You are sleeping; you do not want to believe

I was listening to 'Rubber Ring' by the Smiths recently, one of my favourite Smiths songs. It was originally just a B-side (wow, remember those?) on the back of 'The Boy With A Thorn In His Side', one of the singles from 'The Queen Is Dead', but it got an album release on the 1987 compilation 'Louder than Bombs'. Anyway, as it played out there are several samples intercut with the music. One is a man with a bit of a plummy BBC Received Pronunciation accent saying something like; "everybody's clever nowadays", and then as the music finishes there is a woman with an equally cut glass accent clearly intoning; "You Are Sleeping; You Do Not Want to Believe. You Are Sleeping."

Now as I say it is obviously sampled from somewhere, and as you do, I began to idly wonder where Morrissey might have got it from. I've probably wondered that dozens of times, every time I've listened to the track, but in previous decades that would be as far as it went, as unless you had the album to hand and it was credited on the sleeve notes you'd just never know. Now, however, for better or worse the internet has liberated us from that kind of idle speculation and 30 seconds' Googling led me to a Smiths fan forum, where the truth was laid bare, and it turned out to be more interesting than I had thought.

In fact the woman's voice was from a 7" flexi-disc (those were thin, floppy, disposable vinyl records for those of you below the age of 35) distributed with the English translation of a book called; 'Breakthrough: An Amazing Experiment In Electronic Communication With the Dead', by a Latvian parapsychologist called Konstantins Raudive, then working in Sweden and Germany. The book was published in 1971 but detailed work conducted in the 1950s with what is now known as Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP). The woman is - I imagine - an actress or staff member paid to read transcripts of what the 'dead' are 'saying' for greater clarity, as the recordings themselves are very indistinct, and intriguingly the message that the Smiths purloined for Rubber Ring actually purports to be one from Raudive's dead Swedish colleague, Dr Gephardt Frye (although given that Raudive spent his entire life pursuing this ephemeral pseudo-phenomenon, as a judgement upon him from beyond the grave it seems a bit harsh, frankly). The full version of the flexi-disc can be found at this illuminating site, with its sleeve notes, and makes for mildly diverting listening. The woman speaking the piece used on the Smiths track is about 60% of the way through the first side.

I first became aware of EVP after reading 'Legion', by William Peter Blatty, at a time when I was devouring occult books of any description. Blatty was the man who wrote The Exorcist, and Legion, published in 1983, was the 'official' sequel. There had been a rather hammy sequel film in 1977 called The Heretic, where Linda Blair reprised her role as Regan, the possessed child, now all grown up, and with Ri-Chard Bur-Tonnn as a priest trying to help her deal with Pazuzu, an African spirit who is in the film identified as the 'demon' from the first film. The Heretic, is, however, fairly terrible, and Blatty wisely disassociated himself from it.

Legion, though, is a much more subtle book which takes the police detective from the first book/film (William Kinderman, written as a kind of Jewish Columbo) and Father Dyer, a friend of Father Damen Karras (the priest from the first film), and takes them through the realisation that the demon is still around, now possessing the body of Father Karras, and using it to commit terrible crimes as the 'Gemini Killer', an obvious reference to the 'Zodiac Killer' who terrorised San Francisco and parts north in 1969-71 and who was never caught. Legion eventually got made into a film as 'The Exorcist Part 3' in 1990, but while it's ostensibly about demons and the fight between good and evil, the book is actually mostly Blatty, a committed Catholic (no great surprise there), working through his own personal theology via the mouthpiece of Detective Kindermann. At one point Kindermann becomes interested in EVP as a way of unlocking the murder of a doctor who was into the phenomenon, and starts trying to recreate it, although he eventually decides it's the works of dybbuks (oy!) and throws the apparatus away. Interestingly, not only was the Zodiac Killer active at the same time that Blatty was writing the original Exorcist, it was also the same time that Raudive's book came out, and I suspect there's no coincidence they both make it into Blatty's sequel.

