But not yet

I read a review of Peter Sarris's new book on the late Antique/early Islamic era. I had some dealings with him when he supervised some of my students a while back, and just by bad luck he had my two most troublesome ones. He was ultra-professional, and I have a lot of respect for him, the sort of respect that's tinged with dauntedness. I don't think he suffers fools gladly, and unfortunately for all four of us the two students I sent him, although both very far from unintelligent, were fools.* The review was by Christopher Kelly, who was a fellow of Corpus while I was a research fellow there, but was for most of that time away on a Major Leverhulme Research Fellowship -- or it may not have been Leverhulme, but I do remember that it was Major. I only met him a couple of times, and he never talked to me. His writing usually seems sensible. The thing that caught my eye particularly was about St Augustine.

It is certainly a relief that readers of this book do not have to share St Augustine's concerns, cried out in desperation to his friend Alypius: 'the uneducated rise up and take heaven by storm, and we, with all our learning, here we are, still wallowing in flesh and blood'. This is an embarrassing outburst from one of the finest minds of antiquity who should have known better. To be fair, Augustine was, as Sarris points out, a saint 'on the brink of a breakdown'.

Now, I may not be understanding this properly because I find it hard to make sense of it. It took me a long time to like Augustine, who was a complex individual. If you asked me to say what it is I now like about him, and why I would genuinely have liked to have known the (later) Augustine, it's for exactly the reason that Kelly is singling out as embarrassing. Augustine was a very clever young man, who excelled in his studies of rhetoric and had a high-flying academic career. It took him a long time, even with his "finest" mind, to realise that learning and intelligence are not enough by themselves to make you a good person -- aren't the criteria for valuableness in a human. And ever since I was quite young this has been one of the things I've loved about Christianity too. As a teenager I used to love that Church was a place that involved lots of studying, lots of close reading and discussing of the Bible, lots of explaining of things in cultural context and in wider terms, but no sense at all that to be intelligent was of itself the best thing to be. Intelligence and understanding were tools to be used towards another goal. I loved I Corinthians 1: "For the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man's strength".** (From the context Paul seems to be talking about God's love leading to his plan for our redemption, foolishness in terms of Jewish theology and weakness in terms of Greek theology.) And this is what I find in Augustine's vast Commentary on the Psalms, written over the course of thirty years. (I've been reading it over Lent for three years now and I'm still only on Psalm 78.) These mingled sermons and lectures are much more endearing than many of his writings in their concern to spread understanding to his congregation. This is the Augustine I'd like to have known, more than the Augustine of the Confessions or The City of God, or On Free Will or any of his more academic pieces, the seasoned bishop who cared about his flock. [Edit: some of the quotations I lifted from Chadwick's Life of Augustine are relevant here.)

So that's my point of view, and it's certainly informed by my faith. But surely it's not just Christians who would think this? Leaving Peter Sarris, fellow of Trinity, out of this on the grounds that the review can't be assumed to express his point of view, Christopher Kelly is a fellow of Corpus Christi. I have a true and unforced respect for the learning of all the fellows there. But you can't spend a lot of time in governing body meetings without realising the limits of academic intelligence. It will really only get you so far. It's not the same thing as wisdom, and it's not the thing that justifies people, not the thing that makes you valuable, useful, important, or whatever it is you think people should be. Does Augustine's realising this really count as "an embarrassing outburst" from someone who "should have known better"? Is Augustine's complex spiritual progress really, in modern eyes, "the brink of a breakdown"? Like most people I often feel profoundly alienated from modern life, but it's heartening when, as in this instance, it's in a good way.

*When I reread this I felt bad about calling those students fools, but they did act very foolishly. They were both of them just 20, though, and I'm sure they have grown wiser over time.

**It goes on like this: "Brothers, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things -- and the things that are not -- to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him. It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God -- that is our righteousness, holiness and redemption. Therefore as it is written: "Let him who boasts boast in the Lord"." [I Cor. 1: 25-31]

Amazingly revolting google project video

I am officially just too old now, and should probably be put out of my misery before I hold the rest of you up. Someone just posted this video on my M.Sc. course's facebook group. Maybe it's theoretically cool but it's also so nauseating I literally want to go ack ack and cough up a hairball:

From now on Buying Tickets for Monsieur Gayno is a euphemism, even if it wasn't before.

Books of March, and format

Nothing I read in March really enthused me. The Help by Kathryn Stockett is quite good, and doesn't deserve the complications of the hype that has grown up around it. Debra Hamel's Mutilation of the Herms is a specialist book for a non-specialist reader -- it's nice to be treated as intelligent. And Maria McCann's The Wilding is worth reading too. I can't think of anyone else who writes historical fiction in which the different attitudes of the past are so well conveyed.

I've been reading a lot on kindle because it's easy to take on the tube or bus, and I've got quite a few unread things on it because of the Kindle Daily Deal and the occasional sales they have. At the moment the truth about ebooks is that I want everything in both formats. I yearn for some shelves I can put books on and just know they're there. It would be really luxurious to have all my favourite books physically present somewhere accessible. I also want them on my kindle so that if I suddenly want to look something up I can do that too.

If you do have a Kindle I would strongly recommend using Calibre to set things up so you're less likely to lose what you've bought through some spasm on Amazon's part. Enough of us trusting them, let's force them to trust us for a change.

Hair

I miss my Cambridge hairdresser. He knew roughly how I like my hair to be cut, and he talked to me interestingly while he did it, and he is a nice person. He cut it with a razor, which made the most amazing "crrrrup" noise, and he would change the CD from jazz to Kraftwerk for me even though I didn't ask. My current policy in haircuts is to buy Groupon vouchers when they come up and use them when I need them. So yesterday I went to a really posh place on High Holborn. They had big screens everywhere with models walking up and down catwalks. I've watched too much reality TV so girls on catwalks make me feel quite sad. When I indicated with a gesture what length I wanted my hair, the hairdresser (or more probably, stylist) said "Really?" as if I had genuinely shocked her. With an obvious (and unsuccessful) attempt to keep her voice neutral she said "Hair that length makes people's faces look rounder -- is that something you would want?" So I told her just to do what she felt like. I remember caring so much about haircuts when I was about fifteen, and every haircut was a terrible emotional rollercoaster because I knew that my unreasonable mother probably wouldn't let me stay in my room for a month or two until my hair grew out. These days I seem to be substantially less invested in my hair style than the person cutting it. And in those stylized surroundings I didn't feel up to explaining that one of the main things I want from a hair cut is for my hair to be shorter so that I don't have to give any money to a hairdresser for a while. Anyway, she did cut it quite nicely at the back, but by drying it straight she amazingly managed to make it look longer than when I'd gone in. Sometimes I worry that I'm not meeting life's most simple challenges.

A groupon haircut voucher has come up for Exeter but it's at a place called "Wag's". So I think I might give that one a miss.

On the plus side I have pre-ordered a Raspberry Pi. And I have found a place which sells dog-poo composting wormeries for my new dog-owning Exeter life when I finally manage to arrange it. So it's not all bad. And here is Lady Gaga's brilliant song about Hair:

I looked at some art

Over the last few days I have looked at some art.

The National Portrait Gallery has revived an exhibition I saw a while ago at Montacute House in Somerset. It consists of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century pictures which were bought as being a particular person, but were then realised not to be that person, and left marooned as anonymous in the storage vaults of an institution that's all to do with the named. They got a few authors to write stories inspired by the pictures, though I didn't actually read those this time. It's the sort of exhibition that's good for the imagination, though it does suffer a little from being on a landing. There's also a little exhibition about Charlotte, Princess of Wales, and her cousin who later became Queen Victoria, and how Charlotte laid the way for Victoria's image.

I also went next door to the National Gallery, where they are showing the Titian Diana and Callisto. I do like the little free exhibitions which the National Gallery does showing one picture, or one main picture with a few related things, just in one room, and with interesting directed captions. In this case the Titian is alone and the room has lots of information about the collection it's from, the subject of the painting, and some translated Ovid. There's also a bench in front of it so you can sit and look at it properly. This is in striking contrast to the over-crowded, over-priced and under-captioned exhibitions which the National Gallery puts on in its basement blockbuster exhibition space.

Somerset House has a "contemporary graphic art fair" called Pick Me Up on in the Embankment Galleries. I'm not quite clear what "graphic art" is as opposed to just "art", but I think it implies lower pretensions, and more interest in the concept of illustration. I really liked some of the stuff there, particularly a watercolour by Rikka Sormunen of a tired woman being hugged by a monster under her bed. I also liked Jon McNaught's wildlife charts, and Paul X. Johnson's Rachael picture. Because I got lost on the way out I stumbled across a free exhibition of art by one of Japan's leading traditional tattooists, which was also good.

Then I went to the late night opening at the V&A. I foolishly took a friend who is not fond of loud crowds; the V&A late nights are very popular. I'm never quite sure what to make of the V&A. Sometimes it seems a bit like the nation's attic, full of high-class tat, and sometimes I stumble across cool things in there. For the late night opening they had a lot of music, and story-telling, etc. They had put a brightly-lit disco ball in one of the big dark sculpture galleries; I was quite enjoying this until I found out it was art. Apparently it was called "Mechanisms of Disorientation: Towards a Fragmented Understanding". According to the bumph, it "reflects on and distorts notions of space and cultural reflexivity. ... Reflecting on past histories vis-a-vis contemporary objects, [the artist] draws a parallel between how we observe history in relation to affairs in contemporary culture". I think that the phrase "I was quite enjoying it until I found out it was art" would probably describe my relationship with modern art in general.

