Witterings on Pynchon and other stuff

1. A remarkable thing about hard work is that you can sit there doing it, thinking how much you are enjoying it, how it's the real satisfaction in life to work through a task steadily and intently, how glad you are to be getting on with things, but at the same time overwhelmed by a feeling of almost unbearable fidgitiness and wishing to stop. All today I have been struggling against a wish to blog about how much I am enjoying working hard. Now that I have stopped work for the day and am allowed to blog I don't really want to.

2. I rewatched the Pussycat Dolls vs Coldplay video that I posted before. I like the way that the Coldplay tune underneath brings out the poignancy in the tale of this relationship. It starts well: she's his "favourite girl", and she says "my baby's sexy for sho, I had to have him when he walked through the do". It is not without its spiritual element: "he only wants me for my body and soul". But then Timbaland makes the classic mistake of leaving messages on her answering machine claiming that in return for his gifts she now owes him sex. "Why you be buggin like I'm some kinda ho?" she complains. The Pussycat Dolls are a remarkable phenomenon, not the less so for the TV series about the search for a New Pussycat Doll which gave a glimpse into the wierd world of what it's all about. They are like a plastic simulachrum of sexiness, pitch perfect and exact and not at all like anything real. They all look like very good male-to-female transvestites, for one thing. There's a bit in this video where the lead singer looks back at Timbaland from on the hood of a taxi while wiggling her rear at him which reminded me suddenly of the bit in the latest Pynchon about Mouffette the sexy lapdog. (This got him nominated for a Literary Review Bad Sex award.) The only Pynchon I have never reread is Gravity's Rainbow; I tried once but I gave up at the part where the flirty lipsticked twelve-year-old starts seducing people on the boat. But maybe I will try again, when I unpack my books this autumn, and think of her instead as a Pussycat Doll. It will probably make more sense that way. I wanted to record this because even though I have googled I have found no other instance of the Pussycat Dolls helping anyone to a better understanding of Pynchon. The reason it works is that Pynchon is a great writer and writes about things that are true.

3. Also on the theme of things I've posted about before: I went to the Pinacoteca again and took some photos. Here's the best I got of the mysterious half-smile I talked about:


4. In my classics appreciating mood I reread The Mayor of Casterbridge. I loved and devoured Hardy at the age of about fifteen and spent a happy summer writing an essay about him on a bench in our garden. The bench was overhung with honeysuckle and surrounded by buddleias so that there were butterflies everywhere and I kept having to sit very still because they had settled on me or on my book. Then after that I felt like I had grown out of Hardy, and his misery. His books divide roughly into tragedies and comedies; in the tragedies everyone dies, and in the comedies everyone dies but the young lovers. (One of my great aunts claimed that when Hardy was very young he was present at and may have caused the accidental death of some relative of hers, and that this was why he was always so moody, but I think his biographers have taken other lines on this.) So apart from The Return of the Native, which is my favourite, I haven't read any Hardy for ages. Anyway, early on in The Mayor of Casterbridge Elizabeth Jane is specifically attracted to Farfrae because of his lack of a sense of humour; he makes himself loved by singing nostalgic songs with the men in the pub, but he won't join in with their jokes. I am now collecting instances of a GSOH being an unattractive thing in the past. I think humour is over-rated, myself.

5. Here is Piazza Maggiore after dark. I like the graininess of my camera phone.



When I saw how the light was coming out I took this over-zoomed one of the bronze Neptune.

Life being a bit like that

Here are just a few of the things that have annoyed me today
1) the Italian course I was trying to enrol on has been cancelled. This is bad because my Italian is actually getting worse at the moment, as I point my brain at Old English boundary clauses. The other day I saw the words "in merce" on an Italian shampoo bottle and immediately thought "ah, in mærce, 'in the boundary', or possibly a scribal error for in mersce, 'in the marsh'". This is not good. Yesterday when Federica asked me whether Jack the Ripper was really a relation of Queen Victoria, and I said I didn't think we would ever know for sure at this distance, and she said surely as a historian I had to believe in the possibility of recovering past facts, I found it very hard to sustain the conversation even to the limited extent I would have managed a couple of weeks ago. It's a good thing she's here, with her combined curiosity and forceful assertions, making me try to express difficult things.
2) I went to a guest lecture at the Residenza, partly because I was interested and partly because I felt it might be politic to show my face, given that I don't live there. (I asked a question for roughly the same reasons, which made me feel a bit bad.) Now I can see that an hour on Origen's Christology and Soteriology might not be the most engrossing thing ever for many people, but it was disgracefully rude how some people were chatting and blatantly reading books. To daydream or make some unrelated notes is one thing, but to talk or completely ignore the lecture seems very rude to me. It wasn't a primarily Italian audience, but a very international one, and the English-speakers were the worst. I thought the lecture interesting myself, mostly because I was sincerely shocked by Origen's heterodox views. My uncle (the sensible, nice one) was once asked to be part of a sermon series at St Alban's Abbey on My Favourite Heretic, and chose Origen. Recently someone tried to persuade me that Mariology, which I'm afraid I have a tendency to interpret in old-fashionedly Freudian terms as rooted in men's wishing that their own mother was a virgin, is an essential part of incarnational theory (I remain unconvinced); so I asked the speaker about Origen's Mariology. He didn't really have one, apparently, so either that goes to show that it's not necessary at all, or that not having a Mariology was where he went so terribly wrong.
3. I went to the HyperCo-op (pronounced eeper-co-op), which is right next door to the Residenza. When I go to supermarkets I take my backpack to carry things home in and to save on damage to the earth in the form of plastic bags. At the HyperCo-op, however, if you take in any bag at all they put it in a large blue plastic bag and heat seal it shut. Then at the checkout you have to rip your backpack free hurriedly, destroying the plastic bag beyond possiblity of reuse. This annoys me.
4. Also I've been feeling daftly homesick, though not for Cambridge. At Cambridge I miss good company and library access, and nothing else, and I miss them in a sensible sort of way. But all this poring over maps of the Wiltshire Downs is making me yearn for the South West and the English countryside. I can't wait to go back at Easter and tramp around the fields with my parents, watering alpacas. (Many years ago my parents named me after Rebecca in the Bible specifically because she was nice to camelids.)

What cheered me up:
I had a reply from the Queen of Charters, who is editor of seven of the thirteen volumes which have come out so far in the series for which I am writing my charters book. She says my boundary clause work is good! Or at least, that it can go off for linguistic comment without much work. This is the most tremendous relief because I have been feeling it's absolutely on the border line of what's possible for me. Luckily it seems that I have got onto the right side of that line. I have been worrying about it so much that on reading the message I picked up Figaro and did a little jig. He was unimpressed, though he can never help but purr when cuddled. Here is a picture of him in full teddy-bear mode as a sort of blog-based apology. (Apoblogy?)

Mexipop

I don't understand this, though I'm sure it's full of meaning. I like the music though.

Joy

My dad's safely back from plant-hunting in Vietnam. I asked him how it went and he told me some long story of a knoll with an odd distribution of podacarps (?) and taxus something or other. I have no idea what it all meant so I had to act out responses of interest and pleased surprise at what seemed like appropriate moments but it's made him happy, so thank-you, Vietnamese podacarp knoll.

Also: five furlongs is one kilometre! This gladdened me, and I wish there was someone with whom I could share the pleasure. When I explained it to my mum she sounded pretty pleased about it, but she may have been responding like I did to my dad's podacarp knoll. I feel quite good about the way that families pretend interest in each others' pleasures; there's something about this amiable pretence that speaks more of affection than if we actually all shared the same interests.

Other things

Here is Figaro expressing his disapproval of Old English boundary clauses by sitting on them. I've sent a few off today, and I'm beginning to feel more like they're a possible thing. So I'm going to blog about culture instead.