Anyway, as an impressionable 17/18 year old as I was, having rejected religion but keen on finding meaning in the cosmos, and experimenting (dabbling, I guess is the word) with the occult, this seemed to me to be something worth exploring, and so I started making EVP tapes myself. Unfortunately this tended to involve setting a tape machine to record nothing, and then spending hours with a pair of headphones listening back to see if you could hear anything. Hours of tape hiss (Dolby in or out? Another one to baffle the youngsters) and the occasional squeak of a tape wheel, straining to hear something. And of course eventually you do. I convinced myself I could hear a man saying "a warm welcome" at one point, and a woman saying dismissively "stupid". Of course these voices are not on the tape - they are in your head. The random noises of the tape become an audio version of a Rorschach ink blot. Just as our eyes are built to recognise faces and objects, and so tend to impose such order on random visual input like flames and clouds, so our ears are built to recognise human voices most of all, and can sometimes hear them where they don't exist. I swiftly grew bored with EVP, discovering that, like the occult, it was a load of old bollocks, and left it behind me, but listening to the mp3 version of the 'Breakthrough' record brought it all flooding back. Most interesting of all to me is the thought that Morrissey might have been doing exactly the same thing as me in a room in Salford at almost exactly the same time, as Rubber Ring was made just two years after my own brief flirtation with EVP, although it has to be said that the song itself is not about anything like that, it's about nostalgia and the way we cling to old songs as time goes by like a novice swimmer clings to a rubber ring. A post-modernist might try arguing that Morrissey is clinging in the same way to the hope of life after death, but I wouldn't go that far.

And besides, just go back to the tape of Breakthrough and listen again to those 'voices', without the pre-judgement of deciding that they are voices, and what do they really sound like? Like the random tape noises that they are; electrical and mechanical graunches and groans that are an artifact of the recording process (remember these were made in the 50s, so presumably with an old reel to reel recorder), almost impossible to duplicate with modern digital recording methods. In a way they are almost the inverse phenomenon of the camera 'orbs' - dust motes caught in a flash that are only picked up now we all use digital cameras. It seems to me that it is no coincidence that interest in EVP has declined in the digital age, just as it is no coincidence that interest in 'orbs' has increased. Each is an artifact of the technology being used.

So maybe the woman is right; perhaps I Do Not Want To Believe, but I would argue that, unlike the adherents of EVP, I am not sleeping.

One in a billion

I've recently joined a history website about William Marshall - the knight and sometime Regent of England after the death of King John. But it does seem to have a lot of Americans on it who keep on telling me that they are related to William Marshall, often in the 30th generation or so. Here's the thing about geneology; I enjoy it, but I'm dubious about how much it actually means. I think a lot of people try to read things into it that aren't supportable, probably because they have no real grasp of statistics. The following is a genuine quote:

"Hey that's great - you know I feel a great affinity for your country because I am actually descended from King Henry II."

And this irritates me. I shouldn't let it irritate me, but it does. Now I know that we all like to look for things that make us special, and there's no shame in that. But unfortunately being descended from Henry II doesn't make you that special or unique. It's you and everyone else, buddy - that's just maths (or 'math', if you insist).

Look - if you go back 800 years, and you assume a spacing of 25 years on average per generation (we have kids later now, but they tended to have them much earlier as you go back), then you are talking about 32 generations that separate you from King Henry. That means that as well as Henry II, you have 2^32 other ancestors in that generation, and like the apocryphal Chinese emperor who offered the inventor of chess twice as many grains of rice per square as for the previous one, once you start doubling and redoubling, you soon discover that that is a very large number indeed. How large? Well it's 2.1 billion, actually. Yes, that's right, Henry II (or William Marshall, who was part of Henry's retinue at one stage) may well be one of your ancestors in that generation, but he is only one of 2.1 billion ancestors in that same generation who you also share *exactly* the same amount of DNA with. You are also descended from Jane Johnson the merchant's daughter and Wat the serf and probably Vladislav the stable boy and Aisha the slave girl. In fact there weren't even 2 billion humans alive then - the figure was more like 400 million, according to recent estimates, so in theory it's just about possible that you are related to everyone who was alive on planet Earth back then, but actually it almost certainly doesn't work like that. We didn't travel much before the modern era and it is mathematically more likely that you are related to the same person several times over via various different routes and chains of descent - you may well have 50 different chains of ancestry linking you to back Jane Johnson and a dozen to Wat, maybe 4 or 5 to Vladislav and 2 to Aisha (and one to Henry II), but none at all to Warragul the Aboriginal hunter, Ahuatl the Aztec stone cutter or Xie Ming the potter. But Royals being what they are, it is likely that over 90% of people of English descent can manage to find at least one line of ancestry from Henry II.

