Reading in 2012

I've kept track of my reading for 2012 like I did for 2011. I read fewer books this year than last (though I wouldn't be far off if I counted unabridged audiobooks). Also of course I haven't counted titles like "Artifical Intelligence: a Modern Approach" or "Head-First Design Patterns". Here are the statistics:

• Total number of books read: 174
• Gender of authors of each book: 91 male, 78 female (the rest are anthologies)
• Fiction vs non-fiction: 136 to 38
• Number of re-reads: only 15
• Number read on Kindle: 100 (57.47%)

It's not been quite such an interesting reading year as last year was. I think this is because so much of my energy has gone into the very tough course and the challenge of moving down to Devon and starting a new job in a completely new industry. I haven't taken so many reading risks, so I haven't had so many nice surprises. But there were a few books I enjoyed more than I had expected: Jerzy Pilch's The Mighty Angel, about a Russian drinker who falls in love, and Vanessa Gebbie's The Coward's Tale, about a Welsh mining village haunted by a terrible mine accident, are both more interesting than they sound from synopses. Pat McIntosh's series of murder mysteries set in fifteenth-century Glasgow is very good, as is Nicola Shulman's Graven with Diamonds, a biography of Thomas Wyatt. Lytton Strachey can really write, and is more interesting than he has any right to be, and Iain Pears is reliably great.

I read some mid twentieth-century stuff which I enjoyed, fiction in the form of Anthony Powell's surprisingly easy-to-read A Dance to the Music of Time, and non-fiction in the form of Nella Last's War and Call the Midwife, both of which took my breath away.

But leaving aside rereads, my favourite books of the year were, in reverse order:

• Austin Wright, Tony and Susan, reviewed here
• Craig Taylor, Londoners, reviewed here.
• Tom Lubbock, 50 Great Paintings, reviewed here.
• Muriel Spark, A Far Cry From Kensington. I seem not to have reviewed this yet. It's about a young fat widow called Mrs Hawkins who lives in a genteel boarding house in Kensington. She works in publishing, and the story mostly follows what comes from her designation of a hack called Hector Bartlett as a "pisseur de copie". This is a seriously brilliant book, and has to be one of the standing classics of the twentieth century.

Happy Christmas!

Happy Christmas, anyone who might be reading this. It's wierd how intensely Christmas forms its own traditions. In the last few years we've developed one in my family where my mother and I argue about the content of the midnight mass sermon. It was a pretty inane one last night. But heigh ho, that's not really the point. For once I found myself able to let go of that and enjoy being at that service with a group of people whose actions (if not their words) I admire. It's a Christmas miracle!

About a fortnight ago the people who sometimes graze their sheep on one of my parents' fields turned up at our front door with a carrier bag with half a lamb in it. So for Christmas dinner we had a big leg of lamb. It was very delicious. I don't know how far away it had to go to be killed, but it spent its life within a couple of hundred yards from where I am sitting now.

My mother gave me a device for forcing a hard-boiled egg into a cube shape. I feel quite good about this. I gave my grandma a book about her home city of Bath in the Blitz, with pictures from the time next to pictures of the same places now. Bath's blitz was short but intense. My grandma was a young woman at the time, working for the Ministry of Defence. She told me that she remembered her little niece Jenny, who was four or five years old, saying "You won't let them kill me will you aunty?". (We talked to the same Jenny, a self-assured old-aged-pensioner now, after lunch.) I hadn't known that one of my grandma's second cousins was killed together with her small child. I'm not entirely sure now whether the book was a good present. My grandma clearly finds it very interesting, but are the memories it's bringing back still painful? It's hard to tell. I find it interesting to hear about it, myself. I wished I had asked my grandpa before he died -- he was down in Plymouth at this point, which was far more badly hit, and he didn't move up to Bath and meet my grandma until 1943.

Money and value

I have just had a royalty statement, and my Margaret book has earned £42.62 in royalties! I never thought that it would ever pay off the advance, which, although small in relative terms, seemed rather generous to me. So now I am an author who has not lost a publisher money! And I have £42.62 more than I did before. This is the sort of money which feels like it's worth more than its actual amount in pounds and pence.

The wierd thing is that it has sold over 500 copies overseas in 2011-12, far more than it has in previous years. So that's a bit odd.

In non-medievalist news, I have now been a professional Java programmer for just over two months. I am getting a tad more secure about it, though there are still tons of things with which I need to get to grips. I'm really enjoying the wierd feeling that I'm learning a new sort of articulacy! When I'm more settled down with Java I'm going to learn about Aspect Oriented Programming, and also Functional Programming, which seems to be Hot Right Now. I'm probably going to be doing the Sun Java Programmer Certification at work, and I'm going to make a few Android apps.

But I'm still going to be a medievalist again from time to time, I think. I do really want to finish off my charters book. I've started unpacking some of my book boxes labelled "Academic storage", and although I might do a bit of deaccessioning, I don't think I can part with most of them. But goodness knows where I will put them all. Plus it's possible that by the time I get round to anglo-saxoning again all this Java will have pushed all the Latin out of my brain.

Röyksopp

5th December 2012

I'm currently gearing up to moving out of my parents' house and into a place of my own.  I took this morning off and spent most of it on hold to various utility companies.  It reminded me a bit of the death of Princess Diana, when the radio stations all played emergency chill-out music, with no lyrics but a woman doing vocalisations.  I think British Gas were playing Morcheeba, or maybe it was Leftfield -- very '90s.

It took me over two hours to get home tonight because the motorway was closed. My route involved a mile's walk and two separate lifts.  When I got back I found that my parents had taken a bizarre cue from Big Bang Theory and made Sheldon's favourite meal for dinner.  My mother literally explained it as Sheldon's favourite meal.  This is pasta with tomato sauce and chopped-up hot dogs.  I am now feeling guilty for being insufficiently grateful, though it did in fact taste quite bad.  (They had added lots of chopped onions and mushrooms, and I think my Dad may have put some ginger in.)

In internet news, Zoe Williams' article about the Metropolitan Police Force's new assault prevention advice has a link to this truly brilliant list of Sexual assault prevention tips guaranteed to work. The same website has lots of other good tips, like this handy guide to telling whether a toy is for boys or girls.

Pop love

This mix of more than 24 pop songs is very excellent (via popbitch):



I think maybe pop is so great because a lot of it is about feeling sad but deciding to be happy.  If that's true it would explain why the Pet Shop Boys are the best pop group ever.

Culm down

Here is the entrance to Uffculme. The river Culm is just round the corner, past the bend, under a bridge.

Oh no it's not!

I took this at the point where we gave up on the idea of leaving the village this morning -- we'd already tried the other two routes out.  It looks all peaceful but it was actually flowing quite strongly from right to left, with a surprisingly loud roaring noise.  Luckily the Met Office are understanding about people not getting in to work because of extreme weather conditions. The postwoman, who is an excellent cheery soul, eventually got here at about 3pm.  I'm hopeful I can get in tomorrow, if it doesn't rain too much over night.

The bad pun in the title is because I looked on twitter to see if anyone was saying anything about the Culm, and just got lots of mispellings of the word "calm".  We are a nation of illiterates.

Utility

On the other hand the downside of a job where you have to learn lots of things is that it takes a good deal of time before you can do anything useful at all. If I can get what I'm working on into the next release of the software then I may possibly do my first useful action in January. Which is quite a lot of time of not being any use.

JavaProgrammer javaProgrammer = new JavaProgrammer(Rebecca);

The poet Milton was a bit of a bastard, and one of the ways he expressed this was by teaching his daughters to read, as in to pronounce out loud, Greek, so that by listening to them he could save his failing eyesight; but he did not teach them to read, as in understand, Greek, because they were girls. The way I feel about the things I'm learning at the moment at work is a bit like they might have felt if someone had suddenly decided to teach them Greek vocabulary and grammar. There are things I've been using for ages as just things that exist -- I'm thinking predominantly of XML, but other things too -- and now I'm beginning to learn how to manipulate the things that underlie them. "Why shouldn't you have your own RESTful web service?" said one of the contractors to me the other day. "Everyone else has one." So I'm learning how to write one, and I'm going to make my own as part of a big task I'm doing. Part of this involves learning how to eat XML. And when I know how to do this I will be able to go out onto the web and eat any XML I feel like, and use APIs, and do cunning things. It's all quite complex and it will take me years of learning to be good at it, but my department has a training budget (in terms of both money and time), and I will get the chance to sort these things out. Some people who sit near me are working through the Java Sun certification exams, which is something we are encouraged to do. I am feeling very good about this. I think I had thought of the M.Sc. year as my chance to learn things, and then I would do a job where I would put those things I had learnt into practice, but I probably couldn't get away with doing any more real serious learning until I retire (when I'm going to do a theology degree). What I hadn't realised was that the M.Sc. was just scratching the surface and setting us up for continuing to learn very similar material in more depth while working. Some of it's very complex and challenging stuff -- I'm thinking of design patterns in particular, which are logical ways of making systems which can be easily extended and altered. Deep down, what I like doing is learning things.

Of course all jobs have a honeymoon period, and after a couple of years you start to see how the politics work, and get depressed about that, but at present I am enjoying the Met Office hugely. I also get to do some metereological training, which is cool.

Some things I saw on the internet

"Illiterate kids given sealed boxes with tablets figure out how to use, master, and hack them" sounds like something that would happen in a Neal Stephenson novel.

I want to visit these giant ear trumpets in Derbyshire.

Benjamin Dewey's Tragedy series no. 121 is quite good.

Some of these life hacks are great but I'm not at all sure what to make of the bagel caddy. A good idea or just really daft?

This thing exists: a Pet Shop Boys radio station that plays only Pet Shop Boys songs. (In the broad sense, though -- I just got Ian Wright's Do the Right Thing, co-written and produced by Chris Lowe.)

This four-year-old is crying for a specific reason:

Another woman singing

I do like this remix of Rebecca Ferguson's Backtrack. It really brings out the unusual quality of her voice. (If you prefer a 60s sound to "hi-nrg" dance then you might like the original better.)

Some short thoughts I had about some things

Here are my thoughts on working for the Met Office:
1) It is clear that from now on all people I meet outside the Met Office will hold me personally responsible for the accuracy or in- of all weather forecasts, and possibly for bad weather in general.
2) I like to talk about the weather -- I don't think it's dull, since it's what we live in -- and that's a big part of my small talk, such as it is. But if I say, "Good morning, isn't it a beautiful day?" to someone when I get into the office, does that count as talking shop?
3) Blimey the systems are complicated! I think I ought to be able to handle them eventually but it's going to take a while to get any sort of grip. My current logic is that they gave me the job, so I can probably do it, and if I can't then that's their fault for misassessing me.
4) I will probably post some Met Office videos here from time to time. They do some cool stuff.

Two thoughts about American politics:
1) Let's try to find it funny instead of deeply deeply depressing! Here are some binder reviews on Amazon. I like the one by the woman who can only fit 53% of herself into the binder.
2) Amanda Palmer started an interesting thing about health insurance. I look forward to reading the results. I could never live in America. I would get cancer, go bankrupt, and die -- having insurance doesn't stop you having to pay. Getting cancer and dying would be bad enough, but the bankruptcy and possible dragging down of family with me would make the whole thing significantly worse.

Here are two thought about the X-Factor:
1) Nicole seems to have joined Louis on whatever substance it is he uses to get through the live shows. But I'm disappointed that she didn't actually say "Two words: Bour-geois" to Rylan because that seemed like an interesting sort of compliment to me. But twitter says she said "Gour-geois" e.g. gorgeous, which is less interesting though maybe a tad more crazy.
2) Some cabaret people, led by Frisky and Mannish, did a riposte to Gary Barlow's pejorative use of the term. It's good but goes on a bit long.

One last thought:
I do like this remix of Taylor Swift's We Are Never Ever Ever Getting Back Together

Violent chicken death

Any possibility that I was about to get sentimental about the countryside has been effectively prevented by the sight that met my eyes when I opened my curtains this morning: a trail of white feathers across the paddock; dark patches on the grass; and my father walking back from the far end by the trees dragging a spade. A fox got the chickens in the night, the alpacas having been moved into another field. I feel a bit sad about this, though we did know it was likely to happen some day. They were amiable chickens.

We look after my nephew tomorrow. He is very likely to notice that they are gone because checking for eggs is one of his favourite things, and I am interested to see how my mother will handle this. She has a very strong objection to lying of any sort. I don't think I ever did any wrong as a child that wasn't eclipsed many times in her eyes if I lied about it. I told him my rat died when she died peacefully of old age; we told him when the black hen died, also of old age. I think he could cope with the idea that a fox ate the chickens, perhaps better as a nearly-four-year-old than he will as a seven- or eight-year-old. Nonetheless something in me shrinks from the idea of telling him, and I don't know how his parents would react.

Next things

I start my new job at the Met Office a week on Monday, which is an excellent thing. I'm going to be one of their computer programmers. Among a number of minor but pleasant perks is that their on-site cafe is called the Iso Bar. I feel good about this.

(In London even though Masters Super Fish was maybe better I used to buy my pie and chips from the Fishcotheque. If you find yourself at Waterloo station I recommend it. It's very close, it does Pukka Pies (don't compromise!) and when I ask for extra salt and vinegar they give me extra salt and vinegar. And can you argue with a steak and kidney pie and chips for £3.70? No you cannot.)

Although I will probably be a part-time Anglo-Saxonist it also occurred to me the other day that I don't have to at all. I could take up any hobby I want to, like a normal person. And if I do do some Anglo-Saxonning there is no pressure on me to publish it! (I know an excellent scholar who never publishes anything if he can help it, his paid job being something quite different.) So I'll see how that goes. I would like to spend some time learning how to make linocuts/woodcuts, and doing some more writing.

I'll be living with my parents again until I can sort out a move into Exeter. I've had enough of moving recently, and I have unopened boxes which I packed up in November 2007, but hopefully after that move I can settle down for a while. Because I lived with my parents for a bit before the M.Sc. I have been very quick to remember their annoying habits, which are a) squabbling b) not wrapping things they put in the fridge c) saying they're on a diet and not realising that this makes certain foods unwise. My mother was really upset when I told her that pies are unhealthy, and she didn't believe me until she'd checked the side of a box. (She claims never to have heard the expression "Who ate all the pies?".) They seem to consider clotted cream a staple, and the first night I was here my mother told me about the healthy eating plan and then told me that for dinner we were going to eat up all the Tesco's sausage rolls, mini pork pies, and scotch eggs left over from the harvest festival lunch. But these things are endearing really. And I have my beautiful view back, complete with alpacas, chickens, buzzards, housemartins on the telephone wires getting ready to leave for Africa, and in the distance Culmstock beacon just in case someone sights the Spanish Armada.

USB OTG

I have just found out about a thing called USB OTG or USB on-the-go. USB connections use the concept of "master" and "slave". Suppose you plug a printer into a computer; the computer is the host and the printer is the attached device, controlled by the computer. Or I might plug my Nexus 7 tablet into my computer, and again the computer is in charge. But with USB OTG something that's usually a "slave", like a phone or my Nexus 7 tablet, can become a "master" or host for another USB device. This would usually be either an input device, like a keyboard, or a storage device, like a USB pen or an SD card in a USB reader.

The upshot of this is that with a USB OTG cable, which cost me about £1.50 off of amazon, I was able yesterday to plug an old USB keyboard into my Nexus tablet and type away merrily with no setup whatsoever. As I understand it the Nexus 7 automatically supports USB OTG for keyboard and mouse. In order to use a USB pen drive I had to download an app. I downloaded this free picture viewer app by Homesoft, and it worked well, so I think I will buy this app which allows you to use other forms of media. You can't write to the USB storage device, only read from it.* Also I haven't tested how well it works with material left in situ on the USB device. Nonetheless this is a very cheap solution to one criticism levelled at the Nexus 7, that it has limited storage and you might not be able to fit onto it all the films you wanted to watch on holiday, for example.** I have all my work ever on a 500Gb portable hard drive, and depending on how easy it is to navigate this could be a much better solution than trying to get it all into the cloud and then relying on having internet access wherever I go. Hurray!

* But you can write to a USB device using an OTG cable from the Nexus 7 if you root it, something I don't really want to do.

** Charlie Stross has a more expensive but more interesting solution.

I like this video for Gangnam Style with all the music taken out. The dancing bits and horsey bits are the best.

If you've seen the original you will probably especially appreciate it.

Leighton House

Open House weekend in London is one of those things I find easier to like in theory than in practice. Lots of cool buildings are open, some of which you can't usually get into, but you have to queue up for the best places, or book long in advance, or enter your name into a ballot. I wasn't successful in the ballots I had entered so I only went to one place, Leighton House in Kensington, which I wanted to visit anyway.

Leighton House was built by Frederic Lord Leighton, the nineteenth-century painter. Apparently he amassed a huge varied collection of art objects, but after his death it wasn't possible to keep them all together. The contents of the house now were put together quite recently, with the exception of the Narcissus Room. This is a high square room with a little square pool and fountain in the middle of the floor. It's set all around with a collection of seventeenth-century decorated tiles from Damascus; apparently Leighton showed the tiles to a friend who was an architect, who gave him the idea of building a place to put them in. Some of the tiles are skilled copies to complete the pattern, but most are original, and the one room constitutes an important British collection of Islamic ceramic art. High up in the walls it has bright glass windows also from Damascus. There's also a gorgeous mosaic frieze designed by Leighton but made for him in Venice with three different colours of gold, and the tiles set out of alignment so it sparkles. Actually gorgeous is the word for the whole room. The rest of the house is less remarkable but quite likeable, and there's a lovely garden. When I went there was an exhibition of pre-Raphaelite paintings, which was pleasant enough.

It's open all the time but with a charge, and it might be nicer to go when it's less busy than Open House weekend. But because of the event there was an expert there who explained to me why there was no Lord Leighton in the Tate Britain exhibition. Apparently although Leighton got on with the Brotherhood in a rivals sort of way he had a very different background and ethos. When he first exhibited at the Royal Academy summer exhibition the critics specifically lauded him as a young painter who wasn't involved in the newfangled pre-Raphaelite thing. But to me his work looks quite similar to theirs.

British Museum part 2: Shakespeare

The second exhibition which I saw at the BM was "Shakespeare: Staging the World". I wasn't hugely attracted by it but I could get in for free, so I thought it was worth a try. (It's their current big charging exhibition.)

The first two things I encountered set the tone for the whole. There's a long corridor to get in, with recorded noise of people talking -- I think I'd read or heard somewhere that this was a deliberate attempt to recreate the hubbub of a theatre before curtain-up. Then the first actual object I saw was a clock, annotated with this quotation:
The clock struck 9 when I did send the nurse -- Romeo and Juliet.
Apparently Shakespeare uses clocks to indicate urgency or the passing of time.

There's actually something quite merry about the attempts to shoe-horn in sort-of relevant Shakespeare quotations all over the place, or at least to get the word "theatrical" into the label. The contemporary objects from Shakespeare's world are the best bit of the exhibition. I particularly liked the maps and prospects, including some interesting tapestry maps. There are rooms which deal with the main settings of Shakespeare's plays -- the medieval past, the classical world, and Venice -- but these weren't quite as successful for me. By far the most interesting object is the Robben Island Bible, a complete works of Shakespeare smuggled into the South African prison, disguised as a Hindu text, and signed by many political prisoners including Nelson Mandela.

But I don't think I did the exhibition justice at all, for one simple reason -- it was really really noisy. Each room has one or two looped recordings of actors doing some Shakespeare. The excerpts are short and the actors act away prettily heartily, plus I'm not a huge fan of the art of Thespis anyway. By the time I had looked at one item in a room the chances were that I was already becoming irritated by the repetition of the same piece of material nearby, and also unable not to hear the recordings from the last room and the next one. This drove me round the exhibition at a great speed and made me tetchy. (Except that I love Harriet Walter and think she can do no wrong.)

Really the exhibition is not for me, anyway. It's for GCSE students to go to (not for pleasure); it's for people who visit perhaps from a long way away. It's part of the 2012 Arts Festival and was presumably deliberately chosen as a topic that might be interesting to a large number of visitors from all over the world. If I went to China, for example, I would love to see an exhibition like this about some major Chinese author.

British Museum part 1: Horses

I love the British Museum. I love walking towards it, I love the airy courtyard, I love the objects and the way there always seems to be a corner I haven't discovered yet. I went to look at two exhibitions there.

The Horse exhibition is free but nearly over. It starts with some really lovely Mesopotamian objects, some showing mules, like the Royal Standard of Ur. There are also finely-carved Mesopotamian reliefs showing the horses of the king's lion-hunting chariots. (The Assyrian lion hunts, like this one, are one of my favourite bits of the BM, just off the busy Egyptian statuary galleries.) The next room deals with early Arabic horses and horses in Islam. It has some truly beautiful miniatures, some of the best things in the exhibition. There's also a Rembrandt copy of a Mughal miniature now in the Bodleian.

It was at around this point that I started thinking the selection of objects perhaps a little odd. The next room is about the Arabian horse, and the final rooms about how the Thoroughbreds of modern racing all trace their ancestry to the three foundation stallions brought to England from the Middle East. There's not a mention of other breeds, like the native British horses, of the many other types of horse used for work and competition. The exhibition is supposed to have been put on as a tribute to the Queen's Jubilee year, but the Queen's involvement in equestrianism does go a lot further than just racing. One of the things I do like about the royal family is that they are very good with horses. It's true that they are privileged to have the opportunity since horses are expensive animals -- though I think in Devon it would be cheaper for me to keep a horse than a car -- but these are still really tough things to do, and a horse doesn't know you're royal. Eventing, for example, is frankly terrifying, and the Duke of Edinburgh was still competitively driving Fell ponies in his 80s. (I assume he's stopped now.)

Anyway, the exhibition is sponsored by Saudi Arabian institutions and is in conjunction with the Saudi Commission for Tourism and Antiquities. This explains why there are quite so many Korans in it, I suppose -- it's essentially a Saudi oil prince's idea of the horse. And if I had paid more attention I would have noticed that it's entitled "The Horse: from Arabia to Royal Ascot". It's a pretty fair description without the colon. It's free so worth popping into for the Mughal miniatures, but otherwise it was very disappointing, essentially highlighting one particular horse cliche, the sport of princes thing -- the same exhibition could have been laid on in the eighteenth century more or less.

Bronze at the Royal Academy

If the Tate likes to have a thesis for its exhibitions, the Royal Academy's thesis for its shows seems to be "Look at all these things!" They have a show at the moment which is about looking at things made of Bronze. And because it's at the Royal Academy it's rather larger than is sensible. If my civilised aunt hadn't come to London specially to see it (and bought me a ticket) I might not have bothered to go. But I'm very glad I did because some of the things made of bronze are really worth looking at.

There's no attempt at all to put the objects into any sort of historical, cultural, or technical groups, and no sense that you're supposed to learn anything from it, or have any response more intellectual than the occasional "ooh, look at that!" The rooms are called simply "Animals" or "Objects". This makes the show oddly restful, and helps with the sheer quantity of things on display. There isn't even a definition of what bronze is, as opposed to, say, brass -- I think they were using it as a catch-all term for brownish metal alloys. There is a room that tells you about different bronze-casting techniques, with videos and displays of the same object at various stages, which was very interesting indeed. But this was not laid on heavily, and isn't referenced in other parts of the show. I overheard some people who I think were from the RA talking about trying to get people to look at the objects not the labels. I have mixed feelings about this approach, and I would probably have found it frustrating if it had been a show where I felt there was something available to be learnt and taken away. But just relaxing and looking at nice things is actually probably a good discipline for someone like me who finds it hard to appreciate images without the help of words.

The things I particularly liked were: an etiolated 2nd-century BC Etruscan figure which I thought at first was a Giacommetti (I found later that it inspired him); some beautiful fifteenth-century weeping figures from the tomb of Isabella of Bourbon, Duchess of Burgundy; the African bronzes from Nigeria, especially the leopards; and some Greek and Roman bronzes, especially a surprisingly art-deco style Roman candelabra in the form of a bare-branched tree. There were some interesting modern pieces too, including one of Louise Bourgeois's spiders, and forms by Brancusi and Picasso.

I don't know if it counts as a plus or minus point for a show when you find yourself taking little notes about things to google when you get home. Things I found out later included: the definition of bronze as opposed to brass (they're both copper alloys but bronze has more tin and brass more zinc); who exactly Isabella of Bourbon was (she was the wife of the last Duke of Burgundy, Charles the Bold, and mother of poor old Mary of Burgundy); what the inscription is on the Asante ewer (a little moralistic poem); where Luristan is (part of modern-day Iran); whether Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden was the father of the excellent Queen Christina (he was). I would be interested to know whether the curators would feel good about provoking me to further enquiry or bad about not having told me what I wanted to know. They may have assumed I would have a smart phone, though I don't know how easy it would be to use one in there since photographs and phone calls are not allowed. Or they might feel disappointed in me, with my failure simply to look at all the lovely bronze things.