1. Museums. From the Pinacoteca's art collection and the sculpture fragments in the medieval museum I get a sense of what the Bologna art style was in the late middle ages. Faces have thin, almond-shaped eyes like you see in painters like Giotto, only where Giotto's saints often look stern or even angry, these look like they're sharing some sort of happy mystery with you. Saints in the polittici hold open books and point at them; above the books they hold their faces in three-quarter profile and smile at you like someone imparting a secret. There's a sculpture of Justice (I think) in the medieval museum with just the same smile. I find this style very engaging, even moving.

2. Yesterday was Ladies' Day here in Italy. It seems that this is an international thing which Britain has somehow missed out on. I didn't notice until a supermarket gave me some sprouting bamboo as a tribute to my status as a lady. Now, remembering that women have had to fight some nasty prejudice in the past, like good old Woolf not being allowed into Trinity College Library, and such is all very well; but it seems mostly to be a day for giving flowers to The Ladies. Ah, the ladies, bless them! Where would be without them? A toast to the Ladies! So I don't think I'm going to campaign for its introduction to Britain any time soon. These two possibilities are wonderfully encapsulated by Russian examples on the Wikipedia page about the holiday, which is worth looking at: first a 1930s poster of a babushka crushed under symbols of household cares being helped to her feet by another woman, as together they fight the tyranny of stereotypical gender roles; then a much later card of some pretty flowers.

3. I haven't blogged about books for ages, so this is going to be mostly a list to help me remember later. I finished Julian Rathbone's Mutiny, which is good but not the best of his books. I think he suffers a bit from not being sure if he's writing a novel or history or something in between. It's a pretty horrendous subject anyway, if you think about it seriously, with terrible atrocities on both sides, and I think this held him back from his usual insouciance. Then I read The Bloodstone Papers by Glen Duncan, which was good but oddly downbeat. At least it educated me about Anglo-Indian culture, about which I knew nothing. I can see that the Anglo-Indians must have been in a strange place when the British left India. The Somnambulist by Jonathan Barnes was good enough fun that I will probably read his next one. Then I discovered that in Italy you can buy those green two quid Penguin Classics for three euros sixty, so I read Mansfield Park, David Copperfield, and Kim. I don't know when I've enjoyed novels more -- it reminded me of the fact that Classics can be hard work, but sometimes the tag is simply a shorthand for no-risk quality, unlike modern fiction where your money may or may not bring a return of reading pleasure. My favourite Austen is Persuasion, but I've always had a soft spot for Fanny in Mansfield Park, whom so many people dismiss as dull. It made me wonder when a GSOH became an essential for romance. Nowadays it would be hard to imagine a relationship which didn't involve shared jokes, but this must be quite a recent point of view. In Mansfield Park a good sense of humour is Mary Crawford's fatal flaw, with her talk of Admirals, rears and vices, because it indicates a superficiality about what's important. (I recently heard someone on Radio 4 talking about a history she's writing of personal ads, so maybe that will enlighten me.) I've also read a biography of Dante by Barbara Reynolds, which was very interesting. He spent quite a bit of time here in Bologna. I get the impression that Barbara Reynolds, like her god-mother Dorothy L. Sayers, is an interesting and combative old bird in the old British style. I also read Alaa al Aswany's The Yacoubian Building, which was good; its cover design probably helps it sell, but gives a false impression of triviality. A Dog About Town, by J. F. Englert was quite fun, though I dislike the fact that people are beginning to write books with animal detectives, like that German sheep one as well, because it means that when I get round to my rat detective series it'll all be old hat. The Good Husband of Zebra Drive by Alexander McCall Smith is reliably comforting; this series, like the Harry Potter books, has suffered from its massive hype. And I read Odd and the Frost Giants, a little book by Neil Gaiman, of which I approve, because it's part of the World Books Day scheme. Now I'm reading The Siege of Venice, by Jonathan Keates, because I thought I ought to know something about the Risorgimento. It's quite well written and enjoyable, and it's also interesting to find out about the people behind the street names, like Ugo Bassi and d'Azeglio. All Italian towns seem to have the same street names, in my limited experience.

Hurray!

Hurray for the interweb! And I'll tell you why.
1) There are tons of resources out there for someone trying to edit the Anglo-Saxon Charters of Wilton Abbey. E.g. Bosworth and Toller (the old Old English dictionary) and the Toronto OE Dictionary (needs a subscription and has only got to G); Lewis and Short, and the Latin word analyzer; the Ordnance Survey maps thingy and Google Maps, which lets you build your own maps, like this one of most of Wilton's estates; and Edina Digimap which is brilliant but requires further registration beyond Athens because they want to be sure you're really serious about it; the Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England so I know whether or not I'm just making up a name in a way which would make Prof. Page huffy; my very own Revised Sawyer for bibliography, mostly so I can see what I should have photocopied while still in England; the OED's etymological details; the Unbound Bible for sourcing Bible quotations; and more. I could do with some Old English grammar online, though, cos I can't remember any paradigms and forgot to bring Mitchell and Robinson. The only one I can still remember is this little table of noun endings which I offer to you now, and which can actually get you a surprisingly long way:

	SING.	PLU.
GEN.	~es	~a
DAT.	~e	~um

Andy Orchard told us that when he handed us over to the Prof. for Old English in our first year, and we used to scribble it on the top of all our set texts for reference in moments of panic.

2) Furthermore the www (the only abbreviation which takes three times as long to say as the phrase it abbreviates) offers us entertainment! I've been doing another YouTube trawl for mash-ups, specifically those by Pheugoo and PartyBen. Here is Christina Milian, in one of the most offensively lyricked songs of all time, turning into something rather mellow over the top of Jimi Hendrix; here is Gwen Stefani vs Martha and the Vandellas; here's Dead or Alive and Justice; here's Led Snoopelin; here's Madonna vs Destiny's Child; here are Nirvana and Daft Punk. You've got to love Nirvana, it was so long ago, though it's hard now not to be forcibly reminded of Chris Morris singing Panty Smile (also as Sukie Bapswent). Below I have put a mix of Coldplay and the Pussycat Dolls. After all, if Coldplay and the Pussycat Dolls (featuring Timbaland) can live together in perfect harmony maybe there is hope for the rest of us; maybe we could all just get along.

Misc.

1. Sunday was ridiculously warm here. I went with Francesca and some nice Italians to what they say is the best icecream place. It was pretty good but the queues were long, and inside they had leaflets telling you the glycaemic index of all the flavours, which annoyed me. The Italians I was with seemed to think it wasn't the correct weather for icecream as the sun was making it melt.

2. I am working on Old English boundary clauses. From my window I can see S. Luca with its lit porticos snaking up one of the hills outside Bologna, and nearer to hand a large scooter park where Italian youths congregate of the evenings, but on my desk it's all about the coombes and lynchets of Wiltshire. Now, Old English boundary clauses are proper scholarship of the best precise antiquarian kind, and as such I constantly fluctuate between a strong affection for them and feelings of intense boredom and inadequacy. They do have their own dry poetry though. They describe the area of an estate by detailing the landmarks you'd follow to walk around it, and a lot of the time you go along the old way to the hoar oak, and from the hoar oak to the standing stone, and then down the valley to the fox stream, etc etc. On the Wiltshire chalklands the Anglo-Saxons were constantly encountering the marks of much older cultures, so a lot of mine involve going from the broken barrow to the stone circle to the earth fort along the old dyke, etc. There are also more grim markers like the gallows (literally villain's tree) stood on Wansdyke (Woden's dyke), and a murder quarry (morth crundel); and the oddest so far, the place where someone slew a man for his billy-goat. I intend to visit at least a few of these estates on foot, probably with my parents, in the hope that we'll be able to match up these old markers with modern features in some cases -- often the modern parish boundaries still follow estate bounds laid out over a thousand years ago. My dad is a proper forester and knows something about landscape, but still I can't help but feel that what's needed here is a national treasure.

