By the time of this song’s release, the third single from the This Is Hardcore LP, Pulp’s star was beginning to wane. It has all their signature marks, though.

Pulp: A Little Soul

Sons’ opponents in this year’s League Cup, now called the Premier Sports Cup, will be Aberdeen, Airdrieonians, Queen of the South and East Kilbride.

We have played Aberdeen a few times recently in the Scottish Cup, Airdrie most recently when in SPFL Tier 3 but they are now a level higher, and we will be renewing acquaintance with Queen of the South in next season’s Tier 3. Unless it was in a friendly I can’t remember, Sons have never faced East Kilbride before. They won this season’s Lowland League but lost out to Stranraer in the play-off for SPFL membership. Depending on how the ties turn out this might be a new ground for me to see Sons play at.

The museum is known as Airborne at the Bridge. We’d have liked to go into it but the door was locked. According to the website it is open from 10.00 to 17.00:-

A steel monument to the Resistance lay to the right of the scene pictured above. The inscription reads, “most people remain silent, but a few take action.”

Side view. River Rhine and John Frost Bridge in background:-

“With respect for the past and with an eye to the future, this reminder of the resistance in Arnhem, 1940-1945”:-

Near the Airborne Monument at Arnhem is this marker of the trail of the Alied Armies which liberated western Europe in 1944-5:-

Information on board above:-

Memorial to Jacob-Groenewoud. The area around the Airborne Monument is now known as Jacob-Groenewoud Platsoen (Jacob-Groenewoud Park) after the only Dutch officer involve din the fighting for the Rhine Bridge:-

John Frost Bridge Monument, Arnhem. Airborne Monument in background:-

Information on John Frost Bridge Monument:-

Polygon, 2018, 93 p, plus iv p General Foreword to this reprinting of Spark’s works and xii p Introduction by Dan Gunn. First published in 1971.

The events of this novella all take place over one night in the villa by Lake Leman in Switzerland owned by Baron and Baroness Klopstock.

Well, I say events, but the most significant happens off-stage, in the room where the Baron, the Baroness and their visitor, Victor Passerat, are closeted, with strict instructions not to be disturbed.

The butler, Lister, and all the servants seem to know what that event will be and act as if it is by force majeure, that there is nothing they can do to prevent it. Lister indeed insists that they must follow the script, as if they are acting in a film. In the meantime they are recording (onto a reel-to-reel tape recorder) their stories of the night.

Dan Gunn in his introduction says that the normal fear of the author of such things in including spoilers is vitiated in this case by Spark herself having Lister tell his below stairs audience what will happen. “‘Let us not split hairs’” he says, “‘between the past, present and future tenses.’” Gunn goes on to ruminate on the difference between literature in French and English in this regard. The former has more or less dropped the preterite (the passé simple) in favour of the present perfect tense, whereas in English that can quickly become stilted and unsustainable. It is, he says, merely a heightened example of Spark’s eschewing of plain foreshadowing in favour of outright prolepsis, (see my comments on possible prolepsis in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie) the novel an example of meta-fiction before that term was coined.

Be that as it may, the result here, along with the distancing effect of the present tense narration, is to make the reader simply not care what happens. If there is no jeopardy, or the jeopardy cannot be combatted, why should we carry on reading? I would go so far as to say that adopting such an approach is a dereliction of duty on the part of the author.

This novel encapsulates my reservations about Spark’s writing, which I once described as reading through a layer of glass.  Make that opaque glass.

With the possible exception of the mad man in the attic the characters are fairly unconvincing and their manners of speech indistinguishable. No one in this book behaves in any rational way. It is simply unbelievable.

Spark does, though, does essay the punning observation “Klopstock and barrel.”

I had thought to read all of Spark’s fiction in time. The more I do the less I feel like doing so.

Pedant’s corner:- “routing among the vegetables” (rooting among,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech, scyth (scythe.)

This is by the River Rhine near the John Frost Bridge and consists of an artillery piece plus a photo of the original Rhine Bridge:-

Dedication:-

Commemoration plaques:-

Photo of original Rhine Bridge:-

I saw in the Guardian’s obituary column that Clarence “Frogman” Henry left us in April. So called because of the croak he employed in his first US hit Ain’t Got No Home, he only had three hits in the UK. I don’t remember ever hearing Lonely Street, but You Always Hurt the One You Love and (I Don’t Know Why) But I Do certainly rang a bell

Clarence “Frogman” Henry: (I Don’t Know Why) But I Do

Clarence “Frogman” Henry: 19/3/1937 – 7/4/2024. So it goes.

Hodder & Stoughton, 2023, 309 p. Reviewed for ParSec 9.

