Some more things

Inane newspaper statement of the weekend
In an article about people divorcing in their 20s: "But it is not an exclusively female problem".

Excellent relatives
My brother and his wife have given up supermarkets for Lent, which is a very good idea. Tim says that it's odd how much less rubbish they have, and how much more compostable material, given that he thought that the main thing they bought at supermarkets was loose vegetables anyway. They now get their eggs from a place where you take your own empty egg cartons.

Cassiodorus update
I read each Psalm before I read what Cassiodorus has to say about it, but he's working from the Old Latin text, with occasional variants from Jerome's translations, while I'm using the King James version. (I often read them aloud to the rats, like the Fairing after whom I named this blog. Audrey seems to like this; she looks at me intently for a long time, then runs up onto my shoulder, licks my nose, and runs away again very fast.) I got to one of my favourites the other day, My heart is inditing of a good matter, set by Handel as a beautiful anthem. I was a little taken aback to see that Cassiodorus had it as "My heart has belched forth a good word". "We use the word belched," he goes on to explain, "when the abundant food which we have eaten emits vapour which allows the healthiest digestion. But how great was the spiritual feast with which this man had been so filled that he belched forth the secret source of so goodly an odour~!" There's something about the style as well as the content of this which encapsulates the enjoyable flavour of absurdity in translations from medieval Latin.

Paronomasia
Otherwise the translation annoys me a bit by interpreting those serious puns of which medieval writers were so fond -- I suppose the nearest modern equivalent would be expressions like "herstory" -- as attempts as etymologies. Take "mentiri est contra mentem loqui", to lie is to speak against the mind; this is clearly word play, but the translator adds a sniffy footnote saying the suggestion is fanciful.

Mrs Pilkington
I'm reading an excellent biography of Laetitia Pilkington, who was divorced by her licentious husband when he found a young man in her room. (She claimed they were just reading together, and that her husband had set it up to be rid of her.) Previously a favourite of Swift, she was now abandoned by everyone she knew, and removed from all contact with her children. She just about managed to support herself by writing, and was generally rather interesting. Asked on her deathbed if she forgave her husband she said that if she were to die, then yes, but if she lived then the feud would go on. Before the divorce, at a time when she realised that her husband was seeing other women and perhaps anxious to be rid of her, perhaps even making vague efforts to pimp her out to a rich rake, she wrote some excellent angry verse:

Strephon, your Breach of Faith and Trust
Affords me no Surprize;
A Man who Grateful was, or Just,
Might make my Wonder rise.

That Heart to you so fondly ty'd,
With Pleasure wore its Chain,
But from your cold neglectful Pride,
Found Liberty again.

For this no Wrath inflames my Mind,
My Thanks are due to thee,
Such Thanks as gen'rous Victors find
Who set their Captives free.

Also good, this extract:

Go then, Inconstant, go, and rove,
Forget thy Vows, neglect thy Love;
Some senseless, tasteless, Girl pursue,
Bought Smiles befit such Swains as you;
While for the worst I see you change,
You give me a compleat Revenge.

I've often wished that some woman had answered Rochester.

D'antan

My new toy is a little scanning device. It can't do books or objects. But it turns photocopied articles into pdfs, and recovers pictures from yesteryear.



This is my secondary-school first year form group photo, when we were eleven and twelve. We're so young we haven't yet ditched the purse belts. I'm in the front row, looking like Neil from the Young Ones. The odd thing is how completely some people's personalities come over from the image -- Alison's slightly quizzical look at the camera seems pretty typical, and Nikki, the very blonde one in the middle row, is grinning in the way that usually meant she was about to say something really rude -- but some people's just don't. Melody, the shortest one in the back row, just looks terribly young. I'm quite happy to own my awkward grimace.


I also have a collection of horse photos in an album, helpfully labelled with their characteristics, e.g. "Flossie: small, fast, woolly". The above is Marlborough -- actually the stables spelt it Marlboro -- who was my favourite. He was very fast, and he really wanted to be out hunting. If you caught him in a good mood he was the best thing ever, but if you annoyed him at all, or left him too much to his own devices, he would get rid of you quickly and without regret. He was more dangerous than ecstacy. I've never taken ecstacy but I bet he was also a lot more fun. It's an amazing feeling to be able to communicate with another type of consciousness, and to co-operate with them, and also they can go so fast. However, the fact that I have never taken ecstacy has a lot to do with Marlborough the horse. I fell off him a number of times, on one occasion getting short-term amnesia à la Memento for about twenty-four hours, one of the most frightening experiences of my life. It left me significantly unwilling to mess with my brain in any unnecessary way -- I was scared of alcohol for quite a while.

Indignation!

1. Well, once more I'm having a frustrating time with work-related stuff about which I do not feel I can appropriately blog; and guess what, it's the same two culprits as last time. Luckily I only occasionally have to deal with them -- the people I actually work with day-to-day are all great. They're a witty and erudite bunch, and I shall miss them almost as much as the manuscripts when we're all out of a job this autumn. If anyone's looking to hire a travelling digitisation team we'd be interested to hear from you.

2. Overheard in the UL: "Bugger the man! If he was sat there now (gestures at seat opposite) I would gob in his face! I'd tell him to stick his crozier up his arse!".

I was doing that unwilling eavesdropping thing in a very crowded tea-room. The speaker had already managed to come over as a remarkably unappealing person. From references to his "disciplinary hearing" I understood that he was a compromised Anglican vicar. The problem with the CofE is that the "priests" and bishops think it's all about them -- read the Church Times and despair. It's stuff like this that makes me yearn to immanentize the eschaton, although I know it's wrong. (In the socialist/communist sense, not the crazy dispensationalist lets-all-breed-red-heifers sense. I'm all for red heifers -- there are some beautiful Devon Reds around my parents' village -- but I'm firmly against their use as tools of political oppression. Poor cows.)

3. I went to a seminar yesterday, of the sort where people sit round a large boardroom table and others draw chairs up behind them. The girl sat next to me spent the entire time first cleaning and biting her nails, and then using a pair of clippers to trim and file them. Maybe I should have some stickers made up which say "Your behaviour has earned you a mention on my blog" which I could unobtrusively attach guerilla style to the belongings of those who annoy me. It would be like the M.R. James story "Casting the Runes" where someone slips an accursed runic inscription into a victim's pocket in the UL, with unpleasant results.

What is wrong with the Royal Bank of Scotland

apart from the obvious.

1. About five years ago they suddenly and without warning removed from my current account just under one hundred and sixty thousand pounds. It turned out that someone had mistyped a sort code. They repaid it, and also refunded the eight thousand pounds in unarranged overdraft charges and interest which had accrued in the few days before I noticed. But they did not say sorry.

The odd thing is that when I saw that I had about one hundred and sixty thousand pounds less in my account than I was expecting my immediate reaction was to try to work out what I had spent it on. Then I realised that I had not recently bought any houses.

2. A few years ago it was impossible for me to go into the branch without them offering me large sums of money at (they assured me) very reasonable interest rates. The conversation would go something like
me: I'd like to pay in this cheque please.
cashier: Certainly. Did you know that you are pre-approved for a seven thousand pound unsecured personal loan? You can take it away today!
me: Thank-you very much but I'd prefer not (seethes inside with concealed anger).
I think this is immoral. I've had times of dodgy finance when I might have said yes. Also immoral: mortgages of 100% or more.

3. The first time they sent me a customer satisfaction survey I filled it in, with a warm feeling that they cared what I think. The second time I filled it in, grumpily. The many many times since then I have just thrown them in the bin. I have also refused to complete them in the branch -- about a year ago they stopped trying to get me to take loans, at around the same time that I cleared my overdraft, the cynical bastards, and started pushing surveys on me instead. They still send me the surveys, maybe every month or two. They are glossy and expensively produced, and rouse me to unhealthy, disproportionate paroxysms of fury!

