Yesterday

Why so few posts yesterday, Poul Anderson fans?

Hours Yesterday
1 on gym bike
0.5 swimming
2 visiting Ketlan in the Infirmary, afternoon
0.5 meditation
1 visiting Ketlan, evening
2 Duke's Playhouse film quiz
1.5 travel time

That is a day's work. There was time for eating and reading but not of Poul Anderson. For the Duke's Playhouse night and day, see the images.

The film quiz included a few items relevant to recent posts:

one James Bond film, Doctor No;
four time travel films -

Daleks Invasion Earth 2150 AD;
Terminator;
Planet Of The Apes;
The Time Machine.

The Daleks are Doctor Who's continuing villains. We recently suggested combining the Time Machine and Doctor Who with Poul Anderson's Time Patrol. See here.

Tomorrow may involve visiting another very unwell friend, the Italian Fascist, then Ketlan again. The current reading schedule, maybe, is:

finish reading The Myth Of God Incarnate;
finish rereading The People Of The Wind;
finish reading SM Stirling's On The Oceans Of Eternity.

Theology, future history and alternative history expand the mind.

Alianora Or So

Three Hearts And Three Lions. 

(Following up on recent posts, Lancaster has a Golden Lion pub, a Duke of Lancaster pub and a Duke's Playhouse.)

Alianora is a swan may. She wears a magical tunic of white feathers that enables her to change between human and swan forms. When making the latter transformation, the body lengthens, the neck shrinks, the wings narrow and a woman appears. Sometimes, she transforms to human in midair and falls nearly to the ground before changing back.

Maybe Alianora warrants a post unto herself but I mention her here for the sake of yet another Anderson-Gaiman parallel:

"Even Dream's former lover Alianora is hard to pin down - in chapter 2 of Brief Lives she's referred to as Eleanora, and in part 12 of The Kindly Ones as Alianore; i.e., her name is spelled a little differently every time it appears."

-Hy Bender, The Sandman Companion (London, 2000), 7, p. 116.

For previous blog references to Alianora, see here. (Scroll down.)

Multi-Media Mania

A story can be narrated, enacted or depicted. Thus:

Poul Anderson narrates his History of Technic Civilization in a long series of novels and short stories;

in a live action screen dramatization, a large cast of actors would enact the History;

in a graphic adaptation, a penciler, an inker, a colorist and a letterer, or more probably a team of several artists with these skills, would depict the story;

in an animation, cartoonists would depict and actors would enact;

moreover, some scenes in an animation could be accompanied by voice-over narration, e.g., taken from Hloch's Introductions to The Earth Book Of Stormgate.

A partially narrated animation would synthesize narration, sequential art and drama so would it constitute an ultimate audiovisual art form?

We have not mentioned book covers, illustrated prose narratives, poetry, stage dramatizations, musicals, operas, audiodramas, ballets or other kinds of performances. Also, producers, directors, editors, script-writers etc would contribute to the various kinds of adaptations.

These questions arise because, when we appreciate a work that is excellent in its medium, we ask whether it can be adapted into other media. In a talk delivered at the Duke's Playhouse, Lancaster, Anthony Burgess denigrated a film adaptation of James Joyce's A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man because the cinema screen was unable to communicate the feelings and sensations evoked by the novel.

If an author were to pre-plan the telling of a single story as a prose novel, a graphic novel and a film, then he would have to take into account from the outset that, without contradicting each other, the three media would of necessity tell different parts or aspects of that one story. Characters in Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife eat in a restaurant called "The Beau Thai," and we hear this name in the film but either we do not see it or I missed it when we were shown it.

Anderson's Mirkheim merely states that Sandra Tamarin meets Benoni Strang a few times but, for reasons discussed here, any film adaptation would have to avoid showing us Strang's face during such meetings. This alone would alert the audience that there was something significant about Strang but that is unavoidable.

A Midsummer Tempest XIII

The first year the Duke's Playhouse, Lancaster, presented promenade performances in Williamson Park, the Shakespeare play was A Midsummer Night's Dream. For the Promenade tenth anniversary, they again performed the Dream. I preferred the first performance but, on the second occasion, Puck gave a memorable rendition of:

"Up and down, up and down:
"I will lead them up and down:
"I am fear'd in field and town;
"Goblin, lead them up and down." (Act III, Scene II, lines 418-421)

Poul Anderson must have expected readers familiar with the play to hear an echo of Puck when he wrote of Prince Rupert in A Midsummer Tempest (London, 1975):

"His fist beat the cannon beside which he stood, up and down, up and down." (p. 145)

In this alternative history, Rupert was not only defeated but also captured by Roundheads at Marston Moor. He escapes with help from Oberon, Titania and a Puritan's ward, Jennifer. The Puritans interrogate Jennifer by sleep deprivation but she later wins one of them over. Again, some prose can be rendered as verse:

" 'And here at last a chance has come for thee.'
" 'To do what thing, my lady?' 'Set me free.' " (p. 154)

Later, she reflects:

" 'Oh, hard it is to use him heartlessly,
" 'And from its grave call forth knight-errantry.' " (p. 156)

With some humour but also with harrowing scenes of Jennifer pinched awake, Anderson vividly displays dreadful Puritan intolerance. When reminded that Protestants are tolerated in a Catholic country, one of Jennifer's captors complains that Catholics are tolerated there as well!

