I found some old notes of things I'd liked in books I'd read.
Here's a quotation from J. Stubb's ebullient Donne biography, about Ann Cockayne:
In 1616, not long after she gave birth to her youngest child, her husband Thomas had a crisis of commitment and left her, to pursue his lifelong dream of writing a Greek dictionary.
Jan Morris, Last Letters from Hav:
"We are intellectuals you see," Mahmoud bawled in my ear. "There is no subject that we cannot discuss, and all subjects make us angry."
G. Howells, Daughter of the Desert. Gertrude Bell on a mongoose she had been given by the Mayor of Baghdad's son:
It's a most attractive little beast. It sat in my hand this morning and ate fried eggs like a Christian.
I'm afraid I didn't note where I found the great Liselotte on Racine's Berenice's reaction to losing Titus:
All the howlings she sets up about this make me impatient.
And the excellent Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder:
There was something in Lima that was wrapped up in yards of violet satin from which protruded a great dropsical head and two fat pearly hands; and that was its archbishop.
...He had read all the literature of antiquity and forgotten all about it except a general aroma of charm and disillusion. He had been learned in the Fathers and the Councils and forgotten all about them save a floating impression of dissensions that had no application to Peru. He had read all the libertine masterpieces of Italy and France and re-read them annually; even in the torments of the stone (happily dissolved by drinking the water from the springs of Santa María de Cluxambuqua) he could find nothing more nourishing than the anecdotes of Brantôme and the divine Aretino.
... Like all the cultivated he believed that only the widely read could be said to know that they were unhappy.
Sunday, 27 June 2010
Friday, 25 June 2010
Unbibliographical references
I'm doing a lot of bibliography-style work at the moment, tidying up things that say "ref. to James article on Bury here" by turning them into proper short references, with page numbers, and a corresponding long reference in the bibliography. Take how dull that sentence was, and multiply it many times, and you'll get a sense of the way this is failing to grip my net-browsing E4-watching concentration-averse brain. I tried listening while working to a playlist I made of Handel arias, because I thought I'd like to be that sort of person, but I just ground to a halt and had to revert to Bodyrox feat. Luciana, Kele's Tenderoni, and Lady Gaga's Remix album, of which this is my favourite at the moment:
By the way, have you noticed the little football symbol on Youtube, under the video, which adds vuvuzela noise to any video? The Onion's take on the whole vuvuzela phenomenon is quite funny.
This thing about quorum-sensing bacteria is wierd and makes my brain hurt. It took me a while to realise that they didn't mean some sort of computer bacteria, and I didn't know that bacteria could sense quora, let alone that we should be disrupting this (or pretending to disrupt it while dodging serious legal charges in Arizona, or whatever). Maybe instead we should turn it to our own uses. Maybe they could come up with something on the same lines for certain sorts of committee meetings. I remember several early Governing Body meetings where the quorum was quite an issue, and someone would have to keep an eye on it: "I fear, Master, that with the departure of Dr Wellington we are no longer quorate". I know that people have made strides in making computers out of bacteria recently, which is another head-hurting thing.
Here is a nice explanation of why the platypus plays the keytar. It won't hurt your head, quite the reverse, it will soothe it.
It turns out that there's a music festival happening this summer within walking distance of where I live, called Wattsfest. The local newspaper (The Culm Valley Gazette) has been much exercised by the worry that the loud noise will startle a nearby herd of buffalo, kept for both meat and milk, who will stampede us all to our deaths, probably starting with Tiverton High Street. I don't want to be trampled to death by buffalo but I feel that if I were, in the cause of obscure places in mid-Devon having their own family-friendly world music festival, that would have a nice rounded feeling to it.
This man goes around being rude about people's favourite dinosaurs, which is not very polite.
This attractive art thing is in a field in Wiltshire at a place which is part of my Anglo-Saxon charters book.
Everyone else has probably seen this already but my bibliographising has meant I've spent less time watching viral videos recently: here's the new OK Go video, now with added goose. I actually really like the song too.
Apparently we're all supposed to be making toys out of paper now. You print them out and fold them together, and then you feel happy. It's a sort of fusion of origami and kawaii. Here's one good site, and here's another, plus I like these paper trout. I have to admit I haven't got round to it yet, but it does look pleasing.
Charlie McDowell's Dear Girls Above Me is good if a bit wrong.
Anyway it's back to bibliography and Lady Gaga for me. I think I have listened to the Remix album so many times now that I may even have to move on.
By the way, have you noticed the little football symbol on Youtube, under the video, which adds vuvuzela noise to any video? The Onion's take on the whole vuvuzela phenomenon is quite funny.
This thing about quorum-sensing bacteria is wierd and makes my brain hurt. It took me a while to realise that they didn't mean some sort of computer bacteria, and I didn't know that bacteria could sense quora, let alone that we should be disrupting this (or pretending to disrupt it while dodging serious legal charges in Arizona, or whatever). Maybe instead we should turn it to our own uses. Maybe they could come up with something on the same lines for certain sorts of committee meetings. I remember several early Governing Body meetings where the quorum was quite an issue, and someone would have to keep an eye on it: "I fear, Master, that with the departure of Dr Wellington we are no longer quorate". I know that people have made strides in making computers out of bacteria recently, which is another head-hurting thing.
Here is a nice explanation of why the platypus plays the keytar. It won't hurt your head, quite the reverse, it will soothe it.
It turns out that there's a music festival happening this summer within walking distance of where I live, called Wattsfest. The local newspaper (The Culm Valley Gazette) has been much exercised by the worry that the loud noise will startle a nearby herd of buffalo, kept for both meat and milk, who will stampede us all to our deaths, probably starting with Tiverton High Street. I don't want to be trampled to death by buffalo but I feel that if I were, in the cause of obscure places in mid-Devon having their own family-friendly world music festival, that would have a nice rounded feeling to it.
This man goes around being rude about people's favourite dinosaurs, which is not very polite.
This attractive art thing is in a field in Wiltshire at a place which is part of my Anglo-Saxon charters book.
Everyone else has probably seen this already but my bibliographising has meant I've spent less time watching viral videos recently: here's the new OK Go video, now with added goose. I actually really like the song too.
Apparently we're all supposed to be making toys out of paper now. You print them out and fold them together, and then you feel happy. It's a sort of fusion of origami and kawaii. Here's one good site, and here's another, plus I like these paper trout. I have to admit I haven't got round to it yet, but it does look pleasing.
Charlie McDowell's Dear Girls Above Me is good if a bit wrong.
Anyway it's back to bibliography and Lady Gaga for me. I think I have listened to the Remix album so many times now that I may even have to move on.
Monday, 14 June 2010
Some things I saw
1. I'm quite fond of Glee the program. It's not that it's a work of staggering genius or anything, just that it's an hour in the week which is likely to raise a smile, and I'll be a bit sad after it finishes tonight. I wouldn't have said it had anything much more to say to the world than "Jazz Hands!!!". So I was interested by this perspective on it by Christina Mulligan, pointing out that an awful lot of what these kids get up to is utterly illegal, like putting Sue Sylvester's humiliating Physical workout footage on the web. The fictional Olivia Newton John's response consisted of remaking the whole video with Sue Sylvester in an Eric Prydz "Call on Me" style (lots of wobbly lycra-clad buttocks) and cashing in on the YouTube sensation; this is obviously more sensible than the probable real-life response, which would be serving draconian take-down notices. Those who make mash-ups online, a very illegal thing to do, appeal to their listeners to rediscover the original music, and that's how I first found M.I.A., Plastilina Mosh, Justice (remixed by MSTRKRFT) etc. In their use of mash-ups Glee has brought them just that bit closer to the mainstream, and has made a "fair use" case in a very compelling way. It would be ridiculous to argue that what kids like these do is in any way harming pop music or musical theatre. Is this the message of Glee? Is it putting forward the argument for the copyfight? I do like the way that reasonably low-brow TV can often say things that serious media or actual people could never get away with, like Battlestar Galactica's take on suicide bombing. (NB there are good mash-ups by Party Ben (I recommend the 2010 remix of Boulevard of Broken Songs) and Pheugoo.)
1a. Actually, I suppose it's more likely that this Fox, i.e. Murdoch-owned, program is just sublimely unaware of the whole thing. Heigh ho.
2. Lady Gaga's Alejandro video is out. Alejandro, which I have posted before, is probably my favourite Lady Gaga song. Go Lady Gaga! It annoys me that people say this sounds like Ace of Base; only insofar as it sounds like part of a European tradition of which only Ace of Base made it into the English consciousness. Lady Gaga wrote the whole of the Fame Monster album while touring the Fame album across Europe, and this one is clearly her tribute to a particular sort of Europop (as well as to how much she likes the gays). The three Lady Gaga albums (Fame, The Fame Monster, and The Remix) are among the very very few albums I listen to entire any more. Anyway, here's Alejandro:
The kids from Glee are unlikely to recreate this, even if Rachel and her mother did do a duet of Poker Face with all the stuff about bluffin' with my muffin left in.
3. Here's some of that great Europop: BWO's Barcelona.
In Sweden this is one of the biggest bands, and usually makes a pretty strong showing in the Melodienfest, the process by which the country's entry for Eurovision is chosen. In England no one takes pop very seriously, and it's been ages since any actual good pop act was entered for Eurovision. The fact that in order, apparently, to revive the standard of British entries they called in Andrew Lloyd Webber rather than, say, Calvin Harris and Dizzee Rascal says a lot. This saddens me, and I haven't watched it for a while, although it may be better now Terry Wogan has stopped commentating on it. In Italy they haven't taken part in Eurovision since 1997, which is obviously a serious lack to the competition. They have their own song competition called San Remo, which was apparently the inspiration for Eurovision in the first place. I first found out about it while I was living in Italy, and I could tell something was on one week because of the way suddenly everyone was indoors watching TV. They take it very seriously: it seems to have at least as much popular pull as the X Factor in the UK, and the same guarantee of chart success and magazine stardom for the winner. But even the X Factor in England avoids pop for ballads.
1a. Actually, I suppose it's more likely that this Fox, i.e. Murdoch-owned, program is just sublimely unaware of the whole thing. Heigh ho.
2. Lady Gaga's Alejandro video is out. Alejandro, which I have posted before, is probably my favourite Lady Gaga song. Go Lady Gaga! It annoys me that people say this sounds like Ace of Base; only insofar as it sounds like part of a European tradition of which only Ace of Base made it into the English consciousness. Lady Gaga wrote the whole of the Fame Monster album while touring the Fame album across Europe, and this one is clearly her tribute to a particular sort of Europop (as well as to how much she likes the gays). The three Lady Gaga albums (Fame, The Fame Monster, and The Remix) are among the very very few albums I listen to entire any more. Anyway, here's Alejandro:
The kids from Glee are unlikely to recreate this, even if Rachel and her mother did do a duet of Poker Face with all the stuff about bluffin' with my muffin left in.
3. Here's some of that great Europop: BWO's Barcelona.
In Sweden this is one of the biggest bands, and usually makes a pretty strong showing in the Melodienfest, the process by which the country's entry for Eurovision is chosen. In England no one takes pop very seriously, and it's been ages since any actual good pop act was entered for Eurovision. The fact that in order, apparently, to revive the standard of British entries they called in Andrew Lloyd Webber rather than, say, Calvin Harris and Dizzee Rascal says a lot. This saddens me, and I haven't watched it for a while, although it may be better now Terry Wogan has stopped commentating on it. In Italy they haven't taken part in Eurovision since 1997, which is obviously a serious lack to the competition. They have their own song competition called San Remo, which was apparently the inspiration for Eurovision in the first place. I first found out about it while I was living in Italy, and I could tell something was on one week because of the way suddenly everyone was indoors watching TV. They take it very seriously: it seems to have at least as much popular pull as the X Factor in the UK, and the same guarantee of chart success and magazine stardom for the winner. But even the X Factor in England avoids pop for ballads.
Sunday, 13 June 2010
Some things I thought of
1. Leaving aside the whole [job] thing (square brackets indicate whispering), I'm pretty lucky in how I'm situated at the moment. I love Devon and I love living here, and I also get to visit Cambridge and catch up with the excellent people there, and look at interesting manuscripts. So that on the one hand I get the view of miles of countryside from my desk, and the majority of noises not made by humans, and on the other I can get away and talk to people about interesting things and dip back into the faster pace of Cambridge life, where people spend little if any time talking about TB. Dining off an omelette made from eggs not yet laid that morning vs being able to choose from a huge variety of interesting food shops within a few minutes' walk: watching the buzzards circle up and up on the thermals over the back of our paddock vs market stalls selling cheap paperbacks. It's all good stuff.
