Meme #3: tv adaptations, several small questions

[raven]

I am really enjoying doing these.

skygiants asked: If you had infinite budget and total control of the entertainment industry, what's the first thing you'd adapt to television for your own personal joy?

So the funny thing is I keep having my answers to this question pulled out from under me. Oh, maybe Good Omens, or Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, or A Suitable Boy! But now the BBC have provided me with a beautiful lush miniseries for each of them I’m a bit at a loss. I might have said the Vorkosigan series at one point but actually I’m not sure; I love those books utterly but maybe I don’t need a tv version.

Kind of out of left-field, then, I read Jo Walton’s Lifelode earlier this year and haven’t been able to get it out of my head since. It’s a low-key fantasy set in this fascinating world where time moves faster depending where you are. One of the key conflicts in the book is between two people who both claim to own a single piece of land - one because he’s the son of the original owner, and the other because he’s the great-great-great grandson. (I feel like this must happen a lot.) And more than that, it’s a domestic low-key fantasy. The main characters are all part of a complex household revolving around a four-person polyamorous marriage; the many kids each know who their parents are and the one kid who’s the son of the lord of the manor and his first wife knows he’s the heir, and it’s all very unremarkable and uncontested. While there is conflict arising, it’s from the changing axes of the relationships within the marriage and not any conflict between this set of people and the society they live in. The book just shimmers with beauty and intricate worldbuilding and the quietness of family and family life, and I love it extremely. In my head the tv adaptation would be beautifully shot and understated, with quick cuts and not very much dialogue, and be vidded extensively to classical music and Florence and the Machine. I’m currently a bit obsessed with Shtisel, the also-very-understated Israeli tv show about a complicated Charedi Jewish family in Jerusalem, and I imagine something very like that.

rmc28 asked me a bunch of fascinating questions, each of which I could write an essay on, but here are some quick(ish) answers.

* favourite niche details of process in the civil service

Red tape is real, except it’s actually pink; due to a British constitutional convention known as the Carltona principle, I’m not allowed to stand on the carpet in the House of Commons; in these pandemic times, the Secretary of State’s official seal is having to be couriered everywhere; I am not actually a practising lawyer! I don't have a practising certificate, anyway, and don't technically have to meet any of the professional requirements.

* favourite words / phrases in Gaelic

An-dè, a-maireach, an earar, an eararais - today, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, the day after the day after tomorrow.

“muc-mara” - lit. “pig of the sea”, actually “whale”

“rionnach maoim” - the moving stripes of light on the ground caused by fast-moving clouds

I also love how we all just stick “(e)adh” on the end of things where necessary. bha mi ga thweetadh, I was tweeting it.

* works you would like to write but haven't yet started

God, so many, my mind has been mush for so long. In no order: a time-travel story involving out-of-time babies abandoned on doorsteps; a story about art and political prisoners; a small but perfectly-formed investigative agency for a small but perfectly-formed galactic empire; something something dragons.

* what is an agricultural litigator?

Ahaha, I presume you got this from my DW intro post! An agricultural litigator is the sort of lawyer I was originally, and is mostly someone who deals with contentious matters arising from large-scale rural land use. Mostly farms, for sure, but also nature reserves, foreshore (which is the land covered and uncovered between high and low tides, and in the UK belongs by default to the Crown); riparian property; sewers; long-distance railways (I did not, as the kids say, throw away my shot); Bronze Age forts; prehistoric hill figures; ancient common land; anything that’s not houses, shops and blocks of flats, basically. It is an absolutely fascinating area of law, mostly because it brings you up close and personal with some rather uncomfortable facts. In 1066, William the Conqueror came over from Normandy and put the land to the sword, and if you are reading this in England then every right you currently exercise over the ground you stand on arises directly from that fact. As I seem to say a lot, you don’t own land; you merely own the right to keep people off it. The Crown is the only entity that owns land in itself, and it owns it by right of conquest. Even if you own the freehold, that is just a right that has been granted to you for a time by the Crown, and given the right circumstances, it can be taken away. (The only real modern instance of this is escheat, which is what happens when someone dies with no will and no relatives - their title to their land is extinguished, and it reverts to the Crown.) Of course if you mostly work all day with commercial leases or suburban residential conveyancing, none of this comes up much. It does come up, though, when you’re acting for a landowning family who have held their title interrupted since the Conquest - who then can’t prove they own it, lacking any mortgage, lease, freehold transfer or other deed that an owner would normally have to that effect. That was why I liked agricultural work so much - even if I hadn’t been such a dismal failure of a commercial lawyer - but it’s kind of a dying art these days.

if you'd like to ask me to talk about something, you still can.

Comments

[rmc28]

I did indeed get the last one from skimming your intro post (in case it already held answers so I didn't look like an idiot)!