So what does it mean to say you are related to Henry II? If he is everyone's ancestor, then maybe you shouldn't feel too proprietorial about just one two billionth of your DNA that you share with tens or perhaps hundreds of millions of others - that's not even a single gene, it's not even a single base pair. You know the genetic code of thymine, guanine, adenine and cytosine amino acid bases which form the rungs of the DNA ladder? AGTTTGCACGAGTACA? It goes on for 3 billion letters in each of us - longer than 1,000 Bibles - and you might have shared just one of those letters with Henry II. OK, I admit that actually you'll share 99.9% of them as you're both human beings rather than dolphins, oak trees or bacteria, but those are the meaningless ones - you also share all of those 99.9% with Warragul, Ahuatl and Xie Ming as well, and about 50% of them with your chicken dinner, for that matter. Of the small proportion of base pairs that make up the full range of human diversity, you'll share at most one, but statistically you'll probably share no ancestral DNA at all with Henry. His contribution to your genetic makeup was most likely edited out somewhere in the intervening 800 years, replaced by a strain from Wat or Aisha, of whom you know (and presumably care) nothing.

So yes, geneology is fun, and yes, once you hit a noble or royal chain of descent then it becomes trivially easy to pursue that one particular chain because some herald has already done the work for you centuries ago, but just remember that chain is only one of hundreds of millions, and that the phrase; "I am descended from Henry II" has no real meaning. Once you get beyond 200-300 years you have so many ancestors (325,000 after 300 years) that pursuing any one particular chain is essentially meaningless other than as an academic exercise in how you came to inherit your surname. Unless you are Boris Johnson, you do not have the blood of kings flowing through your veins.

The 'Old Lie'

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest 
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Wilfred Owen, 'Dulce Et Decorum Est'

As someone interested in history, I always enjoy it when history itself becomes news. It is interesting to see our interpretations of the past argued in the full glare of media attention, reinforcing the fact that history is a continual process, as each period is re-evaluated by a new generation and old certainties and assumptions challenged. In the past year we've had two periods of history argued over - one recent; the 1980s, following the death of Margaret Thatcher - a period I can speak on with reasonable authority, as I remember it very well - and the other more distant; our verdict on Richard III, his winter of obscurity made glorious summer by the rediscovery of his bones (and the subsequent argument about where we should bury them). Now we have the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War approaching, and even eight months ahead of that our attitude to the conflict has already become a political football. Some on the right, with Education Secretary Michael Gove as their cheerleader, apparently feel that the national narrative has been hijacked by bleeding heart liberals, war poets and 1960s lefties who produced 'Oh, What A Lovely War!' and - eventually - 'Blackadder Goes Forth', and that we ought to reclaim the war from this pacifist tosh and celebrate our victory over Hunnish Militarism, or somesuch nonsense.

It seems to me that there are two separate arguments here, one about the causes of and justification for the war, which I call the 'Beastly Hun' argument, and the other about its conduct, and whether Lions really were led to the slaughter by Donkeys, stalwart Tommies walking slowly towards machine-gun emplacements while incomptetent toff generals swilled port twenty miles behind the lines, and so on, which might be called the 'Blackadder' argument. The Blackadder argument has definitely been broadened by so-called 'revisionist' historians, who have demonstrated that a lot of Britain's reaction to the war was based on shock of the mass casualties on the Somme, themselves the result of being bounced into action ahead of time by Von Falkenhayn's Cunning Plan to split the Allies by attacking Verdun, forcing Britain to commit masses of untrained troops on a large scale for the first time. British tactics evolved rapidly over the subsequent two years, it is argued, with greater use of mines (as at Paschendale) to destroy emplacements, more reliable use of tanks, greater coordination of artillery fire with advances etc. Battles were conducted as well as they could be under the circumstances, certainly not as stupidly as often portrayed, Germany was, in the end, largely defeated in the field, and much of the preceived futility of taking trenches only to immediately lose them to a counterattack came from inevitable communications problems during battles caused by relying on fragile telephone cables, meaning it was hard to reinforce success where it occurred. I think that this is the kernel of truth that the likes of Gove feel we have lost; a more nuanced appreciation that the soldiers were by and large led by professionals who did the best job they could under difficult circumstances.

