Pre-Raphaelites at Tate Britain

Tate Britain currently has an exhibition about the pre-Raphaelites. It's subtitled "Victorian Avant-Garde" because the Tate is not the sort of place that feels comfortable having pretty pictures up without a thesis. So the thesis, such as it is, is that they were pretty shocking in their day, and I suppose it does manage to convey this a bit. What I mostly came away with was a sense that their works were tremendously diverse, and that after their initial idea about painting nature I would find it hard to define them in any way.

I'm not a huge fan of the Pre-Raphaelites in general. Like with the Impressionists, I adored them when I was about fifteen, and then felt that I had grown out of them. (I made an attempt recently to like the Impressionists again, and I realised that I do really like their work on the rare occasions when they're not painting flowers or pretty ladies.) Pictures of dense-haired women holding pomegranates leave me rather cold. But there were enough interesting or unexpected things in this exhibition to make me glad I went.

I particularly liked two early works by John Everett Millais, which seem to show a sense of humour -- I do not associate the Pre-Raphaelites with a sense of humour. A brilliant pen and ink drawing entitled "The Disentombment of Queen Matilda" which is viewable on the Tate site here; and a scene from the story of Isabella and her pot of Basil, which is from the Walker Gallery in Liverpool and viewable small-size here. It's not just the nasty brother's powerful kick at the dog, and the mild way Lorenzo stoops as, in his pre-composted state, he shares an orange with Isabella, but the excellent serried rows of prim eaters behind them. Millais was only 19 when he did both of these, and they have an interesting energy.

Their religious paintings are a bit more inadvertently funny. I really like Millais' Christ in the House of his Parents, which upset people like Ruskin at the time because it showed a working carpenter's family, but which seems quite innocuous now, even rather kow-towing (as I suspect The Life of Brian will to everyone in a hundred years' time). In it Mary is alarmed because the child Jesus has hurt his palm -- it's prefiguration, you see. Once you've seen several of these sorts of pictures -- a bare-chested teenage Jesus stretches his arms in the middle of his work while Mary reacts in horror to his crucifixion-like shadow on the wall, Jesus fetches firewood to his house while Mary trembles at the two that have fallen down to form a cross -- it's hard not to presume that in the Pre-Raphaelites' mind poor Mary was a nervous wreck constantly starting at every possible prefiguration of the crucifixion. Their sort of piety is the thing that's most hard to enjoy about the Pre-Raphaelites.

William Holman Hunt was certainly the worst culprit. His Light of the World, showing Jesus with a lantern at twilight knocking at an overgrown door in a significant manner, was hugely popular at the time. One of the three versions he painted actually travelled all over the world as a sort of moral booster for the Empire. My mother had a copy on her wall as a child (I saved it for sentiment's sake when she tried to throw it away recently) and there's a print in a dusty corner of the vestry at my parents' church. It's no longer easy to like. Nor is the other famous Holman Hunt, the Scapegoat, showing the poor goat of the Day of Atonement in the desert, fainting and surrounded by the bones of its predecessors. But I had never before come across his Triumph of the Innocents, a remarkably crazy version of the Flight Into Egypt. This contains the traditional elements -- Mary and the infant Jesus flee on a donkey led by Joseph. But surrounding them are strange glowing cherub figures representing the innocents whose massacre by Herod they were fleeing. The cherubs glow with wierd ectoplasm, throw flowers, and dance on top of the water of a stream. Their wounds are healed though their clothes are still slashed. Even odder, they bring with them bubbles, some of them quite large, which apparently represent pious thoughts by the people of the time. This is High Victorian sensibility at its most unconsciously insane. There's an even more lurid version in the Walker. Ruskin thought it 'the greatest religious painting of our time'. (Robertson Davies has some interesting things to say about the power of bad religious art in his Cornish Trilogy.)

There were some other interesting paintings -- I really liked this Burne-Jones now in Stuttgart, where wing-footed Perseus fights a twisting sea-monster to free Andromeda. But by far the most interesting room was the William Morris room, with its different media. There was a fantastic bed designed and embroidered by his daughter May Morris. A tapestry whose design was commissioned by a wealthy merchant took his wife and daughter eight years to complete. There's a gorgeous manuscript copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, written by William Morris and decorated by him, Burne-Jones, and Murray Fairfax. There were some amazing tapestries of the Grail legend. It's the sort of thing that's hideous when badly done by Past Times, but I could have looked at these originals for hours. There's also a great wardrobe painted by Burne-Jones with pictures from the Prioress' Tale.

One thing that did puzzle me at the time was that I thought there were other figures who were part of the whole Pre-Raphaelite thing, particularly Frederic Lord Leighton of Flaming June fame. I did sort this out later, but I will explain in another post since this one is already long enough...

A few links

Ben Goldacre's explanation of how pharmaceutical companies can manipulate research data is very important.

Sarah Silverman makes a persuasive case for American grandmothers getting guns. Blimey America is troubled. I suppose the UK is too.

Wondering how to use the telephone? This advice from 1917 is mostly sound. My father in particular could use the page titled "Concentrate while telephoning". Once he got distracted before he had even finished saying "Hello Rebecca" and just sort of trailed off into silence. I think he'd seen a bird.

Also here is an online mind-mapping tool which I keep meaning to try. I'd be interested in comments if anyone does use it. I use MindManager but the problem with paid-for software is that you have to reinstall it and find all the license keys etc every time you wipe or upgrade your computer.

One Man, Two Guv'nors

Continuing the cultural theme I went to see One Man, Two Guv'nors at the Haymarket, a modern adaptation of an eighteenth-century play by Goldoni, Arlecchino servitore di due padroni. It was very funny in a silly way, with lots of falling over and misunderstandings. It was also quite interesting because I don't really know much about Commedia dell'Arte, and it wore its classical origins very lightly. It's set in 60s Brighton, and had good-humoured skiffle-style songs between the scenes.

But I do find faked audience interaction very annoying, and also when part of the play is to pretend that something has gone wrong with the play -- it's just too tiresomely meta. It also feels like a cheap trick to get audience sympathy -- the less suspicious, older people in the more expensive seats will clap twice as hard for what they think is an embarrassed audience member hauled on stage, and laugh twice as much at what they think is a clever improvised riposte by an actor under pressure. I think most of the audience spent the interval trying to entangle what if anything had been real and what staged. But I think most of them didn't really mind, and the people I was with weren't bothered, so it's probably just me. Judging from this FT review of the Broadway production, which says "the improv is inspired" but mentions something which also happened in the performance I was at, there's probably not really much improv as such.

But then I am not very sympathetic to theatre as an art form any more, and this was by far the least irritating and most enjoyable theatrical production I have been to in many years. I did laugh loads at the time, and my issues with it were mostly retrospective.

Tomb Treasures of Han China, The Fitzwilliam

I'm leaving London at the end of the month, so I've been treating my last fortnight here as a holiday, trying to catch up with people and see some of the things I didn't have the time or energy to do over the course of the year. I was going to blog about cultural things in one big post, but then I thought it would be hideously long, so instead I shall do separate posts about each thing.

The first thing is actually in Cambridge not London, the current exhibition of Chinese tomb goods, mostly from the 2nd century BC, at the Fitzwilliam Museum. The Fitzwilliam Museum is my favourite free-exhibition place now that the British Library charges. (The National Gallery does good free exhibitions too, but small ones.) They tend to get a good balance between spectacle and content too.