3. Here is a picture of Figaro (Feegy for short) pretending to be a cushion on my sofa. I took several pictures without waking him. When I get in I shout out Ciao! and Giorgia and Federica shout Ciao! and Figaro goes Miao! and it sounds just like he's joining in. When I get a dog I might call her Bella and then when it's dinner time I could call out Chow Bella. That would make me happy every single time.



4. I've been listening to stuff while wrestling with the damnable boundaries and the exact difference between a coombe and dean. I downloaded all of Adam and Joe's old podcasts, including the ones where they talk about new music, which I didn't expect to like. It's been a long time since I got all excited about hearing new bands. (Indie bands, that is, not pop.) However, I have discovered some good stuff off that. There's a song called "Monster in a Shirt" by a band called Headland which sticks in my mind, and I keep going around singing dah dah dah dah dah, Monster in a Shirt, doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo, Monster in a Shirt, because I can't remember any of the other lyrics. You can find a preview in itunes. Plus a rapper called Frazer is quite good and has a MySpace page with a fun James Bond thing on it and some more serious songs too. Also good, but from other sources, are Annie, whose fantastic Chewing Gum song is listenable for free on her myspace page, and Hercules and Love Affair. Here is the video to their single Blind, featuring Ray Winstone's daughter stumbling over some sort of ancient smokey orgy. It's like a disco-ier McAlmont and Butler, and the Hercules theme is good too. And Roisin Murphy's Modern Timing is brilliant. I got hold of it free quite legally somehow, I think by subscribing to a newsletter. I do think she'd do better commercially if she didn't wear such ridiculous hats.
Róisín Murphy – Modern Timing

I do like Adam and Joe, they're quite funny. Other good podcasts include some ancient American radio adventures of Hercule Poirot (Zis is... muerder! musical sting); poor old Stephen Fry feeling utterly miserable about his arm; and the BBC radio 4 news quiz podcast. Also on Radio 4 but not as a podcast is a good thing with Bill Bailey called the Museum of Curiosities. I don't think the first episode is up any more, but it had Brian Blessed on shouting about yetis, which was pretty unique. I quite like Russell Brand, reluctantly, but I can't believe his predictably sex-obsessed podcast is from Radio 2! Does Wogan use the same microphone? I'm not so keen on both "Collings and Herrin" and Ricky Gervais for the same reason, which is that they seem to score off other people as part of an ego-bolstering thing.

Appreciating Cambridge

I am enjoying Italy, and it's actually perversely pleasurable to be reminded, by their absence, of the things I like about Cambridge:
1) I wish I had been in Cambridge to hear the archbishops recently, especially Dr Williams.
2) I miss having a variety of intelligent people around. After the stuff Dr Williams said recently about sharia law I wish I could have asked an intelligent lawyer (I was specifically thinking of a particular hard-boiled one I know) about the common law. (Though I would have exposed my ignorance badly.)
3) chat! I want to chat with people about trivial things like TV. Instead my flatmate keeps challenging me to defend vegetarianism or outline Cambridge's admission procedure. It's been ages since I've critiqued one of the lovely ladies in Country Life, and I am not being exposed to enough irony or sarcasm.
4) British TV. When I get back I will make my computer download lots off of 4OD.
5) orange milk chocolate!
6) kettles!
I have to keep these things in mind so that when I do have to leave I see the upside. But I'm really enjoying myself here, and I'm not quite as skint as I expected to be, which helps a lot.

Uncomfortable memory

Actually on rereading the last post I suddenly remembered something rather uncomfortable from my last few months in Cambridge, when my Mum was coming up pretty frequently to help me paint and to take away boxes full of books. One Sunday morning we went down to the car to find a condom on the windscreen. I flicked it off quickly with the corner of my coat but I was too late: my mother had already seen it, and to my discomfort she then actually made a comment about it. Being my mother, whose worst weapon is sympathy, this was entirely to the effect that she was moved by strong pity for the barren emotional life of those who conducted their amatory adventures in grubby carparks. I didn't have quite the courage to add that I was somewhat consoled to think that at least this regrettable liaison was not likely, from the evidence, to result in unwanted offspring or disease. But anyway, having weathered that storm I wonder whether perhaps between us we could even cope with sex-toys in the supermarket queue. It's amazing, being grown up.

Italy is a bit strange

1. The nearest supermarket to me (discounting the scabby cheap one which sells wholesale meats) is called "Pam". They rarely have many staff on the tills so the wait is always long, and they have well-stocked shelves next to the little conveyer belts for those last-minute impulse purchases. (When I worked at M&S I was amazed at just how quickly those shelves empty.) But I noticed that as well as chocolate and chewing gum, at one such till it is possible to buy votive candles decorated with garish religious images, while at the next you can buy those plastic vibrating Durex rings in a nasty shade of purple. (The ones with the disturbing advert where the Tilda-Swinton-like-woman opens the gift and then smiles with Lynx-style sexy gratitude as if to say "Darling! You've noticed that the sex is crap! And you've spent a few quid on a buzzing plastic thing to sort it out!") Anyway, this has boggled my mind somewhat. Wouldn't chocolate and chewing gum be a more remunerative thing to put in that space? Surely the number of people who are in a mind to buy either religious equipment or sex-toys at a supermarket is small? Plus presumably there is little overlap between them; are they hoping people will put themselves into the right queue? I'm not at all convinced by this retail practice.

Furthermore although I know I'm way behind the times now that Ann Summers is on every High Street, I do feel that there is potential for a huge amount of inter-familial embarrassment here. When by myself, suddenly encountering sex toys among the Ferrero Rocher and Kinder bars doesn't much fase me, and I doubt it would fase my mother either; but if the two of us encountered them together I should think the resulting embarrassment bouncing back and forwards between us would be like a feedback loop on speakers, quickly rising to a painful and overwhelming degree.

2. To get to "Pam" I walk past the local park, "Parco di 11 Settembre 2001", complete with children's playground and mini funfair. Now, I know that we have plenty of Diana memorial gardens in England, but Diana wasn't just about the death. Diana was about campaigning against landmines, and having a cuteoverload puppy characteristic named after her, and although it seems trivial now it really was pretty taboo-breaking when she actually touched people with AIDS, because at the time it was like they had the ultimate disease. But there's not a lot more to September 11th than mass, horrific death; followed by horrendously depressing ventures into the Middle East by Americans which we were all forced to go along with for some reason we don't understand, resulting in huge and complex suffering which we seem to be powerless to affect. Do Bolognese mammas say to Bolognese papas, "Honey, let's take the bambini to play on the merry-go-round in the Park of September 11th"? Though the Italians do have a fondness for naming things after dates, and maybe if I were less ignorant of modern history I would be unable to pass without a sigh through the Piazza 20th August where the Bologna Saturday market is held.

3. I can't walk home without passing at least one gelateria, and sometimes as many as three. Recently it's been necessary to wear a hat and gloves as well as a scarf outside; it's been quite painfully cold. I like the cold weather, myself, and am dreading the Bolognese summer, but many Italians can be seen absolutely cocooned in furs or those Michelin-man-style duvet coats, but nonetheless they congregate around gelaterie, eating frozen cream from a little spoon. The ice-cream is excellent. I am eating far more ice-cream than I would usually eat in February, or indeed any month. My current flavour is called something like Beast in the City, though I'm not sure why. It's a swirly mix of hazelnut, chocolate and vanilla, with chocolate crunchy bits.