The drought of march

It's surely spring, and even in London the sun is shining on grass, birds are singing, and all that. I'm recovering from the last few weeks, and in the meantime, I think this is brilliant summer pop. I had previously decided that Nicki Minaj is better in other people's songs than her own, but this one is great:

The Most Reverend and Right Honorable Dr

So Rowan Williams gets to stop being Archbishop of Canterbury.  I wonder whether that will free him up to talk more, or whether he will have to be quiet for the sake of his successor?  His talk called The Body's Grace given to a Lesbian and Gay Alliance church back when he was mere Professor Williams is remarkable for taking as its starting point the idea that to think about sexuality you have first to address the question of what it is about sex that matters.  And I do like this aside:

(Incidentally, if this suggests that, in a great many cultural settings, the socially licensed norm of heterosexual intercourse is a "perversion" - well, that is a perfectly serious suggestion.. .)

Requiescat

I've just heard that Ray Page has died. He was Emeritus Elrington and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, the one before the one who was there when I was an undergraduate, and a brilliant scholar of things Norse and Anglo-Saxon, especially runes -- he was the runemeister. He taught people who taught me, but I didn't know him until he was retired. He was also the Librarian of the Parker Library back when this was not a full-time job but something people did as well as being heads of departments, etc. If the two great early modern manuscript librarians were Parker and Cotton, Ray Page lived up to the Parkerian rather than Cottonian attitude, with a bias towards not letting people handle the manuscripts... Consequently he was not loved by art-historians. He was the man behind the setting up of the Conservation Studio at Corpus -- his concern was always for the manuscripts' survival more than for the vanity of scholars.

But I'll mostly remember him as tremendously good company. I first met him properly soon after I finished my PhD. I was working at the Wren Library putting some scanned manuscript-catalogue text into XML, and finishing off a book on calendars. One of my calendar-manuscripts had a runic inscription in it, and in some trepidation I wrote to Professor Page, asking him for his help. At this point all I really knew about him was his reputation as a scary beer-monster -- there were hard drinkers among our lecturers, one in particular, but even he prepared himself seriously for a drinking session with Ray Page. Ray wrote back pointing me at a French publication which dealt with the runic inscription in question (a bizarre invocation of Thor to deal with blood-pus demons, not at all the sort of text you'd expect to find at the monastery of Christ Church Canterbury in the late eleventh century). He also invited me to dine with him at Corpus Christi.

Occasionally Corpus has wine-tastings before the evening meal, and this was one of those times. We tasted 16 wines before dinner. After dinner we went to Combination. When the port came round I poured myself a glass with perhaps a centimetre of clear air at the top. "Half a glass, half a glass", Ray growled at me, explaining that it wasn't really a full glass until you could see the miniscus protruding slightly above the rim. (I noticed later that although his hands sometimes shook a little with age, this did not affect him when raising a full glass of port to his mouth -- then they were rock-steady.) I had three glasses of port. Good port is so delicious, and so different from bad port, and I've only ever drunk good port after Cambridge dinners.

(Also on this occasion I met a man called Geoffrey Styler, who told me about a recent party he'd had for the eightieth anniversary of his first ever piano lesson.)

As combination drew to a close, Ray asked me if I liked beer. I said that although I like beer I find the sheer volume of it hard to handle, and prefer whiskey. "Ah, whiskey!" he said, and invited me to the room, I forget its name, dedicated to the use of retired fellows. In the cupboard there he had some silver quaichs, and a large box of the sort used to conserve medieval manuscripts. It had been made for him by one of the great conservator-binders, maybe Nicholas Pickwoad, and inside it was fitted out in velvet to hold a bottle of Jura whiskey. On the spine where the title should be it had "The Runes of Jura" in stamped lettering. "Let us consult the runes of Jura", said Ray Page, and so we did.

By this point my mind was a little hazy. It was not at its sharpest. We talked about books mostly, I think, and he tested me on quotations, something which I didn't mind in the least because I caught them all, except one from Hamlet. You don't often meet people who have read the same sort of things as you, even the obscure things like The Wallet of Kai Lung and Lavengro. He was much better read than me; he was of the type of scholar for whom being well-read in general was part of having an active mind. I'm not well-read in an abstract sense, but I've read more than most people I meet, and being able to discuss books like that seemed like the most tremendous luxury to me. It still does.

I was tired after finishing my PhD, tremendously tired, and it took me a good few months to recover. That evening was the most I had enjoyed myself for ages, and a sort of illustration of old-style Cambridge at its best. Working out, as I stumbled home in an alcoholic haze, that Ray was exactly three times my age (26 to 78) I found myself wondering if he had any available grandsons... I made it into work the next morning despite my tremendous hangover.

A couple of years later when I was elected to a Junior Research Fellowship at Corpus Ray sent me a note saying how rare it was for the fellowship to make such a good decision, and at one of my first evenings dining in caused tremendous offence to a visiting manuscript scholar by introducing me to her as "A real manuscript scholar". I think he had been pretty fearsome in his younger years, but he was always very kind to me. He occasionally asked me to read some article he was writing on Parker's manuscripts, and they were tremendously refreshing, the best sort of scholarship, the kind that eschews academicy nonsense for clear, erudite commonsense. He had a great sense of humour, a very dry Scandinavian sense, the sort that does not involves laughing or smiling. "You might call that a beautifully rounded argument", he would say with exaggerated politeness -- meaning that it was circular. He got testy if the port stopped at combination, and would talk loudly about the Bishop of Norwich until it moved again. He insisted that the correct loyal toast was not "The Queen" but "The Church and Queen". And one of my favourite stories about him I am not going to put here, even though very few people read this blog, because of its potential to cause an international incident.

It's not a hundred percent accurate to say that I'll miss him, because he hadn't been quite himself for the last few years as old age caught up with him, and I missed him then. But from a selfish point of view, I do wish there were other people like him. But there just aren't; he was more than usually unique.

Some internet things mostly about brains

I just spoke to my little nephew on the phone. "Do you want to come home in a minute?" he asked me. Which is very sweet and has made me feel a bit sad. I told him I'd like to but I can't come home til Easter. Heigh ho. At least the internet remains to amuse us.

If you're interested in apocalyptic sci-fi scenarios coming true right now, why not read about this woman's experience of attaching electrodes to her head to learn how to shoot better? She's a journalist who tried the US military's enhanced sniper training involving 9 volt batteries attached to the temples. She seems to think that all the big ethical questions are changed by the fact that she enjoyed it so much, when really they're just intensified. I already find it a bit frightening that we pay people to kill people for us, but the idea of switching off their self-doubt while they do so might just be a step too far. All the same, I did feel a momentary urge to try putting a current through my mind. (Also I saw it on Boing Boing, where Cory Doctorow pointed out that "If you can't open it, you don't own it", which is quite funny.)

This psychologist makes an interesting point about how the self-selecting personalities and long training of psychologists might make a serious difference to their view of what mental health is. I like this quote:

Having steered the higher-education terrain for a decade of my life, I know that degrees and credentials are primarily badges of compliance.

In other internet news, if you buy a copy of Pendulous Breasts Quarterly and put "Zing me!" in the comments they will hand-craft some insults just for you. It's mostly by Onion and Daily Show writers and others of that ilk. It's a bit hit and miss but there's something pretty cool about being able to buy random humour things from the other side of the world on a whim. I heard about it because it has some Kate Beaton cartoons in it. As the title suggests, though, it's mostly pretty boyish.

In contrast, you could celebrate International Woman's day, which I think is around here sometime, with this excellent Dragonette song. It's from a pink-covered album about being proud of being a woman. I'm not sure I think that's particularly admirable. I'd rather be a woman than a man, but shouldn't I try to suppress that feeling rather than exulting in it? Isn't it a bit like those playground arguments about whether boys or girls are better? Couldn't we grow up past that stage? Nonetheless it's a great song:

Bye bye AI

I'm a bit sad because today I hand in my Artificial Intelligence coursework, and this is probably the last time I get to use the logic programming language Prolog. It's a very cool language, essentially made of punctuation rather than words. I still have a few more AI lectures left though. We just had an interesting one about the problems with using Classical Logic for actual reasoning. In classical logic, if you have a set of things that are true, and another thing, let's call it P, follows from that set, then, whatsoever you may add to that set, P still has to be true. But we need a different sort of logic for practical reasoning, a defeasible or default logic. In this way of proceeding you have a default, e.g. birds can fly, and then you assume the default that if Tweety is a bird Tweety flies. When you find out that Tweety has a broken wing, or Tweety is a penguin, or Tweety is dead, you change that default. In classical logic you could only do that by stating that birds fly if they are not dead and don't have a broken wing, and aren't a penguin or an ostrich, and aren't glued to the ground, etc, etc, and then when you had Eddie (an eagle) you could only prove that he was able to fly if you could also prove that he wasn't dead, glued to the ground, unwell, an ostrich, etc, etc. Default reasoning is like the legal position where you assume that an accused is innocent until proven guilty. It's also known as the Closed World scenario, like in databases, where it's assumed that what is not recorded is not true. In Prolog it's called Negation By Failure. If you can't prove X then you act like for practical purposes you have proved not X.