2. The human brain! I have mixed feelings about Isaac Newton in general; I was an undergraduate at Trinity, which is full of pictures of him scowling, and I knew he would have disliked me because I'm of the female persuasion. But you have to love him for sticking bodkins in his eyes. (There's a brilliant bit about this in the excellent Neal Stephenson Baroque trilogy.) He did it because a scientist needs to understand his instruments, and for observing the movement of points of light across a wall his eyes were his instruments. If he changed the shape of his eyeballs by slightly compressing them from one side, would his observations change? The biggest scientific instrument of all is of course the human brain, but in eyeball terms it's not perfectly spherical, much as we'd like it to be. This is fascinating stuff. I'd like to know more about it but the problem is that so much of the material looking into this seems to be horrendously naive. I have participated in basic surveys of brain-related things, not to mention those endless online questionaires which offer you entry into a raffle in return for your "feelings" about your mobile phone service etc, and I have tried to give appropriate answers, because it would be arseholey not to try. Now, animal behavourists apparently say that you shouldn't work with cats, they will mess up your data; and essentially in this circumstance I end up being a cat imagining myself as a dog, and answering that way, when in real life the answer to most questions would be about five more questions to try to work out what if anything the question means, or different answers depending on all sorts of criteria which my polite dog self tries to disregard. I can't believe that isn't true of most people, or most educated people with an interest in the subject, or most educated and a bit neurotic people, and frankly there are a lot of us out there, and I'm at least as interested in our brains as brains in general. Maybe the scientific method isn't such a great tool for looking at the human brain, maybe I learn more about it from reading novels than from coming across any number of surveys which report an average 7 percent increase in cheerfulness among people who tried a certain mental exercise, etc. Or maybe I'm just looking at the less effective end of the study of the brain and reading the wrong things. I'm not immediately sure how you'd test the idea that the human brain behaves differently under test conditions, for example. An instance of something I read on this subject is :59 seconds by Prof. Richard Wiseman (which is an excellent pseudonym if it is one). It was readable, and interesting, but as an insight into the human mind it seemed tremendously naive. (On the other hand, if you were looking for an actual self-help book then it might be quite useful as long as you carefully thought yourself into a naive frame of mind beforehand.)
3. The world cup! I don't of my own accord watch football -- when it comes to sport I prefer the clean abstractions of snooker. But I still quite like the World Cup, even though it's inescapable and of no intrinsic interest to me, because it's nice to get to surf on other people's enthusiasms a bit. The one before last I was working on the tills at Marks and Spencer, and it was genuinely really nice the way that during England games the customers would tell you the latest score all unprompted. Management arranged for us to have a TV in the break room, though because M&S is a matriarchy it was usually turned to Big Brother rather than the football matches.
4. Does Mozart help the decomposition of sewage? If so, why? I don't know. The world is very interesting and odd, because at least one of these two things is true: the music of Mozart helps the decomposition of sewage; people really would like to believe that the music of Mozart helps the decomposition of sewage. And the fact that the second is probably true does not in itself mean that the first isn't (though I do fear it).
5. I continue to be challenged about whether or not I am squeamish. We are overrun with rabbits here, they appear at dawn and dusk in huge numbers and eat things, like fluffy locusts. Unfortunately all the local cats are too busy decimating the finches and sparrows to do anything about them, and the foxes prefer the taste of chicken if they can get it. Mr Underhill, the excellent farmer from whom we bought this land before we built the house, occasionally brings one or two dead rabbits over for us, and my mother reluctantly cleans and cooks them. She's not that keen on the cleaning, but it's mostly that she doesn't like eating things with lead shot in, and she won't let my father buy a gun and go out to bag a few himself. However, yesterday at a show she got talking to a man with some kestrels and ferrets, and he's going to give us a quote for coming out and hunting over our fields -- it's one in particular, where my father's botanical specimens are, which needs doing. So: we have too many rabbits; a quick death for the rabbits followed by eating them fits the same moral criteria which I apply to say, lambs; and we would be supporting the sort of skill which I would hate to see lost, and killing the rabbits in one of the ways they're most likely to die anyway, if the buzzards were more efficient. (The buzzards have a good time on road kill and smaller mammals.) But will I be able to go out with ferrets and a hawk and hunt rabbits? I think I will have to, for the sake of my self-respect.
2. The human brain! I have mixed feelings about Isaac Newton in general; I was an undergraduate at Trinity, which is full of pictures of him scowling, and I knew he would have disliked me because I'm of the female persuasion. But you have to love him for sticking bodkins in his eyes. (There's a brilliant bit about this in the excellent Neal Stephenson Baroque trilogy.) He did it because a scientist needs to understand his instruments, and for observing the movement of points of light across a wall his eyes were his instruments. If he changed the shape of his eyeballs by slightly compressing them from one side, would his observations change? The biggest scientific instrument of all is of course the human brain, but in eyeball terms it's not perfectly spherical, much as we'd like it to be. This is fascinating stuff. I'd like to know more about it but the problem is that so much of the material looking into this seems to be horrendously naive. I have participated in basic surveys of brain-related things, not to mention those endless online questionaires which offer you entry into a raffle in return for your "feelings" about your mobile phone service etc, and I have tried to give appropriate answers, because it would be arseholey not to try. Now, animal behavourists apparently say that you shouldn't work with cats, they will mess up your data; and essentially in this circumstance I end up being a cat imagining myself as a dog, and answering that way, when in real life the answer to most questions would be about five more questions to try to work out what if anything the question means, or different answers depending on all sorts of criteria which my polite dog self tries to disregard. I can't believe that isn't true of most people, or most educated people with an interest in the subject, or most educated and a bit neurotic people, and frankly there are a lot of us out there, and I'm at least as interested in our brains as brains in general. Maybe the scientific method isn't such a great tool for looking at the human brain, maybe I learn more about it from reading novels than from coming across any number of surveys which report an average 7 percent increase in cheerfulness among people who tried a certain mental exercise, etc. Or maybe I'm just looking at the less effective end of the study of the brain and reading the wrong things. I'm not immediately sure how you'd test the idea that the human brain behaves differently under test conditions, for example. An instance of something I read on this subject is :59 seconds by Prof. Richard Wiseman (which is an excellent pseudonym if it is one). It was readable, and interesting, but as an insight into the human mind it seemed tremendously naive. (On the other hand, if you were looking for an actual self-help book then it might be quite useful as long as you carefully thought yourself into a naive frame of mind beforehand.)
3. The world cup! I don't of my own accord watch football -- when it comes to sport I prefer the clean abstractions of snooker. But I still quite like the World Cup, even though it's inescapable and of no intrinsic interest to me, because it's nice to get to surf on other people's enthusiasms a bit. The one before last I was working on the tills at Marks and Spencer, and it was genuinely really nice the way that during England games the customers would tell you the latest score all unprompted. Management arranged for us to have a TV in the break room, though because M&S is a matriarchy it was usually turned to Big Brother rather than the football matches.
4. Does Mozart help the decomposition of sewage? If so, why? I don't know. The world is very interesting and odd, because at least one of these two things is true: the music of Mozart helps the decomposition of sewage; people really would like to believe that the music of Mozart helps the decomposition of sewage. And the fact that the second is probably true does not in itself mean that the first isn't (though I do fear it).
5. I continue to be challenged about whether or not I am squeamish. We are overrun with rabbits here, they appear at dawn and dusk in huge numbers and eat things, like fluffy locusts. Unfortunately all the local cats are too busy decimating the finches and sparrows to do anything about them, and the foxes prefer the taste of chicken if they can get it. Mr Underhill, the excellent farmer from whom we bought this land before we built the house, occasionally brings one or two dead rabbits over for us, and my mother reluctantly cleans and cooks them. She's not that keen on the cleaning, but it's mostly that she doesn't like eating things with lead shot in, and she won't let my father buy a gun and go out to bag a few himself. However, yesterday at a show she got talking to a man with some kestrels and ferrets, and he's going to give us a quote for coming out and hunting over our fields -- it's one in particular, where my father's botanical specimens are, which needs doing. So: we have too many rabbits; a quick death for the rabbits followed by eating them fits the same moral criteria which I apply to say, lambs; and we would be supporting the sort of skill which I would hate to see lost, and killing the rabbits in one of the ways they're most likely to die anyway, if the buzzards were more efficient. (The buzzards have a good time on road kill and smaller mammals.) But will I be able to go out with ferrets and a hawk and hunt rabbits? I think I will have to, for the sake of my self-respect.
Saturday, 5 June 2010
What people think about when they should be thinking about Latin
1. Yay, yay! One of my favourite Lady Gaga songs remixed by my favourite band. Although this mix is so very Pet Shop Boys that in the comments to this video people have even suggested it's not by them at all, rather rudely I think.
2. This bat is made up of other bats. I read this amazing thing recently suggesting that caterpillars and butterflies are actually separate species, because apparently there's a sea urchin or something which trundles along quite happily in the sea until it enters a period of metamorphosis producing a completely different sea creature, which splits off from the urchin and swims away to lead its own life, while the sea urchin continues as before as if having recovered from indigestion. Apparently because a lot of sea creatures reproduce by dumping vast amounts of seed out there in the currents, and producing eggs which they just hope will bump into the right stuff, it's possible that very very occasionally something reproductively wierd would happen. It's a cool concept, anyway.
3. So, someone's already training dolphins to use ipads. Bloody dolphins.
4. This cafe is a research cafe. For a long time I had a theory that the coffee machines at Corpus High Table were complex psychological experiments.
5. I do like these anti-venereal disease posters from the WWII era. Many of the slogans work better if said in the voice of Peter Cook as Roger's father in this sketch about the facts of life.
Right, now I ought to get back to the order for the sign of the peace at the high mass on a duplex feast of nine lections. Did you know that the Latin verb to kiss is deponent? It's true, but it's not very interesting.
2. This bat is made up of other bats. I read this amazing thing recently suggesting that caterpillars and butterflies are actually separate species, because apparently there's a sea urchin or something which trundles along quite happily in the sea until it enters a period of metamorphosis producing a completely different sea creature, which splits off from the urchin and swims away to lead its own life, while the sea urchin continues as before as if having recovered from indigestion. Apparently because a lot of sea creatures reproduce by dumping vast amounts of seed out there in the currents, and producing eggs which they just hope will bump into the right stuff, it's possible that very very occasionally something reproductively wierd would happen. It's a cool concept, anyway.
3. So, someone's already training dolphins to use ipads. Bloody dolphins.
4. This cafe is a research cafe. For a long time I had a theory that the coffee machines at Corpus High Table were complex psychological experiments.
5. I do like these anti-venereal disease posters from the WWII era. Many of the slogans work better if said in the voice of Peter Cook as Roger's father in this sketch about the facts of life.
Right, now I ought to get back to the order for the sign of the peace at the high mass on a duplex feast of nine lections. Did you know that the Latin verb to kiss is deponent? It's true, but it's not very interesting.
Thursday, 3 June 2010
I've calmed down now
On the plus side, Wolf Hall is really excellent. It reminded me of War and Peace, so well written it almost seemed like it hadn't been written at all, it's just something you're at. And the latest Ariana Franklin is good too.
Annoyance
I have just finished Liz Jensen's Rapture, and I am annoyed. It's pretty well-written and constructed, but it hasn't a shred of humour, the characters are all mildly annoying people -- in real life you'd overhear them talking on a train and put your ipod on to avoid their conversation --, the plot is predictable, and the premise hackneyed. (Of course evangelical Christians beat their children to get the devils out of them.) It's about a psychiatrist of doubtful stability one of whose patients keeps making awful predictions that come true. I was getting really worked up about its stupid portrayal of evangelical Christians, of whom I am and always have been one, until I read in her acknowledgments her huge gratitude for his advice on the matter to someone I knew at university. (He was one of those charming people who makes you feel stupid, a reaction I have since learned to mistrust, though I expect he really is as bright as he seemed then.) Lazy novels like this just add to the little wedge that is constantly being gently tapped at the divide between those who have a religious faith and those who do not, and we need no extra power to that wedge, in case one day it really does get some purchase.