More random stuff about Italia

1. Shortly before I left England I flicked through the TV channels and caught a Hits TV session entitled "Forgotten Hits of the 90s", which I had on in the background for a while, provoking mingled enjoyment and frustration. But these hits are not forgotten here, and I have heard a large number of exactly the same songs on the kitchen radio since moving into this flat. Most recently there has been: that annoying nasal Canadian one that goes Henh henh henh or mmm mmm mmm mmm, I forget which, but with an air of importing some vast significant truth about Life; Offspring's Pretty Fly (for a White Guy). I have bought the latter for my ipod cos actually I quite like it. Also I have been listening to old Adam and Joe show podcasts, which are good.

2. The other day Federica saw that I had bought a copy of La Repubblica and this perturbed her strangely. She spent some time telling me that it's a paper of the left, and saying that some other paper was more central and less political. (I think it was Corriere della Sera, or some such, I forget.) Anyway I had only bought it because I wanted to buy a book that was being published with it. They have this thing here that a friend told me about before I left, where newspapers publish books and you can buy it with the newspaper on the right day for less money than it will be in the shops. It was a book called I Segreti di Roma and I thought it sounded interesting. But I was impressed at how La Repubblica's front page was mostly about things in the wider world, not just in Italy, in a way totally untypical of British stuff. I bought it again today for the sake of reading Italian, and it has this fantastic column on the front, which is basically about how there's a conference going on in Rome at the moment about the Spanish Inquisition; this has made the writer think of more recent examples of torture, and he mentions a film about the use of torture in Eastern Europe in the 90s, and then goes on to talk about current complicity in torture in the "war on terror", and public opinion about it in European countries. Just when I was losing the thread a bit he threw in a quote from Jeremy Bentham! How can you not love a paper that picks up on an academic conference and goes from that to our moral duties to human rights in the world, on the front page? Possibly it could get a bit dull over time, like Tom Paulin in the Newsnight Review always interpreting every play, book or film as a metaphor for the Troubles. But at the moment I am disposed to like this left-wing newspaper.

3. I am still impressed by the bookshops here. On the tables where English bookshops have piles of Shopaholic goes to Manhattan or some such, here they have facing page translations of the letters of Sallust or works by banned Turkish writers. I went to a supermarket last night, and they had a sale on, selling books for 5 euros per kilogram. I bought a book about Nineveh with lots of pictures; a catalogue of an exhibition of the collections of Queen Christina of Sweden, which I haven't read properly yet but which should be interesting because she was an amazing and odd person (and owned one of the most satisfying manuscripts in the world, the Bury Psalter); and for just a few euros a much better facing-page translation of Shakespeare's sonnets. It translate the marriage of true minds as "matrimonio di due animi fideli", which is less annoying, though I would still prefer "menti", I think. Anyway, Francesca tells me that Federica is more or less right about literary culture being engaged in on a higher level here because engaged in by fewer people. There are no tabloids, apparently; if you want a paper you have to read a serious one.

4. Figaro! Polpetta! Actually here he is doing his best Bond villain cat stare.

Ancora random

1. I do miss my copy of 501 Latin Verbs Fully Conjugated in All the Tenses. I know I ought to be better than that. I ought to have all Latin verbs fully conjugated in all the tenses inside my head, ready to spew out as necessary. Ah, I should say, a second-conjugation pluperfect subjunctive third-person plural! But it is not so. Perseus' word analyser is not a complete substitute, though it does help.

2. I went to Rome. It's not as easy to be in as Bologna. Like a good medievalist I went to the Epigraphical Museum and looked at epigraphy for a while. There were some truly beautiful Rustic Capital inscriptions, but I have a soft spot for the clumsier ones, like this one showing cursive elements.



3. The Spar chains have shops in Rome but they are called Despar which is a bit wierd, really, and makes you think of those anti-capitalist T-shirts.



4. Federica says the bookshops are great here because so few people read. Only intellectuals read, she says, whereas in England culture is for everyone. I tried to suggest that some people wouldn't call it culture at all when it includes The Da Vinci code, and 25% of all books bought are Richard and Judy choices. (I know one's supposed to find the latter shocking, but I can only sympathise with those who want a straightforward easy read, and who go into a bookshop looking for something cheapish, fat, and reliable. Nor are all the R&J choices dumb by any means, and most of them are worth some time.)

Italiano per straniere

Learning Italian in situ here is a much better experience than languages at school. Oddly, though, I do miss the reciting just a little. Not having been through all the days of the week endless times like we did with French I can only work out which one is which by thinking, e.g., Thursday = Thor = Jove = Giovedi. (This is thanks to my old DoS, who pointed out to me that the English days of the week are not named after English pagan gods, but are simply translations, which I never noticed at school when doing French.) Also one of the standard regular verbs is amare, learnt as an example for all ~are verbs, but I don't think I can quite cope with that, and I'll have to find another. Amo, ami, ama; amiamo, amate, amano, versus amo, amas, amat; amamus, amatis, amant is one thing; but once we get into all the amevi's and such I think it would just get too confusing after Latin.

Otherwise I am loving the way Italian often feels rather like cheating; if it's a Latinate word in English, then just slur it a bit and add an Italian accent and you're probably there. Example becomes esempio, adjective is aggetivo, etc. (I've been told you can do something similar with Modern Welsh, by taking an English verb and adding ~iau on the end, but it really winds them up if you do it too obviously, apparently.) Also I like it very much when Italian is like Latin, although it makes it harder for me to spell. The Italian for wife sounds exactly like mulier, though it's spelt moglie.

I'm quite disturbed by the high quality of the bookshops here. I know it's a university town, but so is Cambridge, and there's seriously no comparison. If I could read Italian fluently I'd be buying loads. As it is I've bought quite a few little portfolios of art reproductions, and today I got a cheap hardback facing-page translation of Catullus's Poems. We read them briefly at school, and they were one of those rare things which weren't killed by the classroom (also in this category, Wuthering Heights, and Anouilh's Eurydice). I like best the one that's a translation from Sappho, which starts something like He is more than a god in my eyes. Also I bought a cheap paperback facing-page translation of Shakespeare's Sonnets, but so far this is not pleasing me so much. I looked up one I memorised back when I was a little eleven-year old, the one that starts Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments, and it's translated as Io non farò ai costanti impedimento Di matrimonio. I think that means "I will not (future) do to the constant ones an impediment to marriage". Where are the minds in that? It's supposed to be about minds! The eleven-year old me would never have memorised this version, it's just about how true lovers should be allowed to get married. I may be being unfair, cos of course my Italian is still pretty rubbish, but I suspect that the pressures of translating into the strict sonnet form are at work here, turning something strong into something banal. (In Italian, banale.)

I didn't buy T. S. Eliot's Book of Practical Cats, but I did buy "Beh, che c'è di nuovo, Charlie Brown?" because I couldn't resist the front cover of Snoopy on top of his doghouse, typing "Era una notte buia e tempestosa". And they had a cheap paperback facing-page translation of Orlando Furioso! That's been on my to-read list for ages. Can you imagine going into Borders in Cambridge and finding a cheap parallel text of Orlando Furioso? (Admittedly, Ariosto is local.) Maybe I should buy it anyway, even though I won't understand either side of the page, just as a sort of celebration of intelligent book-selling.

Small random piece of information: Parker is held to have invented the facing-page translation with his Testimonie of Antiquitie, the first book ever printed in Old English. Diligent googling has failed to disprove this as yet.

Pop makes brain ow better

I reread my last post, and it occurred to me that it might sound like I'm saying that I have become all fluent in Italian, whereas really the point of the first bit was how wierd it feels to be talking about non-childish things in baby language. I could do an Italian bambino's First Book of the English Reformation: Ecco Enrigho! Enrigho è molto triste. Perchè Enrigho è triste? Perchè crede che Dio è arrabiato, etc etc. So far today we have had a long discussion about figurative and non-figurative art, with particular reference to Tate Modern and the Gothic/Byzantine traditions, ultimately concluding that one prefers things one was never forced to study at school. Really my brain is very ow.