This seems very interesting to me. It seems like the default reasoning method is a bit like the whole quantum, Schrodinger's cat thing, where only the observable is true. Does it make much difference to people's personalities and attitudes to spend their entire time in an environment where only the observable is true? This seems like almost the opposite of the Humanities approach, and I think this is what Imperial is lacking by having no Humanities here, just a loose association with the Royal College of Art and the Royal College of Music. Tomorrow I may or may not go to a talk by an anthropologist who works on people who work with mice, which seems like an interesting related thing.

Books of February 2012

I read a few very good books in February. Apart from a couple of poetry anthologies (I recommend Andrew Motion's From Here to Eternity) and an exhibition catalogue (for the brilliant Grayson Perry exhibition about which I have failed to blog) everything I read last month was on the Kindle, and most of it was stuff I'd got very cheap in various Kindle sales.

The Mighty Angel by Jerzy Pilcher
This was a lucky find. It's a strange and compelling book which I consumed avidly on the tube, but it's going to be hard to describe it without making it sound awful. It's mostly about an alcoholic drinking. Here instead is the first paragraph:

Before the mafiosi appeared in my apartment in the company of the dark-complexioned poetess Alberta Lulaj, before they wrenched me from my drunken sleep and set about demanding — first with dissembling pleas, then with ruthless threats — that I arrange for Alberta Lulaj’s poetry to be published in the weekly Tygodnik Powszechny, before there began the tempestuous events I wish to recount, there was the eve of those events, there was the morning and the evening of the preceding day, and I, from the morning to the evening of the preceding day, had been drinking peach vodka. Yes indeed, I had been drinking peach vodka, brutishly longing for one last love before death, and immersed up to my ears in a life of dissolution.

Tony and Susan by Austin Wright
Compelling and clever. Susan is more-or-less happily married to a brilliant surgeon and they have three children. But a long time ago she was briefly married to neurotic Edward, who was obsessed with what seemed an unrealistic need to be a writer. Out of the blue Edward sends Susan a novel he has written, with the double-edged comment that she was always his best critic. But it's not a pleasant novel and it's not clear what Edward's motive might be. If it's "about" something maybe it's about being a reader, or maybe it's about the creepiness of domesticity. It's very readable though, I stayed up late to finish it in one day.

Graven With Diamonds: the Many Lives of Thomas Wyatt, Courtier, Poet, Assassin, Spy by Nicola Shulman
This has been on my Amazon wishlist for ages. I'm quite fond of Wyatt's poetry, though I only really knew about the usual anthologised ones and the question of whether or not they were addressed to Anne Boleyn. Henry VIII was king for quite a long time, and most of this book is about the period when his court was very French-influenced, in the years between Henry falling in love with and marrying Anne Boleyn. Courtly love abounded:

Love was newly fashionable. In the previous reign, English continence in matters of love had greatly impressed a visiting Italian: ‘he had never noticed anyone, either at court or amongst the lower orders, to be in love’ he said, ‘… either the English were the most discreet lovers in the world, or they were incapable of love’. But now, in the 1520s, the young and chic of Henry’s court were all at it, tossing and pining on their pallets for love, or saying they did in lyric poetry.

Shulman is very good on the use that people made of the poems, how they got passed about and altered, and used in games which only later might look a little dangerous:

‘I write by this… I mean by that’ wrote one scribe at the bottom of his poem, just in case his surreptitiousness had gone unnoticed. Accordingly, they were often attracted to those works of Wyatt’s that could usurp their own apparent subject matter and turn into poems about the poems themselves. That may make Tudor courtiers sound like French doctoral students, which they were not; but they were young and self-involved and their poems were the vehicle for that most fascinating of all things, their own social drama.

I also really like her characterisations of the major figures, like Henry VIII:

A flash of this ribaldry comes down to us in a book that was doing the rounds of Wyatt’s circle in the early 1530s, in which someone has written ‘presto para servir’ (ready to serve) and others, beneath it, the doubtful coda ‘forse’ (perhaps). But the king would have no particle of sympathy for an ungallant sentiment like that. For him there could be no forse about his eagerness to serve. He was sincere in all his doings. If he were alive today, he’d be Canadian.

Anne Boleyn:

Anne was a bridge-burner by nature, not a conciliator, and a termagant to boot. As Henry’s companion, she had never been one to cut her cloth. Henry’s letters swim with mollification and – in response to some lost rebuff – the sort of shaken dignity one sees in a senior dog in retreat from an unexpected cat.

and Wyatt himself:

As for courtly skills, there was no shortage of these with Wyatt, one of the few Englishmen in history to be held suspiciously smooth by a senior French diplomat.

Also you have to love an author who, when discussing C. S. Lewis' interpretation of some poems, points out that "There is only one joke in the Narnia books" (and footnotes a reference to it -- it's in The Silver Chair, apparently).

A few small things

1. I saw this at Spitalfields in one of the dingy warehousey bits by the market where it stinks of piss.

They're spray-painted concrete blocks, the sort that get used as impromptu bollards.  I think they're quite good.

2. Think it would be nice to encourage thoughtful long-form journalism?  There's something that looks good on Kickstarter.  It's already funded.  I hope they can make it work.  Go responsible media!

3. This blog account of a trip to CERN makes it sound amazing.

4.  Crazy philosopher Slavok Žižek has a great accent.  Here he is talking about (what else) The Wire.  I haven't listened to the whole thing but people who have say it's very interesting.

5. My ipod on shuffle just came up with this excellent Pet Shop Boys song:

I want a positive role model!

Culture fail?

Last night I went to see Noises Off at the Old Vic. I've seen the play before, back in the time long time ago when I used to go to the theatre a lot.  I think that it was Cambridge amateur theatre which irrevocably broke my enjoyment of the form, and now I go about once every five years, just to check if I'm missing something.

This revival of Frayn's classic farce has got impressively positive reviews.  I suppose it's just the sort of comfort food people want in this uncertain period.  It made me smile quite a few times, and even laugh once or twice.  This was a profoundly alienating experience given that the people around me were in the almost continuous throes of uncontrollable fits of laughter.

I would be prepared to accept that I'm lacking something about certain sorts of audio-visual entertainment.  I can't suspend disbelief in actors.  I can't watch them mess about without thinking, is this really a way for an adult to earn a living?  I'm very over-sensitive to people who love themselves too much while also needing constant, forceful validation from outside sources (a psychological condition not unknown in academic circles also).  I suppose it's an unfair assumption about what actors are like, but I can't quite get past it.

But anyway, in my experience, if you want to laugh out loud watch the episode of New Girl where she decides to have have sex with her boyfriend.  If you want to sit in a cramped hot space wondering what you're missing, the theatre as an art form is by no means dead.  And why not -- the exploration of alienation and cultural disjunction is a popular theme in modern art.  Hurray! (And it beats reading another Chuck Palahniuk novel.)

Jean de la Valette and the Anglicans

I went to visit the Museum of the Order of St John.  The Order of St John, aka the Knights of Malta, is about the only military order of the middle ages that it's sort of OK to like.  For one thing they mostly concentrated on running hospitals rather than killing people, and (in a way that seems unusual for a male order) they emphasised service to the sick.  I've heard it said, and I don't know how true it is, that they were open to the medical skills of people from other faiths, particularly Arab surgeons, who were relatively advanced at this point.  And apparently as part of their policy of honouring the poor and sick they fed them off silver rather than wooden platters, thus inadvertently stepping up the hygiene.  They are supposed to have done OK at helping people get better.

Also there's the semi-legendary Siege of Malta, when Jean de la Vallette and a handful of indomitable knights held out against tens of thousands of attackers, including the whole Ottoman fleet and the frightening Janisseries, at a time when the Turks seemed pretty invincible and a Turkish conquest of Europe was a serious threat.  The contemporary rhetoric was very xenophobic and anti-Islamic, but essentially no one wanted to be conquered by the Turks, and the Knights were prepared to sacrifice everything with little support to defend the vital strategic point of Malta.

Unfortunately the museum, which is in Clerkenwell, turned out to be a bit disappointing, or maybe just interesting in a different way.  It's essentially an illustration of what the Victorians could do with a good story, some old buildings, and an inflated sense of their own importance.  I joined on a guided tour, which I slightly regretted, because although the guide was lovely and very interesting, she said enough odd things that it was hard to know how seriously to take her.  These were only small things and hard to put one's finger on, though I remember her pointing at a picture and telling us it was given by the people of Malta when it had a big sign on it saying it was acquired for the museum by the Art Fund; and she said that Queen Mary Tudor reinstated the Order in England but it failed again when she came to a sticky end -- I wondered if she was thinking of Queen Mary Stuart (e.g. of Scots), but then again I think Mary Tudor did die of flu, which could be described as sticky in a way.  So generally, the sense was of a huge heap of history, rather confused, and it was hard to pick a way through it.