But this is just one of those things, and no more than one expects when one reads thrillers aimed at a vaguely popular market. The reason it has upset me so very much is that it's by Liz Jensen, who is one of my favourite authors, and someone whose interesting mind I have in the past envied. She has written some of the most inventive novels I know, ones I revisit from time to time when I want to read something intelligent, unusual, and fun. She used to be on my list of authors whose books I would always read, an author with whose reviews I never bothered. I really highly recommend Ark Baby and Egg Dancing, for example, and in fact all of her previous books (although I wasn't that impressed by The Paper Eater). The Ninth Life of Louis Drax is quite startling. And now she has produced a novel which is the definition of pedestrian. I suppose it's a money thing.
And while I'm at it, I can't stand Kate Mosse, who is quoted on the front of this book as saying it's a warning of the dangers of evangelicalism. I suppose Mosse has at least never set high standards to fall from. Not only are her books badly written but it is fatuous in the extreme to be all sentimental about the Cathars, who weren't much better than the popes of the time, and given the popes of the time that was really going it something.
Anyway one day I might write a novel, and if I do it may well not be very good, and I suppose I shouldn't cast stones &c. Heigh ho. But I am seriously saddened by the loss of Liz Jensen from the ranks of the unusual.
That is all.
But this is just one of those things, and no more than one expects when one reads thrillers aimed at a vaguely popular market. The reason it has upset me so very much is that it's by Liz Jensen, who is one of my favourite authors, and someone whose interesting mind I have in the past envied. She has written some of the most inventive novels I know, ones I revisit from time to time when I want to read something intelligent, unusual, and fun. She used to be on my list of authors whose books I would always read, an author with whose reviews I never bothered. I really highly recommend Ark Baby and Egg Dancing, for example, and in fact all of her previous books (although I wasn't that impressed by The Paper Eater). The Ninth Life of Louis Drax is quite startling. And now she has produced a novel which is the definition of pedestrian. I suppose it's a money thing.
And while I'm at it, I can't stand Kate Mosse, who is quoted on the front of this book as saying it's a warning of the dangers of evangelicalism. I suppose Mosse has at least never set high standards to fall from. Not only are her books badly written but it is fatuous in the extreme to be all sentimental about the Cathars, who weren't much better than the popes of the time, and given the popes of the time that was really going it something.
Anyway one day I might write a novel, and if I do it may well not be very good, and I suppose I shouldn't cast stones &c. Heigh ho. But I am seriously saddened by the loss of Liz Jensen from the ranks of the unusual.
That is all.
Friday, 28 May 2010
Mostly from Boing Boing, I think
Apparently that last post was my 600th, though that's not actually true, because I write more blog entries than I post (if I leave them half-finished they tend to lose their sense of urgency).
Someone has made a thing for turning any song into a swing version, by elongating the first half of each beat and compressing the second half. Daft Punk's Around the World is great. That has to be one of the most remixed and mashed songs ever.
Good Soviet Hobbit illustrations via Boing Boing.
This is a pretty good impression of Gandalf as the Fresh Prince:
This video is quite likeable. You feel like it should be the start of the pair of them going on to fight crime, or something.
Someone has made a thing for turning any song into a swing version, by elongating the first half of each beat and compressing the second half. Daft Punk's Around the World is great. That has to be one of the most remixed and mashed songs ever.
Good Soviet Hobbit illustrations via Boing Boing.
This is a pretty good impression of Gandalf as the Fresh Prince:
This video is quite likeable. You feel like it should be the start of the pair of them going on to fight crime, or something.
Thursday, 27 May 2010
Books: Reservations etc
Every now and then I go through patches of insomnia, and when I do I read too much. Here are some things I've read recently, excluding some books by Kage Baker, which I will blog about separately sometime, because they are great.
Medicine River, Thomas King
This is one of those novels which is essentially a series of installments building up a picture of life in a particular community. The narrator has returned to Medicine River, a Canadian reservation where he lived when he was young, and the book tells the stories of his past and of the people around him. A very good book, enjoyable despite the fact that plot-wise it doesn't go anywhere much.
Truth and Bright Water, Thomas King
The Montana town of Truth faces the Alberta reservation of Bright Water across a river. This is a coming-of-age story about a boy called Tecumseh who moves between the two. I was expecting it to be very funny like Green Grass, Running Water, and it's not, but by the time I realised this I was hooked on it because it is so well written. There's an excellent crazy artist character.
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie
I probably wouldn't have bought this if I had realised that it was YA fiction, but I'm glad I did because it's good, and all the more moving for being pretty matter-of-fact about its subject. The narrator is a teenage boy on a reservation, whose parents are both alcoholics but generally good to him, who realises that the only way he can get anywhere in life is by leaving the reservation. So he transfers to another school, where he's ostracised at first for being the only Indian apart from the school mascot, and sometimes has to walk 20 miles home if his dad's run out of money for petrol and he can't hitch a lift. The things that happen to the kid are pretty depressing, not least the community's reaction to his desertion, but it's not written in a self-pitying way, and the narrator intersperses frequent cartoons. Given that the books you read as a "young adult" teach you about the variety of the world as well as just being entertainment, this would be a good one to have in school libraries. And as I understand it, it's pretty autobiographical as well. I have enjoyed essays by Sherman Alexie in the past and I think I'll look out some more of his work. For example, I liked this reaction to testifying in a court case even though I care nothing about basketball.
The Hunt for Sonya Dufrette, R. T. Raichev
The Death of Corinne, R. T. Raichev
The author is a Bulgarian who wrote a thesis on English Golden Age Detective Stories, and now writes them. These are set in the present-day, but very much in the Golden Age world. Although for both of these I did guess what was coming quite a while before the detectives, I still enjoyed them, and I'll probably read further books by him if I come across them.
Brixton Beach, Roma Tearne
Good but bloody depressing.
In the Footsteps of Harrison Dextrose, Nick Griffiths
Has the following quotation on the front: "This book is cooler than David Hasselhoff in a room full of otters -- Popbitch.com". This conveys two things very accurately: 1, just how irritating this book is; and 2, exactly what particular moment of time it comes from (a couple of years ago). It's a grotesque travel book set in imaginary places among peoples called things like the Innit and the Ikeans. Usually I like books to have chutzpah but this one tips over into annoying. I kept forgetting I was reading it and starting other books instead, though I did finish it eventually.
The Reflections of Ambrosine, Elinor Glyn
Montacute House has a display about its last tenant, Lord Curzon, and his mistress Elinor Glyn, of poetic fame:
Would you like to sin
With Elinor Glyn
On a tiger skin?
Or would you prefer
To err
With her
On some other fur?
This is because she wrote a book called Three Weeks in which a young man has an affair with a tempestuous older Russian countess; he sends her a tiger skin on which they later make mad passionate love in front of a roaring fire. It was pretty racy stuff for the time, apparently; Curzon saw the play based on it, and sent to Elinor Glyn the skin of a tiger which he had shot himself, after which they became lovers. Then he installed her at Montacute, in the freezing cold, where she spent eighteen months trying to make it more of a home, while he spent most of his time in London. Eventually in 1917 she read in the newspaper that he was going to be married to Alfred Duggan's widow (mother of the somewhat tedious but accurate historical novelist of the same name), which devastated her pretty thoroughly. In a nice instance of karma, in 1923 Curzon was expecting to be made Prime Minister but was passed over in favour of Stanley Baldwin, which apparently made him cry. By that time Elinor Glyn had moved on and was having a successful Hollywood career, including being one of the first ever female directors, and had come up with the term "It", by which she meant not so much sex appeal as the quality that tigers and cats have, and also the term "It Girl", for the actress Clara Bow. Anyway, because she sounded interesting I decided to look up some of her stuff online, and found the texts of several novels. I really enjoyed The Reflections of Ambrosine; it's about a half French half English girl who is brought up very strictly by her grandmama in the ancien regime style. Her grandmama is not well, and makes some stern arrangements for the girl's future, which pitches her into a tremendously bitchy world. Some of the society scenes are great, particlarly a character called Babykins, and remind me of E. F. Benson. It works pretty well as a novel, mainly because of its sweet main character who retains her innocence even when she has comprehensively lost her naivety. Now I am about half-way though Three Weeks, which is not as good. Titillation is one of those things which does not age well. Of course it's pretty tame stuff nowadays, and to be honest I find it hard to work out quite what was ever supposed to be shocking. Had they not read any Wilkie Collins, or Sterne, or Shakespeare? Was it because it was written by a woman, and supposed to be autobiographical? I'm not sure I wil finish it, but one can see why she did so well in Hollywood -- the fadeout on the crackling fire in the tigerskin seduction scene might be one of the earliest instances of this cliche.
Aztec, Gery Jennings
Can you criticise a novel set in the Aztec world for being grotesque? This book is pretty chunky, at over a thousand pages in mass-market format, and does at least give its narrator an excuse for relating horrible details, in that he enjoys shocking the Spanish clerics to whom he's dictating the story. There's a lot of sex as well as violence, but overall it's reminiscent of the Sinbad stories in the Thousand and One Nights, as the hero travels around the many different peoples of pre-Spanish South America, sometimes making himself fabulously wealthy by fortunate trades, sometimes losing all his possessions and nearly his life, and being pretty matter-of-fact about the various customs he encounters. This is the sort of thing you read by the pool and then leave behind for some other traveller. I do wish I had realised while I was reading it that it has a map at the end.
Inglorious, Joanna Kavenna
One of those alienation from modern life stories. On the back described as "a slow, comic fall from modern grace", and "somewhere between ... Bridget Jones and Philip Larkin". The problem with buying things unseen off of the internet is that in a bookshop I would have read those things and put the book straight back. They're both true, if you substitute "arch" for "comic". I found the book insufferable and couldn't get past the first forty pages. I read the end just in case but that didn't seem to be any the less insufferable either.
Medicine River, Thomas King
This is one of those novels which is essentially a series of installments building up a picture of life in a particular community. The narrator has returned to Medicine River, a Canadian reservation where he lived when he was young, and the book tells the stories of his past and of the people around him. A very good book, enjoyable despite the fact that plot-wise it doesn't go anywhere much.
Truth and Bright Water, Thomas King
The Montana town of Truth faces the Alberta reservation of Bright Water across a river. This is a coming-of-age story about a boy called Tecumseh who moves between the two. I was expecting it to be very funny like Green Grass, Running Water, and it's not, but by the time I realised this I was hooked on it because it is so well written. There's an excellent crazy artist character.
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie
I probably wouldn't have bought this if I had realised that it was YA fiction, but I'm glad I did because it's good, and all the more moving for being pretty matter-of-fact about its subject. The narrator is a teenage boy on a reservation, whose parents are both alcoholics but generally good to him, who realises that the only way he can get anywhere in life is by leaving the reservation. So he transfers to another school, where he's ostracised at first for being the only Indian apart from the school mascot, and sometimes has to walk 20 miles home if his dad's run out of money for petrol and he can't hitch a lift. The things that happen to the kid are pretty depressing, not least the community's reaction to his desertion, but it's not written in a self-pitying way, and the narrator intersperses frequent cartoons. Given that the books you read as a "young adult" teach you about the variety of the world as well as just being entertainment, this would be a good one to have in school libraries. And as I understand it, it's pretty autobiographical as well. I have enjoyed essays by Sherman Alexie in the past and I think I'll look out some more of his work. For example, I liked this reaction to testifying in a court case even though I care nothing about basketball.
The Hunt for Sonya Dufrette, R. T. Raichev
The Death of Corinne, R. T. Raichev
The author is a Bulgarian who wrote a thesis on English Golden Age Detective Stories, and now writes them. These are set in the present-day, but very much in the Golden Age world. Although for both of these I did guess what was coming quite a while before the detectives, I still enjoyed them, and I'll probably read further books by him if I come across them.
Brixton Beach, Roma Tearne
Good but bloody depressing.
In the Footsteps of Harrison Dextrose, Nick Griffiths
Has the following quotation on the front: "This book is cooler than David Hasselhoff in a room full of otters -- Popbitch.com". This conveys two things very accurately: 1, just how irritating this book is; and 2, exactly what particular moment of time it comes from (a couple of years ago). It's a grotesque travel book set in imaginary places among peoples called things like the Innit and the Ikeans. Usually I like books to have chutzpah but this one tips over into annoying. I kept forgetting I was reading it and starting other books instead, though I did finish it eventually.
The Reflections of Ambrosine, Elinor Glyn
Montacute House has a display about its last tenant, Lord Curzon, and his mistress Elinor Glyn, of poetic fame:
Would you like to sin
With Elinor Glyn
On a tiger skin?
Or would you prefer
To err
With her
On some other fur?
