I had some thoughts, and while I'm trying to recover pictures of manuscripts from a damaged SD card I decided to share them with you, the reader. Lady Wortley Montagu had an endearing habit of apologising for the length of her letters, but saying that if the reader didn't like it she could always chuck it in the fire. You can't really burn a computer, but there's always ctrl+alt+del in extreme circumstances, or a simple ctrl+w closes the tab.
Thought 1. I'm in a city right now, and it occurred to me this morning that the thing about the countryside is that it's casually beautiful, and full of death, often at the same time. There is death absolutely everywhere, and almost all of it is both random and in some way beneficial. In the city people don't have that much to do with death. Except for the occasional pigeon, and that's treated as an aberration instead of what's happening everyday everywhere -- it's something someone will have to clear up, rather than a windfall for the rooks.
Thought 2. Though I did think that I saw some buzzards over Corpus yesterday. I don't see how that can have been right, but there they were, four or five of them circling up on thermals. I think they were buzzards not red kites because they had wedge-shaped tails rather than the forked, and were hefty in build rather than slim. I'm disconcerted by this.
Thought 3. I wish my SD card hadn't failed. I was looking at a really disconcerting manuscript on Wednesday, a late eleventh- or early twelfth-century Bible from Lincoln. It had initials in the white-vine style, which I don't much like at the best of times, because instead of the light entwined foliage or curled leaves of other styles it has fat white vegetable stems, like something grown in the darkness, and makes me think of bean sprouts. But in this manuscript the fleshy white stems don't end in foliage but in the heads of odd beasts, with gaping jaws, and black eyebrows. The human figures have red spots on their cheeks as if they are ill, and enormous hands bigger than their heads. I have a feeling I may have nightmares about it; it was quite crudely done, but also in a wierd style. Anyway, even if I still had the pictures I couldn't post one, because Trinity lets you take pictures for personal use only.
Thought 4. I love my kindle, for many reasons. Hurray for buying stuff instantly! Hurray for its compilation of my highlighted passages, and for being able to search for names of characters whose significance I have forgotten! But boo for the way I no longer enjoy Waterstones so much. Though I did buy a book yesterday, a translation of Isidore's Etymologies which I've wanted for a long time, but needed to get from the CUP shop because of my author discount. It is £29 before discount as a paperback; as an ebook it is 128 dollars. Plus I used a CUP ebook once before and it was infuriatingly terrible. Boo, CUP, boo. Seriously, CUP, give me a job as one who formats ebooks for you -- you're missing a trick. It's when companies do that sort of thing that people yearn to pirate. Now, I'm not going to pirate CUP books, and I imagine that legally I am not allowed to make my own personal ecopy of a book just because I own the paperback, but morally I feel like it's more of a grey area. Unfortunately a while ago I decided that it is morally wrong to break the law unless it's a matter of principle, and I don't think that wanting to read a book on Kindle is a matter of principle. Heigh ho.
Friday, 1 October 2010
Monday, 27 September 2010
Books I have been reading
I've decided I'll only blog about five at a time.
Susan Hill, The Mist in the Mirror
Lots of people rave about Susan Hill's ghost stories. I've always found them a little unsatisfying. There were a few spooky moments in this one I suppose.
Jenny Valentine, Broken Soup
This is YA fiction and got very good reviews. I saw a copy for a quid in a remainder sale so I bought it. It's quite well written, but reading it reminded me of the tremendous rubbish we were all supposed to enjoy as teenagers, in which people have, you know, feelings, and social problems. It was supposed to speak to us in some way, and I'm quite certain it was well meant.
Eça de Queiroz, The City and the Mountains
Very good. About a man who lives in Paris, surrounded by the best in early twentieth-century gadgets (electric lighting, and the théâtrophone, etc). He undertakes a journey to his ancestral estates in Portugal, but it goes disastrously wrong and he loses all his luggage. Quite a funny and amiable book, more comfortable than much of the work of Eça de Queiroz.
Molly Keane, Good Behaviour
This is quite good. The point is that their behaviour is at once very well-mannered, and absolutely atrocious. The main character is a bit of a monster and blithely unaware of what is going on around her, and has been very nastily treated by her family.
Erick Setiawan, Bees and Mist
This sounded to me like just the sort of thing that would annoy me. But I read a few reviews which said, essentially, not as annoying as you'd think, and they were right, it's only a bit annoying. It's about two families, and a girl who marries from one into the other. The first family is haunted by several different-coloured mists, while the second family's mother has at her disposal a swarm of maddening and persuasive bees. You could go so far as to see these bees, these mists, as some sort of metaphor. Anyway, on the plus side it's readable and at least a bit unusual. On the minus side there's all the mists and bees, plus the mother-in-law is a pretty 2-D villainess, and the characters all have names like Meridia and Gabriel. Buy it if you see it on a market stall for two quid, but not from Oxfam, who will probably want £3.95. That's my advice anyway.
Susan Hill, The Mist in the Mirror
Lots of people rave about Susan Hill's ghost stories. I've always found them a little unsatisfying. There were a few spooky moments in this one I suppose.
Jenny Valentine, Broken Soup
This is YA fiction and got very good reviews. I saw a copy for a quid in a remainder sale so I bought it. It's quite well written, but reading it reminded me of the tremendous rubbish we were all supposed to enjoy as teenagers, in which people have, you know, feelings, and social problems. It was supposed to speak to us in some way, and I'm quite certain it was well meant.
Eça de Queiroz, The City and the Mountains
Very good. About a man who lives in Paris, surrounded by the best in early twentieth-century gadgets (electric lighting, and the théâtrophone, etc). He undertakes a journey to his ancestral estates in Portugal, but it goes disastrously wrong and he loses all his luggage. Quite a funny and amiable book, more comfortable than much of the work of Eça de Queiroz.
Molly Keane, Good Behaviour
This is quite good. The point is that their behaviour is at once very well-mannered, and absolutely atrocious. The main character is a bit of a monster and blithely unaware of what is going on around her, and has been very nastily treated by her family.
Erick Setiawan, Bees and Mist
This sounded to me like just the sort of thing that would annoy me. But I read a few reviews which said, essentially, not as annoying as you'd think, and they were right, it's only a bit annoying. It's about two families, and a girl who marries from one into the other. The first family is haunted by several different-coloured mists, while the second family's mother has at her disposal a swarm of maddening and persuasive bees. You could go so far as to see these bees, these mists, as some sort of metaphor. Anyway, on the plus side it's readable and at least a bit unusual. On the minus side there's all the mists and bees, plus the mother-in-law is a pretty 2-D villainess, and the characters all have names like Meridia and Gabriel. Buy it if you see it on a market stall for two quid, but not from Oxfam, who will probably want £3.95. That's my advice anyway.
Thursday, 23 September 2010
Kage Baker PS
Something I forgot to mention about Kage Baker is that I like the attention she pays to the mechanics of writing. For example, the first book mostly takes place in Tudor England, so there's some Elizabethan-y language in it, when the owner of the house holds feasts and such like. But no one wants a whole book where all the dialogue is like that, and she unobtrusively makes it clear that when the lovers are alone they talk Latin, as a more straightforward language. And when the immortals are alone they speak something they call Cinema Standard, which is essentially the language of golden age Hollywood, as spoken by the people in the future who tell them what to do. So she has this distinction between the different types of English which marks out the strangeness of the immortals' situation, but it's far from laboured, and you could ignore it and just get on with the story. Likewise a certain amount of explication is inevitable in a series of books like this, and at the start of most of the books in the series it is necessary to recap the basic premise of immortal agents controlled by people in the future, working to preserve things which would otherwise be destroyed. But she makes it so that it's a different person who explains it each time, and they each present it differently, with slightly contradictory accounts of how it all started, and that way she not only shows the personality of that character but also introduces to the reader suspicions about the reliability of certain accounts. So if you come across a book from the middle of the series without reading the earlier ones you still understand the premise; but if, like me, you read all the books in order as fast as you can get your hands on them, you still find these bits interesting and not just explication blah blah blah. I think it's good craft.
Wednesday, 22 September 2010
Two very good authors, part II
I discovered the books of Kage Baker this summer. She is not that well-known in this country, and I had to turn to ebay, amazon marketplace, and abebooks.com to source most of her work. Now, Joyce Carol Oates is a serious writer, so very serious in fact that I didn't feel at all like reading her work until I found out that some of it is in genre; whereas Kage Baker wrote science fiction. Nonetheless I feel like Kage Baker was the better discovery of the two. There's a certain quality that some writers have which I find very relaxing, and which I'm now going to find hard to describe. I think of it as "humanity". It's a sort of sympathy with the whole human race without sentimentality. When you read, say, Martin Amis, whatever you may think of the book itself you know that the author is an arsehole; what I'm talking about is the opposite of that. It's a sense that the author would make an excellent aunt, or warden in a women's prison. It's something I tend to associate with female writers; Barbara Kingsolver has it, and so does Barbara Trapido. But I think Terry Pratchett may have it too, a sort of wise kindness. Anyway, I probably haven't described what I mean very well, but Kage Baker's work has it in bucketloads. It's particularly good to discover it in science fiction, because the genre as a whole is prone to a sort of aspergers-y coldness.