In the aftermath of a nuclear war Indra was brought up in the Order, a religious sect fanatically opposed to technology, whose members are marked out by a crescent moon branded on one cheek. Despite (or because of) this indoctrination she was fascinated by computers which led her to befriend Nyx, who calls her God Girl. One night they were caught in a radioactive storm and, because of her brand, refused shelter till it was too late, unless they had radical medical intervention. Her mother refused to countenance anything so ungodly as nanite repair therapy but her father okayed it, at the cost of rejection from the sect. Nyx was fine but Indra’s rare susceptibility to acute onsite nanite rejection meant the treatment did not work. The Glindell Corporation offered her a way out through Neural Transcendence, the process of uploading a human mind to an artificial drive, a MindDrive housed in a titanium shell.

Not long after the process but before Indra’s old body has been reconstituted in a layer of FleshMesh designed to allow her to experience all the normal senses along with the enhanced ones the new body brings, she began to have dreams and flashback memories which her conscious mind could not reconcile. Dreams of being underwater, of infiltrating a building, of entering the Order’s compound.

As readers we are ahead of Indra here. In a story such dreams are rarely just dreams. So it proves. This is perhaps a trope in which author Kate Dylan ought not to have indulged but her writing is vivid and Indra’s personality engaging – though she does have a tendency to act without considering the consequences. It is Indra’s wish to untangle the dreams and also find her true self in her new existence which propel the plot. Given she literally embodies hi-tech it is a bit of a stretch that she apparently cannot shrug off the thoughts and sayings of the Order’s Leader Duval, which continue to impinge on her along with memories of her mother and father. It is her consciousness that something is wrong, though, the blanks in her post-upload memories, the flashbacks to events she feels viscerally but cannot account for, the feeling she is being used, which lead to her attempt to break free from Glindell’s clutches, taking up with Nyx and an organisation styling itself the The Analogue Army which opposes corporations such as Glindell. In this she is accompanied by Tian, the Glindell researcher who had been assigned to her, but who has now come under her spell.

The backstreet removal of both Indra’s and Tain’s physically implanted NDAs, (the requirement for its employees to accept such devices is one of the indications that Glindell is not a benign outfit, another is that Indra’s MindDrive is legally questionable) is an indicator of the level of technology available in this post-apocalypse world. Indra of course can switch her senses off. Tian can’t, but the nanites in her blood can repair her tissue damage quickly.

There are plenty of plot twists and turns and not a little high-paced adventure still to come in Mindbreaker, yet despite Indra’s artificial body Dylan never lets us lose sight of Indra’s human origins. The novel could even be seen as an examination of whether uploading such as Indra has undergone would mean ceasing to be human.

The following did not appear in the published review.

Pedant’s corner:- Written in USian, so snuck for sneaked, lay for lie, etc, etc. Otherwise; “wackjobs” (usually spelled whackjobs,) “personal affects” (effects,) “from the face of the earth” (Earth,) “proof that the company’s been flaunting the laws of nature” (flouting the laws,) claxon (several times; klaxon,) “complimenting the shine of his many piercings” (complementing,) “but will only combust when exposed to extremely high heats” (extremely high heat.) “What a difference a few credits make” (what a difference “X” makes, where X = ‘a few credits’,) “that would have easily bankrupt my Order” (bankrupted.) “Her indignance rises to match mine” (indignation,) “my Orders’ deaths” (Order’s,) duffel (spelled duffle at one point,) “once and for good” (conflates two different phrases, ‘once and for all’ and ‘for good’,) “dispatched of them” (conflates two different phrases, ‘despatched them’ and ‘disposed of them’,) “a new crop of my missing memories rear up” (a new crop …. rears up,) “there are whole years’ worth of nursery rhymes, and bedtime stories, and sang mnemonics” (sung mnemonics.)

John Frostbrug in Dutch, this is the famous bridge too far, except it’s a replacement for the original Rhine Bridge fought over in the Second World War during Operation Market Garden. It’s somewhere in The Netherlands I’ve always wanted to visit.

I must say the River Rhine looks not very wide here – not as wide as the Clyde at Dumbarton certainly. Still an obstacle to an army though:-

Eastern guard post. Slight Deco styling.  I assume this is original:-

Western guard post. Note groove up the middle of steps, for wheeling bicycles up and down.:-

Reverse view of bridge:-

Roadway:-

Commemorative plaque with inscription to John Frost by roadway on north side of bridge:-

From You Tube via Astronomy Picture of the Day for 8/5/24.

Not real of course, just an animation, but it shows the weird effects of the black hole’s gravity on the light emanating from the disc.