Medieval golgotha

This carved skull is part of the "golgotha" preserved in the church at St Andrews Cullompton.  This is the church where my parents go in the evenings -- I sometimes go with them but I usually leave it at one church service per Sunday these days.  The church in the sense of the people is very different from the church in the sense of the building: the former is lively, modern, concerned with spirituality rather than aesthetics; the latter is very old, full of memorials to past generations, truly beautiful in a number of styles which harmonise despite spreading over centuries.  Maybe what they have in common is a presence in the community.  The huge tower of St Andrews can be seen all over Cullompton, and the people of St Andrews do a lot of community work in this rather troubled and shabby mid-Devon town.  I think it's fair to say that I love them both, and it saddens me that the people don't love the building much.  In the evenings they often hold the service in the church hall, so as not to be distracted.

Anyway, maybe some time I'll post properly about the building, which is really very beautiful, but I just thought I'd put up this one striking picture.  It's the middle of a single massive oak trunk, carved in the late middle ages.  In medieval art Golgotha, the place of skulls, was often symbolically represented as the place where Adam's skull was buried, so making a link between humanity's fall and its redemption.  That's Adam's skull there, and you can see the socket where the cross would have gone.  There are also platforms on either side which presumably held statues of Mary and John the evangelist.  The statues are long gone, obviously, but the base remains.  It's held to be a unique survival.  It was placed above the rood screen, apparently, for the congregation to look at.  Now that only the rough ground survives, carved with skulls, pelvises, and other bones, it's quite a morbid object, but when it was entire those skulls would have both emphasised the terrible scene above and been a counterpoint to its meaning.

Another good thing I read last month

Another thing I really enjoyed last month was Henry Chadwick's Life of St Augustine. Because I read it on my kindle I can paste in here a few of the clippings I took as I read.

Augustine was still in process of discovering that ordinary churches are not places where half-educated fools imagine they worship God while the wise men are in a country villa studying oriental mysticism and Plotinus.
Loc. 624-25

But Augustine has no fear of the natural sciences. Rather his fear is of theologians, orthodox in intention, who try to treat the book of Genesis as a source-book for science without realizing the very different purpose of the sacred book. Like Mani, they merely end in writing bad science and bring discredit on their faith. By pursuing science our minds may grasp everything in heaven and earth, but still remain baffled at the problem of human nature and destiny (AO 4. 6. 7-9. 13).
Loc. 964-67

'Educated Christians like myself', he wrote to Simplician (DS 1. 2. 22), 'expect God's grace to prefer people of greater natural ability, higher standards of behaviour, and superior education in the liberal arts. In fact God mocks my expectations.'
Loc. 977-78

He felt it to be a characteristic of Christianity that the basic essentials of its gospel are plain to the simplest mind, yet that its ramifications are of such complexity that a lifetime is nothing like enough to master them, even for the most gifted intelligence (E 137. i. 3).
Loc. 1307-9

Demosthenes once replied to someone asking him the three first principles of oratory that they are first, Delivery, second, Delivery, and third, Delivery. The Christians say the same of Humility (E 118. 3. 22). The incarnation is rejected where it is offensive to that pride to which it is God's answer.
Loc. 1430-32

The Manichees thought the evils of this world too massive to be explicable by the free-will defence. They saw evil in conflicts of interest. They thought Neoplatonic talk about evil as non-being would quickly change if you put a scorpion into the philosopher's hand (an argument which Augustine thinks unfair to the interests of the scorpion, which has its due place in the beauty of a diverse world).
Loc. 1586-88

Let him have the last word: 'I should wish no one to embrace all my teaching except in those matters in which he has seen that I have made no mistake.... I have not followed myself in everything. I think that by God's mercy I have made progress in my writing, but not at all that I have reached perfection.... A man is of good hope if the last day of his life finds him still improving' (DP 21. ss)
Loc. 1772-75

Some good things I've read this month

I thought I'd blog about some of my favourite reads of this month.

1. A Heart So White, by Javier Marías
A very good book, very well crafted, intelligent and humane. It starts with a woman just back from honeymoon who leaves the lunch table, goes into the bathroom, and carefully shoots herself in the heart. It's told from the point of view of the son of the widower from his next marriage, who finds out about these events not long after getting married himself. I've had this on my Amazon wishlist for ages, but was put off a bit because of the immense length of his sentences, which goes to show that Amazon's Look Inside feature is not always helpful. But I quickly got used to the style, and I think now I will read everything else he has ever written.

2. Hint Fiction: an Anthology of Stories in 25 Words or Fewer, ed. Robert Swartwood
Some of these ultra-short stories are very good indeed. They should be the captions to paintings. Here's "Shipwrecked" by Bob Thurber:

After we buried the captain, we salvaged the Victrola. It worked, though the mahogany was ruined. Half of us put on dresses. And we danced.

3. Lady into Fox and A Man in the Zoo, by David Garnett
Two novellas. In the first a man's wife suddenly turns into a fox. He's quite upset about it. Apparently David Garnett was with his wife, Ray, in a woodland one day trying to see some fox cubs, and he said that it was no use, that the only way they would see any foxes was if she turned into a fox suddenly, and that this wouldn't surprise him. So she said he should write it. She was an illustrator, and made excellent woodcuts to go with it. Nonetheless he dedicated it to his lover Duncan Grant -- oh those Bloomsburyites. The second story is about a man who moves into a zoo after an argument with his fiancee. It's very good stuff.

4. Moo, by Jane Smiley
A brilliant book set in a mid-western university. It has a huge university-wide cast and short chapters, and is shrewd and funny. A lot of it has to do with grant applications and research funding, but it is far more interesting than that sounds. It's one of those rare books which I enjoyed so much I found myself stopping reading just to feel good that I had so much of it left. (I felt the same about Wolf Hall and The Children's Book.) I love Jane Smiley.

5. The File on H, by Ismail Kadare
I should probably read more Eastern European stuff. This is a novel based on the trip that Alfred B. Lord and his friend Parry made to Yugoslavia in the 1930s to record oral transmission in the wild in the hope that it would shed light on Homer. We looked at this when I was undergraduate because oral vs written transmission is a big deal in Old English literature. This novel moves the events across the mountains to the author's native Albania, where the visitors are suspected of being spies. It's very funny and clever.

Two tabs closed

Russian cossack dancing was a sort of fight dancing.  Here it is with some Run DMC to make the point. 

