I just discovered the Tiny Art Director:
http://tinyartdirector.blogspot.com/
A professional artist takes commissions from his small daughter and reports her response to the finished work. Best read chronologically, starting when she was 2 years old. My favourite of her comments is the crushing "You're doing art the wrong way".
I hated Mika at first, but "Relax" was quite good. And here is his new one, which is excellent. RedOne has done pretty well out of the whole Lady Gaga thing, and without having to go to the trouble of wearing odd clothes and leaping about a lot.
There's this new thing called mflow, which is a bit like twitter if twitter were nothing but music recommendations (which would obviously be an improvement). You can listen to whole versions of recommended songs, but only once; it's more about finding new stuff than a method of actually listening to your music. I quite like it but goodness knows whether it will last -- the internet is so tiring these days. I got an invite off of the popjustice website (where else). (Also I have invitations now if anyone wants one.) It reminded me of this wonderful and oddly sinister song. According to wikipedia it was the last ABBA song ever recorded, and Agnetha sang the lyrics with the lights off.
So I bought it. By my calculations this means I have given popjustice 20p. And I'm fine with that.
You can get 4OD on Youtube now. I'm trying to work out how to link a computer up to my parents' TV. I wish I were just a bit more geeky; I'm geeky enough to have most of the disadvantages without the advantage of being able to do Cool Stuff.
Also I would like to point out that the new Mr Kipling advert, in which a slightly disconsolate Mrs Kipling implies that his renowned ability with cakes is a way of coping with erectile dysfunction, is wrong. Just plain wrong.
Wednesday, 31 March 2010
Tuesday, 30 March 2010
Organization
Paper is good stuff. Hurray for paper! On the other hand, it weighs quite a lot and takes up space. Also a big heap of paper is hard to manage in the long term, unless you are excellent at filing. Plus can I take all my files with me into a manuscript library? No, I cannot. But I can take this: [stock photo]
It's my little 500Gb hard drive! (If you want one you can get a commemorative "Michael Jackson is dead" version for less money than the plain variety.) I am quite pleased with how I'm getting on with making this change, so I thought I'd write a blog post about it, partly as an exercise in self-satisfaction, but also just in case anyone reading wants to make a similar transition. Of course the stuff I work on imposes a few odd constraints on how I work.
1. Managing references.
A long time ago I got fed up of retyping the same bibliographical references, and made a file called "Megabibliography" which was just an amalgamation of all the bibliographies I had ever written, for reference purposes. They were in variable styles, of course, but it worked as a quickish way of getting references. I switched to Endnote in 2003 or 4 when the whole thing got out of hand, and I had a several-thousand-item bibliography I had to manage for work, and also needed to generate an annual bibliography in a very odd style. (Importing all the data gave me RSI.)
The things which Endnote does which I really need are: ability to tag documents with keywords (e.g. "Calendars", "ASE 2006", or "ASE check", etc); easily customisable export styles, allowing me to produce my own style sheets for obscure journals, and XML material for easy import into other things; and it quickly generates citations in a way which I can edit. The last is vital: most reference software is designed for scientists, and is based on the idea that your computer does all the work for you. But in the humanities a reference manager is essentially a time-saving device. It won't be able to cope with certain oddities, like nineteenth-century German monographs which are also issues of a journal, etc, and it's important that you can easily edit what comes out. Beware of Zotero and Mendeley. They may be OK if you're just starting out, and they are free, but they do things automatically for you which you don't necessarily want done, and are very inflexible. Also I am intensely suspicious of the cloud. It's just not true that I am rarely offline; sometimes I'm on a train, or in Corpus Christi College, where there is no wifi at all. Occasionally broadband connections go down. And I'm not a fan of their social-networking-style features. The other day Mendeley told me that the most popular author in the Humanities is Foucault, and suggested that I might like to read Foucault. As many as 15 Mendeley users have Foucault in their bibliographies, apparently. Stupid software. That sort of thing is a bit like the Ask the Audience option on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, in that it's most useful for the questions about soap operas. I can quite happily believe I'll discover a fun YouTube clip or a good TV show through Web 2.0/Cloud-style stuff; not so sure I'm going to find help in my work on late Anglo-Saxon liturgy.
Be cautious also about the option to import references automatically into your library. One of those applications' website says something like "Avoid typing errors by importing references from web databases" but what it means is "Propagate other people's errors by importing references from web databases". Library catalogues are packed with mistakes, because a lot of libraries mistakenly treat cataloguing as a data-entry task and pay casual staff not much money to do it. Import material as a time saver, but you'll need to edit it before moving on.
2. Recycling my "Photocopied Papers" folders.
All my folders of photocopied papers have now been recycled into rat bedding or taken away by the council, and I gave the lever arch files to my dad. The key to this was a small sheet-feeding scanner, and DVD box sets. The DVD box sets are vital because this is dull work in the same way that feeding CDs into iTunes is dull. I recommend the complete Seinfeld; it's light-hearted and you've probably seen them all before anyway. I bought a little scanner which does one sheet at a time quite quickly and feeds it through for you. Plus points: it's cheap; it's very portable; it came with excellent software. It was probably my favourite thing about 2009. (It wasn't a great year.) But if I were seriously rich I would have spent about 300 quid on this superfast non-portable sheet-feeding scanner which can do double-sided. Really it's the software which made the whole thing possible. Feeding paper into a scanner is fine because you don't need to think about it. Then, once I had done a whole article, I simply highlighted all the images from it in Presto PageManager, which came with the scanner, right-clicked to stack them, and then dragged them onto a PDF icon to save as a multi-page PDF. Whilst doing this I was beginning to feed the next article through (unless I had got too distracted by the antics of that Kramer). So if you have a scanner but no software then look into something which will painlessly turn images into pdfs for you.
3. Metamanuscripts.
I work on medieval manuscripts. I pay a lot of attention to form as well as content. I have not yet managed to find a way of taking notes on a computer which is better for my work than paper and pencil, because I need sometimes to make drawings of odd shapes of letters, or of decoration. I'm not an artist by a long long way but I can copy things OKish. I've tried using electronic pen input, with a graphics tablet, but it's not as controllable as a real pencil in terms of shading and such like; and some libraries let you take your own photographs, but not all do, and besides sometimes you need to copy something in order to look at it properly, or to add notes on things you can't expect to come out in a photograph, like words scratched into gold on initials. So I have a lot of manuscripts about manuscripts. I digitised them in the same way as the articles of step 2, but I haven't recycled them just in case, since they are unique; the originals sit in a couple of large boxes full of suspension files. I have added the PDFs to my MS-image files, and now if I'm sitting in a library looking at a manuscript and it reminds me of another manuscript I can immediately call up all my notes on it and any images I have just like that. This is an immensely useful tool for me. I continue to take notes with a pencil on paper, and then scan them in when I get home.
NB The graphics tablet might not have worked for me for manuscript notes, but it was great for the RSI caused by step 1. Hurray! Also these gloves, without which I cannot now type; I recommend them heartily if you have back-of-the-hand style RSI like me, rather than bad wrists.
4. Photocopying costs 10p a sheet at CUL, and 20p at the BL (where you are not allowed to copy more than a single page at a time, e.g. no double-page spreads).
I ended up in a situation where I would carefully (and expensively) photocopy an article, take it home, scan it, and then put the paper straight into the recycling. My current project is an attempt to cut out the middle phase of this, thus saving money, time, and the planet. I have acquired a very cheap, portable, USB-powered flat-bed scanner, and I am experimenting with scanning things from books. For example I have some multi-author books with one or two seriously useful articles in, and I am trying out digitising these so that I can take them with me to libraries. So far it's working well. So if possible in future I will borrow books or journals and copy the article I want straight on to my computer, and the portable scanner can live in my suitcase when I travel. Now I know that the UL photocopiers will now, theoretically, scan things for you and e-mail them to you for 8p (!) an image, but when I tried it it charged me for a whole article and only sent me the first page. Meaning I had to go back to the library and find the journal again, etc. I might give this another go sometime though, for things I can't borrow.
5. Image and text
I didn't originally OCR my scans. This was because at work I used to have access to the full copy of Adobe Acrobat, which would OCR pdfs for you, but very very slowly, without much accuracy, and with a large augmentation to the storage size of the file, so I wrote it off as a concept. However, I have recently got hold of ABBY Finereader 10 and it is very fine indeed. It even OCRs in Latin. If I run pdfs through it which I scanned in from photocopies of open books, so that they have two pages side by side on a landscape sheet of A4, it automatically splits these into two separate pages and rotates them before doing the OCR. It's also possible to scan straight into Finereader; it does a lot of image processing though, and I think it's quicker to give it pdfs which it doesn't feel the need to tidy up so much.
6. Managing PDFs.
The point of having a computer-read text is to be able to search it. Of course the OCR isn't perfect (though it's very good) and I'm not wasting time making it perfect, so searches have to be reasonably fuzzy. It's at this point that I'm still experimenting. I can set Windows' own indexing facility to include pdfs (using the pdf iFilter which comes with Windows 7 at least) and then I can look for, say, "Harley" in all pdfs in a folder, and it returns a list of matches. However, it doesn't give me context -- it would be useful to have the several words before and after, especially since I am probably most interested in the number that follows Harley. Or I can use the "search all in folder" option in Adobe Reader 9, which I think will be useful. Ideally I'd like to produce a concordance file, but concordance software seems on the whole to need .txt files. If I could find a good piece of software that allowed me to insert my own index tags in pdfs and then produce an index across many pdf files I would have a go at making manuscript indexes for myself. These would be very very useful. I have manually indexed important articles in the past, and it's tedious work, but wonderful to have later.
7. Backing up.
I had a hard drive fail only the other day, but my complex backup system meant that I didn't lose any data. Get at least one large external hard drive and set things backing up when you go to bed. I use BounceBack to do system backups and Allway Sync to do basic synchronisations of data. (BounceBack came free on an external hard drive I bought; it's sometimes worth paying attention to the software that comes bundled with hardware.) Allway Sync lets you choose whether or not things deleted from the source folder get deleted from the backup folder, so I back my external hard drive up twice, once in each way to different hard drives. If I accidentally delete something I can retrieve it from the comprehensive backup, but if I were to lose the whole drive I would get my new copy from the more accurate backup. Of course if I were really paranoid I would have an off-site backup, but I have too much data for an online one.
8. What I'd like to try.
I think I'm going to try taking photos of books and see whether Finereader can OCR them for me. The problem will be camera shake. But ABBYY have a special application for this, Fotoreader, which is what gave me the idea it might be worth trying.
9. Maybe in about 10 years' time.
My graphics tablet has amazing handwriting recognition. I found I could write more or less normally and it would OCR what I had written. So the next thing will be something I can run my handwritten MS notes through which will OCR them and make them searchable. Not possible now I think, but technology might well head that way. So at present I can't search my manuscript notes, which would be a useful thing to be able to do. I have two workarounds for this: the first is Onenote. I switched to Onenote a couple of years ago and now I absolutely depend on it for all my work and home organisation and everything, and will never be able to leave it. It replaces those lever arch files I used to have which organised notes for a particular project. When I find something in a manuscript which I don't need at the moment but think I might want to find again one day I make a note in Onenote. For example the other day I saw an interesting form of quire signature which reminded me of something in a Trinity MS, and because I made a quick note in Onenote I can find it immediately by searching on "quire" and tell you now that it was in an 8th-century Merovingian manuscript in the Vatican. I'm not going to go into the excellences of Onenote now; but I find it very useful for many things, and it's now the core of how I work. My second workaround is old school: I have a little address book, the sort with alphabetical tabs but no actual text printed in it, and I copy interesting letterforms into it. One day I'll work out how to migrate it to my computer, but at the moment I just carry that around. It's useful to consult but easy to leave it home accidentally.
10. If I were a proper geek.
There are instructables and such online for making your own book scanner, from complex ones to more basic but clever designs. It would be a lot quicker, and a bit better for the book, than using a flat-bed scanner or photocopier, and quicker and more accurate than the basic camera method. But I don't have the oomph to make one, and even if I did it would be a bit expensive. You can get a proper professional set up for about 1500 dollars, plus the cost of a good camera, and I think more and more libraries are investing in them. Then they digitise books which are in demand for undergraduates. I have no idea what the copyright implications of that are. (For myself I'm not digitising anything I'm not allowed to photocopy, so I don't think it's an issue for me.) I saw the scanner at Stanford when I went out, one of the ones which works for google books, but it's huge, the size of a room, and we've all seen how patchy its results are.
Of course some parts of this have taken me quite a bit of time, but I am prone to intense but short-lived enthusiasms, and got most of it done while watching TV I was probably going to watch anyway. Now it seems easier to me to scan something in than to file it. And the wierd thing is that my pdf library is only just over 9Gb in size, e.g. tiny. (My manuscript notes library is 155Gb but then it has a lot of images in.)