I went round with a friend and we agreed how interestingly disconcerting it is to see objects from a culture where neither of us have any sense of time-frames and stylistic changes -- I kept being startled to remember how very old the objects are. There are some really lovely small things, like the gold beasts on the poster, and some carved jade, and disturbing all-over jade burial suits. The terracotta figurines of servants and officials are also very pleasing in their quiet elegance, and for the mulish expressions of the horses. There are also some truly beautiful figures of long-sleeved dancers. I think that dancing with long sleeves or "water sleeves" is a very old Chinese art but I only really know about it from the film "The House of Flying Daggers" and from a google search when I got back. Something to point out that that's why the figures had such extended arms would have been good. (I assume that is why -- I don't know for sure.) I also found out from the website when I got back that I'd missed the exhibition's narrative and that the treasures were from rival kingdoms -- but I'd rather have learnt about the dancing than the politics anyway. But these are mostly little quibbles. Apart from suffering a little from the perennial problem of lighting where you cast a shadow on what you're looking at, it's nicely laid out and a good size, and I really enjoyed it.

The Fitzwilliam also has about the most refined tea room I know, where you can get aromatic rosebud tea made from real rosebuds.

Here's some water sleeve dancing I found on YouTube.

Some pig

Pig saves goat:


Dog feeds lamb.

Ralph Lauren hires plus-size model -- she's 6 ft 2 and a size 12.

Animals are coming off better in today's news. Pick up your game, humanity!

Jamaican dancehall

Half of Major Lazer is Diplo, who is most famous for working with M.I.A., and you can hear that in this track although the vocal is softer:

Two thoughts and an unrelated video

Thought 1: I think being a young unestablished academic in Cambridge is most like being in an abusive relationship in the way it persuades you that any troubles or sufferings you have are your own deserved fault. (Furthermore sometimes not even your fault because of things you have done or chosen, but because of what you are, some quality intrinsic to yourself.) The middle aged men tell you that something always turns up for the good people -- but they're not an imaginative bunch and it's hard to believe that their assessment of someone as good is completely unrelated to whether something turned up for them. Now I have distance it seems odd how completely I bought into it all. Of course I shouldn't be too melodramatic -- obviously no one ever actually beat me up, and I was brought up in an old-school British way so that I feel that an occasional severe pruning of the self-esteem is probably good for me. (If anything this year might have been an over-corrective; I'm feeling quite smug right now.)

Thought 2: I do like how lyric videos have become the standard way to make some sort of video for a new song before the full-on big-budget video comes out. I haven't watched any pop TV recently so I don't know whether they play the lyric video or whether they still say "the song at number 8 doesn't have a video yet so here instead is a new release by X". It must be a huge boon for graphic designers. The first one I remember seeing was for Cee Lo Green's F*** You. I think in that case it was a way of letting the song loose to see if people liked it, and when it went viral they made a full video with the scansion-compromised clean version. This one's good (I don't get all the references though by a long way):



Unrelated video: Robbie William's new song. That's Kaya Scodelario, again.

A pastor's letter about the church and abuse

I find this letter very interesting. It's from the pastor of a full-on every-word-of-the-Bible church in America, admitting a specific way in which they have got things wrong.

I have a few friends (non-Christians) who reproach me with what they see as my unBiblical views. They say they have more respect for the Bible-thumpers who condemn homosexuality for a phrase in Leviticus and women's ministry for a phrase of St Paul. They think all my explanations are just a fudge, a weaseling out of the details of what I profess to believe. I can sympathise with their desire for the absolute; but I also find this attitude thumpingly naive -- like Bertrand Russell's idea that children left to themselves are sweetness and light, or those teenagers who think sex is a physical act with effects only on the physical plane.* I believe that the Bible is the word of God, but the word of God refracted through humanity. As light gets distorted by water or scattered by dust, or coloured by a shadow or a by a puddle of oil, so human mediation distorts truth. It is an obvious folly to concentrate attention on the tone, the texture of the glass's effect and not to seek to get at the pure light behind it.**

The great Methodist campaigners against slavery knew this. I could pick out phrases in the Bible to suggest another attitude -- "Slaves obey your masters" said St Paul -- but they knew that slavery was intensely transgressive of a deeper Biblical message, and they acted on that. The pastor of this church has discovered for himself how an attention to a literal interpretation of sentences can impair attention to the spirit. I'm sorry that people suffered for this to happen, but I'm glad he wasn't too proud to learn the lesson.

* Excellent XKCD cartoon.

** This isn't my metaphor, it's George Herbert's:
A man that looks on glasse,
On it may stay his eye;
Or if he pleaseth, through it passe,
And then the heav’n espie.***

*** Interestingly my Granny was recommended something very similar, in fact an alternation between the two, to improve the strength of her eye muscles.

Athleticism

It's a shame it's so difficult to let go of pole-dancing's sleazy associations and just appreciate it as an art form. I'm not sure the high-heels and underwear outfits are really any worse than the things ballet dancers wear, and there's a little-girl-ishness about ballet which I find more offensive by far. Anyway, the dancers in this video are pretty amazing, and I really like the song. The video is not actually rude but you might still feel a bit embarrassed if someone saw you watching it at work. (As I watched it just now it came with an advert for a Thomas the Tank Engine DVD which does seem a bit inappropriate.)

Oh dear

This young man is feeling oppressed by social constructs of gender.

Have I mentioned that I heart the Pet Shop Boys?

I love that
a) their next single includes the word "context" and has seem pretty good lyrics about death
b) Chris Lowe wanted to call their new slower album "Pet Shop Boys Infirm"
c) the new album apparently includes a song based on some Handel
d) they think Facebook is sinister and horrible
e) the (not that great) single Winner wasn't written about the Olympics at all but about Eurovision
(b c d and e are from this interview)

Monkey therapists

My individual project for the M.Sc. is not something I came up with myself, but something I was allocated. One of the things it involves is reading up on Attachment Theory, which makes me a bit sad. Apparently babies are born with the part of the brain which deals with terror in place, but without the bit of the brain which you use when you calm down. They need adults around to act as that part of the brain for them, until they're old enough to grow that bit for themselves. (I think that's when they're around two years old.) A small child that doesn't have interactions with a nice sensible adult brain won't be able to grow that part of their brain properly. They have missed out on something almost as important as food.

It's interesting stuff. I think we're all used to the idea of the brain as a huge set of connections between neurons. I wasn't aware before of the idea of the brain as only one brain among many, only able to develop its own internal connections through its interactions with other external brains. On the one hand it's quite cheering because there seems to be a general anxiety around about parenthood, and all the parents I know are succeeding hugely in ways they may not even be aware of. On the other hand learning about it is depressing because it involves learning about what happens when it goes wrong. This means lots of sad stories of terrible things happening to toddlers so that they grow up without a part of their brain, and a certain amount of systematic cruelty to baby monkeys to see how they cope with it. They did experiments where they gave baby monkeys all the food etc that they needed but replaced their mothers with stuffed toys. Said monkeys, when introduced to other monkeys, could not cope at all, and acted in ways described as "autistic". Poor monkeys. There was another interesting experiment where they gave the "autistic" young adult monkeys other monkeys as therapists. The monkey therapists were half the age of the damaged monkeys, and their incessant demanding need for social interaction was able to break through the damaged monkeys' isolation and socialise them, so that they were all later able to join monkey society together. Which is something, I suppose. Because the human brain stays changeable for much longer than people used to think -- you can make significant new pathways even late in life -- those who missed out as toddlers could probably be helped by carefully directed therapies.