Now this is all fair enough, but I do think it's possible to go too far down this road, with some revisionist historians arguing that the War Poets were just over-sensitive young men suffering from PTSD who happened to be the literate ones, and their voices have sounded over-loud down the decades compared to the silent majority who did their job and got on with it. There are various arguments as to why the revisionists may have gone too far, and they don't just rely on casualty figures or the debacle of Gallipoli. British tactics did change, it's true, but much more slowly than French and German. By 1915-16 the French army had developed the 'fire team' tactic of advancing in two leapfrogging groups, one covering the other as it moved, and the Germans likewise had developed 'stormtroopers', advancing in dispersed formation behind a creeping barrage, to destroy machine-gun posts and command positions in advance of the main infantry assault. The British Army proved more resistant to change and did not improve its small unit tactics in this way until 1917, and surely much of this was down to the attitude of the General Staff, who didn't think that conscripts were capable of mastering more involved tactics. This undoubtedly had an effect on casualty levels. And the dissatisfaction with the war and how it was being waged was not just the province of a few handkerchief-sniffing Brideshead Revisited types (by the by, Siegfried Sassoon won the MC after all) - all of the major armies had large scale mutinies, in a way that didn't happen in the Second World War, which was just as long and bloody. The French Army mutiny of 1917 affected half of the divisions on the Western Front. The British mutiny at Etaples involved 50,000 men. The Russian Army effectively ceased to exist as a fighting force during 1917 and the country suffered two coups d'etat. The conduct of the war may have become a charicature in the popular imagination, but there is still some truth in the charicature as well as the revisionist view, and I'm not sure Gove accepts that sufficiently. Richard Evans has also pointed out in the Guardian that a lot of the criticism of the conduct of the war actually has come from the right, people like Max Hastings, Alan Clark and Niall Fergusson.

Perhaps a lot of the dissatisfaction with the war was down to whether it was perceived to be a necessary one, and here the Beastly Hun argument about the war's justification is a much harder one, although that hasn't stopped people trying to make it.There seems to be an attempt to play up Imperial Germany's "aggressive, militarist" stance, lack of democracy (how so unlike our ally Russia...) and generally portray it as being somehow proto-Nazi. I'm far from the first to point out that there is far too much hindsight in this argument, and that it neglects Britain's own "aggressive, militarist" imperial past (to quote Blackadder - "the British Empire at present covers a quarter of the globe, while the German Empire consists of a small sausage factory in Tanganyika. I hardly think that we can be entirely absolved of blame on the imperialistic front"). The causes of the war were far more about grand imperial rivalries than they were about Plucky Little Belgium, raped nuns or Hunnish Militarism, and the impetus was all the greater for no-one really being aware of what the terrible consequences of their actions would be. August 1914 was all cheering crowds and white feathers for cowardice, and it took the reality of the Western Front to make people re-examine the reasons for which they were fighting, and find them wanting.

The last word, I think, should go to the much denigrated Blackadder for summing it all up as succinctly as it is, I think possible:

Captain Blackadder: "You see, Baldrick, in order to prevent war in Europe, two superblocs developed: us, the French and the Russians on one side, and the Germans and Austro-Hungary on the other. The idea was to have two vast opposing armies, each acting as the other's deterrent. That way there could never be a war."

Private Baldrick: "But, this is a sort of a war, isn't it, sir?"

Captain Blackadder: "Yes, that's right. You see, there was a tiny flaw in the plan."

Private Baldrick: "What was that, sir?"

Captain Blackadder: "It was bollocks."

Land of Hope and Glory, Mother of the Free (SHUUUT UUUP!)

So, a while ago someone made a throwaway comment about a friend wearing a pith helmet looking like Don Estelle from 'It Ain't Half Hot Mum'. And that set me to thinking about David Croft and Jimmy Perry's less appreciated sitcom. Yes, they wrote 'Dad's Army', and we'll try to forgive them for 'Hi De Hi', but apparently the BBC, when considering during 2012 what shows they could repeat, took one look at 'It Ain't Half Hot Mum' and decided that it basically could never, ever be shown again.

