The Return of the King

It's not a bad time to be a sixteenth century geek, what with exhibitions at the British Library, Philippa Gregory's constant onslaught of frolickful historical fiction and even Booker Prize-winning literacha set during the Tudors' rule. Of course, what I look forward to most at this time of the year is the start of the new season of The Tudors, which is definitely one of the most amusing shows on TV, although not usually intentionally. With its attractive cast, ludicrous accents and only cursory attention to actual historical events, if I weren't a geek for all things Tudor, I would probably hate it but somehow, the series is compulsive and has made it through to a fourth season (and fifth wife).

Maybe things will be different this year. I mean, they could read the Wikipedia entry for the Tudors (no, not this one that comes up when you search Wikipedia for the Tudors; this one would be a good start, although as I suspect the dynasty will end up dying out with Henry VIII, perhaps his Wikipedia entry would be more useful) and consider some of the events that actually happened in the 1540s. I suspect they may just read the IMDb forums for The Other Boleyn Girl when carrying out research.

I'm not overly confident though. After all, the sixteenth century wasn't really dramatic enough for a weekly TV series for a modern audience, so if they stuck to what really happened, it would be way boring. I mean, all of those affairs and beheadings...dull... (to be fair, those bits were usually pretty accurate apart from when characters were invented, disappeared or merged). On the Showtime website, they are running a helpful set of FAQs. "So, like, who is Henry 8?" is the first question. I'm sorry but that just looks wrong. I realise that not everyone is as proficient with Roman numerals as I am, but if "VIII" is really out, can't they at least write, "Henry the Eighth?" (yes, eighth is a tough word to spell, I know). The answer to the question is thus:

Unexpectedly propelled to the throne of England at an early age, the once young prince soon laid the foundations for one of the most spectacular reigns in English history. Now in his late forties, with an ailing body and increasing sense of paranoia, the king is more obsessed than ever with his quest for an heir. It's all been leading up to this, as the scandalous reign of King Henry comes to an epic finale, and he will stop at nothing to secure his place in history.

Doesn't Jonathan Rhys-Meyers immediately conjure up images of a man in his late forties with an ailing body? So far in the series, he is supposed to have gone from age 20-ish to 50-ish but naturally, appears only to have aged about three years; he must be using Crème de la Mer. Oddly, he doesn't yet seemed to have mastered an English accent, either; you'd expect more from the King of England (and assorted bits of France). At least they didn't use David Starkey's ubiquitous gobbet, "Henry went from spare...to heir," I suppose.

Henry's last two queens, Catherine Howard and Catherine Parr, are traditionally portrayed as polar opposites. Catherine Howard (Catherine II?) is the slutty, young thing that Henry hopes will revitalise his "quest for an heir" (if that's the euphemism he wants to use) but who can't keep her legs together or her indiscretions to herself. Catherine III, meanwhile, is older than her predecessor and already twice widowed (one of the main problems with Catherine II was that Henry later discovered that she wasn't a virgin when they hooked up, which hurt his pride to say the least and led to her tumbling rapidly from her pedestal; at least a widow wasn't expected to be pure). An intelligent intellectual who nurses Henry tenderly through his dying years, while, on the side, pushing her own radical, Protestant agenda and grooming Henry's daughter Elizabeth to follow in her footstep (in terms of religion, that is). Of course, the devoted nursemaid ended up finally marrying the man she really loved, Thomas Seymour, scandalously soon after Henry's death. Not that that ended happily either: Seymour spent months romping and frolicking with the 14-year-old Princess Elizabeth and Catherine died of puerperal fever a few days after giving birth to a girl who never survived infancy.

The moral of the story is that you shouldn't be called Catherine. Or Thomas. And you definitely shouldn't marry Henry 8 VIII. Well, maybe the TV show will have a different moral. I guess I'll have to tune in to find out.

Assorted--and Sometimes Surprising--Pleasures

From my radar this week:

1. Pretending I'm in New York. Although living in London (rather than the sticks) can usually ward off my New York cravings for quite some time, once I start getting close to six months since my last visit (as I am now), I start getting antsy, especially given that my parents are going in a few weeks. I want to wander through the West Village and run in Central Park. I also want to shop. Luckily, of the three American shops in which I spend most money, two of them (Banana Republic and Anthropologie) have Regent Street branches, both of which are staffed partly by Yanks. This means I can amble up Regent Street on a Saturday afternoon and I could almost be in NYC. The prices of the clothes are, of course, way higher than in New York but today I discovered the sale room at Anthropologie where I picked up a gorgeous, colourful top on sale for £9.95, reduced from £60. Both the sales assistant and the woman behind me in the queue commented on what a great bargain it was.