(I often wonder, what does it do to the development of the brains of the people who do this to monkeys? The discovery of long-term neuroplasticity means that it could quite feasibly alter the adult brain. I don't know if anyone's studied the neuroscientific and psychological effects of cruelty to animals being part of your job. I'd have though it could be as bad as second-hand smoke.)

The literature on the subject is a little annoying because of its tendency to see this as the entire deal. It may be true that you can induce autistic-like behaviour in a child just by how you treat it -- thankfully no one has tried this but they assume they can because of their afore-mentioned successes with monkeys -- but that doesn't change the fact that there are children out there who have actual autism. It certainly doesn't mean their parents don't play with them, and it does seem to have a large genetic component. And they're very sexist -- everything is mother this, mother that, and I read a formal interview where one of them was asked about this and he implied that when a father looks after a baby the father has a different emotional gender from his physical one. Attachment theory has been used as another stick to beat women around the head with, by people who think they should stay home and gurgle at their babies instead of going out to work. It's not just unfair on the mothers, it's unfair on fathers and men in general too. My brother is certainly part of his small children's emotional framework, and when my dad (who is a softy) spends ages pulling faces at his little grand-daughter and bouncing her on his knee I'm sure that's helping her brain to develop.

While I'm on depressing subjects I recently read a thing (as part of a book review in the Literary Review) which said that the Japanese were already gearing up to surrender before the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It said that this was partly because the terrible conventional bombing campaigns were having a massive effect, but also because the Red Army was invading Manchuria, and the Japanese knew they couldn't face the military power of enormous Russia. It said that the Americans knew this and that the point of dropping the bombs was not to force a surrender which was already on its way, but to hasten the surrender to limit the inevitable land gains which the Soviets were about to make in the Far East. In this reading the "shorten the war by five years and save innumerable lives" justification was knowing bullshit and the real reason was about the post-war political map. Ouch ouch ouch. Part of me wants to follow this up and see what the evidence is for and against, while part of me dreads doing that.

Relevance in popular culture

I don't have a lot in common with will.i.am and I'm OK with that, but it looks like I might be inadvertently ahead of a trend (again!). Apparently next year will.i.am is going to college to study computer science. Here is a nicely-verbed quote from the popjustice website:

“When I am 57 I still want to be relevant in popular culture,” he threatened, “and the way to be relevant within popular culture in the future is writing code.”

I like ZeFrank and this job interview video is him at his best, with his wierd combination of funny and intensely serious:


You probably already saw this video of excellent dancing. Now here is another by the same man, to the good sort of dubstep.


This song is brilliant. I don't know why it's called Peanut Butter because it seems to be just a love song, unless it's a love song to peanut butter. I'm not a big fan of peanut butter myself. I like the taste but somehow I never want to eat it. Still a good song though:
Note that you can download it for free (click where it says "download").

Some things!

I just had some good news which I won't mention because it's not 100% definite. So here are some good things!

1. Radical tea towels! By the time you read this I will probably have bought this March of the Women tote bag.

2. This story of an 18-year-old Somalian refugee bought tears to my eyes in both a bad and a good way.

3. My small nephew is only three so he doesn't enunciate very clearly. At the moment he seems to be confused about the difference between an adventure and a bench. "Let's go on a benchure!" he'll say when in the park, and confound his parents by then running up to and sitting down on a bench. My brother feels a bit guilty that they're clearly not providing him with a very adventurous life. Also when we play "football" and he gets the ball in the right place he shouts "Gold!". I love my nephew. And my eight-month-old niece is getting fun too. She likes to pick things up and then drop them. Then she looks at you with this excellent expression of wonder and joy as if to say "that was both awesome and hilarious!".

4. If you want to upgrade your laptop's memory Crucial have a tool that lets you select its manufacturer and model and then shows you the right things to buy and a video to help you do it. I'm going to try upgrading mine to 8Gb. (Thanks Adrian for the link.)

America!

I have a sense of the American literary scene (or more likely one particularly vocal aspect of it) because I subscribe to various literary blogs, including the Millions, which sometimes prefaces its longer blog entries with as many as three epigraphs. The McSweeney's and Dave Eggers lot are quite ascendant. And because I like it when things are very much themselves, without fear of parody, it made me happy when I saw that the latest issue of the Believer has an actual audio cassette taped to its front cover. Apparently it has music on it which is exclusively available in audio cassette form. But Beck has gone one step further by only releasing his latest album as sheet music, in, where else, McSweeney's.

It includes ukelele notation, obviously.

On the other side of things enthusiastic Americans get up to, this project to make a 3D motion sensor from tin foil and cardboard (and also an Arduino board, some crocodile clips, and free software) is pretty cool.

Dansk höspitalitet

I made up the word "höspitalitet", sorry. But I did go to the Danish Olympic hospitality house at St Katharine's Docks. They had one of the Roskilde museum reconstructed Viking ships there, a little one called the Helge Ask. This was just a coastal defence ship, not a full-on raiding vessel, but it's very nice anyway.

The Helge Ask

Putting up the sail

Taking the sail down

There were also Vikings fighting, which was great:

And a lego model of the Olympic park:

Well done the Danes.

Pet Shop Boys yay!

The latest Pet Shop Boys single, Winner, is not that great. So it's lucky that popjustice exists to point out that its b-sides are much better ("Well the third Pet Shop Boys b-sides album is off to a good start"). There's a sad Beegees cover, a long atmospheric piece which I think is based on a poem I read as a kid, and this excellent song which they wrote for but did not give to Kylie, possibly because they realised that "I like the cut of your jib" is not a very Kylie lyric. Hurray!

(Is it just me or is the beginning a bit like that saucy Bloodhound Gang song?)

Snooker is not an Olympic sport

I'm not one for watching sport, with two exceptions. I used to watch a lot of snooker, because I find the combination of abstraction and seediness very appealing. I also had a big crush on Stephen Hendry as a teenager -- I think it was his shyness, spottiness and firm grasp of geometry that did it for me. Also I watch showjumping when it's on, but I do find it a little stressful as well as beautiful because of the partnership aspect.

So I have watched almost none of the Olympics, even though unlikely people like my mother have been finding themselves glued to the TV. Still I'm quite enjoying them. I thought London would be a nightmare but it's actually quite pleasant. There's a bit of a party atmosphere, with tube train drivers announcing medal results as they come through, and visitors wandering around in Olympic uniforms of various countries, as well as lots of people carrying children waving British flags. Yesterday I met up with my friend Laura who is one of the Olympic volunteers. She's come down from Manchester to spend her fortnight's summer holiday sleeping on a friend's sofa and getting up ridiculously early to steward people through security at the Olympic park. We went to St Paul's for evensong and then had a coffee. The marathon route was still closed to traffic, which had essentially turned the whole St Paul's area into a large pedestrian precinct, and the cafes, which in the City usually close at weekends, were open and bustling. The City is usually a depressing ghost town at the weekend. Then we walked across the Millenium Bridge down to Southwark. Lots of the visiting Olympic nations have hired large places and set up hospitality houses. I think they're mostly open to the public, and many of them are free. (The Londonist has a list.) We went to the Swiss one, right next to Southwark Cathedral. Perhaps immediately after Murray's surprise victory over Federer wasn't the most tactful time, but actually we had a tremendously polite conversation with a lovely Swiss lady, where we extolled the virtues of Federer as both tennis player and human being while she did the same about Murray. They had free biscuits and Lindt chocolate, as well a woman yodelling along to accordian music, and one of those massive long alpine horns. Also climbing, cheese rolling, and other Swiss 'sports'. Laura picked up a few free lapel pins, which apparently are collected by the Olympic volunteers, and have swapping value.