Now. Some of this is perhaps down to the treatment of transvestite gunner 'Gloria' Beaumont (although M*A*S*H got away with it), but I am sure that the main reason is Michael Bates' character, Ranjit Ram. Michael Bates is a white man (albeit of Indian ancestry) playing an Indian, complete with blackface (well, brownface, but still - not even Ben Kingsley could get away with that these days). Bates may have grown up in India and speak fluent Hindi, and the character may well be a largely sympathetic one, but he is still a figure of fun, and there is a bit too much of the aura of the 'Black And White Minstrel Show' about him. And fair enough - this is 2014, after all. But watching a couple of episodes tonight on YouTube, it strikes me that there's actually a deeper malaise at the heart of the show. It made me think back about the series and the way I had laughed at it as a young boy. I was eight when the series started, and nearly 16 when it finished, and by 1984 it was already a creature of another era, somehow belonging to the 1970s and 'Love They Neighbour' era, rather than the 'Alternative Comedy' of the 80s that seemed to speak to me and my generation. But in fact it was actually far older than that. The reason that 'Dad's Army' and 'Hi De Hi' felt authentic was that even in the 1970s and 80s they were period pieces, harking back to the 1940s and 50s, and Perry and Croft were obviously writing it based on their own experiences of that time. 'It Ain't Half Hot Mum' was as much a creation of the 1940s and 50s as Anthony Eden, rationing and Brylcreem. And looking back on it, it seems to me no accident that this was the time of the retreat from Empire - the unravelling of a world-spanning power that before the war had stood for 200 years and people expected to last for many more. In a peculiar way, the programme is its own unwitting testimony to that era, and why the Empire was doomed.

Consider this: Ranjit Ram is a devotee of Britain. He speaks fluent English (albeit with plenty of dialect thrown in), he is in, or attached to, the British Army, serving the British Empire, fighting Britain's war against the Japanese. He even sings 'Land of Hope and Glory' during the closing credits of every episode (and is told to Shut Up in no uncertain terms by Windsor Davies' Welsh sergeant). Today, you'd have to ask the question; how much more British could he possibly be? He'd pass the Tebbit Test, and probably even most of the hoops that the Home Office makes prospective Britons jump through. And yet, when he says "We British" - and this is quite uncomfortable to recall today in 2014 - the 1970s studio audience laughs at his pretension to be something that he is, as far as they are concerned, 'evidently' not.

Empires rise and fall, and how and why they do is to me an interesting question. Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers took an economic perspective, arguing that Empires rise to the point where the cost of defending and policing them outweighs the benefits, and he looked at Spain, Britain and the United States in those contexts, but what he didn't really examine was their social and political make-up. The most successful western empire that we know of, and the one that all western empires (even the Muslim ones) have ended up harking back to, is the Roman Empire, but for all of its classical columns and boys doing their Latin prep at Eton, it's belief that like the Romans they were spreading "civilisation", the British Empire was of a fundamentally different character to the Roman Empire, because the Romans were altogether more inclusive in a way that the British Empire never was. The Roman Empire progressively gave its citizens the same rights wherever they were, and allowed free movement throughout its borders. It tolerated and incorporated local religions and co-opted local elites. Yes, it could be ruthless with dissent, but provided you accepted a minimum standard of 'Romanness', it didn't matter whether you were Italian, Syrian, or even British (ironically, a by-word for barbarism in Rome). The British Empire did some of those things as well, but it never accepted Indians, Africans or even its American or Australian colonists as being on a par with the citizens of the motherland. There was no British equivalent of Augustus inviting the Gauls to send senators to Rome - no members of parliament for Calcutta West or Hong Kong - remember this was basically the straw that led to American Independence, which should have been the wake-up call for Britain. And as for an African leader, like Septimus Severus - the idea of a Nigerian prime minister would have been unthinkable for a 19th or even 20th century Briton.

So today, when Ranjit Ram says "We British", it's that mocking laughter that breaks my heart. Never mind any of the geopolitical arguments; that laughter is the reason why the British Empire is rightly confined to the history books, and the series is best confined there too.