Most of her work is in the Company series. The premise is that in the twenty-fourth century a consortium of scientists and merchants have come up with two remarkable inventions, neither of which turns out to be marketable in the way they had hoped. They have invented time travel: but it's a really unpleasant procedure; and although you can go back in time and then return to where you started, you can't go forwards in time from your start point in any other way than living it. Plus you can't change recorded history. Martin Luther King still gets shot; the Titanic still sinks. They also invented immortality: but it's even more unpleasant to go through; it only works on carefully-selected small children; and at the end of the process you're not entirely human any more, but a sort of cyborg. So neither of these can be marketed to middle-aged billionaires. But then they find out that although you can't change recorded history, you can work around the gaps. You can't stop an animal from going extinct, but you can take a population from the wild before it happens, and hide them away somewhere to be rediscovered centuries later. And if you don't want to go through all the nasty time-travel yourself, why not go back to the dawn of time, make some suitable children immortal, and then leave them to it, preserving things to order for the billionaires of the future, and recruiting other children to join them.
The first chapter of the first book, which explains all this, is available for free here. The rest of the book is about a girl called Mendoza.
Aged about four she is rescued from the dungeons of the inquisition in Spain, and put through the immortality process. She trains as a botanist, and is sent to England to stay in a house with a remarkable garden, and to take clippings and DNA analysis of some rare plants which are soon to go extinct. She's violently anti-mortal because of her inquisition experience, and although she's been made immortal she's still only seventeen years old so far. Unfortunately she falls head over heels in love with the garden-owner's secretary, a protestant. But it's the reign of Mary Tudor, who has just married Philip of Spain, and the inquisition is coming to England.
The second book involves Joseph, the man who recruited Mendoza. The Company sorts him out with some impressive prosthetics and sends him to the west coast of America, where he has to pretend to be Sky Coyote in order to persuade a Native American village to let anthropologists come in to document their doomed civilisation.
As well as the main books in the series, Baker has also written collections of short stories and novellas, some set in the same world. I've read almost all of them now. Some aren't quite as good as the others, but they are all an enjoyable way to spend time. Kage Baker is the sort of writer I would like to be, and I'm glad she managed to finish the Company series before her death earlier this year.
Most of her work is in the Company series. The premise is that in the twenty-fourth century a consortium of scientists and merchants have come up with two remarkable inventions, neither of which turns out to be marketable in the way they had hoped. They have invented time travel: but it's a really unpleasant procedure; and although you can go back in time and then return to where you started, you can't go forwards in time from your start point in any other way than living it. Plus you can't change recorded history. Martin Luther King still gets shot; the Titanic still sinks. They also invented immortality: but it's even more unpleasant to go through; it only works on carefully-selected small children; and at the end of the process you're not entirely human any more, but a sort of cyborg. So neither of these can be marketed to middle-aged billionaires. But then they find out that although you can't change recorded history, you can work around the gaps. You can't stop an animal from going extinct, but you can take a population from the wild before it happens, and hide them away somewhere to be rediscovered centuries later. And if you don't want to go through all the nasty time-travel yourself, why not go back to the dawn of time, make some suitable children immortal, and then leave them to it, preserving things to order for the billionaires of the future, and recruiting other children to join them.
The first chapter of the first book, which explains all this, is available for free here. The rest of the book is about a girl called Mendoza.
Aged about four she is rescued from the dungeons of the inquisition in Spain, and put through the immortality process. She trains as a botanist, and is sent to England to stay in a house with a remarkable garden, and to take clippings and DNA analysis of some rare plants which are soon to go extinct. She's violently anti-mortal because of her inquisition experience, and although she's been made immortal she's still only seventeen years old so far. Unfortunately she falls head over heels in love with the garden-owner's secretary, a protestant. But it's the reign of Mary Tudor, who has just married Philip of Spain, and the inquisition is coming to England.The second book involves Joseph, the man who recruited Mendoza. The Company sorts him out with some impressive prosthetics and sends him to the west coast of America, where he has to pretend to be Sky Coyote in order to persuade a Native American village to let anthropologists come in to document their doomed civilisation.
As well as the main books in the series, Baker has also written collections of short stories and novellas, some set in the same world. I've read almost all of them now. Some aren't quite as good as the others, but they are all an enjoyable way to spend time. Kage Baker is the sort of writer I would like to be, and I'm glad she managed to finish the Company series before her death earlier this year.
Sunday, 19 September 2010
Kindle: some thoughts on it so far
My kindle arrived yesterday, hurray! I like it. Here are some things I have thought about it so far.
1) Reading on it is fine. It tells you how far through a book you are, and is pretty easy to navigate. When you turn a page it's fast enough. The screen flashes black as it changes and some people find this distracting -- I don't mind it myself, because for one thing you can see the words of the next page in white on black just for a moment, and so continue reading. The screen is better than any e-ink screen I've ever seen before, but it is still a little grey rather than bright white. If you try really hard and turn it the right way you can just about get a little glare off it, but on the whole the more light the better.
2) The dictionary is more useful than I would have expected, maybe because I've been reading nineteenth-century material. I expect it's rather good for me; for example I wouldn't usually bother to look up words like indurated, because the context suggested the correct meaning, but it's so easy just to flick the cursor to the right place that I did it, and now I know. And because it's the Oxford English Dictionary it can cope with the odd Classical reference, which can be useful in nineteenth-century stuff. (Though you do have to change it to the OED in the settings, instead of the default American dictionary.)
3) Somehow it's rather charming.
4) But I find that I miss the blurb on printed books. I don't quite know why. I must consult book blurbs more often than I thought I did. I have been reading a few pretty obscure things, and some of them I downloaded a while ago in kindle readiness. Reading the blurb of a book sets you up for reading the real thing, I suppose. But I wouldn't have expected to miss it. And once you've finished a book you're just stuck on the last page, which leaves me feeling some odd sort of need to do something like reread the blurb, or shut the book in a definite manner. In time I'll probably feel just as satisfied by moving it into my "Finished" collection.
5) You can organise books into collections, but this is not yet flexible enough. And for some reason you can't put magazines into collections.
6) I wasn't expecting to use the magazine possibilities, but after browsing a lot I have taken out trial subscriptions to two which consist simply of short stories.
7) The browser is pretty good -- perhaps less so if you have high expectations. I don't have a smart phone, and every now and then I really feel the need of a way of checking train times, or looking for a nearby shop, or some such. I think it works best with mobile versions of websites. But I haven't tried it out on the road so far. It connected very well to the wifi here, but we don't have 3G here, so it will be interesting to try it the other way round.
8) Buying things from amazon.co.uk is very simple indeed. Downloads are remarkably fast. You can also get a sample of a book sent to your kindle before deciding whether or not to read the whole thing. I've done this with some items, e.g. to find the best Kindle edition of Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici. (This is the best kindle edition; Amazon tell me they are trying to sort out the mislabelling issue with the publishers.)
8a) I bet that suggesting samples could be a good way of sharing book recommendations with friends. Amazon could add a feature saying "suggest this to a friend" and the friend could get a message saying "XX recommends this to you, would you like to download a sample?"
9) I really like the highlighting feature, and I will tell you why. It's very easy indeed to highlight a bit of text, and the kindle assembles on the fly a text file of all your highlighted stuff, labelled with where it came from, as a sort of immediate commonplace book. I wasn't expecting to annotate things much on the kindle, so this comes as a surprise to me.
10) You can share those annotations over facebook or twitter. You can read other people's annotations of books you have downloaded. Needless to say I turned this feature off as soon as I got the kindle. Just imagine reading Moby Dick if you could see all the annotations and underlinings of all the American high school students who have to read it! On the other hand it might be a good sociological experiment, or a new form of novel.
11) As for choosing books, you have to watch out for the really cheap or free items, because some are very badly OCR'd from old copies of texts, and I have heard that poetry in particular can be very badly formatted on the page. If you come across a problem like this it's very easy to get your money back from Amazon; and it's a problem you're most likely to find in free things anyway.
12) Other shops: check what format they supply in. Kindle uses .mobi, but it can't use .mobi with DRM, as I understand it, unless it's Amazon's own DRM. A program called Calibre will turn epub documents into Kindleable documents, as well as other formats; but this only works on epub docs without DRM. So watch out for DRM. But stores other than amazon are often dramatically expensive anyway. I've only used one other shop so far. I've found it very easy to put non-Amazon .mobi files onto my Kindle.
13) But so far I have not experimented with putting onto it files which are not ebooks.
14) Instapaper is quite good. It gives you a "Read later" button for articles on the web, and then you can export the whole lot onto your kindle as a sort of self-made magazine.
15) I think that for the moment I shall continue with cheap or free stuff for a while, or things which it wouldn't be easy for me to get in another format.
1) Reading on it is fine. It tells you how far through a book you are, and is pretty easy to navigate. When you turn a page it's fast enough. The screen flashes black as it changes and some people find this distracting -- I don't mind it myself, because for one thing you can see the words of the next page in white on black just for a moment, and so continue reading. The screen is better than any e-ink screen I've ever seen before, but it is still a little grey rather than bright white. If you try really hard and turn it the right way you can just about get a little glare off it, but on the whole the more light the better.