Anyway, in short: the Olympics are quite good fun. (A lot more interesting than my M.Sc. summer project...)

Endearing things

I've realised that I find the Scissor Sisters very lovable. I'm not sure why since they're not particularly tame.

In that video I think Jake Shears is channelling a certain amount of Techno Viking. If you haven't see the Techno Viking you should watch it because it's one of the precious things of the internet:


Also here is a walrus making noises:


London isn't half as bad as people were expecting during the Games. There's quite a nice friendly atmosphere -- to the extent that people who stand on the left on the elevators who also have small children with them are generally being left alone by the London populace, even if it's busy. Forgiving someone for standing on the left on the elevator is the hardest thing for a Londoner to do. And we got silver in the eventing! Not only is it Mary King's sixth Olympics, she also recovered from a broken neck to compete again.

Some interesting things

This review of Fifty Shades of Grey is truly excellent -- great use of .gifs, especially the last one.

This small girl guesses what books are about based on their cover. I particularly like her take on Jane Eyre.

When I was a kid I loved The Secret Life of Machines, and now mental floss has collected some of the episodes together. This sort of thing made me really frustrated about how boring Physics was at school -- it just seemed like there was no need for it not to be interesting. They're really worth revisiting. I love the bit in the fax machine one where they act out the handshake that starts a connection by saying things to each other like "Can you understand me if I speak this fast?" Something like that would actually have been very useful when I was learning about TCP connection for my networks exam. Also, generous cattage.

Programming query

How did anyone program anything ever before the internet? Maybe that's why my childhood programming was so ineffective. But my brother rewrote minesweeper from scratch for me when he was about 14 -- perhaps I should ask him.

Weather

I've been finding all this rain a little tedious and inconvenient for obvious reasons, but I'd forgotten to think of it more broadly until I was talking to a farmer after church today. I wish I could have recorded what he said, Devon accent included. Basically the farmers are at their wits' end. His potatoes are rotting in their banked-up rows, with standing water as high as the base of the mounds -- expect potato prices to rise. And there will be almost no millable British wheat to make bread unless we get some proper sunshine. Every possible shed is full of livestock which should not be indoors at this time of year, and you can't take tractors out because they just sink in the muddy fields, even if you only half-load them, so lots of jobs are having to be done laboriously by hand. No hay can be made, though some people have managed to get some silage done. Today's St Swithun's day so let's hope the old saying doesn't hold this year. Right now it's actually rather pleasant here in Devon.

Some various things

I have a raspberry Pi. And I'm going to try to do this with it!
http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/desktops/how-to-turn-your-raspberry-pi-into-an-xbmc-media-centre-50008599/
The raspberry Pi is beautiful.

The problem with London at the moment is that everywhere you go you are constantly bombarded with public service announcements suggesting that you avoid this place in the near future, especially at this particular time of day, and also places near to it or connected to it in any way. It's getting a bit tedious.

Andrew Prescott used to be a BL person and is now head of the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at KCL. Here he talks about this sort of thing. I only ever skim-read anything that's to do with the digital humanities because it tends to provoke my unhelpful thinking patterns, but I did notice this true sentence:

We try and suggest that we are collaborating in new ways, but at the end of the day a unit like that at King’s is simply an XML factory for projects led by other researchers.

Though possibly it would be more accurate to say that they are consultants for setting up and helping to run an external XML factory staffed by some poor research associate. Anyway, the situation is not healthy for "digital humanities" and it's not healthy for the humanities who are working with them.

I made my mother a cover for her new little Kindle. I suppose it's the fault of jpeg that in this picture the beautiful soft brown colour has been replaced by splotchy purple and grey-green:

I was oddly alert to gender stereotyping as a child so I'm glad I learnt to sew when I was too young to know that it was seen as a typically female thing to do. I don't sew well, but given that I spend so much of my life not managing to do things it's nice to make something simple from time to time. This is made from alpaca cloth woven out of our herd's fibre, and it's lined with unbleached cotton. The button I got off of etsy, from this bloke.

I'm trying to learn Ruby on Rails. It's making me feel stupid. It's very simple in many ways, but it involves information passing between lots of different files, and that's where I'm having trouble. One vital thing in programming is understanding a program's flow of control, which is simply which bits of code are executed in which order, and therefore understanding what all the variables are at any point in the program. Ruby is a programming language and Rails is a framework which sets up automatic groups of folders and customisable files which work together in a pre-specified manner. The idea is "convention over configuration", e.g. instead of having to tell a file where to find another file it just assumes it's in a particular place unless told otherwise. It makes it very quick to set up fast websites that deal with data. But if I ask it for a particular page via a browser, it looks first at a routes file, then at a controller file, then at a model file, then at a view file, then at a layout file, then at a template file, and then (probably using a stylesheet as well) it makes html out of all these things. I think I am being a bit slow, but it can be very hard to work out just where exactly you are when you work on a particular file, especially given that it might have just one line of code and make no sense out of context. (And also in Ruby you can pass blocks of code around as parameters to methods, and that's just wierd, frankly, though I can see that once I get used to it I'll use it all the time and think it's fantastic.)

Lastly, a friend of mine takes great photos, and I really love this one of part of Mill Road, Cambridge, at 6am.

Brief observation, query

I have been living alone for about eight hours and already I am talking to myself like a loon.

In other news, if anyone has an idea for a reasonably straightforward Android app I could make then I'd be interested to hear it. It doesn't need to be useful for more than 2 or 3 people in the whole world. I used to have a database set up to produce the most efficient route round the UL from a given set of classmarks, so maybe I could try to do that, though it wouldn't be much use to me these days. Or I did wonder about an app for making a brief note whenever I see tube mice. Tube mice make me happy.

Music makes me feel good

K-pop -- is it the new Italodisco? Don't ask me, I'm 36! Anyway here's an excellent Korean pop song:


George Michael is glad to be alive. Good! I too am glad that George Michael is alive.


Little Mix have a great single coming out. It's Beyonceyish in a good way:


Who is Charli XCX? I can't remember. But I like this song:


Benny Benassi is a figure of mixed blessings but I love this rather soulful remix of a song by Temper Trap.


Noisettes have a great song called Winner which I hope will make them lots of London 2012 money. Here it is remixed:


Of course I saw all these things originally on popjustice, I always do. I'm only really putting them here so I can play them all from one tab.

Miaow

I went to a choral eucharist at Southwark Cathedral yesterday evening. During the consecration a cat appeared and curled itself up luxuriously in the middle of the kneelers in front of the communion rail, having accurately worked out where in the whole of that huge church it could most comfortably get in everyone's way. It was very annoyed when someone moved it and yowled loudly. In honour of this cat I am posting some cat-related links. Because as we all know, the internet is made of cats.