This is because she wrote a book called Three Weeks in which a young man has an affair with a tempestuous older Russian countess; he sends her a tiger skin on which they later make mad passionate love in front of a roaring fire. It was pretty racy stuff for the time, apparently; Curzon saw the play based on it, and sent to Elinor Glyn the skin of a tiger which he had shot himself, after which they became lovers. Then he installed her at Montacute, in the freezing cold, where she spent eighteen months trying to make it more of a home, while he spent most of his time in London. Eventually in 1917 she read in the newspaper that he was going to be married to Alfred Duggan's widow (mother of the somewhat tedious but accurate historical novelist of the same name), which devastated her pretty thoroughly. In a nice instance of karma, in 1923 Curzon was expecting to be made Prime Minister but was passed over in favour of Stanley Baldwin, which apparently made him cry. By that time Elinor Glyn had moved on and was having a successful Hollywood career, including being one of the first ever female directors, and had come up with the term "It", by which she meant not so much sex appeal as the quality that tigers and cats have, and also the term "It Girl", for the actress Clara Bow. Anyway, because she sounded interesting I decided to look up some of her stuff online, and found the texts of several novels. I really enjoyed The Reflections of Ambrosine; it's about a half French half English girl who is brought up very strictly by her grandmama in the ancien regime style. Her grandmama is not well, and makes some stern arrangements for the girl's future, which pitches her into a tremendously bitchy world. Some of the society scenes are great, particlarly a character called Babykins, and remind me of E. F. Benson. It works pretty well as a novel, mainly because of its sweet main character who retains her innocence even when she has comprehensively lost her naivety. Now I am about half-way though Three Weeks, which is not as good. Titillation is one of those things which does not age well. Of course it's pretty tame stuff nowadays, and to be honest I find it hard to work out quite what was ever supposed to be shocking. Had they not read any Wilkie Collins, or Sterne, or Shakespeare? Was it because it was written by a woman, and supposed to be autobiographical? I'm not sure I wil finish it, but one can see why she did so well in Hollywood -- the fadeout on the crackling fire in the tigerskin seduction scene might be one of the earliest instances of this cliche.
Aztec, Gery Jennings
Can you criticise a novel set in the Aztec world for being grotesque? This book is pretty chunky, at over a thousand pages in mass-market format, and does at least give its narrator an excuse for relating horrible details, in that he enjoys shocking the Spanish clerics to whom he's dictating the story. There's a lot of sex as well as violence, but overall it's reminiscent of the Sinbad stories in the Thousand and One Nights, as the hero travels around the many different peoples of pre-Spanish South America, sometimes making himself fabulously wealthy by fortunate trades, sometimes losing all his possessions and nearly his life, and being pretty matter-of-fact about the various customs he encounters. This is the sort of thing you read by the pool and then leave behind for some other traveller. I do wish I had realised while I was reading it that it has a map at the end.
Inglorious, Joanna Kavenna
One of those alienation from modern life stories. On the back described as "a slow, comic fall from modern grace", and "somewhere between ... Bridget Jones and Philip Larkin". The problem with buying things unseen off of the internet is that in a bookshop I would have read those things and put the book straight back. They're both true, if you substitute "arch" for "comic". I found the book insufferable and couldn't get past the first forty pages. I read the end just in case but that didn't seem to be any the less insufferable either.
Wednesday, 26 May 2010
Countryside
As I try to work, I am watching professionals shear alpacas. This is the downside of having a desk that looks out over miles of Devon countryside; the opportunities for distraction are frequent. It's impressive to see how efficiently the local shearer and his Italian assistant just heave the animals onto their sides and set to work. One trims their toenails while the other is shearing; then they pop them back on their feet, give them an encouraging slap on the rump, and move to the next one. Some alpacas are fine with this, but some make a noise like they're being eviscerated. The shearers just get on with it either way: these aren't pets, and they don't want reassurance from you, they just want you to get it over with and leave them alone. This is how you tell professional animal workers, even if it can be mistaken for a lack of compassion. When I have anything to do with a worried alpaca I tend to say something like "hey, small, don't worry, everything's fine", and rub their neck a bit. It's an automatic response, but I know that really it's me that feels better for it. We lay a pretty heavy burden on animals as reflections of ourselves, sometimes. Look at all those wildlife rescue programs on TV; I hate it when they take some injured wild bird into a centre full of other animals and people and bright lights, and handle it frequently, and keep it "under observation" until they're sure it's OK. Wild animals, even predators but much more so prey, are very uncomfortable about being observed. It's not the bird who is gaining so much from the attempts to save it, but the people who like to think of themselves as the sort who doesn't give up on any creature. If we're so keen to avoid animal suffering then often the best thing we can probably do for them is give them a quick death. But we don't like to think of ourselves as the angel of death.
When it comes to self-image, I don't like to think of myself as sentimental, even if I am fond of cuteoverload. I've made the decision to have animals put to sleep when necessary; I eat animals even though I know what that involves. But living in the countryside is still occasionally oppressive for me. Essentially there is no way of living in this world which doesn't involve you in a huge network of damage. (Rowan Williams is very interesting on this, and on his related dislike of crucifixes showing a suffering rather than a dead Christ, in his book Resurrection.) Just by drawing breath I cause damage every day to other people and to the natural world. My brother decided that it is impossible to interact with animals without causing damage, and he is therefore a vegetarian with no pets. (I note that the same logic hasn't stopped him having children though.) I love my brother and respect his decision, which has drawn down onto his head a lot of flack from various people, so I don't point out the fates of male calves and male chicks implied by the production of milk and eggs. Vegans aren't off the hook either, not by a long chalk: some arable farmers have a saying that if you want to 'cure' a vegetarian, take them ploughing. Both ploughing and harvesting cause huge amounts of small animal deaths by mangling, as well as destroying homes and food in a way which causes slower, less immediate carnage.
I knew all this before I moved here -- I think most people do, really, they just prefer not to think about it. The thing that gets me down now is the TB problem. You don't want TB in the milk supply (although I think there's limited evidence that it causes harm), so any animal that has it is put to sleep. The problem is that in parts of south-west England, Wales, and Ireland it's near endemic. It's pretty likely that it's spread by badgers. Now I quite like badgers, though it drives me mad when people think they're in any way gentle or furrily endearing -- badgers are nasty vicious little things. I've only ever been looked at by a badger when I was in a car, and I have to say that every time I have been glad of it, because they tend to have an air to them like if you hang around they will take you on, metal frame or not. I don't think animal protection should depend on how cute the animal in question is, and I'm all for the badger being about the most heavily-protected species in the English countryside. So I'd really prefer it if there weren't a cull. Nonetheless, something serious must be done about TB. It's like the foot and mouth crisis but slow-burning, and with more possibility of harm to humans. The organic farm next to us sold six breeding heifers -- a substantial and important sale for them -- four of which tested positive for TB and had to be destroyed. So the whole sale was lost, lots more animals were pointlessly destroyed, and the farm was locked down -- a disaster for which even generous financial compensation could not compensate, and the amounts paid are far from generous. Because they were so near us, and we certainly share families of badgers, our alpacas had to be tested too. Luckily they all came up negative. If any had been positive then they would all have been immediately slaughtered, and a flat rate of 750 pounds paid per carcase -- quite good for a wether, which would usually be sold live for about 500-600 pounds, but woefully inadequate for the bulk of our herd which are breeding females and start at about two grand, and ludicrously insufficient for a stud male, for which you'd pay at least ten grand. Nonetheless, if it had happened it would not have been the financial loss which would have got to my parents. They have bred these animals, carefully choosing bloodlines, delivering the babies and halter-training them at weaning, for ten years now. They would have been utterly devastated. And it's not so much different for people who breed for meat, either. It really annoyed me when the foot and mouth crisis was on that people would say that it shouldn't make much difference as long as farmers were paid a market price for their animals -- such a stupid townie thing to say.
It's not easy to see what's the best thing to do; and the government gives the strong impression that it's doing its best to stop anyone finding out. If you pick up a dead badger by the road (there are some parts of our lifestyle to which we sacrifice multiple badgers without a second thought) it is illegal to test it for TB. No one is quite sure how infected the badgers are. It is illegal to vaccinate your own cows or alpacas, etc, let alone trying to vaccinate the badgers. (It's illegal to fill in a hole left by a badger, even if long out of use, which is frankly just unworkable -- one dug a hole in the middle of our drive and just left it there -- they're certainly not stupid enough to try to live in the middle of our drive.) If a cull is on the cards, that seems like a shame to me; but to pretend that we can produce food for humans without sometimes causing wholesale animal death around us is revoltingly hypocritical, and to care more about animal than human suffering is just fatuous. What everyone round here wants is for their animals to have a happy life and a quick death, and they want that death to be for a purpose; they want a population of undiseased badgers; and they want to earn money from their farming not from compensation paid by people who have just destroyed their farming.
When it comes to self-image, I don't like to think of myself as sentimental, even if I am fond of cuteoverload. I've made the decision to have animals put to sleep when necessary; I eat animals even though I know what that involves. But living in the countryside is still occasionally oppressive for me. Essentially there is no way of living in this world which doesn't involve you in a huge network of damage. (Rowan Williams is very interesting on this, and on his related dislike of crucifixes showing a suffering rather than a dead Christ, in his book Resurrection.) Just by drawing breath I cause damage every day to other people and to the natural world. My brother decided that it is impossible to interact with animals without causing damage, and he is therefore a vegetarian with no pets. (I note that the same logic hasn't stopped him having children though.) I love my brother and respect his decision, which has drawn down onto his head a lot of flack from various people, so I don't point out the fates of male calves and male chicks implied by the production of milk and eggs. Vegans aren't off the hook either, not by a long chalk: some arable farmers have a saying that if you want to 'cure' a vegetarian, take them ploughing. Both ploughing and harvesting cause huge amounts of small animal deaths by mangling, as well as destroying homes and food in a way which causes slower, less immediate carnage.
I knew all this before I moved here -- I think most people do, really, they just prefer not to think about it. The thing that gets me down now is the TB problem. You don't want TB in the milk supply (although I think there's limited evidence that it causes harm), so any animal that has it is put to sleep. The problem is that in parts of south-west England, Wales, and Ireland it's near endemic. It's pretty likely that it's spread by badgers. Now I quite like badgers, though it drives me mad when people think they're in any way gentle or furrily endearing -- badgers are nasty vicious little things. I've only ever been looked at by a badger when I was in a car, and I have to say that every time I have been glad of it, because they tend to have an air to them like if you hang around they will take you on, metal frame or not. I don't think animal protection should depend on how cute the animal in question is, and I'm all for the badger being about the most heavily-protected species in the English countryside. So I'd really prefer it if there weren't a cull. Nonetheless, something serious must be done about TB. It's like the foot and mouth crisis but slow-burning, and with more possibility of harm to humans. The organic farm next to us sold six breeding heifers -- a substantial and important sale for them -- four of which tested positive for TB and had to be destroyed. So the whole sale was lost, lots more animals were pointlessly destroyed, and the farm was locked down -- a disaster for which even generous financial compensation could not compensate, and the amounts paid are far from generous. Because they were so near us, and we certainly share families of badgers, our alpacas had to be tested too. Luckily they all came up negative. If any had been positive then they would all have been immediately slaughtered, and a flat rate of 750 pounds paid per carcase -- quite good for a wether, which would usually be sold live for about 500-600 pounds, but woefully inadequate for the bulk of our herd which are breeding females and start at about two grand, and ludicrously insufficient for a stud male, for which you'd pay at least ten grand. Nonetheless, if it had happened it would not have been the financial loss which would have got to my parents. They have bred these animals, carefully choosing bloodlines, delivering the babies and halter-training them at weaning, for ten years now. They would have been utterly devastated. And it's not so much different for people who breed for meat, either. It really annoyed me when the foot and mouth crisis was on that people would say that it shouldn't make much difference as long as farmers were paid a market price for their animals -- such a stupid townie thing to say.
It's not easy to see what's the best thing to do; and the government gives the strong impression that it's doing its best to stop anyone finding out. If you pick up a dead badger by the road (there are some parts of our lifestyle to which we sacrifice multiple badgers without a second thought) it is illegal to test it for TB. No one is quite sure how infected the badgers are. It is illegal to vaccinate your own cows or alpacas, etc, let alone trying to vaccinate the badgers. (It's illegal to fill in a hole left by a badger, even if long out of use, which is frankly just unworkable -- one dug a hole in the middle of our drive and just left it there -- they're certainly not stupid enough to try to live in the middle of our drive.) If a cull is on the cards, that seems like a shame to me; but to pretend that we can produce food for humans without sometimes causing wholesale animal death around us is revoltingly hypocritical, and to care more about animal than human suffering is just fatuous. What everyone round here wants is for their animals to have a happy life and a quick death, and they want that death to be for a purpose; they want a population of undiseased badgers; and they want to earn money from their farming not from compensation paid by people who have just destroyed their farming.