(Off of Boing Boing).

And someone has been making paper dolls of the Arrested Development people, including Tobias Fünke, the world's first analyst-therapist.

Uffculme revisits its moment of notoriety

Uffculme, the nearest place to us with shops and a Post Office and a bus service that runs more than once a week, was featured on Charlie Brooker's How TV Ruined Your Life, which is quite exciting.  It's right at the beginning, the thing about the explosion in the fireworks factory.  Uffculme is a bit of a nightmare because, of the three roads into it, two are only wide enough for one vehicle at a time.  Consequently you only need two cars to make a traffic jam, but from where we live you have to drive through it to get to the station or the motorway.  It's quite a poor place, and isolated, and I used to laugh at the signs on the lamp-posts saying "Don't do crack!", but actually drug use among the young is a big problem in rural areas where they have nothing to do and no prospects of employment.  There's a big rubbish dump which smells foul when the wind is in the east, and an estate where people throw things through each other's windows in outbursts of neighbour-from-hellishness.  Brooker talks about quaintness, wrongly.

It's a bit depressing because I was all ready to buy into Brooker's thesis that the world isn't as bad as the news makes it sound but actually that was one of Uffculme's more interesting moments.  Amazingly no one was killed and no one was badly hurt, though a lot of houses lost windows and the church roof was damaged.

Rap fail again

Talking to some friends about my difficulty finding a way to start listening to more rap, we briefly discussed what makes music rap.  Today I was looking at the Southampton Psalter in St John's, a wonderful Irish Psalter from the early eleventh century.  It has prayers at the end of each quinquagene.  (A quinquagene is a set of 50 Psalms, each a third of the full Psalter.  I would bet money that few blogs use the word quinquagene as often as this one does.)  Here is the prayer after Psalm 50:

Deus altissime rex angelorum
deus laus omnium elimentorum
deus gloria et exultatio sanctorum
custodi animas seruorum tuorum
qui regnas in secula seculorum, Amen.

Here the one after Psalm 100:

Deus quem exercitus canet angelorum
quemque ecclesiae laudat sanctorum
quem spiritus ymminizat uniuersorum
Misserere obsecro omnium nostrorum tuorum
qui regnas in secula seculorum, Amen.

And after Psalm 150:

Te dominum de caelis laudamus
teque omnium regem regum rogamus
Tibi uni et trino in quem speramus
cum excelsis angelis imnum cantamus
per dominum nostrum, et rl [= et reliqua, i.e. 'and the rest']

In the Middle Ages they liked rhyming Latin, and it's a good language to do it in.  Hurray for Hiberno-Latin!

This also isn't rap, it's a Freemasons remix of a song by Alexis Jordan.  When she says "you'd better have some cake" what does she mean?  Presumably not actually cake?  Only there should be more cake in pop.  I tried googling "cake slang" and according to this page it probably means either money or nice buttocks.

Also a sheep looked at me funny while we were waiting for them to go past

Happy music

Together with Daft Punk's Harder Better Faster Stronger, Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit must be one of the most mashed-up songs.  I love this version here by Go Home Productions which puts it over the top of the Jackson 5's Rockin' Robin and makes it into a chirpy sing-along:

Hello, hello, hello, hello!  It's mindlessly cheering like the Beyonce over Andy Griffiths mash-up by Party Ben:

This was honestly where I ended up when I tried to find internet advice on what rap to listen to.

I'm not wrong...

Some record companies have started making material available to buy as soon as it's available to hear, resolving a problem I blogged about, in my foresighted way, in June 2008. The sagacity I am tooting is rather undercut by the fact that one of the things I was thinking of at the time, when I talked about hearing singles and being frustrated that I couldn't buy them at once, was Lady Gaga's Just Dance, which I had blogged about a few days earlier. I heard it on popjustice, wanted to buy it but couldn't, and worried that I'd never hear anything about her again.  The song wasn't released in the UK until the following January, but somehow something jogged my memory about her existence.

Leaving that detail aside, this new music industry policy basically proves that I must be right about ebooks and DRM.  I stripped the kindle DRM off one of my books the other night just to see if I could.  The method works for other sorts of ebook DRM too.  I can't be bothered to do them all because I'm certainly not going to pass them on and I've got them all backed up, but it's laughably easy.  I did it while watching the Battlestar Galactica mini-series, and the latter was the geekier of the two occupations.  Hear me, publishers, alienating your core fan base with daftly high prices is a really bad idea from the consequences of which DRM is not going to protect you.

Book records

I'm going to try out Library Thing and see if that's a better way to keep track of what I've been reading. I chose it over Goodreads because it's designed for librarians and only has social networking added as an afterthought. I think I need to decide whether it's to record things I've read or things I own. In the meantime here's a review I had already written of something I read in 2010.

1. Exercises in Style, Raymond Queneau
This is the sort of thing which was written to be read by creative writing students and academics who work on literature.  It's the short story of a man who accuses another of jostling him on the bus and is then seen again later talking to a friend about his coat, but rewritten ninety-nine times in different styles.  It's also perhaps an exploration of what it is to be clever, and what it is to be bored.  Lots of people rave about it. It's by one of those writers who lived a writerly life to a greater extent than he actually wrote, and it's just not my sort of thing, as you may be gathering.  On the plus side it wouldn't take you long to read it, and then you'll have read it.  I do quite like being in a state of having read it, so it wasn't a complete waste of time.

Books, DRM, and annoyance

A friend sent me some interesting links on the DRM and ebooks issue.

This article discusses DRM ("It has no impact whatsoever on piracy") and how publishers can use piracy data to good effect. Plus the fact that every pirated download does not equal a lost sale. (In fact, sometimes a pirated download equals an extra sale.) And how publishers frustrating demand leads to piracy. Listen up, Penguin!

Here Paulo Coelho talks about how he mines the data on piracy of his books, and it shows him where the demand is, so that he can get new editions out in particular regions or arrange for translations to be made. Sensible Coelho! (Terrible books though.)

We all pay money all the time for other people's bad behaviour, like the costs of security in supermarkets. But knowing that the DRM that's causing me hassle is nothing at all to people who don't care about such things is plain irritating. It's like if the security people at supermarkets just looked you in the eye as you left and said "have you stolen anything, hmmm?", after a while you'd probably start stealing things just out of annoyance. I pay for DVDs: and then I waste a not insignificant portion of my life sitting through patronising warnings on the DVDs about what would happen if I didn't pay for them. I'm quite fed up with it.