Lucky for me there is popjustice. This is a tad sub-Goldie Looking Chain, but it's always been a great record, and I like the ending. Maybe it's time to revive harem pants? Yes I know they were ridiculous, but there are so many short men wandering round here making themselves look like penguins by wearing their jeans with the belt nestling under the curve of their buttocks that any increase in volume of coverage could only be a substantial improvement. I don't care if your pants are designer! I don't want to see them!

Brain hurt

1. Federica, my flat-mate, has exam retakes coming up. This is making her quite miserable, and she is inclined to abandon her revision and come and ask me difficult questions. Here are just a few so far:
Q. why is Amy Winehouse's No no no song quite sad? (This one was my fault -- she said she didn't like it and I said it was also quite sad now, not realising that she wouldn't have got the general import of the lyrics.) A. because she really ought to have gone to Rehab, obviously. That one at least was easy.
Q. why have you come to Italy? All that stuff about la bella vita isn't true, everyone in Italy is miserable. A. Everyone in England is miserable as well but at least you have nice bread.
Q. why study the middle ages given that we are living in 2008? (she does economics) A. first because I find it very interesting and the manuscripts are beautiful. Secondly (I'd had a few cocktails by the time I tried to answer this one) because it is a good thing to understand humankind. History is not a series of improvements leading up to the present day and an even better future; on the contrary there are things we have lost when we gained certain types of knowledge, and this loss is causing us problems in the way that the religious and the non-religious live together. Then I talked about American right-wing evangelistic Christians for a while.
Q. why is England Protestant? A. I didn't want to over-simplify this one, so I ended up going back to the marriage of Arthur Tudor and Catherine of Aragon, and in this way I may have fallen into the opposite trap. It's just that it makes me annoyed when people talk about Henry VIII as some sort of pragmatic man motivated by lust and the desire for a political heir; I think he was much more complex than that, and dangerously principled, even if he was perhaps a bit self-deluded about the motivation behind his principles. He genuinely thought that his lack of a son was a sign of God's anger at his marriage to his sister-in-law; and it was quite fair for him to get annoyed at his treatment by the pope. Henry VIII was not the first English king to get divorced, but the last (until we get Charles III), and medieval divorces and annulments were common on far far more flimsy grounds. Look at Eleanor of Provence, who had two daughters with Louis the whatnot before divorcing him and marrying the future Henry II. Henry VIII had a team of scholars who tracked down a manuscript of the Old Testament in Hebrew in order to analyse the texts more precisely, and he took it very seriously. The pope at the time, Clement VII, would certainly come out worse than Henry in any comparison of moral behaviour. He was a Medici by-blow, and had at least one "nephew" of his own whom he advanced through his power; he was certainly not motivated by the desire to uphold the sanctity of holy wedlock. Instead, because of some military reverses, he was completely politically under the thumb of Spain, and hence of Catherine's nephew. It's hard not to sympathise with Henry's anger that his scholarly arguments couldn't get a look in compared to political exigencies, that the pope wasn't considering God's laws but the wishes of the Emperor. The forged Donation of Constantine made the popes temporal rulers and diminished vastly their spiritual authority, and it's the best exemplum I know for the need to separate political power and religion. And then Mary's unpopular marriage to Philip of Spain, and the pope's ridiculous bull exhorting English Catholics to assassinate Elizabeth I, sealed England's Protestantism.
Q. Do people in England like the queen? A. She's OK, but we're not so fond of her descendants.
Q. Isn't it strange that England has a royal family when it's a very avant-garde country? A. Not at all, England is very traditional. Then I ended up trying to explain the failure of the Commonwealth and the restoration of Charles II. I may have overmade my point about the need to study history...

2. Italian is great, and having to speak it to my flatmates is very good for me. I think I have learnt quite a lot in a week and a half of the corso di Italiano per straniere. I don't have a natural ability with languages, but I do have a helpful OCD/aspergers-y tendency to become obsessive about things, which means I keep trying to work things out in Italian in my head, and it's making me tired.

3. Oh Figaro! Salsiciotto!

Cartoons

Historical cartoons

T'interweb

Hurray! I have t'interweb in my room now, and I can catch up on popjustice, and blogs, and all that sort of thing, without being in the office.

I really want one of these steampunk keyboards:


Below are some pictures I took of Bologna. They're not very good because they were taken on my little camera phone, and the light hasn't been great, but they give some idea of bits of it.

Inside the courtyard of the building where I work. Eat your heart out, 9 West Road!


Here is the window of a grocer's. Nearby Parma is of course famous for its ham and parmigiano. If you look closely you will see carvings made of cheese!



Here is the Palazzo di Re Enzo, the illegitimate son of Frederick II, stupor mundi. Really it was his prison; he lived here for over twenty years before he died. In front is the fountain of Neptune. It has lots of ladies spurting water from their breasts.



Portici on my way to work:



The church outside where I live. I think it's seventeenth-century, but maybe it's sixteenth-.



Figaro the cat:



Also, I've found Rambaldi, living just below a room I looked at just outside the Porta Saffi:

Some things I like about Bologna

1. people greet each other with "salve". Francesca says it's just a way to avoid doing an instant evaluation of one's relationship with someone so as to decide between the informal "ciao" or the formal "buongiorno", but it sounds wonderfully Latinate to me. Also it reminds me of starting Latin when I was about 12 at school; when the teacher came into the room she said "salvete puellae" and we all said "salve Mrs Washington".

2. there's this slight air of the 1950s. Everyone smokes, and women have little feet and wear fur. On the buses there are tiny elderly ladies swathed in glossy furs, and I have to resist a terrible, patronising impulse to stroke them. There are two fur shops on the street where I live. One is large and pretty posh. It has things in the window which look rare, leopard-like, but surely they can't be? They cost several thousand euros each. Most disconcerting are the ones made of lots of loose furry bits, looking like a legion of hamsters is clinging to the coat, perhaps as part of some hamster-smuggling wheeze. The other shop is tiny and last time I went past there were two big (alive) Alsatians squeezed in among the clothes.

3. people bring their dogs into shops. I like this, personally. Not sure the dogs are enjoying it much.

4. it's a beautiful city without being at all pretty. Almost everything is built in local red brick, often very roughly finished, and the buildings harmonise because of this, and also because the architecture is quite straightforward. (The picture above is one of the nicest bits of my walk to work.) The city is mostly flat but there are hills all around it, which mean there are lots of beautiful views. Also there are towers. At some point in the late middle ages local merchant families took up competitive tower building. Only a few are left but apparently once there were about 180, all with their only entrances about six metres up, and galleries around them; it must have been like something out of sci-fi. And a lack of anything hugely startling means Bologna isn't really on the tourist trail, not compared to Florence and Venice, so it's rather more like a real city.

5. the people are mostly very friendly. Sometimes an attempt to speak Italian gets a really positive reponse.

6. my flatmates are great. Giorgia speaks some English but is out quite a lot. She looks like Alexa off of Popworld. Federica speaks almost no English but is really friendly. She says my Italian has noticeably improved over the last few days, and yesterday we had a conversation about what I do and I explained what palaeography is, which gave me a sense of achievement. Also we have just had a long talk about Pete Doherty (consensus: over-rated). She has exams coming up, because she is doing some sort of postgraduate degree in economics, but after that she says she is going to cook proper lasagne for me and Giorgia. Figaro the cat is also good; his role in the house is suddenly to do something charming but very inconvenient, so that one of us goes "Oh, Figaro!" like in the Felix adverts.

