Happy orangutan

I wish I had a dog:

Watch more National Geographic Channel videos on AOL Video

A literary drunk

In a Life magazine gallery of famous literary drunks and addicts I found this picture.

Raymond Chandler is sprawled into the back of a sofa looking lost and vaguely owlish. More intriguing are the people smiling at each other across him. Apparently the man is Anthony Blond, a publisher, but the identity of the woman isn't recorded. According to his obituary Blond was married at this time to a Charlotte Strachey, a part-time model, and the woman is married, so I hope it's her. I wonder what the smile means -- how drunken this novelist is? They divorced in 1960 after a series of miscarriages and a still-birth. There's something touching about the slight reservation in her smile, and the way her name isn't recorded. It reminds me of a clever novella by Jane Stevenson, included in her Several Deceptions, in which the middle-aged son of famous literary parents inserts, as an Umberto Eco-inspired joke, his drab secretary into the history of their circle by identifying her with anonymous women in famous snap-shots, and becomes powerless to correct the record when she starts to run with the role.

More good things

Furthermore, here are They Might Be Giants talking about their new Here Comes Science album. I gave their Here Come the 123s to my nephew and god-daughter for Christmas. Little nephew, as soon as it was put on, started bopping in his high chair in an odd but endearing manner. It is very energising and likeable stuff, which I played to my mother in the car while we drove slowly down the M3 in a snow storm in the small hours of the longest night of last year, to help keep her awake. Here's one of the songs:


Plus CuteOverload has a really good picture here, not quite their usual sort of thing.

Yesterday and the day before I spent a total of eleven hours on trains (surprisingly pleasant) and four hours teaching seminars (it's easy to forget how draining teaching is when you haven't done it for a while). It was tiring but I read some very good stuff, and this reminded me that I haven't blogged about books for ages. (I got so far behind that I could never catch up, so I'm just starting again from recent things.) I really enjoyed Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby, who is a very funny writer. I particularly liked the unaggressive but judgemental analyst; perhaps analysts who say the sort of things your mother would say could be quite popular, really. The Children's Book by A. S. Byatt is fantastic; I had to ration it because it was absorbing me while I was meant to be doing other things. I will definitely read it again. It's essentially about the children of Fabians growing up in late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century England. It starts off being about the boys and moves more and more into the fates of the girls, who are just that bit less prominent in their parents' thoughts. There's a very good bit where some of the girls are deciding, in the face of the general indifference of their parents, whether to go to the cocoa-drinking female enclave of Newnham or do the default thing and look around for nice husbands, and they suspect they're going to have to choose between thinking and sex. Both these two books are definitely keepers, and not for the Oxfam pile.

I've also been reading some sci-fi/fantasy. The sci-fi sections of bookshops are very frustrating, because you know there is seriously good stuff there somewhere, but it's very hard to find it. There's not much point looking at covers and blurbs, because those just tell you what some publisher's assistant has guessed you want to hear, but I picked a few things from this list of the last decade's best sci-fi/fantasy because it seemed reasonably intelligent. The Mount by Carol Emshwiller is about a future where aliens with very short weak legs but very effective weapons have crash-landed on Earth, fallen in love with humans as a species, and now breed them as a lovable form of transport. It's not quite a straightforward them-versus-us thing because the aliens, the Hoots, love the humans, and some of the humans really love the Hoots back. Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton transposes Trollope to a world of dragons, and the combination of dragon behaviour like eating the bodies of the dead and hoarding gold with Victorian societal mores is fun and and quite clever. The Alchemy of Stone by Ekaterina Sedia is the most typically sci-fi/fantasy of the three, being set in a another world where you have to learn about different creatures and the ruling structure. The main character is a fragile robot with a porcelain face, whose maker has agreed for her to be emancipated and to earn her own living, but who won't give her the key that winds up her heart. It's quite good but probably the least memorable of the three, though I did enjoy The Secret History of Moscow by the same author. I'm looking forward to doing the same train journeys again in a fortnight, and getting some more reading in.