Wednesday, 19 May 2010
Tuesday, 18 May 2010
All sorts of nice things, and one troublesome thing
Nice things
1. I strongly advise you to watch this video about a gorilla.
2. This man who got stuck in a river had standards which he would not compromise: first he was too embarrassed to call for help, and then he refused to let firemen pull him out unless it was with his trousers still on.
3. Here is a touching story about two people who had both had a miserable battering at the hands of life but met when they picked the same suicide spot and are now getting married.
4. Now this woman has a gun she is no longer scared of tramps. (Is this a genuine advert?)
5. Our prehistoric forebears got up to all sorts of stuff. Let's hope they all loved each other very much. (My favourite comment on this is the man who says he doesn't think artists have been painting Neanderthals sexy enough.)
5a. There's an iphone/Android app for Neanderthalising yourself. It's called MEanderthal.
6. A young man who had a difficult time growing up gay in Vermont at least has a wonderful mother who wrote a letter to the local newspaper in response to some homophobic opinions. This is actually really old, so hopefully the youth has got to somewhere more accepting now.
7. Would you like the day better if you could hear the sound of rain? Here is a site that does that. I have tried it and decided that I don't particularly find the sound of rain helpful.
8. Bronte sisters action dolls! I do like how angry Anne looks. What a shame they're not a real product; otherwise they'd be on my amazon wishlist for my god-daughter when she's a bit older:
9. This animation where a kid with asperger's interviews his mother is really sweet and quite funny. I like when he asks her if she has any mortal enemies.
10. You should really hear Big Mama Thornton singing Hound Dog, which was originally her song before Elvis did it. Excellent stuff.
11. I keep forgetting to blog about how much I love the Bugle podcast. Since discovering it a few months ago I have developed and then successfully suppressed an unsuitable crush on John Oliver.
12. The Drunk History project involves getting someone very drunk, asking them to recount some history, and then acting out their narration with quite famous actors. Vol. 3, about Oney Judge, is actually rather moving, and Vol. 5 is also great.
13. Justin Bieber has been out-Biebered by a kid called Grayson Chance. (I looked on trendsmap.com yesterday and Grayson was trending in Exeter, which suggests that the whole phenomenon is probably over by now anyway.) Bieber was upset about this, because apparently twitter has changed their tweet trend rules. Anyway there's now a thing called Twieber, which describes itself as "twitter for beliebers". "Twieber" is trending on twitter. How much this makes your head hurt depends exactly on how many times your age is divisible by twelve.
The troublesome thing is Facebook. I watch the repeated furores about facebook as a non-user -- I was first introduced to it long ago when I did a lot of teaching, and felt that my multi-facetedness was an appropriate part of my professional life rather than some sort of hypocrisy. People are getting very upset about the privacy issues. The most sensible comment I saw was, I think, on boing boing, where someone pointed out that for facebook you are not their customer, but their product. I think that makes it all a bit less inflammatory. Facebook puts a lot of programming time, infrastructure and general effort into making a facility that people find useful, and if you want to use it then it's up to you to consider whether you think the exchange of data for features is fair. Their actual customers are the companies who mine that data. The problem is that Facebook keeps changing what it does with data, and is a bit obfuscatory about privacy options. (In my brief membership of facebook, back when it would only accept university e-mails, I had two accounts, one for cam.ac.uk and one for cantab.net, and I used the cantab.net one solely as a means of checking up that my cam.ac.uk account was as hidden as I wanted it to be.) Anyway, if you're interested, here's the story about the Facebook founder calling his early adopters "dumb f**ks" for trusting him with their data; here's the story about how even things you delete from your account remain on facebook's records and will still be used for data-mining; here's an interesting thing suggesting that facebook should be as transparent about exactly what is happening with your data as it thinks you should be with that data yourself, e.g. by logging all searches and views and letting you see what third-parties have had access to it. If I used facebook I would probably find all this pretty disturbing -- but then I have a friend who refuses to get a nectar card because he doesn't want the supermarket to get to keep track of what he buys, and I don't have a problem with that, so it's all relative. (Although it is a tad depressing when they send me lots of targetted vouchers for Pinot Grigio and Chocolate Digestives, as if their computer has run me through a system and decided I'm Bridget Jones. Also, although I usually quite like the Amazon feature where it suggests things you might like based on the purchasing histories of people who also liked them, once even though I had been buying nothing but novels and popular history it decided that my next purchase should be a book on living with borderline personality disorder, which felt a little judgemental.)
1. I strongly advise you to watch this video about a gorilla.
2. This man who got stuck in a river had standards which he would not compromise: first he was too embarrassed to call for help, and then he refused to let firemen pull him out unless it was with his trousers still on.
3. Here is a touching story about two people who had both had a miserable battering at the hands of life but met when they picked the same suicide spot and are now getting married.
4. Now this woman has a gun she is no longer scared of tramps. (Is this a genuine advert?)
5. Our prehistoric forebears got up to all sorts of stuff. Let's hope they all loved each other very much. (My favourite comment on this is the man who says he doesn't think artists have been painting Neanderthals sexy enough.)
5a. There's an iphone/Android app for Neanderthalising yourself. It's called MEanderthal.
6. A young man who had a difficult time growing up gay in Vermont at least has a wonderful mother who wrote a letter to the local newspaper in response to some homophobic opinions. This is actually really old, so hopefully the youth has got to somewhere more accepting now.
7. Would you like the day better if you could hear the sound of rain? Here is a site that does that. I have tried it and decided that I don't particularly find the sound of rain helpful.
8. Bronte sisters action dolls! I do like how angry Anne looks. What a shame they're not a real product; otherwise they'd be on my amazon wishlist for my god-daughter when she's a bit older:
9. This animation where a kid with asperger's interviews his mother is really sweet and quite funny. I like when he asks her if she has any mortal enemies.
Q&A from StoryCorps on Vimeo.
10. You should really hear Big Mama Thornton singing Hound Dog, which was originally her song before Elvis did it. Excellent stuff.
11. I keep forgetting to blog about how much I love the Bugle podcast. Since discovering it a few months ago I have developed and then successfully suppressed an unsuitable crush on John Oliver.
12. The Drunk History project involves getting someone very drunk, asking them to recount some history, and then acting out their narration with quite famous actors. Vol. 3, about Oney Judge, is actually rather moving, and Vol. 5 is also great.
13. Justin Bieber has been out-Biebered by a kid called Grayson Chance. (I looked on trendsmap.com yesterday and Grayson was trending in Exeter, which suggests that the whole phenomenon is probably over by now anyway.) Bieber was upset about this, because apparently twitter has changed their tweet trend rules. Anyway there's now a thing called Twieber, which describes itself as "twitter for beliebers". "Twieber" is trending on twitter. How much this makes your head hurt depends exactly on how many times your age is divisible by twelve.
The troublesome thing is Facebook. I watch the repeated furores about facebook as a non-user -- I was first introduced to it long ago when I did a lot of teaching, and felt that my multi-facetedness was an appropriate part of my professional life rather than some sort of hypocrisy. People are getting very upset about the privacy issues. The most sensible comment I saw was, I think, on boing boing, where someone pointed out that for facebook you are not their customer, but their product. I think that makes it all a bit less inflammatory. Facebook puts a lot of programming time, infrastructure and general effort into making a facility that people find useful, and if you want to use it then it's up to you to consider whether you think the exchange of data for features is fair. Their actual customers are the companies who mine that data. The problem is that Facebook keeps changing what it does with data, and is a bit obfuscatory about privacy options. (In my brief membership of facebook, back when it would only accept university e-mails, I had two accounts, one for cam.ac.uk and one for cantab.net, and I used the cantab.net one solely as a means of checking up that my cam.ac.uk account was as hidden as I wanted it to be.) Anyway, if you're interested, here's the story about the Facebook founder calling his early adopters "dumb f**ks" for trusting him with their data; here's the story about how even things you delete from your account remain on facebook's records and will still be used for data-mining; here's an interesting thing suggesting that facebook should be as transparent about exactly what is happening with your data as it thinks you should be with that data yourself, e.g. by logging all searches and views and letting you see what third-parties have had access to it. If I used facebook I would probably find all this pretty disturbing -- but then I have a friend who refuses to get a nectar card because he doesn't want the supermarket to get to keep track of what he buys, and I don't have a problem with that, so it's all relative. (Although it is a tad depressing when they send me lots of targetted vouchers for Pinot Grigio and Chocolate Digestives, as if their computer has run me through a system and decided I'm Bridget Jones. Also, although I usually quite like the Amazon feature where it suggests things you might like based on the purchasing histories of people who also liked them, once even though I had been buying nothing but novels and popular history it decided that my next purchase should be a book on living with borderline personality disorder, which felt a little judgemental.)
Monday, 17 May 2010
Montacute House
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The other day I went to Montacute House, near Yeovil in Somerset, with my mother and grandmother. It's an excellent place, and if you find yourself in Somerset I strongly advise giving it a look. It has two very good things about it. First, the house itself, a lovely late Elizabethan construction built out of the local hamstone (named after Ham Hill, where it's quarried), a sort of warm honeycomb-coloured limestone. It's really beautiful, very harmoniously designed, set in parkland so that you are presented with vistas in all directions, over formal gardens to gently rolling hills. The rooms are lovely, with panelling and carved fireplaces, and windows set in diamond lights between lead. You couldn't want to live there in the present day, but I found it hard not to long to live there properly, in the seventeenth century, playing shuttlecock in the immense Great Gallery on wet days, singing catches with the family after dinner, and sleeping in a bed with wooden doors. The grounds look lovely too, but my grandma is in a wheelchair most of the time, and getting round the house was quite enough of a challenge for her.
Secondly, it's a sort of outpost of the National Portrait Gallery. When the house was given to the National Trust some decades ago it was completely bare, and had in fact been sold for architectural salvage. They managed to pull together, mostly through loans, a good deal of appropriate furniture from the late Elizabethan period onwards, and they borrowed a very large number of portraits. They have occasional exhibitions there, and the current one was the main reason I had wanted to go. The National Portrait Gallery has a number of pictures which were bought as portraits of someone specific, and then later shown not to be that person, and so sit in the storage vaults being all anonymous. They got some famous authors to write very short stories inspired by some of these portraits, and these are on exhibition together there at present. (There's an accompanying book, called Imagined Lives: Mystery Portraits 1540-1640.) It was an enjoyable exhibition, but I was also really impressed by the other portraits on display there, also loaned from the NPG. The London galleries display material chosen as much for historical significance as quality, and this means that there is a lot of material not on display available for loan to Montacute, again chosen as much for historical meaning as for quality, but with a subtle difference in the historical criteria for selection. I really loved, for example, a group of monarch portraits hung in one of the rooms off the long gallery. This was put together to make an appropriate set at some point in the Jacobean era, but with many of the pictures from a late Elizabethan set. So it includes not only excellently archaic looking medieval kings but Anne Boleyn, presumably as a compliment to her daughter, and a wonderful angry-looking Mary Tudor. Here is that picture, copyright National Portrait Gallery from the NPG website, but you'd have to see it larger to really get the full effect of the subtly furious eyebrows and set mouth.
Also off the long gallery were three rooms containing Henrician, Elizabethan, and Jacobean portraits respectively, and there were some more down the length of the gallery (which is the longest such surviving). They're not quite the best pictures ever, not stand-alone masterpieces, and often attributed to a workshop, or an anonymous Dutch painter, or "after Holbein"; but they are not the sort of copies which take something well-balanced and bland it down, they're the sort of copies which take something well-balanced and slightly unbalance it. A lot of them are just a little bit wonky or exaggerated in a way that makes them look very modern, and gives them a Paula Rego-style ultra lucidity. There are oddly elongated faces, an emphasis on patterns, and bold shapes and colours, and a sense that everything's just very slightly off. It was one of those odd places that makes you feel inspired to write something, but you're not quite sure what. I think I might go back alone in the summer with an empty notebook and write a historical murder mystery about time-travelling aliens. Or my long-planned raunchy TV drama about the reign of James VI and I. There are excellent portraits there of a number of the main movers in those events, including a young intense-looking Prince Henry, and a wonderful picture of the 3rd earl of Essex, the man who was psychologically hammered in Frances Howard's racy annulment suit but whom she didn't quite manage to poison, looking all gauche and with a head too large for his body. Poor soul. He went on to be a great Parliamentarian general -- good for him.
