1. In the 2010 theatre adaptation of Nation, Cox was played by Paul Chahidi. 2. Paul Chahidi was also in the 2009 Day of the Triffids miniseries. 3. The book on which Day of the Triffids was based also inspired Australian rock band The Triffids. 4. The Triffids fouth album, released in 1987, was called Calenture. 5. At some point before the events of Nation, Daphne learns about Calenture from Cox.
HOW AWESOME IS THAT
Current Music
"Bonnie Ship the Diamond," Connemara Stone Company
Have some terrifyingly fandom-tastic texts from last night entries instead:
From Ankh-Morpork Minnesota: All I could understand from his text was "hatchet" "soccer" & "bitch". its safe to say andy has had enough to drink & will be violent soon
From Chiswick Michigan: I feel I need to conquer him. He's six ft eight and 265lbs. Its like the mount Everest of sex.
TEE HEE
now back to studying for this godawful sociology test whooooooo
I've also (just) had some thoughts regarding a potential pattern in the big four Pratchett psychopaths' personalities:
- Teatime represents the psychopath as a young child. Like any small child, he's highly imaginative and has unachievably big dreams. He's bright and keen and cheery and very, very observant, and what he observes is this: he's not like the other children. He tries to play their games, but they bore him. They've got friends and he doesn't. With time, he learns that he can change them--all he has to do is make them too scared to resist.
- Andy is the adolescent version of the same character. He's had years to work on intimidating people, and he's become quite good at it, even managing to keep the same group of "friends" he forced into his service as a child. He's got better at managing his stunted emotional range, too--committing crimes, getting in fights, and The Football keep him on a constant adrenaline rush so he doesn't feel the ennui that comes along with having half your emotions missing. At this point, he's still too scared of punishment to completely bust through society's boundaries, and while he doesn't really care for anyone else's well-being he does try to stop short of murder for his own sake. As he gets older, his "friends" will wise up to what he really is and grow enough of a spine to stand up to, or at least abandon, him.
- Carcer is the young adult psychopath, no longer fettered by any rules but his own but still not as dangerous as he'll become later on. Whatever respect for the law or fear for his own life held him back before is gone, and he's free to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, to whomever he wants. However, he's still young and impulsive and he's not got any real goals in life beyond having fun. This makes him more dangerous in the sense that being so disorganized makes him unpredictable, but at the same time his lack of real motivation helps spread out the havoc he wreaks, and his near-total failure to show any concern for his own life and health means he's pretty likely to get killed before he leaves this stage of his life. At this point, he's working alone more often than not. Then he gets a job--in a position with quite a bit of power--and, with his superiors' expectations to guide him and a new gang of lackeys who can't leave as easily as his old friends, he becomes a lot more organized and because of that a much bigger threat.
- Cox represents what happens when the character reaches full maturity. He's still totally unencumbered by anyone's rules, but he's also got back a healthy sense of self-preservation and developed some sense of purpose in life. No longer content to do whatever seems like a good idea at the moment, he carefully plans his actions to keep him sadistically amused without getting him into too much trouble with anyone who matters. He's also developed a different and less...direct sense of fun: while he still enjoys killing things just for the sake of killing them and probably still spends a lot of his money on drink, women, and the rest of Man's Ruin, he's come to take a lot more pleasure in slow, psychological torment--breaking minds before he ever gets round to breaking bodies. He's the most dangerous of the lot, because he's hard to kill after so many years of surviving and even harder to outsmart.
...not exactly a scientific portrait of the disorder, perhaps (though maybe it is; I've drifted away from the field and I'm none too up to date on current ideas) but then that's not the point. This is armchair-English-professor time, and I think I've found a pattern worth reading more into. Am I right?
(based on The Floating Brothel, Sian Rees - map on pp. 238-239)
Labeled ports and regions: [North Atlantic] 1. Plymouth, England 2. Tenerife 3. Cape Verde Islands [Doldrums] 4. Rio de Janiero [South Atlantic] 5. Cape Town [Roaring Forties] 6. Port Jackson
...so Port Advent is maybe in South America? Nation is like fifty years later than the convict ship in question, so who knows whether they still used that basic route in 1860? But maybe.