2) The dictionary is more useful than I would have expected, maybe because I've been reading nineteenth-century material. I expect it's rather good for me; for example I wouldn't usually bother to look up words like indurated, because the context suggested the correct meaning, but it's so easy just to flick the cursor to the right place that I did it, and now I know. And because it's the Oxford English Dictionary it can cope with the odd Classical reference, which can be useful in nineteenth-century stuff. (Though you do have to change it to the OED in the settings, instead of the default American dictionary.)
3) Somehow it's rather charming.
4) But I find that I miss the blurb on printed books. I don't quite know why. I must consult book blurbs more often than I thought I did. I have been reading a few pretty obscure things, and some of them I downloaded a while ago in kindle readiness. Reading the blurb of a book sets you up for reading the real thing, I suppose. But I wouldn't have expected to miss it. And once you've finished a book you're just stuck on the last page, which leaves me feeling some odd sort of need to do something like reread the blurb, or shut the book in a definite manner. In time I'll probably feel just as satisfied by moving it into my "Finished" collection.
5) You can organise books into collections, but this is not yet flexible enough. And for some reason you can't put magazines into collections.
6) I wasn't expecting to use the magazine possibilities, but after browsing a lot I have taken out trial subscriptions to two which consist simply of short stories.
7) The browser is pretty good -- perhaps less so if you have high expectations. I don't have a smart phone, and every now and then I really feel the need of a way of checking train times, or looking for a nearby shop, or some such. I think it works best with mobile versions of websites. But I haven't tried it out on the road so far. It connected very well to the wifi here, but we don't have 3G here, so it will be interesting to try it the other way round.
8) Buying things from amazon.co.uk is very simple indeed. Downloads are remarkably fast. You can also get a sample of a book sent to your kindle before deciding whether or not to read the whole thing. I've done this with some items, e.g. to find the best Kindle edition of Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici. (This is the best kindle edition; Amazon tell me they are trying to sort out the mislabelling issue with the publishers.)
8a) I bet that suggesting samples could be a good way of sharing book recommendations with friends. Amazon could add a feature saying "suggest this to a friend" and the friend could get a message saying "XX recommends this to you, would you like to download a sample?"
9) I really like the highlighting feature, and I will tell you why. It's very easy indeed to highlight a bit of text, and the kindle assembles on the fly a text file of all your highlighted stuff, labelled with where it came from, as a sort of immediate commonplace book. I wasn't expecting to annotate things much on the kindle, so this comes as a surprise to me.
10) You can share those annotations over facebook or twitter. You can read other people's annotations of books you have downloaded. Needless to say I turned this feature off as soon as I got the kindle. Just imagine reading Moby Dick if you could see all the annotations and underlinings of all the American high school students who have to read it! On the other hand it might be a good sociological experiment, or a new form of novel.
11) As for choosing books, you have to watch out for the really cheap or free items, because some are very badly OCR'd from old copies of texts, and I have heard that poetry in particular can be very badly formatted on the page. If you come across a problem like this it's very easy to get your money back from Amazon; and it's a problem you're most likely to find in free things anyway.
12) Other shops: check what format they supply in. Kindle uses .mobi, but it can't use .mobi with DRM, as I understand it, unless it's Amazon's own DRM. A program called Calibre will turn epub documents into Kindleable documents, as well as other formats; but this only works on epub docs without DRM. So watch out for DRM. But stores other than amazon are often dramatically expensive anyway. I've only used one other shop so far. I've found it very easy to put non-Amazon .mobi files onto my Kindle.
13) But so far I have not experimented with putting onto it files which are not ebooks.
14) Instapaper is quite good. It gives you a "Read later" button for articles on the web, and then you can export the whole lot onto your kindle as a sort of self-made magazine.
15) I think that for the moment I shall continue with cheap or free stuff for a while, or things which it wouldn't be easy for me to get in another format.
Friday, 17 September 2010
PS another odd thing
Here are the four finalists for the third annual "Dance Your PhD" competition.
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/09/dance-your-phd-finalists-announce.html
I like the chemistry one: it has the most smiling; also "props", as it were, to the guy with the beard who plays Urea. But the Social Sciences one looks somehow like archive footage from the 70s.
My PhD dance would start with lots of English scribes dancing Whigfield's Saturday night.
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/09/dance-your-phd-finalists-announce.html
I like the chemistry one: it has the most smiling; also "props", as it were, to the guy with the beard who plays Urea. But the Social Sciences one looks somehow like archive footage from the 70s.
My PhD dance would start with lots of English scribes dancing Whigfield's Saturday night.
Odd stuff
Before I post about Kage Baker, here are some odd things I've seen:
1. Someone in Russia made a high energy dance track about wanting a man like Putin. Putin now uses this at his rallies. Oh, those Russians!
2. Talking of Russians here are some excellent Russian photo sets. Here are some pictures of Russian 'types' from the 1860s: this link takes you straight to the start of the photostream, while this one goes to one particularly excellent picture of a peasant, looking like he came straight out of Dostoyevsky. And here are pictures from the school for female cossacks. Go female cossacks! They're just as brassy as you'd hope.
3. Talking of tough ladies, there's a very interesting documentary about women competing in a prison rodeo on 4OD. I found it via Boing Boing, which has a trailer, and a lot of heated argument about whether it's OK to watch prisoners get beaten up by bulls for entertainment. In the documentary itself the rodeo and the chance of maiming are the light-hearted bits. In fact it's probably not fair to call these women tough -- they're very very damaged, and most of them started failing their children before they had really finished being failed by their own parents. Sad but interesting.
4. Someone has thoroughly analysed the way that genders are divided by signs on toilet doors, and it's quite interesting. I hate it when toilet door signs try to be clever.
5. This Six Degrees of Francis Bacon poster shows how all literature is related.
6. The new X Factor magazine is quite good. I'm not going to apologise for reading it -- I need amusement in my reading life, and I can't get it all from Anglo-Saxon liturgy or intensely clever books by Joyce Carol Oates. (You can probably guess who the senior editor is...) I think you can only get it in Tescos though.
1. Someone in Russia made a high energy dance track about wanting a man like Putin. Putin now uses this at his rallies. Oh, those Russians!
2. Talking of Russians here are some excellent Russian photo sets. Here are some pictures of Russian 'types' from the 1860s: this link takes you straight to the start of the photostream, while this one goes to one particularly excellent picture of a peasant, looking like he came straight out of Dostoyevsky. And here are pictures from the school for female cossacks. Go female cossacks! They're just as brassy as you'd hope.
3. Talking of tough ladies, there's a very interesting documentary about women competing in a prison rodeo on 4OD. I found it via Boing Boing, which has a trailer, and a lot of heated argument about whether it's OK to watch prisoners get beaten up by bulls for entertainment. In the documentary itself the rodeo and the chance of maiming are the light-hearted bits. In fact it's probably not fair to call these women tough -- they're very very damaged, and most of them started failing their children before they had really finished being failed by their own parents. Sad but interesting.
4. Someone has thoroughly analysed the way that genders are divided by signs on toilet doors, and it's quite interesting. I hate it when toilet door signs try to be clever.
5. This Six Degrees of Francis Bacon poster shows how all literature is related.
6. The new X Factor magazine is quite good. I'm not going to apologise for reading it -- I need amusement in my reading life, and I can't get it all from Anglo-Saxon liturgy or intensely clever books by Joyce Carol Oates. (You can probably guess who the senior editor is...) I think you can only get it in Tescos though.
Wednesday, 15 September 2010
Two very good authors, part I
I have discovered two excellent writers, specifically Joyce Carol Oates (her Gothic novels), and Kage Baker. I'm going to blog about them separately, but before I start: hurray that there are always good books to be found!
Joyce Carol Oates's Gothic novels
I found these because I read a Guardian article by Carlos Ruiz Zafon about twentieth-century Gothic novels. I had to buy them secondhand from the USA, and I love that they come in slightly trashy mass-market covers; they remind me very much of the sweeping family sagas which I used to find in my granny's house as a kid. At the same time, Joyce Carol Oates is clearly formidably intelligent, and she has chosen to write this group of novels each in a different related genre because she has points to make underneath the stories.
Bellefleur is the first I read. The cover has a hole cut in the O of Oates to show part of a picture which is revealed when you turn the page:
It's about several generations of a rich and exploitative American family in the nineteenth century.
Frankly it's gloriously mad, and cries out to be illustrated, perhaps with melodramatic engravings, something like Goya's Sleep of Reason. It starts with the traditional stormy night and something unknown approaching the castle, and the impetuous young wife who rushes down to let it in before anyone can stop her. The family members tend to meet strange fates -- about the best you can hope for as a Bellefleur is to disappear and not be known for certain to be dead. There are lots of grotesque elements, like Leah's unusually attractive pet spider Love, the Bellefleur Vulture, and the woman who accidentally fell in love with a bear. Oates writes extravagantly, daringly long sentences which deliberately push at ridiculousness and sometimes curve back on themselves like Pynchon. There's a sort of chutzpah quality to the writing which you also find in Julian Rathbone's works -- as if you read something and think "hang on a moment, what?" and the author replies "you heard".
The Mysteries of Winterthurn was the next one I read.