2. Random London eateries. If I can't be discovering fun new places in the Big Apple, random restaus in London almost make up for it. Yesterday, there was Paolina's a cheap and low-key Thai restaurant near King's Cross, with very tasty food, friendly staff and a ski chalet-like decor. The other night, it was the Posh Banger Boys in Borough Market, which is basically a guy with a barbecue in an unheated, candle-lit garage, decorated with sparse furniture that looks like it's just been salvaged from a skip. The burgers were very tasty, though, and I speak from experience. Mori, meanwhile, is a smart new Asian takeaway on Marylebone High Street with a range of reasonably priced sushi, salads and other Asian goodies. I haven't eaten there yet but next time I need a quick bite to eat in the quartier, I will probably check it out.

3. The Blind Side. I went to see this film, like many people, to see whether Sandy B really deserved that Oscar. Also, I had a voucher for a free Cineworld ticket for which I only paid £1 so I decided to use it on a film I might not otherwise have seen. Two things surprised me: 1) there were far more men than women in the audience and 2) I liked it, despite the fact it was corny as hell. And yes, Sandra Bullock was very good, although I still think Carey Mulligan should have won. The premise is like The OC meets Friday Night Lights. Rich, seemingly perfect, BMW-driving family come across underprivileged boy from bad neighbourhood, take him in and under their watch, he flourishes (in The OC, Ryan is from Chino, is white and goes on to be a great architect, as opposed to Michael, in The Blind Side, who is black and very good at football, but otherwise, the concept is very similar). The family even has a slightly geeky, sarcastic sun who tries to help Michael out--a son who, despite being about ten years younger than The OC's Seth Cohen in the movie, reminds me a lot of him. Of course, The Blind Side is not borrowing from The OC as it is based on the true story of NFL football player Michael Oher. I genuinely enjoyed the film, anyway, although I wasn't expecting to.

4. RunKeeper. I really like my Nike +iPod sensor. It tracks the speed, distance and pace of my runs and syncs automatically with the Nike+ website, allowing me to track my training over time. Unfortunately, I've been having problems getting accurate recordings almost as long as I've had the sensor. Most of the time, it works fine but sometimes, if I pause the app while I stretch or try to change the music, it gives up and only records the time of the rest of the run and not the speed or distance. Also, the Nike system requires that I bring the sensor with me and as I regularly use two pairs of trainers, this is a hassle. Enter RunKeeper. This is an iPhone app that performs a similar function to Nike+ but using the GPS on the iPhone; this means it also automatically maps my routes on Google Maps and sends the information to the RunKeeper site without me even having to hook up my iPhone with a computer. I'm not sure which of the two is more accurate (RK's distances and paces are worse than the Nike+ ones I'm used to) but RK could potentially be a good back up and/or alternative to Nike+ -- and it's free!

5. Walking home from work. Yesterday was the first time I've walked home from my new office. It's less than 2.5 miles but a combination of really bad weather and the sun setting too early has meant walking wasn't a very appealing prospect until yesterday. It only took me 35 minutes and I was home while it was (just about) still light. Walking is also much less stressful than getting the Tube or waiting too long for buses. In the mornings, I usually get a bus to work but when you factor in the walking to and from the bus stops, waiting for a bus to arrive and getting stuck in traffic, I usually get into work 20-40 minutes later so perhaps I will walk in more often. On those days when it's not raining or snowing, I'm not running late and I'm not wearing high heels, anyway. The route isn't the most pleasant in London (unless you are a fan of the Euston Road) but at Great Portland Street, I cut up into Regent's Park and walk the rest of the way buffered from most of the traffic and enjoying the spring flowers).

Who Is 67, Who Is Magellan and Who...Are...You?

I've written before about the only literature paper I took at university, which was called Visions of Hell (I got extra brownie points for reworking a famous Jean-Paul Sartre quotation about hell in an exam on Dante's Inferno, Levi's Se questo è un uomo and Svevo's La coscienza di Zeno). I think the conclusion we were supposed to draw is that hell means different things to different people and can be comic as well as tragic.

Over the past week, I've seen three films, which, collectively, could be seen as the introduction to a course entitled Visions of Madness. Shutter Island, Alice in Wonderland and Green Zone don't have much else in common but each presents a contrasting depiction of madness and sanity, reality and deception.