Bologna continua

Well I have now moved into my new room, and at last have unpacked all my things. I can walk into the palaeography department in about ten or fifteen minutes, almost all under portici so I don't need an umbrella, and most of the way along the ancient Roman Via Emilia. After some very foggy days it's suddenly really sunny and beautiful, and I think I shall spend the afternoon exploring. Apparently I need to buy a journal called "Bologna spettacolo!". They have a free newspaper here like the ones in London, but today's headline seems to say that the salads of the lazy are making prices soar, which is either about how people buy prepackaged salad these days or it's something I'm really not getting in Italian. I've had three lessons now, two and a half hours each, and it's beginning to seem like hard work, but I can only imagine how gruelling it is for the teacher, who does five hours a day of complete beginners.

The two girls I live with are very nice and helpful. Figaro the cat has developed a game where he pushes my door open, leaps onto my desk, pats the pens until one falls on the floor, and then chases it round and round until it disappears under the sofa. Then he lies there going "miao" in a small sad voice. He's not a terribly vocal cat, which is probably good, because it makes him easy to ignore when I feel like it. It's nice to have a pet again though, even if only at second hand and temporarily.

They have very formal book launches here. I went to one yesterday for the new volume of the department's library catalogue (specifically of the older books) and the Professor, who is very nice, introduced to me to lots of important people, at whom I smiled inanely and said "piacere". Then we all sat down and lots of men gave speeches. (Our professor was the only woman on the stage, and reference was made at least once to her charmingness in a rather depressing, but very familiar, way.) By the time Francesca and I gave up and sneaked out the seventh such speech was going on, we'd been there for an hour and forty minutes, and there were still people up there waiting to talk. I couldn't follow it much, partly because the microphones distorted the sounds a bit, but someone said there were too many libraries and someone else said there weren't. But the room we were in is amazing; a huge hall with a raised dais at one end, with high vaulted ceilings decorated with beautiful and quite simple floral designs. Behind the speakers was the most immense fresco of some subject I couldn't identify, perhaps the court of King Herod, I'd guess seventeenth century but possibly later. The palazzo which houses all the historical subjects used to be the nunnery of San Giovanni in monte -- the monte is a Cambridge-style hill, i.e. a slight slope, but it's just up from the Gerusalemme church and to pilgrims represented the Mount of Olives, apparently. Then until the 1980s the building served as a jail, possibly the poshest jail in the world.

I probably ought to start doing some of the work I'm here to do... I originally allowed myself a week to settle in but then I decided to extend it because of the hassle of having to find my own place. Maybe on Friday...?

Woolf had a point

A room of one's own and five hundred pounds a year were what Virginia Woolf said people need in order to write. I was pretty dismayed on getting to Bologna to discover that the free accomodation ("shared apartment") that comes with what they call a "fellowship" is a shared bedsit! The woman I'm supposed to share with seems very nice, but is even older than me and also doesn't want to share a bedroom and a single desk for six months. I can't believe the Institute of Advanced Studies really thought that would be OK. It's more common in Italy than in England for students to share a room, but even so, my student days are a long long time behind me. Anyway the amazing thing about not being a teenager any more is you don't have to put up with this sort of thing, so after a short stay in a hotel I have found myself a room in town to move into on Tuesday. It's a large nice room, in a flat shared with two other women, one of whom speaks English, but anyway it will be good for me to try to speak Italian as much as possible. And wonderfully, there is also a cat! The cat is a fluffy grey cat called Figaro, who likes to pounce on imaginary mice. I am very hopeful that this will all work out OK. It's simply not possible for me to sleep in the same room as a complete stranger for months on end; after about a week they would find me shrivelled up in my bed like a dried up monkey, aged by millennia through the constant company.

The problem is that now it is a case of a room of one's own versus the five hundred pounds a year, i.e. financial independence, because the rent will reduce my stipend to the level of a nice gesture. Still it's only for six months so hopefully I won't run up vast debts.

Bologna is otherwise very excellent. There are posters with little tear-off phone number slips on the lamp-posts advertising tuition in Latin and Greek. The department where I will be working is very friendly and surprisingly organised, and it's in a huge sixteenth-century palazzo. Next week I start an intensive "Italiano per stranieri" course. To enrol they made us all introduce ourselves in turn in Italian and when I said was studying palaeography they gave me respect: this has never happened before. So I think I will like it very much here once I've settled in to my new room and unpacked my things.

Obviously I was worried I would have withdrawal symptoms from British TV so I downloaded some 4OD stuff before I left. I have watched the first 3 episodes of Shameless now, and I think it's back to its best. "Well, form is temporary but class is permanent" as Frank Gallagher says. I also watched the first episode of City of Vice, which I quite liked, though there was something rather naive about it somehow. I have read A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo, which is very good, as is Can Any Mother Help Me? by Jenna Bailey, and I am partway through Julian Rathbone's The Mutiny, which is good but odd because I think of him as a very cheeky writer, and this isn't cheeky at all.

Parcelforce says...

...that my copy of Ker's Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon is currently in a depot somewhere unspecified in Germany. This gives me anxiety.

More random stuff

1. I finished Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk. It was funny in places, which was good, but otherwise it did read a bit like a parody. All that spit and semen! Also menstrual blood, disgusting viruses, the action of chemicals in the body described at pretty much molecular level, and self-mutilation. The sort of stuff he does is good for the first few of his books you come across, but I wish he'd broaden it out a bit, maybe write something people could read without mild nausea.

2. We had a works outing today to Westminster Abbey archives and Lambeth Palace conservation centre. The latter was interesting but the former was amazing, because there is a whole balcony overlooking the abbey from above, with a huge twelfth-century oak chest and an even bigger thirteenth-century one, which must have been winched in when the abbey was still being built. Also, lots of thirteenth-century tiles and a huge wall-painting of Richard II's badge, and other great stuff. I particularly liked a fourteenth-century big illuminated Missal in which the opening prayer asking for God's blessing had been altered to invoke King "H" and Queen "N" -- presumably meaning that it was altered from praying for the pope to praying for King Henry and some queen whose name was not specified, perhaps a sensible cautionary measure given Henry VIII's character.

3. The Soulwax album arrived and it's great.

4. This book exists:I will read it sometime. Though that word "beautiful" in the title worries me.

Random Stuff

1. I think this is fantastic. There was a link to it off of the Guardian's music pages the other day. Good things happen about three and a half minutes in, and the last minute is great. I love 2 Many DJs but I tried some Soulwax once and thought it was a bit too rocky, so I've bought the remix album this track comes from off of ebay in the hopes it will be good, and will arrive in time to form the soundtrack of my move to Italy.


2. Every year at the time of my summer exams I used to get this terrible need to write a novel, and this is called a displacement activity. Maybe my life would be different if one time I had just gone with the flow and not struggled through finals etc. Recently I have been getting very appropriate displacement activity urges: when I was meant to be painting I felt the need to crochet an ipod sock; and when I was supposed to be packing and getting rid of books I felt an overpowering urge to start collecting Everyman Classics.
There is a reason for the latter, a good reason. Hardbacks are rubbish. They cost lots; they are difficult to read because unwieldy; they are large making them a hassle to carry or store; they are printed on bad paper with big fonts and lots of space on the page to stretch the text out to a larger book; and they have dustjackets, which are a nuisance to keep on while reading, but even worse if you take them off because then you have to put them somewhere safe and find them again later. Except for academic reference books, hardbacks are not good. The message conveyed by a book in hardback is "Look at me! I am a... (pause for effect) hardback!". You pay extra for that self-importance. But, in the words of Shania Twain, that don't impress me much. I am lucky enough to work with some of the most beautiful books in the world, the more beautiful for being meaningful in many different ways, and they mostly look like nothing special with their covers closed.
There is one exception to the wrongness of hardbacks, which is the old style Everyman Classics -- not the current series, which is even worse than most hardbacks because it tries too hard by having cream covers. The original Everyman hardbacks are the size of a small paperback (thriller/detective novel size rather than literary novel size), and therefore easy to carry. They wear their sturdy format lightly. They may have had dustjackets at one point, but many have now lost them. They also have lovely endpapers and title pages (see below). So I am thinking of starting a collection of battered valueless Everymans. The more stained and imperfect the covers the better, as long as the books can be read without discomfort, and have the insides all intact. Hopefully at some point I will be able to get some more rats to help the shabbiness along; rats are good at customising books to make them less physically pretentious.



