A reply!

On By Laura MorganIn Newspapers and magazines1 Comment

I’m pretty sure this is a form letter, but I’m nonetheless cautiously impressed to have received a reply from the Daily Mail today:

Thank you for your correspondence re the Jan Moir article. We welcome feedback-whether positive or negative- about the paper and our writers.
Our Columnist’s views have prompted a widespread response and debate. You may also be interested in the column by Janet Street-Porter in today’s edition.

Thank you for taking the trouble to send us your own  point of view.

Yours sincerely,
Managing Editor’s Office

I read the Janet Street Porter article and they were right, it was interesting. I’d still like to see a genuine apology from Jan Moir, but in the continuing absence of that it’s heartening to see that the paper is willing to publish a different view, and that the PCC is investigating last week’s piece. The Daily Mail will never become my newspaper of choice, and I’ve no doubt that they’ll continue to publish hateful opinions from people I disagree with, but it’s good to know that a  spontaneous response from so many people last week has actually resulted in action being taken. A small victory is still a victory.

“a repulsive nobody writing in a paper no one of any decency would be seen dead with”

On By Laura MorganIn Newspapers and magazines2 Comments

That was Stephen Fry’s description on Twitter of Jan Moir, who has written this extraordinarily hateful piece in the Daily Mail today. I’ve just sent the Mail the following complaint. I’m not expecting a reply, but it’s made me feel better:

Shame on you for publishing today’s poisonous, under-informed, illiterate article on Stephen Gately by Jan Moir.

The circumstances of Gately’s death are still unclear. That being the case, speculation on Fleet Street may well be rife but there’s no excuse for making such unsubstantiated, homophobic and uneducated views public in a way that can only distress further the family and friends of the dead man.

There are many cases every year of sudden death in apparently healthy young people. The causes are myriad and it’s always devastating for those left behind. The only official indication we have of what caused Gately’s death suggests natural causes. But frankly, even if there were drink, drugs or sex involved, how on earth does Moir jump from that to her breathtaking claim that his sexuality or, unbelievably, his civil partnership, is to blame? It’s ungrounded, insulting and stupid.

And why on earth does she feel the need to be rude about Gately as a singer? What wrong has he done her to deserve this rancid poison, other than being a gay man? He had an unremarkable but perfectly good singing voice, so this:

A founder member of Ireland’s first boy band, he was the group’s co-lead singer, even though he could barely carry a tune in a Louis Vuitton trunk

is just spiteful and silly. And this:

He was the Posh Spice of Boyzone, a popular but largely decorous addition

demonstrates that Moir has no idea what the word “decorous” means. If you’re going to publish offensive drivel like this, then at least proofread it beforehand.

I was already reading in open-mouthed astonishment when I got to this gem:

After a night of clubbing, Cowles and Gately took a young Bulgarian man back to their apartment. It is not disrespectful to assume that a game of canasta with 25-year-old Georgi Dochev was not what was on the cards.

Actually it is extraordinarily disrespectful. Moir is making assumptions based on her own unreconstructed, stereotyped view of gay men. How dare she? And how dare you publish this rubbish?

I have no idea what goes on in what passes for Moir’s mind, but there’s no place for her seedy little fantasies in a piece published by a national newspaper.

Edit: if you feel the same way, complain to the PCC. The article breaches points 5 and 12 of the code of practice.
There’s also a good blog post on it here.

Quite Inaccurate

On By Laura MorganIn Communication1 Comment

I’m sure that whoever had the idea of giving QI a Twitter feed of its own thought it would be a delightful wheeze, and in principle I suppose it is. Unusual facts are always fun, after all.

The problem, though, is that the Twitter stream is clearly less well-researched than the TV programme, and written by people with poorer general knowledge than Stephen Fry (which, to be fair, is everyone), and as a result it’s quite often just plain wrong. They had to publish a retraction this week after posting the interesting but inaccurate claim that kangaroos are the only animals besides humans who move on two legs, when various of their followers pointed out that birds, among others, are equally bipedal.

