Category Archives: pensées

Brits in spa-a-a-ce …

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After due consideration following my earlier post on the topic, I’ve decided I’m not going to sue Steven Moffat.

I’m going to let George Lucas do that instead, for pinching not one but two of the iconic Star Wars scenes and combining them. His lawyers are much more high powered and it will be far more entertaining.

But while it lasts, this guy is good. “The Beast Below” could have been so unbearably silly: in fact it was just enjoyably silly, and moving at the same time. The scene where the Doctor talks about not forgetting, in a gentle, kind, wise voice that politely chides Amy while also making it clear she has done a very silly thing – that could have come from any Patrick Troughton episode. Any other Doctor bar 2 and 11 would have just lectured, over-acted, postulated or otherwise just not done it so well.

Yep, this guy is good. And he’ll have to be even better to stop me yawning when guess-who glides back onto our screens next week … Which he probably will.

Every cross is a burning cross?

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The Bible is quite big on the Cross, and why not? It’s kind of the point of the whole thing, really. I have a palm cross by my desk at work – not for the supernatural aura of protection that it exudes, but for conversation, and to remind me that there are higher things than the latest quarterly report, and (oh, all right) for decoration. And when I think of everything it’s meant to mean, I actually feel quite proud of it.

I hope I would have the humility to remove it if anyone found it offensive, though. From this I discount my former Jehovah’s Witness colleague, because lovely guy that he was, I don’t care if I wind up the JWs in general. At least, not in any areas of specious and/or totally made-up theology. But in other areas …

All this sparked by a recent blog post from Hal Duncan, a writer with whose work I am not familiar. An Open Letter to the Usual Suspects is a little more polemic than I would usually go for, and probably contains no words that your children don’t already know (but let’s not pass judgement), but it makes a couple of good points that I have not thought of before.

  1. The recent hoohah over the nurse forbidden to wear a cross with her nurse’s uniform tends to miss the point that dangly jewellery is a good vector for germs and diseases, and her freedom to witness to her faith is not the same as her freedom to give her patients MRSA. I don’t know if this has been taken into account or not, but feel it’s worth mentioning.
  2. (The big one.) The cross really is offensive to some people with good reason – specifically, as cited by Mr Duncan, gay or transgendered persons who have been on the receiving end of so-called Christian hate. I also think of Palestinians who lost loved ones in the Sabra and Shatila massacres, children abused by priests … I suspect the list could go on. Wearing a cross really is not going to get you any friends here. Hal puts it thusly: “every cross is a burning cross.”

Yes, yes, the burgeoning black pentecostal church, made of people whose forebears were persecuted by the Klan, seem to have got over it. Not the point. The getting over it was up to them, not imposed on them by others. I’m not taking my palm cross down on the off-chance that someone who once heard that Christians aren’t meant to approve of Teh Gay and fancies people of the same gender might get hurt. Hopefully exposure to me will by contrast bring a bit of love and light into their life, and if that positive exposure is amplified by contrast with their initially negative expectations then so much the better. But Hal’s post gives me cause to think twice before keeping it up, and to tune the antennae more sensitively should someone pass by who really has been hurt in the past.

St Paul can bang on a little about the virtues of the cross, and he was no great fan of homosexuality, and if you asked him about transgendered people you would have just got a blank look. But he also gives the exemplary advice of 1 Corinthians 10:23-33: our freedom to do stuff with a clear conscience does not come at the expense of other people’s hurt. Other people are more important.

I heard Nurse Chaplin on the radio this week saying that she put her cross on when she got confirmed and doesn’t want to take it off again. She is proud to witness for her faith. Well, fair enough. But putting your cross away, if it genuinely hurts people, is a much more powerful witness than displaying it come what may.

God loves a cheerful giver

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This is one of those posts where lots of separate strands of thought are whirling around and I need to write them down to see what I actually think. So, in no particular order and not in a way that maximises coherence:

A simple Google search to seek out the meanings of what I’m sure are very clever German jokes in Unseen Academicals led me to a Russian site with the full text of the book on it, copyright page and all. It’s an Adobe Digital Edition, September 2009, ISBN 978-0-06-194203-7, but I will bet at least a fiver that it’s not supposed to be on that particular site.