3. I'm reading Chuck Palahniuk's Haunted. I'm no distance in and already I've read something so gross I'm going to have to work really hard to forget it, almost in the My Idea of Fun league. It's going to have to be good to make it worthwhile.

Some miscellaneous good stuff

1. I read Lisa Jardine's Ingenious Pursuits, which is quite readable, though it was partly for some work I'm doing not just pleasure. Her Latin is imperfect and she's not always accurate, though. My favourite details are a) that the Royal Society printed far too many copies of a heavily engraved book on fish. Not only did that jeopardise the publication of Newton's Principia, but they had to pay Hooke for his work as the Society's demonstrator in copies of Willoughby's History of Fishes at the nominal value of one pound each. I bet they're worth a bomb now. I think fish are very beautiful, myself. And b) Hans Sloane, introducer of chocolate to England and sort-of founder of the British Museum and British Library, describing some of his natural-history collecting activities in Jamaica:
Though I foresaw the difficulties, yet I had an Intention to try to bring with me from Jamaica some uncommon Creatures alive, such as a large yellow Snake, seven Foot long. I had the Snake tam'd by an Indian, whom it would follow as a Dog would his Master, and after it was deliver'd to me, I kept it in a large earthen Jarr, such as are for keeping the best Water for the Commanders of Ships, during their Voyages, covering its Mouth with two Boards, and laying Weights upon them. I had it fed every Day by the Guts and Garbage of Fowl &c. put into the Jarr from the Kitchen. Thus it liv'd for some time, when being weary of its Confinement, it shov'd asunder the two Boards on the Mouth of the Jarr, and got up to the Top of a large House, wherein lay Footmen and other Domesticks of her Grace the Dutchess of Albemarle, who being afraid to lie down in such Company, shot my Snake dead.

2. I found the notes I took on some lectures which Rowan Williams gave about art a couple of years ago. They were very difficult. I have a bad tendency, when presented with sustained language and concepts which I don't understand, to wonder whether this is being done on purpose by someone who would rather appear clever than be comprehensible; but in the case of Dr Williams I cannot hope that that is the case. He is simply very very intelligent. My notes are consequently a bit hazy. Apparently "Prudence is the ethical reasoning-out of good". Art is when "things are more than they are, and give more than they have". David Jones, loads of whose stuff is in Kettle's Yard, consequently drew an analogy with transubstantiation. And it's OK not to like Eric Gill's work because it is not "wounded by the infinite". (I've usually not liked it because of the child abuse, but I don't think it's really OK not to like art because of the artist's life.) Part of the way through I appear to have given up and just written out some of the lyrics to the Pet Shop Boys' Domino Dancing -- presumably there was some connection in my mind at the time, or maybe it had just given under the strain. Not in these notes, though, is an interesting definition of porn which I remember him giving, which included the late Caravaggio, and also fitted with the way people call the start of Country Life property porn, etc. If I had read more of Williams' stuff I would be a better person; if I had understood more of it I would probably be quite wise. He is the only clergyman who should ever be allowed to talk about sex, for example.

3. I have made a playlist of the campest songs on my ipod to help me pack, and though I says it as oughtn't it is geen-yus. T.A.T.U.'s version of How Soon Is Now?, Dusty Springfield singing I'd Rather Leave While I'm In Love, Tarkan's proper version of Simarik (which Holly whatnot murdered as that Kiss Kiss song), and Girls Aloud's No Good Advice are current favourites.

A small step

Modern life is full of complex challenges, most of which I significantly fail to meet, like filing my utility bills in labelled folders, or remembering the names of the people who live on the same stairs as me. But I have just successfully crocheted my own ipod sock! It's the third attempt, and it's pretty ragged, but I think it's important to rejoice in these small triumphs. Hurray! Below is a picture: on the left, ipod; on the right, sock. I chose an attractive mottled green-brown wool, which didn't photograph that well in artificial light. And hopefully it won't give me static shocks like the polyester case I am currently using. Seriously, this is the first thing I've actually achieved in yonks.

Some notes on stuff

1. I object profoundly to the Kleenex advert where a man takes a sofa out on to the streets and gets people to sit down and have a bit of a cry, with feel good emotional music in the background. Nobody needs that.

2. Amazon.co.uk has just told me that after looking at Ruskin's Stones of Venice 80% of customers buy it, but 6% choose Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows instead.

3. Jill Paton Walsh's Imogen Quy detective books are quite good.

4. An intelligent friend of mine pointed out that the demon-man hybrid aspect of the plot of Beowulf the recent film is entirely present in the original poem, when the Grendel-kin are associated with the Nephilim, the children of fallen angels and human women who provoked the flood. Hurray!

5. Borders has sent me an e-mail to offer 50% off "The Handbook for Exceptional People" by Jez Cartwright, assuring me that it is written in an "easy-to-read fashion" with use of pictures and analogies.

Extract from poem on Day of Judgement

Nis nan witnesse also muchel se monnes a3en horte.
Wa se seið þet he bo hal . him solf wat best his smirte

Morris 1868, p. 163

The import is that our own hearts will condemn us as to the law at the day of judgement. It's a slightly frightening piece, like so much Middle English religious poetry -- very Romans 7, rather than Romans 8.

As a rule, his mornings were filled with bouts of energetic roaring

My only really long-term subscriptions are to the Literary Review, which I first started as an undergraduate, and to the Early English Text Society, which oddly enough I joined as a sixth-former. Otherwise I tend to try a subscription but not renew. Still, every now and then The Believer comes up with something like this, about the man after whom the venerable Warburg Institute is named: Ghost stories for the very adult, by Leland de la Durantaye: so maybe I'll stick with it.

Half submerged in water in order to reduce the stress caused by its vast size

Thank-you Fiona for telling me about this rat the size of a hippo. I could have been its pet human!

A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought

I was flicking through the channels yesterday when ITV3, which seems to be dedicated entirely to repeats of old adaptations of golden age murder mysteries, produced an episode of the late 80s version of Dorothy L. Sayers' Have His Carcase. This was a big nostalgia thing for me because I watched them with my parents the first time round, when I was 10, and consequently read the books. Sayers first invented Wimsey as a frivolous character, who acts foppishly to hide his debilitating shell shock, particularly in Murder Must Advertise, where he spends much of the time dressed as a harlequin. But once the Harriet Vane books start he's much more serious. In the last Harriet is investigating some nasty poison pen letters and vandalism at a women's college in Oxford, and fears to discover that the chaste spinster life will have turned some of the fellows loony; only to find out that the perpetrator is a "normal" woman with children. She marries Wimsey anyway. I fell head over heels in love with Peter Wimsey; I did realise even at the time that it was a bit naff he was a lord, but I couldn't resist his intelligence and his patience with Harriet Vane. I used to follow up the quotations at the start of each chapter, and also the quotations made by Harriet and Peter if I could tell where they came from. This was a harder thing to do before the internet made it easy to find obscure books, and when I had very little money to spend, but I put a list of items on the wall by my bed and tracked them down over a long period, and in that way discovered some really excellent books. Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici; the poetry of Donne and Herbert; Tristram Shandy; Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy; Ernest Bramah's The Wallet of Kai Lung; Boccaccio's Decameron; and probably others I can't think of right now. And coincidentally this morning my post included another of them, a copy of Thomas Lovell Beddoes' Death's Jest Book, which I only recently managed to track down in an affordable paperback edition. It's a mad nineteenth-century blank verse attempt at a Jacobean Revenge tragedy by one of those romantics who took it all rather hard and eventually killed themselves. The list of characters ends with "Homunculus Mandrake, zany to a mountebank", and it all looks rather hard work, but I'm in just the mood for that given that most modern fiction is rubbish.