Sunday, 16 May 2010
Amiable TV
Some months ago I suggested to some people that Ice Ice Baby was ripe for re-evaluation as a great song. (This was before all the Jedward/Halifax nonsense, which obviously doesn't count.) The people in question were sceptical -- sceptical to the degree that next time I saw them they brought up their scepticism again. So the fact that this week's episode of Glee started with the rehabilitation of Ice Ice Baby, properly, with dancing, makes me feel all vindicated: as usual, I am so ahead of the curve. Therefore I think I am allowed to do a very self-indulgent post in which I pick out some songs they ought to do in a UK-based episode called Gluk, or maybe What the Gluk?! since it's not really about subtlety -- I'm envisaging something along the lines of that Friends episode where they all went to London and Joey met the Duchess of York.
First has to be those sinister pointy-faced boys from Bros, I think with I Owe You Nothing (though When Will I Be Famous? might fit a Glee storyline better). This song should be played to people who complain about the recent prevalence of autotune in pop.
Definitely something by Robert Palmer, probably Bad Case of Loving You. No autotune required:
Certainly some Adam Ant. Prince Charming would seem the most obvious, with its message that Ridicule is Nothing to be Scared Of, but I think I'd prefer the Dandy Highwayman:
There ought to be something sixties, probably by the Beatles, but my favourite Beatles song is Happiness is a Warm Gun, and you couldn't really fit that into a US high-school drama without some pretty ungleeful storylines. So I think it has to be either Help! (excellent Ringo video) or Twist and Shout:
Definitely some George Michael, probably Faith (embedding disabled by request). And there has to be something modern too, perhaps Dizzee Rascal's Dance Wiv Me. Probably also some guesting chirpy cockneys doing Blur's Parklife.
There are also some American songs I'd really like to see them do, but given that they've already done Color Me Badd's I Wanna Sexx You Up, Bel Biv Devoe's (That Girl Is) Poison, and MC Hammer's You Can't Touch This, they can probably be relied upon to put at least some of these in: Offspring, Pretty Fly (For a White Guy); Backstreet Boys, Everybody (here is what should have been the official video); Meatloaf, I Would Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That); Enrique Iglesias, Ping Pong Song (Do You Know What It Feels Like), and Jermaine Stewart, (We Don't Have To Take Our) Clothes Off (To Have A Good Time, Oh Yeah):
(That's a great video: Jermaine Stewart must have been some of the inspiration for Andre 2000, and I love the bit at the end where he won't even let her take his hat off.)
But I'm disappointed that they jettisoned Tina's stammer without taking advantage of this song by Scatman John, which I seem to remember really annoyed everyone I ever played it to when it came out in 1995. When it comes to ways of beating a profound stammer, releasing a ridiculously catchy sub-jazz pop single and becoming a huge hit in Europe and Japan is pretty classy, especially if you look like a 1960s bank manager:
It's a scooby dooby dooby, scooby dooby melody!
First has to be those sinister pointy-faced boys from Bros, I think with I Owe You Nothing (though When Will I Be Famous? might fit a Glee storyline better). This song should be played to people who complain about the recent prevalence of autotune in pop.
Definitely something by Robert Palmer, probably Bad Case of Loving You. No autotune required:
Certainly some Adam Ant. Prince Charming would seem the most obvious, with its message that Ridicule is Nothing to be Scared Of, but I think I'd prefer the Dandy Highwayman:
There ought to be something sixties, probably by the Beatles, but my favourite Beatles song is Happiness is a Warm Gun, and you couldn't really fit that into a US high-school drama without some pretty ungleeful storylines. So I think it has to be either Help! (excellent Ringo video) or Twist and Shout:
Definitely some George Michael, probably Faith (embedding disabled by request). And there has to be something modern too, perhaps Dizzee Rascal's Dance Wiv Me. Probably also some guesting chirpy cockneys doing Blur's Parklife.
There are also some American songs I'd really like to see them do, but given that they've already done Color Me Badd's I Wanna Sexx You Up, Bel Biv Devoe's (That Girl Is) Poison, and MC Hammer's You Can't Touch This, they can probably be relied upon to put at least some of these in: Offspring, Pretty Fly (For a White Guy); Backstreet Boys, Everybody (here is what should have been the official video); Meatloaf, I Would Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That); Enrique Iglesias, Ping Pong Song (Do You Know What It Feels Like), and Jermaine Stewart, (We Don't Have To Take Our) Clothes Off (To Have A Good Time, Oh Yeah):
(That's a great video: Jermaine Stewart must have been some of the inspiration for Andre 2000, and I love the bit at the end where he won't even let her take his hat off.)
But I'm disappointed that they jettisoned Tina's stammer without taking advantage of this song by Scatman John, which I seem to remember really annoyed everyone I ever played it to when it came out in 1995. When it comes to ways of beating a profound stammer, releasing a ridiculously catchy sub-jazz pop single and becoming a huge hit in Europe and Japan is pretty classy, especially if you look like a 1960s bank manager:
It's a scooby dooby dooby, scooby dooby melody!
Friday, 7 May 2010
That's all the books for now
I think this post sees me caught up with books I have read recently, except that I recently reread every single one of Jilly Cooper's novels with girls' names, in an access of nostalgia. The best one is probably Prudence.
The House by the Thames, Gillian Tindall
The story of an old house on Bankside and the people who lived there. I'm afraid it's just insufficiently interesting. All the good bits were just bits which reminded me of other books, like the mud larks in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Trilogy, and the boatmen in Our Mutual Friend.
Gold, Dan Rhodes
About a girl who goes once a year to a small village and gets mildly involved in its gentle village events. Touching and quite funny. Much like Timoleon Vieta Come Home by the same suthor.
Bareback, Kit Whitfield
Set in a world where everyone is a werewolf, except for some people who undergo a mild form of brain damage at birth, this is quite an angry book. The non-werewolves, or barebacks, are despised and feared by the rest of the population because on days around the full moon they are in charge of keeping order and use drastic measures to do it. The barebacks hate the werewolves because of their contempt and their habit of maiming people while in wolf form. Quite a well realised book, but a bit brutal.
Anianos of Kleitor, George Economou
A novel in the form of some fragmentary Greek poetry with commentary on it down the years. Very good, quite evocative, but not hugely substantial. And the boys' humour pun of the author's name in Latin seems a bit unnecessary.
The Day of the Barbarians, Alessandro Barbero
Does what it does very well, that is investigate the events leading up to the battle of Adrianople in 378, the battle itself, and its implications. I felt like it made quite a few things a bit clearer for me, particularly the Roman empire's need for immigrant settlers, although it's certainly written from an Italian point of view. At just 146 pages before the notes start it's quite a short book, which isn't necessarily a bad thing since it allows it a pretty specific focus. For the time being though, while I'm still listening on and off to Gibbon's Decline and Fall in audiobook form, I've had to stop reading about Classical and Antique history in any other way because it just gets too confusing.
Blacklands, Belinda Bauer
I don't really like thrillers, but this is quite a well-written story. It's about a boy whose family has been angry and miserable ever since his uncle went missing at about the same age as he is now. It seems almost certain that a particular serial killer killed the long-lost boy, and his nephew is now systematically digging on Exmoor to try to find the body, in the hope that this would settle things for his mother and grandmother and that they could then be more like a normal family. But unfortunately he has the idea of writing to the killer in prison to ask for help. It's quite a well-written book, with a real bogeyman of a baddie. But in places it's not entirely realistic -- would a mother, finding a letter simply asking for a photo in her loner eleven-year-old son's bag, really see this as evidence that he had or was about to knock up some girl?
The Silver Linings Playbook, Matthew Quick
If you read lots of middlebrow modern fiction you would spot that many now have narrators with various mental illnesses or conditions, and you might come to the conclusion that the mentally ill have gained a voice. This sounds like a good thing, but unfortunately it's the voice of an animated teddy bear. The mentally ill bumble along being harmless and lovable except that sometimes they get confused and violent, and then they're very sorry. Is this a step forwards? No it is not. This book is a readable way to spend time, but I'm afraid that in the abstract it is objectionable. Another recent one like this is The Behaviour of Moths by Poppy Adams. There is a huge variety of mentally ill people in real life, and I fail to see why in novels they should all sound like talking dogs.
One Day, David Nicholls
Very well done book which follows a man and a woman on the same day every year. Individually they are both slightly annoying people, but it's hard not to want to see them get together. Excellent stuff, oddly moving, with very convincing characters.
Love Child, Allegra Huston
Allegra Huston's mother died when she was only four years old, and she spent a lot of her life being something of an afterthought, passed around between relatives and step-families. She met her film director father for the first time after her mother died, only to find out when she was twelve that he wasn't her real father after all -- to his credit he treated her no more coldly, perhaps even rather better, than his other children, who included Anjelica Huston. Anjelica comes across as a really sweet person, who tried to make a home for her younger sister whenever she could, which is how Allegra ended up living in Hollywood with Jack Nicholson and other film types, and going to mad parties which actually don't seem to have done her much harm. Her real father turned out to be John Julius Norwich, which seemed to me like a bit of luck until I read that on first meeting the poor twelve-year-old girl he gave her the three volumes of his father's diaries and the one volume of his mother's. A well written book, and quite poignant.
The House by the Thames, Gillian Tindall
The story of an old house on Bankside and the people who lived there. I'm afraid it's just insufficiently interesting. All the good bits were just bits which reminded me of other books, like the mud larks in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Trilogy, and the boatmen in Our Mutual Friend.
Gold, Dan Rhodes
About a girl who goes once a year to a small village and gets mildly involved in its gentle village events. Touching and quite funny. Much like Timoleon Vieta Come Home by the same suthor.
Bareback, Kit Whitfield
Set in a world where everyone is a werewolf, except for some people who undergo a mild form of brain damage at birth, this is quite an angry book. The non-werewolves, or barebacks, are despised and feared by the rest of the population because on days around the full moon they are in charge of keeping order and use drastic measures to do it. The barebacks hate the werewolves because of their contempt and their habit of maiming people while in wolf form. Quite a well realised book, but a bit brutal.
Anianos of Kleitor, George Economou
A novel in the form of some fragmentary Greek poetry with commentary on it down the years. Very good, quite evocative, but not hugely substantial. And the boys' humour pun of the author's name in Latin seems a bit unnecessary.
The Day of the Barbarians, Alessandro Barbero
Does what it does very well, that is investigate the events leading up to the battle of Adrianople in 378, the battle itself, and its implications. I felt like it made quite a few things a bit clearer for me, particularly the Roman empire's need for immigrant settlers, although it's certainly written from an Italian point of view. At just 146 pages before the notes start it's quite a short book, which isn't necessarily a bad thing since it allows it a pretty specific focus. For the time being though, while I'm still listening on and off to Gibbon's Decline and Fall in audiobook form, I've had to stop reading about Classical and Antique history in any other way because it just gets too confusing.
Blacklands, Belinda Bauer
I don't really like thrillers, but this is quite a well-written story. It's about a boy whose family has been angry and miserable ever since his uncle went missing at about the same age as he is now. It seems almost certain that a particular serial killer killed the long-lost boy, and his nephew is now systematically digging on Exmoor to try to find the body, in the hope that this would settle things for his mother and grandmother and that they could then be more like a normal family. But unfortunately he has the idea of writing to the killer in prison to ask for help. It's quite a well-written book, with a real bogeyman of a baddie. But in places it's not entirely realistic -- would a mother, finding a letter simply asking for a photo in her loner eleven-year-old son's bag, really see this as evidence that he had or was about to knock up some girl?
The Silver Linings Playbook, Matthew Quick
If you read lots of middlebrow modern fiction you would spot that many now have narrators with various mental illnesses or conditions, and you might come to the conclusion that the mentally ill have gained a voice. This sounds like a good thing, but unfortunately it's the voice of an animated teddy bear. The mentally ill bumble along being harmless and lovable except that sometimes they get confused and violent, and then they're very sorry. Is this a step forwards? No it is not. This book is a readable way to spend time, but I'm afraid that in the abstract it is objectionable. Another recent one like this is The Behaviour of Moths by Poppy Adams. There is a huge variety of mentally ill people in real life, and I fail to see why in novels they should all sound like talking dogs.
One Day, David Nicholls
Very well done book which follows a man and a woman on the same day every year. Individually they are both slightly annoying people, but it's hard not to want to see them get together. Excellent stuff, oddly moving, with very convincing characters.