This matter is rightfully not subject to imperialist meddling

In the late 1980s, I used to play a great little game on the Atari ST called 'Balance of Power'. It was as good a simulation as 128k of processing power allowed of a world of geopolitical manoeuvreing. You played as either the President of the United States or Premier of the Soviet Union, and got to intervene in a variety of foreign states, pushing your own agenda, sending financial aid, military aid, 'military advisors' or even just outright invading. All of this was fine unless the other side took exception to what you were doing, in which case a Crisis would result. This basically amounted to a poker game where both sides would escalate until either one side backed down (and lost Prestige - the game's victory points) or triggered a nuclear war (in which case both sides lost). For a largely text-based game with rudimentary graphics it could be very tense! The computer player had a degree of AI, but there was also a random factor, and you could never be quite sure which way they would react. One of the things I enjoyed was the diplomatic rebuffs that your computer opponent would give you. If you were up against the US, your actions as the USSR would be greeted with Pentagonese like "the United States considers this a key interest", but if you were the USA, up against the USSR your actions would generate some wonderful Cold War Soviet rhetoric like the title of this post; "this matter is rightfully not subject to imperialist meddling."

I was reminded of the game recently by the Syrian crisis. It feels like Obama effectively just got told: "this matter is rightfully not subject to imperialist meddling", and is backing down. Syria is still a Russian client state after all, complete with naval base, and for all of the rhetoric about "holding the Security Council to ransom", the Permanent Five get vetoes on the UNSC for this exact reason - so that nuclear-armed powers don't end up in military conflict over what they consider to be key strategic interests. The US has used it countless times to head off any criticism of, or international action over, Israel, including its long-standing flouting of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and really has no room for complaint here. But it also underscores the extent to which things have and haven't changed in the 25 years since the end of the Cold War. The world was once - by and large - a two-player, zero sum game; East vs West. Tito, Nasser, Nehru and Sukharno tried to create a third player - the Non-Aligned Movement - but they were only defined by being "none of the above", and had no real collective interest beyond making sure that nuclear armageddon didn't happen, nor did they have any ability to project power or enforce it. But things are changing.

The Balance of Power game unfortunately didn't really survive the end of the Cold War, but it did have a second edition, published in 1990 just on the cusp of the ending of the "old world order", which had a 'multipolar' mode. This simulated a world where not just the USA and USSR were taking action, but also a variety of regional and global players, from Britain, France, India and China to Israel, Iran, Cuba and South Africa. It made the game massively more complicated and enjoyable, but also much more frustrating, as supposed 'allies' could often mess things up for you or drag you into conflicts you didn't want to get involved in. But in fact the ending of the Cold War didn't turn the world into multipolar mode - it just removed one of the two main players. For two decades the world has been defined by a single superpower, and whether you were, in Dubya's memorable phrase "with us or against us". But now it feels like we're finally moving back into 'multipolar' mode. China's economic might is approaching that of the US, it is a major player in Africa, and its military capability is coming on by leaps and bounds. Russia went through a bad patch after the collapse of the USSR but has now re-emerged as an energy superpower in a world where oil prices are $100 per barrel. The EU still can't get its act together, but Britain and France have proved  - in our case over Syria, in France's over Iraq - that they are not just cheerleaders for the US. India and Brazil are up and coming, and a variety of regional players like Turkey, Israel and Iran are playing a chess game across the Middle East. I think the US has been stuck in 'single player mode' diplomatically for too long, and needs to start thinking about how it achieves its ends in a world that has grown more fragmented and complicated.

History be Damned

So I'm finally watching the last of Spartacus, this time the third series, 'War of the Damned'.

It's... okay. But the series has had a downward trajectory, and this isn't the best series of the three. Without the scheming Roman matrons and the rival Praetors, we're left with new entrants Crassus (a rather nobler portrayal than my own idea of him, it must be said), his son Publius - a chip off the old block - Julius Caesar, and a few others. The Cilician pirates are there, and pleasantly sleazy, and Crassus' attempt to play the sternest of Roman paterfamilias' is nicely played. The famous 'decimation' of a force that ran from Spartacus' men is very well done. I hadn't actually realised that the punishment was carried out by bludgeoning, but apparently it was, and suitably grisly. The action has been telescoped a bit - several months of campaigning around southern Italy has been shoehorned into the capture and defence of one provincial port (played here by Dubrovnik) - but that's okay. The whole campaign is confusing and Spartacus' motives hard to discern. Setting him up against Crassus as the main villain, and using Pompey's arrival with his army from Spain as a time limit for action is both pretty accurate and suitably dramatic. A great plus point is that, unlike the Kubrick film, the series doesn't glamorise the slaves or attempt to portray them as ideologically motivated freedom fighters or revolutionaries; they are convincingly chaotic, desperate and unpleasant; out for revenge and plunder and with no credible long term game plan, riven by ethnic and personal rivalries and jealousies. Crixus is nicely edged into being a rival centre of power - in reality he and Spartacus appear to have parted company and Crixus led a contingent of the slaves on a divergent path for over a year until he was cornered and defeated.