4. Today I popped in to pay in a cheque. The cashier said that I had not had a premier account customer discussion. I said yes. She said why don't you do that right now. I said because I have other places to be; can't I just have a leaflet? She said No; how about tomorrow? I said I'll be at work -- what a shame that this branch isn't open at weekends! Here she wrongfooted me -- apparently it is now open on Saturdays. Could I make eleven o'clock? she inquired. I don't know, I said, I might be out of town on Saturday. Well, she said, here is a letter confirming your appointment, you can call to rearrange if you find you can't make it. Maybe I should have been really firm with her but she was young and hyper and aggressively helpful in a way that scared me a bit. The letter says I have to bring two forms of ID and bank statements for all my bank accounts and other financial holdings or liabilites. I wonder if they're all running a pool on how long it'll be before I phone up to cancel?

But basically, not to over-react or anything, they can all f*** off and die. I'm so fed up with the new tone of bank adverts on TV. Dearie me, they say, have you been a foolish customer? Have you been saving too little and spending too much? Never mind, we're here to sort you out, you silly billy. Whereas in reality we're here to sort them out, whether we like it or not. People complain about the government but I'd rather be patronised by them than by any sort of corporation. Couldn't we have some sort of revolution? Perhaps a twitter-based one, so that no one gets physically hurt? In the meantime my mortgage is with RBS so I think I'm stuck with them. Don't even get me started on my endowment account...

The bulls of Bashan

Well, Cassiodorus is quite hard work. It's taking up my entire rat-exercising hour every night, but I am now nearly half-way through the first volume, and I've ordered the other two from amazon. I'm enjoying it in an austere sort of way. Setting a fixed target of stuff to read and then just working through it is the opposite of thinking, and enjoyable in its way -- no tyranny of the blank page here.

You can buy stickers from Muji that you put down the spines of books -- they have two thin ribbons attached, so that you've got a pair of place-keepers like the ones sometimes built into a hardback binding.

Yesterday I did both Psalms 22 (23), which is painful, and 23 (24), which is soothing. Psalm 22 reminded of this extract from a translation which I came across once:
Then Lord depart not now from me
In this my present griefe
Since I have none to be my helpe
My succour and reliefe.
So many Buls do compasse me
That be full strong of head:
Yea Buls so fat as though they had
In Basan fieldes bene fed.

They gape upon me gredely
As though they would me slay:
Much lyke a Lion roring out
And ramping for his prey.
But I droope downe like water shed,
My jointes in sunder breake:
My hart doth in my body melt,
Like waxe against the heate.

It's supposed to be from the 1569 Geneva Bible but I've never found the same version elsewhere. Maybe I should try the Rare Books room sometime. I taught under the name of Eadwig Basan a few years back -- it wasn't my idea but my boss's, because there were two of us who were arranging our own division of labour, so he put us down under that name in the lecture list.

Ashes

1. I've just finished Henry VIII's Last Victim: The Life and Times of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, by Jessie Childs. Henry VIII executes him in the end, as the title rather gives away, but after the Congo books (I also reread Heart of Darkness) there's something rather restful about brutality which is individually targeted, intentional, and which no one is pretending is for the victim's own good.

2. Today is Ash Wednesday. This Lent, as a bit of a cop-out from anything that involves actual engagement, I am going to read Cassiodorus on the Psalms, either one Psalm per day doing one quinquagene each Lent for three years, or three Psalms per day in order to finish by Easter. (There are 47 days in Lent -- because Sundays don't count towards the 40 -- so I'll have to have a few days with extra Psalms.) I ought to do the former and read it properly in a medieval lectio divina style, moving through lectio, contemplatio, oratio and meditatio. In her second Sandars lecture yesterday Michelle Brown pointed out that almost all of us are illiterate in the sense in which that term was understood by Bede and his contemporaries. But I think I shall just read it, modernly and illiterately, although sometimes I feel tired of only ever scraping the surface of anything. The translation of the first fifty arrived this morning. It has an excellent index of "Arguments, Definitions, Syllogisms, Types of Speech" -- syllogisms come in categorical, enthymematic, epichirema, and hypothetical -- and another of figures of speech, which is full of things like synecdoche and paronomasia which I once knew about and others like tapeinosis and cacozelon which are completely new to me. This Silva rhetoricae should help.

And I'm not going to get my forehead marked with ashes, either -- I did consider it but this year's procession starts at the Corpus emo-bling clock, which put me off.

3. In non-religious news, here is an excellent Britney song -- though it takes a few minutes to kick in. The bassline is quite I Feel Love:

Some things

1. My Margaret book has been catalogued under the wrong author surname in several UK and US libraries. I think maybe I should just embrace all possible variants of my name and learn to love them. The interview I did for Woman's Hour was repeated the other day, presumably because snow staffing problems led them to scrape the repeats barrel, and I got a nice letter to "Ms. Rochefort" from a lady in Sidcup who wants to learn Old English. My foolish uncle thinks we're descended from Huguenots. He is almost certainly wrong.

2. Young undergraduate Matthew Parker earned 40 shillings a year plus the right to eat with the manciple when he became Bible Clerk at Corpus Christi in 1520 -- the income was derived from a property recently given to the college, very probably the Eagle. Nowadays the profits of that pub do not go towards having someone read the Bible out loud to the fellows over lunch. I wonder what they are spent on.

3. I have just finished Lucy Worsley's Cavalier and George Mann's Affinity Bridge. Both of them were unexpectedly dull. I might have enjoyed the Cavalier book if I hadn't been expecting a racy biography. It's written in a series of (masque-like) scenes, one day each and several years apart, which means that anything dramatic happens in brackets like in To The Lighthouse, and instead of a narrative there are tons of details about how exactly the household structure worked. I thought it was interesting that oak branches were a royalist symbol long before 1651, but that's as far as it went, really. Affinity Bridge is a steampunk murder mystery set in a Victorian London filled with airships and automatons, with the occasional zombie lurching out of the pea-soupers, and it really shouldn't be more boring than the biography of Richard Bentley which I have also been reading on and off.

4. I have also just finished Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost, a brilliant book, very readable, and also horrendous. It's about the Congo and is full of terrible facts, like Stanley's enthusiastic comment on the Maxim gun, which could fire 600 bullets a minute, that it would be "of valuable service in helping civilisation to overcome barbarism"; or that in 1906 the Bronx Zoo in New York exhibited a black man from the Congo called Ota Benga in their monkey house. King Leopold seems to have been a remarkably evil man; he had, for example, a subscription at a London brothel whereby for eight hundred pounds a month they kept him supplied with girls, warranted virgin, aged from ten to fifteen. These terrible but discrete things are easier to write about than the main issue, the mass murder and slave labour. Vast numbers of people died -- maybe about ten million, but it's hard to tell because the deaths counted so little to the killers that they weren't recorded. The aim of the colonists was to extract as much ivory and rubber as possible, and the deaths of the forced labourers (known as liberés, 'freed people', and often referred to as volunteers) only seem to have been of interest insofar as they kept the remaining slaves in a state of fear on the one hand, or diminished the size of the workforce on the other. For the first time ever I felt some twinges of relief that our current bunch of constitutional monarchs are traditionally brainless -- you can't imagine Prince Harry setting up a huge colony and enslaving its population for vast profits while gathering donations from philanthropists on the grounds that it's all a selfless humanitarian exercise. Probably the undergraduates who toasted Empire at a dinner the other night should have to read this book.

Honest Abe; and some other good stuff

I enjoyed Doris Kearns Goodwin's biography of Abraham Lincoln, Team of Rivals -- actually it's more a group biography of him and some of his contemporaries. This tactic works very well in putting into context things like passionate friendships and disturbing statements about race. I particularly liked the evocative names, and got a bit carried away in collecting them. Schuyler Colfax; Eldridge Spaulding; Thurlow Weed; Millard Fillmore; Reverdy Johnson; Lyman Trumbull; Hannibal Hamlin; Montgomery Meigs; Amasa Sprague; Elmer Ellsworth; Roscoe Conkling; Hamilton Gamble; Ulric Dahlgren; Junius Booth; Elihu Washburne; Jubal Early; Pamphila Walcott; Erastus Corning; Orpheus C. Kerr; Murat Halstead; Ithamar Chase, his brother the bishop Philander Chase, and his son Salmon Chase. The last wanted to change his name, finding it "awkward, fishy"; which is such a wonderfully Pynchonesque way of putting it.