This is a "mystery" in that it has a detective figure, but also in that it has elements of horror and the supernatural. It's less exuberant than Bellefleur, and much angrier -- it has that undertone of suppressed rage which is found in many nineteenth-century novels by women -- just think how angry Jane Eyre is. It's very spooky and could be read as a straightforward story, or rather three stories; but the first two stories also hint something rather disturbing about the third, and all three together make points about different types of suppression, points which are there to be discovered rather than forcing themselves on the reader.
A Bloodsmoor Romance is the story of five sisters; and starts with the sudden abduction of one of them from their grandparents' garden by a sinister black balloon.
It's the funniest of the three, and the one which most clearly has points to make, as the five sisters meet their different fates. The reviews, or at least the reviews quoted on the flyleaves, reflect this, saying things like "that rare and valuable thing, a warm-hearted and humorous feminist tract", and "female, clever, facetious and mischievous... the book is a feminist romance with a lot of axes to grind, and it grinds them wittily until their edges are polished to a fine sharpness". Either the reviewers or the publishers seem to have taken this one rather more seriously than the others.
I am currently waiting for My Heart Laid Bare to arrive from America. And the last of the five, The Crosswick Horror, has not been published (apart from an extract about rabies) and lies, complete, in an archive in Syracuse. People often talk about the Great American Novel, often in a rather tongue-in-cheek tone, but I think that maybe in this group of novels about the American family and class system Joyce Carol Oates may actually have written it, without many people noticing.
The odd thing is that I still feel a bit cautious about reading Oates's other books. She's famously prolific, and I don't know where I'd go next. The same is not true of my other new discovery, Kage Baker. Tune in tomorrow (or sometime soon) for information about why you should read everything Kage Baker has ever written! She's not as literary, and she doesn't put genres on and off like outdoor coats, but I'm still just as glad to have found her work.
Joyce Carol Oates's Gothic novels
I found these because I read a Guardian article by Carlos Ruiz Zafon about twentieth-century Gothic novels. I had to buy them secondhand from the USA, and I love that they come in slightly trashy mass-market covers; they remind me very much of the sweeping family sagas which I used to find in my granny's house as a kid. At the same time, Joyce Carol Oates is clearly formidably intelligent, and she has chosen to write this group of novels each in a different related genre because she has points to make underneath the stories.
Bellefleur is the first I read. The cover has a hole cut in the O of Oates to show part of a picture which is revealed when you turn the page:
It's about several generations of a rich and exploitative American family in the nineteenth century.
Frankly it's gloriously mad, and cries out to be illustrated, perhaps with melodramatic engravings, something like Goya's Sleep of Reason. It starts with the traditional stormy night and something unknown approaching the castle, and the impetuous young wife who rushes down to let it in before anyone can stop her. The family members tend to meet strange fates -- about the best you can hope for as a Bellefleur is to disappear and not be known for certain to be dead. There are lots of grotesque elements, like Leah's unusually attractive pet spider Love, the Bellefleur Vulture, and the woman who accidentally fell in love with a bear. Oates writes extravagantly, daringly long sentences which deliberately push at ridiculousness and sometimes curve back on themselves like Pynchon. There's a sort of chutzpah quality to the writing which you also find in Julian Rathbone's works -- as if you read something and think "hang on a moment, what?" and the author replies "you heard".The Mysteries of Winterthurn was the next one I read.
This is a "mystery" in that it has a detective figure, but also in that it has elements of horror and the supernatural. It's less exuberant than Bellefleur, and much angrier -- it has that undertone of suppressed rage which is found in many nineteenth-century novels by women -- just think how angry Jane Eyre is. It's very spooky and could be read as a straightforward story, or rather three stories; but the first two stories also hint something rather disturbing about the third, and all three together make points about different types of suppression, points which are there to be discovered rather than forcing themselves on the reader.A Bloodsmoor Romance is the story of five sisters; and starts with the sudden abduction of one of them from their grandparents' garden by a sinister black balloon.
It's the funniest of the three, and the one which most clearly has points to make, as the five sisters meet their different fates. The reviews, or at least the reviews quoted on the flyleaves, reflect this, saying things like "that rare and valuable thing, a warm-hearted and humorous feminist tract", and "female, clever, facetious and mischievous... the book is a feminist romance with a lot of axes to grind, and it grinds them wittily until their edges are polished to a fine sharpness". Either the reviewers or the publishers seem to have taken this one rather more seriously than the others.I am currently waiting for My Heart Laid Bare to arrive from America. And the last of the five, The Crosswick Horror, has not been published (apart from an extract about rabies) and lies, complete, in an archive in Syracuse. People often talk about the Great American Novel, often in a rather tongue-in-cheek tone, but I think that maybe in this group of novels about the American family and class system Joyce Carol Oates may actually have written it, without many people noticing.
The odd thing is that I still feel a bit cautious about reading Oates's other books. She's famously prolific, and I don't know where I'd go next. The same is not true of my other new discovery, Kage Baker. Tune in tomorrow (or sometime soon) for information about why you should read everything Kage Baker has ever written! She's not as literary, and she doesn't put genres on and off like outdoor coats, but I'm still just as glad to have found her work.
Tuesday, 14 September 2010
Stylistic contamination
Today I have been writing a book review, a somewhat overdue book review, of a worthy, one might almost say excessively learned tome. Yet because of the influence of Joyce Carol Oates' excellent Gothic novels (on which I shall blog further at a later day) I am having immense trouble not to write it in a slightly overwrought, faux nineteenth-century style. A book, I want to say, design'd more to be consulted, than read.
Well, hopefully it will wear off soon. Here's Kylie's new single (embedding disabled by request), which might help me remember which century I live in.
Well, hopefully it will wear off soon. Here's Kylie's new single (embedding disabled by request), which might help me remember which century I live in.
Sunday, 12 September 2010
Interesting Radio 4 piece
A friend alerted me to this short piece by Lisa Jardine on hardbacks and ebooks. Apparently Oprah's book club readers wanted books in hardback to keep on their shelves. That's quite interesting, I think. It was on Radio Four, and I don't know how to embed the iplayer, so here's a link:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b00tmtft/A_Point_of_View_Book_Choice
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b00tmtft/A_Point_of_View_Book_Choice
Friday, 10 September 2010
Readers
That thing where authors sell books to publishers who sort them out and distribute them for money is obviously only part of book culture. I don't think it's likely that there will be a wholesale move to eBooks any time soon in the way that cassettes got replaced by CDs, just because the codex format of book is such a brilliant one. It has tons of advantages, perhaps foremost among them how easy it is to move from place to place within the book -- I don't know yet but I rather suspect no one is going to want to read a book with endnotes on the Kindle -- and also how little is needed in the way of accessories to get at the words. Plus, they are likeable and there are so many of them out there. I don't think the codex is going to die out. But maybe there will be a big shift for certain types of book, perhaps chief among them 3-for-2 paperbacks, Tesco books, cheap genre fiction, casual consumable throw-away books. I can't think of any way in which this might be to the detriment of the publishers and authors -- except insofar as they will eventually feel it if book culture suffers damage. Take the question of how many people read each copy of a book. Presumably authors and publishers feel that the ideal number is 1, and with the current model of ebook-distribution they can pretty much achieve that. But then some of those putative second readers of books might like the author, or the genre, and this might lead to more sales in the future.
So the thing that concerns me about this likely shift has to do with the implications of fewer chances to be physically proximate to a random book. To be honest it seems likely to me that other things will pop up to take their places in unpredictable ways, and that serendipity will still occur. I have often heard people bemoan the loss through digitisation of discovering the book next to the book you're looking for on the library shelves: but not only do most library catalogues show you things in shelf-mark context if you want, digitisation has helped me discover quite a few obscure references in places I wouldn't have thought to have looked, quite randomly while searching for other things in Google Books or Google Scholar. So I think it evens out, pretty much. And for myself these days I mostly decide what to read from reviews and recommendations, rather than by browsing in bookshops. (The big exception is the Waterstone's near the Cathedral in Exeter, which always has good stuff on its shelves.)
But I'd be sad if opportunities are lost to the young, with their unformed tastes and lean pockets. The picture at the top of this post shows excellent nephew one Sunday afternoon when he got bored with us all and went to fetch a book instead. (I can tell him from experience, that behaviour will only be treated as cute for a limited number of years.) When I was a kid I, like many, read anything I could get my hands on, which meant terrible trash at my dad's parents', repulsive Reader's Digest abridged books at my mum's parents', utterly random things from book stalls at village fetes, pretty much anything the library was selling for 20p or less, my parents' books, and stuff from the local book exchange which sold Mills and Boons by weight. Also, of course, second-hand bookshops and those small local independent bookshops, now largely disappeared (which were actually pretty rubbish and don't quite deserve the sentimental way we remember them). If it's that very class of entertaining, consumable literature which is likely to go less physical, won't it be harder for children to bump into books randomly? They say that having books lying around is a good thing for children's literacy, but I'm not quite sure how that will work if the easy-come-easy-go books which used to stack up on the windowshelves of spare rooms are instead intangibly stored on devices.