Love Child, Allegra Huston
Allegra Huston's mother died when she was only four years old, and she spent a lot of her life being something of an afterthought, passed around between relatives and step-families. She met her film director father for the first time after her mother died, only to find out when she was twelve that he wasn't her real father after all -- to his credit he treated her no more coldly, perhaps even rather better, than his other children, who included Anjelica Huston. Anjelica comes across as a really sweet person, who tried to make a home for her younger sister whenever she could, which is how Allegra ended up living in Hollywood with Jack Nicholson and other film types, and going to mad parties which actually don't seem to have done her much harm. Her real father turned out to be John Julius Norwich, which seemed to me like a bit of luck until I read that on first meeting the poor twelve-year-old girl he gave her the three volumes of his father's diaries and the one volume of his mother's. A well written book, and quite poignant.
Wednesday, 5 May 2010
Hurray for books
Jamestown, Matthew Sharpe
This is the story of the foundation of the colony Jamestown in Virginia in the early seventeenth century, but set in a not too distant post-apocalyptic future. The settlers have come down from Manhattan, which is at war with Brooklyn, to try to find oil and unpolluted food. It's really an oddly touching love story between Pocohontas, who is an angry teenager, and John Rolfe, who has been beaten down by seeing terrible things. This is actually a very excellent book. I can't remember how it got onto my amazon wishlist, since although I quite liked The Sleeping Father it didn't wow me, but I'm glad it did, because it is unusual.
Green Grass, Running Water, Thomas King
When I started reading this I had this wierd but comfortable feeling that this is what books used to be like in my reading heyday, say about fifteen years ago. Which, as it happens, is about when it was written. I think it's the fusion of myths, ordinary life, and humour which made me think of the mid-90s, particularly Jeanette Winterson at her best. Four very old and usually comatose Indians go missing from a mental asylum in Florida. They are heading to a Native American reservation in Canada, where they get mixed up in a not especially helpful way with the lives of people there. Very good stuff. I am going to hunt out some other things by him.
The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart, Jesse Bullington
Odd mythical tale set in a slightly alternative medieval Europe. Rather more action sequences than I'm really capable of absorbing. But interesting and odd. The eponymous brothers are professional grave robbers and total scum, who encounter some very odd things in the woods of middle Europe, and have some unusual theological viewpoints. The story is set on their travels towards Egypt, a grave-robbers' Shangri-La.
The Bastard of Istanbul, Elif Shafak
I was finding this irritatingly chick-lit-y at first, but it quickly became much more interesting. It's mostly about Turkish and Armenian people, especially in the American diaspora, coping with the past Turkish treatment of Armenians, but with a satisfying quantity of uncovering past family secrets. It captures that odd thing about humanity where it's clear just how completely impossible it is for us all to get along, and then how much simple human connections can make it possible for people to get along. Maybe it's because we're not the best nation at reading literature in translation that books like this get covers -- in this case full of purple, pink, blue, and gold and with squiggly writing -- which position them a few levels downculture in the women's weekly 3-for-2 market. Alaa al Aswany's Yacoubian Building was another such.
Soulless, Gail Carriger
Now this is real chick-lit. I quite like chick-lit, but it has to be well enough done not to be too annoying. This nearly annoyed me by being clearly written by an American even though it's set in England, but I decided just to see this as a testimony to how good Elizabeth Peters is (she never puts American English into her English characters' mouths). Basically the premise is that Heyer-era London society -- Carrigan clearly loves her Heyer, which is an amiable characteristic -- is heavily infested with vampires and werewolves, who have reached an accommodation with humans and live among them. The heroine has been born without a soul, and can neutralise supernatural powers by her touch -- this gets her into shocking social situations. Entertaining in a harmless sort of way; a good airport book.
This is the story of the foundation of the colony Jamestown in Virginia in the early seventeenth century, but set in a not too distant post-apocalyptic future. The settlers have come down from Manhattan, which is at war with Brooklyn, to try to find oil and unpolluted food. It's really an oddly touching love story between Pocohontas, who is an angry teenager, and John Rolfe, who has been beaten down by seeing terrible things. This is actually a very excellent book. I can't remember how it got onto my amazon wishlist, since although I quite liked The Sleeping Father it didn't wow me, but I'm glad it did, because it is unusual.
Green Grass, Running Water, Thomas King
When I started reading this I had this wierd but comfortable feeling that this is what books used to be like in my reading heyday, say about fifteen years ago. Which, as it happens, is about when it was written. I think it's the fusion of myths, ordinary life, and humour which made me think of the mid-90s, particularly Jeanette Winterson at her best. Four very old and usually comatose Indians go missing from a mental asylum in Florida. They are heading to a Native American reservation in Canada, where they get mixed up in a not especially helpful way with the lives of people there. Very good stuff. I am going to hunt out some other things by him.
The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart, Jesse Bullington
Odd mythical tale set in a slightly alternative medieval Europe. Rather more action sequences than I'm really capable of absorbing. But interesting and odd. The eponymous brothers are professional grave robbers and total scum, who encounter some very odd things in the woods of middle Europe, and have some unusual theological viewpoints. The story is set on their travels towards Egypt, a grave-robbers' Shangri-La.
The Bastard of Istanbul, Elif Shafak
I was finding this irritatingly chick-lit-y at first, but it quickly became much more interesting. It's mostly about Turkish and Armenian people, especially in the American diaspora, coping with the past Turkish treatment of Armenians, but with a satisfying quantity of uncovering past family secrets. It captures that odd thing about humanity where it's clear just how completely impossible it is for us all to get along, and then how much simple human connections can make it possible for people to get along. Maybe it's because we're not the best nation at reading literature in translation that books like this get covers -- in this case full of purple, pink, blue, and gold and with squiggly writing -- which position them a few levels downculture in the women's weekly 3-for-2 market. Alaa al Aswany's Yacoubian Building was another such.
Soulless, Gail Carriger
Now this is real chick-lit. I quite like chick-lit, but it has to be well enough done not to be too annoying. This nearly annoyed me by being clearly written by an American even though it's set in England, but I decided just to see this as a testimony to how good Elizabeth Peters is (she never puts American English into her English characters' mouths). Basically the premise is that Heyer-era London society -- Carrigan clearly loves her Heyer, which is an amiable characteristic -- is heavily infested with vampires and werewolves, who have reached an accommodation with humans and live among them. The heroine has been born without a soul, and can neutralise supernatural powers by her touch -- this gets her into shocking social situations. Entertaining in a harmless sort of way; a good airport book.
Tuesday, 4 May 2010
More miscellaneous stuff
Here are some special glasses for looking at gorillas without threatening them. I think it would also be comfortable to wear them in other public situations, like maybe on the tube.
Land carpet! Quite nice.
Nicola Barker is great. I also like Hark a Vagrant; here is a good one on Macbeth.
Popjustice has links to good music by Kele and Hurts.
Here are some cute babies racing while wearing political pants:
Land carpet! Quite nice.
Nicola Barker is great. I also like Hark a Vagrant; here is a good one on Macbeth.
Popjustice has links to good music by Kele and Hurts.
Here are some cute babies racing while wearing political pants:
Continued books
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, Alan Bradley
The heroine is a precocious and rather unpleasant ten-year-old girl with a fondness for distilling poisons from things she finds around the house or garden. Her mother died when she was very little, her father is pretty absent, and she and her older sisters have a relationship of mutual torturing. An old-style country house murder, well plotted and executed, and oddly comforting in the way that such murders are -- I hope there will be many more in the series.
The Artist, the Philosopher and the Warrior, Paul Strathern
A sort of group biography of Leonardo da Vinci, Machiavelli, and Cesare Borgia, based around a time in 1502 when da Vinci was working as a military engineer for Borgia while Machiavelli was in attendance on him as an ambassador of Florence. Cesare Borgia was the brother of Lucrezia Borgia, and had a habit of killing her lovers. Their father was Rodrigo Borgia, Pope Alexander VI, who had the idea of using his papal power to set up territories which could be ancestral Borgia possessions, and who put Cesare in charge of the armies to achieve this. These ambitions may even have encompassed turning the papacy into a hereditary possession of the family, much like it had been five centuries earlier in the time of the Tusculanii and Crescentii. Machiavelli was very impressed by Borgia, and may have been all for the secularisation of the papal territories on the grounds that it was the papacy which was attracting lots of foreign attention into Italy, and making it the complex mess it was throughout the later middle ages and early modern period. Ideally the papacy, as the headship of Western Christendom, would not be an inherited post, but at this point no one seems to have thought of the papacy in moral terms at all -- that the pope held banquets at which various sexual acts were the after-dinner entertainment is attested not by his enemies but by his own master of ceremonies -- so you can sort of see what Machiavelli was thinking. The fact that whenever the pope wanted some more armies he just offered some sort of indulgence to a ruler of a neighbouring kingdom was pretty destabilising. For example, King Louis XII of France wanted a divorce from his wife in order to marry his predecessor's widow, Anne of Brittany, and thus keep her territories under French control. He had no grounds whatsoever for the divorce, so he alleged that his wife was deformed in a way that made consummation impossible. (She was not thrilled by this.) Alexander VI granted the divorce in return for money and troops which Cesare Borgia used to carve out his own territory in the Romagna. (Louis XII's last wife, the one who theoretically danced him into his grave, was the sister of Henry VIII, whose own rather more reasonable divorce request was not granted because by that point it was the Spanish who controlled the papacy, with interesting results.)
Anyway, I enjoyed this book, which brought various aspects of the time together quite effectively. I've never read The Prince on the grounds that it would probably depress me, but Machiavelli comes over as an interesting and entertaining person here, so maybe I will. His letters to his friends are very tongue-in-cheek -- annoyingly the author of this book seems to take them all at face value. For example, a letter from one of Machiavelli's friends congratulating him on the birth of his son, and saying what a relief that he looks at you so you know you haven't been cuckolded, is taken by this author as evidence that there was serious doubt over the paternity of the child, and he brings forward as further evidence for this the fact that Machiavelli's wife wrote to her absent husband asking him to "come back soon" -- so that he can see the child's resemblance for himself, apparently. Hmmmph.
The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters
Another book I'd been holding off on reading because I knew I would enjoy it, and it did not let me down. It's set after the Second World War, when England's country-house gentry underwent a suddent decline into poverty and irrelevance. (I don't recommend the Wodehouse books from this period, they're as depressing as asking a farmer about farming.) A small-town doctor gets to know the mother and two grown-up children who live in the local big house when he's called in to treat their one remaining house maid. The son was badly wounded in the war, and the doctor starts to worry about his mental state. Spooky like the author's Affinity but not as crushing.
Two Serious Ladies, Jane Bowles
I can't remember how this got onto my Amazon wish list, but I do know there were heavy recommendations behind it. But I just completely didn't get it -- perhaps in the same way I didn't get A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. Bits of it were mildly amusing but in general it seemed insufficiently interesting. Perhaps it didn't help that it has a peculiarly revolting foreword by Truman Capote, which has put me off ever reading In Cold Blood in case it turns out to be as fey.
The Love of Stones, Tobias Hill
How does this book manage to be so dull? I gave up about half-way through, still unsure whether or not I had read it before. A story about someone pursuing a long-lost jewel through their shady underworld contacts, with flashbacks to the history of the jewel itself and stories of legendary jewels from history, really ought not to be such a total chore to read. Remarkable in its way.
The heroine is a precocious and rather unpleasant ten-year-old girl with a fondness for distilling poisons from things she finds around the house or garden. Her mother died when she was very little, her father is pretty absent, and she and her older sisters have a relationship of mutual torturing. An old-style country house murder, well plotted and executed, and oddly comforting in the way that such murders are -- I hope there will be many more in the series.