2011 Books Read pt 2

1. Symposium, Muriel Spark
Another excellent Muriel Spark novel.  It's about a dinner party, but thankfully most of it consists of the back stories of the participants rather than the actual dinner party itself.  It's pretty funny, and very well done.  Spark's books aren't heavy, but they have a lot going on beneath the surface.  I think it's a shame that the first I read of hers was The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which I found annoying.








2. Yellow, Janni Visman
I can't remember where I read this raved about -- my mother gave me Amazon vouchers for Christmas and I went on a book-blog-recommendations splurge.  It's well written and I'm quite glad I've read it, though it's not quite my sort of thing.  A lot of books from the point of view of someone with mental illness (in this case agoraphobia) are somewhat heavy handed, but this one has an impressive lightness of touch and doesn't bore you with "difficult childhood yada yada yada" back story.  Even Humbert Humbert had to have his flashback where he told you how he got stuck on fancying youths after an intense non-consummated teenage crush.  (Surely everyone had intense unconsummated teenage crushes?)  So well done for that, Janni Visman.  I will consider reading other books you write.


3.  Leviathan, Scott Westerfeld
I think it's fine for books just to be story, and measured by that criterion this is very very good.  It's about an alternative early twentieth century where Darwin didn't just work out evolution but also got the whole DNA and genetic splicing thing down, which was just too much for some people.  Europe is split between countries which have made huge advances in growing custom animals for particular uses, and countries which eschew that as revolting and instead make sophisticated mechanical devices, taking their inspiration from animals.  When an Archduke is killed in Sarajevo it triggers a continent-wide war between the Darwinists and the Clankers.  The story switches between a British girl who is hoping to become a midshipman on an airship made of a bizarrely-genetically modified flying whale, and the Archduke's son from a morganatic marriage who tries to escape his enemies in a huge two-legged fighting robot.  This is story pure and simple, well-crafted but unlikely to make you think.  I read it when I couldn't get to sleep.


4. The Time of the Ghost, Diana Wynne Jones
Another entertaining non-challenging book for insomniacs.  A girl suddenly finds herself drifting down the road as a ghost.  She can't remember who she is or how she got there but she knows there's something she needs to do.  I think once my god-daughter is old enough quite a few of her presents will be by Diana Wynne Jones.








5.  Moo, Jane Smiley
A brilliant book set in a mid-western university.  It has a huge university-wide cast and short chapters, and is shrewd and funny.  A lot of it has to do with grant applications and research funding, but it is far more interesting than that sounds.  It's one of those rare books which I enjoyed so much I found myself stopping reading just to feel good that I had so much of it left.  (I felt the same about Wolf Hall and The Children's Book.)

Rap: I'm a bit lost

My resolution to find out more about rap is not going well because I don't really know where to start, but here is Sean Diddy Puff Daddy Coombs' next track which I quite like, though the way he says "hi-igh" in the first few lines does epitomise the thing I like least about rap because it swoops vaguely like the tuneless singing in my grandparents' URC church.

One of the Bootie best mash-ups of 2010 is LL Cool J over Come On Eileen, but I guess this isn't really one for the rap purists.  These are great mash-ups (mashes-up?) and they make me smile.  You can listen to a continuous mix of them all via soundcloud, which I've tried to embed below, or download them individually from the proper Bootie site here.
Best Of Bootie 2010 by bootie

I've changed my mind

The more I look into it the more I'm inclined to think that the Kindle pricing issue affecting publishers like Penguin, a.k.a. "agency pricing", is the publishers' fault and just plain stupidity on their part.  The idea is that amazon is just an agent in selling the books, not the actual bookseller, and does not therefore get to set the price.  This is Penguin and the others deciding that they know more about selling books than amazon does.  I can see the agency argument, but they need to set a fixed price for amazon and then let amazon get on with doing what it does best, getting people to give them money.  Especially given that if you sell 100 units for a tenner, but sales go up to 200 when you charge eight quid, in ebook terms you're getting six hundred quid extra for doing nothing at all, whereas for physical books you'd have to take off the costs of producing the extra hundred copies.

(There's VAT, which is another thing that needs sorting, but it's proportional not absolute so it doesn't affect my argument.)

So, although it pains me because I don't have the space, from now on anything that costs more in kindle than in paperback I will buy secondhand.  Get a grip, publishers, why can't you see that ebooks are a good thing for you?

I first heard about Diarmid MacCulloch's History of Christianity because I sat next to its editor or copy editor, I forget which, on the train down to Devon and we got talking.  She told me that Penguin won't take on that sort of book any more unless it has a TV series attached.

I feel such an urge to get hold of a copy, scan it, OCR it, and turn it into a .mobi for my own use.  It wouldn't take me longer than a long afternoon, and I wouldn't even need to chop it up if I dug out the improvised rig I had for digitising copies of my out-of-print academic books.  I probably won't because I like to think of myself as essentially law-abiding, but if mild-mannered me is so provoked by this there must be others who are more enraged.  Don't annoy your fans, Penguin, you need us.  It's like Bieber threatening to cut his hair.

2010 reading continued

1. My Heart Laid Bare, Joyce Carol Oates
This is a very good book, telling the story of a family of conmen, whose younger members live in an isolated place near a swamp and don't know what the others are up to.  But it was a bit disappointing after the glorious insanity of Bellefleur and the other ones of her Gothic novels that I've read.  It fits pretty straightforwardly into the literary fiction mould.








2. How to Read Like a Writer, Francine Prose
This is quite good but it also annoyed me a lot, because most of it seems like the sort of stuff we did in English at school.  GCSE exams papers give you a piece of writing and ask you to pick out adjectives used to describe a character to make him sound negative, and it's offering 5 marks so you pick out 5 different examples, and so on.  Learning how to read closely is a mixed blessing, really.  It's like watching a film and being unable to forget that the actor isn't really the character.  Nicholas Cage, for example, won't eat animals which have undignified sex, and now it's impossible to watch anything he's in without wondering how he tells, and whether he has a list.  A lot of turkeys are produced by AI these days -- is that more or less dignified?  Anyway, Francine Prose interests me because she has a very good reputation, which I'm happy to believe in, but the only book of hers I've read before is Blue Angel, which is a rather tedious leave-your-door-open-while-supervising book about a relationship between a lecturer and a crazy undergraduate.  Maybe I just didn't get it. I haven't seen the Marlene Dietrich film it draws on, but that sounds quite annoying too.