It's my little 500Gb hard drive! (If you want one you can get a commemorative "Michael Jackson is dead" version for less money than the plain variety.) I am quite pleased with how I'm getting on with making this change, so I thought I'd write a blog post about it, partly as an exercise in self-satisfaction, but also just in case anyone reading wants to make a similar transition. Of course the stuff I work on imposes a few odd constraints on how I work.
1. Managing references.
A long time ago I got fed up of retyping the same bibliographical references, and made a file called "Megabibliography" which was just an amalgamation of all the bibliographies I had ever written, for reference purposes. They were in variable styles, of course, but it worked as a quickish way of getting references. I switched to Endnote in 2003 or 4 when the whole thing got out of hand, and I had a several-thousand-item bibliography I had to manage for work, and also needed to generate an annual bibliography in a very odd style. (Importing all the data gave me RSI.)
The things which Endnote does which I really need are: ability to tag documents with keywords (e.g. "Calendars", "ASE 2006", or "ASE check", etc); easily customisable export styles, allowing me to produce my own style sheets for obscure journals, and XML material for easy import into other things; and it quickly generates citations in a way which I can edit. The last is vital: most reference software is designed for scientists, and is based on the idea that your computer does all the work for you. But in the humanities a reference manager is essentially a time-saving device. It won't be able to cope with certain oddities, like nineteenth-century German monographs which are also issues of a journal, etc, and it's important that you can easily edit what comes out. Beware of Zotero and Mendeley. They may be OK if you're just starting out, and they are free, but they do things automatically for you which you don't necessarily want done, and are very inflexible. Also I am intensely suspicious of the cloud. It's just not true that I am rarely offline; sometimes I'm on a train, or in Corpus Christi College, where there is no wifi at all. Occasionally broadband connections go down. And I'm not a fan of their social-networking-style features. The other day Mendeley told me that the most popular author in the Humanities is Foucault, and suggested that I might like to read Foucault. As many as 15 Mendeley users have Foucault in their bibliographies, apparently. Stupid software. That sort of thing is a bit like the Ask the Audience option on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, in that it's most useful for the questions about soap operas. I can quite happily believe I'll discover a fun YouTube clip or a good TV show through Web 2.0/Cloud-style stuff; not so sure I'm going to find help in my work on late Anglo-Saxon liturgy.
Be cautious also about the option to import references automatically into your library. One of those applications' website says something like "Avoid typing errors by importing references from web databases" but what it means is "Propagate other people's errors by importing references from web databases". Library catalogues are packed with mistakes, because a lot of libraries mistakenly treat cataloguing as a data-entry task and pay casual staff not much money to do it. Import material as a time saver, but you'll need to edit it before moving on.
2. Recycling my "Photocopied Papers" folders.
All my folders of photocopied papers have now been recycled into rat bedding or taken away by the council, and I gave the lever arch files to my dad. The key to this was a small sheet-feeding scanner, and DVD box sets. The DVD box sets are vital because this is dull work in the same way that feeding CDs into iTunes is dull. I recommend the complete Seinfeld; it's light-hearted and you've probably seen them all before anyway. I bought a little scanner which does one sheet at a time quite quickly and feeds it through for you. Plus points: it's cheap; it's very portable; it came with excellent software. It was probably my favourite thing about 2009. (It wasn't a great year.) But if I were seriously rich I would have spent about 300 quid on this superfast non-portable sheet-feeding scanner which can do double-sided. Really it's the software which made the whole thing possible. Feeding paper into a scanner is fine because you don't need to think about it. Then, once I had done a whole article, I simply highlighted all the images from it in Presto PageManager, which came with the scanner, right-clicked to stack them, and then dragged them onto a PDF icon to save as a multi-page PDF. Whilst doing this I was beginning to feed the next article through (unless I had got too distracted by the antics of that Kramer). So if you have a scanner but no software then look into something which will painlessly turn images into pdfs for you.
3. Metamanuscripts.
I work on medieval manuscripts. I pay a lot of attention to form as well as content. I have not yet managed to find a way of taking notes on a computer which is better for my work than paper and pencil, because I need sometimes to make drawings of odd shapes of letters, or of decoration. I'm not an artist by a long long way but I can copy things OKish. I've tried using electronic pen input, with a graphics tablet, but it's not as controllable as a real pencil in terms of shading and such like; and some libraries let you take your own photographs, but not all do, and besides sometimes you need to copy something in order to look at it properly, or to add notes on things you can't expect to come out in a photograph, like words scratched into gold on initials. So I have a lot of manuscripts about manuscripts. I digitised them in the same way as the articles of step 2, but I haven't recycled them just in case, since they are unique; the originals sit in a couple of large boxes full of suspension files. I have added the PDFs to my MS-image files, and now if I'm sitting in a library looking at a manuscript and it reminds me of another manuscript I can immediately call up all my notes on it and any images I have just like that. This is an immensely useful tool for me. I continue to take notes with a pencil on paper, and then scan them in when I get home.
NB The graphics tablet might not have worked for me for manuscript notes, but it was great for the RSI caused by step 1. Hurray! Also these gloves, without which I cannot now type; I recommend them heartily if you have back-of-the-hand style RSI like me, rather than bad wrists.
4. Photocopying costs 10p a sheet at CUL, and 20p at the BL (where you are not allowed to copy more than a single page at a time, e.g. no double-page spreads).
I ended up in a situation where I would carefully (and expensively) photocopy an article, take it home, scan it, and then put the paper straight into the recycling. My current project is an attempt to cut out the middle phase of this, thus saving money, time, and the planet. I have acquired a very cheap, portable, USB-powered flat-bed scanner, and I am experimenting with scanning things from books. For example I have some multi-author books with one or two seriously useful articles in, and I am trying out digitising these so that I can take them with me to libraries. So far it's working well. So if possible in future I will borrow books or journals and copy the article I want straight on to my computer, and the portable scanner can live in my suitcase when I travel. Now I know that the UL photocopiers will now, theoretically, scan things for you and e-mail them to you for 8p (!) an image, but when I tried it it charged me for a whole article and only sent me the first page. Meaning I had to go back to the library and find the journal again, etc. I might give this another go sometime though, for things I can't borrow.
5. Image and text
I didn't originally OCR my scans. This was because at work I used to have access to the full copy of Adobe Acrobat, which would OCR pdfs for you, but very very slowly, without much accuracy, and with a large augmentation to the storage size of the file, so I wrote it off as a concept. However, I have recently got hold of ABBY Finereader 10 and it is very fine indeed. It even OCRs in Latin. If I run pdfs through it which I scanned in from photocopies of open books, so that they have two pages side by side on a landscape sheet of A4, it automatically splits these into two separate pages and rotates them before doing the OCR. It's also possible to scan straight into Finereader; it does a lot of image processing though, and I think it's quicker to give it pdfs which it doesn't feel the need to tidy up so much.
6. Managing PDFs.
The point of having a computer-read text is to be able to search it. Of course the OCR isn't perfect (though it's very good) and I'm not wasting time making it perfect, so searches have to be reasonably fuzzy. It's at this point that I'm still experimenting. I can set Windows' own indexing facility to include pdfs (using the pdf iFilter which comes with Windows 7 at least) and then I can look for, say, "Harley" in all pdfs in a folder, and it returns a list of matches. However, it doesn't give me context -- it would be useful to have the several words before and after, especially since I am probably most interested in the number that follows Harley. Or I can use the "search all in folder" option in Adobe Reader 9, which I think will be useful. Ideally I'd like to produce a concordance file, but concordance software seems on the whole to need .txt files. If I could find a good piece of software that allowed me to insert my own index tags in pdfs and then produce an index across many pdf files I would have a go at making manuscript indexes for myself. These would be very very useful. I have manually indexed important articles in the past, and it's tedious work, but wonderful to have later.
7. Backing up.
I had a hard drive fail only the other day, but my complex backup system meant that I didn't lose any data. Get at least one large external hard drive and set things backing up when you go to bed. I use BounceBack to do system backups and Allway Sync to do basic synchronisations of data. (BounceBack came free on an external hard drive I bought; it's sometimes worth paying attention to the software that comes bundled with hardware.) Allway Sync lets you choose whether or not things deleted from the source folder get deleted from the backup folder, so I back my external hard drive up twice, once in each way to different hard drives. If I accidentally delete something I can retrieve it from the comprehensive backup, but if I were to lose the whole drive I would get my new copy from the more accurate backup. Of course if I were really paranoid I would have an off-site backup, but I have too much data for an online one.
8. What I'd like to try.
I think I'm going to try taking photos of books and see whether Finereader can OCR them for me. The problem will be camera shake. But ABBYY have a special application for this, Fotoreader, which is what gave me the idea it might be worth trying.
9. Maybe in about 10 years' time.
My graphics tablet has amazing handwriting recognition. I found I could write more or less normally and it would OCR what I had written. So the next thing will be something I can run my handwritten MS notes through which will OCR them and make them searchable. Not possible now I think, but technology might well head that way. So at present I can't search my manuscript notes, which would be a useful thing to be able to do. I have two workarounds for this: the first is Onenote. I switched to Onenote a couple of years ago and now I absolutely depend on it for all my work and home organisation and everything, and will never be able to leave it. It replaces those lever arch files I used to have which organised notes for a particular project. When I find something in a manuscript which I don't need at the moment but think I might want to find again one day I make a note in Onenote. For example the other day I saw an interesting form of quire signature which reminded me of something in a Trinity MS, and because I made a quick note in Onenote I can find it immediately by searching on "quire" and tell you now that it was in an 8th-century Merovingian manuscript in the Vatican. I'm not going to go into the excellences of Onenote now; but I find it very useful for many things, and it's now the core of how I work. My second workaround is old school: I have a little address book, the sort with alphabetical tabs but no actual text printed in it, and I copy interesting letterforms into it. One day I'll work out how to migrate it to my computer, but at the moment I just carry that around. It's useful to consult but easy to leave it home accidentally.
10. If I were a proper geek.
There are instructables and such online for making your own book scanner, from complex ones to more basic but clever designs. It would be a lot quicker, and a bit better for the book, than using a flat-bed scanner or photocopier, and quicker and more accurate than the basic camera method. But I don't have the oomph to make one, and even if I did it would be a bit expensive. You can get a proper professional set up for about 1500 dollars, plus the cost of a good camera, and I think more and more libraries are investing in them. Then they digitise books which are in demand for undergraduates. I have no idea what the copyright implications of that are. (For myself I'm not digitising anything I'm not allowed to photocopy, so I don't think it's an issue for me.) I saw the scanner at Stanford when I went out, one of the ones which works for google books, but it's huge, the size of a room, and we've all seen how patchy its results are.
Of course some parts of this have taken me quite a bit of time, but I am prone to intense but short-lived enthusiasms, and got most of it done while watching TV I was probably going to watch anyway. Now it seems easier to me to scan something in than to file it. And the wierd thing is that my pdf library is only just over 9Gb in size, e.g. tiny. (My manuscript notes library is 155Gb but then it has a lot of images in.)
Wednesday, 24 March 2010
Uncanny voices
This is my blog, and I'll fill it with embedded YouTube videos if I want to. In more news from the internet of the recent past, here is a recentish Hot Chip video. Now, I was feeling a bit, as it were, "over" Hot Chip, but I've decided I like them again on the strength of this. Well done Peter Serafinowicz! It does exactly what a video should do: make you listen to the song enough that you get to like it; and draw out some quality of the song that you would have liked anyway. (In this case, the uncanniness of the man's voice.) It's a bit like the way that good literary criticism leaves you with a greater appreciation of the work itself. I never got Antony and Cleopatra when we did it for A-level until I read an excellent essay saying it was all about gaps in communication, but ever since then I've actually been quite fond of it as a play. (I think that's why I don't like a lot of Theory-style criticism much, because it adds too much. It's like if someone said, Look at that tree! and then pointed out to you some of the beautiful things about the tree, you could look at the tree and enjoy those things which you might not have noticed immediately; whereas lots of modern criticism is more about painting the tree in bright colours and hanging exciting things off its branches, and yes the result looks great and very interesting, but I'm more interested in the tree itself, and frankly I think you're a bit wierd.)
And in news from my ipod's shuffle facility, here is one of my favourite Handel arias. My version is sung by Sarah Connolly, who is truly brilliant, and takes it a bit more slowly, which I think suits it better; but there's nothing so uncanny as a counter-tenor's voice. (Myself I'm still croaking from my endless sore throat *sigh of self-pity*.)