The Artist, the Philosopher and the Warrior, Paul Strathern
A sort of group biography of Leonardo da Vinci, Machiavelli, and Cesare Borgia, based around a time in 1502 when da Vinci was working as a military engineer for Borgia while Machiavelli was in attendance on him as an ambassador of Florence. Cesare Borgia was the brother of Lucrezia Borgia, and had a habit of killing her lovers. Their father was Rodrigo Borgia, Pope Alexander VI, who had the idea of using his papal power to set up territories which could be ancestral Borgia possessions, and who put Cesare in charge of the armies to achieve this. These ambitions may even have encompassed turning the papacy into a hereditary possession of the family, much like it had been five centuries earlier in the time of the Tusculanii and Crescentii. Machiavelli was very impressed by Borgia, and may have been all for the secularisation of the papal territories on the grounds that it was the papacy which was attracting lots of foreign attention into Italy, and making it the complex mess it was throughout the later middle ages and early modern period. Ideally the papacy, as the headship of Western Christendom, would not be an inherited post, but at this point no one seems to have thought of the papacy in moral terms at all -- that the pope held banquets at which various sexual acts were the after-dinner entertainment is attested not by his enemies but by his own master of ceremonies -- so you can sort of see what Machiavelli was thinking. The fact that whenever the pope wanted some more armies he just offered some sort of indulgence to a ruler of a neighbouring kingdom was pretty destabilising. For example, King Louis XII of France wanted a divorce from his wife in order to marry his predecessor's widow, Anne of Brittany, and thus keep her territories under French control. He had no grounds whatsoever for the divorce, so he alleged that his wife was deformed in a way that made consummation impossible. (She was not thrilled by this.) Alexander VI granted the divorce in return for money and troops which Cesare Borgia used to carve out his own territory in the Romagna. (Louis XII's last wife, the one who theoretically danced him into his grave, was the sister of Henry VIII, whose own rather more reasonable divorce request was not granted because by that point it was the Spanish who controlled the papacy, with interesting results.)
Anyway, I enjoyed this book, which brought various aspects of the time together quite effectively. I've never read The Prince on the grounds that it would probably depress me, but Machiavelli comes over as an interesting and entertaining person here, so maybe I will. His letters to his friends are very tongue-in-cheek -- annoyingly the author of this book seems to take them all at face value. For example, a letter from one of Machiavelli's friends congratulating him on the birth of his son, and saying what a relief that he looks at you so you know you haven't been cuckolded, is taken by this author as evidence that there was serious doubt over the paternity of the child, and he brings forward as further evidence for this the fact that Machiavelli's wife wrote to her absent husband asking him to "come back soon" -- so that he can see the child's resemblance for himself, apparently. Hmmmph.
The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters
Another book I'd been holding off on reading because I knew I would enjoy it, and it did not let me down. It's set after the Second World War, when England's country-house gentry underwent a suddent decline into poverty and irrelevance. (I don't recommend the Wodehouse books from this period, they're as depressing as asking a farmer about farming.) A small-town doctor gets to know the mother and two grown-up children who live in the local big house when he's called in to treat their one remaining house maid. The son was badly wounded in the war, and the doctor starts to worry about his mental state. Spooky like the author's Affinity but not as crushing.
Two Serious Ladies, Jane Bowles
I can't remember how this got onto my Amazon wish list, but I do know there were heavy recommendations behind it. But I just completely didn't get it -- perhaps in the same way I didn't get A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. Bits of it were mildly amusing but in general it seemed insufficiently interesting. Perhaps it didn't help that it has a peculiarly revolting foreword by Truman Capote, which has put me off ever reading In Cold Blood in case it turns out to be as fey.
The Love of Stones, Tobias Hill
How does this book manage to be so dull? I gave up about half-way through, still unsure whether or not I had read it before. A story about someone pursuing a long-lost jewel through their shady underworld contacts, with flashbacks to the history of the jewel itself and stories of legendary jewels from history, really ought not to be such a total chore to read. Remarkable in its way.
Wednesday, 28 April 2010
More books
Continuing to catch up on blogging about books I've been reading:
Nation, Terry Pratchett
I do like Terry Pratchett. This is the first non-Discworld book of his which I have read -- to be honest I have no idea if he's written other non-Discworld books. It's set in an alternative eighteenth-century world, and is about a boy in the South Seas who is out in a canoe when a huge wave comes and wipes out his entire island, and an English girl who is the only survivor of a shipwreck. More survivors join them, and the boy wrestles with how to fulfil the directives of his ancestor-worshipping religion. This is clearly Pratchett working through his own dilemma, which is very interesting to see. On the one hand Pratchett loves Story, and the transforming power of story, which is why A.S. Byatt loves Pratchett, although he has a rather lighter touch than she does -- on the other hand he loves rationality and scepticism, and breaking down received ideas. You can see him being on Dawkins' side about the God stuff, but horrified at some of Dawkins' wackier anti-"lies" suggestions that it's wrong to tell children stories with unicorns in, for example. So the boy in Nation spends a lot of time torn between the powerfulness of the ancestors' story and the ancestral way of doing things as a symbol of continued life after the tsunami, and his sense that the whole thing is futile nonsense which didn't prevent the tsunami in the first place. It all turns out to be OK when it transpires that the ancestors were actually terribly rational themselves. Anyway, I may be over-analysing -- it's an enjoyable book.
Sacred Hearts, Sarah Dunant
I would be willing to bet large sums of money that she got the idea for this book from reading Mary Laven's excellent non-fiction Virgins of Venice (which I lent to my hairdresser and which he then returned signed by the author because he cuts her hair too, which was pretty cool of him), although this novel is set in Ferrara. Essentially in the late medieval/early modern period it became more and more expensive for the Italian nobility and gentry to marry, and in any large family only one or two of the sons and daughters might find spouses, the sons because it was expensive to set up a full married establishment, and the daughters because the father couldn't afford more than one or two full-grade dowries. Younger sons had various ways of earning their living, but respectable fathers really either had to marry off their daughters or to put them into a convent, which would take them for a much lesser dowry than a husband would demand, and there was not much consultation of the wishes of the women themselves. The convents became sort of like a girls' boarding school but all-age, and the nuns could be visited by their families, put on concerts, keep pet dogs and other luxuries, and generally have a reasonably good time. If they didn't mind being spinsters -- the big advantage being no threat of death in childbirth and no beatings -- then it wasn't too bad a life, and if it's true that both options involved obedience, either to a husband or an abbess, at least you had a chance of working your way up to be abbess, whereas no one was ever going to promote you to be husband. But after the Reformation in northern Europe the Council of Trent etc led to reforms fighting back against criticism of various aspects of Roman Catholic life, and the nuns were sitting ducks for stringent crack-downs on anything against the spirit of the most austere monasticism, because it is just one of those things about nunneries that throughout the ages bishops have been worried that they are not sufficiently under the bishop's control. This novel is about a girl who is put unwillingly into a convent in Ferrara after the man her father has chosen as a son-in-law chooses her younger sister. It is largely from the point of view of an older nun who does not particularly want to be in the convent but had no other socially acceptable option after her father died. The book is quite good and not too heavy-handed about exploring the convent's life and the young novice's attempts at rebellion. I think I might lend it to my grandma.
Prodigal Summer, Barbara Kingsolver
I do like this book, which I have read at least twice before. It's largely a novel about ecology, and I read an interview with her where she said she tried to make the ecosystem one of the characters, something at which I think she succeeds more than you'd expect. It has three separate strands, set around the same area, and although the three main heroines don't know each other there's a strong sense towards the end that they will meet before long, which is a nice ending because you know they will like each other. A happy book, but not in a soppy way.
Instruction Manual for Swallowing, Adam Marek
A collection of quite good short stories, some pretty striking. Some don't really seem to go anywhere much, which might be deliberate, but makes them harder to read. There's a pretty memorable one with a giant talking centipede.
A Place of Greater Safety, Hilary Mantel
I remember the fantastic reviews this book got when it came out, a long time ago, but the subject matter always put me off before. It's about three of the main movers in the French Revolution. Mantel writes very well, and it's probably a good thing that I'm sufficiently ignorant about the revolution not to be able to remember in which order people died. It's one of those books which fills you with a sense of relief almost as soon as you start it, because you know it's going to be reliably good, and because it's nice and fat enough to last you a long time. I used to feel that way often as a child, when I was able to read any sort of trash, but now it's quite a rare experience. The relationships of the characters are very convincingly traced, both in their initial friendship and their fallings out. I love the bit where Robespierre remarks wryly that his presence turns everyone into a hypocrite. This may have been horrendously conceited of me, but I did used to feel like that sometimes as a sixth-former. I still haven't read Wolf Hall, out of a sense that I don't want to waste something I'm going to enjoy.
Nation, Terry Pratchett
I do like Terry Pratchett. This is the first non-Discworld book of his which I have read -- to be honest I have no idea if he's written other non-Discworld books. It's set in an alternative eighteenth-century world, and is about a boy in the South Seas who is out in a canoe when a huge wave comes and wipes out his entire island, and an English girl who is the only survivor of a shipwreck. More survivors join them, and the boy wrestles with how to fulfil the directives of his ancestor-worshipping religion. This is clearly Pratchett working through his own dilemma, which is very interesting to see. On the one hand Pratchett loves Story, and the transforming power of story, which is why A.S. Byatt loves Pratchett, although he has a rather lighter touch than she does -- on the other hand he loves rationality and scepticism, and breaking down received ideas. You can see him being on Dawkins' side about the God stuff, but horrified at some of Dawkins' wackier anti-"lies" suggestions that it's wrong to tell children stories with unicorns in, for example. So the boy in Nation spends a lot of time torn between the powerfulness of the ancestors' story and the ancestral way of doing things as a symbol of continued life after the tsunami, and his sense that the whole thing is futile nonsense which didn't prevent the tsunami in the first place. It all turns out to be OK when it transpires that the ancestors were actually terribly rational themselves. Anyway, I may be over-analysing -- it's an enjoyable book.
Sacred Hearts, Sarah Dunant
I would be willing to bet large sums of money that she got the idea for this book from reading Mary Laven's excellent non-fiction Virgins of Venice (which I lent to my hairdresser and which he then returned signed by the author because he cuts her hair too, which was pretty cool of him), although this novel is set in Ferrara. Essentially in the late medieval/early modern period it became more and more expensive for the Italian nobility and gentry to marry, and in any large family only one or two of the sons and daughters might find spouses, the sons because it was expensive to set up a full married establishment, and the daughters because the father couldn't afford more than one or two full-grade dowries. Younger sons had various ways of earning their living, but respectable fathers really either had to marry off their daughters or to put them into a convent, which would take them for a much lesser dowry than a husband would demand, and there was not much consultation of the wishes of the women themselves. The convents became sort of like a girls' boarding school but all-age, and the nuns could be visited by their families, put on concerts, keep pet dogs and other luxuries, and generally have a reasonably good time. If they didn't mind being spinsters -- the big advantage being no threat of death in childbirth and no beatings -- then it wasn't too bad a life, and if it's true that both options involved obedience, either to a husband or an abbess, at least you had a chance of working your way up to be abbess, whereas no one was ever going to promote you to be husband. But after the Reformation in northern Europe the Council of Trent etc led to reforms fighting back against criticism of various aspects of Roman Catholic life, and the nuns were sitting ducks for stringent crack-downs on anything against the spirit of the most austere monasticism, because it is just one of those things about nunneries that throughout the ages bishops have been worried that they are not sufficiently under the bishop's control. This novel is about a girl who is put unwillingly into a convent in Ferrara after the man her father has chosen as a son-in-law chooses her younger sister. It is largely from the point of view of an older nun who does not particularly want to be in the convent but had no other socially acceptable option after her father died. The book is quite good and not too heavy-handed about exploring the convent's life and the young novice's attempts at rebellion. I think I might lend it to my grandma.
Prodigal Summer, Barbara Kingsolver
I do like this book, which I have read at least twice before. It's largely a novel about ecology, and I read an interview with her where she said she tried to make the ecosystem one of the characters, something at which I think she succeeds more than you'd expect. It has three separate strands, set around the same area, and although the three main heroines don't know each other there's a strong sense towards the end that they will meet before long, which is a nice ending because you know they will like each other. A happy book, but not in a soppy way.
Instruction Manual for Swallowing, Adam Marek
A collection of quite good short stories, some pretty striking. Some don't really seem to go anywhere much, which might be deliberate, but makes them harder to read. There's a pretty memorable one with a giant talking centipede.
A Place of Greater Safety, Hilary Mantel
I remember the fantastic reviews this book got when it came out, a long time ago, but the subject matter always put me off before. It's about three of the main movers in the French Revolution. Mantel writes very well, and it's probably a good thing that I'm sufficiently ignorant about the revolution not to be able to remember in which order people died. It's one of those books which fills you with a sense of relief almost as soon as you start it, because you know it's going to be reliably good, and because it's nice and fat enough to last you a long time. I used to feel that way often as a child, when I was able to read any sort of trash, but now it's quite a rare experience. The relationships of the characters are very convincingly traced, both in their initial friendship and their fallings out. I love the bit where Robespierre remarks wryly that his presence turns everyone into a hypocrite. This may have been horrendously conceited of me, but I did used to feel like that sometimes as a sixth-former. I still haven't read Wolf Hall, out of a sense that I don't want to waste something I'm going to enjoy.
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