world, founded by religious extremists who weren't big on either technology or female emancipation. Fortunately the most zealous elements, the Faithful, were exiled to nearby star system following a civil war many hundreds of years before, but despite their new home being somewhat less poisonous than Grayson, they will do anything to seize possession of their former world from the Apostates.

Upon arrival in the Yeltsin, Honor realises that her gender is causing problems for the diplomatic mission, lead by her mentor, Admiral Raoul Courvosier. She decides to change the order of the Casca escort so that it includes her own Fearless, Alice Truman's Apollo and Alasdair McKeon's Troubadour, leaving the destroyer HMS Madrigal in system to assist the diplomatic mission and fend off any raids by the Faithful. Unfortunately, Honor is missing a key piece of the puzzle. The forces of the Faithful do not merely consist obsolete cruisers, for which Madrigal is more a match, but also a pair of modern Havenite warships. Thus when the Faithful come calling whilst Honor is away, Madrigal is destroyed and the Grayson navy devastated.

Horrified by the consequences of her decision to absent herself, Honor attempts to take charge of the defence of Grayson but falls foul of the entranced misogyny and is not helped cowardly snivellings of one of the senior Manticoran diplomats. She deals with the situation by manipulating the planetary ruler, Protector Benjamin, into installing a more suitable officer into the position of fleet admiral. Thus set up, she takes a joint task force composed of Grayson and Manticoran ships to kick the Faithful back to their own star system. Although the mission is successful, the victory is somewhat pyrrhic: although the Havenite destroy has been captured, Apollo has taken heavy battle damage, and the battlecruiser — which substantially out-masses and out-guns Fearless — is not present but is expected back at any moment.

I suspect that The Honor of the Queen is probably one of my favourite novels in the series. There's a certain freshness to the Graysons and their distinctly unenlightened view of the world — a view that is explained, at least in part, by the sheer toxicity of their planet and the fact that women out number men by four to one — although it's pretty clear that they're going to turn out to be alright in the end.

I even like the objectionable diplomat, Reginald Houseman, a man so vastly unpleasant that when Honor slaps him down, initially metaphorically and later more literally, you can help feeling pleased. My only real problem with him is that he's styled as a Liberal, whereas he's actually more of a neo-con buffoon: he refuses to accept the evidence of the military threat to Grayson in favour of a foolishly simplistic economic approach, then when the topic does come round to the use of military force, he expresses a casual, Rumsfeldian, disregard for obvious consequences of his views.

The Hedgehog and the Fox

Here are a few initial thoughts on Isaiah Berlin's essay The Hedgehog and the Fox. I'm sure I'll have more once I've had time to reflect, but my initial reaction is one of stunned astonishment.

According to Berlin, people can be roughly divided into two intellectual categories, depending on their outlooks on life. The first category composes the monists, people who hold a single overarching view that colours every aspect of their outlook. These people, who include amongst their number their number the likes of Dostoevsky, are the hedgehogs. The second category are pluralists, whose lives encompass many different ideas, ideas which may be eclectic and which may on cohere because they adhere to yet another idea or standard. These, Berlin says, are the foxes.

Having created these two groups, Berlin then raises a difficult question: to which group does Leo Tolstoy belong? On the face of it, this should be an easy question to answer because of the sheer volume of information available on Tolstoy's life, writings and ideas, but in practice it turns out to be quite difficult. According to Berlin, this problem exists because, whilst Tolstoy was by nature a fox, he believed in being a hedgehog and set out to systematically persuade people of this. Berlin sets out to explore this dichotomy by examining Tolstoy's theories on history, as expressed most comprehensively in War and Peace

As an intellectual experience, Hedgehog is positively thrilling. The savage brilliance of Tolstoy's mind shines through, with his scathing view of Hegel ("unintelligible gibberish interspersed with platitudes") and his whithering spoof of history as explained by the actions of great men:

By the end of the eighteenth century there gathered in Paris two dozen or so persons who started saying that all men were free and equal. Because of this in the whole of France people began to slaughter and drown each other. At this time there was a man of genius in France — Napoleon. He conquered everyone everywhere, i.e. killed a great many people because he was a great genius; and, for some reason, he went off to kill Africans, and killed them so well, and was so clever and cunning, that, having arrived in France, he ordered everyone to obey him, which they did. Having made himself Emperor he again went to kill masses of people in Italy, Austria and Prussia. And there too he killed a great many. Now in Russia there was the Emperor Alexander, who decided to re-establish order in Europe, and therefore fought wars with Napoleon. But in the year '07 he suddenly made friends with him, and in the year '11 quarrelled with him again, and they both again began to kill a great many people.

Rather than favouring the theory that history is shaped by great men who wield some nebulous form of power, Tolstoy takes the view that history emerges from the chaotic actions of ordinary people. Thus the events that historians see as significant, such as Pyotr Bagration on the field at Austerlitz, are merely the events that people chose to remember, whilst any number other events, which may be just as significant but which fail to contribute to the historical picture are forgotten.

Fascinating, frustrating and beguiling stuff.

Call that a Ring Cycle?

I'm beginning to remember why I didn't bother to catch The Return of the King when it first came out: too little Schopenhauer, too few Nietzschean nitwits who enjoy setting bears on their surrogate fathers, a shortage of valkyries and no incest whatsoever. What's with that? Couldn't just one of the principles have managed to impregnate his own sister so that the child can marry his own aunt. I mean. They're just not plausible as characters...