You’d think, after that embarrassment, that they’d be paying a bit more attention. But today’s “QI fact of the day” on the BBC homepage, whilst quite possibly true, is frankly baffling:

Container ships carrying pistachio nuts, Brazil nuts, peanuts, almonds, hazelnuts, walnuts, copra, and sunflower seeds are floating time bombs liable to explode without warning.

Wouldn’t you think that required some sort of explanation? Perhaps a link to a page with a bit more context, so those of us who had no idea what it means could have our curiosity satisfied? My sister works on a ship: should she be busily enquiring whether any of the neighbouring crafts at the various ports she comes to a halt in are likely to “explode without warning” while she’s asleep?

Of course, it barely matters. There’s all sorts of nonsense on the internet: that’s kind of what it’s for. But the whole QI brand is specifically about precise little fact-checking, and poking fun at people when they get it wrong. The TV show is sometimes a smug-fest, but it gets away with it because it makes a point of getting the details right. It’s unforgivable to be smug and wrong.

Edit: since I posted this a couple of hours ago, several people have ended up here after searching for “nuts explode container ships” and similar terms. I’d hazard a guess that those are people who, like me, want to know more. Sorry if you’re one of them; I’m no wiser than you are.

Teen angst

On By Laura MorganIn Navel gazing1 Comment

My dad has found two of my diaries, from 1990 and 1991. Re-reading them was both disturbing – because I seem to have been hugely hung up on weight and dieting, whereas if you asked me now I’d have told you I didn’t give that kind of thing a second thought at thirteen – and fun, because – well, because it’s fun reading the diary of a teenage girl. Here’s a snippet:

Sunday 4 Feb, 1990

Another ultra mega cool day in Milton Keys [sic]. It is FAB here!!! I wanna stay and not go back to bloody fucking school.

Charmingly, I end each entry with three kisses. Perhaps I will start doing that here.

There are also a lot of entries which look like this (names changed to protect the innocent):

Friday 2 Feb, 1990

Now Debbie’s not talking to me because she thinks I’m back with Sarah again. What a hippo! (hypocrite). She’s always complaining cos Sarah says she can’t go round with Claire and now she says I can’t go round with Sarah if I want to be friends with her (not that I want to go round with Sarah anyway!)

How tiring it must have  been, being thirteen.

xxx

Edit: I should point out that the “Sarah” of the extract above is still one of my closest friends. In the diaries, we fall out FOR GOOD approximately once a week. I’m Facebook friends with “Debbie” but we never really had that much in common, and “Claire” turned out to be a total bitch after all. True story!

Hur hur

On By Laura MorganIn Theatre3 Comments

I saw the posters for Ben Hur Live a few months ago and became unreasonably excited at the thought of a live chariot race. I didn’t realise I’d voiced this excitement but I must have done, because on my birthday I was presented with a pair of tickets, and two weeks ago we took ourselves off to what we now have to call the O2 for what promised to be, at the very least, a spectacle.

Well, it was super. For reasons which remain unclear to me it’s performed entirely in Latin and Aramaic, with – of course! – a besuited Stewart Copeland of The Police wandering among the loincloth-clad cast narrating the action for us. This alone is enough to make it a winner in my book, frankly. Add a couple of brilliantly executed set pieces (a pitched battle at sea and a – SPOILER – crucifixion) and there’s enough here to make it worth the price of entry. The music (also by Stewart Copeland, less surprisingly), the introduction (by director Franz Abraham who, brilliantly, sounds exactly like Werner Herzog) and the clever tricks they play with a smallish amount of very versatile scenery, are other points in its favour.

Small points against are some scenes which drag slightly, a mildly racist depiction of an Arab horse breeder and the lingering suspicion that the animals involved in the production may not be enjoying it quite as much as the audience does. I can’t decide whether getting horses to perform a chariot race at the O2 is better, worse or just different from getting them to race at Ascot. But there’s a long tradition of show animals, and I’m not going to start pontificating in an uninformed way about them.

This was a five-day premiere prior to a European tour, during which the team behind the show hope to make back the £19m (£19m!) it cost to put on. It comes back to London in January, and whilst I won’t be rushing out for a ticket to see it again, I think it’s well worth seeing once. Sometimes, things are worth seeing just because they’re not like anything else.