There there

After an afternoon of Mandelson-related indigestion (lots of burping) I turn to the internet for its soothing powers. Here are some happy things I found:
1. The bones of an interesting Anglo-Saxon woman may have been found in Germany.
2. If I had an iphone I would definitely buy this app for making pictures of real life look more exciting.
3. The Onion has quite a funny thing on idiot Pat Robertson's comment on Haiti. (If the Haitians made a deal with the devil to get rid of the French then that devil was the French -- the "reparation" they had to pay to leave the French empire has had permanent repercussions, as explained in this bloody depressing Times Online article written months before the earthquake.)
4. Here a curious wild chimp in the Congo pokes a camera with a stick.

5. Here is a seriously freaky Japanese robot: http://www.boingboing.net/2010/01/19/diego-san-a-robot-de.html. The Japanese lead the world in uncanny robots.
6. Did that robot make you think of Lillebror? If it didn't, are you perhaps not familiar with Lars von Trier's amazing supernatural hospital drama comedy Riget? If so you should track it down -- it's by far the best thing he has ever done, by turns hilarious and very frightening. Make sure to get it in a format which includes the spooky introductions:

and von Trier's little talks over the closing credits:

Here is the Swedish doctor Stig Helmer expressing his distaste for Danish exile:

Hatred is bad for you

There are some obvious truths that it's hard to live out in real life. For example, it's bad for you to hate. Every now and then I find myself disliking someone really really intensely and when I do I try to find a few redeeming characteristics in them, and then just stop thinking about them. People are only people on the whole, and not worth destroying your digestion over.

Recently though my feelings about Peter Mandelson have been really getting away from me. I can literally feel my bile rising every time I think about him or encounter anything he says or does. I'm not going to go into the humanities research debate; my personal situation at the moment is such that I feel simply too close to the whole question. I've always had a feeling that when I get to do research I am extremely lucky, but I'm not sure that that's inconsistent with a suspicion that humanities research is an essential part of civilisation, chiming with something intrinsic to the human condition, etc. With all the gloom of recent humanities pronouncements I am reminded of being at birthday parties when I was small -- there's a sense that the music is stopping and I don't have anywhere to sit. Back then my usual snap response was to feel disdain for the game; so it's really too complex for me to make judgements about the humanities at the moment.

But science! I feel like posting a Youtube video screaming "Leave science alone!". Seriously, leave science alone! The sciences represent pure intellectual curiousity to me, for various reasons. I can count among the scientists I know from my time as a research fellow some very very bright people many of whom share a particular trait which is hard to describe -- a sort of way of looking at the world freshly, of always wanting to know why something happens, which is often coupled with a particular sort of kindness and just a hint of innocence, though not naivety, in relations with people. I'm not describing what I mean well: but if I were to counterpose the engineers from my old college with the historians I might even suppose that these different disciplines produce different characters. I wish I could explain what I mean better; it's almost like the humanities are the Roman Empire in the second century AD, while the sciences are back in the days of the Republic, when Cincinnatus would take on supreme power to beat the state's enemies and then resign the dictatorship and go back happily to his farm.

It's quite possible of course that I am talking complete nonsense.

But I do often wish I were more of a scientist myself. I did double maths and physics at A level, and I often find myself missing the simple elegance of maths. If you make it so that research scientists have to work on questions closely related to immediate profit then you'll hobble them from understanding how the universe works, and understanding how the universe works is important, and can even eventually be extremely profitable. (See this Observer article about how arcane and useless any investigation into lasers appeared to be for a long time.) So why is Britain letting Peter Mandelson anywhere near our beautiful fragile sciences? He's not elected. He doesn't actually know anything. Hasn't he been repeatedly discredited and made to move on? Why's he back again, and how did he get to be even more Teflon than Tony? Why is any of this anything to do with him?

I'm no fan of David Cameron -- very very far from it, he's pretty content-free, and reminds me of that processed cheese that you peel off its plastic backing and put on burgers. But if there's a chance that we can at last shake off the inexplicable leech that is Peter Mandelson then bring on the election. I don't care if it would be like changing one set of wound-bothering flies for another, just get Peter Mandelson away from my consciousness now. I could almost bring myself to vote Tory on this one issue: get this terrible terrible man away from the things I love (universities and the digital world, on which I haven't even touched in this post).

What Britain is Actually Like?

PS to last post: you've got to find it touching that while yesterday (Saturday) most UK towns on trendsmap.com had "curry" as a frequently tweeted word, today (Sunday) both London and Bristol have "roast".

The interesting inanities of crowds

1. I've finally worked out what Twitter is for. I've tried following people on it, and I've even briefly tried tweeting, but neither of these interested me. What you want to do instead is go to some Twitter analysis tool, for example trendsmap.com which annotates a google world map with tag clouds of words frequently used in tweets from specific areas. Of late in the UK there's been lots of "cancelled", "freezing" and "bothered", but also "nexus" on the day the new Google Nexus was announced. Today most UK cities seem to have something about "curry" and things relating to the football attack in Togo, plus things relating to CBB7. I like that in Newcastle many people's tweets include "@joemcelderry91". Also I have learnt that the yout' these days says "lool" or "loool" or even "looool". I assume that's because of the natural human urge to make words longer -- I did find something that said that lool is for Laughs Outrageously Out Loud, but I suspect that's a false etymology. In New York the kids say "lmaooooo" and seem to be talking a lot about going to "ihop", which google tells me is a pancake restaurant. Anyway now I have found this I want to contribute to this huge largely anonymous cloud of data (but I'm not sure I can quite bring myself to churn out tweets of the necessary dullness for fear that some poor soul actually reads them). It reminds me of one of my favourite Pet Shop Boys songs, a Chris Lowe one about the attractions of being One of the Crowd:


2. Well, I think it's a shame that Adam and Joe are leaving BBC Radio 6 for an unspecified length of time, because they're quite amusing. Here is Adam in his shed:


3. Lady Gaga's next single is going to be Alejandro, which I have embedded before, but which I am embedding again because it's Great.

Stuff I have done

I have been doing various things, for example: putting all my stuff into boxes in a van which my dad crashed (very minorly) and had to abandon for a night at the bottom of an icy hill in the back lanes of Devon; trying to find a copy of the Guardian in the countryside, which is truly Telegraph-land; and looking into tax regulations, which is taking a while because I keep getting distracted by coming across things like the rules for declaring income derived from a gravel pit, which send me off into complicated daydreams about how I might acquire and use a gravel pit. Presumably one would need some sort of gravel washing device.

Also I've been playing with small nephew. Small nephew is very excellent indeed. He's just over a year old now, and very cheerful. He loves light switches, turning the pages of books, and crawling out of the living room, into the hall, into the kitchen, and then back into the living room by a different door -- he thinks that's very funny. He likes pretending that a TV remote is a telephone, and the other day he managed to embark on a long-distance phone call to his other grandparents in Germany -- he used the Last Number Redial button and then gurgled at them down the phone for some time before his mother noticed. On the down side I have now got my first small-child-spread cold. He gets quite a few colds because of going to nursery, but he has such a good time there that his mother, who agonised about sending him at first, now feels guilty that she only sends him three days a week. They have a special baby area where they do things like putting them all in swim nappies and then letting them do whole body painting, and he made his parents a Christmas card and a 2010 calendar -- his parents kept finding glitter between his toes at bathtime.

I also got my favourite ever spam message, from someone who wants my details so that he can give me a discount on puppies.

In sorting through some old papers I found this excellent old handout from one of Simon Keynes's Anglo-Saxon History lectures. It's an extract from the index entry for E. A. Freeman from a book by (I'm pretty certain) J. H. Round. Click on it to get it full-size, because it's worth a look.

Joe McElderry may be our only hope

No matter how puppy-dog the eyes of Joe McElderry I wasn't planning to buy the X Factor single, which I didn't even particularly like all those months ago when it was a Miley Cyrus single. However, I have bought it, simply in the hope that I can help keep bloody Rage Against the Machine off the Christmas no. 1 spot. I really really hate Rage Against the Machine; they're a symbol of all the worst tendencies of teenagerhood. Back when I was a youth I remember they had an album cover/t-shirt with a picture of a Tibetan monk setting himself on fire. This used to annoy me hugely; you really can't put someone killing themselves gruesomely in protest against genuine political persecution on a cheap t-shirt and use it to sell music to self-dramatising self-satisfied suburban indie boys as if this made them rebels too, or at least you shouldn't be allowed to, or at least the idiots who wear the thing ought to take a deep breath and get some sort of perspective. It's like when Kula Shaker started wearing swastikas. Idiots.

Not to mention that the Rage Against the Machine thing is all being driven by Facebook, which I also hate. Although it is quite interesting to follow, from the point of view of one who doesn't need to worry about it, the attempts of Facebook to monetise by selling information, and the protests of the Facebookees, and the reactions of Facebook as it withdraws part of what it has just done or puts some small opt-out tick-box somewhere buried in the site's settings. (There are links to info about it from this page: "Is this Facebook's 'Microsoft Moment?'".)

If you too hate 80s rock and Facebook then you could join my 'campaign' and download the Joe McElderry single. It's less than a quid and it's not like you have to listen to it -- I'm certainly not going to. In the meantime here is some different music:

Manuscripts and identity

I've been rather saddened recently to see that a little Psalter in Edinburgh which may once have belonged to St Margaret of Scotland is being touted as the Scottish Book of Kells. Now I've never actually managed to see it, but I have got a copy of the facsimile and some high-grade images, and I included it in my Margaret book. It's a cute little thing, only about 130 mm by 85 mm in size and with lots of bright little initials, but calling it the Scottish Book of Kells is a bit like calling Birmingham England's Venice. Birmingham's OK, but Venice is startling, and comparing the two sounds like a joke at England's expense. We, especially the English with our colonial history, ought to take Scotland's early medieval heritage more seriously than that: Scotland's Book of Kells is either irrevocably lost, or it's the Book of Kells -- it's actually quite likely that that manuscript originated on the island of Iona.

On the other hand, although it's a shame if one has to make these sorts of comparisons in order to get people interested, I suppose I shouldn't grouch about it; of course I think this stuff deserves more serious treatment, I've spent years studying it, and I shouldn't turn up my noses at those who haven't. Take something I know a bit about but not much, say the Rosetta stone, and then tell me that some object is the Rosetta Stone for pre-Columban Mayan hieroglyphs or something like that, and my attention will be grabbed even as the experts are finding themselves annoyed at all the ways that it's not like the Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta Stone has become cultural short-hand for a key that unlocks past written cultures, and the Book of Kells has become short-hand for a beautiful book with alien decoration, for "don't underestimate these people just because they lived a long time ago".

The little Psalter in question actually seems to me to have a very interesting significance which has, understandably perhaps, been glossed over by the promotion for the exhibition it's in. The main body of the Psalter is in a beautiful script of the sort written in Ireland and Scotland, a development of the early Insular scripts found in the Book of Kells among others (only it's a minuscule, e.g. lower-case, script, not a majuscule or upper-case one). It has decorated initials for the start of every psalm, made of interlace and beast bodies, and it has lots of little coloured initials at the start of verses. Psalters, especially ones from the Irish world, tended to split the 150 psalms into three sets of 50, and had decorated pages to start the 1st, 51st, and 101st psalms. The first and third of these decorated pages are missing (this is really common in medieval manuscripts) but the second shows a fascinating development. All you can still see of the original is a rectangular frame with interlace corner pieces; the rest has been completely erased and replaced with some English decoration in a Carolingian style, roughly datable to the eleventh century, probably late. And this is why the manuscript is associated with St Margaret; because she is the person who, with the best of motives, was at work in late eleventh-century Scotland making it more English/Continental. St Margaret was married to King Malcolm, or Máel Coluim, i.e. Malcolm Canmore from the end of Macbeth. Malcolm's first wife was a Scandinavian woman called Ingebjorg, and their sons were called Domnall and Donnchad (respectively pronounced Dovnall or Donall and later to become the name Donald, and pronounced Donnakha and later to become Duncan). Malcolm and Margaret's children were called Edward, Edmund, Athelred, Edgar, David, Alexander, Edith and Mary; not one seems to have been given a Gaelic name. The girls were educated in England. When Malcolm, Margaret and Edward all died suddenly within three days of each other, the younger children had to flee from the subsequent anti-English backlash. Consequently David, who later became one of Scotland's greatest kings, grew up at the English court, where his sister Edith/Matilda was queen, and became a vassal of the English king for huge estates in East Anglia before eventually succeeding to the Scottish throne. After that the heir to the Scottish throne was always a vassal of the English king. If you're a die-hard fan of things Gaelic Margaret is not the most positive of figures. This diminishing of Gaelic culture can't be seen as anything other than a terrible shame, even if you find Margaret an endearing figure as I do, and that picture in the little Psalter in Edinburgh provides a very literal symbol of the erasure of almost the whole of something Gaelic to replace it with something blandly English.

Televisual entertainment.

1. I continue to enjoy BBC2's School of Saatchi (subtitle: This is what's wrong with Modern Art). The subtle digs at Saatchi are getting slightly less subtle, which is appealing. In the last episode they had to put some art in a stately home. Saad, who is an egocentric monster but has occasional good ideas, made an installation of 2000 chapattis as a gift to Lady somebody, the chatelaine. He sent one through the post in advance, which by the time she received it had turned into a circle of green and brown mould. I don't know if he was referencing the famous precursor of the Indian mutiny, where Indians used the sending of chapattis as a means of freaking out the British ruling classes, but unfortunately I rather suspect not. Still, the whole thing had very sinister undertones. Also I'm totally expecting that Eugenie, who is very pretty and who has all the judges wondering whether she's a talented artist or a talented chancer, will turn out to be a plant from the Daily Mail. Good stuff.

2. Misfits is entertaining too, in a trashy sort of way.

3. The only other thing I'm watching at the moment is the X Factor, which is one of those things which you don't actually enjoy but find yourself watching anyway. It's only bearable if you follow the various live tweets and the comments on the Guardian's X Factor Live Blog. Of course I want Joe to win, but now that John and Edward are out it's very dull even if the actual quality has improved, and now that Danyl has gone there's no hate figure.

4. All these programs have only one episode to go, which may be for the best.

Things that are good

I was sitting in the Wren library yesterday looking at one of the most beautiful books in the world, Trinity College MS B.10.4 (214). It has these amazing attenuated gold Rustic Capitals which actually wring my heart. I can't quite work out why; mostly I think of beautiful things being slightly painful because of their transience, like the little sticky leaves in spring, or mist on the fields in the morning. But the Trinity Gospels have survived for a thousand years so far, and will look exactly the same when I'm archaeology. Odd.

Anyway, another sort of good: here are some fantastic Japanese robots. You don't actually need to be that muscly to play ping pong.

Plus this is Alejandro by Lady Gaga, produced by RedOne. I love music where the bass sounds like it's on the other side of a door.

Latin abuse

I'm not quite sure what to make of this accusation of sexual harassment via Catullus quotation. It does seem pretty clear that the "vos" in question was his unspecified enemies, and didn't refer to the woman who got the e-mail. I hope they've got some good expert witnesses in.

Note to bankers: also steer clear of John Wilmot.

Collingswatch

Matthew Collings is back in School of Saatchi on BBC2 at 9pm on Tuesday [edit: actually Monday, apparently], as one of a panel of judges evaluating the work of new artists. According to the Guide, "Collings in particular is great value explaining the difference between silly tat and actual art".

Science is cool

It's great that bits of physics are often like things from Sci Fi, but recently it's struck me that bits of prehistoric archaeology are often like things from the genre Fantasy. Take the galloping crocodiles with tusks that used to live in the rivers of the Sahara; or the ancient cold-blooded goat of Majorca, with its tiny brain and eyes.

Good stuff

1) Matthew Collings is on TV tonight, BBC2 8.30pm. He has a beard now.

2) Amazing Nina Simone voice:


3) I shouldn't really post this nice comment about my Kalendars book here, but then I am un(/self-)employed you know, I'm allowed to be a bit self-indulgent. It's from Richard Pfaff's excellent new history of liturgy.

Nooooooo!

Firefly was just getting into its stride when it was axed, and something really good was lost. Although the film Serenity cleared up some of the open story lines, we will probably never know quite what was up with Shepherd Book. Now it looks like they're killing Dollhouse too. Geeks obviously don't yet rule the world enough.

W00t!

I've got google wave! Now I can send waves like the people in Firefly.

PS When it crashes you get error messages from the Serenity crew -- it just told me everything's shiny cap'n, which is something Kaylee says. I love the way that geeks run the world now.

Christmas hurray!

The Pet Shop Boys are releasing a Christmas EP, which includes their version of My Girl, which is great.

In other Christmas news I need to find a feminist book for my little god-daughter, whose mother is tired of reading things to her like Rumpelstiltskin, where the king threatens the girl with death for three days in a row before finally asking her to marry him, and she accepts with apparent joy; and The Princess and the Pea, where an idiot prince scours the world for a woman so precious that even when rescued from a storm by kind strangers she still complains that her bed is uncomfortable; and the Little Mermaid (not-Disney version) in which she just suffers herself to death by degrees for love of another idiot prince. I certainly don't mean feminist in an anti-men way, just that I want to find her a book where sex isn't portrayed as a woman's economic asset, and where relationships between men and women might be based on equality and mutual respect. It's a different kind of fairy tale.

What I want for Christmas is a beard from the "I made you a beard" etsy shop. When I got to Palestine, where of course most of the wilderness monasteries don't allow women in, I was very disappointed that you couldn't buy false beards like in The Life of Brian.

I think I've posted this before, but anyway here is the Pet Shop Boys' version of My Girl:

Coffee breaks at 10.30

The morning coffee break at 10.30 is one of the best things about a regular hours job. I missed it when I left the Wren, I missed it when I left the BL, and I miss it now I've left the Parker. Luckily both the Wren and the Parker have expressed themselves happy to have me back to visit. So I made some raspberry buns to my great grandma Dean's recipe and took them in to the Parker this morning for a coffee break reunion. I'm putting the instructions below. It's about the only thing I know about my great grandma Dean, although I did meet her a few times before she died. I know that when my grandpa was a boy he wasn't allowed to go to tea if any of his friends invited him, because they were too poor to ask people back in return.


Great Grandma Dean's raspberry buns
Ingredients
1/2 lb self-raising flour
4 oz butter
4 oz caster sugar
1 egg
1 tsp water (optional)
1 tiny pinch salt
Raspberry jam with pips

Instructions
1. Sieve flour and salt
2. Rub in the fat
3. Add the sugar keeping a little back
4. Add the egg
5. If too stiff add water
6. Roll on floured board
7. Cut into 12 pieces
8. Shape each into a rough cup
9. Put 1/2 tsp raspberry jam into centre of each
10. Pinch each closed (with perhaps a little jam showing)
11. Sprinkle with the remaining sugar
12. Cook for 15-20 mins at 180° C