4OD has lots of good stuff on Youtube, including Chris Morris pointing out in Brass Eye that the ancient Egyptians worshipped cats because they thought they were funny. (Morris was ahead of his time in this as in many things -- this was about eight years before the invention of YouTube itself and ten before I Can Has Cheezburger, and as I recall back in the 90s cats were not seen as intrinsically amusing.)

Google built a neural network and let it loose on the interweb and it came up with a Platonic ideal of a cat.

Here is an excellent illustration of the Smart poem "For I will consider my cat Jeoffry". And by the same artist an excerpt from Edward Lear's poem "How pleasant to know Mr Lear", featuring Old Foss his cat.

And two quick things not to do with cats but I want to close the tabs: 1) a ten-year-old girl bursts into tears in a room full of Rembrandts; her parents take her to a psychiatrist whom she eventually marries; apparently a true story though it sounds like a novel; 2) two small girls interviewed about a bad haircut.

June's reading

By far the best thing I read in June was Great Works: 50 Paintings Explored by Tom Lubbock. It was my (requested) birthday present from my brother. It's a series of short newspaper columns by a since-deceased art critic, each on a single painting. The way he discusses pictures is unusual and and interesting -- for example to explain the power of an El Greco of a boy blowing on a candle he makes you visualise three short films. The book is quite well illustrated, though the pictures are constrained by its size. I really enjoyed it and discovered people I hadn't heard of like Peter Doig and Philipp Otto Runge. I wish Tom Lubbock had written more I could read. He was only 53 when he died. His obituary tells me that more may be published -- and also that he was a philosophy student at Corpus Christi, which is interesting. Next time I go back I'll see if any of the older fellows remember him.

Otherwise the things I enjoyed were mostly rereading -- Mason and Dixon, Anathem, Moo -- but I did read an excellent New Zealand book called Uncle Trev and his Whistling Bull by Jack Lasenby. This is the sort of book which any age of person could enjoy. It's about a boy in the 1930s who has to spend a long time in bed with some illness. When his mother goes out his bachelor Uncle Trev sneaks in to eat biscuits and tell the boy tall stories about his farm. Very good and unostentatiously charming.

There is no Latin word for TLDR

The Vatican Library newsletter pops into my inbox every few months, and it brings a smile to my face despite being pages and pages long. This time I was quite struck by the question of translation. The Cardinal in charge has recently retired from the post, and here is just a small part of what the newsletter had to say about this:

We had known for some time that the Cardinal had presented to the Pope his request to be relieved of so heavy a commitment, and we had adopted the attitude of those who understand, who do not wish a loved one to be afflicted with burdens beyond what he is able to bear. But this does not take away from the sorrow of a separation that each individual experiences by retracing the memories of the years, whether many or few, which he or she spent with Prefect, and later with Cardinal Farina.

The language of the Vatican is, of course, Latin. But I still think this was written in Italian and translated into English, not just because the writer is Italian but because there are a few untranslated Italian phrases in the middle, somehow passed over. Have I just never noticed before that Italian is very Latinate in style as well as in actual vocabulary and grammar? You could translate this into Latin without much rearranging.

Plus I love the closing paragraph:

After all that I have told about us, sometimes the thought comes that we are able to do many beautiful things, and sometimes somebody says so explicitly with expressions of appreciation. It is not that we are unhappy about this. But you will allow me not to forget the Biblical passage from the Book of Judges (chapter 7) which tells the story of Gideon and his fight against the Midianites. Gideon had gathered thirty-two thousand men, but the Lord made him reduce the number to only three hundred fighters because – he explained – if they had been so many, they would have been able to boast before him, saying: "It is my own hand that has saved me." I quickly found that in the Library we are about a hundred, only one third of Gideon's three hundred. We are thus even more protected against that sort of dangerous arrogance! Also for this reason, and through Him who has filled our hands, has enlightened our minds and enlivened our hearts, we give sincere thanks.

To be honest, if you told me that this had been translated straight from Augustine or Anselm I'd probably believe you. (Although they were a bit less likely to congratulate themselves on their escape from dangerous arrogance, which is a little Pooterish.)

A good book

It's a sad truth, for which I am prepared to take no responsibility whatever, that the better people know me the less seriously they tend to take my book recommendations. So here's somebody else, with the authority of the New York Times behind him, talking about how great Pynchon's Mason and Dixon is. He describes it as

less willfully cerebral than the author’s earlier masterworks

Hurray for Rowan Williams

I went to an excellent talk by Rowan Williams -- in the dialogue format with another poet -- where he talked about language, poetry and translation. Because I went to his difficult Clark lectures on aesthetics some years back in Cambridge, which were published as Grace and Necessity, I was able to follow more than otherwise. I do like the archbishop. He's good at gentle self-deprecating humour, and he is so startlingly but unostentatiously bright. His adoption of Simone Weil's idea that one should always approach other humans with hesitation, e.g. a sort of expectant humility, is something you can actually see him doing as well talking about. It means not putting a name or label on a person but instead being open to them as a human. The Franciscans who used to live in Cambridge were like that. I suppose it's part of the reason why he seems undefinite to the world in general, his refusal to condemn. And certainly many Anglicans (and journalists) would like him to do a bit more condemning -- my evangelical relatives on my father's side don't really approve of him. I think he's just what we need. The Church of England is sometimes called the only organisation that exists for the benefit of its non-members, and I think he provides a good sign for both the church and the non-church. The church needs to be just a bit skew-whiff from the world. It needs not to copy the name-calling style of modern politics. It needs to measure its success by things that are neither worldly nor unworldly but aworldly, or refuse to measure its success at all.

Also it was cool to hear him talk about the poetry culture of his native Wales. I hadn't realised that he was brought up bilingual in Welsh and English. And I enjoyed that he talked intelligently about Geoffrey Hill. An elderly bishop used to bring Hill into lunch sometimes when I was a research fellow. I liked that bishop, since deceased, and a few times actually sat next to Geoffrey Hill. Whereupon I found myself completely unable to say anything at all intelligent to him about his work, much as I like it. It was one of those moments that seems frustratingly bigger than itself, and actually emblematic of a whole part of life. Maybe I should write a poem about it.

Attempts to forget a depressing fact

I'm now in the part of my course where I do my project.  I've more or less accidentally ended up with a very odd one, which involves learning about early brain development.  This involves quite a few rather depressing things; for example I recently found out that there is a thing called the Kazdin hopelessness scale for children. We live in a world in which someone has successfully quantified the hopelessness of children. So I googled Kazdin, worried about the toll that sort of work would take on someone, and discovered that he (presumably the same man) is also the author of The Kazdin Method: Parenting the Defiant Child. Defiant children are probably more fun to work with than hopeless ones, so I've stopped worrying about Kazdin. I'm not going to look into it for fear of what I find, but if Kazdin is the man who did the Learned Helplessness experiments on rats which involved timing how long it took them to drown then a) I really hate him and b) he shouldn't be allowed anywhere near children anyway. I hope someone's looking after the hopeless children.

As always, there are likeable things out there too. Here for example is a good song:


If you go to this website and then click on "Digitale Gemälde" you get the artist's meldings of Renaissance faces with modern photographs. I rather like these, even though the heads of famous madonnas on the bodies of semi-clad ladies are a bit odd.