I know very little about American history. I've never really found it that interesting. This Lincoln biography, which has been huge in America, has been marketed on the assumption that all that has changed since November. I counted eight mentions of Obama on the outside of the book and only five of Lincoln -- Obama even makes it onto the spine, which Lincoln doesn't. I was sufficiently influenced by a positive write-up in the Literary Review to overlook this annoying attempt at relevance. Another reason for my change of heart may be because I've always looked upon the Roman Republic and America as similar in the way that their self-satisfied claims to be founded on high principles just make their revolting failures of moral behaviour all the more depressing; but recently I've been really enjoying learning about the Roman Republic in the History of Rome podcast, which is the best podcast, especially if you discount ones which are just edited highlights of radio shows.

Anyway my ignorance meant that some things surprised me. I hadn't known that at this period the Democratic party was automatically seen as the party of slavery and the agricultural south, rather than the industrialised north. (Which made me think, probably irrelevantly, of this map from the excellent Strange Maps blog.) That the Republican Party arose out of the Whig party also surprised me. Mostly however I was struck by the fact that 1860 really isn't that long ago. It's the era of my great-great-grandparents, and I can remember some of my great-grandparents. But even that recently some terrible things were being said about race not just by those who supported slavery, which you'd expect, but by those who opposed it. Everyone was keen to dodge the accusation that they believed in racial equality. Even as Lincoln was waiting for the right moment to make the Emancipation Proclamation he was trying to persuade a delegation of freed slaves to support a mass emigration movement to settle in colonies in Africa; and the ex-slave Frederick Douglass's emotional response to being allowed to enter the White House, and being treated as a man by Lincoln, is touching and upsetting. I knew that it was a naive view to see the American Civil War as just about slavery, with the righteous North trying to stamp out the evil, but I suppose I was surprised because British opinion by that date was mostly more advanced. Am I not a man and a brother? etc. But maybe I only think this because I only read biographies of the sort of people who were likely to be on that side of the debate. I think I will look out a good biography of Frederick Douglass, who sounds like a remarkable man.

I was also disturbed by the author's anxiety to distance Lincoln from depression at all. She says that he had melancholy instead. Apparently "melancholy differs from depression. It is not an illness; it does not proceed from a specific cause; it is an aspect of one's nature ... perhaps genetically based." Her logic seems to be that Lincoln functioned as a human being and as a president and that therefore he can't have ever suffered from mental illness. It seems rather old-fashioned to me to see mental illness as necessarily incapacitating, rather than something with which people might be able to deal. Actually it makes me very angry. I also dislike the Stephen Fry madness-and-genius thing, which runs the risk of being a bit like that old patronising attitude that blind people have remarkably developed senses of smell and hearing, etc. I think that both of these are harmful; people who find themselves mentally unwell should not have to think that they are now incapacitated and unable to contribute, or that they now have to do genius things to justify it and not be a double-loser. If people in general had a better sense that this is an illness that can be cured or managed then maybe people might deal with it better, maybe there could even be fewer deaths. For now this is the end of my rant, but I might return to it at some point.

In other news
I like the Black Cab Sessions. Here is Benjamin Zephaniah doing an excellent The Wrong Radio Station. Here's Amanda Palmer doing Radiohead's Creep, always a fantastic and moving song. Here's Lykke Li.

Also good; Amanda Palmer's I Google You song, with lyrics written by Neil Gaiman. Someone I work with joined an academic networking site which he didn't realise at the time would subsequently e-mail to tell him every time he's googled -- he finds it disconcerting.


And this is still great!

Spending money on books

Waterstone's have an overseas fiction section in their 3-for-2 offer. From it you should buy Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita; Szerb's Voyage by Moonlight; and Calvino's Invisible Cities.

I keep forgetting to write about what I've been reading, plus I'm still doing a lot of rereading at the moment -- lately John Julius Norwich's History of Byzantium, which I have certainly blogged about before. I read the new Patrick McGrath, Trauma, which is quite good, but I don't think he has ever quite got back to the heights of Asylum, which is a spooky modern Gothic story about a 1950s woman who falls in love with a mental patient, or Dr Haggard's Disease, which is also about obsessive love, though I forget the details. I also read the new Naomi Novik Temeraire book, which made me smile. I think that, like J.K. Rowling, she has an appealing natural honesty in her work. In this book Lawrence and Temeraire have to face the consequences of their decision to do the moral thing at the end of the last book, including worries about whether it was really the moral thing to do after all. I'd recommend the series if you want something easy to read and friendly but not annoyingly vacant, or they'd be good for children too I expect. I read Heather McGowan's Schooling because a friend recommended it, and it is very good. It's a sort of stream-of-consciousness story of a thirteen-/fourteen-year-old girl whose father sends her to an English boarding school after the death of her mother. The problem with stream-of-consciousness stuff is that I just don't think like that; I mostly think in sentences, certainly with proper words in (and sometimes I find myself going back to correct split infinitives); and if someone nearby says something aloud it in no way becomes jumbled with what I'm thinking. Everything doesn't rush at me at once. If the inside of someone's head was really like McGowan's Schooling then I think they would be mentally ill to a quite significant degree. The interesting thing is that I didn't use to think this about stream-of-consciousness when I first encountered it as a teenager. Either I was less critical then, or the way my brain thinks has changed and everything did use to rush at me at once, which may be true. Plus I read The Aviary Gate by Katie Hickman. I quite enjoyed it -- it's not challenging stuff, and it annoyed me on the first page when someone discovers a "parchment" with a watermark, but then "person finds interesting manuscript in the Bodleian" is one of the great story-lines, and I do intend to write one myself one day. There's a lot about western slave-girls entering the Sultan of Constantinople's harem, written in a way which must have made the publishers think "bingo!". The odd thing is that when I finished it and read the thanks at the end I discovered that she's married to A.C. Grayling. Somehow that doesn't seem quite congruent with writing racy orientalist historical fiction. And I read Conspiracies of Rome by Richard Blake. I nearly didn't pick this up because the hero is described in the blurb as a Briton called Aelric, but actually this was explained in the book, and most of its inaccuracies are arguable -- the Donation of Constantine is now thought to have been forged rather later than that, and the description of book production was more late medieval than early. I can never quite believe that the use of imposition in manuscript-making was more than a daft passing fad. The story is OK, but the blurb likens the main character to Flashman, which he isn't at all. I'll probably read the next one. Also I read The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce by Paul Torday, which was a real downer.

In other news I'm very annoyed because I just found out something I didn't know about bookland (not a land full of books but a type of Anglo-Saxon land tenure). And here is a good song:

and here is a fantastic one:

Mandatory conferences

Well, the decree has come from California: I've got to go to Newfoundland for ISAS this July. It's not that I'm not interested in seeing Newfoundland, it's just that the travelling will be so long and complex, and when I get there I will be surrounded by Anglo-Saxonists. I know many Anglo-Saxonists of whom I am fond as individuals but en masse they do not thrill me. At least it's a proper conference with proper intelligent papers, unlike Kalamazoo -- WHICH I ALSO HAVE TO ATTEND!

There's an Anne Tyler book called the Accidental Tourist which has a character who goes around writing travel books for people who would rather be at home. It tells them where they can get a good burger (this being an American book) in all sorts of obscure places. I wouldn't go that far, and I certainly don't want to pretend I'm still in Cambridge. But some guidance would be helpful. Most people who go to Newfoundland presumably have decided to go there, so they already know why they want to be there. I'd like to know what I might enjoy in Newfoundland. I understand the local accent is endearing, and I might see some whales. But some more help would be good.