It's hard to say too much about Shutter Island without spoiling the film but, in brief, Leonardo DiCaprio is a US marshal with a lot of baggage in his past, sent to investigate the disappearance of a female prisoner (patient) from a locked cell in the mental asylum for the criminally insane on Shutter Island in the 1950s. What begins like an episode of Jonathan Creek soon descends into a paradox of the unreliable narrator as Leo finds a note in the cell of the missing prisoner, which reads: "THE LAW OF FOUR... WHO IS 67?" and begins to uncover some sinister goings on on Shutter Island. Or does he? And who can he trust, anyway? Surely not the oh-so-creepy Sirbenkingsley? Who, for that matter, can we trust? Martin Scorsese doesn't exactly go out of his way to cover his tracks, and although Shutter Island is rather silly in places (some say intentionally so), it works well as a thriller and as an examination of what is sane, anyway, and whether you can tell if you aren't sane.

In a sense, Leo's character Teddy is in Wonderland, although not a Wonderland from Lewis Carroll's or Tim Burton's imagination. Like Alice, Teddy is on a journey of discovery--he wants to go back home but he also wants to find the truth. And along the way, nothing and no one is as they seem.

I probably wouldn't have gone to see The Disney-Burton version of Alice in Wonderland but I won a free ticket to see the film in 3D on the IMAX screen and I thought that in that cinematic environment, it was bound to be visually stunning, at the least. Although the decidedly mixed reviews of the film had made me wary, I actually rather enjoyed it. It was interesting to see an older Alice down the rabbit hole, one whom the Mad Hatter could fall for and whom the Red Queen's henchman could try to seduce. The animal characters were, for the most part, lovable and funny (Stephen Fry's Cheshire Cat was particularly funny and somehow reminded me of Antonio Banderas's Puuuss in Boots). Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter was funny too, although he, like the film as a whole, felt a lot like Burton Lite. Nonetheless, it was a perfectly likable film.

Again, the themes of madness and reality often recurred. Is Alice mad to have wild dreams of this Wonderland place or has she just been smoking too much opium? Is she dreaming at all or is Wonderland and its inhabitants real? Given the constraints of the Victorian society from which Alice comes, I suspect she would have been shipped straight to Shutter Island rather than to a new life as a businesswoman in China at the end. Then there is the Hatter. Like some of the patients on Shutter Island, at times he seems quite coherent and can hold a normal conversation. You wonder whether he merits being called mad. But then, his mind "resets" and he asks his favourite question ("Why is a raven like a writing desk?") for the hundredth time and you begin to think that he may actually be crazy after all, running on autopilot. As for the swollen headed Red Queen, an egomaniac, megalomaniac, dictatorial sadist, she certainly seems crazy when compared to the White Queen, her good, kind (and somewhat boring) sister.

Green Zone is more specific in its portrayal of madness: it looks at the lies and the crazy decisions that led America into the Iraq war in the search for the weapons of mass destruction. Matt Damon (restored again to Team America) plays Roy Miller, an army chief who suspects that his team have been given some "bad intel," namely that all of the places they have been told to raid or blow up because they are supposed to contain chemical weapons have turned out to be empty. The intel is supposed to come from a very reliable source--someone high up in the Iraqi forces, codenamed Magellan. Miller begins to dig deeper, with the help of an Iraqi named Freddie, but some powerful Americans in both Washington and Iraq start to worry about what he will find out and what he will do when he discovers the truth. In this film, a war started on the basis of false premises is madness. All of the unnecessary deaths, explosions and destructions are madness. Whether it is mad to die fighting for your country or for your freedom is less certain. Paul Greengrass certainly presents an interesting view of the Iraq war, in any case and the Americans sitting next to me in the cinema seemed to agree.

Calling All Satirical Linguists and Linguistic Satirists

It isn't easy studying linguistics at university. Not only do you have to keep on coming up with creative answers to the frequently asked question, "so which languages do you speak?" (pi?) but often, you can't even find your textbooks in a library or a bookshop (linguistics books are found variably with the philosophy, modern languages, psychology, science and even new age sections). No matter how many times you explain that linguistics is "the science of language" or that it involves the study of the evolution, structure, form, history, acquisition and variation of language (among other things), you are invariably met with a look of scepticism. "That's a real subject?"