And in news from my ipod's shuffle facility, here is one of my favourite Handel arias. My version is sung by Sarah Connolly, who is truly brilliant, and takes it a bit more slowly, which I think suits it better; but there's nothing so uncanny as a counter-tenor's voice. (Myself I'm still croaking from my endless sore throat *sigh of self-pity*.)
Tuesday, 23 March 2010
It continues
New annoyances: thousand-pound council tax bill for a place I no longer live, necessitating lots of repeat phone calls to people who are terribly nice but say everything's fixed when it turns out later that it isn't; I can't find my copy of Bishop's English Caroline Minuscule (once owned by Clemoes); I still have a horrible sore throat and the only pastilles which help are foul; and frankly being involved in the castration of sweet little alpacas is revolting. Darcy the alpaca is very annoyed with us, and is taking it out on Glenfiddich, who is a bit more phlegmatic about the whole thing.
Continuing my catch-up with the internet of a fortnight ago, here is an excellent Sophie Ellis Bextor song which was new that recently:
And this excellent drawing blog has a guide to making perfect sauerkraut. Don't forget to put the wine in its place.
Continuing my catch-up with the internet of a fortnight ago, here is an excellent Sophie Ellis Bextor song which was new that recently:
And this excellent drawing blog has a guide to making perfect sauerkraut. Don't forget to put the wine in its place.
Sunday, 21 March 2010
Stuff
Well to add to the pile of life aggravations I now have a hard drive failure, a bad cold that's still going strong after three weeks, and failing to get a job I really wanted. Also an impending operation on my lovely rat Audrey. And tomorrow I get to help a vet castrate alpacas, which I'm not sure is going to be fun. I'm so far behind with my google reader subscriptions that it has just said "1000+" for ages. But while making vague attempts to break the 1000 barrier I was quite pleased to see this explanation of how Mega Shark can take out an aeroplane. Also I hadn't seen the clip before, and it is great:
I suspect that Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus is one of those films that's better in clips.
Another good thing:
But otherwise this season of Skins has been rubbish. It used to be funny; the bits with Josie Long in were fantastic. Also it was quite clever. But the last two series have just been full of Issues.
And I really like this xkcd about the Collatz Conjecture, which I hadn't heard of before. But it disconcerts me that it's called a conjecture; at first glance it seems like the sort of thing they used to make one try to prove for the British Maths Olympiad. I would get out a pencil and try except that I've forgotten all that stuff now, and I was never one of those who were brilliant at it.
Edit: this wikipedia entry on it shows that it really is a conjecture. It's always odd when things which are really easy to state aren't provable.
I suspect that Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus is one of those films that's better in clips.
Another good thing:
But otherwise this season of Skins has been rubbish. It used to be funny; the bits with Josie Long in were fantastic. Also it was quite clever. But the last two series have just been full of Issues.
And I really like this xkcd about the Collatz Conjecture, which I hadn't heard of before. But it disconcerts me that it's called a conjecture; at first glance it seems like the sort of thing they used to make one try to prove for the British Maths Olympiad. I would get out a pencil and try except that I've forgotten all that stuff now, and I was never one of those who were brilliant at it.
Edit: this wikipedia entry on it shows that it really is a conjecture. It's always odd when things which are really easy to state aren't provable.
Friday, 12 March 2010
Smashing things up
Lots of life has been happening to me all at once recently -- not anything excessively dramatic, just lots of travel and deadlines and problems, all topped off with the worst cold I have had in ages and a large sprinkling of minor aggravations like the bank losing a cheque I paid in, etc. I have over 700 things to read on my google reader, and have three weeks' worth of Guardian review sections to catch up on, and I keep not being around for Glee on Monday evenings. Once I have shaken off the lurgy and got back into the swing of things maybe I will post something terribly reasoned and insightful on this blog. In the meantime here is another video by OK Go, the people who make excellent videos. (They came up with the treadmill dance routine thing which one sees ripped off all over the place now.)
Saturday, 20 February 2010
Gibbon vs Augustine
I'm still working my way slowly through my Gibbon audiobook, with the occasional half an hour before I go to sleep or an hour on a train journey. The problem is that now it's Lent, and in Lent I like to read something, rather than actually going through the self-discipline of giving something up. This year it's Augustine on the Psalms, after Cassiodorus on the Psalms last year.
Gibbon is renowned for being anti-Christian, and he got into some trouble for parts of his work. When I listened to these bits my first reaction was that he was being surprisingly polite about Christianity -- imputing folly to misinterpretations rather than to anything intrinsic. I suppose his detractors were not very used to hearing people being rude about Christianity, whereas nowadays there's a constant stream of unpleasant and facile jokes made at our expense. Luckily we Christians, Protestants at least, rather like this, even if it is wearing over time, because of the bits that say "Blessed are you when people revile you" (see Matt 5.10-12) -- it makes us feel a little bit less like the pharisees -- most of the time I at least feel terribly like a pharisee. Anyway, Gibbon pays a lot of lip service to Christianity. The way in which he loses my sympathy is with his constant snide comments, which no doubt he could defend as simple quotations of ancient authors -- you get the impression that he felt himself terribly clever to be so rude while still staying within the bounds of what was politely permissible at the time. That sort of mealy-mouthed politeness with underlying jibes is not very likeable.
Gibbon thinks that Christianity came along and spoilt his lovely Roman empire -- not a view widely held by historians today, but it's true that it's not much use everyone having run off to become a monk if you're trying to raise an army. My contrasting opinion is that the Roman Empire took over and did not do much good to lovely Christianity, by making it all patrician. There's an excellent novel by Iain Pears, The Dream of Scipio, which treats this theme very well. (It's also the best novel ever about textual criticism, unless you count Pale Fire.) I also read a very good Peter Brown book about it not long ago.
The last time I read some Augustine it was his On Free Will, in which he writes about this issue in an old-school proper philosophical format, in a dialogue complete with those somewhat odd rather personal exchanges that you come across in the genre. It was very hard work, and several of his logical steps were ones I would have liked to have been the pupil for, and challenged; it really felt like he was making a point as much by the format as by the content. I was reading it at the same time as Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love, which it seemed to me tackled something very similar indeed, but from a hugely different angle. You can't help but warm to Julian, with her vision of the little thing the size of a hazelnut in the palm of her hand, and the revelation that this was all that existed, and that it only continued to exist because God loved it. Behind her visions and plain English speech lie a good deal of learning and sophisticated understanding, and Augustine was certainly very influential on her thought. They tackle the question "Why does God allow sin?" with similar points, but such a different tone. Julian conveys distress tempered by faith and hope, Augustine intellectual curiosity.
Augustine on the Psalms is a very different proposition. Last year when I read Cassiodorus over Lent I made myself targets of so much per day; usually three psalms, but four or five if I could manage it, because Psalm 118 is such a monster (really it's 22 short psalms). I pushed myself hard, and spent most of my daily rat-exercising hour on it. I enjoyed his practical attitude. He expressly says it's meant as a shorter and more accessible version of Augustine's work, and he likes telling us things, and occasionally remarking on how excellent this all is. Augustine on the Psalms is so much longer that I was never able to entertain the idea of reading it all in one Lent. But what has surprised me is that I keep finding it rather moving. He wrote it over thirty years, and some Psalms have more than one section on them; some bits were dictated to secretaries as notes for future reference, some were taught to pupils, while others were preached in churches to a mixed audience. It's some of his most personal material, after the Confessions, obviously; we know that Psalms were hugely important to him from his conversion onwards, and on his deathbed he asked to be left alone to pray the penitential psalms. Where Cassiodorus talks about all the things that one can learn from the Psalms, Augustine adds a significant emotional and spiritual dimension. It's very important for him that the Psalms are a way of exercising the emotions; you pray a Psalm and let it direct your emotions towards better places. Also here he does convey real sadness about damage and sin. I haven't always found it easy to like Augustine in the past, and one could argue that his own problems with lust have had a really strong and quite negative effect on the direction of the church. ("Please could the church get over Augustine's dick?" as one feminist theologian plaintively remarked recently.) But in his Enarrationes in Psalmos he comes across as a real human, and one with a remarkable sense of the inner human being. I think I shall read them slowly, one psalm per day, and carefully, and it won't matter if I never finish them all.
Gibbon is renowned for being anti-Christian, and he got into some trouble for parts of his work. When I listened to these bits my first reaction was that he was being surprisingly polite about Christianity -- imputing folly to misinterpretations rather than to anything intrinsic. I suppose his detractors were not very used to hearing people being rude about Christianity, whereas nowadays there's a constant stream of unpleasant and facile jokes made at our expense. Luckily we Christians, Protestants at least, rather like this, even if it is wearing over time, because of the bits that say "Blessed are you when people revile you" (see Matt 5.10-12) -- it makes us feel a little bit less like the pharisees -- most of the time I at least feel terribly like a pharisee. Anyway, Gibbon pays a lot of lip service to Christianity. The way in which he loses my sympathy is with his constant snide comments, which no doubt he could defend as simple quotations of ancient authors -- you get the impression that he felt himself terribly clever to be so rude while still staying within the bounds of what was politely permissible at the time. That sort of mealy-mouthed politeness with underlying jibes is not very likeable.
Gibbon thinks that Christianity came along and spoilt his lovely Roman empire -- not a view widely held by historians today, but it's true that it's not much use everyone having run off to become a monk if you're trying to raise an army. My contrasting opinion is that the Roman Empire took over and did not do much good to lovely Christianity, by making it all patrician. There's an excellent novel by Iain Pears, The Dream of Scipio, which treats this theme very well. (It's also the best novel ever about textual criticism, unless you count Pale Fire.) I also read a very good Peter Brown book about it not long ago.
The last time I read some Augustine it was his On Free Will, in which he writes about this issue in an old-school proper philosophical format, in a dialogue complete with those somewhat odd rather personal exchanges that you come across in the genre. It was very hard work, and several of his logical steps were ones I would have liked to have been the pupil for, and challenged; it really felt like he was making a point as much by the format as by the content. I was reading it at the same time as Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love, which it seemed to me tackled something very similar indeed, but from a hugely different angle. You can't help but warm to Julian, with her vision of the little thing the size of a hazelnut in the palm of her hand, and the revelation that this was all that existed, and that it only continued to exist because God loved it. Behind her visions and plain English speech lie a good deal of learning and sophisticated understanding, and Augustine was certainly very influential on her thought. They tackle the question "Why does God allow sin?" with similar points, but such a different tone. Julian conveys distress tempered by faith and hope, Augustine intellectual curiosity.
Augustine on the Psalms is a very different proposition. Last year when I read Cassiodorus over Lent I made myself targets of so much per day; usually three psalms, but four or five if I could manage it, because Psalm 118 is such a monster (really it's 22 short psalms). I pushed myself hard, and spent most of my daily rat-exercising hour on it. I enjoyed his practical attitude. He expressly says it's meant as a shorter and more accessible version of Augustine's work, and he likes telling us things, and occasionally remarking on how excellent this all is. Augustine on the Psalms is so much longer that I was never able to entertain the idea of reading it all in one Lent. But what has surprised me is that I keep finding it rather moving. He wrote it over thirty years, and some Psalms have more than one section on them; some bits were dictated to secretaries as notes for future reference, some were taught to pupils, while others were preached in churches to a mixed audience. It's some of his most personal material, after the Confessions, obviously; we know that Psalms were hugely important to him from his conversion onwards, and on his deathbed he asked to be left alone to pray the penitential psalms. Where Cassiodorus talks about all the things that one can learn from the Psalms, Augustine adds a significant emotional and spiritual dimension. It's very important for him that the Psalms are a way of exercising the emotions; you pray a Psalm and let it direct your emotions towards better places. Also here he does convey real sadness about damage and sin. I haven't always found it easy to like Augustine in the past, and one could argue that his own problems with lust have had a really strong and quite negative effect on the direction of the church. ("Please could the church get over Augustine's dick?" as one feminist theologian plaintively remarked recently.) But in his Enarrationes in Psalmos he comes across as a real human, and one with a remarkable sense of the inner human being. I think I shall read them slowly, one psalm per day, and carefully, and it won't matter if I never finish them all.
Friday, 19 February 2010
Things I have been up to
It was absolutely heavenly preparing my paper for the Rome conference, and I was lucky enough to talk in the very first session, which took off the pressure. Of course now I have to write it up for the proceedings, and I'm enjoying that so much that I keep going back to it instead of doing the things I need to do, viz., prepare teaching for Monday and Tuesday in York. This is particularly necessary because on the Monday I want to tell them why provenance is important. I feel very strongly that provenance is important, which is why I decided to add it into the course, but fitting the importance of provenance into a single session is going to challenging. Tuesday is just post-Conquest script in England, so it won't be too hard, but I need to amass lots of examples in a powerpoint.
Anyway, to return in focus at least to Rome, here is the view from my bedroom window in the Domus S. Marthae.