I think my biggest problem is with the version of Julius Caesar on offer. The idea that he was around in Rome in 72BC isn't implausible. The idea that he began his association with Crassus then, and that Crassus bankrolled his candidature for tribune is likewise very credible - Caesar was Crassus' protege and Caesar used Crassus' son as an officer on his later campaign in Gaul. His energy, womanising and military genius is well caught. But the idea that he would act as some kind of secret agent behind the lines, acting as agent provocateur, and above all, do it while wearing a beard? No. Just, no. Caesar was infamously fastidious about body hair, and had all of his plucked out by a slave with tweezers, and surely wouldn't risk being in the presence of Cilician pirates again only a year or so after having just had a bunch of them hunted down and killed for kidnapping him. It just feels too big a betrayal of what we know about the man.

All that aside, and in spite of the CGI blood, T&A, and armies full of Kiwis and Aussies, it is still well done. It revels in the '300' school of ancient history, but is far more historical than that travesty was. The use of language is quite interesting; the definite article is dropped, and Latin derived words used in preference for Anglo-Saxon ones; 'gratitude' for 'thanks', 'apologies' for 'sorry'. It makes it nicely strange and outre - as with Deadwood, just alien enough to catch the ear, but not enough to be distracting. I'm glad it was done, but disappointed that they didn't make more of the genuine history, which was dramatic enough!

Into the labyrinth

I have started reading Labyrinths, a collection of Jorge Luis Borges stories and essays. Previously I'd only read a couple of his stories, as they tangentially crossed paths with my own interests; The Garden of Forking Paths, as it deals with multiple parallel realities, and The Zahir, about a mystical talisman that causes obsession, which someone had mentioned in connection with Arthur Machen (who was apparently a big influence on Borges). I also know that William Gibson, one of my favourite authors, is a big fan, and I've talked to other people who've recommended Borges, but in my mind I'd somehow lumped him with other South American writers like Isabel Allende and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who I had found quite annoying, and never got around to tackling him in earnest.

However, something happened on Sunday that was almost in itself Borgesian. I was on a fairly empty 185 bus, being mildly annoyed by the guy a few seats ahead who was playing Buena Vista Social Club-esque Cuban music too loudly. A girl was sitting opposite and obviously also annoyed. As she got up to get off the bus, she tried talking to the guy, but he was either asleep or feigning being asleep, so she eventually gave up and headed down the stairs to get off. It was only then that I looked back at where she had been sitting and saw she had left a well-thumbed and rather dog-eared paperback behind. By then it was too late to try and return it to her - the bus was already off and moving, and something about the placement almost looked deliberate, as though she had finished it and put it down, leaving it for the next person, as some people do, and since there were only about three other people on the top deck, I reached across and picked up the book. If the young woman from the bus ever reads this - do please feel free to contact me and I will gladly return it. It was of course Labyrinths. Something about the Latin music, the serendipitous nature of the find, and of the work itself, wormed its way into me, and this morning I started reading it. There's definitely an opening of a Borgesian story in there already.

The first thing that struck me is how much he appears to be writing Weird Fiction, which is a bit of a personal obsession of mine - that early 20th century genre of the strange and fantastic that had come from Lord Dunsany and some odd 'decadent' novelists of the 1890s like Robert 'The King in Yellow' Chambers. In particular, in Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, he is using the Lovecraft trick of strange books and name-dropping real world mystics and outre authors to build a parallel world that moves behind the scenes of our own (it's almost a precursor of the DaVinci Code, only almost infinitely better written). Borges apparently called Lovecraft "an unconscious parodist of Poe", and Lovecraft did draw a lot on Poe as well as the Weird Fiction pioneers in constructing his tales. Anyway, it's a good start. More on this as I get deeper into the Labyrinth, but I'm already regretting having taken so long to discover Borges.