The Da Vinci Problem

On By Laura MorganIn Books1 Comment

I’ve just – this minute – finished reading “The Shadow of the Wind” by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, translated by Lucia Graves, who as the daughter of the poet Robert might have been expected to know better. The cover proudly proclaims it to be a number one bestseller and, even more thrillingly, “shortlisted for Richard and Judy’s Book Club”. The first two pages are full of enthusiastic reviews from the usual suspects (The Observer, The Scotsman, The Daily Mail) as well as from some less obvious sources (Trinny Woodall, Susannah Constantine, Elle Magazine).

Now, I’m all for thrillers, generally. There’s nothing I enjoy more than a big, violent, plotty, twisty, romp, and I get a bit cross when people try to argue that a book whose main purpose is to be exciting is somehow by definition an inferior piece of writing. I’m with whoever it was who said that bookshops should just have a “fiction” section in which the best storywriting gets showcased, rather than separate “literary fiction” (what?) and “genre” categories.

But it does annoy me when a book which comes in for huge amounts of praise is full of obvious, avoidable, stupid mistakes. And unfortunately this is one of those books. It is gripping, and I raced through it and enjoyed it very much, but my pleasure was tempered by constant glaring reminders that somebody, somewhere, hadn’t bothered to take five minutes to get things right.

Some of the mistakes are the writer’s, though a good editor should have corrected them. They range from actual, honest mistakes (characters go out for a walk after breakfast and return half an hour later at dusk) to wildly improbable plot points designed to haul the story awkwardly towards a designated point.

Some of the mistakes are the translator’s and I really think she’s done a poor job. The most frequent and irritating example is the dangling construction which occurs when the translation requires a change in word order. In Spanish it’s fine to say “la casa di mi tío, un hombre gordo”, but it’s not OK to translate that as “my uncle’s house, a fat man”. That’s not a real example (I couldn’t be bothered to look one up), but that’s precisely the syntax and it happens over and over again. It’s kind of hideous.

And some mistakes might be his, or might be hers. One character leaves his house “at dawn”, crosses the city, takes a tram up the mountain and arrives at a mansion, at which point “dawn is just breaking”. No way of knowing, without tracking down the original, whether the author really used the same word twice, or whether it’s a lazy and innacurate piece of translation.

There’s also 100 pages of exposition presented in the form of a posthumously-written letter explaining the mystery at the centre of the book, which seemed to me a cheap way of getting to a solution, and a twist in the last couple of chapters which is so cynical and manipulative that I almost stopped reading.

But I didn’t, of course, because it’s also exciting and I needed to know the ending, which is why the book reminded me of The Da Vinci Code, which is slightly better written than this, if you’re counting mistakes and nonsensical plot points against it, but which easily takes the gong by being called “The Da Vinci Code”, as though that makes any kind of sense at all. As you, being educated and naturally smart, know, “Da Vinci” wasn’t Leonardo’s surname; it was where he was from. Calling a book “The Da Vinci Code” is as meaningless and as bizarre as calling the New Testament “The Of Nazareth Story”. All the time I was reading the book, and enjoying it, because it’s a big, violent, plotty, twisty, romp, and because I am a sucker for riddles and puzzles and mysteries (at one point a character says that over 100 anagrams can be made from a particular word or phrase – I forget what it is – and naturally I had to put the book down and work out what they all were before I could keep reading), I had a simultaneous irritation that nobody had stopped him halfway through and said “woah, Dan, you’ve made a silly mistake here: let’s put it right before ONE HUNDRED MILLION PEOPLE read it!”.

So I can’t recommend the book, really. Which is a shame, because it was a birthday present and I enjoyed it and it’s 510 pages long which makes it good for taking on holiday. But now I’ve told you all the annoying things about it, you’re going to find it even more irritating than I did. Sorry.

Facebook

On By Laura MorganIn Communication

I wish we’d had Facebook when I was a teenager. I’ve just been reading a series of conversations between my teenage cousin and (I assume) her schoolfriends, and it sounds so much fun! I suppose they’re the same conversations we used to have at school, or on the phone in the evenings (Mum never understood how I could spend the day in lessons with S and then speak to her for an hour on the phone that night), but it’s so much easier and cheaper and more fun now. And anyone who wants to can join in! Even boys!