Which doesn't mean it won't work, of course, just because I can't quite imagine it. Maybe when he's old my nephew will reminisce about how he loved to visit his mad aunt because she'd let him play with her ebook reader, and that's how he first discovered Wilkie Collins or something. Maybe gadgetising books will make them more appealing to some kids who might not otherwise have become readers. And they will be in luck about having the old and reasonably obscure at their fingertips, thanks to Project Gutenberg and the like. Perhaps the kids of tomorrow will grow up voracious readers of Anthony Trollope and Sir Walter Scott.
Wednesday, 8 September 2010
Some videos
1. Here are some free-runners in Cambridge, leaping about, pretending to be cats. OK so maybe climbing on old bits of carved stone has the potential to cause damage to both stone and climber, but I still think the thing at my block of flats where I was supposed to call the police when I saw them was an over-the-top reaction. I think that one of these kids in this video is one that I stopped and talked to one time. I like the ending too. It's quite "hang on lads, I've got a great idea".
2. I watch the X-factor with about half of one eye and about a quarter of my brain, and with a remote constantly ready so I can put it on mute. It's at the auditions stage, so really it's just waiting for them to open their mouths, when either they can sing and people clap, or they can't and people laugh, or the song doesn't go that well and Simon Cowell says have you got another song, and then he says, you really turned it around with that song. Best bit by miles so far was a 16-year-old called Cher singing like someone who is 16 in 2010, which really shows up the wierd time-warpy quality of most of the performances. It's Keri Hilson's version of Soulja Boy's Turn My Swag On, and if you want an example of the way in which the X-factor is occasionally cheerful and life-enhancing then you can watch it below:
(Here's Keri Hilson's version.) Poor kid must be a bit disappointed that no one gave her more than 100 percent. Maybe they're all saving the illogical percentages for live finals this year. Anyway, suspend your disbelief, try to ignore how it's somehow sinister when Simon takes a sip of water while the audience is applauding, and remember that this could well have a happy ending.
3. Here is an excellent remix.
4. I found that last one on popjustice, of course, and here's popjustice hifi's second single release, a brilliant song by a good-looking man from Wales.
5. If I were quicker with my camera I'd have put here a video of Jemima the baby alpaca chasing rabbits. But I didn't catch it so you'll just have to imagine. It's very cute, if that helps.
2. I watch the X-factor with about half of one eye and about a quarter of my brain, and with a remote constantly ready so I can put it on mute. It's at the auditions stage, so really it's just waiting for them to open their mouths, when either they can sing and people clap, or they can't and people laugh, or the song doesn't go that well and Simon Cowell says have you got another song, and then he says, you really turned it around with that song. Best bit by miles so far was a 16-year-old called Cher singing like someone who is 16 in 2010, which really shows up the wierd time-warpy quality of most of the performances. It's Keri Hilson's version of Soulja Boy's Turn My Swag On, and if you want an example of the way in which the X-factor is occasionally cheerful and life-enhancing then you can watch it below:
(Here's Keri Hilson's version.) Poor kid must be a bit disappointed that no one gave her more than 100 percent. Maybe they're all saving the illogical percentages for live finals this year. Anyway, suspend your disbelief, try to ignore how it's somehow sinister when Simon takes a sip of water while the audience is applauding, and remember that this could well have a happy ending.
3. Here is an excellent remix.
4. I found that last one on popjustice, of course, and here's popjustice hifi's second single release, a brilliant song by a good-looking man from Wales.
5. If I were quicker with my camera I'd have put here a video of Jemima the baby alpaca chasing rabbits. But I didn't catch it so you'll just have to imagine. It's very cute, if that helps.
Sunday, 5 September 2010
What is a book?
Arrrrgh. I'm really interested in all this eBook stuff but so much incredible rubbish is written about it, like this really stupid Guardian article. It's not a matter of the Kindle versus the Book! Dracula on a Kindle is still a book! The Kindle is a good thing for books and the book-industry because it gives people extra ways of reading them. I take a lot of books with me when I travel -- if I'm going alone then at least one a day. If I take a Kindle instead would this make me anti-book? Would it signal the end of the book? Will Self, who annoys me even though his books are pretty much all brilliant, talks in the same terms, or at least is quoted in those terms, in that article. But Will Self, who makes money through writing, should be saying hurray that there is a now a new way to sell his stuff to readers, and what's more sell another copy to someone like me who might suddenly want to reread Great Apes and be unable to find my paperback copy which may have gone to Oxfam anyway, I can't remember.
(PUBLIC INFORMATION ANNOUNCEMENT: do not ever read Will Self's My Idea of Fun. It's an excellent book but it's grimmer than American Psycho.)
Anyway it makes me very annoyed. If they come up with a format for books where trained monkeys whisper the chapters into your ears at twilight Frankenstein will still be Frankenstein; Jane Eyre will still be Jane Eyre. Will Self will still be writing wierd novels for someone to teach to the monkeys. Please everyone get a grip and remember that the word "book" has several meanings. A decline in hardbook sales is not an assault on literature. Hardbacks are rubbish anyway.
If you want to know, the proper term for a physical book with pages linked together at one side is a codex. It replaced the roll as a physical format for most purposes during the late antique period. I'm sure it seemed like the end of the world to everyone at the time. I can't imagine reading Vergil, they would have moaned, in one of these cheap objects where it's so easy to lose your place. Oh for the smell of old papyrus! And it may be convenient not to need a slave to rewind it for you once you're done, but where's the dignity in that? It's the death of literature.
(PUBLIC INFORMATION ANNOUNCEMENT: do not ever read Will Self's My Idea of Fun. It's an excellent book but it's grimmer than American Psycho.)
Anyway it makes me very annoyed. If they come up with a format for books where trained monkeys whisper the chapters into your ears at twilight Frankenstein will still be Frankenstein; Jane Eyre will still be Jane Eyre. Will Self will still be writing wierd novels for someone to teach to the monkeys. Please everyone get a grip and remember that the word "book" has several meanings. A decline in hardbook sales is not an assault on literature. Hardbacks are rubbish anyway.
If you want to know, the proper term for a physical book with pages linked together at one side is a codex. It replaced the roll as a physical format for most purposes during the late antique period. I'm sure it seemed like the end of the world to everyone at the time. I can't imagine reading Vergil, they would have moaned, in one of these cheap objects where it's so easy to lose your place. Oh for the smell of old papyrus! And it may be convenient not to need a slave to rewind it for you once you're done, but where's the dignity in that? It's the death of literature.
Thursday, 2 September 2010
Books and gadgets PS
I'm a huge fan of Neal Stephenson, and I know there are others out there, they post on Boing Boing and such. But the Baroque Trilogy, which I think is fantastic, has failed to be liked by both my friends whom I have managed to persuade to read it. I don't think either of them got past the undergraduate Newton bits so didn't even encounter the excellence of Half-Cocked Jack the king of the vagabonds.
I still strongly recommend Crytonomicon; the Baroque Trilogy; and The Diamond Age, or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. The electronic book in this last is a brilliant device.
Anyway, Stephenson's latest project is called The Mongoliad. It's not just him, there are others involved, and I think it's an attempt to make a new format of publication which takes advantage of the sorts of things that technology now does well. As I understand it, stories are published in installments, and these will later form a novel which will be published as such at some point. There is also a world in which the novel is set. I think you can read the chapters without subscribing but I'm not sure. You definitely have to subscribe in order to do all the contributing-to-the-world stuff. On the one hand, kudos to them for engaging with the whole fan-fic thing; on the other, apparently when you sign up you give away all rights in anything you produce. I don't know how well it will catch on because people who write Neal Stephenson fan-fic are also likely to be pretty savvy about the copyfight. (Myself, I prefer to consume; I think Web 1.0 had a lot to recommend it.) The problem is, much as I like the Dickensian publishing by instalments thing, and Tolkienian interest in back-story, it looks like a lot of it is just going to be about sword-fights and various types of armour. But if it's good I will post about it.
I still strongly recommend Crytonomicon; the Baroque Trilogy; and The Diamond Age, or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. The electronic book in this last is a brilliant device.
Anyway, Stephenson's latest project is called The Mongoliad. It's not just him, there are others involved, and I think it's an attempt to make a new format of publication which takes advantage of the sorts of things that technology now does well. As I understand it, stories are published in installments, and these will later form a novel which will be published as such at some point. There is also a world in which the novel is set. I think you can read the chapters without subscribing but I'm not sure. You definitely have to subscribe in order to do all the contributing-to-the-world stuff. On the one hand, kudos to them for engaging with the whole fan-fic thing; on the other, apparently when you sign up you give away all rights in anything you produce. I don't know how well it will catch on because people who write Neal Stephenson fan-fic are also likely to be pretty savvy about the copyfight. (Myself, I prefer to consume; I think Web 1.0 had a lot to recommend it.) The problem is, much as I like the Dickensian publishing by instalments thing, and Tolkienian interest in back-story, it looks like a lot of it is just going to be about sword-fights and various types of armour. But if it's good I will post about it.
Wednesday, 1 September 2010
Books and gadgets
I'm going to blog about books at some point, but I keep being interrupted by work or power cuts or traumatic alpaca births (Jemima is doing very well by the way, I am watching her frolic about as I write). The book I'm reading at the moment is by Eça de Queiroz. The blurb on the back says of the protagonist:
I think happiness itself might depend on other things, but you can't deny that books and gadgets make a pretty strong contribution. Hurray for books and gadgets! So I've pre-ordered a Kindle. (It's not really pre-ordering obviously, it's just that it's going to take ages and ages for it to arrive.)