3. Devonshire Folk Tales, Michael Dacre
Interesting folk stories, but not really my style.  I prefer my ghosts deadpan. Haldon Hill on the A38 is haunted apparently, which seems fitting because it is a spooky place to drive especially in snow. I'm sure there was a brilliant story in here about people dancing in trees, but I can't find it now.  Spooky.








4. The Golden Child, Penelope Fitzgerald
This is a very good book indeed, and funny.  It's about an exhibition at a British museum of some very rare artefacts from an oil-rich North African country.  The public queue for hours on end to see the gold-covered mummy of a child and its grave goods, but one of the museum staff starts to worry it's a fake.  He is sent to Russia to talk to one of the world's two experts on the material -- the other is an official at the British museum but elegantly declines to get involved.  Very good stuff, I enjoyed it immensely.








5. Hell's Belles, Paul Magrs


I've searched this blog and it seems that I haven't mentioned Paul Magr's Brenda series before, which is odd. The previous ones are Never the Bride, Something Borrowed and Conjugal Rites. They're set in Whitby among elderly ladies who investigate the wierd things that go on there, inbetween fish suppers and really strong tea. The main character, Brenda, is a B+B owner with a mysterious past. These are very good friendly reading, funny and quite clever. If like me you enjoyed the general funny tone of Jasper Fforde's books but found their clever-clever-ness a bit much on occasion, then these might be more to your taste. I love Jessie the womanzee in the second one.

2011 books

1. The Abbess of Crewe, Muriel Spark
Apparently a satire on Watergate, this novella reminded me more of collegiate life.  It's about a scandal in a nunnery and is very funny. The Abbess, who likes to say the services in Latin despite Vatican II, and sometimes substitutes words of English poetry, has set up a wholescale electronic bugging of almost every part of the nunnery. Sister Felicity has fled with a Jesuit lover and is feeding damaging stories to the papers.







2. The Literary Conference, Cesar Aira
A novella by one of those current South-American authors whom one ought to have read already. It's wierd and very good, and perfect for a novella because it might have tipped over into insufferable at novel length. The protagonist, a writer and translator called Cesar (it's very trendy for people to write versions of themselves into their books, but I'm running out of patience with it a bit) is a mad scientist in his spare time, and has decided to achieve world domination by making endless clones of the novelist Carlos Fuentes. (Another one I haven't read, but probably will now, if only to get a sense of why clones of him would make an invincible army, though I suspect it's really because he's a chum of Aira's.) There are more musings on literary theory than you would expect from this synopsis. It's a good book and I'll probably read more Aira, but only after carefully checking the blurbs.



3. Tamsin, Peter Beagle
I read this entirely out of nostalgia, though I've never read it before. It's one of my favourite plots from my young days: sulky girl, uprooted from her normal life by some family event, goes to live in an old house, and gradually learns more about the fate of a previous young female inhabitant. I am totally going to write one of those myself, one day. This one is amiable and good, and involves ghosts, including boggarts and pookas. Also Judge Jefferys plays a part in it. They still just about remember to hate Judge Jefferys in the south west. He was an utter bastard. My mother's mother's family in Bath were Jefferyses, and they would say "no relation!" until my great great aunt started digging around in the family tree and then stopped abruptly refusing to tell anyone what she had found. So then they worried that maybe they were related to Judge Jefferys. But after her death they found her papers and actually she'd stopped on getting to a lot of people with Jewish names. So that's the 1930s for you. If they really were Jewish I'd love to find out more about them some time. Even in the non-conformist south-west it must have been complex to be that non-conformist.

4. Bad Behavior, Mary Gaitskill
A collection of short stories mostly about New York women's relationships with men and other women.  They're quite well-written but very New York-y, full of hookers and masochists, and somehow terribly late 1980s.  There's a story called Secretary which is presumably the inspiration for the film Secretary.  I'm not sure that I can be bothered to find other stuff she's written though I expect she wrote other things well too.








5. Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico, Javier Marías
Another novella -- I read lots of blogs recommending novellas in December, and the Amazon secondhand orders are now coming in after the snow. I like Marías from the few short things of his which I've read, but I've not yet plucked up the courage to read his novels. I was recommended them some time ago so they've been on my wishlist for ages. This one involves a trip to Mexico with Elvis Presley, which gets complicated when the protagonist has to translate insults in a rough bar.

Apex Magazine

On the theme of small publishers and remembering to buy elsewhere than Amazon, Apex Magazine is great. Each issue has several short stories in (plus some poems which I never read), and they are consistently both good and interesting. It's also dirt cheap at $12 for twelve issues, a year's subscription.

Buy Weightless

When I first got my kindle, at the very end of September I think, books were cheap, usually a bit cheaper than the corresponding paperback. Even though Waterstones has hugely reduced its ebook prices since then, it's still much cheaper to get kindle books from Amazon.

Also, I think that Amazon subsidises the kindle a bit.

Then there was a revolt by publishers, and now quite a lot of kindle books are more expensive than their paperback versions. For example Diarmad MacCulloch's History of Christianity, for the monstrous 1216-page paperback of which I would have to pay just £8.24 (R.R.P. £14.99), now has its kindle price set by the publisher at £11.99. It's probably worth the extra £3.75 not to sprain my wrists, but I object to paying it. Otherwise I would own that book by now, because I really enjoyed his Reformation and it would have been a good meaty Christmas read.

The question is what the publishers are trying to achieve, and that worries me. I'm not one of those people who thinks that publishers don't do much -- they do absolutely tons. I've been involved in basic publishing enterprises and I was lucky to see a lot of the processes that produced my Margaret book, so I know that even the most basic book-production involves huge amounts of work. But clearly the physical production of books, their printing, binding, and trimming, as well as storage and transportation, cost lots of money which is not spent on a digital copy. Furthermore I cannot sell on an ebook. (Amazon.com has just set up a feature whereby you can lend an ebook for a fortnight, but I don't think amazon.co.uk has this yet.) I can't give an ebook to Oxfam or to my nephew. I don't think I'm being unreasonable, therefore, in expecting to pay a bit less for an ebook than a paperback.