There is help, however. Or, at least, company. I was in my third year at university when I discovered the Speculative Grammarian (AKA SpecGram), a wonderful, hysterical, satirical, online linguistics journal. A fellow linguist (yes, linguist; linguistician is such an ugly word) pointed me in the direction of the Choose Your Own Career in Linguistics page and once I'd stopped laughing, I managed to move my mouse pointer towards some of the earlier issues of the journal and it's been keeping me in in-jokes ever since. Some of my favourite articles include:

• Why Linguistics Is Not a Science and Why Linguistics Doesn't Care (some variation of the essay title, "linguistics is a science; discuss" was guaranteed to come up in my Ling101 exam).
• What Is Linguistics Good for, Anyway? (picking up chicks, apparently; damn. To be followed by Love Queries of a Linguist and How They Do It in Linguistics.
• Murphy’s Law as Applied to Field Linguistics (this is why Chomsky wasn't interested in the language spoken by real people).
• Autodescriptives (this will be wholly unfunny to anyone who has no knowledge of linguistic processes but contains a list of words describing sound changes that have themselves undergone the sound change; rhotacism, for example, means "bunging in an extra r sound" so in this article, it is written as rhotarcism. This article was one of my main revision sources before my historical linguistics exam).

SpecGram is, thankfully, free and they have just put out a call for papers and I got this email from the Managing Editor, Trey Jones:

My main purpose in writing is to ask you to promote SpecGram just a little bit more by encouraging people you know, online and in real life, to send submissions to SpecGram. We have published satirical and humorous articles, poems, cartoons, ads, and all sorts of other material—and no field within or related to linguistics is off limits. SpecGram always has been and always will be free, and everything we do is built on submissions from readers and donated time from editors and other supporters. So, if you have something worthy of the premier scholarly journal featuring research in the neglected field of satirical linguistics, submit it! If not, please donate a little time and pass the word along.

You can submit your SpecGram contributions here.

Getting One's Actors Together

With just a few short hours to go until the Oscars ceremony begins tonight, I thought it was time for me to pick my favourites in each of the major categories. This time, however, I thought I would also have a go at predicting who I think will win each award as well as noting my own choice for the category. Of course, my predictions of the winners are likely to be more accurate in those categories where I have seen all or most of the movies shortlisted. By listing both my favourites and my predictions for how the Academy will vote, I get double the opportunity to brag about my prowess if I do well, I suppose, although if I don't do so well, I'll look like even more of a cultural ignoramus.

Best Picture: An Education / Avatar [seen 8/10]
Best Director: Kathryn Bigelow / Kathryn Bigelow [5/5]
Best Actor: Colin Firth / Jeff Bridges [5/5]
Best Actress: Carey Mulligan / Sandra Bullock [3/5]
Best Supporting Actor: Christoph Waltz / Christoph Waltz [2/5]
Best Supporting Actress: Maggie Gyllenhaal / Mo'nique [4/5]
Best Foreign Language Film: A Prophet / A Prophet [2/5]

Cómo Se Dice "Brunch" en Español?: Dehesa Review

I've acquired a taste for tapas, recently, in part because now that I'm starting to eat more like an adult with (shock horror!) spices and (eek!) flavour and in part because there are more and restaurants where you can eat tapas-style without having to eat Spanish food. Polpo, a new-ish Italian in Soho, is my favourite of these with its bite-size chichetti to start, interesting main courses and yummy puddings.

I've been meaning to check out Dehesa, a Spanish/Italian tapas bar just off Carnaby Street for some time now (usually when I walk past at six on a Saturday evening, tired and hungry after a long day of shopping) so when E asked me to suggest somewhere central for us to do brunch, I decided to suggest Dehesa instead of Providores, my usual choice. As Dehesa is usually rammed of an evening, we arrived at the start of their lunchtime opening and were rewarded by sitting in one of the small, curved, leather booths by the window. It wasn't overly busy, which suited us fine as we wanted to chat, but there was a nice, buzzy vibe.

When we were presented with the menu, though, I began to wonder if I had made an error as the menu items were decidedly unbrunchy--charcuterie plates, salt cod croquetas, tortillas and the like. I asked for the brunch menu and was told they just did one brunch dish--a sort of Mediterranean version of the fry-up with pancetta,  fried eggs (which weren't overly greasy), tomatoes and ciabatta. I was a little disappointed not to have more choice but the brunch option did sound good so we both ordered it (incidentally, their website does say "brunch specials available" weekend afternoons rather than "brunch menu at the weekend"). The double espresso I ordered was good and E's OJ also tasted nice. I was relieved to find that the churros with chocolate sauce I had promised E did show up on the pudding menu as the brunch special and I couldn't not order them. And yes, they were cinnamony and yummy.

The lack of queue meant we could linger in the prime real estate that was our booth for a couple of hours and all in all it was a successful brunch that didn't require us to wait outside in the cold for 30 minutes as would have been the case at Providores. I would definitely go back to Dehesa for lunch or dinner and probably brunch too, despite the lack of choice. It is probably OK for me to patronise a non-antipodean establishment in London once in a while, I suppose...

Dehesa. 25 Ganton Street, London, W1F 9BP (Tube: Oxford Circus). Website. Twitter.