It's Laurence Durrell's Centenary. There's an exhibition.

You can get The Alexandria Quartet on Kindle now. I prefer The Avignon Quintet, which isn't available on Kindle yet. Also recently available on Kindle are the books of Thomas Pynchon. My favourites are Mason and Dixon, Vineland, and V. (which includes Fairing and his parish among the rats). Plus Neal Stephenson's Baroque Trilogy (Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World) are available at last. Hurray!

Also, I went to an Art History in the Pub event, which was quite good. It was organised by an art historian who was covered in tattoos -- he even had some small ones on his face. I wished it were socially OK to ask him about this, because I'd imagine that as an art historian either the choosing of tattoos would be fraught with significance, or else alternatively maybe tattoos are sufficiently outside the bounds of general art that they are a liberating opportunity to choose entirely for yourself. The talk was given by a young woman sitting in a big velvet chair on a raised platform, which gave the whole thing a soothing atmosphere. It was about Tudor and Stuart portrait sets, an interesting topic. The person I sat next to writes for the Fortean Times and we talked about cryptozoology for a bit -- a friend of my parents in Devon had an alpaca killed, she swears by a Big Black Cat.

Plus the National Art Pass is doing a three-month free trial. I like the Art Fund. My housemate/landlord dislikes them because their rhetoric is very much about "saving" things for the nation, as if foreigners are likely to set them on fire, drop them in the bath, or something, and I agree that that's a bit dodgy. We "saved" the Macclesfield Psalter from going to the Getty, for example, where they would lavish ridiculous amounts of money on its conservation and what's more, on its scholarship. (My landlord/housemate is going to the Getty on a three-month research jaunt to study a manuscript they have there just for an exhibition, because increasing knowledge is part of their remit and even now they have cash.) (Though of course the Fitzwilliam looks after it beautifully -- they do a wonderful job despite being cash-strapped to the extent that most things that happen there seem to do so as a result of ad hoc donations by rich people.) Anyway, although I don't think things need "saving" I do like the idea of paying some money towards a big fund that can buy things for UK museums, and also you get very good discounts off entry into museums, galleries, and exhibitions. I used to have an Art Pass but I let it lapse because of student poverty, but it was great when I did have it because I rarely went to a paid-entry museum or exhibition where it didn't get me some money off.

Ashill beer festival 2012

I went down to Devon for the Ashill Village Beer Festival, and my friend Adrian, a beer-festival fan, came with me. My brother and family came along too, so I introduced Adrian to my little nephew. I mentioned that Adrian's father is a builder and his name is Bob. Even though I did say that this wasn't the same person as on TV, I think that Bob the Builder is just a figure of too great mythic resonance for qualifications -- like the Knights Templar or Leonardo da Vinci or the Holy Grail, which distort all the stories in which they appear. In short my nephew was quite sure that Adrian was in fact Bob the Builder himself, and treated him all weekend with a sort of cautious awe. When he said his prayers with his father on Saturday evening* apparently he said thankyou for meeting Bob the Builder, and on Sunday morning he read his Spot the Dog book with Adrian and told my father when he came into the room "Grandad, I'm sitting next to Bob the Builder!". I felt a bit bad about this, but my Mum tells me that they talked to him about it later and he did know really that he was playing a game, like when he pretends to be a cat. (On the other hand, I sort of wish I'd said Adrian was Peppa Pig...)

Between us we both managed to taste all 22 of the beer festival beers, which was a better achievement than last year when I only managed something like 16 out of 18 over three days not two. The problem with living in London is that you ask yourself a lot "Do I want to do this? Will I enjoy it?" whereas in the village you just take what you're given. They actually call it the Ashill Beer and Music Festival, but unlike many music festivals in between two of the bands on the Saturday evening they had a half-hour zumba class. My nephew thought that was amazing. There were tons of kids there and it was generally a huge success. When my parents went to clear up the field they had lent for parking they found very little litter, and generally everyone was really well behaved.

*Yes, Richard Dawkins wouldn't approve of my brother saying prayers with my little nephew, but then again the mindfulness people would approve of going back over the day to pick out and feel glad for good things. Praying with my parents is one of my favourite childhood memories -- I think it was really good for me to know that my parents weren't the highest authority.

I read it in May

Here are my May reading highlights, in order of excellence:

1. Londoners: The Days and Nights of London Now -- As Told by Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It, and Long for It by Craig Taylor
This is a very good book indeed, a series of interviews about London. It's a good concept, but the thing that really makes the book great is the quality of the interviews and the diversity of the people he found to talk to.

2. Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time.
Although it's made of 12 books they are actually all quite short -- about 200 pages. Not much really happens in the first and second books, and limited amounts in the books after that, but I did find it very enjoyable once I'd stopped worrying about this. It's a bit like a cross between Proust and Nancy Mitford -- it's not quite as funny as Mitford but then again, it's nowhere near as French as Proust. I would recommend it not as something one ought to read but as something that you might well enjoy reading. There's always an anxiety about starting a long set of books, because if they're hard work you either have to decide to give up or try to power on through. But when you start a long set of books and realise that you enjoy them then that's a very pleasant feeling, you can abandon any pressure to finish and just read them at your own pace, and you know you've got good reading material lined up for some time to come. And there's something very comfortable about novels which take you into a different but entirely sustained world, and because one of the themes of the series is how fate throws people together in a complicated pattern there are many recurring characters. In fact if I were to summarise it in seven words they would be these:
The man turned round. It was Widmerpool.

3. Mrs Robinson's Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady by Kate Summerscale
This story isn't quite as engrossing as The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, but then that was a truly phenomenal book, one you could enjoy yourself while also being sure that your Grandma and all your other relatives would love it too. This is about one of the earliest divorce cases brought in England when the switch was made from divorce being something only achievable by Act of Parliament, e.g. for the very very rich and influential only, to being handled by the courts. Isabella Robinson kept an ill-advised diary, and she had ill-advised crushes on handsome men. When it gets really interesting (after a rather slow beginning) is when those diaries are advanced by her husband as evidence of her adultery, and are considered in the courts and the newspapers as possible evidence of her mental derangement. It was one of those issues around which the mores and assumptions of the day crystallised and Kate Summerscale does a great job of putting it all in its context. I was amazed by the young man from a genteel Edinburgh family who faked his own death in order to spend a few years undergoing painful penis-cauterising operations in the hope of curing his tendency to masturbation. He finally found peace when someone suggested to him that he try having sex with women -- he turned to prostitutes and found the urge to masturbate became less. Now I'm not a fan of prostitution, but however much one disapproves of it you'd think someone might try that before convincing their large loving family that they're dead and then repeatedly attacking their private parts with hot wires. Wierd.

4. The Mongoliad: Book One of the Foreworld Saga by Greg Bear, Neal Stephenson, etc etc etc.
This isn't a brilliant book but it's enjoyable, and it sneaks onto this list because it was better than I had feared. It's a jointly written book which arose from some fantasy-writers' sword-fighting classes. It's set in the (more-or-less) past, at the time that the Mongolian hoards were starting to threaten Europe. This book is part of a wider project that's experimenting with what a book is, something which I approve of people doing but in which I don't really feel that interested in taking part. I posted about it before.