The programme for Kalamazoo is out now. My session is at 8.30 on the Sunday morning. Not only does this mean that no one will come, making the whole exercise even more pointless, but I can't leave before the Saturday night disco like I did last time. I could always not go to the disco -- but I fear I will turn up to revolt myself at the sight of all those professors dancing revoltingly with their conference wives, or with oddly-flattered postgraduates. I think I will arrive half-way through the week since I can't leave early, though this does mean I will miss such papers as "Holy Shitheads: The Path of Unreason and “Wasted” Thought in Medieval Saints" (shouldn't there be a "' Lives" on the end there?), "Our Father’s Eggs: The Use of the Paternoster as a Medieval Timing Device", and "The Pleasures of Fecopoet[h]ics". Looking through I find that all the usual suspects are there. There's enough Tolkien that you could probably get through the whole conference without encountering any other author, and more papers (i.e. some) on Elvish than on Welsh. (Elvish is essentially Welsh, but Welsh is a real language with real medieval texts in it.) Of course there are also mentions of the Buffyverse, J.K. Rowling, online RPGs, the blogosphere, and 9/11. There's also a paper on that YouTube clip of some people rapping Chaucer, and quite a lot about Angelina Jolie. Will I survive the experience with any remaining feeling of connection to academia? I think I'm using the term "academia" here deliberately in opposition to the term "scholarship". Scholarship I still love; I'd like to be a scholar.

OMG!!1!

I'm on cute overload! (Well not me, obviously.)

News from 1731

A website with digitised searchable images of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century newspapers has just been released. I got an e-mail about it at about 3.30 yesterday afternoon, which according to google reader stats is the slowest part of my day, so I decided to investigate the reports of the Cottonian fire. Most of the digitised images are taken from British Library copies of the journals, so it was interesting to see large crosses in the margin by the mentions of the fire, added perhaps by Madden? Here's the Daily Advertiser for Monday October 25th 1731, in their miscellaneous news section:

On Saturday Morning about 2 o'clock, a very terrible Fire broke out at the late Earl of Ashburnham's House near Westminster Abbey, where the Cottonian Library was kept: It did great Damage to the House, and consum'd several valuable MSS. belonging to that Collection; but by the Diligence of the Firemen, and others who assisted thereat, the St. James's and Alexandrian Libraries were preserv'd, tho' with great Difficulty.

This is fair enough, though the "Alexandrian Library" is, as far as I know, just one book, the Codex Alexandrinus. But the next paragraph of news caught my eye:

The Mail from Chelsea of the 19th Instant informs us, that a Person who lives not many Miles from the Church in that Town, was dreadfully frighted by 12 Specters who came posting thro' the Room where he was in Bed, burst open the Curtains, and bristling up, cry'd out, Blood and Thunder; he observ'd that their Noses were of an uncommon Length, and they breath'd their Words thro' their Nostrils; which gave them a Twang that was not over delicate, and not far unlike the Sound of a Bag-pipe. The poor terrified Creature would not describe the Shape of these Visions. ----- But our last Letters from the above mentioned Town relate, that a dozen Hogs were cruelly murthered by a Butcher within the Atmosphere of it, and suffer'd to run about the Streets (the Blood streaming all the way) the instant the Knife had pierced their Entrails, to the great Dismay and Scandal of the human Parts of the Inhabitants.

Perhaps heartened by the thought of the spectres with noses of uncommon length, the writer went on in speculative vein:

A Gentlewoman in but indifferent Circumstances, having a Ticket in the Lottery that came up a prize of 1000 l, was seiz'd with such sudden Joy, that she burst into a Flood of Tears, and continu'd in that extasy for four and twenty Hours. As Joy is productive of such fatal Effects, it perhaps would be necessary that the Bodies of the several Adventurers in the State-Lottery, should be prepar'd in something after the same manner as for Innoculation.

I have no idea what precautions were taken when people were innoculated in 1731 -- probably something more substantial than just sitting down for fifteen minutes like you have to at my doctor's.

Music

Music I have been discovering, or re-, ordered according to appropriate occasion:
• If you're alone (because you're going to want to yodel along): spotify; youtube
• If you're looking for something that sounds like it's from the mellower bit of a Tarantino film (it's in Kill Bill 2, which I haven't seen): spotify, youtube
• You're in a Bollywood strings mood: spotify, youtube
• You're looking for a catchy song about being broken-hearted/playing ping pong: spotify, youtube
• You want some gospel-euro-camp (I'm making an Alexander Bard playlist): spotify, youtube
• You want to listen to someone shouting in a badly-sustained estuary accent (I wonder if daddy's a bishop?): spotify, youtube
• You yearn for anti-romantic Scandinavian electronica from a couple of years ago: spotify, youtube
• You're wondering how the Pussycat Dolls are feeling about fame these days: spotify, youtube
• You feel ancient (but justified): spotify, youtube
• You're trying to get through something: spotify, youtube

Hard work

If I were doing one of those books where you set yourself some pointless task and then write about it I would spend a year doing what the Guardian told me to. Reading that newspaper has become increasingly hard work. Every weekend there are supplements telling you to learn Portuguese, or set up a comprehensive exercise routine based on the workouts of Olympic athletes, or save something or other, or learn to play the piano. That's not even counting the main newspaper itself, which is full of things one's supposed to think or want. Currently they have a "1000 books everyone must read" supplement. This is just so pointlessly annoying. If they had called it "1000 books you might like" then I'd have collected the series of supplements and looked through them with interest. As it is each one just seems like an aggressive act, and all about setting you a checklist to fail against rather than actually about sharing some interesting book recommendations. If I were looking for reasons to feel bad about myself I would go to the sermons at St Andrew the Great's, which at least have the merit of some real moral basis. (I probably ought to do that, really.)

Still the comedy issue had a book called "Slouching Towards Kalamazoo" in it, which I shall take with me to Kalamazoo, I think. It's still up in the air whether I will be going to the Newfoundland conference. I think it would be a waste of time and money. But then again there isn't much that I've done in the course of my life which doesn't arguably fall into that category. Heigh ho.

Still at least it's a relief to know that the Guardian approves of music streaming. I'm getting a bit confused about what it logically implies though. Recently I have mostly been listening to music via Spotify, and discovering new stuff, and occasionally indulging in nostalgia to old things like Ebenezer Goode and Frazier Chorus. I have been feeling very clever for making it work on my office computer. But now I'm back where I was a year or so ago, when I listened to lots of stuff on my ipod, but everything I had for playing music out loud wanted CDs, so that I either sat around at home with headphones on or I could only listen to stuff I could physically find, which was a very last century way to live. I sorted it out by getting ipod dock speakers to take to Italy, and now I only use those and have never bothered to unpack my hifi. But now I am back to the same situation where I have to listen to stuff at home with headphones on, because my laptop's speakers aren't any good. I might need to set up some AirPort streaming system. Technology is complicated and confusing. Suddenly my ipod looks all out-dated. Could we all just stop and catch our breaths?

West End Girls! Here it is on spotify.

Discretion

The problem with writing a diary is that it doesn't take much in the way of low mood or drunkenness before you start pouring out your heart into it. What comes out of the poured-out heart may very well have needed expurging, but it should have then been cleaned up and disposed of rather then kept for the future. I have teenage or even younger diaries which I can't quite bring myself to junk now they've got this far, but which I can't read or bear the thought of anyone else reading, because they're mostly gush about boys or horses. (Apparently having spent my entire youth with a mad intense crush on someone or other, occasionally both, is why I will never find sensible love as an adult, which, to be honest, I can live with.) At the same time it's hard to suppress the urge to record some comments on life to reread later. To get round this I once started a diary which wasn't about me, but about what my friends were up to, and this was the most interesting diary I have ever kept. Alas I lost it in a computer failure, the last one before I started my current paranoid backup system.

This blog is a reasonable solution to the problem. (I'm afraid I do write it for myself to reread later, and if that seems unpleasantly self-obsessed and wierd, well I find that I can forgive myself.) I can't pour my heart out to it because people might read it, but I can record stuff that I feel a need to get out of my system a bit. When I'm feeling particularly bad I sometimes write a happy post as an effective counter measure. Unfortunately it is a public place, and I can't count on people's not reading it, so there are some things it just wouldn't be appropriate to say. Sometimes you have to be more oblique.

