Weekend update
Jun. 28th, 2005 12:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vaznettiSaturday was miserable: cold and gray. I spent most of it reading two Flashman books -- the most recent (Flashman on the March), and Flashman and the Tiger, which is actually two short stories and a novella. All very good, and Harry Flashman remains his cowardly, sex-obsessed self throughout. (It is, in fact, entirely the fault of George MacDonald Fraser that for quite a while I believed that "subaltern studies" was a field devoted to, or at least taking its name from, junior officers on British imperial service. I was deeply disappointed to learn that it's just a coined word for "other and below," although you'd think that the people coining it would have realized that it already had a meaning.)
The last story in the collection has as a major character Tiger Jack Moran, who got his start in a Sherlock Holmes book (the footnote on him compares Flashman's account of the man with Watson's), but also makes a cameo appearence in Kim Newman's Anno Dracula as one of Moriarty's associates. That did get us talking about the question of derivative fiction, and BH raised the idea that it's one thing to hold a copyright on a text, and another to hold a copyright on a fictional character. It's an interesting thought, although he's no more a copyright lawyer than I am. (ETA: I see that the fanfic discussion continues, but I doubt I'll be tracking down all the posts I've missed.)
[A brief aside: George MacDonald Fraser is the author of a series of novels following the career of Harry Flashman, the villain from Tom Brown's School Days, and his career after being expelled from Rugby. He keeps the outline of the character -- cowardly, immoral, self-centered etc. -- and sends him on a variety of expeditions from which he almost always emerges covered in glory, despite having spent the entire time trying to save his skin and get laid (both, usually, with great success). His biographical note reads like a catalogue of imperial adventures and misadventures, from Afghanistan in 1841 to the Boxer rebellion, and he ends up a Brigadier-General. The books purport to be the recently-discovered volumes of memoirs written by Flashman in the later years of his life, so one gets the Flashman-eye view of all the events -- and he has no illusions about his own nature, which makes him an engaging narrator. Anyway, although they appear fluff, they aren't quite -- Flashman on the March, for instance, has a lot to say about imperialism -- although I suppose they're not for tender stomachs either, exactly. If all you can think about the British Empire is that it was an Empire, and therefore A Bad Thing, you probably won't get much enjoyment out of them, although you may feel the warm glow of self-righteousness at the unreconstructed Victorian prejudice displayed therein.]
* * *
We also watched a few episodes from Homicide Season 5. It always amazes me that people argue that the Mahoney shoot was clean. Nothing of the sort -- Mahoney had his gun down, and was in the act of surrendering. That's not to say that Luther Mahoney didn't deserve to die, but call it what it was: an execution. Not self-defense, and not in Lewis' defense, and not, in any technical sense of the term, "a clean shooting."
Whether Luther Mahoney would ever have been convicted of murder, even though they had him on tape shooting one of his lieutenants and a kid playing nearby in the park, is another matter, but still not grounds for shooting him.
* * *
I was in the process of desctibing our plans to solve the chaplain-hiring problem by instituting a public college religion modeled on that in ancient Rome (how one of the fellows, who happens to work on the behavior of birds, could head up the college of augurs, or my plans for the boat club processions and the honors to be paid to the numen of the Master of the College) when the fancy new computer we'd ordered turned up, 12 hours earlier than scheduled. Now I need to go set it up! Huzzah!
(ETA: I wrote this Monday morning, but thought I might as well let it stand as is.)
The last story in the collection has as a major character Tiger Jack Moran, who got his start in a Sherlock Holmes book (the footnote on him compares Flashman's account of the man with Watson's), but also makes a cameo appearence in Kim Newman's Anno Dracula as one of Moriarty's associates. That did get us talking about the question of derivative fiction, and BH raised the idea that it's one thing to hold a copyright on a text, and another to hold a copyright on a fictional character. It's an interesting thought, although he's no more a copyright lawyer than I am. (ETA: I see that the fanfic discussion continues, but I doubt I'll be tracking down all the posts I've missed.)
[A brief aside: George MacDonald Fraser is the author of a series of novels following the career of Harry Flashman, the villain from Tom Brown's School Days, and his career after being expelled from Rugby. He keeps the outline of the character -- cowardly, immoral, self-centered etc. -- and sends him on a variety of expeditions from which he almost always emerges covered in glory, despite having spent the entire time trying to save his skin and get laid (both, usually, with great success). His biographical note reads like a catalogue of imperial adventures and misadventures, from Afghanistan in 1841 to the Boxer rebellion, and he ends up a Brigadier-General. The books purport to be the recently-discovered volumes of memoirs written by Flashman in the later years of his life, so one gets the Flashman-eye view of all the events -- and he has no illusions about his own nature, which makes him an engaging narrator. Anyway, although they appear fluff, they aren't quite -- Flashman on the March, for instance, has a lot to say about imperialism -- although I suppose they're not for tender stomachs either, exactly. If all you can think about the British Empire is that it was an Empire, and therefore A Bad Thing, you probably won't get much enjoyment out of them, although you may feel the warm glow of self-righteousness at the unreconstructed Victorian prejudice displayed therein.]
* * *
We also watched a few episodes from Homicide Season 5. It always amazes me that people argue that the Mahoney shoot was clean. Nothing of the sort -- Mahoney had his gun down, and was in the act of surrendering. That's not to say that Luther Mahoney didn't deserve to die, but call it what it was: an execution. Not self-defense, and not in Lewis' defense, and not, in any technical sense of the term, "a clean shooting."
Whether Luther Mahoney would ever have been convicted of murder, even though they had him on tape shooting one of his lieutenants and a kid playing nearby in the park, is another matter, but still not grounds for shooting him.
* * *
I was in the process of desctibing our plans to solve the chaplain-hiring problem by instituting a public college religion modeled on that in ancient Rome (how one of the fellows, who happens to work on the behavior of birds, could head up the college of augurs, or my plans for the boat club processions and the honors to be paid to the numen of the Master of the College) when the fancy new computer we'd ordered turned up, 12 hours earlier than scheduled. Now I need to go set it up! Huzzah!
(ETA: I wrote this Monday morning, but thought I might as well let it stand as is.)
