Something quite new was required

[sovay]

It is not an important yahrzeit of Alan Turing. That will be in a couple of years; in a couple of weeks it will be a more important birthday. He did not really live out of time like T. H. White's Merlin, but the Pet Shop Boys called him a man from the future. Since the last time I checked in, there seems to be a poetry collection about him and a poetry fest judged for humanness by an AI, not to mention a train named in his honor. The statue at King's College is still in zoning limbo. I like the news of these memorials and investigations, these personal or institutional engagements, but I keep recurring to the idea of how much easier it is to honor the dead than accept the living: how badly governments learn the lesson of letting people live as themselves. If I'm still here this time next year, I'll have outlived him. When I was sixteen and reading Hugh Whitemore's Breaking the Code (1986) in the red-jacketed secondhand hardcover whose spine has faded with time and sunlight to a most acceptably queer pink, dying like a fairy tale of injustice at forty-one looked a long way off in an eventful life. I didn't have to come this close in time to know his life had a lot in it, but it could have had a lot more.

Comments

[aurumcalendula]

I think nearly everyone with prior knowledge of Turing either avoided and/or hated 'The Imitation Game' (I got the impression it drew a lot from Levitt's biography, which I heartily disliked, let alone its other problems)

iirc I saw 'Breaking the Code' via the (now broken) link on Hodges' website. It doesn't look like it's officially available to stream anywhere, but someone uploaded a copy here

I really liked Codebreaker and the music video looks cool!

(I would love to see a play about Joan Clarke someday too!)

[sovay]

I think nearly everyone with prior knowledge of Turing either avoided and/or hated 'The Imitation Game'

I certainly don't know anyone who saw and/or liked it. Andrew Hodges was contractually tactful. I still resent that it sucked all of the funding out of the room for a Turing movie until the next God knows when. Not to mention a waste of a naturally apt title, although Ian McEwan's The Imitation Game (1981) is also obnoxious, so maybe the title is actually cursed.

iirc I saw 'Breaking the Code' via the (now broken) link on Hodges' website. It doesn't look like it's officially available to stream anywhere, but someone uploaded a copy here

Nice! Thank you.

(I discovered the link to that page was broken when I tried to add it to this post. It worked ten years ago!)

I really liked Codebreaker and the music video looks cool!

Apologies for recommending something you were likely to have seen: Codebreaker seems to have a weirdly low profile for how good it is.

There's this small number of songs about Alan Turing that just seem to come into existence at unpredictable intervals and I really appreciate them.

(I would love to see a play about Joan Clarke someday too!)

(I don't know how to interest anyone in the project. I do not know how to write plays and do not have time to learn. But I keep hoping.)

[aurumcalendula]

Apologies for recommending something you were likely to have seen: Codebreaker seems to have a weirdly low profile for how good it is.

No worries - I'm glad you reminded me of it!