Hurray for Dorothy L. Sayers! She was an interesting individual too. She fell head over heels in love with someone who was not really a very good idea. He asked her to go and live with him; for religious reasons she said No sex outside marriage; he replied that marriage was a bourgeois institution to which he objected on multitudinous very high-minded grounds. This stalemate continued for a while; then he suddenly married someone else. She felt like an utter fool to have taken his objections seriously rather than personally, and naturally went out and slept with the first man she met -- a lodger in the same house as her, who worked on motorcycles. She got pregnant from this. She managed to conceal it from everyone, and for the last couple of months went away to stay with a cousin of hers who took in foster children, but she arranged for her mail and phone calls to be relayed to her so efficiently that no one even knew she had left London. She left the baby with her cousin and supported him from afar. Whatever psychological damage she may have done to this poor kid who didn't even know that this frequent visitor was his mother until he was 10 or so, I can't help admiring someone so human but also so efficient at coping with a difficult and at the time very scandalous circumstance. She continued to support herself through her writing, and eventually married someone terribly shell-shocked; they "adopted" her son. She was renowned for striding around Oxford in strange clothes humming Bach loudly to herself.

Good work Sweden!

Also I do like the idea that there is a Swedish girl pop duo called West End Girls who exist purely to cover Pet Shop Boys singles. One of them even does a Chris Lowe and just stands around looking sulky.





I phoned Ikea the other day in a foul mood because they had delivered the wrong stuff to me, and they put me on hold with Abba singing Lay All Your Love On Me, and it just didn't seem worth staying angry. There has never been a better accent for pop. (Except possibly Baccara, who have never sounded that Spanish to me.) Also Neil Hannon wrote a good song about Sweden. It's here on YouTube, but with a poor video some filmschool student made.

Notes on disappointing books

I am reading A. M. Homes' This Book Will Change Your Life and it's boring me. I don't like to be snobby but I think maybe I should stop reading Richard and Judy choices. I recently finished The Book Thief by Markus Zusak and that wasn't so great either. It was readable enough I suppose, but had a terribly schlocky death scene at the end. Apples by Richard Milward was also disappointing after the rave Guardian reviews. Probably it would have had more impact if I were likely to be shocked by the idea of teenagers having lots of grubby sex; I suppose it's just another way in which the Guardian is about 20/30 years out of date. I don't know why I read The Self-Preservation Society by Kate Harrison; it's really the sort of thing one should only read while recovering from a great emotional trauma, in the same way that in the aftermath of a nasty breakup a friend of mine found she couldn't bear to watch anything on TV except for Will and Grace.

Actually good is Mary Wortley Montagu's Life on the Golden Horn, one of those small Penguin paperbacks, an interesting but brief selection of letters she wrote from a diplomatic expedition to Istanbul in the early eighteenth century. I think I will read a longer compilation of her stuff some time. Maybe I should switch to biography and history for a bit. I need some good books! Some proper literature. Something substantial but not too indigestible. Something reliable by someone who can write.

Mooses are good at least:
http://moosefarm.newmail.ru/mfe01.htm
Kiss a lovely moose today! Also this bloke's illustrations are gently cheering. I like his portable halo here. Also the undercover pig, although I fear for said pig's future.

Kostantiniyye part 3

I was going to blog some more about İstanbul but I've been too busy doing other stuff. I definitely intend to go back, and I will stay longer and see more mosaics. The Istanbul Archaeological Museum is great, with the Alexander sarcophagus which Fiona said rendered Michelangelo unnecessary, and statuary displayed very well with huge pictures on the walls of details which I might otherwise have missed, but I didn't manage the first and second floors, with their stuff from Troy; plus I never made it over to the Asian side of the city. Here is a fishing boat near Eminönü, looking over the Golden Horn towards where the Genovan colony used to be.


PS Eminönü is fun to say.

More about Fraser

Typically sensible stuff about George McDonald Fraser from Neil Gaiman (in the middle of a long post). I'd noticed that the obituaries have been surprisingly pro-Flash, and it's true that the books are much better when he's being a cast-iron scoundrel. Newspapers aren't very capable of subtlety, are they?

So, farewell then General Flashman

George MacDonald Fraser, author of the Flashman novels, has died. Now we will never have the full details of the briefly-alluded to sordid episode in the Parker Library.

John Sutherland has written in the Guardian about how Americans never got Flash, and how this just goes to show how British he is. He is a genuinely revolting anti-hero for much of the time, and the amount of vileness people will put up with in a hero varies hugely. Nick Hornby can't stand the Charlie Mortdecai books, for example. But I liked Flash: he drank Tokay; he seduced women; he rode fast horses; he cheated at cricket; if pursued through the Russian snow by knout-wielding cossacks he would happily push his sleeping lover off the back of the sleigh to increase speed; he felt no qualms about living off the earnings of infatuated hookers; and I learnt a huge amount about the military cock-ups of the nineteenth century by reading the copious endnotes provided by his editor. He wasn't just pretending to be nasty, he was the real thing, and a wonderful antidote to Tom Brown's Schooldays, if you have had the misfortune to read it.

Kostantiniyye part 2

6. I loved Agia Sophia -- for a start, isn't it cool to have a church dedicated to Holy Wisdom? The bit about Wisdom calling in the market-place is the main place in the Bible where God is referred to as female; I remember my uncle Paul, who is a URC minister, telling me that when I was quite small, because he comes from the civilised non-sexist side of my family. The Orthodox church interprets her as Christ before he was incarnated and they have a good icon, where Wisdom has a bright red face for reasons I forget.
Unhappily, I could tell that Fiona was distinctly unimpressed by Agia Sophia. It's true it's not in the greatest shape. The dome is huge, and a good section is filled with a construction of iron scaffolding so immense as to be impressive in its own right. (Apparently this is for surveying purposes, and they will move it every ten years until they have looked at the whole building, and then they can decide what to do about its terrible structural deformations.) The massive calligraphic roundels, put up in the nineteenth century, disappointingly turn out just to say the names of Allah, Muhammed, the caliphs, and the prophet's grandsons, rather than anything profound about God. The building was converted from the head church of Orthodoxy to a great mosque within three days of the fall of Constantinople in 1453, and only a few mosaics survive. One is the Virgin and Child; apparently a similar image was the only one not destroyed by Muhammed when he cleansed the Kaaba at Mecca, which I completely don't understand. There's also a very fine fourteenth-century deisis, and various emperors and empresses giving things to Christ. I liked the one of that termagent Zoe and her husband -- whose name and face had been changed at least once according to political circumstances. But it seemed sad that the whole place is no longer used for anything sacred. Ataturk turned it into a museum in the 1920s, and it has a very secular busy air, no one keeping their voices down. I'm biased, and would have liked it to have been a church, but at least if it were a mosque there would seem some point to its not being a church any more. When the army of Mehmet the conqueror breached the defences of Constantinople the orthodox priests who were celebrating the liturgy in Agia Sophia are said to have gathered up the sacred vessels and disappeared into the walls behind the altar, where they await the return of orthodoxy to the empire.