I have also come up with a genius idea. When people talk about eReaders vs actual books they always talk about a) can you read it in the bath and b) real books smell nice. Almost as soon as the Kindle appeared people started making clear watertight covers, or just using ziplock bags, so that the bath thing became less of an issue. I am going to make felt covers which are impregnated with the smell of real book! Either I will come up with my own somehow -- my copy of the Centaur press paperback of Lucy Toulmin Smith's 5-volume edition of Leland's Itineraries smells fantastic -- or I will use this spray by people who came up with the idea before me. Though I don't think they get it -- it's not new book smell, like with cars, it's old book smell you want. Those Leland volumes smell amazing because they just sat in a warehouse forgotten from the 60s. (You can't get them at a bookshop, you have to know the name of the man to write to, and I'm afraid I've forgotten it.) It's not a musty smell either, it's oddly sweet and slightly spicy. I read somewhere that the lignin in the wood-pulp paper breaks down into vanillin -- I don't know if that's true.
(I'm pretty sure the smell argument against digitisation of books was first made by Giles in the fantastic Buffy season one episode where Willow accidentally scans an ancient demon onto the internet. Then he gets in touch with her via a chat room. And Buffy says "He says he's a sixteen-year-old boy but you've never even met him! He might have a hairy back!" Excellent episode, you can watch it here if you either speak Italian or can read subtitles backwards. "Did you know in the last two years more e-mail was sent than regular mail?")
My other gadget news is sad news. There is a rumour about that Apple is dropping the ipod classic. When they announced all the new versions today they didn't mention the classic at all. But I need all 120Gb of my ipod space -- I can only get all my stuff on there because I tell it to sync to the ipod at a lower quality than my actual files. Trying to fit it onto a 64Gb iPod touch would involve thinking about what music I'm likely to want at any particular time, which would be a boring job. So I hope that they didn't mention the Classic because it's not changing at all. The standard 160Gb version is still there in the Apple store, which is hopeful.
In other things-contributing-to-happiness news, the Pet Shop Boys sang "I want a dog", and it's easy to agree. But they went on to specify that it should be a chihuahua and I've never really agreed with them about that until now:
He lives in a mansion crammed with books and all the latest gadgets, for he believes that human happiness depends on a combination of erudition and the most sophisticated of mechanical aids.
I think happiness itself might depend on other things, but you can't deny that books and gadgets make a pretty strong contribution. Hurray for books and gadgets! So I've pre-ordered a Kindle. (It's not really pre-ordering obviously, it's just that it's going to take ages and ages for it to arrive.)
I have also come up with a genius idea. When people talk about eReaders vs actual books they always talk about a) can you read it in the bath and b) real books smell nice. Almost as soon as the Kindle appeared people started making clear watertight covers, or just using ziplock bags, so that the bath thing became less of an issue. I am going to make felt covers which are impregnated with the smell of real book! Either I will come up with my own somehow -- my copy of the Centaur press paperback of Lucy Toulmin Smith's 5-volume edition of Leland's Itineraries smells fantastic -- or I will use this spray by people who came up with the idea before me. Though I don't think they get it -- it's not new book smell, like with cars, it's old book smell you want. Those Leland volumes smell amazing because they just sat in a warehouse forgotten from the 60s. (You can't get them at a bookshop, you have to know the name of the man to write to, and I'm afraid I've forgotten it.) It's not a musty smell either, it's oddly sweet and slightly spicy. I read somewhere that the lignin in the wood-pulp paper breaks down into vanillin -- I don't know if that's true.
(I'm pretty sure the smell argument against digitisation of books was first made by Giles in the fantastic Buffy season one episode where Willow accidentally scans an ancient demon onto the internet. Then he gets in touch with her via a chat room. And Buffy says "He says he's a sixteen-year-old boy but you've never even met him! He might have a hairy back!" Excellent episode, you can watch it here if you either speak Italian or can read subtitles backwards. "Did you know in the last two years more e-mail was sent than regular mail?")
My other gadget news is sad news. There is a rumour about that Apple is dropping the ipod classic. When they announced all the new versions today they didn't mention the classic at all. But I need all 120Gb of my ipod space -- I can only get all my stuff on there because I tell it to sync to the ipod at a lower quality than my actual files. Trying to fit it onto a 64Gb iPod touch would involve thinking about what music I'm likely to want at any particular time, which would be a boring job. So I hope that they didn't mention the Classic because it's not changing at all. The standard 160Gb version is still there in the Apple store, which is hopeful.
In other things-contributing-to-happiness news, the Pet Shop Boys sang "I want a dog", and it's easy to agree. But they went on to specify that it should be a chihuahua and I've never really agreed with them about that until now:
Sunday, 29 August 2010
More optimistic now
When I wrote the last post the mother and baby alpacas were both looking quite knackered, it was raining, and I was feeling a bit traumatised by the whole experience. But the sun has come out, Jemima has got the hang of her legs with impressively few tumbles, and she may even have suckled -- she certainly had her head in the right place and was making slurpy noises. But she at least seems to understand that she ought to. It can be very frustrating when baby alpacas are just standing up, because they seem to have an innate sense that there is good stuff to be had somewhere around their mother's undercarriage, but aren't sure where or what, and you have to watch them tentatively licking their mothers' shoulders or other unproductive bits of anatomy for quite a while before they get it right. Anyway, I'm pretty sure she has suckled now, and hopefully all will be well! Hurray! Because she's really a very lovely little alpaca. Here is some footage of when she had just got the hang of standing up, and knew there was something she ought to be doing:
But she missed.
She's brown because her father is a champion brown alpaca, and has even held his own at shows against white alpacas, which tend to be of a much higher quality. A lot of effort has gone into breeding very good white alpacas, and coloured alpacas tend to lag behind, and look a bit more like llamas than is ideal. If Jemima's going to be a good quality brown alpaca, and it looks like it, then she's a very good thing indeed.
But she missed.
She's brown because her father is a champion brown alpaca, and has even held his own at shows against white alpacas, which tend to be of a much higher quality. A lot of effort has gone into breeding very good white alpacas, and coloured alpacas tend to lag behind, and look a bit more like llamas than is ideal. If Jemima's going to be a good quality brown alpaca, and it looks like it, then she's a very good thing indeed.
Tense situations, country style, part II
So this time the alpaca really had gone into labour when I was the only person here, and it wasn't a normal labour. The head and front legs are supposed to come out together, but only the head was out, and gasping horribly. Luckily my dad wasn't far away, so that by the time the vet was giving over-the-phone instructions along the lines of "put the head back in and feel around for the legs" my dad was the one who greased up and did the whole James Herriott thing. I just held Esther the alpaca's head. She made the most horrible noises, and eventually ended up just lying on her side looking utterly exhausted, poor soul. Even more luckily a real vet was able to get here and sort it out properly -- it only took him about ten minutes of rummaging to get the legs sorted out. The alpacas do this really rather endearing thing where, although they are usually a bit stubborn and like to do their own thing, if something is actually wrong they declare a truce and are really nice to us. So that even though we were clearly causing Esther a lot of pain she seemed to realise we weren't doing it for no reason, and didn't ty to get away from us -- she just expressed herself through blood-curdling shrieks.
Anyway, at the time of writing a baby girl provisionally called Jemima is sitting next to her mother, making occasional movements towards standing up. I ought to feel all elated, but the crucial thing with baby alpacas is that they suckle. If they've suckled by nightfall they're almost always fine. If they haven't then they almost always die. Usually when things go wrong with the whole process of birth and the first few days it's because there's something underlying wrong. Hopefully feet in the wrong place is just the sort of random thing which could happen to anyone, and doesn't indicate a bigger issue. But she must be very tired after such a protracted birth, and I'm sure her mother is exhausted too. So I am not totally optimistic as yet. She is adorable though and I will take some pictures to put up. And I expect that the next post will either be a happy one, or an RIP.
Anyway, at the time of writing a baby girl provisionally called Jemima is sitting next to her mother, making occasional movements towards standing up. I ought to feel all elated, but the crucial thing with baby alpacas is that they suckle. If they've suckled by nightfall they're almost always fine. If they haven't then they almost always die. Usually when things go wrong with the whole process of birth and the first few days it's because there's something underlying wrong. Hopefully feet in the wrong place is just the sort of random thing which could happen to anyone, and doesn't indicate a bigger issue. But she must be very tired after such a protracted birth, and I'm sure her mother is exhausted too. So I am not totally optimistic as yet. She is adorable though and I will take some pictures to put up. And I expect that the next post will either be a happy one, or an RIP.
Sunday, 22 August 2010
Cows: a photo story
I was walking up Corks Hill the other day at milking time. Herds of cows are just one of those things around here -- like not being able to use the motorways at the weekend in August. Where are the cows?
There they are!