So what has gone wrong in that MacCulloch example? Is the problem really with the price of £8.24 for the paperback? I'd love to know how much money Amazon gives the publisher out of that £8.24 and that £11.99. It may be that the publisher wants people to choose the paperback instead of the ebook so that they can then justify their existing business models by saying that people prefer tree books. Also, the Penguin website will sell you the same ebook in an Adobe Digital Editions format for £11.99. (I hate Adobe Digital Editions.) So is it to do with their agreements with Adobe or Sony? Are they just trying to get back to the Net Book Agreement days via the back door? I can't entirely blame the publishers if their fear, in forcing higher prices for kindle books, is not that customers will swap to ebooks but that customers will swap and Amazon will end up with a monopoly. The big difference between a dead tree book and a kindle book is that the kindle book can only be sold through Amazon. It's a fair concern.

This really annoys me for two reasons. Reason 1: Someone out there needs to sort themselves out and rival Amazon. Reason 2: what we, the innocent book-consuming customer, motivated only by our delight in the written word and appreciation of literary culture, are paying extra for is DRM. Without DRM you can read an .epub on a kindle. An .azw kindle file is a .mobi file with Amazon DRM. The complications have entirely to do with the possibility of people ripping things off. Publishers are worried about what's happened to record labels. (Though it's not like there's no music any more, is it? I'm old enough to remember when home taping was killing music. Plus haven't publishers noticed that even itunes has DRM-free stuff now? Hasn't Amazon spotted that it's own MP3s don't have DRM?)

Part of me wants to revolt against the enforced publisher prices on kindle books by buying second-hand instead. But that would probably still be via Amazon, I'm afraid, so it doesn't really work, because I doubt it's just the publishers being stupid here. But there is another option! This is to buy direct from publishers who eschew DRM. This involves lots of different sorts of win: you can buy something which isn't on tables in every bookshop in England; you can support small interesting publishers; and you can buy from anywhere in the world instantly. Yay! Here is the website of Weightless Books. I think they're partly run by the same people as Small Beer Press, which publishes excellent and unusual stuff on the spec-fic/slipstream side of things, as well as Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, an excellent short fiction zine. You can subscribe to it at Weightless Books, as well as to Lightspeed magazine. You can buy excellent stories by Kelly Link, one of my favourite writers around today, and the truly brilliant Carmen Dog and The Mount by Carol Emshwiller are both available too.  Plus at the moment there is a 25% off sale on.  You could buy The Mount for $7.50, less than a fiver.  And you can pay by paypal, which I find very convenient for overseas transactions.  Hurray!

They don't have DRM and theoretically I could copy them for people but I'm not going to and I expect that you wouldn't either, gentle reader. Or if you did you would deserve to go on the International Bell-End Register suggested by popjustice as a possible deterrent for illegal music file-sharers.

(If you're using a kindle you need to pick the .mobi or .prc format, or use .pdf.  Transferring your purchase onto a kindle is very easy. You could a) plug the kindle in and drag the file into the folder labelled Documents or b) e-mail it to yourself at your kindle e-mail address, which you'll find on the Manage Your Kindle page at Amazon -- free for things which are delivered via wi-fi or a small charge if it's delivered via 3G. Pdfs can either be converted or read as pdfs on the kindle.)

More 2010 reading

1. One Billion Days of Earth, Doris Piserchia
Classic Sci-Fi, set long in the future, when humans have become something distant and over-evolved, and earth is split between humanoid descendants of rats and some strange conscious animal hybrids. A thing called Sheen comes out of a crater and goes around loving people and then subsuming them.








2. The Comforters, Muriel Spark
An oddly self-confident girl takes a job at a society for producing autobiographies, and starts enhancing the manuscripts she's given to type up. In the meantime she's writing a novel of her own. Very good. Funny and somehow not conciliatory.








3. A Guide to the Birds of East Africa, Nicholas Drayson
Gentle humour set among middle-aged bird watchers in Nairobi. I lent it to my grandma and she liked it. It's quite Alexander McCall Smith-like but in a good way.









4. Dictionary of the Khazars: a lexicon novel, Milorad Pavic
Odd.  Comes in male and female versions, which have one paragraph different between them.  I bought this at the Waterstone's in Exeter near the Cathedral, which has a great selection of translated and unusual things on a table quite near the front.  I talked to someone there about it, and he said it's harder and harder to keep these things out with good display space, but that actually they sell really well.  Go Exeter!  Anyway, the premise of this book is that it is a dictionary of all that is known about the Khazars, a medieval people who lived somewhere in the region of Transylvania, who decided they needed a religion and invited representatives of the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim religions to a debate so they could decide which one to pick.  The book is split into three sections, each containing all that is known about the people from within each of the three faiths, all of whom claim that they were the ones who persuaded the Khazars.  Also included are dictionary entries on how the information got transmitted.  I really liked this.

5. The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps and The Courage Consort, Michel Faber
Very very good.  Michel Faber can really write.  I hadn't read the Courage Consort before because it sounded too technically musicy, but it's not, and it's very good.  They are both novellas, the first quite a spooky one about an archaeological dig at Whitby Abbey, and the second about a group of singers rehearsing in an isolated house.

Things I read last year

1. Patriotism, Yukio Mishima
This is a Japanese novella. It starts:

On the twenty-eighth of February, 1936 (on the third day, that is, of the February 26 Incident), Lieutenant Shinji Takeyama of the Konoe Transport Battalion -- profoundly disturbed by the knowledge that his closest friends had been with the mutineers from the beginning, and indignant at the imminent prospect of Imperial troops attacking Imperial troops -- took his officer's sword and ceremonially disemboweled himself in the eight-mat room of his private residence in the sixth block of Aobo-cho, in Yotsuya Ward.  His wife, Reiko, followed him, stabbing herself to death.

It's about the lead-up to their deaths, especially the last few hours.  Very good.

2. Cox's Fragmenta
This is a small miscellany of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century newspaper articles taken from scrapbooks made by a man called Cox. The font is a bit annoying -- I don't mind s+t and c+t ligatures, but s+p ligatures are taking it too far. I thought it was interesting that in the eighteenth century people in Birmingham gave up rum and sugar to try to decrease the economic reasons for slavery. Also on the 14th July 1817 the Morning Chronicle had an advert for the exhibition of a Sapient Pig at Charring-cross. It includes a poem that starts "Hail, Toby! truly sapient Pig!".