In unrelated work news, if you find anything wrong with our 0.6 version website you can send the info in to Stanford using the "Contact Us" link at the bottom. Then it will get into their expensive and complicated bug-recording system and be carefully logged and given code numbers and everything.

Plus, if you want to be able to use programs without installing them on your computer, to which perhaps you don't have administrative access, the portable apps available at sites like this are a very good alternative -- you can put them in the My Documents folder if you don't want to carry them around on a USB pen. I'm going to experiment with making my own portable apps later, specifically spotify. I'm guessing that I will give up after about five minutes realising it's totally over my head.

Present continuous

I am quite enjoying using Spotify. Here is my "En francais" playlist.

I am also watching 30 Rock and have almost finished the second season. I'm sure it's wrong to find Alec Baldwin attractive. I like his show "MILF island": "25 super-hot mums, 50 eighth-grade boys, no rules." As he points out when one of the women turns out to be a hooker, "that doesn't mean she's not a wonderful caring MILF".

I am reading The Relic by Eça de Queiroz. So far very good, and a bit madder than the others.

Culture

Today I am unwell and I can't speak at all, just make croaking noises. So I'm blogging instead of working. I haven't said anything about books for a while, partly because I've been doing quite a lot of rereading. I had to prune my books heavily before going to Italy so when I was unpacking them again I came across a lot of things I wanted to reread. Also I've forgotten all the stuff I read in Devon, except for The Journal of Dora Damage, which was readable but mediocre, and the thing I remember most about it was that the author died immediately after finishing it, which was sad.

I did pick up Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence. It is good. Either Rushdie has returned to form or I've just not been in the mood for his last few books -- I think it's the former. I also read Kate Atkinson's When Will There Be Good News?. I think she's great and it annoys me that now there won't be another for a while. Benjamin Markovits's second Byron book, A Quiet Adjustment, is very well written and psychologically convincing, but I don't think I will ever reread it -- it just didn't quite interest me enough. It's never going to be easy to have any sympathy for someone who willingly marries Lord Byron. The book sort of skips her decision to marry him as well as most of the actual marriage, which was probably a good choice.

My boss recently decided that I watch too much television and spend too much time on the internet, so he has helpfully lent me a big pile of nineteenth-century novels translated from the Portuguese. They're by someone called Eça de Queiroz, who spent a long time as an ambassador in England (his letters are quite interesting apparently). They turn out to be very good. So far I've read The Crime of Father Amaro, which is like a sarkier Edith Wharton, and The Tragedy of the Street of Flowers, which is sort of Manon Lescaut meets Oedipus rex. They're pretty bitter. I've noticed that the women get their comeupance, but it's not in a straightforward anti-women sort of way, it's more as if he was a very cynical person who couldn't quite let go of the idea of women as moral beings. The men just get worse and worse and end up morally dead -- Father Amaro's crime results in some terrible consequences, but not to Father Amaro, and what he takes away from it all is a resolution only to "confess" married women.

Also I saw The Reader. I think people have been a bit harsh about this, as if they want it in some way to solve the holocaust. I would interpret it as just telling a story. If it's asking whether you can ever feel any sort of human relationship to someone who has done really terrible things then that's a fair question, and I don't think it makes any attempt to diminish her guilt -- especially given that she only ever shows shame about one thing, and it's not active participation in mass murder. I give it three and a half stars, which is short for reasonably interesting, not a waste of time, but probably quite forgettable, and I won't bother watching it when it's shown on Channel 4.

In this shocking story scientists have discovered that many Victorian novels promote moral behaviour! The scientists did this by getting academics to fill in a questionnaire. I assume Eça de Queiroz wasn't included; his sort of moral universe might not come over well in a third-hand questionnaire.

I used to like David Quantick a lot but his new Radio 4 thing, Broken Arts, isn't very good. Alas. But I do like these odd shorts, and also this Rex the Dog video, which I got off of popjustice.

Bubblicious from Rex The Dog on Vimeo.

Some things

1. As an evangelical I ought of course to be all enthusiastic about the atheist bus; but in my, as it were, private capacity I just find it annoying for all sorts of reasons too tedious to give here. But today I had a sudden thought about the puzzlingly weak phrasing which has remarked upon by many people; maybe it's actually a subtle message to Richard Dawkins from other atheists? Stop worrying, Dawkins, and enjoy your life!

2. These pictures of deserted London are very excellent. I particularly like the one of Waterloo Bridge completely empty; I've been over it so many times on foot or by bus and it's always teeming.

3. I've been watching 30 Rock. It's quite good. It's like Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip only funny. I can't even remember if Studio 60 was supposed to be funny, or if I just assumed that because it had Chandler in.

4. Doesn't this bedroom version of Little Boots' Stuck on Repeat make the single sound over-produced?

I'd love to play with a Tenori-on but they're not cheap and it cannot be said that I need one.

2009 has just started

Insomnia!
I couldn't get to sleep last night so I worked out that the prime factors of 2009 are 7, 7 and 41. I don't know if it's possible for a number to have more than one set of prime factors but I suspect not; anyway 2009 doesn't.

Dostoyevsky!
At midnight mass on Christmas Eve, even though there tends to be a pretty poor sermon adapted to provide for all the non-church-goers who wander in from the pub, I usually get some sort of urge to improve my life (with the result that my resolutions for the coming year have often worn off by the time I get to New Year's Day). This year I have decided to try to return to reading more heavy-weight stuff. I'll make a big attempt to get back to Karl Barth's Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (translated by Hoskyns, a previous Parker Librarian), which I got stuck in at around chapter 5, partly through feeling a bit overwhelmed at what I might be going to have to try to understand for chapters 7 and 8. I also decided to read Rowan Williams' new book on Dostoyevsky, which I managed to find in Exeter on Boxing Day, and which I enjoyed very much. He explains well the problems with seeing Prince Myshkin as a Christ-figure, which bothered me but which I was never quite able to express. He also clarified very helpfully for me the views known as apophatic or "negative" theology, which can be found in one of its more extreme forms in Simone Weil's statement that one must pray to God as though he didn't exist, because however you imagine God to exist you are imagining him wrong, and your imagined God is not God but your own creation. Also, the "Kill the Buddha" idea, which comes from some Buddhist master telling his pupil that if he has a vision of the Buddha he must kill him, because it is not the Buddha he has met but an expression of his own longing. There's stuff about it here. It's interesting but it also seems like there's a problem with that and with the incarnation as theophany. Isn't there? Anyway, Williams talks instead about the Russian icon tradition, and ideas of whether the divine can be represented in an image, saying that while an icon is not a complete or correct image, it's not a matter of saying "this is not it" but saying "this is not all". Which makes much more sense to me. One day I will probably have to make up my own mind about images, but for the time being I enjoy my icon collection on a non-intellectual level. Dostoyevsky was very against the idea of Jesus as teacher, which also is pleasing -- all in all it's a satisfying book for explaining properly why various things have previously made me uneasy.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad!
I watched the alternative Christmas message by the president of Iran, which is available on 4OD. I was slightly touched that he seemed so sure that in addressing the people of Britain, moreover the Channel-4-watching people of Britain, he was talking to a Christian nation with a reverence for the son of Sitt Miriam and the prophets. I was also interested in how much he talked about What Would Jesus Do. Why all this What Would Jesus Do stuff bugs me is summed up by what I said about the apophatic tradition above. Ivan Karamazov's story of the Grand Inquisitor conveys some of this, and Williams talks about it very well.

Atheism!
Hurray! Here's someone saying that Pullman's atheism is entirely derivative of Christianity, like I said on this blog a while ago. One might also observe that his view of sin as particularly sexual is very Augustine. I feel guilty for not getting more to grips with all these anti-religion arguments, but not enough to do anything about it when there are so much more interesting things to do, like Barth on Romans. Williams quotes the novelist Marilynne Robinson saying that Creationism is just the sort of impoverished ideology that militant atheist Darwinism most needed. Now we could do with the Christian backlash against Creationism. But Williams, entirely consistently with the thesis of his book and of his theology in general, works less by argument than through actions and narrative, and his reply to impoverished views of Christianity is to bring out in his Dostoyevsky book an examination of particularly interesting and subtle Christian views. Hurray for the archbishop! He's unusual.

More TV!
I do like Star Stories -- the Kate Moss one is very tasteless. I understand Take That have embraced theirs to the extent of playing extracts at their concerts, and I bet George Michael likes his, but the Bono one is pretty savage.

Little nephew slightly less little!
He has now passed his birth weight, and is nearly seven pounds, plus he is learning how to burp.

Glasses!
I got my new glasses. The lady at Boots made me try them on and look at her computer to check they were OK, which gave me the really odd experience of looking at something I could see perfectly clearly and then its suddenly becoming much clearer. I feel like this should be a metaphor for something.

Angry young man

1. I met my little nephew. He really is little, the smallest baby I have ever seen in real life. He's been back in hospital because he's having trouble regaining his birth weight, which was only 6lbs 11oz anyway, so he's absolutely tiny. When he's angry, which is a lot of the time, he looks like an animatronic goblin, and when he's not angry he looks a bit like William Hague. He gets particularly annoyed when anyone tries to feed him. He very rarely opens his eyes, and then usually only one at a time to have a cautious look at us, before closing them firmly again. I have a lot of sympathy with him, and actually he wasn't due until tomorrow. He does at least appear to appreciate effort -- while I was looking after him he went into an arch-backed purple-faced tantrum pulling faces as if the worst thing ever was happening to him, and in panic I tried a rendition of the Frog Chorus, at which he settled back to sleep; this was distinctly generous of him. Hopefully it's all just indigestion, poor soul.

2. My mother is reacting in a very typical way to grandmotherhood, essentially by turning the full beam of her mind's energies onto worrying about it. My brother told me that when they told her back in the spring that she was going to be a grandmother her immediate reaction was "what shall we do about the pond?", rather than the more conventional joy. The next day she went out and bought lots of those plastic things you put into unused electric sockets, so that now whenever we want to plug anything in first we have to prise one of these devices out with our fingernails. The other day she gave my father a stern talking to, really a telling off, that he should never eat berries in front of his grandson. She told me that it's nonsense that grandchildren are better than children, because now she has to worry not just about her grandson but about how my brother and his wife are coping with him, and about whether they're being made miserable by worrying about him too.

3. Actually I remember it did make me very unhappy as a child that, although I knew that you shouldn't eat any berries you found in the wild, on autumnal walks with my father he would insist on eating pretty much all the berries he came across, including ones which I knew very well to be poisonous, like rose hips and yew berries. He said it was OK because he was careful to spit out the poisonous pips, but I didn't see how he could be sure that he wouldn't miss one, and then he would die. Hopefully my nephew will get a useful balance to this sort of thing from his mother's family, who all seem pretty sane.

Learned, fat, and red: part I

I've been meaning to post for ages about Bologna. I do miss it a bit, though mostly for the food. The title of the post is because Bologna is renowned for being learned, fat, and red: learned because of the university, the oldest in the West; fat because of its wonderful food; and red partly for the bricks it's built from, but also because it's famously socialist/communist.
Why go to Bologna?
1. Because it is a very nice city. It may not match up to Venice in the amazingness stakes, and I suppose Florence has more obvious things, but it has a very major advantage over those two places in that it is not packed full of tourists. It has far fewer tourists than Cambridge, for example, and at least as much nice stuff to look at. In Venice and Florence you have to book everything you want to see in advance, but there is nothing that needs booking in Bologna. You can get a seat outside at one of the cafes under the portici of beautiful Piazza S. Stefano with no trouble no matter what the weather; your competition will not be other foreigners but Italians. (Probably some will be having graduaton parties, wearing the Dante-style laurel leaf of the laureate.)
2. Also, it is the major railway hub for the north of Italy so a very good place to go to on the way from one city to another.
3. Plus even in Italy people think the food of Emilia Romagna is something pretty special.
What to do there
1. Eat good stuff. Parma ham and Parmigiano cheese are from nearby Parma (nice town) but Bologna is famous for doing things with them. In particular tortellini. (Tortelloni are the bigger ones, usually with vegetarian filling.) I saw a recipe for old-style Bolognese tortellini that had five or six different local meats in the filling. One was mortadella, for which Bologna is famous; it's pleasant enough but not as good as much other Bolognese food. (It's where the term 'baloney' comes from.) It's essentially luncheon meat, or what my mother always called boiled baby, though it's a high-class garlicky boiled baby. You won't find spaghetti Bolognese, but you will get tagliatelle al ragu, which is the closest thing, and very good.
2. Admire the portici. The story goes that townspeople wanted to get in on the lucrative student room-rentals market but didn't have a room to spare, so they would build one onto the first floor over the road, leaving the space beneath as a covered walkway with arches separating it from the traffic. This is now the official Bolognese style of architecture, and it's not only attractive but a real blessing when the sun is very hot or when it's raining. Plus the pavements beneath the portici are usually a little higher than the road so it makes busy streets more pleasant to walk down. In the sixteenth or seventeenth century the Bolognese went slightly mad and decided to build portici all the way out to San Luca, a round church built on a hill outside Bologna. There are 666 portici from the city gate, and twice a year the communist citizens go up there and bring an image of the virgin all the way down into the city. The sanctuary of San Luca is not that exciting inside, but if you get a bus out it's a lovely walk back down into the city. The walk out I would not recommend; in places it's essentially as steep as a staircase, and you feel it in your calves just from walking down.
3. Have lunch at Tamburini's. This is right in the middle of the city, about half-way between the two towers and the main square. It's essentially a delicatessen but at lunch-time it serves its own produce in a canteen style. Hopefully they'll have tortellini on and you can get a great plate for about six euros. Otherwise you can buy raw tortellini to cook yourself; this is where my Bolognese friend buys pasta when she has a dinner party.
4. Have lunch or dinner at Fantoni's on via del Pratello. This has apparently been just the same since the fifties. The roasted vegetables are always fantastic. A Bolognese friend told me that this is an excellent place for a) horse and b) zuppa inglese (literally "English soup", a type of trifle). I know it's a tad wet of me but I have counted horses as friends and I don't feel up to eating them; and I never tried the plain zuppa inglese either. (I did have some orange zuppa inglese somewhere not long before I left, and it was amazing.) This was partly because when I was lecturing on codicology years ago Melvin the lovely conservation man lent me a lot of props to make things more interesting for the youth. The one he was really emphatic about needing back intact was a little plastic bag full of costly imported kermes, the shells of insects which were used to dye alum-tawed skins pink for medieval bindings -- some of those bindings still survive on Bury books, for example, and I handled some while working on my PhD. Apparently the red liqueur used to make zuppa inglese comes from the very same insects, and this rather put me off it as a dessert. (See the wikipedia entry here which explains that the liqueur declined in popularity when people began to realise what it was made of.)
5. Also Tony's has very good, old-style cheap excellent food; popular with the Bolognese. It's on Via Righi, very close to the corner with Via dell'Independenza.
6. You have to do aperitivo. This was explained to me by locals as a very Bolognese thing, but other Italian cities seem to do something similar, like cicchetti in Venice. It comes down to the attitude to food whereby people will happily spend all day at work and all evening on the evening meal, which might explain why their TV is so bad. (They really take food seriously; if you want to make someone from Bologna cry try telling them how you cook spaghetti.) In the evening, at a time too early to start your full evening meal of antipasti, primi, secondi and dolci -- say 7.30 - 8.30 -- the bars all put out buffets of little bits and pieces to eat with your drinks. Some of these are really substantial and could easily stand in for your whole meal. They may charge a minimum for drinks in this period, e.g. when I first arrived and didn't know about the aperitivo tradition I was surprised that I couldn't get a half pint of beer at 7.30 in an Irish pub one time but had to buy a whole pint. (It was a carefully reconstructed "Irish" pub with wall tat placed inside a Renaissance building with frescoed vaulted ceilings.) In my last week there I went to Boa Vista in Via Cesare Battisti, which had really good stuff. It had a very dark black-and-mirrors decor and was playing electro music very loud, in a way which was so 80s and incredibly dated that it seemed really stylish for not caring that even 80s revival is now passé. Eddie Izzard used to do a very good routine about the progression "quite cool, cool, very cool, extremely cool, looking like an idiot" but I don't think that really holds in Italy; it doesn't seem like there's a sense that you can go Too Far. In some ways this is admirable and rather fun, though all those flamboyant young Italian men are a bit disconcerting. Anyway, I thought Boa Vista was great, and just the sort of thing that seemed the epitome of coolness when I was 13, but I'm not sure my companion liked it so much. Then we went on to Tamburini again, which turned out to be just as good in the evening as at lunchtime. Here the food isn't free but an amazing plate of sliced meats and such was only ten euros and the drinks were much cheaper. We ate all the meats even though we were already full from Boa Vista. The problem with aperitivo is that you're unlikely to want dinner as well, and it's a shame to waste a dining opportunity in Bologna if you're not there for long. Still you really should make time. One of the first things my flatmate Federica said to me when I moved in, looking at me very gravely, was "Sai il modo di Bologna?". Aperitivo is the mode of Bologna.
7. Gelati! Where to start? Where to end is also difficult. When the Parker people came out to visit me we were having four or five a day. The only not-excellent icecream I had in my whole time in Italy was at Pisa. (Pisa is a bit of a mess. It has three fantastic things to look at, all close together, and the area around them is filled with tat-selling stalls of a nature that even Rome cannot match. It's a sort of tourist black hole in an otherwise unremarkable Italian town. Walk a few hundred yards away and you're OK, but we went for icecream too close to the tower because we really wanted some.) Still Italians are able to distinguish gradations in icecream quality which escape me, and the two top places in Bologna are Gianni's, which has several outlets but with a particularly famous one just by the two towers, and the Sorbetteria Castiglione on Via Castiglione, not far from the Dominican church. Gianni's is lighthearted and has flavours called things like "Where is Gianni?" or "Beast in the City" (which is chocolate based, and which the Gaylord Donnelly librarian helpfully compared to dog poo -- there are a lot of dogs in Bologna, and therefore quite a lot of dog poo). Their pistachio is truly fantastic. The Sorbetteria Castiglione is a bit more serious, and has leaflets telling you the nutritional values of all its products, which seems to me to be spoiling the fun a bit, but I get the impression that it's the top one for the locals. Walking towards it either way at any time (I first went with some Bolognese friends on a very cold day in February) the streets are full of people eating icecream walking the other way.

I think that's most of the eating things. At some point I will try to get round to posting about the art. There are some fantastic art things to see and I have notes on them somewhere.

I had an eye test and apparently I now have to wear glasses when I use the computer. I already have to wear special gloves, called SmartGlovesTM, to keep my RSI under check. I am gradually turning into bionic computer woman. Eventually I will probably just have some complex body-fitting terminal which I just have to slot myself into before computer use -- maybe a bit like those excellent fork-lift body suit things in one of the Alien films. I love the interweb, but, is it worth it? I found it remarkably hard not to choose comedy glasses; there were some excellent pointy pink ones, but in the end I forced myself to go for bland frames since they're a pretty expensive purchase.

When I finished my PhD my mother told me that if I hadn't ruined my eyesight I hadn't been doing it properly, and paid for me to have an eye test then. It turned out I was only a little long-sighted at the time, but I think it was probably my hard work in Bologna which tipped me over the edge -- squinting not just at a computer screen in the usual way but also at online maps, looking for things which might be the remains of ancient lynchets and gores. I should have spent more time eating tortellini and pistacchio gelato.

I found myself surprisingly anxious before my eye test, and I think it's that word test, which still takes me back to school anxiety. Deep down I knew I would fail the eye test because I hadn't tried hard enough. It seems odd to me in retrospect how much pressure I used to feel about these things, because it certainly wasn't peer pressure -- I went to quite an academic school but it still wasn't good to be too much of a swot -- and it certainly wasn't parental pressure either. My parents always wanted me to be kind and honest -- which is asking a lot, it's true -- and school results came under the broad heading of honesty, in that they were things you shouldn't try to duck out of, but not things that mattered in themselves. They generally found it funny when I did well at school. I remember getting 100% in the easier of the two GCSE mock maths papers, and excitedly telling my father, who said "what, left no room for improvement?". I thought this was funny at the time, and still do, but he told a group of people about it at a seminar on Christian parenting and got utterly evil looks as if he'd confessed to some form of child abuse. I suppose they thought he should have affirmed my achievement by saying "I'm proud of you daughter and I love you!" and I would have said "I love you too pa!" and then we'd have hugged and recorded my results to send out in the annual Christmas letter, the fools. So anyway the pressure I put on myself to do well at school must have come from somewhere else. I think maybe I invented it in my brain. Or maybe it's that invidious desire to be honest, which can mean so many things. One of the excellent people of the college here taught me that if a thing's worth doing it's worth doing adequately, which is a seriously good piece of advice. How many things are really worth doing well?

Hurray for aunts!

I have a nephew! He arrived a fortnight early, on Sunday, sensibly avoiding the whole thing about having a birthday immediately adjacent to Christmas.

Some music stuff

1. I love this La Roux song:

Here is her myspace.

2. I don't usually watch the X Factor but I've seen a couple of episodes of this series. So I'm a bit puzzled to find out that Simon Cowell has chosen Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah as the winner's song. I only really know the classic Jeff Buckley version:

But if cherub-faced 16-year-old Eoghan Quigg sang it and all his granny fans bought it thinking it was some kind of religiousy Christmas thing and then found out it was a slightly tormented song about sex, wouldn't the Daily Mail have to start a petition? Can we start one in advance to stop this? I don't think any of the contestants are capable of not massacring it. Apparently Diana sang it in some earlier round, drawing praise from Louis Walsh, but after whatsername from the Cranberries I think we've had all the cracky squeaky-voiced singers we can sustain. The Cranberries did one good song:


3. I was going to embed the video to the Girls Aloud single written by the Pet Shop Boys but it wasn't that interesting, so here is Pet Shop Boys' extended mix of Here. It seems like quite a Christmas-y song to me, with it's "you've got a home here" message.

Bad things and something good

1. I had to buy a new laptop because my old one was getting iller and iller, and can no longer access its battery among other issues, not least the tractor noise it makes. It was a bit of a waste because I haven't really been in the mood for heavy technological expenditure. If you're going to spend hundreds on a new gadget you ought to get the most possible pleasure out of it, but it all just seemed like a huge chore to me. Anyway I solved three little problems and I thought I'd mention them in case they're of use to anyone.
a) Predictably itunes was the hardest to transfer: it turns out that wherever you keep your library -- I was moving it from an external hard drive to the second partition of an internal drive -- the actual important files are in the Music folder in your own user directory on the C: drive, and those are the ones you have to transfer in order to keep all your info like play counts and podcast subscriptions. If you copy over the ".itl" file you're OK. For some reason using the XML option didn't work. Then of course I had to authorise my new computer for the itunes store and for audible.co.uk, and deauthorise the old one. Also, why will itunes only let you back up to CDs or DVDs, and not to an external hard drive? Given how long most of us have spent posting CDs into the drive in order to amass our itunes libraries, why on earth would we want to reverse that process? It's insanity.
b) You can't connect to Lapwing with Virgin Wireless Manager on. This puzzled me for ages before I worked out what the issue was. You can easily turn Virgin's Wireless Manager off; in fact I'm thinking of jettisoning it altogether. I told the computing service help desk and they're going to add it to their FAQs, since there must be other people in Cambridge who use Lapwing and have Virgin broadband at home.
c) I keep all my important stuff on a little USB drive so that I don't have to worry about versioning, and I have a beautiful little batch file which automatically backs up for me every time I plug it in, meaning I have all my work in a recent form on both my home and work computers. My new laptop wouldn't autorun from a USB drive, which ruined this whole scheme. Eventually I sorted that out by editing the registry from these instructions; thanks AJJ for googling better than me.

2. I got two notes yesterday which made me sad. One was from a local police officer, handwritten, and the other was from the Housing Society of the block of flats where I live, both to the same effect. Apparently there is going to be a community meeting to discuss "the problem of youths climbimg and antisocial behaviour". Now, I have mentioned before on this blog how much I like having the Le Parcour/free-running kids about. They leap around the area between the two blocks which make up the flats where I live, bouncing off things with the elegance of monkeys, and walking on their hands, etc. They must be in their early teens -- I'd guess around 13-15 -- e.g. they are children, playing outdoors and having fun. I haven't ever thought of them as anti-social. Did we need to get the police involved? Is this a police matter? I'm worried we're doing that thing one hears so much about in the media these days, reacting with unfair fear to children who are only being children. What are we actually expecting them to do with their time? OK they're not a very approachable bunch, but we don't want young kids to be approachable by strangers, it wouldn't be appropriate. I understand that children over the age of 12 have been banned from the local playground, and presumably we don't want them sitting at home playing on their playstations or doing unsuitable things on the internet. Poor kids. I want to see them running free! In time they'll have to grow up and worry about adult things but for now why can't they just leap about, daringly risking grazed knees and perhaps broken arms in order to look cool in front of their friends and very occasionally girls?

3. But if I go to the meeting and try to put this point of view I will not be sympathetically heard, and it will probably turn out that the kids have been throwing stones at old ladies or something. I have had bad experiences with this before. It is very hard to deal with people whom you think are over-reacting without coming off as an unpleasant person incapable of sympathising with other people's traumas, and there are some hardcore complainers who live in my block of flats.

4. I did have the audio cassette of On the Hour, but it was only a few episodes, and now both series are available on itunes. Hurray! This is the good thing. It has the beginnings of Alan Partridge, when he went around asking athletes about their groin strain, and will make you feel nostalgia for the days of John Major and Douglas Hurd. Some of it was repeated in the later TV version, The Day Today. Hurray for Chris Morris! Here are his thoughts on the CERN hadron collider.

Stereotypes

1. I put four blogs into www.genderanalyzer.com and it thought they were all written by men:
Neil Gaiman 54%
Taking Liberties 59%
Kenodoxia 78%
and this blog 81%. I found this disconcerting til I looked at its accuracy rate.

2. This shouldn't need saying. I get so angry about the fake religion/science divide, I'm not even going to say any more about it.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2008/nov/13/evolution-creation-creationism

3. A friend of mine who lives in Rome and is the only other person in the entire world who doesn't like the Wire told me I should watch Gossip Girl. I am enjoying it very much. But no one else will because you all love the Wire. It's one of those great US teen dramas where the actors have even sillier first names than their characters; the main four protagonists are played by people called Blake, Leighton, Penn and Chace. I think genderanalyzer would have even more trouble with those. (F, F, M, M btw). The theme is "rich people have problems too" -- it's a sort of New York O.C. but with none of that tedious agonizing (at least so far). Hurray!

De raris fabulis

Ever since arriving at Cambridge and finding that the Insular Latin course took it for granted that I had done A-level (which is no longer the case) I have felt like I am playing catch-up with my Latin. (I did GCSE, at which level you just translate all the words and rearrange them into a sentence -- no man ever bit a dog in GCSE. With a smattering of superficial intelligence you can do well without learning much grammar at all.) In my first ever Cambridge supervision Andy Orchard (Provost Orchard as he is now known) showed me St Patrick's Confessio and asked me to spot the grammatical errors. Andy made the point that we were lucky when we could understand Patrick at all since his Latin education had ceased at sixteen (though in Patrick's case this was because he was abducted and sold into slavery, rather than that he chose different A-level courses). I meant to give up Latin every year, and never quite got round to it, until for my MPhil I edited the Vita S. Cuthburge; at that point my Latin was at a reasonable standard, but it slips away again so fast.

Anyway, at least our Insular Latin classes did start slowly, with early medieval texts made for teaching Latin to boys in monasteries. One, misleading called De raris fabulis, had some surprising ideas of what sort things they were going to need to be able to say in Latin. There doesn't seem to be a text online, but here is part of an image, taken from the wonderful Early Oxford Manuscripts Online, of the perhaps Cornish manuscript:

It's rather a nice bit, as opposed to the many chapters which involve savage beatings:
Audi frater ueni huc.
Quid uis carissime indica me?
Ego uolo te salutare.
Audi princeps da mihi potum de liquore qui in manu tua est.
Audi pistor uel cocus da mihi cibum ex colina tua.
Audi frater carissime ueni iuxta me et sede in pace.
Then the rather endearing:
Audi uxor pulcherima ueni huc cito et osculare me et pone manus tua circa collum meum.
and the more daring:
O puella optima da mihi osculum.
then the rather bathetic:
O iuuencula laua uestimenta mea hodie laua caput meum et faciem simul cum barba.
to the troubling:
O frater ueni mecum ad meam necessitatem.
which gets this understandable response:
Non ibo frater quia non facile est mihi quia aliud opus occupauit me.
How seriously would one take this as suggesting that people talked to their wives in Latin? Not very, I suspect. There are advanced colloquies for better students, including a very scatological slanging match between a teacher and a pupil. Oddly this also includes the Latin for asking someone to accompany you to the toilet, and a request not to stand in the light.

Some stuff

1. My father is back from plant-hunting in Arunachal Pradesh. Oddly enough this coincides with the British Museum running an exhibition about Arunachal Pradesh, helpfully titled "Between Tibet and Assam". There were riots while my Dad was there, and they got thrown out of a border region by a tetchy general, but to be honest I'm on the general's side because I know my Dad was hoping to sneak over some mountain pass into Burma. They all enjoyed themselves anyway. My father is the young one of the group, in his late fifties; his friend Peta is in her seventies and still happily striding about the Himalayas. How did I not get to be one of these people? Was I just born fifty years too late, and the wrong class? Or do I have only my own self to blame?

2. Talking of trees a friend sent me this helpful link; I'm not sure how to feel about there being no logical need for fish poison. Is that sad? Or is it happy for the fish? I might have to hunt through Borders for Country Walking Magazine to hear more of Ray's thoughts on this.

3. The same person sent me this link, from Bookslut. Admire the positioning of the "click to look inside" arrow. Also I like "broad riding" as a key phrase for Lady Chatterley's Lover. I remember reading it when I was 13 and being shocked, but not by its explicitness -- even as a young nicely-brought-up girl I'd read stuff at least as explicit -- but by its complete lack of romance, or even much in the way of emotion. I read tons of D. H. Lawrence as a teenager and for a while The Plumed Serpent was my favourite book but now it seems almost unreadable.

4. Actually I was wondering if the Circle Line was running:


And when I got to the platform the Circle Line was running. Hurray!

Music

Indie bands whose music I dislike except for one song which I love
•Travis, Sing
•Coldplay, Don't Panic
•Keane, Better Than This
•The Killers, Mr Brightside (although it ought to be the popjustice compilation version which fades into Sophie Ellis Bextor singing Dear Jimmy)
•Oasis, The Importance of Being Idle (they had other songs but they've been overbuskered)

Bands I am slightly ashamed of liking
•Scooter (e.g. Posse)
•Basshunter (he's such an old-style idiot but the blurb for this video says the record's success was due to word of mouse, and you can't resist that)
•Scroobius Pip vs Dan le Sac

though I do approve of beards like that; he has decided to have a beard and then abandoned restraint
•Sash (here is encore une fois long version with the French intro)
•Enrique Iglesias, e.g. the ping pong song

Music that puzzles me
Why did Sam Taylor Wood stop being a vaguely controversial but very successful Young British Artist and decide to release a cover of I'm in Love With a German Filmstar produced by the Pet Shop Boys? I feel like there's some message there I can't read. The video is quite good except that it is the same as the stuff she did as a video artist.

Also we should all just agree that prank calls are not now nor ever have been funny
These aren't really prank calls but if they were they would be the exception.