1. This child's to-do list is rather good. Maybe I'll add a few of those things to my to-do list.

2. I had an argument with a friend of mine because I honestly really like this painting of Mr Spock with a cat. He thought I liked it as kitsch, or ironically, but I don't believe in liking things like that, you should either like them or not. If I owned this picture I would put it on my wall. I don't know much about art and I'm not really sure what I like but on the whole I like things which have energy and don't quite follow the usual rules. I do buy art from ebay and etsy in the form of ACEO cards, about which I will blog someday. You have to wade through a lot of rubbish but I have some I really love, and they are embarrassingly cheap.

3. Sound of Arrows, I love you so:


4. These LED shades seem very Pet Shop Boys to me, and therefore I think 1984 would have been more appropriate than 1981. I like the sine wave best:


5. The US Library of Congress has an Ask A Librarian feature. Because I had enjoyed reading about the Comanches in Empire of the Summer Moon, I asked for recommended reading on all the various North American native peoples before the Europeans came. Within a few days I had been sent a list of four suitable books. I'm really impressed by this. Go Librarians! (In the meantime I had started reading a book which turned out to be mostly about how the Indians were wiped out. It was very upsetting and I had to stop reading it, like the coward I am. Basically the US was founded on acts of deliberate genocide. At least the Comanches were genuinely horrible and fought back well. The stories of most of the tribes go: Chief XXXX made a reasoned and eloquent speech about how the Europeans were doing bad and unjust things; the tribe was then wiped out; now the only reminder of its existence is in the name of one small mountain and a 1960s car.)

6. I listened to this song twice more or less accidentally, and it's a real grower, and got stuck in my brain for ages. St Lucia, Before the Dive:

It continues

Life! It's full of challenges, but sometimes it's unexpectedly joyful. I walked from Imperial to the tube today via Exhibition Road, down past all the museums, and felt suddenly meaninglessly happy. Of course the underground soon saw to that -- a ten-minute stop in the tunnel outside Sloane Square, oven-hot and crowded in -- but sometimes I think that moods have wierdly little to do with actual circumstances. And if you're in a bad mood there's always some convenient reason to hand.

Here is a good song, "The Way I Like It" by Mandy Capristo:


I have finished my exams. They were more or less OK except for one but I won't worry about it now. I also helped out with my parents' alpaca auction. This went far better than I feared. They have six left now, including, I'm glad to say, Beth, the matriarch, my favourite. I blogged about her a bit last June. I'm sorry to see the others go but it's the sensible thing to do. The auction itself was nervewracking but rather fun in retrospect. There were two auctioneers -- the first was very country, the second very county -- and lots of people came. I met a ridiculous little dog which looked like someone with curly black hair had had a haircut and the sweepings had come to life. Apparently it was a King Charles cross toy poodle. My nephew thought she was great but wasn't utterly convinced she was a dog at all -- "Mummy," he said, "we saw a dog and it squeaked at me!" The dog's owners bought Jemima the alpaca, who went for by far the most money, which made me feel quite proud when I remembered that I was the only one home when she was born and had to call the vet out amid much stress (part 1; part 2).

My parents were being very like themselves while I was there. I overheard with amusement my father trying to give some poor woman directions from Honiton to the auction entirely in terms of trees -- "Turn right at the Monterey pines". My mother is annoyed with him because he's planning to go tree-hunting in Arunachal Pradesh again this autumn. (When asked exactly when in autumn he just said "After the Deanery Synod" and I haven't yet got around to googling this so am no wiser.) My mother says it will be a tremendous hassle if he dies out there and she has to go to fetch him, so I suggested good travel insurance would take care of that, but that just started an argument about insurance providers. My father has bought a very large number of pheasant eggs -- he did this last year as well, giving me serious regrets about introducing him to ebay. Last year they all either failed to hatch (disappointing) or died in small batches from odd but preventable things (traumatic), and only one lived to adulthood. It was a Reeves pheasant, a notoriously vicious breed, and it has no toes because its siblings pecked them off before succumbing to various ailments (except I think one was eaten by a badger). Consequently my mother and I call it The Pobble, which annoys my father, after the Edward Lear poem: "The Pobble who has no toes, had once as many as we". Anyway my father purchased a bride for the Pobble, and she laid fifteen eggs, and of all the eggs he's been trying to hatch so far this summer, none have except thirteen of those. Which means that he now has thirteen little monsters to try to rear. Reeves pheasant chicks are scrawny and vicious and remind one of the things which pecked the fat computer man to death in Jurassic Park. But my father is so eternally optimistic that I expect he'll be surprised when they all manage to kill themselves and each other, and he'll be upset, and my mother and I will both be nice to him but still aggravated that he didn't see it coming, because that's how families work.

Noble in reason, etc

So, I'm the middle of exams for the first time since 1997.  They issue us with calculators in the exams, just in case a topic comes up with logs in it or something.  But I don't think I've used a calculator since 1994, when I had a nice graphing one for my Maths A-levels.  (These days I do all my sums in Excel, which is a good deal more civilised.)

Probably everyone ought to have to do exams from time to time just to remember how hideous they are and bad for mental balance.  I'd forgotten quite how crazy they make one.  I'm a good deal more wise and have a better sense of perspective than last time I took them, and although this is nice for me as a person, I don't think it's going to affect my results positively.  I seem to have lost all academic competitiveness and just want to pass -- but my failing one or more module is a very real prospect.  It'll be annoying if I do.

It's good for me to be forced to go back through this stuff under pressure, because parts of it are tremendously cool really.  And I like the general attitude of Computing Science.  Our slides are full of sentences like this: "Writing device drivers can be fun but must be taken very seriously", written by lecturers clearly worried that if not checked we'll be out there writing frivolous device drivers with the innate carelessness of youth.

And basically I can't think of a bigger human achievement than the computer.  Our exam tomorrow is a very tough one which takes us from the absolute basics up to the operating system level.  It's amazing that within the last sixty years or so people have taken two very simple concepts -- the difference between 1 and 0, and the everlasting loop -- and built on them to make such incredibly complex machines.  Cities are very impressive things, and so are buildings, and industries, but I don't think there's any way that humanity can compete with the mind-bendingly massive stretches of space except in the mind-bendingly huge number of tiny logic gates constantly flicking between 1 and 0 as huge amounts of data stream through them every time I type a simple letter a.  When I post this, and someone views it elsewhere, the protocols and formats that will be casually invoked and discarded, the codings and decodings, the transmutation of pulses into different forms as they travel through different media, are so complex and abundant -- and all just to do this trivial thing, to put some throwaway thoughts I had onto a screen.  It's very disconcerting, in a good way.  (Though this may be just the exam craziness talking.)

The books of April

I read too many books this month. I read a lot while I was in Devon over Easter, and then carried on doing it when I got back, during breaks in revision which were rather longer than they should have been. Here are the ones I enjoyed most:

1. The Gil Cunningham books by Pat McIntosh. This series, starting with The Harper's Quine, is about a clerk in late fifteenth-century Glasgow who solves crimes. It's amiable and interesting, and I do like the use of proper Scots. (There's a glossary but it's more appealing without.) They were all on kindle for 99p each when I read them.