3. Memento Mori, Muriel Spark
I have suddenly discovered that I love Muriel Spark. This book is about a group of friends in the 70s or 80s. Someone keeps phoning them and saying "Remember you must die". It's a dark comedy. Muriel Spark is an odd one.








4. Rice's Architectural Primer
My brother got me this for Christmas. Hurray for amazon wishlists! It has a lot of pen-and-watercolour diagrams of buildings with features labelled. I now know what crocketing is, and that is good.








5. Nell Gwynne's Scarlet Spy
More Kage Baker. A novella and a short story about Lady Beatrice, a prostitute in an eighteenth-century brothel which is a cover for a spying operation.

Resolutions

In 2011 I am going to try to blog briefly about everything I read.  Now I no longer get to keep all my books (and I'm still finding that a bit painful) I'd like some other way of keeping track of what I have read.  (Plus I would be interested to know how many books I get through -- I've got nearly 60 things in the Finished folder on my Kindle so far.)  I might try to catch up a bit as well, and blog about some things I've read over the last few months.

Also I think I might watch the whole of Battlestar Galactica again.  I like the cylons with their side-to-side red eye lights and Greek-inspired design.  I'm more afraid of the ancient Greeks than of dinosaurs.

I am also going to develop an opinion on East Coast versus West Coast rap.  In a way I've missed that particular question, but I know there's really good rap out there that I'm not hearing.  I've given up on modern art and the theatre, but I think that if I really try to listen to rap properly I'll get something back from it.

Three resolutions is enough.

Dreaming of a green New Year

Hurray, I can see some grass!

Oh how I hate facebook

I had an e-mail today to say Welcome back to Facebook!  And that if I hadn't reactivated my account I should go to facebook help.  Of course it wasn't me who reactivated my account.  So I have just spent half an hour having to reactivate it in order to change the password and then removing all information from it -- the profile picture alone had to be deleted from several different places, and it wouldn't let me delete my name, birthday, or gender.  Just out of curiosity I looked at its page of suggested friends, and became absolutely furious about the accuracy of its predictions.  It has to have had access to my e-mail correspondence in some way to do that.  There's no other way it would suggest I should be friends with Kevin Kiernan, Professor of English at Kentucky, with whom I once shared a conference session and a brief polite argument about manuscript digitisation.  Last time I tried to get rid of facebook you could only deactivate your account, but now you can delete it, so I've set that in motion.  It takes fourteen days.

Possibly my account was hacked.  Christmas is the season for hacking and spamming, I suppose because a lot of bored people have time on their hands.  But if I were facebook I would send that message to all deactivated accounts from time to time, to force them to reactivate and perhaps lure tham back in for monetisation.

I first got a facebook account at the instigation of a friend who wanted to show me something he thought was funny, and which I really didn't, and that's been my whole experience with facebook ever since.  I have never looked at anyone's facebook page without thinking just a little the less of them, which is why it's not for me, because I like to like my friends.  I can't believe how much of my time and patience that website has taken up.

Of course I probably wouldn't be in such a bad mood if the snow had thawed.  It's ten days since it fell and it's pretty much all still there.

Happy Christmas!

The very low temperatures have made the snow go all sparkly in the Christmas sun.  It was cold as predicted on the way to church -- people said that it was minus 12 -- and then when we got there the heating was broken and so we all had to sit shivering in our coats and scarves.  Everything anyone said hung in front of them in a mist, and you could see when people were whispering to each other.  No one had told me in advance that I was doing the reading, but it was OK because it was an excellent shouty one from Isaiah, lovely feet on mountains etc.  At communion (I took off my gloves for it) when the vicar handed out the consecrated bread she also gave each of us a chocolate coin.  I don't know what the liturgical traditionalists would make of this but I thought it was quite nice.

The sermon was all about the BBC's dramatisation of the nativity, which to be honest annoyed me a bit, because I've been avoiding it all week when my parents watch it, and I don't need some Eastenders writer to point out to me that it must all have been very difficult at the time.  From a young age I saw the nativity tale as a horror story and it's taken me a long time to make any peace with it.  My favourite thing anyone's ever said about it was Rowan Williams pointing out that small babies are alien and hard to understand.  The churches round here are great for fellowship and being kind to each other, but not excellent at the sermons.

The people next door have no heating because the oil in their tank has frozen.  But the BBC predicts better weather tomorrow.  In the meantime I'm proud of the university I went to.  I like to think that if anyone had tried to censor my post-grad work my head of department would have written similarly, but oddly enough no one was that outraged by my edition of the Life of St Cuthburga or my analysis of the manuscripts made at Bury St Edmunds in the eleventh or early twelfth century.

Weather forecast

It's predicted to be minus 9 tomorrow morning when we walk to church in the village, but then we did have some actual sun today.  The icicles have got a bit out of hand.  There are some really long ones by the front door, and the wisteria is smothered in them.  It won't take much more to pull the whole structure off the wall, and the ground below is already covered in little shards that look like broken glass.

The hills are back!

I can see the distant hills again!  This has lifted my spirits even though logically it's a bad thing, since it means the fog has lifted, which in turn means that there is slightly less material between us and the infinite depths of cold space, which means low temperatures.  Nonetheless, hurray!

Distant hills!

Otherwise the snow is still here, perhaps a little diminished on some of the gateposts.  My parents have been hunting tracks in the snow.  I'd like to be the sort of person who goes out into the cold to look for animal tracks but I'm the sort of person who stays at home and blogs instead.

Anyway, here's an excellent video of babies bouncing along to German Industrial music (off of Boing Boing).


A friend sent me this, explaining the Dude in the Big Lebowski as a Christian ascetic in the holy fool mode.  I quite like this, but it does beg the question: what about Maude Lebowski?  She sees through her father's pretensions, and devotes herself to her "strongly vaginal" art.

Here's a man who has made suspenders for low-hanging trousers.  If these caught on the world would be a wonderful and surreal place.  Over time trousers become like loose heavy stockings, and pants are recognised as outerwear.

And here are two great Martin Solveig and Dragonette songs (off of popjustice).  There's something about how Martin Solveig looks which only a Frenchman could get away with.

Bored of snow

The snow's not really melting here.  I don't think we've had any more, but the trees and hedges are still loaded with it.