You look across the Piazza S. Marthae to the northern side of the dome of St Peter's. On the left-hand-side of the curve of the dome there's a door with a guard outside it, tiny in that picture because St Peter's is so huge. I was told that this was a way for Vatican residents to enter St Peter's without going through the tourist queues. The guard led me through a narrow dark passageway and opened a door for me, and suddenly I was about ten feet away from a red velvet rope behind which large numbers of people were taking photos with flash going off right at me. It turned out I had come out of a door in the middle of a tomb. Here is a picture I took afterwards from behind the photographing tourists; I emerged from the darkness under the skeleton.
It was very disconcerting and I had to go and sit by the confessional boxes for a while just to try to look spiritual, and like the sort of person who might justifiedly take shortcuts through the Vatican and appear out of renaissance tombs.
In general St Peter's is not to my taste. The first time I ever went to Rome I was rather shocked by it. I was not there as a tourist, but to read a wonderful manuscript in the Vatican Library, so I had just one morning, out of a busy week, set aside for seeing things. I went to visit some catacombs as a contrast. The rows of bare tombs, and the scratched messages of vulgar Latin commemoration like "Vibas in Christo", are far more congenial for a Protestant.
I also found an amazing place to eat, so good that I went back for lunch the day after Fiona took me there for dinner. It's called Antica Taverna, and is at 12 Via di Monte Giardino.
I just made it back to Devon in time for Shrove Tuesday -- which I realised on the plane made my present to my mother of some Trappist-made chocolate spread rather inappropriate, since she always gives up chocolate for Lent. Yesterday I was off again, to London this time, for the Annual John Coffin Palaeography lecture, which was a really excellent paper and well worth the journey. Also I had been invited to the dinner afterwards, which was rather flattering. A certain palaeographer of recently increased fame was there, being his unique self, fun but challenging until you've had enough wine to just go with it. (For a flavour, see his comments on this blog entry.) I haven't been to a dinner with so many toasts in a long long time. My contribution was Humfrey Wanley (1672-1726), who is the closest thing I have to a hero, a cheerful man of remarkable learning. The eminent Professor in question indignantly refused the suggestion of M. R. James -- "I will not toast that over-rated gynophobe!" he said with a high degree of firmness. It occurred to that if, when we revere past scholars, we start to leave out all the over-rated gynophobes we may be in trouble -- I did not say this. But it was really an excellent evening.
Today was the BL, where I was trying to disentangle Jerome from pseudo-Jerome in a manuscript of considerable codicological interest, and Lambeth Palace, where I was looking at a lovely simple Anglo-Saxon Psalter of deceptively sophisticated learning. Then a lamb shashlik with a friend. Then back to Devon for cocoa and rats. Hurray!
Anyway, to return in focus at least to Rome, here is the view from my bedroom window in the Domus S. Marthae.
You look across the Piazza S. Marthae to the northern side of the dome of St Peter's. On the left-hand-side of the curve of the dome there's a door with a guard outside it, tiny in that picture because St Peter's is so huge. I was told that this was a way for Vatican residents to enter St Peter's without going through the tourist queues. The guard led me through a narrow dark passageway and opened a door for me, and suddenly I was about ten feet away from a red velvet rope behind which large numbers of people were taking photos with flash going off right at me. It turned out I had come out of a door in the middle of a tomb. Here is a picture I took afterwards from behind the photographing tourists; I emerged from the darkness under the skeleton.
It was very disconcerting and I had to go and sit by the confessional boxes for a while just to try to look spiritual, and like the sort of person who might justifiedly take shortcuts through the Vatican and appear out of renaissance tombs.
In general St Peter's is not to my taste. The first time I ever went to Rome I was rather shocked by it. I was not there as a tourist, but to read a wonderful manuscript in the Vatican Library, so I had just one morning, out of a busy week, set aside for seeing things. I went to visit some catacombs as a contrast. The rows of bare tombs, and the scratched messages of vulgar Latin commemoration like "Vibas in Christo", are far more congenial for a Protestant.
I also found an amazing place to eat, so good that I went back for lunch the day after Fiona took me there for dinner. It's called Antica Taverna, and is at 12 Via di Monte Giardino.
I just made it back to Devon in time for Shrove Tuesday -- which I realised on the plane made my present to my mother of some Trappist-made chocolate spread rather inappropriate, since she always gives up chocolate for Lent. Yesterday I was off again, to London this time, for the Annual John Coffin Palaeography lecture, which was a really excellent paper and well worth the journey. Also I had been invited to the dinner afterwards, which was rather flattering. A certain palaeographer of recently increased fame was there, being his unique self, fun but challenging until you've had enough wine to just go with it. (For a flavour, see his comments on this blog entry.) I haven't been to a dinner with so many toasts in a long long time. My contribution was Humfrey Wanley (1672-1726), who is the closest thing I have to a hero, a cheerful man of remarkable learning. The eminent Professor in question indignantly refused the suggestion of M. R. James -- "I will not toast that over-rated gynophobe!" he said with a high degree of firmness. It occurred to that if, when we revere past scholars, we start to leave out all the over-rated gynophobes we may be in trouble -- I did not say this. But it was really an excellent evening.
Today was the BL, where I was trying to disentangle Jerome from pseudo-Jerome in a manuscript of considerable codicological interest, and Lambeth Palace, where I was looking at a lovely simple Anglo-Saxon Psalter of deceptively sophisticated learning. Then a lamb shashlik with a friend. Then back to Devon for cocoa and rats. Hurray!
Friday, 12 February 2010
Various -ographies
I am at a glossography conference in Rome. It's one of the best conferences I've been to in ages, but is also very exhausting. Favourite moments so far:
1. Flying out on easyjet from Bristol I was forced to overhear teenage girls (about 15, 16, obviously thinking themselves very grown up). Some had arrangements with male friends that if they hadn't managed to find anyone to marry by a certain age they would marry each other -- the age in question was 25 years old. Daft puppies. Also they were asking each other if when they were 30 they would rather go out with an 18-year-old or a 50-year-old, and all went for the 18-year-old. Luckily for university professors few women live this principle.
2. On the first night we stayed at a place just like in Father Ted where versions of normal things are intended entirely for priests. This was a priest hotel. Everyone there was a priest, except anyone doing anything practical, who was a nun. The rooms were plain and functional with en-suites -- no hairdryers, but a helpful notice informed us that if we wanted to concelebrate mass we could borrow an amice and purificator from the reception desk.
3. Now we're in the Domus S. Marthae. The view from my window, across a piazza to St Peter's, is spectacular, and every time we go in or out of the Vatican the Swiss Guards salute. This is a lodging house for cardinals when they elect a new pope, and again there is a heavily ecclesiastical clientele. (The reason that we couldn't stay the first night was because of a sudden influx of cardinals.) It's nice and plain in the rooms, without even bad religious art (the first place was full of terribly saccharine madonnas) but downstairs it's really rather lavish and gilded. And everything is carefully adapted to the elderly, as many of the cardinals are not young. Anyway now I know what a cardinal has for breakfast: it's disappointingly like a normal breakfast. There are Coco Pops, and All Bran "Per La Tua Regularità !". But today was Friday so maybe it's a plain breakfast for religious reasons.
4. Wonderful conference moment: southern gentleman from Baton Rouge, plays washboard in a band, short grey beard, intrinsically relaxed, is having a little trouble with his powerpoint. "Clic! Clicca là !" shout lots of Italian women from the audience, at a high pitch of excitement and urgency, and with some degree of contradiction. He stops fiddling with the computer and looks up at his audience. "Do not worry", he says, in his wonderful unshaken drawl, "Everything is going to be alright". And it was alright. I think I need to record him saying it, to keep about me for moments of high stress.
5. Snow in Rome. Unfortunately we couldn't get to the Pantheon to see the snow falling into it. Actually it was a pretty pathetic snowfall, but it made the people from Sicily very happy.
6. I have been at dinner with Big Names, loudly defending palaeography after too much wine. And possibly telling too many anecdotes, and being my usual socially maladjusted self, but I've had just the right amount of wine not to care! Hurray!
1. Flying out on easyjet from Bristol I was forced to overhear teenage girls (about 15, 16, obviously thinking themselves very grown up). Some had arrangements with male friends that if they hadn't managed to find anyone to marry by a certain age they would marry each other -- the age in question was 25 years old. Daft puppies. Also they were asking each other if when they were 30 they would rather go out with an 18-year-old or a 50-year-old, and all went for the 18-year-old. Luckily for university professors few women live this principle.
2. On the first night we stayed at a place just like in Father Ted where versions of normal things are intended entirely for priests. This was a priest hotel. Everyone there was a priest, except anyone doing anything practical, who was a nun. The rooms were plain and functional with en-suites -- no hairdryers, but a helpful notice informed us that if we wanted to concelebrate mass we could borrow an amice and purificator from the reception desk.
3. Now we're in the Domus S. Marthae. The view from my window, across a piazza to St Peter's, is spectacular, and every time we go in or out of the Vatican the Swiss Guards salute. This is a lodging house for cardinals when they elect a new pope, and again there is a heavily ecclesiastical clientele. (The reason that we couldn't stay the first night was because of a sudden influx of cardinals.) It's nice and plain in the rooms, without even bad religious art (the first place was full of terribly saccharine madonnas) but downstairs it's really rather lavish and gilded. And everything is carefully adapted to the elderly, as many of the cardinals are not young. Anyway now I know what a cardinal has for breakfast: it's disappointingly like a normal breakfast. There are Coco Pops, and All Bran "Per La Tua Regularità !". But today was Friday so maybe it's a plain breakfast for religious reasons.
4. Wonderful conference moment: southern gentleman from Baton Rouge, plays washboard in a band, short grey beard, intrinsically relaxed, is having a little trouble with his powerpoint. "Clic! Clicca là !" shout lots of Italian women from the audience, at a high pitch of excitement and urgency, and with some degree of contradiction. He stops fiddling with the computer and looks up at his audience. "Do not worry", he says, in his wonderful unshaken drawl, "Everything is going to be alright". And it was alright. I think I need to record him saying it, to keep about me for moments of high stress.
5. Snow in Rome. Unfortunately we couldn't get to the Pantheon to see the snow falling into it. Actually it was a pretty pathetic snowfall, but it made the people from Sicily very happy.
6. I have been at dinner with Big Names, loudly defending palaeography after too much wine. And possibly telling too many anecdotes, and being my usual socially maladjusted self, but I've had just the right amount of wine not to care! Hurray!
Thursday, 11 February 2010
Strano, ma interessante
Last time I went to Rome it was from Bologna. It struck me then that I preferred Bologna, with its compact centre, its portici so easy for the walker, and its clear and efficient bus system. But I think Rome has reexerted its pull today, through its sheer glorious anythingness. As we walked from the private Catholic university where we are having our conference towards our accommodation in the Vatican we cut through St Peter’s square, where many people were singing Salve regina and holding little candles. Suddenly they all started waving their handkerchiefs like crazy and the pope appeared at a very far window. There was something oddly touching about this tiny tiny figure so high up and far away – though we could see him clearly on a large TV screen down at our level. He said a prayer for the sick, and then blessed us, and the nuns waved and waved.
We managed to find someone who told us what it was about – it was for the sick, she said. Then fireworks started over the southern curve of columns. They went on and on, in inventive forms with multitudinous colours, and huge bangs that reverberated back and forwards across the square. They didn’t stop for a surprisingly long time. I don’t remember when I last saw such a display – it was a good deal more impressive than the several times I have been to the Lord Mayor’s fireworks in London.
One of our party, an American-Italian lexicographer, said her Catholic mother would be absolutely thrilled that she was blessed by the pope (a moment I managed to capture on my camera phone). It occurred to me then that the whole spectacle would most probably have depressed my mother severely. If she were thinking of something to do for the sick then she would start with prayer, but I doubt her next move would be a firework display which I just cannot believe could have come in under several tens of thousands of pounds. Visits would be more her style, helping to take people out, reading letters for blind friends, and talking to the lonely however difficult they may be – these are things which my mother, of whom I am proud, makes an effort to do. And I must say that the papal way did seem odd to me, when we’re so used to fireworks as celebrations – “there’s loads of sick people in the world – let’s make some noise!” Like the pharisees said, the money could have been spent on other things, and as a general rule I couldn't myself take part in the strange exuberances of Roman Catholicism. But it’s still quite joyful to stumble across them unexpectedly at dusk.
The white speck in the window on the top floor, second from the right, is the pope:
Here are some nuns watching fireworks:
We managed to find someone who told us what it was about – it was for the sick, she said. Then fireworks started over the southern curve of columns. They went on and on, in inventive forms with multitudinous colours, and huge bangs that reverberated back and forwards across the square. They didn’t stop for a surprisingly long time. I don’t remember when I last saw such a display – it was a good deal more impressive than the several times I have been to the Lord Mayor’s fireworks in London.
One of our party, an American-Italian lexicographer, said her Catholic mother would be absolutely thrilled that she was blessed by the pope (a moment I managed to capture on my camera phone). It occurred to me then that the whole spectacle would most probably have depressed my mother severely. If she were thinking of something to do for the sick then she would start with prayer, but I doubt her next move would be a firework display which I just cannot believe could have come in under several tens of thousands of pounds. Visits would be more her style, helping to take people out, reading letters for blind friends, and talking to the lonely however difficult they may be – these are things which my mother, of whom I am proud, makes an effort to do. And I must say that the papal way did seem odd to me, when we’re so used to fireworks as celebrations – “there’s loads of sick people in the world – let’s make some noise!” Like the pharisees said, the money could have been spent on other things, and as a general rule I couldn't myself take part in the strange exuberances of Roman Catholicism. But it’s still quite joyful to stumble across them unexpectedly at dusk.
The white speck in the window on the top floor, second from the right, is the pope:
Here are some nuns watching fireworks:
Monday, 1 February 2010
Listening
I don't usually like to listen to audiobooks which I haven't already read. It's not only a snobbery thing, I also don't like to risk investing the listening time in something which I haven't already decided I like. But I've only read some of Gibbon's Decline and Fall -- I had a little six-volume Everyman set which is the only thing I regret getting rid of in my pre-Italy clear out, and I'd only read the first volume of that. I'm now listening to it on audiobook and it's fantastic. It helps that the narrator has a voice like Oliver Postgate, only instead of "Listen! I will tell you the tale of Noggin the Nog, as it was told in the days of old by the men of the Northlands", or "He was just an old saggy cloth cat, baggy and a bit loose at the seams, but Emily loved him", he says things like "Trained from his earliest youth in the exercise of arms, he set too small a value on the life of a citizen, chastised by military execution the slightest offences, and transferred the stern discipline of the camp into the civil administration of the laws", etc etc.
So far I am about 18 hours into the first of three unabridged volumes, each volume about 40 hours in length. Gibbon's beautiful rolling sentences were made to be read aloud by an Englishman of mature years with an understated wry inflection. The only problem with audiobooks is that it's harder to stop and reread something that's particularly good. So far the things that have made me want to go and find out more are 1) the way that Gibbon obviously loathed Galiennus but makes him sound really interesting 2) Zenobia seems pretty interesting too. Gibbon is very sniffy about her not committing suicide. (I hope there are good readable biographies of these people, but I expect not.)
The audiobook is from audible.co.uk, read by Bernard Mayes, who has also done an unabridged City of God, apparently, nearly 48 hours long. I don't think I could face that; you'd be about twenty hours in before he stopped telling you why it's not a good idea to worship Romulus.
Other good audiobooks on audible are: the comedy of Laura Solon; a brilliant unabridged Moonstone with each narrator done by a different actor; and anything with Sue Perkins in.
(Here is the famous Gibbon quote on the younger of the Gordians: "His manners were less pure, but his character was equally amiable with that of his father. Twenty-two acknowledged concubines, and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes, attested the variety of his inclinations, and from the productions which he left behind him, it appears that the former as well as the latter were designed for use rather than ostentation.")
So far I am about 18 hours into the first of three unabridged volumes, each volume about 40 hours in length. Gibbon's beautiful rolling sentences were made to be read aloud by an Englishman of mature years with an understated wry inflection. The only problem with audiobooks is that it's harder to stop and reread something that's particularly good. So far the things that have made me want to go and find out more are 1) the way that Gibbon obviously loathed Galiennus but makes him sound really interesting 2) Zenobia seems pretty interesting too. Gibbon is very sniffy about her not committing suicide. (I hope there are good readable biographies of these people, but I expect not.)
The audiobook is from audible.co.uk, read by Bernard Mayes, who has also done an unabridged City of God, apparently, nearly 48 hours long. I don't think I could face that; you'd be about twenty hours in before he stopped telling you why it's not a good idea to worship Romulus.
Other good audiobooks on audible are: the comedy of Laura Solon; a brilliant unabridged Moonstone with each narrator done by a different actor; and anything with Sue Perkins in.
(Here is the famous Gibbon quote on the younger of the Gordians: "His manners were less pure, but his character was equally amiable with that of his father. Twenty-two acknowledged concubines, and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes, attested the variety of his inclinations, and from the productions which he left behind him, it appears that the former as well as the latter were designed for use rather than ostentation.")
Friday, 29 January 2010
Thursday, 28 January 2010
A literary drunk
In a Life magazine gallery of famous literary drunks and addicts I found this picture.
Raymond Chandler is sprawled into the back of a sofa looking lost and vaguely owlish. More intriguing are the people smiling at each other across him. Apparently the man is Anthony Blond, a publisher, but the identity of the woman isn't recorded. According to his obituary Blond was married at this time to a Charlotte Strachey, a part-time model, and the woman is married, so I hope it's her. I wonder what the smile means -- how drunken this novelist is? They divorced in 1960 after a series of miscarriages and a still-birth. There's something touching about the slight reservation in her smile, and the way her name isn't recorded. It reminds me of a clever novella by Jane Stevenson, included in her Several Deceptions, in which the middle-aged son of famous literary parents inserts, as an Umberto Eco-inspired joke, his drab secretary into the history of their circle by identifying her with anonymous women in famous snap-shots, and becomes powerless to correct the record when she starts to run with the role.
Raymond Chandler is sprawled into the back of a sofa looking lost and vaguely owlish. More intriguing are the people smiling at each other across him. Apparently the man is Anthony Blond, a publisher, but the identity of the woman isn't recorded. According to his obituary Blond was married at this time to a Charlotte Strachey, a part-time model, and the woman is married, so I hope it's her. I wonder what the smile means -- how drunken this novelist is? They divorced in 1960 after a series of miscarriages and a still-birth. There's something touching about the slight reservation in her smile, and the way her name isn't recorded. It reminds me of a clever novella by Jane Stevenson, included in her Several Deceptions, in which the middle-aged son of famous literary parents inserts, as an Umberto Eco-inspired joke, his drab secretary into the history of their circle by identifying her with anonymous women in famous snap-shots, and becomes powerless to correct the record when she starts to run with the role.
Wednesday, 27 January 2010
More good things
Furthermore, here are They Might Be Giants talking about their new Here Comes Science album. I gave their Here Come the 123s to my nephew and god-daughter for Christmas. Little nephew, as soon as it was put on, started bopping in his high chair in an odd but endearing manner. It is very energising and likeable stuff, which I played to my mother in the car while we drove slowly down the M3 in a snow storm in the small hours of the longest night of last year, to help keep her awake. Here's one of the songs:
Plus CuteOverload has a really good picture here, not quite their usual sort of thing.
Yesterday and the day before I spent a total of eleven hours on trains (surprisingly pleasant) and four hours teaching seminars (it's easy to forget how draining teaching is when you haven't done it for a while). It was tiring but I read some very good stuff, and this reminded me that I haven't blogged about books for ages. (I got so far behind that I could never catch up, so I'm just starting again from recent things.) I really enjoyed Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby, who is a very funny writer. I particularly liked the unaggressive but judgemental analyst; perhaps analysts who say the sort of things your mother would say could be quite popular, really. The Children's Book by A. S. Byatt is fantastic; I had to ration it because it was absorbing me while I was meant to be doing other things. I will definitely read it again. It's essentially about the children of Fabians growing up in late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century England. It starts off being about the boys and moves more and more into the fates of the girls, who are just that bit less prominent in their parents' thoughts. There's a very good bit where some of the girls are deciding, in the face of the general indifference of their parents, whether to go to the cocoa-drinking female enclave of Newnham or do the default thing and look around for nice husbands, and they suspect they're going to have to choose between thinking and sex. Both these two books are definitely keepers, and not for the Oxfam pile.
I've also been reading some sci-fi/fantasy. The sci-fi sections of bookshops are very frustrating, because you know there is seriously good stuff there somewhere, but it's very hard to find it. There's not much point looking at covers and blurbs, because those just tell you what some publisher's assistant has guessed you want to hear, but I picked a few things from this list of the last decade's best sci-fi/fantasy because it seemed reasonably intelligent. The Mount by Carol Emshwiller is about a future where aliens with very short weak legs but very effective weapons have crash-landed on Earth, fallen in love with humans as a species, and now breed them as a lovable form of transport. It's not quite a straightforward them-versus-us thing because the aliens, the Hoots, love the humans, and some of the humans really love the Hoots back. Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton transposes Trollope to a world of dragons, and the combination of dragon behaviour like eating the bodies of the dead and hoarding gold with Victorian societal mores is fun and and quite clever. The Alchemy of Stone by Ekaterina Sedia is the most typically sci-fi/fantasy of the three, being set in a another world where you have to learn about different creatures and the ruling structure. The main character is a fragile robot with a porcelain face, whose maker has agreed for her to be emancipated and to earn her own living, but who won't give her the key that winds up her heart. It's quite good but probably the least memorable of the three, though I did enjoy The Secret History of Moscow by the same author. I'm looking forward to doing the same train journeys again in a fortnight, and getting some more reading in.
Plus CuteOverload has a really good picture here, not quite their usual sort of thing.
Yesterday and the day before I spent a total of eleven hours on trains (surprisingly pleasant) and four hours teaching seminars (it's easy to forget how draining teaching is when you haven't done it for a while). It was tiring but I read some very good stuff, and this reminded me that I haven't blogged about books for ages. (I got so far behind that I could never catch up, so I'm just starting again from recent things.) I really enjoyed Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby, who is a very funny writer. I particularly liked the unaggressive but judgemental analyst; perhaps analysts who say the sort of things your mother would say could be quite popular, really. The Children's Book by A. S. Byatt is fantastic; I had to ration it because it was absorbing me while I was meant to be doing other things. I will definitely read it again. It's essentially about the children of Fabians growing up in late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century England. It starts off being about the boys and moves more and more into the fates of the girls, who are just that bit less prominent in their parents' thoughts. There's a very good bit where some of the girls are deciding, in the face of the general indifference of their parents, whether to go to the cocoa-drinking female enclave of Newnham or do the default thing and look around for nice husbands, and they suspect they're going to have to choose between thinking and sex. Both these two books are definitely keepers, and not for the Oxfam pile.
I've also been reading some sci-fi/fantasy. The sci-fi sections of bookshops are very frustrating, because you know there is seriously good stuff there somewhere, but it's very hard to find it. There's not much point looking at covers and blurbs, because those just tell you what some publisher's assistant has guessed you want to hear, but I picked a few things from this list of the last decade's best sci-fi/fantasy because it seemed reasonably intelligent. The Mount by Carol Emshwiller is about a future where aliens with very short weak legs but very effective weapons have crash-landed on Earth, fallen in love with humans as a species, and now breed them as a lovable form of transport. It's not quite a straightforward them-versus-us thing because the aliens, the Hoots, love the humans, and some of the humans really love the Hoots back. Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton transposes Trollope to a world of dragons, and the combination of dragon behaviour like eating the bodies of the dead and hoarding gold with Victorian societal mores is fun and and quite clever. The Alchemy of Stone by Ekaterina Sedia is the most typically sci-fi/fantasy of the three, being set in a another world where you have to learn about different creatures and the ruling structure. The main character is a fragile robot with a porcelain face, whose maker has agreed for her to be emancipated and to earn her own living, but who won't give her the key that winds up her heart. It's quite good but probably the least memorable of the three, though I did enjoy The Secret History of Moscow by the same author. I'm looking forward to doing the same train journeys again in a fortnight, and getting some more reading in.
Thursday, 21 January 2010
There there
After an afternoon of Mandelson-related indigestion (lots of burping) I turn to the internet for its soothing powers. Here are some happy things I found:
1. The bones of an interesting Anglo-Saxon woman may have been found in Germany.
2. If I had an iphone I would definitely buy this app for making pictures of real life look more exciting.
3. The Onion has quite a funny thing on idiot Pat Robertson's comment on Haiti. (If the Haitians made a deal with the devil to get rid of the French then that devil was the French -- the "reparation" they had to pay to leave the French empire has had permanent repercussions, as explained in this bloody depressing Times Online article written months before the earthquake.)
4. Here a curious wild chimp in the Congo pokes a camera with a stick.
5. Here is a seriously freaky Japanese robot: http://www.boingboing.net/2010/01/19/diego-san-a-robot-de.html. The Japanese lead the world in uncanny robots.
6. Did that robot make you think of Lillebror? If it didn't, are you perhaps not familiar with Lars von Trier's amazing supernatural hospital drama comedy Riget? If so you should track it down -- it's by far the best thing he has ever done, by turns hilarious and very frightening. Make sure to get it in a format which includes the spooky introductions:
and von Trier's little talks over the closing credits:
Here is the Swedish doctor Stig Helmer expressing his distaste for Danish exile:
1. The bones of an interesting Anglo-Saxon woman may have been found in Germany.
2. If I had an iphone I would definitely buy this app for making pictures of real life look more exciting.
3. The Onion has quite a funny thing on idiot Pat Robertson's comment on Haiti. (If the Haitians made a deal with the devil to get rid of the French then that devil was the French -- the "reparation" they had to pay to leave the French empire has had permanent repercussions, as explained in this bloody depressing Times Online article written months before the earthquake.)
4. Here a curious wild chimp in the Congo pokes a camera with a stick.
5. Here is a seriously freaky Japanese robot: http://www.boingboing.net/2010/01/19/diego-san-a-robot-de.html. The Japanese lead the world in uncanny robots.
6. Did that robot make you think of Lillebror? If it didn't, are you perhaps not familiar with Lars von Trier's amazing supernatural hospital drama comedy Riget? If so you should track it down -- it's by far the best thing he has ever done, by turns hilarious and very frightening. Make sure to get it in a format which includes the spooky introductions:
and von Trier's little talks over the closing credits:
Here is the Swedish doctor Stig Helmer expressing his distaste for Danish exile:
Hatred is bad for you
There are some obvious truths that it's hard to live out in real life. For example, it's bad for you to hate. Every now and then I find myself disliking someone really really intensely and when I do I try to find a few redeeming characteristics in them, and then just stop thinking about them. People are only people on the whole, and not worth destroying your digestion over.
Recently though my feelings about Peter Mandelson have been really getting away from me. I can literally feel my bile rising every time I think about him or encounter anything he says or does. I'm not going to go into the humanities research debate; my personal situation at the moment is such that I feel simply too close to the whole question. I've always had a feeling that when I get to do research I am extremely lucky, but I'm not sure that that's inconsistent with a suspicion that humanities research is an essential part of civilisation, chiming with something intrinsic to the human condition, etc. With all the gloom of recent humanities pronouncements I am reminded of being at birthday parties when I was small -- there's a sense that the music is stopping and I don't have anywhere to sit. Back then my usual snap response was to feel disdain for the game; so it's really too complex for me to make judgements about the humanities at the moment.
But science! I feel like posting a Youtube video screaming "Leave science alone!". Seriously, leave science alone! The sciences represent pure intellectual curiousity to me, for various reasons. I can count among the scientists I know from my time as a research fellow some very very bright people many of whom share a particular trait which is hard to describe -- a sort of way of looking at the world freshly, of always wanting to know why something happens, which is often coupled with a particular sort of kindness and just a hint of innocence, though not naivety, in relations with people. I'm not describing what I mean well: but if I were to counterpose the engineers from my old college with the historians I might even suppose that these different disciplines produce different characters. I wish I could explain what I mean better; it's almost like the humanities are the Roman Empire in the second century AD, while the sciences are back in the days of the Republic, when Cincinnatus would take on supreme power to beat the state's enemies and then resign the dictatorship and go back happily to his farm.
It's quite possible of course that I am talking complete nonsense.
But I do often wish I were more of a scientist myself. I did double maths and physics at A level, and I often find myself missing the simple elegance of maths. If you make it so that research scientists have to work on questions closely related to immediate profit then you'll hobble them from understanding how the universe works, and understanding how the universe works is important, and can even eventually be extremely profitable. (See this Observer article about how arcane and useless any investigation into lasers appeared to be for a long time.) So why is Britain letting Peter Mandelson anywhere near our beautiful fragile sciences? He's not elected. He doesn't actually know anything. Hasn't he been repeatedly discredited and made to move on? Why's he back again, and how did he get to be even more Teflon than Tony? Why is any of this anything to do with him?
I'm no fan of David Cameron -- very very far from it, he's pretty content-free, and reminds me of that processed cheese that you peel off its plastic backing and put on burgers. But if there's a chance that we can at last shake off the inexplicable leech that is Peter Mandelson then bring on the election. I don't care if it would be like changing one set of wound-bothering flies for another, just get Peter Mandelson away from my consciousness now. I could almost bring myself to vote Tory on this one issue: get this terrible terrible man away from the things I love (universities and the digital world, on which I haven't even touched in this post).
Recently though my feelings about Peter Mandelson have been really getting away from me. I can literally feel my bile rising every time I think about him or encounter anything he says or does. I'm not going to go into the humanities research debate; my personal situation at the moment is such that I feel simply too close to the whole question. I've always had a feeling that when I get to do research I am extremely lucky, but I'm not sure that that's inconsistent with a suspicion that humanities research is an essential part of civilisation, chiming with something intrinsic to the human condition, etc. With all the gloom of recent humanities pronouncements I am reminded of being at birthday parties when I was small -- there's a sense that the music is stopping and I don't have anywhere to sit. Back then my usual snap response was to feel disdain for the game; so it's really too complex for me to make judgements about the humanities at the moment.
But science! I feel like posting a Youtube video screaming "Leave science alone!". Seriously, leave science alone! The sciences represent pure intellectual curiousity to me, for various reasons. I can count among the scientists I know from my time as a research fellow some very very bright people many of whom share a particular trait which is hard to describe -- a sort of way of looking at the world freshly, of always wanting to know why something happens, which is often coupled with a particular sort of kindness and just a hint of innocence, though not naivety, in relations with people. I'm not describing what I mean well: but if I were to counterpose the engineers from my old college with the historians I might even suppose that these different disciplines produce different characters. I wish I could explain what I mean better; it's almost like the humanities are the Roman Empire in the second century AD, while the sciences are back in the days of the Republic, when Cincinnatus would take on supreme power to beat the state's enemies and then resign the dictatorship and go back happily to his farm.
It's quite possible of course that I am talking complete nonsense.
But I do often wish I were more of a scientist myself. I did double maths and physics at A level, and I often find myself missing the simple elegance of maths. If you make it so that research scientists have to work on questions closely related to immediate profit then you'll hobble them from understanding how the universe works, and understanding how the universe works is important, and can even eventually be extremely profitable. (See this Observer article about how arcane and useless any investigation into lasers appeared to be for a long time.) So why is Britain letting Peter Mandelson anywhere near our beautiful fragile sciences? He's not elected. He doesn't actually know anything. Hasn't he been repeatedly discredited and made to move on? Why's he back again, and how did he get to be even more Teflon than Tony? Why is any of this anything to do with him?
I'm no fan of David Cameron -- very very far from it, he's pretty content-free, and reminds me of that processed cheese that you peel off its plastic backing and put on burgers. But if there's a chance that we can at last shake off the inexplicable leech that is Peter Mandelson then bring on the election. I don't care if it would be like changing one set of wound-bothering flies for another, just get Peter Mandelson away from my consciousness now. I could almost bring myself to vote Tory on this one issue: get this terrible terrible man away from the things I love (universities and the digital world, on which I haven't even touched in this post).
Sunday, 10 January 2010
What Britain is Actually Like?
PS to last post: you've got to find it touching that while yesterday (Saturday) most UK towns on trendsmap.com had "curry" as a frequently tweeted word, today (Sunday) both London and Bristol have "roast".
Saturday, 9 January 2010
The interesting inanities of crowds
1. I've finally worked out what Twitter is for. I've tried following people on it, and I've even briefly tried tweeting, but neither of these interested me. What you want to do instead is go to some Twitter analysis tool, for example trendsmap.com which annotates a google world map with tag clouds of words frequently used in tweets from specific areas. Of late in the UK there's been lots of "cancelled", "freezing" and "bothered", but also "nexus" on the day the new Google Nexus was announced. Today most UK cities seem to have something about "curry" and things relating to the football attack in Togo, plus things relating to CBB7. I like that in Newcastle many people's tweets include "@joemcelderry91". Also I have learnt that the yout' these days says "lool" or "loool" or even "looool". I assume that's because of the natural human urge to make words longer -- I did find something that said that lool is for Laughs Outrageously Out Loud, but I suspect that's a false etymology. In New York the kids say "lmaooooo" and seem to be talking a lot about going to "ihop", which google tells me is a pancake restaurant. Anyway now I have found this I want to contribute to this huge largely anonymous cloud of data (but I'm not sure I can quite bring myself to churn out tweets of the necessary dullness for fear that some poor soul actually reads them). It reminds me of one of my favourite Pet Shop Boys songs, a Chris Lowe one about the attractions of being One of the Crowd:
2. Well, I think it's a shame that Adam and Joe are leaving BBC Radio 6 for an unspecified length of time, because they're quite amusing. Here is Adam in his shed:
3. Lady Gaga's next single is going to be Alejandro, which I have embedded before, but which I am embedding again because it's Great.
2. Well, I think it's a shame that Adam and Joe are leaving BBC Radio 6 for an unspecified length of time, because they're quite amusing. Here is Adam in his shed:
3. Lady Gaga's next single is going to be Alejandro, which I have embedded before, but which I am embedding again because it's Great.
Saturday, 2 January 2010
Stuff I have done
I have been doing various things, for example: putting all my stuff into boxes in a van which my dad crashed (very minorly) and had to abandon for a night at the bottom of an icy hill in the back lanes of Devon; trying to find a copy of the Guardian in the countryside, which is truly Telegraph-land; and looking into tax regulations, which is taking a while because I keep getting distracted by coming across things like the rules for declaring income derived from a gravel pit, which send me off into complicated daydreams about how I might acquire and use a gravel pit. Presumably one would need some sort of gravel washing device.
Also I've been playing with small nephew. Small nephew is very excellent indeed. He's just over a year old now, and very cheerful. He loves light switches, turning the pages of books, and crawling out of the living room, into the hall, into the kitchen, and then back into the living room by a different door -- he thinks that's very funny. He likes pretending that a TV remote is a telephone, and the other day he managed to embark on a long-distance phone call to his other grandparents in Germany -- he used the Last Number Redial button and then gurgled at them down the phone for some time before his mother noticed. On the down side I have now got my first small-child-spread cold. He gets quite a few colds because of going to nursery, but he has such a good time there that his mother, who agonised about sending him at first, now feels guilty that she only sends him three days a week. They have a special baby area where they do things like putting them all in swim nappies and then letting them do whole body painting, and he made his parents a Christmas card and a 2010 calendar -- his parents kept finding glitter between his toes at bathtime.
I also got my favourite ever spam message, from someone who wants my details so that he can give me a discount on puppies.
In sorting through some old papers I found this excellent old handout from one of Simon Keynes's Anglo-Saxon History lectures. It's an extract from the index entry for E. A. Freeman from a book by (I'm pretty certain) J. H. Round. Click on it to get it full-size, because it's worth a look.
Also I've been playing with small nephew. Small nephew is very excellent indeed. He's just over a year old now, and very cheerful. He loves light switches, turning the pages of books, and crawling out of the living room, into the hall, into the kitchen, and then back into the living room by a different door -- he thinks that's very funny. He likes pretending that a TV remote is a telephone, and the other day he managed to embark on a long-distance phone call to his other grandparents in Germany -- he used the Last Number Redial button and then gurgled at them down the phone for some time before his mother noticed. On the down side I have now got my first small-child-spread cold. He gets quite a few colds because of going to nursery, but he has such a good time there that his mother, who agonised about sending him at first, now feels guilty that she only sends him three days a week. They have a special baby area where they do things like putting them all in swim nappies and then letting them do whole body painting, and he made his parents a Christmas card and a 2010 calendar -- his parents kept finding glitter between his toes at bathtime.
I also got my favourite ever spam message, from someone who wants my details so that he can give me a discount on puppies.
In sorting through some old papers I found this excellent old handout from one of Simon Keynes's Anglo-Saxon History lectures. It's an extract from the index entry for E. A. Freeman from a book by (I'm pretty certain) J. H. Round. Click on it to get it full-size, because it's worth a look.
Wednesday, 16 December 2009
Joe McElderry may be our only hope
No matter how puppy-dog the eyes of Joe McElderry I wasn't planning to buy the X Factor single, which I didn't even particularly like all those months ago when it was a Miley Cyrus single. However, I have bought it, simply in the hope that I can help keep bloody Rage Against the Machine off the Christmas no. 1 spot. I really really hate Rage Against the Machine; they're a symbol of all the worst tendencies of teenagerhood. Back when I was a youth I remember they had an album cover/t-shirt with a picture of a Tibetan monk setting himself on fire. This used to annoy me hugely; you really can't put someone killing themselves gruesomely in protest against genuine political persecution on a cheap t-shirt and use it to sell music to self-dramatising self-satisfied suburban indie boys as if this made them rebels too, or at least you shouldn't be allowed to, or at least the idiots who wear the thing ought to take a deep breath and get some sort of perspective. It's like when Kula Shaker started wearing swastikas. Idiots.
Not to mention that the Rage Against the Machine thing is all being driven by Facebook, which I also hate. Although it is quite interesting to follow, from the point of view of one who doesn't need to worry about it, the attempts of Facebook to monetise by selling information, and the protests of the Facebookees, and the reactions of Facebook as it withdraws part of what it has just done or puts some small opt-out tick-box somewhere buried in the site's settings. (There are links to info about it from this page: "Is this Facebook's 'Microsoft Moment?'".)
If you too hate 80s rock and Facebook then you could join my 'campaign' and download the Joe McElderry single. It's less than a quid and it's not like you have to listen to it -- I'm certainly not going to. In the meantime here is some different music:
Not to mention that the Rage Against the Machine thing is all being driven by Facebook, which I also hate. Although it is quite interesting to follow, from the point of view of one who doesn't need to worry about it, the attempts of Facebook to monetise by selling information, and the protests of the Facebookees, and the reactions of Facebook as it withdraws part of what it has just done or puts some small opt-out tick-box somewhere buried in the site's settings. (There are links to info about it from this page: "Is this Facebook's 'Microsoft Moment?'".)
If you too hate 80s rock and Facebook then you could join my 'campaign' and download the Joe McElderry single. It's less than a quid and it's not like you have to listen to it -- I'm certainly not going to. In the meantime here is some different music:
Monday, 14 December 2009
Manuscripts and identity
I've been rather saddened recently to see that a little Psalter in Edinburgh which may once have belonged to St Margaret of Scotland is being touted as the Scottish Book of Kells. Now I've never actually managed to see it, but I have got a copy of the facsimile and some high-grade images, and I included it in my Margaret book. It's a cute little thing, only about 130 mm by 85 mm in size and with lots of bright little initials, but calling it the Scottish Book of Kells is a bit like calling Birmingham England's Venice. Birmingham's OK, but Venice is startling, and comparing the two sounds like a joke at England's expense. We, especially the English with our colonial history, ought to take Scotland's early medieval heritage more seriously than that: Scotland's Book of Kells is either irrevocably lost, or it's the Book of Kells -- it's actually quite likely that that manuscript originated on the island of Iona.
On the other hand, although it's a shame if one has to make these sorts of comparisons in order to get people interested, I suppose I shouldn't grouch about it; of course I think this stuff deserves more serious treatment, I've spent years studying it, and I shouldn't turn up my noses at those who haven't. Take something I know a bit about but not much, say the Rosetta stone, and then tell me that some object is the Rosetta Stone for pre-Columban Mayan hieroglyphs or something like that, and my attention will be grabbed even as the experts are finding themselves annoyed at all the ways that it's not like the Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta Stone has become cultural short-hand for a key that unlocks past written cultures, and the Book of Kells has become short-hand for a beautiful book with alien decoration, for "don't underestimate these people just because they lived a long time ago".
The little Psalter in question actually seems to me to have a very interesting significance which has, understandably perhaps, been glossed over by the promotion for the exhibition it's in. The main body of the Psalter is in a beautiful script of the sort written in Ireland and Scotland, a development of the early Insular scripts found in the Book of Kells among others (only it's a minuscule, e.g. lower-case, script, not a majuscule or upper-case one). It has decorated initials for the start of every psalm, made of interlace and beast bodies, and it has lots of little coloured initials at the start of verses. Psalters, especially ones from the Irish world, tended to split the 150 psalms into three sets of 50, and had decorated pages to start the 1st, 51st, and 101st psalms. The first and third of these decorated pages are missing (this is really common in medieval manuscripts) but the second shows a fascinating development. All you can still see of the original is a rectangular frame with interlace corner pieces; the rest has been completely erased and replaced with some English decoration in a Carolingian style, roughly datable to the eleventh century, probably late. And this is why the manuscript is associated with St Margaret; because she is the person who, with the best of motives, was at work in late eleventh-century Scotland making it more English/Continental. St Margaret was married to King Malcolm, or Máel Coluim, i.e. Malcolm Canmore from the end of Macbeth. Malcolm's first wife was a Scandinavian woman called Ingebjorg, and their sons were called Domnall and Donnchad (respectively pronounced Dovnall or Donall and later to become the name Donald, and pronounced Donnakha and later to become Duncan). Malcolm and Margaret's children were called Edward, Edmund, Athelred, Edgar, David, Alexander, Edith and Mary; not one seems to have been given a Gaelic name. The girls were educated in England. When Malcolm, Margaret and Edward all died suddenly within three days of each other, the younger children had to flee from the subsequent anti-English backlash. Consequently David, who later became one of Scotland's greatest kings, grew up at the English court, where his sister Edith/Matilda was queen, and became a vassal of the English king for huge estates in East Anglia before eventually succeeding to the Scottish throne. After that the heir to the Scottish throne was always a vassal of the English king. If you're a die-hard fan of things Gaelic Margaret is not the most positive of figures. This diminishing of Gaelic culture can't be seen as anything other than a terrible shame, even if you find Margaret an endearing figure as I do, and that picture in the little Psalter in Edinburgh provides a very literal symbol of the erasure of almost the whole of something Gaelic to replace it with something blandly English.
On the other hand, although it's a shame if one has to make these sorts of comparisons in order to get people interested, I suppose I shouldn't grouch about it; of course I think this stuff deserves more serious treatment, I've spent years studying it, and I shouldn't turn up my noses at those who haven't. Take something I know a bit about but not much, say the Rosetta stone, and then tell me that some object is the Rosetta Stone for pre-Columban Mayan hieroglyphs or something like that, and my attention will be grabbed even as the experts are finding themselves annoyed at all the ways that it's not like the Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta Stone has become cultural short-hand for a key that unlocks past written cultures, and the Book of Kells has become short-hand for a beautiful book with alien decoration, for "don't underestimate these people just because they lived a long time ago".
The little Psalter in question actually seems to me to have a very interesting significance which has, understandably perhaps, been glossed over by the promotion for the exhibition it's in. The main body of the Psalter is in a beautiful script of the sort written in Ireland and Scotland, a development of the early Insular scripts found in the Book of Kells among others (only it's a minuscule, e.g. lower-case, script, not a majuscule or upper-case one). It has decorated initials for the start of every psalm, made of interlace and beast bodies, and it has lots of little coloured initials at the start of verses. Psalters, especially ones from the Irish world, tended to split the 150 psalms into three sets of 50, and had decorated pages to start the 1st, 51st, and 101st psalms. The first and third of these decorated pages are missing (this is really common in medieval manuscripts) but the second shows a fascinating development. All you can still see of the original is a rectangular frame with interlace corner pieces; the rest has been completely erased and replaced with some English decoration in a Carolingian style, roughly datable to the eleventh century, probably late. And this is why the manuscript is associated with St Margaret; because she is the person who, with the best of motives, was at work in late eleventh-century Scotland making it more English/Continental. St Margaret was married to King Malcolm, or Máel Coluim, i.e. Malcolm Canmore from the end of Macbeth. Malcolm's first wife was a Scandinavian woman called Ingebjorg, and their sons were called Domnall and Donnchad (respectively pronounced Dovnall or Donall and later to become the name Donald, and pronounced Donnakha and later to become Duncan). Malcolm and Margaret's children were called Edward, Edmund, Athelred, Edgar, David, Alexander, Edith and Mary; not one seems to have been given a Gaelic name. The girls were educated in England. When Malcolm, Margaret and Edward all died suddenly within three days of each other, the younger children had to flee from the subsequent anti-English backlash. Consequently David, who later became one of Scotland's greatest kings, grew up at the English court, where his sister Edith/Matilda was queen, and became a vassal of the English king for huge estates in East Anglia before eventually succeeding to the Scottish throne. After that the heir to the Scottish throne was always a vassal of the English king. If you're a die-hard fan of things Gaelic Margaret is not the most positive of figures. This diminishing of Gaelic culture can't be seen as anything other than a terrible shame, even if you find Margaret an endearing figure as I do, and that picture in the little Psalter in Edinburgh provides a very literal symbol of the erasure of almost the whole of something Gaelic to replace it with something blandly English.
Friday, 11 December 2009
Televisual entertainment.
1. I continue to enjoy BBC2's School of Saatchi (subtitle: This is what's wrong with Modern Art). The subtle digs at Saatchi are getting slightly less subtle, which is appealing. In the last episode they had to put some art in a stately home. Saad, who is an egocentric monster but has occasional good ideas, made an installation of 2000 chapattis as a gift to Lady somebody, the chatelaine. He sent one through the post in advance, which by the time she received it had turned into a circle of green and brown mould. I don't know if he was referencing the famous precursor of the Indian mutiny, where Indians used the sending of chapattis as a means of freaking out the British ruling classes, but unfortunately I rather suspect not. Still, the whole thing had very sinister undertones. Also I'm totally expecting that Eugenie, who is very pretty and who has all the judges wondering whether she's a talented artist or a talented chancer, will turn out to be a plant from the Daily Mail. Good stuff.
2. Misfits is entertaining too, in a trashy sort of way.
3. The only other thing I'm watching at the moment is the X Factor, which is one of those things which you don't actually enjoy but find yourself watching anyway. It's only bearable if you follow the various live tweets and the comments on the Guardian's X Factor Live Blog. Of course I want Joe to win, but now that John and Edward are out it's very dull even if the actual quality has improved, and now that Danyl has gone there's no hate figure.
4. All these programs have only one episode to go, which may be for the best.
2. Misfits is entertaining too, in a trashy sort of way.
3. The only other thing I'm watching at the moment is the X Factor, which is one of those things which you don't actually enjoy but find yourself watching anyway. It's only bearable if you follow the various live tweets and the comments on the Guardian's X Factor Live Blog. Of course I want Joe to win, but now that John and Edward are out it's very dull even if the actual quality has improved, and now that Danyl has gone there's no hate figure.
4. All these programs have only one episode to go, which may be for the best.
Saturday, 5 December 2009
Things that are good
I was sitting in the Wren library yesterday looking at one of the most beautiful books in the world, Trinity College MS B.10.4 (214). It has these amazing attenuated gold Rustic Capitals which actually wring my heart. I can't quite work out why; mostly I think of beautiful things being slightly painful because of their transience, like the little sticky leaves in spring, or mist on the fields in the morning. But the Trinity Gospels have survived for a thousand years so far, and will look exactly the same when I'm archaeology. Odd.
Anyway, another sort of good: here are some fantastic Japanese robots. You don't actually need to be that muscly to play ping pong.
Plus this is Alejandro by Lady Gaga, produced by RedOne. I love music where the bass sounds like it's on the other side of a door.
Anyway, another sort of good: here are some fantastic Japanese robots. You don't actually need to be that muscly to play ping pong.
Plus this is Alejandro by Lady Gaga, produced by RedOne. I love music where the bass sounds like it's on the other side of a door.
Tuesday, 24 November 2009
Latin abuse
I'm not quite sure what to make of this accusation of sexual harassment via Catullus quotation. It does seem pretty clear that the "vos" in question was his unspecified enemies, and didn't refer to the woman who got the e-mail. I hope they've got some good expert witnesses in.
Note to bankers: also steer clear of John Wilmot.
Note to bankers: also steer clear of John Wilmot.
Saturday, 21 November 2009
Collingswatch
Matthew Collings is back in School of Saatchi on BBC2 at 9pm on Tuesday [edit: actually Monday, apparently], as one of a panel of judges evaluating the work of new artists. According to the Guide, "Collings in particular is great value explaining the difference between silly tat and actual art".
Thursday, 19 November 2009
Science is cool
It's great that bits of physics are often like things from Sci Fi, but recently it's struck me that bits of prehistoric archaeology are often like things from the genre Fantasy. Take the galloping crocodiles with tusks that used to live in the rivers of the Sahara; or the ancient cold-blooded goat of Majorca, with its tiny brain and eyes.
Saturday, 14 November 2009
Good stuff
1) Matthew Collings is on TV tonight, BBC2 8.30pm. He has a beard now.
2) Amazing Nina Simone voice:
3) I shouldn't really post this nice comment about my Kalendars book here, but then I am un(/self-)employed you know, I'm allowed to be a bit self-indulgent. It's from Richard Pfaff's excellent new history of liturgy.
2) Amazing Nina Simone voice:
3) I shouldn't really post this nice comment about my Kalendars book here, but then I am un(/self-)employed you know, I'm allowed to be a bit self-indulgent. It's from Richard Pfaff's excellent new history of liturgy.
Wednesday, 11 November 2009
Nooooooo!
Firefly was just getting into its stride when it was axed, and something really good was lost. Although the film Serenity cleared up some of the open story lines, we will probably never know quite what was up with Shepherd Book. Now it looks like they're killing Dollhouse too. Geeks obviously don't yet rule the world enough.
W00t!
I've got google wave! Now I can send waves like the people in Firefly.
PS When it crashes you get error messages from the Serenity crew -- it just told me everything's shiny cap'n, which is something Kaylee says. I love the way that geeks run the world now.
PS When it crashes you get error messages from the Serenity crew -- it just told me everything's shiny cap'n, which is something Kaylee says. I love the way that geeks run the world now.
Thursday, 5 November 2009
Christmas hurray!
The Pet Shop Boys are releasing a Christmas EP, which includes their version of My Girl, which is great.
In other Christmas news I need to find a feminist book for my little god-daughter, whose mother is tired of reading things to her like Rumpelstiltskin, where the king threatens the girl with death for three days in a row before finally asking her to marry him, and she accepts with apparent joy; and The Princess and the Pea, where an idiot prince scours the world for a woman so precious that even when rescued from a storm by kind strangers she still complains that her bed is uncomfortable; and the Little Mermaid (not-Disney version) in which she just suffers herself to death by degrees for love of another idiot prince. I certainly don't mean feminist in an anti-men way, just that I want to find her a book where sex isn't portrayed as a woman's economic asset, and where relationships between men and women might be based on equality and mutual respect. It's a different kind of fairy tale.
What I want for Christmas is a beard from the "I made you a beard" etsy shop. When I got to Palestine, where of course most of the wilderness monasteries don't allow women in, I was very disappointed that you couldn't buy false beards like in The Life of Brian.
I think I've posted this before, but anyway here is the Pet Shop Boys' version of My Girl:
In other Christmas news I need to find a feminist book for my little god-daughter, whose mother is tired of reading things to her like Rumpelstiltskin, where the king threatens the girl with death for three days in a row before finally asking her to marry him, and she accepts with apparent joy; and The Princess and the Pea, where an idiot prince scours the world for a woman so precious that even when rescued from a storm by kind strangers she still complains that her bed is uncomfortable; and the Little Mermaid (not-Disney version) in which she just suffers herself to death by degrees for love of another idiot prince. I certainly don't mean feminist in an anti-men way, just that I want to find her a book where sex isn't portrayed as a woman's economic asset, and where relationships between men and women might be based on equality and mutual respect. It's a different kind of fairy tale.
What I want for Christmas is a beard from the "I made you a beard" etsy shop. When I got to Palestine, where of course most of the wilderness monasteries don't allow women in, I was very disappointed that you couldn't buy false beards like in The Life of Brian.
I think I've posted this before, but anyway here is the Pet Shop Boys' version of My Girl:
Thursday, 29 October 2009
Coffee breaks at 10.30
The morning coffee break at 10.30 is one of the best things about a regular hours job. I missed it when I left the Wren, I missed it when I left the BL, and I miss it now I've left the Parker. Luckily both the Wren and the Parker have expressed themselves happy to have me back to visit. So I made some raspberry buns to my great grandma Dean's recipe and took them in to the Parker this morning for a coffee break reunion. I'm putting the instructions below. It's about the only thing I know about my great grandma Dean, although I did meet her a few times before she died. I know that when my grandpa was a boy he wasn't allowed to go to tea if any of his friends invited him, because they were too poor to ask people back in return.
Great Grandma Dean's raspberry buns
Ingredients
1/2 lb self-raising flour
4 oz butter
4 oz caster sugar
1 egg
1 tsp water (optional)
1 tiny pinch salt
Raspberry jam with pips
Instructions
1. Sieve flour and salt
2. Rub in the fat
3. Add the sugar keeping a little back
4. Add the egg
5. If too stiff add water
6. Roll on floured board
7. Cut into 12 pieces
8. Shape each into a rough cup
9. Put 1/2 tsp raspberry jam into centre of each
10. Pinch each closed (with perhaps a little jam showing)
11. Sprinkle with the remaining sugar
12. Cook for 15-20 mins at 180° C
Great Grandma Dean's raspberry buns
Ingredients
1/2 lb self-raising flour
4 oz butter
4 oz caster sugar
1 egg
1 tsp water (optional)
1 tiny pinch salt
Raspberry jam with pips
Instructions
1. Sieve flour and salt
2. Rub in the fat
3. Add the sugar keeping a little back
4. Add the egg
5. If too stiff add water
6. Roll on floured board
7. Cut into 12 pieces
8. Shape each into a rough cup
9. Put 1/2 tsp raspberry jam into centre of each
10. Pinch each closed (with perhaps a little jam showing)
11. Sprinkle with the remaining sugar
12. Cook for 15-20 mins at 180° C
Wednesday, 28 October 2009
Windows 7: day 2
I've got Windows 7 more or less set up as I want it now, and I've reinstalled almost all the programs I need. I've got the Quick Launch bar back, which is good, because I hated the Mac-dock rip-off taskbar that's supposedly one of Windows 7's features. So far I'm not sure I've noticed that my laptop is any faster, but this is probably just because of the inevitable updates it's constantly downloading -- maybe it will be better once this calms down a little. I do like that items on the taskbar glow in different colours when you hover your mouse over them, which is possibly the most trivial feature ever. There is also a new thing called Libraries, which I think allows you to do the same thing as you could do in Vista with tags, but without frightening the horses with the word "tag" -- tags don't seem to be popular with the public, and google has largely abandoned this terminology in its documents and mail features. I haven't yet played with it. I do hope such tags as I put in in Vista still work; otherwise I will be angry. I wouldn't have bothered to upgrade if Windows 7 hadn't been so cheap, and what I really want from it is quicker bootup times and less seizing up to do unspecified things which it thinks are more important than my work. So it will probably take a while to work out if it is doing what I wanted it for. But if you upgraded to it from XP it would probably seem pretty shiny.
In other news: you've got to love autotune. Go Timbaland!
In other news: you've got to love autotune. Go Timbaland!
Tuesday, 27 October 2009
Best 79p I've spent all week
The Miley Cyrus single is finally out on itunes. It's an excellent pop thing about the mood-changing power of pop music.
Newton
1. Someone is supposed once to have said to Newton that it was understandable that people used to think that the sun revolved round the earth, because that's what it looks like. To which Newton is said to have replied, What did they suppose it would look like if the earth revolved around the sun? One of the excellent things about my Ph.D. supervisor, who taught me palaeography as an undergraduate, is that he has a similar attitude. If something looks like it's from a particular place and time, he still asks the question of how it would look different if it were from somewhere else. I think that Anglo-Saxon art history has suffered from not having people who ask those sort of questions. Most late Anglo-Saxon gospel-books are dated to circa 1020 because one particular gospel-book can be dated to around that time; but people might have made gospel-books in the 1030s to 1060s too.
2. Windows 7 is annoying me. On the one hand installing it was pretty easy. Because I was upgrading from Vista Home to 7 Pro it couldn't do an install on top of what I already had, but it did leave intact all my files and folders that weren't part of the Windows system -- so I had to restore the My Pictures folder from a backup, but not all my other important folders. But I dislike intensely the taskbar, and it's taking ages to sort it out.
2. Windows 7 is annoying me. On the one hand installing it was pretty easy. Because I was upgrading from Vista Home to 7 Pro it couldn't do an install on top of what I already had, but it did leave intact all my files and folders that weren't part of the Windows system -- so I had to restore the My Pictures folder from a backup, but not all my other important folders. But I dislike intensely the taskbar, and it's taking ages to sort it out.
Sunday, 18 October 2009
Absence
I have been away for the best part of a week in a place without internet access or mobile phone reception. This is because I was at an Arvon course on biography writing, at their centre in Totleigh Barton, and they deliberately eschew such things as distractions. But I don't think I will ever again try to do some serious work without an internet connection. I felt badly hamstrung by not being able to check things as I went, like the death date of Queen Anne, or the meaning of the word "desidiousness". Yes the internet has its distractions, and I had 350 items on my google reader list when I got back, but I think that's a matter of the self-control you exercise over it. And I'm sure I would have got more done if I'd been able to use it.
Now I am at my parents', retrieving my rats before heading home again. The TV reception here is decidedly patchy and I can't get any BBC channels. But I am enjoying a glorious feast of internet, and I've got my e-mail inbox down to one.
Now I am at my parents', retrieving my rats before heading home again. The TV reception here is decidedly patchy and I can't get any BBC channels. But I am enjoying a glorious feast of internet, and I've got my e-mail inbox down to one.
Saturday, 17 October 2009
"Science" means knowledge
I do love the way that the line between science and science fiction sometimes buckles under the strain. There's something oddly soothing about the idea that the entire universe is just a holographic projection on the lip of a black hole into which it has already been swallowed. The suggestion that people from the future are trying to stop us from making Higgs Bosons seems a little less original though.
Tuesday, 6 October 2009
Unemployment
Since becoming unemployed last Wednesday I have looked at eight excellent manuscripts, four in Trinity and four in the BL. Some of them had very interesting codicological features, and one was in a dazzlingly beautiful Anglo-Caroline. It has made me very happy, and reminded me of what I do, and, if it's not too pretentious to say it, who I am.
There's a Douglas Adams book where a man goes from not knowing that such a thing as an I Ching calculator exists to owning one in a dizzyingly short amount of time. Adams must have loved the internet. I only very recently became aware that there's such a thing as a Buddha machine, and yet my own arrived in the post this morning. I went and bought batteries for it at lunchtime and now I'm listening to it on headphones. It's a bit like tuning in to alien signals from deep space, probably from a transmitter so far away it's long since stopped broadcasting, in the ruins of the planets of a dead civilisation.
I suppose that a sensible unemployed person would not spend any money on buddha machines. But having left my job on Wednesday last week I am actually back in for four days this week, to write a report about the project website. I have become wierdly disconnected from the whole thing during my two days of freedom, but they are paying me, so I'm giving it a bash.
There's a Douglas Adams book where a man goes from not knowing that such a thing as an I Ching calculator exists to owning one in a dizzyingly short amount of time. Adams must have loved the internet. I only very recently became aware that there's such a thing as a Buddha machine, and yet my own arrived in the post this morning. I went and bought batteries for it at lunchtime and now I'm listening to it on headphones. It's a bit like tuning in to alien signals from deep space, probably from a transmitter so far away it's long since stopped broadcasting, in the ruins of the planets of a dead civilisation.
I suppose that a sensible unemployed person would not spend any money on buddha machines. But having left my job on Wednesday last week I am actually back in for four days this week, to write a report about the project website. I have become wierdly disconnected from the whole thing during my two days of freedom, but they are paying me, so I'm giving it a bash.
Thursday, 1 October 2009
Good TV
I'm not keen on the Wire, or West Wing, or all that serious shouty stuff. I have decided that what I like is TV that at some point makes me say "Coo-ol!" The two syllables indicate amusement, surprise, and respect. I am currently watching the third series of Primeval, which has some particularly horrible things happening to bankers.
Joss Whedon makes good TV. Joss Whedon is great! I've just watched the first series of the Dollhouse, which works better than I was expecting. The premise is that brain-wiped pretty people can be hired for lots of money and programmed to be whatever you want, with a guarantee that they'll be rewiped at the end of the hire time. It's not as sordid as you might think; it's probably true that people would want something more complicated than just sex from that sort of service. Possibly it's all a metaphor for acting. Anyway it reminded me of the terrible waste that was the cancellation of Firefly, which was just hitting its stride when Fox gave up on it on the grounds that Americans aren't interested in people who lose wars. (Pity American veterans.) Here is the theme tune -- I love the bit at the end with the spaceship and the horses.
TV PS The clothes of Sex and the City are terrible. Why were they ever supposed to be good? Isn't real style supposed to be timeless? I'm not a fashionista by a long stretch but I can still hardly look at them.
Joss Whedon makes good TV. Joss Whedon is great! I've just watched the first series of the Dollhouse, which works better than I was expecting. The premise is that brain-wiped pretty people can be hired for lots of money and programmed to be whatever you want, with a guarantee that they'll be rewiped at the end of the hire time. It's not as sordid as you might think; it's probably true that people would want something more complicated than just sex from that sort of service. Possibly it's all a metaphor for acting. Anyway it reminded me of the terrible waste that was the cancellation of Firefly, which was just hitting its stride when Fox gave up on it on the grounds that Americans aren't interested in people who lose wars. (Pity American veterans.) Here is the theme tune -- I love the bit at the end with the spaceship and the horses.
TV PS The clothes of Sex and the City are terrible. Why were they ever supposed to be good? Isn't real style supposed to be timeless? I'm not a fashionista by a long stretch but I can still hardly look at them.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)