2. I've read quite a lot of twentieth-century social history, and I would strongly recommend Call the Midwife by Jennifer Worth and Nella Last's War: the Second-World-War Diaries of 'Housewife, 49'. The first is the memoir which lies behind the BBC tea-time drama, and though I haven't seen that I do think they must have toned it down a bit to get it pre-watershed. It's shocking how recently this happened -- the kids in the book would be contemporaries of my mum and dad. I read it on a day when I was feeling a bit sorry for myself and it made me feel like I had been mentally slapped. Nella Last's diary is a great thing. She was one of the people recruited into the Mass Observation Project in the late 30s, an attempt to do the "anthropology of ourselves". She clearly had a flair for diary-writing, and her account of the great stresses of the war -- and also of marriage -- are compelling and very readable.

3. Two good American history books: The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara, and Empire of the Summer Moon, by S.C. Gwynne. The Killer Angels is a novelisation of the battle of Gettysburg. It won the Pullitzer, and is kind of a big deal in America. It's very well done; the sort of novel that teaches more about history than a history lesson. I read it because I heard it inspired Joss Whedon to write Firefly, but actually it doesn't have anything much about the post-war era in it, except for a brief summary of what happened to each of the main characters. Empire of the Summer Moon, about the last Comanches and particularly their great leader Quanah Parker, is a startling book if, like me, you don't know much about American history. The Comanches were violent and lived by war, and were really the frightening killers of playground Cowboys and Indians games. The Texans weren't much better of course. The author is good at conveying both sides of this culture clash, and the tragedy of Cynthia Ann Parker, captured in a violent raid by Comanches at the age of 9, and then captured back again in another violent raid by Texans decades later, and never allowed to rejoin her two young sons despite her increasingly desperate attempts to escape back to the Comanches.

4. Iain Pears, Stone's Fall. Iain Pears is one of my favourite novelists, and perhaps the one I'd most like to be like. He usually writes about art, but in this book he brings out the elegance and beauty of industry and finance. It's also one of those satisfying books in which you learn more and more about the past -- there are three narratives each of which is from further back in time. Go Iain Pears!

5. Vanessa Gebbie, The Coward's Tale.  I think this was another Kindle book I took a chance on for 99p and it turned out to be very good.  It's about a small Welsh mining town still traumatised by a terrible pit accident a generation before.  A boy moves there to stay with his Gran while his parents have problems, and gets to know the town beggar who tells stories to the people in the cinema queue in return for toffees.

I also read three books by Jonathan Carroll who may or may not be great -- I haven't decided yet. He's an odd one.

P.S. I've scheduled this post to appear while I'm in the middle of one of my exams. I'd forgotten quite how truly horrible exams and revision are, and young people have my sympathy.

A note regarding last post

In my last post I linked to Charlie Stross's thoughts on ebook DRM and the US anti-trust suit about Apple. He's just put up a follow-up in reaction to the fact that Tor (part of Macmillan) are going to abandon ebook DRM -- it seems they actually asked his opinion on this. I think it makes interesting reading. I like that he talks about midlist sales, and considers those people who buy 20-150 books a year as well as those who buy 1-5. Did you know you only have to buy 20 books a year to count as an avid booklover?

Metareading

1. I enjoyed this piece about rereading. I am a rereader myself -- saying that you don't reread because there are so many unread books out there seems to me a bit like saying you don't want to go out with your friends during valuable time when you could meet new people. But who would have thought that Philip Hensher regularly rereads Little House in the Big Woods, and Ian Rankin rereads Jilly Cooper's Rivals? (As is appropriate he does so without guilt.) I reread lots, but the problem is that the things you really love need longer and longer between each rereading. It will be quite a while before I can reread Robertson Davies' Cornish Trilogy again, or Neal Stephenson's Baroque Trilogy, or Pynchon's Mason and Dixon.

2. I find fan fiction a very interesting concept, so I read this piece on it even though I don't usually read the Millions' long-form stuff. I had not heard before that there were women corresponding with Richardson while he was releasing Clarissa in installments. I read Clarissa a while ago because I read somewhere that all novels were descended from Clarissa and Tristram Shandy in varying proportions.* I found it readable but absolutely horrible. It reminded me of Hitchcock's sadistic recipe for drama (which I think he actually got from someone else) "torture the heroine". Nasty things happen in a lot of books but in this one for some reason I could feel the mind of the author all the time. Richardson created Clarissa, not perfect but very lovely and loveable, a good person, and then he slowly and precisely handed her over into Lovelace's power, and he made Lovelace torment her and rape her. Lovelace's announcement of the rape when he writes to his friend "Clarissa lives" is somehow the more evil for its understatement. So I find it fascinating to know that while Richardson was slowly building up to this -- it's a really massive book -- women were writing to him suggesting that perhaps Lovelace might not rape Clarissa after all, and perhaps Clarissa could live a long and happy life. I don't think I'll ever reread Clarissa, and I would cross the street to avoid meeting Samuel Richardson. (Not that there's any need, he's dead of course, but you know what I mean.)

3. I love my kindle and I read a lot on it right now. I went into Waterstone's the other day to use up some reward points I'd built up, and it made me feel all sad because now that their 3 for 2 offers are dead I have no real reason to go there. At the moment all the books I buy are either a) cheap and electronic b) cheap and secondhand c) too obscure to have any chance of being in stock in Waterstones. However it is pretty scary how much control Amazon now have over my book-buying, even though Awesome is quite often cheaper and Abebooks can be better at sourcing oddities. Even more worrying is the power they are building up over publishers. Every publisher who insists on DRM for their books is selling themselves into the hands of Amazon, because Amazon are rich and can afford to lose some money on physical devices in return for a long-term monopoly over both book-buyers and book-sellers. Every reader who buys a book published by, say, Penguin with Kindle DRM is that much less likely to switch to another ereader in future, and with every sale like that Penguin gives Amazon power over its business. Charlie Stross thinks that for this reason the anti-trust suit against Apple in the US over its publishing agreements means the end of ebook DRM. I hope that's the case. The whole situation is quite interesting, but a bit worrying. I suppose in the meantime one can buy more things from independents like Weightless Books, like Carol Emshwiller's The Mount.

* I tracked this down! Salman Rushdie, writing about G. V. Desani's brilliant Shandean All About H. Hatterr, attributed this statement to Milan Kundera. It's quoted in this article about Desani (which makes him sound much harder work than he is -- I've never really coped with Joyce and I can take or leave Flann O'Brien but I loved All About H. Hatterr).

Some things

1. I like big books and I cannot lie. I really want this bag but it's too expensive.

2. Otters who look like Benedict Cumberbatch. 

3. A laser unprinter to help you reuse paper (but possibly increase subsequent paper jams).

4. At the end of last term several people on my course were announcing that they had stayed up all night in the library, as if they thought it were in some way a good thing.  This author says that when you work long-term for more than 40 hours a week your productivity goes down not up, which seems like common sense to me.

5. Also some of them just invited me to go to see an exhibition, which I had to point out to them closed last week. Oh, young people! It's actually quite heartening the way they make me feel all together and sensible.

6. I'm in Devon at the moment. I went with my parents to the local farmers' shop, Mole Valley Farmers. They spent enough there to get a voucher for a free faecal worm count. (For livestock, I should say, not humans.) Take that, Nectar points.

7. Soon after I got back here, over dinner my parents asked me what I thought of the Schmallenberg virus. I forgot that they talk about different things in the country. At least the conversation has moved on from badger death. By the way, the word round here is that the Schmallenberg virus is not new, if you keep up with these things.

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: