Audrey the rat; sad Parker; consoling PSB

I am sad because I have had my little rat, Audrey, put to sleep. She was a very good age for a rat, and it was time to call it a day because she was becoming miserable, and she had had a pleasant life, and I did everything I could to make her comfortable as she grew more frail: all these supposedly comforting things are true, but I still feel very sad. I will miss her. She liked to sit on my lap and make happy teeth-chattering noises. She had an annoying habit of casually chewing things as she passed them, so that most of my electrical goods now have thick clumps of insulating tape around their cables, but when I shouted Hey Audrey, stop that! at her she would look up as if to say Oh, it's you! and then bound over to me and climb onto my lap to have her neck scratched. This was endearing. When given the choice, she preferred to run towards me rather than away, and when rats do this it always seems like a bit of a miracle to me, given the tremendous disparity in size between us.

I have also been reading Matthew Parker's eventually futile attempts not to become archbishop of Canterbury. All bishops are supposed not to want to be bishops, it's a topos known as noli episcopari, but I think in Parker's case, as probably in the case of all those who ought to be bishops, it was not a pose. Poor old Parker. He only wanted to be left along with his books. When his friends Bacon and Burghley, elevated by the accession of Elizabeth I, were first offering to do something for him after the lean fugitive years of Mary's reign, he said this:

But to tell you my heart, I had rather have such a thing as Benet College is in Cambridge, a living of twenty nobles by the year at the most, than to dwell in the deanery of Lincoln, which is two hundred at the least.

He was hoping to be restored to the mastership of Corpus, which he had been forced to resign for religious reasons. But he soon began to understand that they had a higher and much worse honour in store for him.

But, sir, except ye both moderate and restrain your overmuch good will in the former respects to me-ward, I fear, in the end, I shall dislike you both, and that your benevolences should by occasion of my obstinate untowardness jeopard me into prison; yet there shall I bear you my good heart, which I had rather suffer in a quiet conscience, than to be intruded into such room and vocation, wherein I should not be able to answer the charge to God nor to the world, wherein I should not serve the Queen’s honour, which I would wish most heartily advanced in all her wise and godly proceedings; nor yet should I live to the honour of the realm, and so finally should but work a further displeasant contemplation to my good friends who preferred me.

But Elizabeth had decided, and Parker couldn't do much about it. Being archbishop of Canterbury made Parker miserable, and his last letters, after the death of his wife, are very pitiable.

Here is an excellent Pet Shop Boys remix which is helping me to feel better through expressing my melancholy.

Closing tabs

I don't care if I'm far from his target audience, I still think Tony Hawk is really cool:

And he's 42! That gives me eight years to become that cool. I'd better go and buy some elbow pads.

Quantum biology is also cool. According to this article, which you won't be able to read without going "whoah!" at least mentally, quantum tangling may help to keep our dna together. At some point the right-wing American loony-Christians will catch on to the fact that if evolution made God sound a bit uninvolved, or cruel, or whatever it is they object to about evolution, then quantum theory makes Him sound, like, totally stoned. (My Christianity involves believing that God is complex, unexpected, and mind-blowing, so it's all good for me. Hurray for science which reconfirms one's prejudices!)

Kids are getting high on digital drugs! Don't they know there's quantum biology out there, or skateboarding? Anyway, this is not surprising, because Chris Morris is clearly some sort of cleverly-disguised prophet, or like those medieval genres where the parody emerges before the thing it's supposed to be parodying.

The iPhone has no app for making your own apps, and it never will. This is why Android is better.

In darker news, Boing Boing has the advert for prison experiment guinea pigs. Chilling. You can't observe things without changing them, you see.

Popjustice has launched a record label.

According to this website, I write like James Joyce. I think it means that computers can't understand me. Hurray!

And here is a kaleidoscope thing. It goes round and round.

Pictures

I've been browsing the Guardian's Galleries, in one of those displacement activities brought on by the need to format bibliographies. There are some great ones:
Here are pictures of some of Edmund de Waal's netsuke which inspired his recent book. (I covet all rat netsuke, and every now and then I look for them on ebay, but the nice ones are too expensive.)
Here is a nineteenth-century French photographer's views of London people. I love the penultimate picture. It should be the front cover of a novel.
These competition entries for a London Transport competition for a cycling poster are really very good.

I love this illustrated blog post about dog training. Wanting so much to be a good dog, and trying everything in the hope that something is right, is such a typical dog thing.

This xkcd thing is very true. I have learnt the hard way that if someone is doing computer things in a wierdly roundabout way you need to think twice about trying to sort them out with something more sensible. Only do it for people you really love and for whom you are prepared to be IT support until one of you dies.

I want an etching by Glyn Thomas. You could argue that they're too easy to like, but I really really like them, and I don't think they would wear out over time. I like the way he draws flat spaces a bit curvy, because that's what they feel like somehow when you're there.

I'm usually not that interested in "save this work of art" stuff, and I couldn't be less bothered about this new plan to build a theatre over the remains of the actual Globe, but this portrait of Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, a West-African muslim who was freed from slavery by public subscription in London in the eighteenth century, and who sounds like a significant figure but isn't in the Oxford DNB, really should be in the National Portrait Gallery.

Infantility

Although our village has no shop it has a small pub, which serves Otter beer (motto: relax with an otter) and very good chips, and there's a small church. The church is actually a chapel of ease, which means it was built so that people could have services nearer at hand. There have been three weddings there in its whole existence: some people I don't know, who had to get the church licenced first; my brother and his wife; and a fake wedding which Joss Stone recorded for a music video. (She comes from here.)

It's very nice to be able to walk a few minutes down the road to go to church, and the people are pleasant too. But I am being driven slightly distracted by its infantilism. Admittedly a lot of the services there are specifically for children. But there are endless colouring-in activities, and sometimes we don't even get sermons, we get Christian children's stories read aloud (actually these fascinate me in the way they revive sentimental medieval apocrypha which were just the sort of thing to which Protestants strongly objected at the Reformation, in my view rightly). Today the usual person was away because of a family illness, and so we went one step more inane. We didn't even get a Bible reading, instead we had our next-door neighbour telling the story of the early years of Moses extempore, with a long digression about how he sort of sympathised with Pharoah because he went to London yesterday and no one there looked English and he couldn't read the signs in the shop windows. You may be thinking, well, the King James Version is hard work for a child and maybe it's better for them to have something easier to digest: but we're not talking about the King James here, or the RSV, or the NIV, or even the Good News. (I didn't come across the King James until I discovered it for myself as a literary teenager, and loved it -- "I feel like a bottle in the smoke", etc, though it still wouldn't be my first call for trying to understand what the Bible is actually saying -- and we always had the NIV and the Good News at church.) At the best we're talking about one of those books of Children's Bible Stories which I really hated as a child. (It wasn't a religious thing, I also hated those Children's Stories from Shakespeare books, which really put me off Shakespeare until I was old enough to realise that the point of Shakespeare is not so much the plot as the mad vertigo of the language.) And I fear we might even be talking about one of those "modern" translations written in a mixed slang which is about ten years out of date. (Peter said, What up dog! That was like, so totally rad.) But this would still have been a step up from someone randomly dredging the story out of their memory, with splashes of Martin-Amis-style, I'm-just-saying-what-we're-all-thinking racism mixed in.

In a funny development, the bloke who usually does the service had e-mailed his 5-min talk to my mother, who read it out, and it turned out to be all about how we should welcome people from foreign countries and try to protect them from exploitation. It's heartening how often the people in charge in the church are in charge for a good reason.

Anyway, I fear that I need to find myself a church which is a bit less inane. It's not that I actually disagree in general with these things, it's just that I know that my own religious life has to involve some intellectual content. (Is it any wonder that so many people think Christianity is just a matter of accepting a series of children's stories?) I need to read things written by intelligent Christians, and here's the difficult bit, I could really do with some people to discuss them with me. In Cambridge this was achievable, although even in Cambridge it was pretty difficult to find people who are more interested in theology than aesthetics.

On the plus side the good thing about these lightweight services is that I flee them yearning for some serious meaty Christianity. I read Rowan William's Dostoyevsky book as a direct result of a Christmas eve service of peculiar inanity, and now I feel all driven to read Marianne Robinson's Absence of Mind. (She was on the Daily Show the other day, doing pretty well I thought at pointing out how the people engaged in the Science vs Religion debate are not the brightest minds from either tradition.)

PS Do children really need things to be so thoroughly digested for them? I remember that it completely blew my mind when I was eight and my mother told me that thing Augustine said, that we should love God and do whatever we wanted. I said but what if you love God, but you want to steal things? And my mum said, but if you really loved God like he loves us, you'd know that stealing things wasn't a God-like thing, and that it would pain him, and you'd be revolted by the idea of stealing and try your hardest never to do it even by accident. And this totally blew my mind. I remember thinking about it for some time, and when my mother came up at light's out (9 pm) to check I wasn't reading under the covers, I said that I had had an idea that could make everything alright. If we didn't only love God, but if we loved everyone, and loved them properly, then we could all do whatever we wanted all the time, and everything would be fine. My mother, bless her, said that she knew some people who had said that, and she thought maybe they were right. But I remember it vividly as seeming utterly amazing to me at the time.

PPS Wouldn't it be great to love God like that, so that all the commandments just became descriptions of what you were like? Wouldn't it be amazing to be that person out of love, not duty? I think that's what Paul is saying in Romans.

Visiting Oxford

I've had a lovely few days in Oxford, catching up with lots of old friends, especially my little god-daughter, who doesn't really count as an old friend because she's only two and three quarters. She's lovely, and has an air of responding to the world in quite a considered way which is very reminiscent of her mother. Also she loves books, and can even read a bit already, which is luck for me -- I am figuratively rubbing my hands planning birthday after Christmas of interesting book presents. She now has a little sister who is one of those babies who looks at you very steadily for a long time in a way which is oddly flattering and disconcerting at the same time.

It would be fatuous beyond words to say that the Bodleian Library is an old friend, but as libraries go it's certainly a grower. Once you get used to its ways, and find out about its unusual resources, it's one of the best places I know to do research. Almost all the manuscripts are currently in a temporary reading room at the Radcliffe Science Library. A science library is a bit of a quaint thing, and it was very quiet, though I suppose it is out of term. Contrariwise the special collections area was packed. Now, the Science Library has free photocopying to a USB stick or e-mail (unlike the UL which charges 8p!!!! per incorporeal sheet), and it's very easy to print things out, and get books ordered there, etc. But it was nice that my work also took me to Duke Humfrey. I may not have many more chances to read there, because eventually even the Select manuscripts and the reference resources will be moved out, and in a few years' time it won't really be a reading room at all, but part of the tourist tour. No more sitting by the shushing gargoyle; no more Selden end. You're allowed to take your own pictures of manuscripts now, after filling in a form to say what you require, so while I was trying to get a good image of an original ninth-century limp binding (very exciting!) I took a picture from the window, out across the gardens to the Radcliffe Camera and St Mary's Church (where you can get nice teas).



And it's a lovely building inside too, full of paintings I never look at properly.

I love you, Literary Review

The reason the Literary Review is great is that its book reviews address the question: do you, a reader, want to choose to read this book for pleasure? Academic reviews concentrate on the value of a book to academics who are users more than readers: some journals, like the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books, project the attitude that reading is a duty, imposed on us by being the sort of terribly well-educated people that we are. But the Literary Review is interesting, and its reviews tend to be as much about the book's subject as the book itself. I suppose an author might feel a bit aggrieved if a review makes little mention of their book -- sometimes in the Literary Review judgements on the actual volume are limited to something like "this well-written but over-long book" -- but as a reader I like it when a reviewer tackles the interest of a book's subject. You can tell me that someone has written an excellent book on Pavel Florensky, for example, but I need some context to tell me why I should care about Pavel Florensky.

Pavel Florensky sounds absolutely fascinating: apparently he was a brilliant mathematician, physicist, and theologian; helped electrify Russia (turning up dressed as a priest to meetings with Trotsky); spent his time as a prisoner in an Arctic labour camp working out how to extract useful chemicals from sea water; and was a brilliant geologist who refused to prospect for gold on moral grounds. Furthermore he lived a good life, loved his family, confessed to crimes when interrogated by the NKVD so as to spare others from torture, and worked hard for his country despite persecution. He ended up in one of Stalin's mass graves and is a candidate for sainthood in the Russian Orthodox church. I know about this because of the June issue of the Literary Review, and I intend to read the biography at some point. (By Avril Pyman.) Also in the June issue are reviews of a biography of Cardinal Newman which makes him sound very interesting, and a book about the battle of Little Big Horn, both of which I might read if they come out in paperback. There's a piece by Diana Athill about the Edmund de Waal book on his inherited netsuke. There's also a review of a book by Paul Bloom on pleasure. I don't think I will read the book, but the review, by Michael Bywater, says some quite interesting things about the subject in general, and about what Bloom's book doesn't tackle. And there's a review of Marilynne Robinson's Absence of Mind which makes me feel that I really have to get to grips with her work at some point. I've always been daunted by her, because the archbishop of Canterbury reveres her intellect. The archbishop of Canterbury eats languages for breakfast and when given a sabbatical to refresh himself spiritually before the Lambeth conference spends it lightheartedly making a serious contribution to the study of Dostoyevsky. Marilynne Robinson sounds even tougher.

But it's not just about the books I decide to read, it's also about the books I don't. I read somewhere that art is reading books and going to the theatre and such, and culture is reading the reviews of books and theatre and such, and still being able to discuss them. It struck me the other day that although I have never read anything about the Dreyfus affair, I have read enough reviews of books about the Dreyfus affair to have a reasonable sense of what happened. You could see that as a bad thing, because strictly speaking it would be better if I had read and assimilated all the different books about it and come to my own conclusion (or even better, the actual sources). But what could be attacked as superficial knowledge could also be defended as a broad and persistent curiosity about the world and its history. And there are worse ways to be self-indulgent.

The closest parallel I can think of to the Literary Review's attitude to books is the attitude of Boing Boing to science. Boing Boing often has items about interesting new scientific or technological stuff just out of a sense that these things are genuinely exciting, and no one's duty. Hurray for enthusiasms! The world is wierd and complex in a good way.

Dialect; Big Bird

This list of management-speak contains some impressive terms. I like the statement that nine women can't have a baby in a month; it sounds so reasonable. I have escaped from management-speak land, hurray! To be fair, the salary was handy, and the management-speak was really only a few times a year when our project-partners visited from America. Though it was vital not to think about how the people speaking the management-speak were paid at least two or three times as much for being about half as effective, about a quarter as bright, and about a tenth as knowledgeable as us embittered academic types sitting on the other side of the table writing each other notes in Latin. Being able to emerge from meetings with your self-respect and cheerfulness intact should be added onto Kipling's If poem in an extra verse at the end.

"Mission creep" was one we used to get accused of a lot. It made us (maybe just me) want to scream "This isn't mission creep! It's just actually deciding to do something in a way that will work! Making the thing bloody work is not mission creep!" Instead I would be repressed and snarky and then go home and hate myself.

What is Big Bird? This is quite an interesting presentation. I like the concept behind Pecha-Kucha; it's essentially presentations of 20 slides which advance automatically every 20 seconds, while the speaker tries to keep up. It sounds like it could be a really interesting way to introduce people to research in areas not related to theirs. I'm tempted to make one and just put it online, but that's mostly because there are other things I should be doing right now.

Biblioteca apostolica Vaticana

I get the Vatican Library e-mail newsletter, and it usually makes me feel cheerful. The person who writes it has not heard of the five sentences rule which I mentioned in a recent post; he talks at length, and in an engagingly unfiltered manner. The library closed very suddenly about three years ago, and no one has been able to do any research on Vatican manuscripts in the meantime, which is a big deal considering their collections. Luckily I've only had one thing I needed to see, and I was able to get by without it by fudging a little, but many are anxious for it to reopen its doors. Anyway, here is one entire paragraph from the latest newsletter:

In fact, in recent meetings with various people, I have often heard the question, "Say, when will you open the Library"? My initial reaction, which I always try to suppress, is to think that they have clearly not been paying attention to the newsletters we have sent; nor have they been reading the newspapers or the web pages where the news has been announced and passed on. Of course I tell them, affecting as much indifference as I can muster, that we will open on September 20. But then another idea occurs to me: could it be that the inquirers were well aware of the date, but had been seized by an "impertinent" doubt which made them fear that it might not be true? Perhaps this was their way of asking a different question: "Will the reopening actually happen as planned? Will you keep your promises"?

The combination of, on the one hand, awareness of the neurotic undercurrents in academics' conversations with, on the other hand, the naive expectation that academics will go to the effort of reading newsletters or checking things online instead of just bothering the first person they can find to ask, is really very endearing. The nearly-2000-word-long message ends with this:

The number of newsletter recipients has now reached 15.327: the population of a small city, united by a love for culture and certainly also by reciprocal esteem and friendship. In that spirit, in the name of the entire staff of the Library, I send my warm greetings and best wishes to all.

Which is quite nice. I'm afraid I suspect that there are many among the other 15 326 whom I might find a bit trying, but I am doing my best to esteem them long-distance nonetheless.

Star Trek

Slash fiction started out with Kirk/Spock. (Neil Gaiman explains it here, with the epitomical phrase "it would be logical for you to touch it, Captain".)
Kottke.org has a post on how there is now a musical genre of Kirk/Spock mashups, which are a little more easy on the brain. This excellent Tik Tok one is very light on the slash at all, and serves to remind me just how good-looking the young Shatner was.

On the other hand this Nine Inch Nails one is a bit more loaded. But because all the images come from Star Trek episodes it can't be explicit, and the whole thing would be SFW except that the song is pretty N. There's something amusing about slash fiction in general. I think it's because it's such a female phenomenon, and female attitudes to sex generally involve more deprecatory humour than male. (That's probably a ridiculous generalisation, but I think it's roughly the case among the small sample group of people I know.)

Some internet things

I think my google reader subscriptions have reached capacity now. If I leave them alone for just a few days it takes ages to catch up. But here are some things I have liked recently:

This story about a four-year-old playing Grand Theft Auto will make you feel all warm and fuzzy.

These people think no e-mail should be more than 5 sentences. Not a bad idea. But sometimes one writes a long e-mail because one doesn't have time to write a short one. (I'm misquoting someone, but I've forgotten whom.)

This man has what I can only assume is an ironic tattoo. Seriously, American Psycho much? (I'm allowed to talk like that because I own all seven series of Buffy on DVD.)

John Hodgman's Today in the Past podcast (itunes link) has mysteriously skipped 27th June. What happened in the past on 27th June? Was it something that the molemen are not yet ready to tell us?

The New York Times goes a bit Onion-y in their banner headline. We all knew that America seeing itself as part of the world, even in something as straightforward as football, couldn't last for long.

Here is a cool bridge which reminds you which side of the road you should be driving on.

I like these prints of collective nouns.

Here are the 2010 locus award winners. I intend to read most of them.

And here are the Scissor Sisters doing Kylie's All the Lovers as a Dolly Parton song. (Here's the related story on, where else, popjustice.)

Notes from a notebook

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

You go, internets!

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.

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.