But I think that what happened was this: at some point in the nineteenth-century someone bought up an old pub which occupied the gatehouse of the priory of Clerkenwell.  This was about the only monastic building left except for the Church, which was also bought up, though maybe later.  Clerkenwell had been the English headquarters of the Knights of St John, until the priory was dissolved in 1540.  I think the buildings were bought up and a supposedly "revived" English Order of St John was set up some time before it all kicked off in terms of what's visible there, but basically by the end of Victoria's reign the revived Order was in full swing and heavily associated with the royal family. (They were, to be fair, doing some pretty admirable stuff that resulted in the volunteer St John's Ambulance which we have today.) Queen Elizabeth II is titular head of it today, and one of her relatives is actual head. They have come up with enough ceremonial and busy-work to make Oxbridge colleges look like informal modern places.

But all the actual things you see there are Victorian and early Edwardian reconstructions.  They took the pub buildings and filled them with wooden panels and old paintings people bought up and gave to them.  They received quite a few donations from the 'people' of Malta.  (Was this a dig at Rome, where the actual continuing Order of St John was based?)  They painted up the coats of arms not just of the English priors before the Dissolution, but of post-Dissolution French or Italian heads of the Order of St John, which survived on the Continent untouched by Reformation, even though these heads would have abominated the English church as heretical, probably almost as bad as the Turks. They have nice things that enthusiastic Edwardians gave them which unfortunately turn out probably not to be as relevant as first thought, like the Weston Triptych (from the school of Rogier van der Weyden).  The church may have been quite nice but it was bombed flat in the second world war and rebuilt afterwards.  The twelfth-century crypt survives and is full of religious bits and pieces acquired in the early twentieth century, including two rather nice tomb effigies from completely different places, one of them actually from Spain, and a bit of stone from the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, acquired during the British Mandate.

A lot of what we look at in the Middle Ages and think of as forgery can be more easily understood in the Victorians as over-enthusiastic reconstruction.  Sometimes I think we give the Middle Ages a hard time for their attitude to truth when we're so busy having fun with the past ourselves.  And I don't mind it -- it's just that I think that in the Museum of the Order of St John the story is not so much about the medieval Order but about what the Victorians got up to with it.  That would have been an interesting thing to learn about.

The Future is a Disappointment

says my AI lecturer, talking about how he read Isaac Asimov's I Robot as a kid, and now iRobot is a company that makes ... extremely limited robotic vacuum cleaners.  (They don't clean well but combined with cats they make a pretty good youtube meme.)  He's lecturing right now about whether computers can achieve consciousness.  I've got my fingers crossed for no.  I think the moral and legal ramifications would be tedious.

By the way writing this in the lecture isn't bad behaviour on my part, it's live-blogging.

If he allows questions at the end I will ask how on earth he thinks we'd identify machine consciousness given that people aren't agreed on how conscious animals are.  The tests for animal consciousness are terrible, and often turn out to be culturally-specific for humans, like the thing where you put a dot on a person or animal when they're not looking and see if they remove it when shown themselves in a mirror.

He just said "a real mouse is surely conscious in some sense".  Hmmm.  Oh scientists, you are just too vague.  That's how the future has disappointed me.  He says it's conscious because he doesn't want anyone to torture it.  But I used to feel like that about my teddy bear.  (I still do, a bit.)

Now he's talking about creating zombie mice.  This is pretty cool stuff really.  They're not going to bother to think too hard about what a mouse is, they're just going to try to make one anyway.  I think that's one of the things that's likeable about the sciences, the optimism.  But it is a bit wierd to find myself thinking of the humanities as the practical branch of knowledge, and the sciences as unrealistic, naive.

Unit testing coverage statistics...

...are getting me down, so I'm cheering myself up with more Pet Shop Boys.  Here's Sexy Northerner:

and here's How I Learned to Hate Rock and Roll, which starts:

Someone states the obvious
Someone sneers at all you love
Someone preaches ugly manners
excluding some, including me

which is great because I love the criticism that rock is basically insufficiently polite.  Hurray for politeness!

I love you Pet Shop Boys

Format, the Pet Shop Boys' new album of B-sides, came out on Monday, and my copy arrived from Amazon today.  So far I have listened to the first three songs, and they are all brilliant.  Here is one of them, a very simple sad love song.  I don't think anyone does simple sad love songs like the Pet Shop Boys.

M.I.A.

I like this new M.I.A. song, and the video involves stunts with not-flashy cars.

Callousness

The London Underground works by everyone on it acting as though there is no one else anywhere near them, even when (or especially when) they are jammed together so tightly that there's no need to hold on to the rails because there's nowhere to fall over into.  Every now and then what seems like a group of people just trying to get from one place to another suddenly displays some striking act of callousness.  It's not just the complete lack of sympathy for anyone who wants to kill themselves.  The other day someone was taken ill while I was on the District Line.  This was in the same carriage as me but at the other end.  I couldn't see very well but he looked in a bad way, collapsed on the floor and finding it hard to breathe.  The people near him pulled the emergency cord and asked around for a doctor.  The people near me were disgusted at this, furious at the delay to the journey, and kept asking why the man was not just moved onto the platform so that the rest of us could go on.  It was pretty revolting.

There's another sort of callousness in Devon.  A couple of weeks ago my mother mentioned to me that there were large numbers of baby rabbits around because of the unseasonably mild weather.  They won't have survived this cold snap.  I suppose that if they died above ground they will have been eaten by scavengers, a sort of windfall for the badgers, foxes and buzzards.  If they died below ground I expect they will be decomposed by smaller organisms, and the nutrients from their body might make it into plants and get back to the mother rabbits who put so much wasted biological effort into producing them.  People who live in the countryside are often far from sentimental about nature; when you spend a lot of time with nature you notice that nature is often pretty nasty.  In a way the human city callousness is almost preferable to this immense efficient use of death.

Retablos

I've definitely broken my resolution to spend an hour a week in a museum or other cultural institution.  But I'm not going to abandon it, just try to keep it when I can.  So this afternoon I went to the Wellcome Institute to see their exhibition Mexican Miracle Paintings.  These are little paintings given to churches in thanks for miracles or answered prayers: freedom from prison or an unjust accusation, restoration of a long-lost son or a herd of goats, rescue from bandits or from death in battle, preservation in a train accident or lightning strike, recovery from an almost fatal wound or a scorpion bite, escape from flooding or a collapsed mine.  There are a lot of pictures of operating theatres and lots involving mothers and babies; in one of them a mother gives thanks that her daughter's baby has been acknowledged by her son-in-law.  They were commissioned by ordinary people, or maybe even made by themselves, I'm not sure, and they have quite long inscriptions explaining what happened.  I particularly liked one that started:

In Matehuala on 7th January 1937, Juan Hernandez became so drunk that he completely lost his senses, to the point of walking into the mountains where he passed out all night.

This was put up by his wife in thanks that he didn't die from the subsequent illness, but stayed alive to support her and her son.  It sounds like the start of a short story.

It made me want to commission a small painting to say thanks for something.  I'm not sure what, since my life has been happily free of dramatic injuries, and I've never been kidnapped by bandits.  Maybe I should commission a small painting being thankful for that.  But if you do have a more striking tale, you can leave it on the Wellcome website and they might get an artist to do a retablo based on it.  I don't much like the ones they've had done so far, because they're not really in the tradition.  But it seems like an interesting thing to do in conjunction with the exhibition.

A few little things

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Summary of Lord Lyttleton's 'Advice to a Lady':
Be plain in Dress and sober in your Diet;
In short my Dearee, kiss me, and be quiet.

Stooshe have released a single called Love Me which is a de-ruded version of their song F*ck Me.  They start off with simple word substitutions like "Your play's fine but I ain't got the time" but towards the end they run out of invention and one of them just shouts "explicit" at particular points.  This quite a good way of dealing with rude words in songs, I think.

These break dancers are fantastic:

Eschatalogical reserve

The number of things I'm failing to blog about gets larger and larger.  The second week of term was worse than the first, and in third week I started to feel like I was getting some control back until my laptop died.  My housemate/landlord has gone away for a month and it's wierd how much this is disconcerting me given that I lived alone in Cambridge for years.  But then, I had pets there.  I've put up a bird feeder in the garden but it's not yet getting many visitors.

Yesterday I went back to Occupy LSX, and the steps of St Paul's.  I went to hear the same vicar friend talk as on my first visit.  It's still a pretty cool place, but of course now they're just waiting for the eviction.  It won't be there next Saturday.  The talkers were more varied than last time, in that they weren't all talkers, but also singers, bands, and poets.  There were a couple of good performance poets, like this man with his "Crazy Santas Occupy the World":

He also did a poem about Sampson over the top of the instrumental from Dr Dre's What's the Difference.  That was great, and even I was sort of dancing a little bit.  It's not on YouTube, maybe because of copyright issues.

I feel sad that the place is going; I hope the eviction goes both peacefully and mediafully.

Afterwards I talked to my vicar friend about something eucharistical in London that had disturbed me, and which didn't seem to bother him at all.  But then by accident I profoundly shocked him by mentioning casually something else I had seen in Devon, and he wanted me to write and complain to a bishop about it.  I'm afraid I may have just provided another waystation on his inexorable journey towards Rome.  Oh dear.  But he did teach me a great concept -- or rather, a great name for a concept I already had.  This is "eschatological reserve".  It's the idea that when it comes to the end, perhaps we'll look back and see the patterns of things differently, and it will be clear who was doing God's will and it won't be the people we expected -- not the Pharisee or the Levite but the Samaritan.  Which was something I already thought but had no way to express except in something that Aslan says during the last battle, which didn't seem very respectable, intellectually.  It's good to have two ways to say it -- even though now I think of it there's almost no one in the world to whom I could suitably say the phrase "eschatalogical reserve".

It has realistic legs but no head

I am sitting in a Robotics lecture right now being simultaneously amazed and freaked out by this robot, "Big Dog".  Watch when the man kicks it.

They're currently envisaged as pack animals for soldiers, but I doubt we civilians will escape on the day when packs of them tire of their servitude and trample us all to death.

There's also a Little Dog, if you're interested.

Intelligence

What is intelligence?  I don't know.  I think maybe we need as many words for it as the proverbial Eskimo has for snow.  Remembering things is intelligent.  Managing your life is intelligent.  Being able to make people understand you is intelligent.  Being able to train a dog, that's pretty intelligent.  I'm intelligent if you count having a PhD as being intelligent (and I think that is true for a certain value of intelligent) but in some ways I'm very stupid -- I'm nowhere near as good as my brother is at being happy, I struggle to feed myself healthily and inexpensively, and I can't play chess or do cryptic crosswords.  This is one of those philosophical problems that spills out into real life.  The other day I was talking about atheism and the idea of "Oxbridge" intelligence came up, as a type of intelligence that often involves a certain type of stupidity.  As someone who has sat in a gown at High Table and had my blouse's label politely tucked in by a member of the waiting staff, I can't claim not to be implicated in all that, though as a concept it does a disservice to the fact that there are plenty of people at Oxbridge who are actually fully functioning members of society.  I can think of about five without even trying.

Yesterday I went to a lecture on Machine Learning, a sub-part of Artificial Intelligence.  It was full of very complicated stuff which I couldn't follow.  But the question "What is Intelligence?" was pretty quickly dealt with.  Intelligence is the ability to solve problems, so that "we do in life better".  (Oh dear, that rules out my PhD as a sign of intelligence, let alone reading War and Peace.)  I also went to an Introduction to Artificial Intelligence this morning, which sensibly did not define intelligence, but looked at the different ways people try to replicate it.  Some people do AI in order to learn more about animal and human cognition, by modeling it and seeing what happens. 

So the people who are shaping our practical idea of what intelligence is, and what intelligence should be, are essentially taking it for granted that what intelligence is is what they are, and using that as the unreflective basis of their research; and yet these people are, for a certain value of stupid, quite likely to be very stupid.  I find that interesting, in a worrying sort of way.  It's not great news for people from cultural backgrounds which are under-represented in scholarly circles, for example.

A long post about my week

This week has been hectic for large reasons but also for small annoying ones:

1-- I bought some shampoo which turns out to smell of chicken coops.  It's the smell that wafts out when you open the little coop door in the evening, and the chickens are all there fluffed up in the darkness, and they peer at you beadily as if to say "What? We're roosting", so you shut the door again and leave them alone.  It's a sweet warm smell, partly hay or straw, a little sour, and not unpleasant, but it does have the undertone of chicken shit, and it's not therefore a smell I would choose for my hair.  But I feel about shampoo bottles like William of Ockham felt about entities, so I'm stuck with it.

2-- Every now and then my mother hurts my brain by expressing an opinion so random and unexpected I just don't know what to do with it.  She told me she disapproves of the high speed rail link plans, and I thought it would be because of the Chilterns or something, but she says that actually it's such a long time until it will be completed that by then we're pretty much bound to have developed high-quality hologram replicas of ourselves (like Rimmer in Red Dwarf, she said, helpfully) so we will no longer have any need to travel much in person.  The problem is that when I was a teenager she used to drive me mad by going on and on about the imminence of robot-driven cars, and now google are doing it and she was right all along.  And there are other annoying crazy things she's been right about too. Maybe she has a point that with the current rate of change we can't really predict what we'll need in 2026.  But I would guess that being able to move our physical bodies is going to remain important for a long time.  If you've ever done a video conference meeting you'll know just how unsatisfactory they are.  We did some for the Parker project with our Stanford partners -- they would all be there clutching their morning coffees while we were packed up ready to go home.  They were odd experiences.  The University video suite (on the New Museums Site) videoed them all for posterity, I think, which is yet another reason to feel sorry for posterity.

3-- The most ostensibly stressful thing about this week was the two exams at the start.  They were the first exams I've ever done by typing.  The C++ one was tough but interesting -- it involved using supplied text files of some poems and a pronunciation dictionary to analyse the poems' rhyme schemes and identify what if any type of sonnet they were.  (Distractingly the supplied Spenserian sonnet was the "One day I wrote her name upon the strand" poem which I love.) I didn't get it fully working but I made what I think was a reasonable attempt, so it depends on their marking attitudes.  (Prolog was fine, I got that all working I think, though I didn't have time to test it properly.)  It was so strange doing exams again after so long.  Like anyone who's been through Oxbridge, at school exams used to be my thing, and in my case particularly the more mathsy ones.  My mother always used to tell me that the important thing with exams was to enjoy them.  And although I by no means got it all done I did really enjoy the C++ exam.  There's something rather beautiful about going into a defined space and letting go of absolutely everything to do with life and its many complications, and distilling all your thoughts and concerns into one tiny thing, like whether your function can correctly pick out and return the last syllable of a line of poetry.  (Of course that's not the sort of thing you can say to people who take the exam with you, it would be rude.)

4-- Then the exams end and life rushes back in on you.  The post-exam bit of this week has been really hard.  It's going to be a very tough term, mostly because of the group project which we need to get done over the next ten weeks.  Ours involves writing an android app for elderly people which can help them to stay in their homes rather than in hospitals when they have ongoing health problems which need monitoring.  It involves various input from wearable sensors, but thankfully the sensors are already set up and not our problem, we just have to deal with the data.  I'm group leader and it's stressful.  I really like everyone in my team but we're basically a bunch of lovable misfits who would be better suited to generating sitcom scenarios than an actual working product.

5-- We get a short (nine-hour) lecture course on project management, which is actually really interesting in a gruesome sort of way.  The lecturer does make it sound like it's pretty much impossible to implement anything ever, but that sort of fits in with my real life experience.  And to be able to put names to the reasons why various things I've worked on have had terrible problems, and to realise that anyone who knew anything about project management would have known these problems were coming way in advance, is a compelling and strange development for me.

6-- We've also done Java -- I love Java! -- and Matlab.  I've had to think about eigenvectors and eigenvalues for the first time this millenium.  But two hours of lectures and four hours of labs mean that we now know Java, apparently, and for Matlab we only had two hours of lectures and two hours of labs.  It's so much new stuff all at once, and next week we start our proper courses.  The idea of this MSc is that the first term gets us up to speed and is equivalent to the first year of the undergraduate computing course, and all our options this term are shared with second-, third-, and fourth-year Computing and Engineering students.  The big question for me is whether to take on Maths-related courses.  On the one hand I could do Maths back in 1994, when I did two A-levels in it.  On the other hand 1994 was so long ago that I have a creeping suspicion that I'm not actually still the same person.  I have next week to try out courses and decide, because the week after is the week for sorting out my individual project on which I will spend the entire summer.

7-- So that's my week.  I'm writing this post mostly to get some thoughts out of my system, and also to remind myself of what it was like later.  I need to mentally gird my loins for the task ahead.  It's going to be a very tough term.  But the good thing is that having done last term's courseworks, and this week's exams, I now know that I can hold my own with these young people, many of whom did Maths or Engineering degrees, many of whom have spent a few years working in the computing industry, and that is the most immensely massive relief.

Studenthood: the downside

Aaaagh, I have an exam tomorrow, and another one the day after.  I haven't done any exams since 1997, and no non-humanities exams since 1994, back when many of my classmates hadn't yet started school.  C++ is tomorrow afternoon, and Prolog on Tuesday morning.  Doing well in them is out of my reach -- my hope is to achieve a respectable pass.

New Year's Thoughts

1. Why has Amazon just recommended to me a book called Tater's Bear, in a series which seems to be entitled "Siren Everlasting Classic ManLove: Erotic Alternative Paranormal Romance"?  When I went to "fix this recommendation" it turned out to be because I had previously purchased .... a Kindle.  I've heard it said that rudery would flourish in ebook form in the same way that polaroid cameras will ever be associated with people wanting to photograph their bits without showing them to people who work in Boots.  But if I wanted to read about Erotic Paranormal ManLove I would far far rather find some actual bookshop where I could go, hand over money, and take the book away in a one-time transaction, than buy it on Kindle and have Amazon recommending other Siren Everlasting Classic ManLove titles for the rest of my life.  Of course I've probably achieved that anyway by clicking on the link.

2. I kept my last year's New Year's Resolutions all year, which is pretty rare in my life, and in general, I think.  I deliberately didn't go for the predictable resolutions of an unfit, unemployed, overweight thirty-four-year-old living in her parents' house (which would probably be to take up smoking): instead I vowed to record what I read, rewatch all of Battlestar Galactica, and develop an opinion on East Coast vs West Coast rap.  I didn't entirely manage that last, but I did listen to a lot of rap.  Because quite a few tracks were depressingly violent or strangely filled with hatred for women I made a playlist called Hip-Hop for Devon Ladies which filtered out the ones which made me feel sad.
Anyway I was trying to come up with some good resolutions for this year, but it's the 4th January now and I may be defeated.  I don't want them to be resolutions about things which need doing anyway.

3. One of the problems with growing older, and this relates to both points 1 and 2, is that with increasing self-knowledge it becomes less and less likely that taking the risk of trying something new will pay off.  I find it easy to tell in advance whether or not to try foods, books, films, TV series, and all sorts of things, and it's a very long time since I tried something I didn't think I'd like and liked it, no matter how highly it was recommended by others.  I think I do genuinely want to find new things to like more than I want to be proved right here.  Against my better judgement I have been trying to read Deborah Harkness' A Discovery of Witches, about the forbidden love of a witch and a vampire, because it starts in Duke Humfrey (the Bodleian Library's erstwhile manuscripts reading room) and was written by an academic one of whose factual books is on my to-read list.  But it's just not well enough written to be OK.  I'm only five brief chapters in but the protagonist is perfect in a sub-Dan-Brown way -- when she calls friends they start the conversation by congratulating her on all the awards her books have recently won and then go on to describe her great beauty in detail.  I'm going to have to give it up.  How do I teach Amazon that I'm even more put off by Paranormal Romance than Classic ManLove?

4. So here are my final 2012 resolutions, in a more or less finished form:
a) to spend at least an hour every week in a museum or gallery with a notebook and pencil.  I'm going to start tomorrow by catching the end of the Canadian Impressionists exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery.
b) to find and satisfactorily test a recipe for almond macaroons (the old-style ones, not the pretty French ones with cream filling)
c) maybe something to do with animals?  I admit this one still needs working on.

The company you keep

It's definitely true that people change people. The characters of the people you are friends with make a difference to what you're like, especially the friends of your youth.  When I think about how life would have been different if I had done Maths or CompSci as an undergraduate the thing that seems really crucial is that I wouldn't have met people who helped to shape my character.  Also it seems to be the case that some company makes one feel more alive and alert than others.  (The people on my course are young and often make me nostalgic for the dry humour of people with PhDs but no job prospects.)

I think that's also the case with animal company.  I think spending time with horses, or dogs, or any animal, forces you to be calm and patient, and makes you a little less human in a good way, a bit more part of the immediate world, and a bit more focused on affection.  I really miss having pets.

I like to think that this also has an effect on the animals too.  At this point I may be moving into wishful thinking.  Definitely my brother would say that keeping animals is a sort of slavery, and that because I like to do so I imagine that there is a positive side for them too.  He says that if the pet loves you that makes it worse not better, because the pet has no choice in the matter -- it's just a form of Stockholm syndrome and sick.  (Last time we talked about this I pointed out that he had done the same thing to my nephew, who has no choice but to love and utterly depend on his parents, but he says that's different because children grow up -- I'm not convinced, and to me it seems more of a big deal to create a human who is totally emotionally in your power than to do the same thing to an animal with less complex emotions and easier needs.  I admire in both senses the chutzpah of people who decide to have children.)

But anyway, with the proviso that I really want to believe this, I think that animals are changed a little by human contact.  The pets I've had have been dogs and rats, and they both love to communicate with humans.  Am I reading too much into it because I loved to communicate with them?  It seemed to me a bit like the good conversation which is about the only thing I miss about Cambridge -- it made me feel a similar sort of mental satisfaction, though of course it's a very different sort of communication.  Sentimentally I like to imagine that spending time with humans made my pets also feel a sort of satisfying mental alertness, that it enlarged their world.

Anyway this is just a roundabout way of introducing a very interesting video of a bonobo ape called Kanzi who likes to light fires and toast marshmallows.  The woman with him attributes this to a film he saw when younger, which is culture I suppose.

Reading in 2011

One of my three New Year's resolutions for 2011 was to keep track of what I read. I've done this using LibraryThing, which is quite a good system. So here is my personal set of book awards for 2011.

Favourite all-round book of the year:
A tie between these two, which are both humane, amusing, and intelligent:

• Moo by Jane Smiley
• Rameau's Niece by Cathleen Schine

Moo is a great campus novel which I read back in January. Rameau's Niece is another academic-y one. I read it in August, and since I never reviewed it on this blog I'm posting here my review from LibraryThing:

Wonderful, my favourite of hers so far. Margaret has a lovely husband, a terrible memory, and a surprise bestseller under her belt, an edition of a post-Revolutionary anatomical treatise by a Frenchwoman. Now she's editing an eighteenth-century philosophical dialogue which is really the story of the seduction of the eponymous niece of Rameau -- written by a philosopher at a time when "philosopher" had a secondary meaning of dirty, dirty man (e.g. Sade, Casanova). Unfortunately she gets rather caught up in her work, and rediscovers erotic yearnings. This novel is great fun, affectionately satirical, and pokes gentle fun at the idea of the search for knowledge as a form of sexual desire.

Snidest and most subtly brilliant author:

• Muriel Spark, especially for The Abbess of Crewe
• Barbara Pym, especially for A Glass Full of Blessings

Enjoyable company, but likeable?  And a runner-up prize for Elinor Lipman, The Ladies' Man.


Best light-hearted reads:

• Alan Bradley's Flavia de Luce books
• Paul Magrs's Brenda books

Two excellent series, worth saving up.


Favourite author discoveries

• Jo Walton
• Javier Marías
• Ismail Kadare

with runners-up awards for Cathleen Schine, Allegra Goodman, Kate Christensen, and Ian McDonald.


"I'm an Intellectual me" award for high-brow books I actually really enjoyed

• Javier Marías, Your Face Tomorrow trilogy

Reliably cheering author award:

• Marian Keyes
• Jilly Cooper

and a lifetime service award to Georgette Heyer


Brilliant memoir award:

• Rhoda Janzen, Mennonite In A Little Black Dress
• runner up Caitlin Moran, How To Be A Woman

You're A Bit of An Arse award for being entertaining but mostly a bit of an arse:

• Russell Brand, Booky-Wook Two

Very interesting history/biography award:

• Bride of Science by Benjamin Woolley (about Ada, daughter of Byron)
• Mad Madge by Katie Whitaker (about Margaret Cavendish, another early female scientist)
• Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey
• Augustine of Hippo by Henry Chadwick (worthy but more likeable than you'd expect)
• As Good as God, as Clever as the Devil by Rodney Bolt (Mary Benson)

Ouch award for unpalatable truths:

• Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

There's a lot of racial tension in the US but when you read this book it's hard to understand why there isn't out and out war. Of course this book was credited by Abraham Lincoln no less with starting the War Between the States.
Honourable mention to John Lanchester, Whoops!.


Best drawings:

• Hark a Vagrant! by Kate Beaton
• The First In Line by Mattias Adolfson

And here is an analysis borrowed from how Stuck In A Book does it, though shortened.

• Total number of books read: 209
• Gender of authors (of each book): 107 male, 92 female, 5 not sure (they're all K. J. Parker), and 5 anthologies
• Fiction vs non-fiction: 181 to 28
• Number of re-reads: 23

That's less non-fiction than I would have guessed, and fewer rereads.  Also I would have expected the male/female ratio to be more equal (though K. J. Parker is probably a woman, which would make the numbers closer).

Catch-up

1. I forgot to post about things I read in November. I mostly enjoyed books by Elinor Lipman, who is gently funny, or sometimes not so gently in a Spark/Pym style. (E.g. The Ladies Man.) Caitlin Moran's How To Be A Woman was very enjoyable. Strictly speaking we ought to be further along in feminism than this by now, we shouldn't need someone to point out that equal treatment for men and women is a good thing and beneficial to both, but it seems that we do. I wanted to post about it properly but I doubt I'll ever get round to it. But it did make me think that given that a lot of women are prone to crazily analytical thoughts, and given that women are at least fifty percent of the population, does that really count as crazy after all? If a lot of people do it it could be argued that it's quite normal. Anyway, I recommend this book mostly because it's funny.

2. I meant to post about the Victorians. On my way into college I walk past either the Natural History Museum or the Royal Albert Hall and Albert Memorial, or sometimes past the V&A. In my childhood I was frequently told by both grandmothers that the Victorians would not have stood for my behaviour and would have taken away my food, beaten me, and probably clamped me to metal things to stop me slouching, and I got the impression that the Victorians were a very dull lot who hated children. But you can't go past those buildings without realising that actually the Victorians were completely crazy. I really meant to blog about the amazingness of the Natural History Museum building, and to read up on Victorian things, but I never got round to more than reading Strachey's Eminent Victorians, which I loved.

3. I never got round to writing a post about K. J. Parker. I still want to do this one day. In the meantime I'll just say that her (or possibly his) Engineer Trilogy is a really excellent work and one of my favourite discoveries of 2010. I reread it recently and I still think it's great.

Brilliant music

Popjustice's list of the top 45 singles of 2011 is out. (Have I mentioned that popjustice is great?) There were two great songs on it which I had missed. Here's Donkeyboy (who did Ambitions before Joe McElderry), City Boy, with quite a watchable video:


And Selena Gomez, who deserves sympathy for being hated, did this excellent pop song, Love You Like a Love Song.