These cows really know where they are going. I don't usually encounter them on foot, and I think that if I had had a dog with me I would have been nervous. Apparently the thing to do is to let your dog go, and don't try to protect it: it can run faster than the cows, and if it legs it the cows are less likely to trample you. Anyway, some of them had a good look at me, but it was time to be milked so they trundled on. Apparently cows have a very fine sense of order and hierarchy, so here you looking at boss cow:
When I was a small kid, about seven or eight, my mother used to buy me Pony magazine, and my little brother used to say that cows are much better than ponies, and that he wished there was a Cow magazine. At the time I thought this was amazingly inane of him, but maybe Cow magazine would be quite good. Our local farmer's supply shop probably sells it -- it sells birthday cards with specific makes of tractor on.
These are just standard Friesians, but still have their own grace. Cows have a cow style in the way that cats have a cat style, and terriers have a terrier style but most dogs don't. There are some wonderful Devon Reds round here, and other less usual breeds. The horned types in particular seem to channel an ancient spirit of cow; they are quite soothing to be around.
Goodbye cows!
There they are!
These cows really know where they are going. I don't usually encounter them on foot, and I think that if I had had a dog with me I would have been nervous. Apparently the thing to do is to let your dog go, and don't try to protect it: it can run faster than the cows, and if it legs it the cows are less likely to trample you. Anyway, some of them had a good look at me, but it was time to be milked so they trundled on. Apparently cows have a very fine sense of order and hierarchy, so here you looking at boss cow:
When I was a small kid, about seven or eight, my mother used to buy me Pony magazine, and my little brother used to say that cows are much better than ponies, and that he wished there was a Cow magazine. At the time I thought this was amazingly inane of him, but maybe Cow magazine would be quite good. Our local farmer's supply shop probably sells it -- it sells birthday cards with specific makes of tractor on.
These are just standard Friesians, but still have their own grace. Cows have a cow style in the way that cats have a cat style, and terriers have a terrier style but most dogs don't. There are some wonderful Devon Reds round here, and other less usual breeds. The horned types in particular seem to channel an ancient spirit of cow; they are quite soothing to be around.
Goodbye cows!
Friday, 20 August 2010
Alpaca alarm, regretsy, and energy music
Alpacas make odd noises when they're alarmed. They sound part like a bird of prey, part like an angry donkey. I've never managed to record one before, so when Edith was annoyed the other day I picked up my camera and filmed. The view isn't very good because I was sitting at my desk with my window open -- I just wanted to get the sound.
Edith is the further away of the two adult alpacas on this side of the fence. We don't know what upset her, but she's been very tetchy ever since these three girls were moved away from the main herd, and Jabberwocky annoys her in the evenings by running round and round her very fast. I think the donkey-ness of this alarm call suggests as much anger as genuine worry.
Ever since I have been following Regretsy I have been inspired by the "WTF Alchemy requests" and want to commission my own mad celebrity fights animal picture. This person wants to decorate their home with Charles Bronson beating up a shark while a dinosaur roars in the background; but Lady Gaga eating a unicorn is better. I do like the way that almost anything is on etsy; it's the ebay of crafts. The chances are that if I decided I wanted a picture of Michael Hutchence dancing the tango with a bear while watched by vultures it would already exist.
Actually I just checked and it doesn't, but I did somehow get sidetracked into the world of fish portraiture and traditional Japanese fish printing. (Good slogan by the way.)
The freelance work I'm doing at the moment is very dull, and also very similar to the actual paid jobs I've done for the last six years or so, which is giving me pause, because I'm currently doing it for much better money. But I will have to sort out my own tax, which leads to the question: will I be able to claim Lady Gaga's Fame Monster as a legitimate business expense? I really would work much less well without it. Yesterday for work purposes I bought a BWO album which turned out to be below their usual standards (too many ballads) but had a few excellent songs on it. Here's the video for one of them: the beautiful Martin has to sit in the back of the car while the grown-ups drive.
And today I bought for a fiver off of Amazon MP3 the Clubber's Guide to Summer 2010. I love this one with very clear Soulwax input -- Soulwax are great. Start it playing and then get on with some data entry, and you will see what I mean.
Edith is the further away of the two adult alpacas on this side of the fence. We don't know what upset her, but she's been very tetchy ever since these three girls were moved away from the main herd, and Jabberwocky annoys her in the evenings by running round and round her very fast. I think the donkey-ness of this alarm call suggests as much anger as genuine worry.
Ever since I have been following Regretsy I have been inspired by the "WTF Alchemy requests" and want to commission my own mad celebrity fights animal picture. This person wants to decorate their home with Charles Bronson beating up a shark while a dinosaur roars in the background; but Lady Gaga eating a unicorn is better. I do like the way that almost anything is on etsy; it's the ebay of crafts. The chances are that if I decided I wanted a picture of Michael Hutchence dancing the tango with a bear while watched by vultures it would already exist.
Actually I just checked and it doesn't, but I did somehow get sidetracked into the world of fish portraiture and traditional Japanese fish printing. (Good slogan by the way.)
The freelance work I'm doing at the moment is very dull, and also very similar to the actual paid jobs I've done for the last six years or so, which is giving me pause, because I'm currently doing it for much better money. But I will have to sort out my own tax, which leads to the question: will I be able to claim Lady Gaga's Fame Monster as a legitimate business expense? I really would work much less well without it. Yesterday for work purposes I bought a BWO album which turned out to be below their usual standards (too many ballads) but had a few excellent songs on it. Here's the video for one of them: the beautiful Martin has to sit in the back of the car while the grown-ups drive.
And today I bought for a fiver off of Amazon MP3 the Clubber's Guide to Summer 2010. I love this one with very clear Soulwax input -- Soulwax are great. Start it playing and then get on with some data entry, and you will see what I mean.
Wednesday, 18 August 2010
Internet gambolling
Jabberwocky likes to run about like a mad thing in the evening, and this is the first time I have managed to get some video of it. I was feeding Iris chopped carrots at the same time. Jabberwocky has a cute thing where he copies the adult alpacas, and at the start of this clip you can see him chewing along as Iris munches.
Wednesday, 11 August 2010
Even more stuff from the internet
Dear Blog, I am quite fond of you, but even so, you would not exist if Penzu had been around when I started, because I really only wanted an internetty way of writing. (Although the fact that this blog is public probably does make me better behaved.)
Also, 750words.com. It's for writing three pages a day. I've only done it for seven days so far, but I am already collecting badges, and points, and just feeling good about writing something completely throwaway every day. I intend to try to make it a regular thing, and if I do I think I'll subscribe. It has algorithms for analysing what you've written, and keeps telling me that the prevailing mood of my writing is "self-important", which is a bit harsh, because I don't use it as some sort of therapy like they seem to assume you do, but instead write random and pointless short stories based on random and stupid things. Hurray!
Folksy! It's like Etsy but UK-based! (Awful name though.) I bought this handmade print of the beast with seven heads from Revelation. It's called What Have I Become. Hurrah! The European Etsy is called DeWanda. These are both quite good if you feel like finding something unusual, or just supporting makers. There are lots of nice hand-made cards, at prices congruent with mass-produced cards. Earrings are good too. I quite covet these ones with sea urchin chips in.
Plus you can buy Hark A Vagrant prints now. I love Hark A Vagrant. I'm going to buy this one, which is on several different topics; they're all good, and I really like the strip about the Bad Monk.
Question: is it time for a kindle? When I really wanted an ebook reader about a year ago I looked into it and decided that it would basically be stupid to buy one. I think maybe now they've got to the stage where it would no longer be a stupid purchase. Some books are cheaper as ebooks than as paperbacks, and it seems that you can now read pdfs on them OK. And the contrast is apparently higher. But my enthusiasm for the whole concept has waned, so I'm waiting until either I get enthused again or it gets so good that it becomes an actively sensible thing to buy.
Also, 750words.com. It's for writing three pages a day. I've only done it for seven days so far, but I am already collecting badges, and points, and just feeling good about writing something completely throwaway every day. I intend to try to make it a regular thing, and if I do I think I'll subscribe. It has algorithms for analysing what you've written, and keeps telling me that the prevailing mood of my writing is "self-important", which is a bit harsh, because I don't use it as some sort of therapy like they seem to assume you do, but instead write random and pointless short stories based on random and stupid things. Hurray!
Folksy! It's like Etsy but UK-based! (Awful name though.) I bought this handmade print of the beast with seven heads from Revelation. It's called What Have I Become. Hurrah! The European Etsy is called DeWanda. These are both quite good if you feel like finding something unusual, or just supporting makers. There are lots of nice hand-made cards, at prices congruent with mass-produced cards. Earrings are good too. I quite covet these ones with sea urchin chips in.
Plus you can buy Hark A Vagrant prints now. I love Hark A Vagrant. I'm going to buy this one, which is on several different topics; they're all good, and I really like the strip about the Bad Monk.
Question: is it time for a kindle? When I really wanted an ebook reader about a year ago I looked into it and decided that it would basically be stupid to buy one. I think maybe now they've got to the stage where it would no longer be a stupid purchase. Some books are cheaper as ebooks than as paperbacks, and it seems that you can now read pdfs on them OK. And the contrast is apparently higher. But my enthusiasm for the whole concept has waned, so I'm waiting until either I get enthused again or it gets so good that it becomes an actively sensible thing to buy.