[via_ostiense]

who then can’t prove they own it, lacking any mortgage, lease, freehold transfer or other deed that an owner would normally have to that effect

This is fascinating!

[via_ostiense]

P.S. What kinds of legal issues tend to arise with the foreshore?

[raven]

A lot of interesting things! Mostly the foreshore is in public ownership because you want to be able to take care of seafaring type things at the government level, like buoys and harbour walls and lighthouses. And it's also a really ancient right of the Crown, so they also have title to wrecks, salvage, and mineral resources related to the sea. But sometimes the Crown will turn the foreshore over to nature conservation orgs, which leads to some interesting legal stuff about how you transfer ownership, and there are also issues about ramblers and public rights of way which have to be dealt with at the statutory level. It's a very cool area!

[soupytwist]

OMG I feel like Lifelode would be BRILLIANT, what a good idea. And I am so delighted you love it as much as I do.

All those potential stories sound very cool and any time you feel like you wanna yell at someone about any of them, I volunteer as tribute!

[raven]

Hee, I will remember that when yelling is necessary, which it so often is! Thank you again for Lifelode, I'd never have read it if you didn't love Jo Walton so much.

[daegaer]

bha mi ga thweetadh

Bhí mé ag tweeteaigh (ag tweeteaíocht ? WHO KNOWS, NOT ME) - I was tweeting, as Gaeilge. If the existence of such a foul foreign letter as a "w" is admitted, of course. Ag tuiteaigh? Hmmm.

[raven]

I like age tweetaíiocht, that looks v cool. I suppose you could do "ag tweeteadch", in the Other Gaelic. or tuiteachd, but I know I'd look at that all day without knowing what it meant.

[skygiants]

I am so glad I asked this question, because I'd heard of Lifelode as interesting domestic fantasy but had not heard about the time-slowing elements or the property ownership conflicts and am now intensely curious! Thank you for answering. :D

[brainwane]

Lifelode is in a very interesting set of fantasies that have low-key, domestic, cosy, or small-scale settings/elements, like At Amberleaf Fair and some of Naomi Kritzer's stories (like "The Good Son" and "Honest Man") and Zen Cho's stories (like "The Guest" and "Everything Under One Roof"). I think Lifelode is longest among them and I do want more stuff like that. Jo Walton sort of takes other angles at domestic fantasy in Tooth and Claw and My Real Children but Lifelode is the one that most valorizes and foregrounds the homemaker who must be keeping everything running in all those feudal-ish secondary-world fantasy novels, in the background.

While there is conflict arising, it’s from the changing axes of the relationships within the marriage and not any conflict between this set of people and the society they live in. The book just shimmers with beauty and intricate worldbuilding and the quietness of family and family life, and I love it extremely.

YES. There is one important plot element that's not like that, a conflict involving a potential change to the setting itself, but overall the heart of Lifelode is (as with At Amberleaf Fair) much more about people falling in love, growing up, choosing careers, making food, and so on.

[raven]

You're very welcome! It's a great question. What would you adapt, if you feel like telling me?

[skygiants]

My decisions on this are mostly formed by 'what have I been really wanting to vid ...' My 'I think this might actually be a good show' choice would be DWJ's Dalemark books -- I've only seen two episodes of The Witcher but I do think it's opened the door to be cool nonlinear stories, where you could have the viewer start with the last book when our heroine falls into the middle of a revolution and then run parallel threads to show the pre-revolutionary backstories of her companions from the prequels, which I think would be really neat -- and my 'this series is not good overall but maybe I could just start with the initial premise/first few books that are good and then fix the rest in post?' would be Kage Baker's Company books, which are about a terrible corporation that travels back in time to create immortal operatives that trudge forward through history working for its interests, and I think one could have a lot of fun using the set dressing of various gorgeous prestige dramas and populating them with exhausted immortal bureaucrats.

I also would kill for a good 7 Seeds adaptation, my absolute favorite postapocalyptic manga about friendship and redemption and wacky bands of misfits and truly absurd amounts of killer bugs, but all I would want to do there is just pour money into a Japanese studio and then order them to give Yumi Tamura complete creative control.

[hedda62]

Ah well, if you want out-of-time babies abandoned on doorsteps, I do that kind of thing quite often (mostly in the second half of my series, admittedly).

Now I really have to read Lifelode! I recently read her newest, Or What You Will and loved it and wrote a thing about it: https://ericahsmith.wordpress.com/2020/08/14/jo-waltons-or-what-you-will-and-how-to-make-up-people/

Enjoying these posts! Favorite thing to be drinking in favorite place to drink it in?

[ndrosen]

I also enjoyed Jo Walton’s LIFELODE, and I’m looking forward to reading her newest book.

[raven]

Me too! I keep forgetting it's out, I should go and buy it now while I remember!

[toft]

Pig of the sea!!!!

I love hearing you talk about law. As a medievalist, it's just really cool.