Siblings

I met my brother's baby girl, my little niece. I suppose in the normal run of things one just doesn't encounter little babies very often. I was struck, just like I was by my nephew when he was tiny, how wierd new babies are. I can't remember what philosopher it was who said that we can never know what it's like to be a bat, but I could make a much better go at imagining a world defined by clicks and twilight flying than imagining what it's like to a be a little weeks old baby. They look so alien, and they can't touch things or see much. They go dark and stiff when they're angry, and cry like small animals coughing, and they have freakily tiny necks. My nephew is clearly finding the adjustment a bit frustrating, though he's generally being good. My niece needs most of the attention of at least one of her parents at all times, and sometimes both, and she's too young yet to do anything which would engage my nephew's interest. He strokes her head very gently, but it annoys him if this doesn't stop her crying. I expect he'll find it easier once she starts smiling and sitting up, and generally being more human.

Bip-bop: a retraction

So it turns out that when I emended my mother's term "bip-bop" to hip-hop I was wrong and she really meant beat box. I think I might have guessed this if I had thought more carefully about the small likelihood of her substituting the labial plosive b for the glottal pseudo-fricative h, the fact that even Devon-dwelling grandmothers have probably heard the term hip-hop at some point, and the text-critical rule of lectio difficilior. But I know for sure because she made me first search for and then watch the rapping vicar on YouTube. So I am embedding it here. I'm not sure I'd recommend it but it has made my mother very happy. Go vicars! If you want to, be unusual.

Good stuff

Because my last post went all ecclesiastical I didn't quite feel up to posting at the end some other videos, especially this song, which I enjoy as music, but which is depressing if you listen too much to the lyrics, which seems to be just how things are these days (unless you're listening to a rapping vicar, in which case the other probably applies).  I quite like Andre 3000 as a talking cat.


Ages ago I ordered Kate Beaton's Hark A Vagrant book, which was waiting when I came back, and is great. The first cartoon in it is this brilliant Bronte one. Go Anne!

I like this song too, and the video is quite good if not brilliant.

Bip-bop

I'm back in Devon.  My mum collected me from Honiton and drove me back through the Blackdown Hills.  She tells me that they had a rapping vicar at church yesterday morning.  She said she was surprised at first but that when she listened she thought the lyrics were quite clever.  "He didn't call it rapping, though," she told me, "but bip-bop."  I asked if it was possible she meant hip-hop, and she said yes, if that's like rapping.  I love Devon.  I felt I ought to warn her that teenagers are unlikely to have been impressed by it, and I'm glad that I wasn't there, but still I do think vicars should be allowed to rap if they feel like it.

It is impossible to be unmoved by the Blackdown Hills AONB, but I have to say that enjoying living in London has slightly shaken my faith in my living-in-Devon life plan.  London has so much going on that's good for the mind. And another thing is that even leaving rapping vicars aside, the church situation in London is so much easier to deal with.  I think for the first time ever in my life I'm going to a church where my rather liberal views are in tune with those of many there.  The vicar is the chairman of the Inclusive Church movement, which is mostly famous for its stance on LBGT issues, but which also campaigns about women's ministry, mental health, poverty, and other things that can make people feel excluded from the church.  When I went to St Andrew the Great's in Cambridge, many years back, I couldn't avoid the feeling that that church was there for undamaged, successful people, and it made me feel out of place.  Jesus' ministry was largely to people who had failed or been hurt in some way.  (Though St Andrew the Great's is an excellent church and good at prodding the comfortable.) 

Anyway (if it embeds properly, I'm not used to vimeo) here's the vicar of St John's Waterloo preaching about power and powerlessness as part of a sermon series he organised for advent.

Revd Giles Goddard from David Simoes-Brown on Vimeo.

Week Eleven

So here we are in the middle of week eleven, the last of term.  It's been very hard work, and I feel simultaneously relieved at the thought of a break, and very anxious at the idea that we have almost finished with one of just two teaching terms for the whole course.  I've been doing OK in coursework, but the courseworks are a tiny tiny piece of the total mark.  I got one back yesterday that counts for one third of ten percent of three-quarters of a module, out of nine modules in total.  (And there's an individual project too, the marks for which remain separate.)

A lot of the time I don't notice being older than the others but sometimes it really hits home, and then I feel like Louis CK in this coffee shop (it starts about a minute in):

Females

When I was a student the first time round it was a relatively short time since most Cambridge colleges had started to admit women, a short enough time that no one in my year at Trinity was going to have a mother who also went to Trinity.  The gender balance of colleges and courses was something people were aware of in the way that they were also aware of the need for a balance of social and economic backgrounds.  In Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic we were proud of ourselves for being pretty much 50/50.  (And by the time I left ASNC many years later I think the senior members were about 50/50 too.)  So when I was first a student there was a feeling that gender imbalance was a problem that was slowly being overcome.

I don't know if it's just a natural part of moving from youth to middle age, which is famous for making you look back with rose-tinted spectacles, but it seems like in so many ways gender things have failed to get better, or even got worse.  I first noticed it at about the time I became a research fellow.  The fellowship was very male-dominated -- it was numerically more typical to be an out gay man than a woman -- and although no one was ever anti me as a woman, they certainly commented on it from time to time.  One fellow told me that as a woman I had got second place in the lottery of life, which I laughed at uproariously because I thought he was making a joke, until I realised that whether joking or not he did actually think this was true.  Anyway, it wasn't a problem, it was just odd because it seemed like a retrograde step.

Now I'm a student again things are even worse.  I'm one of seven women out of 56 students on my course, and although we're a pretty vocal bunch -- our year's student rep is a woman -- we're vocal in that way that women are when they're surrounded by men.  Imperial should be a bit ashamed of this imbalance, which is visible throughout the department.  They should be even more ashamed of the examples used in our Object-Oriented Programming lectures.  In object-oriented programming you model the scenario you want to program by thinking about different types of objects as classes.  So if you were modelling a traffic junction you might have a TrafficLight class and a Vehicle class.  You can have subclasses which share some behaviours and data with a superclass, e.g. Vehicle might be a superclass with subclasses Car, Bicycle, and Bus.  Then you can make things behave differently according to which subclass they're part of.  In our object-oriented design lectures we have all this demonstrated with repeated examples using a Human superclass which has a Female subclass.  Humans enjoy walking and Females enjoy cooking.  When a Human goes on holiday it spends its time walking, but when a Female goes on holiday she cooks.  When a Human talks to a Human they talk about sport, but when a Human talks to a Female they talk about discos.

Clearly this is appalling.  When I was younger I might have been actually genuinely hurt by it.  By now I just find myself thinking that the men involved in it are all arseholes -- I think they realise it's not OK but they think it's funny not-OK not change-it-now not-OK.  And because I too can be sexist I find it very hard for my contempt for these individuals not to leak out a little bit onto men in general, or at least the young men on my course who think it's funny too.  I wish they'd just sort it out.  The feminism I believe in is about ending not perpetuating the war of the sexes.  I'm not just damaged by sexism because it might stop me doing things, but also damaged by it when it makes me a worse person by provoking a reactionary sexism in me.

So welcome to a difficult world, little niece.  I promise never ever to buy you anything pink.

Hurray!

My niece was born this morning.  I am now twice the aunt I was!  It's very exciting.  I don't know how my little nephew will deal with being a big brother.  He's usually quite a nice kid -- he has an endearing habit when playing of stopping and handing the toy over to you, saying "your turn now" -- but I think any child would be challenged by the sudden arrival of a smaller more demanding sibling.  I can remember when my little brother was born even though I was a bit younger then than my nephew is now.  I remember realising I wasn't going to get all the attention from now on, but I felt quite fatalistic about it.  My Granny bought him a teddy bear and she didn't buy me anything, but then again it was a horrible knitted teddy bear and I didn't want it.  Even at that age I felt that living up to people's attention could be hard work sometimes.

On the theme of its being pleasant not to be the only one, here's Chris Lowe singing One of the Crowd:

Plenteously

Here are some good things:

1. The 20th was stir-up Sunday. The full collect reads:

Stir up, O Lord, the wills of your faithful people; that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may be by you plenteously rewarded through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.

Most Anglican collects come from late Antique Latin via Thomas Cranmer or one of his ilk, and in the sixteenth century they could get away with writing English which sounded both Latinate and elegant. (E.g. that we by thee being defended from the fear of our enemies may pass our time in rest and quietness, etc.)

2. LibraryThing has introduced support for books with co-authors. I haven't tried it out yet, but this was my major problem with the system. So maybe I'll be able to put my academic books on too. (Although it occurs to me that unlike my novels some of them have value, and do I want to make my ownership of them public? LibraryThing does have a private book feature but I had assumed it was for porn.)

3. Prolog! Prolog is a computer language for doing logic. It's not like C++ where you tell the computer to do things. Instead you give the computer lots of facts and then ask it questions about them, along the lines is it possible to find a variable X which fulfils all these requirements. It's a lot more powerful than that sounds -- it's not just a database engine. We did some basic natural language processing the other day, where we made a system which could check and generate sentences from a basic list of vocabulary, doing elementary checks to see that the article, subject and verb all agreed in number, and with optional adverbs. Anyway it's not easy but it's cool. Part of me yearns to try to process some Latin. Part of me feels that would be a retrograde step.