Our trip to Tesco was clearly hubristic.  In my excitement at getting out I had forgotten how horrible supermarkets are just before Christmas, negociating your way past people with two full trollies, searching for bread sauce, while the PA system blares out a ska version of Mary's Boy Child.  On the way back there was a bus stuck in the middle of Uffculme and lots of us had to go in convoy across the back roads.  We got over several humpback bridges and then loads of us got stuck at the bottom of a slope.  We all took it in turns to push each other up the icy hill, which was nervewracking because it was hard to get a grip.  When we got back home someone had pushed their broken-down car across our drive, clearly mistaking it for a place where no one would ever want to go.

Anyway I don't think there's any chance I'll get away again until at least after Christmas.  This isolation ought to make it easy to do work but I just obsessively check the BBC weather forecast.  It's always predicting milder weather for the day after tomorrow.

Still too snowy

There's been no more snow in the night.  With much digging, and pushing, and bickering, my parents and I managed to get both cars out, and they've gone off to try to get the tyres changed.  I know one's not supposed to say I told you so, but I did suggest this three weeks ago, and they pooh-poohed me.  Every now and then I can just see the hills from my window, but mostly it's the same as yesterday, with the ground brighter than the sky.  If all goes well with the tyres we might attempt a Christmas shopping trip to Tesco.  That's excitement for you.

It may be getting on my nerves, but this weather does have some odd beauty to it.  The hedges and trees have big globs of snow in them as if shot from a foam cannon.  You can look straight at the sun, which looks like the moon but slightly lemonier.  And today we have icicles.  The wisteria on the side of our house by the front door has become completely covered in them overnight.  I took this video while they were melting a bit in the sun.  That's stopped now, though.

Wisteria with icicles

The ice has completely covered some of these red stems

Look how thick the ice is round the twig on the left

There are little icicles all through the wisteria

The late 80s were like this

Blimey

From one of those best books of the year lists:

4. Christian Hawkey’s Ventrakl explores ideas of authorship and collaboration through the act of translation. Hawkey didn’t know German when he began translating Georg Trakl’s poems, and so he integrated creative techniques like using using an online translation program, shooting the text with a 12 gauge and translating the perforated page, and leaving pages exposed to the elements for a year before translating what remained. In doing so, Hawkey physically represents (and augments) the inherent degradation of the original text that occurs in translation. Ventrakl is as much a book of poetry as it is a meditation on how the identities of the author and translator merge. The result is haunting and beautiful.

Hello from snowy mid-Devon

On Wednesday I went to Tesco with my mother.  I should have enjoyed it more at the time, because it looks like it was my last outing for quite a while.  Last night there was another six to eight inches of snow, and I think we might count as snowed in.

We did actually go out yesterday evening.  My father has been in China at a conference on biodiversity, not Graun-style whole ecosystems biodiversity but the biodiversity of some particular species or groups of species of shrub.  It's important to have lots of genotypes.  His flight back was diverted from Heathrow to Edinburgh, and he was very lucky to get a flight down to Exeter airport.  However, that meant my mother had to collect him.  I didn't want her to go alone because it was forecast to be minus seven last night, so we loaded the car with shovels, blankets, foodstuffs and grit, and headed off.  It took us twenty minutes to get 200 yards to the pub -- luckily for us our nextdoor neighbours came and helped me push the car over the difficult bits.  Anyway we did eventually get him home, and though we couldn't get the car back in the drive at least we left it out of people's way.  But it made it clear just how unlikely it is that we're going anywhere.  If I got appendicitis I expect I could, eventually, be got to a hospital, but short of that extreme measure I'm stuck here.  And I can't see the hills from my window.

Desk view: note lack of distant hills

Even my dad's bamboo is holding a surprising amount of snow:

Spot the blue tit

Here's the gate to the garden and paddock.

The theme is snow

To photograph this teasel I walked into snow deeper than my wellies.

Snow is heavy

There are also some icicles, which are quite pretty, and which are melting in an encouraging fashion.

Plink

Anyway I'm not going out again without my sunglasses.

Getting hay to alpacas before sunset

It's real Oh-let-me-see-thy-footmarks-and-in-them-plant-mine-own weather out there. My mother says the way to deal with it is to put alpaca fluff or hay in your boots. We got hay round to all the alpacas before the sun got too low, but it's nearly gone now.  The thaw stopped a couple of hours ago, and the snow that's left we're stuck with.  In places which have been shady all day the snow is eight or nine inches deep.

Unfortunately I can't find my proper camera so these pictures are from my mobile phone, and not very good.

This wether is clearly well insulated

They fell on the hay I was carrying as if starved, but actually they still had some left in their shelter

The winterburn is frozen

At the back on the right is baby Jemima

It's going to take ages for my toes to defrost.

The big thaw

I love watching a really big thaw, it reminds me of the end of the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Right now it's only snowing here if you stand underneath the trees. We had about six inches overnight, a proper snow where everything turns white, and now the sun is melting it. It was uncanny at about three in the morning: the moonlight reflected on the snow so that it never got dark, and the light shone in through my curtains all night.

We have an arrangement in the village about newspapers. No one is going to deliver papers around here, not least because none of the streets have names and the houses don't have numbers. But the nearest newsagent drives out every morning with our paper orders, and they get left on a table in the women's loo at the pub. The pub's loos open onto the street -- you have to go out of the pub and a little way down the road to get to them. Everyone picks up their paper in the morning when they walk the dog or whatever. The newsagent politely tucks my Saturday Guardian inside the Daily Telegraph so that my father doesn't have to feel embarrassed carrying it home.

When I got up this morning it was quite clear that none of us were going anywhere, and that the newsagent would not have driven up Cork's Hill with our papers. But just now we got a phonecall from Trevor Underhill, saying he'd taken his tractor down and collected the papers himself. Trevor Underhill is a proper old-style farmer. He's been retired for years, but he can't stop doing farmery things, and he cuts the hedges and brings in people's hay for them. He has a Devon accent as thick as clotted cream, and relatively few teeth.