Hugh Cornwell, ex-frontman of the Stranglers, advocates giving away creative content for free online, as it will only stimulate sales. And he has some quite convincing statistics of follow-through sales to back it up. It’s scary to think that the Stranglers could now be the kind of thing listened to by the parents of a generation old enough to vote – Hugh Cornwell and Val Doonican are in the same box – but his logic is sound: there’s a whole generation now that could enjoy his music but probably hasn’t heard of him, so how best to get in touch?

There is surely – isn’t there? – a difference between me giving you something for free, and you taking something of mine because you like the look of it and for which you may or may not subsequently choose to pay. With anything other than creative online content, the latter behaviour would be theft, pure and simple. The only reason it isn’t automatically theft here and now is … well, what? Perception? Possibly.

The matter has been bouncing around the world of publishing for some time now, always given a little extra impetus by the like of Cory Doctorow, who is probably the leading advocate of “give it away for free and somehow make money from it too”. It certainly works in his case: he seems to make an adequate living from doing just that. Or rather, perhaps, he makes an adequate living from being Cory Doctorow – a man of immense talent and energy with multiple income streams. Not everyone is gifted with being Cory Doctorow. Or Hugh Cornwell.

I am contributing to this in my own small way, though I don’t think I’m big enough for my experience to generate reliable data one way or the other: my short stories areavailable, for free, online. My logic was that I had got all the money I was going to get from them, so why not? You can, if you want, buy them in a separate volume with value added in the form of authorial endnotes: for that you have to pay, but only enough to cover the cost of printing the thing in the first place. Likewise, His Majesty’s Starship is (currently) available at cost only.

Of course, I don’t need to be paid: I have a reasonably salaried job which I would probably want to hang onto even if the writing income suddenly skyrocketed. However, it would be interesting to see Mr Cornwell’s reaction if young fans, having got hooked on his free downloads, started turning up at his gigs with the expectation of getting in without paying. The money that pays for the venue hire, for the equipment, for the salaries of the stagecrew and other staff … well, that just comes from somewhere, dunnit?

Yup, it comes from you. Likewise, books and movies don’t magically appear out of the ether. They are all the result of the work of many people. All those people need paying.

But always, always, always we hear that people expect stuff to be free … A lot can come of expectation in the face of what established authority would like you to have. Magna Carta. The separation of power in democratic government. Things like that.

At the moment the governments of the UK and the US are tackling the matter: us with the Digital Economy Bill, them with the DMCA. This isn’t the place to debate the rights and wrongs of these acts – see links at the end for that – but in terms of nutcracking they are both towards the sledgehammer end of the spectrum, and they are both far too friendly towards the big industry interests rather than the little guy. Put another way, they think little to nothing of criminalising innocent users as long as their income doesn’t suffer. To the Mandelsons of this world that is a perfectly reasonable point of view. Further down the ladder, however …

Let’s go back to Magna Carta. No country has ever had a revolution out of perversity or because the people felt bored. Revolutions happen because of grievance. Those regimes that adapt to the revolutionary demands, by and large, continue, though with reduced power. Like, us, after the Restoration. Those regimes that don’t adapt, don’t even budge, fail. Like, the French monarchy. To retain overall control, you have to let go of a little of it.

So, I’ve finally decided what I think. It is right that publishers and other rights holders should make a profit from their activities – obviously. It is right that artists also make money for their endeavours – obviously. But, no one actually owes those artists a living, either. Harsh but true. If the creative income isn’t keeping you alive: sorry, get a real job.

I’m not – yet – going to make my currently in-print novels freely available. However I won’t rule it out as a future course of action if that finally, irrevocably seems to be the way the industry is going; and if my publishers decide to do it as some kind of promotional strategy, I won’t stand in their way either. Let’s be the Republic, not the Ancien Regime.

Further reading