4. London! London is great. I thought it would be hard work living here, but the tube is so much easier when you do it every day and know exactly where to stand and walk and you don't have a suitcase with you (or a box of rats), and there are many cool things going on, even if I don't make it to most of them cos I'm busy, and best of all I am catching up with lots of people I see only occasionally.  Some time ago in Cambridge I used to have a party every year between Christmas and New Year, as the best time to catch my friends who were working abroad and came back to England at that period to see their parents.  It worked pretty well for several years, but then they started marrying and having children, and if they come to England at all for Christmas they are very busy with family stuff.  But living in London makes seeing people on fleeting visits just that bit easier.

5. Even though I'm a man-hating middle-aged spinster somehow most of my friends are men. When I spend time with women without men there we somehow often end up talking about men. I find listening to women talking about men absolutely fascinating in a sort of gruesome way, and some of my female friends are very witty, in a crazy self-deprecating style, on the subject. An evening spent listening to them slagging off a) men, b) their own stupid dependence on the opinions of men, is very amusing. But sometimes it depresses me that for much of the time my life would fail the Bechdel test. So hurray for the women on my course! There are only seven of us out of fifty-six, and I think that makes us feel automatically friendly towards each other. And when we talk we talk about all sorts of things, including memory allocation and virtual functions.

Computer systems panic!

I'm panicking a bit about how I don't really understand Systems Architecture.  So I've got hold of the standard textbooks and am trying to get through them all this weekend.  Obviously the other thing I need is good music to keep me going while I read up on pagefiles and commit charge.  Here's Little Boots' new song, which I really like:

Also, if like me you're a Community fan, and I don't get why more people aren't, here's quite a nice little video, to which I am giving rather more screen-space than the previous:

Elder

I'm living a bit of a double life at the moment, but for once in a good way.  I got a bundle of offprints the other day and sent them out to the usual people.  As a result I've been in touch with quite a few people to whom I only talk intermittently but of whom I am fond, and I have lots of nice postcards from professors on my corkboard.

In my other life as a computing student I am working very hard and enjoying myself though feeling tired.  We are now in week six of eleven.  I'm not used to such a long term, because Cambridge has an eight-week term that goes at a mad gallop.  We're galloping too, and going very fast, but I do think that as a Cambridge undergraduate I had to produce rather more work for submission.  For one thing then I did three languages from the off (Latin, Old English, and Middle Welsh) and here we've only just started our second (Prolog, in addition to C++), plus we've only handed in two sets of coursework so far, neither of which we've yet had back marked.

There are two big contrasts for me.  The first is with being someone on the teaching end of the lectern.  For example, the fact that we're only six weeks into an eleven-week term makes me feel really good about the time I've got left to learn things before the Christmas break, whereas for so long the end of term has felt like something to be desired with mythical intensity. And there's also a big contrast in the sort of hard work we're doing.  For someone who is teaching and all that stuff, term-time is a big slog, but hard work without necessarily being of itself testingly difficult.  I'm not working as hard as someone who's teaching, but the work I'm doing is right on the outside fringes of my brain and needs a lot of reaching as far as I can into concepts I hardly grasp.  It's exhausting in a different way.  I could work harder than this but I'm more or less at full capacity in my ability to think.

The second constrast is with being a humanities student.  The great thing about trying to write a computer program is that you get instant feedback on what's wrong with it when it fails to compile or, having compiled, run properly.  If you mistranslate some Latin or misunderstand something in a history essay you don't get an immediate error message.  It's a very useful thing for learning to be told that something is wrong and only get a slight hint about what it is, so that you have to go back, work out what it is, and fix it for yourself.  I don't know how you could reproduce that in humanities teaching.

I think the one thing I would change about my classmates is the quality of our conversations.  I'm sure it's quite a lot my fault, and it's partly because so many of my fellow students are young -- the other day I was talking to someone about exams, and when I mentioned that I last did a non-humanities exam in 1994 he told me that he was four years old then.  And it's partly because I think people who choose this sort of subject have a tendency to be quite straightforward, which is mostly a good thing.  It's not that I want to spend lots of time bitching about things as such, but I miss the feeling that if bitching were to be going on it would be done amusingly and without being too predictable.  Luckily I have interesting real friends to talk to about actual things and I can continue to relate to the young course people in a largely auntly manner.  Go aunt Rebecca!  I'm trying hard to stay on the right side of patronising...

October books: Strachey wins

I didn't read much in October, unless you count books with titles like Problem-Solving in C++ and Structured Computer Organization.  I liked The Family Markowitz by Allegra Goodman, though I still think Intuition is my favourite of hers.  I also liked some short stories by Muriel Spark -- her particular sort of nastiness comes over well in short story form.  But the thing I enjoyed most was Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians.  I should have read this years ago.  Because it's free on Project Gutenberg I read it on my Kindle, and highlighted some bits I enjoyed.


Here he is on History in general:

THE history of the Victorian Age will never be written; we know too much about it. For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian—ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.

...

Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past. They have a value which is independent of any temporal processes— which is eternal, and must be felt for its own sake.

Poetry and common sense -- not my experience of Cambridge, but maybe Newman might have done better there:

Even in his own age he might, at Cambridge, whose cloisters have ever been consecrated to poetry and common sense, have followed quietly in Gray's footsteps and brought into flower those seeds of inspiration which now lie embedded amid the faded devotion of the Lyra Apostolica. At Oxford, he was doomed. 

 The Oxford Movement, making Cambridge look good by comparison:

'It would be a gain to this country,' Keble observed, 'were it vastly more superstitious, more bigoted, more gloomy, more fierce in its religion, than at present it shows itself to be.' 'The only good I know of Cranmer,' said Hurrell Froude, 'was that he burned well.' Newman preached, and soon the new views began to spread. Among the earliest of the converts was Dr Pusey, a man of wealth and learning, a professor, a canon of Christ Church, who had, it was rumoured, been to Germany. 

The Irish monsignor who did for poor old Newman:

Monsignor Talbot was a priest who embodied in a singular manner, if not the highest, at least the most persistent traditions of the Roman Curia. He was a master of various arts which the practice of ages has brought to perfection under the friendly shadow of the triple tiara. He could mingle together astuteness and holiness without any difficulty; he could make innuendoes as naturally as an ordinary man makes statements of fact; he could apply flattery with so unsparing a hand that even Princes of the Church found it sufficient; and, on occasion, he could ring the changes of torture on a human soul with a tact which called forth universal approbation. 

Here is Florence Nightingale considering a proposal of marriage:

'I have an intellectual nature which requires satisfaction,' she noted, 'and that would find it in him. I have a passionate nature which requires satisfaction, and that would find it in him. I have a moral, an active nature which requires satisfaction, and that would not find it in his life. Sometimes I think that I will satisfy my passionate nature at all events. …' 

Dr Arnold, Headmaster of Rugby, wants to improve his pupils' morals:

... and it was that that Dr. Arnold set himself to accomplish. But how was he to achieve his end? Was he to improve the character of his pupils by gradually spreading around them an atmosphere of cultivation and intelligence? By bringing them into close and friendly contact with civilised men, and even, perhaps, with civilised women? By introducing into the life of his school all that he could of the humane, enlightened, and progressive elements in the life of the community? On the whole, he thought not.

And on General Gordon in the Sudan:

One catches a vision of strange characters, moved by mysterious impulses, interacting in queer complication, and hurrying at last—so it almost seems—like creatures in a puppet show to a predestined catastrophe.

Made by people

Now we've done some logic of the "Either Adam or Bill is a murderer, and if Bill is a murderer then..... etc" type, we've started doing some stuff about the basic logic that underlies the physical implementations of computers. For example, if you have an AND gate in a circuit then it has two inputs and one output. If both the inputs are true, or 1, which means that they have a small current going through them, then the output is true. Then you can put a NOT gate on it, which just turns a true into a false and vice versa. The two together make a NAND gate, which apparently is the most useful gate -- you can put NAND gates together to form lots of different types of gate.

The thing is that these outputs all vary according to the current input. If you put two NAND gates together in a particular combination you can make a latch, which can be set to true or false and then remains at that value even though both its inputs are set to true as default. This is a way of storing some information -- one latch can store one bit, e.g. one instance of true or false (1 or 0). So suppose you want to store the number 5, which is 101 in binary. That's three bits of information, but to put it into a computer you have to follow the computer's rules about how numbers are stored. On a 64-bit machine an integer is probably stored as 4 bytes, that is 32 bits of information. So you need 32 latches to store it, each of them consisting of four little gates, two AND and two NOT. I have a little USB pen about the size of my thumbnail which has 2Gb of storage. 2Gb is (strictly speaking) 2 x 1,073,741,824 bytes, which is 2,147,483,648 bytes, which is 17,179,869,184 bits, and each of those bits has four gates, making a total of 68,719,476,736 logic gates just on that little thing. I think that's truly amazing.

Of course it's possible I've not got this right because unfortunately our lecturer for this is very softly-spoken and doesn't give the impression of thinking it's amazing at all. I really need to sit down and work through it properly.