If we ignore what Thatcher did to the Tories and what Blair did to Labour and think back to older political divides, even though I still think that we have a duty to care for each other because life is too random to assume everyone can make it on their own, I can see the attractions of the Tory way because it's how people live here. If something gets broken or stuck here, the farmers fix it. In the last big freeze one of our outdoor taps broke, and the farmer who has the next field rummaged through his box of random useful bits and pieces until he found just the right fitting to mend it. So next time my mother went to Mole Valley Farmers she bought him a replacement, but it meant the tap was fixed quickly and without fuss. When my parents ordered some concrete and the idiot suppliers sent it in a 32-ton lorry which unsurprisingly got stuck in the field, Trevor bought his tractor down, and called a friend, who called another friend, who called the man with the biggest tractor in the village, and with those four tractors they dislodged it. That sort of pugnacious attitude to problems is probably the only way to keep going as a farmer. You can't be a farmer and expect the government or any sort of central authority to help you out.

I'm going to walk down to the pub now and get my Guardian. Hopefully Trevor has not discriminated but brought them all -- unless he felt that Guardian-readers have no right to profit from acts of private enterprise. Later I'm going to help my mother with alpacas, so I'll try to get some pictures.

A few more things

Amanda Palmer has released an anti-pube-shaving song.  It's quite good.  In a way that's pretty typical of her uniqueness she manages to make a post about it into a story of the best "sorry for your loss" present ever.

Blimey the Graun is good at making pop sound like a dull chore.  I might try out this album, though.

I want to make my own recycled train set but my nephew is too young for it and he's my excuse for this sort of thing.  For his birthday earlier this week I got him a Noah's Ark set, which he loved, and my parents got him a Trunki ride-on suitcase, for which he went absolutely crazy.  He's probably also too young for Bad-Ass Lego Guns.  *sigh*.

Apparently our universe shows signs of being bruised by collisions with other universes.

If you want to join in all the wikileaks fun then then why not put an encrypted version of the cables on a swish USB stick and wear it as jewellery?

I like that this website gets people to recommend the books they've enjoyed most this year whenever those books were released, so you end up with something a bit more interesting than just loads of people recommending Franzen's Freedom.

Get that imposter pug! Get him!

Things I have learnt

The Italians have some odd ideas and we should probably just let them get on with it.


I'll post some alpaca pictures when I can get some good ones.  Here is a story about an alpaca in a hospital.

You can buy maps printed on thin cloth.  I may have some sort of map-buying problem.

Sheep live in hobbit houses.

One of my old students is undergoing discernment to be a vicar.  I think this is quite cool.

I'm a bit sad about the demise of X Magazine, because after the end of the X Factor was when it was going to get good, with less about X Factor contestants and more general pop stuff like Smash Hits.  Alas.

Frost

There was the most beautiful hoar frost while I was in Cambridge, and everything was covered in surprisingly long ice spikes.  Here's Cranmer Road pretending it's in a fairytale, white vans and all.

You could put the far end of Cranmer Road in a fairytale because it does feel a bit shifted from the rest of Cambridge, a degree or two colder and not quite in the same place.  Also the new Parker Library is haunted by inexplicable laptop typing noises.  The old one was haunted by the ghost of when M. R. James got locked in on a winter's night and had to break a pane of glass to attract the porters' attention.

Twitter and TV

I tend to keep an eye on Twitter while I watch the X Factor, and Richard P. Bacon has just expressed the opinion that anyone who enjoyed that Black Eyed Peas performance is a moron.  I enjoyed that performance by the Black Eyed Peas because it's pleasantly silly, and I do have the Dirty Bit song on my ipod to help keep me struggling onwards as I walk through the slush to the UL.  I'm not saying I'm completely the opposite of a moron.  But I will go up against Richard Bacon in a moron-off any day.

Edit: here's the official video.

PS hair whipping

You've probably come across Whip My Hair by Willow Smith.  Forget how old she is, and who her father is, and it's a very good pop song.  Remember those things and it's a bit depressing.  Anyway it's released now.  The video is embedding disabled by request.

If Cowell picks this for the Winner's Song you'll know it's a fix for Cher.

Cantab. misc.

Well, I'm in Cambridge again, on a trip I've had to organise quite carefully to fit in with other things, like a talk I gave on Thursday night in London, which was quite good fun.  Even though it's always a bad time in Cambridge, I accidentally picked a particularly bad time to come up, having failed to notice that it was a) Commemoration of Benefactors b) interviews season.  I'm going to buy a card for the woman who found me a college room despite all this, to thank her and apologise.  At the Commemoration of Benefactors service they read out the names of all the college's benefactors, starting with a brewer called Margery, and then one of the fellows gives a short talk about some aspect of the college's history.  There's a pleasing old-school piety about it, piety in the old Roman sense of remembering the ancestors.  The interviews, on the other hand, are very much of the now.  I get really annoyed whenever I hear people moan about Oxbridge admissions, because I know how much sincere effort is put into it in Cambridge at least.  Almost everyone is completely taken over by it for about a week or more, and there is constant discussion at lunch about how to be fair, and what's the best way to look for potential rather than the effects of past tutoring.  It's really hard work to do, I remember well, because you're dealing with seventeen-year-olds and you want to give them as many opportunities as possible in a short time to show you that they can think.  Now that I haven't done it for a few years I've got a good outside perspective on the vast amounts of effort that everyone puts in.  I had a job interview a while ago at a top UK university, one of the best non-Oxbridge ones, and when I asked how they went about selecting their students from the applications, the head of the department couldn't tell me, and the whole panel talked about it as some dull duty they'd managed cleverly to avoid.  While in Cambridge it's seen as something you'd want to have a say in, an important part of what a university does.

When recently Die Antwoord were "all up in the interweb", as they put it, I didn't pay a lot of attention because so much of the coverage seemed to about the unusual disease which one of the bandmates has.  Plus what are the chances that Boing Boing and I would share a taste in music?  But I quite like this one:

That's the clean version, which has lots of punch and slap noises over the words in an "Uzi lover" style, which I find quite funny.

Although getting the internet in my current room involved moving all the furniture and unscrewing a mystery white box using the end of the squashed penny I got at Bristol zoo with my little nephew (it made me feel like the evil bloke from No Country for Old Men, except that he used unsquashed pennies with no sentimental value), and then buying a cable from the big Tesco's and getting involved in a minor car crash in the taxi on the way back, plus the usual restarting and endless retyping of credit card details, now I've got it working it's so much faster than Devon internet that it feels really luxurious.  I can watch YouTube videos without having to pause and wait for the download to catch up, and I can stream live TV using tvcatchup.com. 

Aso here are some good photographs I saw on the web.  These two large photos of stock exchanges are very striking.  Here's a thing about making real life things look like models.  Here are some good London photos.