Anderson does not mention this here but John Milton in Paradise Lost describes Catholic monks entering the hereafter and ascending as they believe towards Paradise only to be blown around, and their religious symbols scattered, by whirlwinds in the Paradise of Fools. How can anyone be so certain, first, that there is a hereafter and, secondly, that he and his co-religionists will be well received and their opponents confounded on arrival there? Such unwarranted certainty, serving only to make its believers feel better about themselves, is with us still.

It would be an instructive exercise to design a hereafter where everyone (everyone) learned more than they had on Earth. Milton might receive a short taste of the Paradise of Fools, then be shown that there is more to life, and death, than intolerance and complacency.

St Paul preached a new message of universal salvation that made sense at the time to some Jews and many Gentiles, both master and slave. Hence, its success. "Blood sacrifice" resonated then if not with most of us now. Christianity, ie, Gentile Messianism, provided ruling ideas for three stages of social development: slave-owning, feudal and capitalist. It was endlessly adaptable. Pagan elements absorbed earlier could be jettisoned when appropriate at the Reformation although the ideas remained distinctively Christian. Hence, the intolerance of the Puritans who attributed their business success or failure not to aristocratic privilege but to inscrutable Predestination. If only England 1649-1660 had been a genuinely inclusive and tolerant Republic... 

The Elizabethan Age

Last night: improvisation drama/comedy at the Duke's Playhouse (and see here).

Today: Barton Grange Garden Centre and Garstang Victorian Festival.

Tomorrow: Christmas preparations, including buying a tree.

On this blog:

reading about falconry in SM Stirling's Emberverse reminded me of falconry in Poul Anderson's Time Patrol universe;

Anderson mentioned that Emperor Frederick II wrote a book on falconry;

Sean listed other rulers who wrote books;

I added Henry VIII's Defense Of The Seven Sacraments;

SM Stirling mentioned that the Defense was probably ghost written;

Sean, Mr Stirling and Nicholas discussed Henry VIII, Elizabeth I and sixteenth century global politics -

- so what did Poul Anderson write about the Elizabethan Age?

First, it was part of a time war:

"'...in this present century, Denmark is not where our real European strength lies. Rather we are concentrated in Britain. King Henry has forsaken the Roman Church; but we saw to it that he did not go over to Lutheranism either, and for us his kingdom is pivotal. What you know as the episode of the two Queen Marys is a time of gain for the Wardens; the Rangers will resurge with Cromwell, but we will drive them out at the Restoration.'"
-Poul Anderson, The Corridors Of Time (Frogmore, St Albans, Herts, 1975), Chapter Eleven, p. 102.

"...King Henry snored beside Anne Boleyn...poor Anne whose head would fly from the ax in less than a year, and none to warn her. But her daughter lay cradled in that same palace and was named Elizabeth. The strangeness possessed Lockwood like a vision: not merely his own fate, but the mystery that was every man's."
-op. cit., Chapter Twelve, p. 104.

(By referring to the mystery of every man's fate, Anderson raises this time travel novel to the level of all literature as he also does in There Will Be Time:

("It was a strange thing to meet her at intervals of months which for Havig were hours or days. Each time, she was so dizzyingly grown. In awe he felt a sense of that measureless river which he could swim but on which she could only be carried from darkness to darkness."
-Poul Anderson, There Will Be Time (New York, 1973), Chapter IX, p. 98.)

Secondly, Noah Arkwright questions whether the Polesotechnic League period is a neo-Elizabethan age. See Noah Arkwright III.

Thirdly, in "Call Me Joe," human colonists of Jupiter will experience:

"'A hard, lusty, stormy kind of life, granted - dangerous, brawling, violent - but life as no human, perhaps, has lived it since the days of Elizabeth the First. Oh, yes, there will be small trouble finding Jovians.'"
-Poul Anderson, "Call Me Joe" IN Anderson, The Collected Short Works Of Poul Anderson, Volume 1: Call Me Joe (Framingham, MA, 2009), pp. 11-36 AT p. 35.

Meanwhile, Crown Princess Orlaith's friends and allies have protected her from those two tigers.  

War

Poul Anderson frequently writes about war whether between tribes armed with spears or between space fleets armed with nuclear missiles. Maybe this is outside our experience? However, war directly affects us:

for my generation, our parents lived through World War II;

out governments still wage wars;

I have not posted until now this evening because I attended a Duke's Playhouse showing of Nae Pasaran, a documentary film about Scottish workers boycotting Chilean fighter jet engines. (I was a student in Ireland then but, if I had been working and in a British trade union, I would have been asked to support those workers.)

Thus, fictional wars should remind us that wars are our present realities whether or not we are combatants.

"Allah Akbar!"

Three Hearts And Three Lions, CHAPTER TWENTY.

"'Allah akbar!' exploded Carahue. 'They're terrified of magic. Merciful saints, I meant to say.'" (p. 129)

Ketlan was a big fan of Anthony Burgess and was envious that I had heard Burgess speak on James Joyce at Lancaster Duke's Playhouse. Ketlan got me to read Earthly Powers. In that novel, a Maltese character has always accepted that he prays to Deus in a church whereas his Muslim neighbor prays to Allah in a mosque. Now, however, the Catholic Church has adopted the vernacular liturgy so that suddenly the character finds himself praying, in his Arabic-influenced Maltese, to Allah in church. For him, this is a problem - but had he never addressed God in the vernacular in private prayer?

When Sheila and I were on holiday in Malta, we were looking around the back of a church during a Mass and heard the priest say, "Oh, Allah..."

Carahue acts in character as a recent convert from Islam to Christianity.