Tuesday, 10 August 2010
Jabberwocky the alpaca born this morning
The baby alpaca was born this morning. Sunday's events were a false alarm, and my parents laughed at me for worrying, which I think was a bit unfair, given that I was a) doing my best when left alone to care for their animals and b) there were some odd things going on. My new rule is: never look at an alpaca's privates. Someone has to do it, but it doesn't need to be you.
Anyway here is little Jabberwocky, in a rare bit of sunshine between today's storms and showers of grey rain.
Isn't he lovely? He's large for a newborn (which may explain Sunday's disconcerting phenomena, as that's about when he was probably turning in the womb so as to come out right). Alpaca labour is reasonably straightforward and seems to cause more stress to any neurotic humans in the vicinity than to the animal herself -- there was a wierdly comic bit this morning where Edith was grazing, and Jabberwocky's head and front legs were dangling out under her tail, and she would occasionally try to look round to see what was making the bleating noises, with about as much effectiveness as a dog trying to catch its tail, but much slower and more vague. She got quite a bit of grazing done before he was finally all out and on the ground.
Anyway, before long I am going to blog about all sorts of exciting things, like books (I've read some interestingly crazy ones recently) and why Devon is great. (Here's a teaser: one of the great things is cows.)
PS I'm taking it as read that I accidentally put on a stupid voice whenever I record sound or video, like how all of us tend to pull an expression for the mirror, and if you know me and that's my real speaking voice, please do not tell me.
Anyway here is little Jabberwocky, in a rare bit of sunshine between today's storms and showers of grey rain.
Isn't he lovely? He's large for a newborn (which may explain Sunday's disconcerting phenomena, as that's about when he was probably turning in the womb so as to come out right). Alpaca labour is reasonably straightforward and seems to cause more stress to any neurotic humans in the vicinity than to the animal herself -- there was a wierdly comic bit this morning where Edith was grazing, and Jabberwocky's head and front legs were dangling out under her tail, and she would occasionally try to look round to see what was making the bleating noises, with about as much effectiveness as a dog trying to catch its tail, but much slower and more vague. She got quite a bit of grazing done before he was finally all out and on the ground.
Anyway, before long I am going to blog about all sorts of exciting things, like books (I've read some interestingly crazy ones recently) and why Devon is great. (Here's a teaser: one of the great things is cows.)
PS I'm taking it as read that I accidentally put on a stupid voice whenever I record sound or video, like how all of us tend to pull an expression for the mirror, and if you know me and that's my real speaking voice, please do not tell me.
Sunday, 8 August 2010
Tense situations, country style
My parents are not around, and from the vantage point of my desk I am pretty sure that one of the alpacas (I think it's Esther) is about to give birth. Either that or she has suffered some sort of really disgusting rupture, and let's not rule that out, because the alpacas have a habit of saving up their most revolting diseases until they're alone with me.
I have never been an alpaca midwife before. My parents are not within mobile phone reception. How very different life is in the country.
I have never been an alpaca midwife before. My parents are not within mobile phone reception. How very different life is in the country.
Friday, 6 August 2010
Some stuff on the internet
What are Japanese robot designers trying to do to us? I think, but I may be wrong, that this robot is a bit like a way of transmitting your facial expressions telephonically.
Someone on Boing Boing pointed out how much it looks like the thing that tries to kill Buffy's mum after her brain operation, one of the creepiest Buffy episodes ever.
Boing Boing have something they call a Unicorn chaser, a cute or soothing follow-up to a disturbing post. In that spirit I offer you this Mattias Adolfson drawing. I really like his pictures.
Also, Jan Morris is right about how we shouldn't have to go around kissing people, but is regrettably soft on hugs. I hate hugging. I was famous for it as a teenager -- during the sign of the peace in communion services I would go around resolutely holding my hand before me to be shaken, while the rest of the youth group went around hugging like they were in an American sitcom. In fact the other day I found a copy of the Forever Friends Hugs Book which someone gave me for my 18th birthday in reference to this. It is amazingly nauseating.
William Shatner stole Leonard Nimoy's bicycle. I must track down and watch some Original Star Trek.
Someone on Boing Boing pointed out how much it looks like the thing that tries to kill Buffy's mum after her brain operation, one of the creepiest Buffy episodes ever.
Boing Boing have something they call a Unicorn chaser, a cute or soothing follow-up to a disturbing post. In that spirit I offer you this Mattias Adolfson drawing. I really like his pictures.
Also, Jan Morris is right about how we shouldn't have to go around kissing people, but is regrettably soft on hugs. I hate hugging. I was famous for it as a teenager -- during the sign of the peace in communion services I would go around resolutely holding my hand before me to be shaken, while the rest of the youth group went around hugging like they were in an American sitcom. In fact the other day I found a copy of the Forever Friends Hugs Book which someone gave me for my 18th birthday in reference to this. It is amazingly nauseating.
William Shatner stole Leonard Nimoy's bicycle. I must track down and watch some Original Star Trek.
Tuesday, 3 August 2010
Actually I just like how it catches the light
On Saturday I went to the artsy bit of Exeter. While I was browsing some earrings in a little shop, the lady behind the counter was telling a customer all about the manifold properties of some crystal or other. I wasn't really listening until I thought I heard her say that it boosts broadband function -- which sounded pretty useful in a rural area. Probably I misheard, but it's interesting how sometimes these sorts of superstitions relate to the mundane. Recently I have read a few horoscopes in papers left on trains, and I have noticed that they tend to have one of the twelve giving some sensible practical advice about life. In among the stuff about romance, etc, they often have one that says something like "a conjunction of Saturn and retrograde Mars means it's time to make sure your bank statements are filed properly" or "this weekend the sun will be in the house of Jupiter, making it a good time for big chores like defrosting the fridge". So if you strip away the superstition that the movement of planets affects us in these big broad ways, and just look at the structure of it -- imagine that you're allocated to one of the twelve by drawing lots -- then it's quite an interesting thing. Presumably there are people out there who do believe in it, and who are influenced by their horoscope for a day or week, and behind it all there are the horoscope-writers, who come up with little schemas for the lives of strangers. It's the same with the healing crystals. It seems to me self-evident that lumps of semi-precious stone don't have emotional powers, and any sort of discussion about whether or not they do is going to be very dull indeed. But if you ignore that bit then you can just look at the stories. It's as if someone has picked a structure for belief without bothering about what it's based on, like a house without foundations. The lady in the shop was warning the customer not to wear a haematite ring twenty-four hours a day, because it would cause a bulge in her energy field, and I suppose this taboo emphasises the idea of the stone as powerful. In the end the customer settled on a stone which was guaranteed to dispel nonsense, which boggled my mind for a moment -- she clearly has a complex love-hate relationship with nonsense. Anyway, people = quite interesting.
Tuesday, 27 July 2010
Audrey the rat; sad Parker; consoling PSB
I am sad because I have had my little rat, Audrey, put to sleep. She was a very good age for a rat, and it was time to call it a day because she was becoming miserable, and she had had a pleasant life, and I did everything I could to make her comfortable as she grew more frail: all these supposedly comforting things are true, but I still feel very sad. I will miss her. She liked to sit on my lap and make happy teeth-chattering noises. She had an annoying habit of casually chewing things as she passed them, so that most of my electrical goods now have thick clumps of insulating tape around their cables, but when I shouted Hey Audrey, stop that! at her she would look up as if to say Oh, it's you! and then bound over to me and climb onto my lap to have her neck scratched. This was endearing. When given the choice, she preferred to run towards me rather than away, and when rats do this it always seems like a bit of a miracle to me, given the tremendous disparity in size between us.
I have also been reading Matthew Parker's eventually futile attempts not to become archbishop of Canterbury. All bishops are supposed not to want to be bishops, it's a topos known as noli episcopari, but I think in Parker's case, as probably in the case of all those who ought to be bishops, it was not a pose. Poor old Parker. He only wanted to be left along with his books. When his friends Bacon and Burghley, elevated by the accession of Elizabeth I, were first offering to do something for him after the lean fugitive years of Mary's reign, he said this:
He was hoping to be restored to the mastership of Corpus, which he had been forced to resign for religious reasons. But he soon began to understand that they had a higher and much worse honour in store for him.
But Elizabeth had decided, and Parker couldn't do much about it. Being archbishop of Canterbury made Parker miserable, and his last letters, after the death of his wife, are very pitiable.
Here is an excellent Pet Shop Boys remix which is helping me to feel better through expressing my melancholy.
I have also been reading Matthew Parker's eventually futile attempts not to become archbishop of Canterbury. All bishops are supposed not to want to be bishops, it's a topos known as noli episcopari, but I think in Parker's case, as probably in the case of all those who ought to be bishops, it was not a pose. Poor old Parker. He only wanted to be left along with his books. When his friends Bacon and Burghley, elevated by the accession of Elizabeth I, were first offering to do something for him after the lean fugitive years of Mary's reign, he said this:
But to tell you my heart, I had rather have such a thing as Benet College is in Cambridge, a living of twenty nobles by the year at the most, than to dwell in the deanery of Lincoln, which is two hundred at the least.
He was hoping to be restored to the mastership of Corpus, which he had been forced to resign for religious reasons. But he soon began to understand that they had a higher and much worse honour in store for him.
But, sir, except ye both moderate and restrain your overmuch good will in the former respects to me-ward, I fear, in the end, I shall dislike you both, and that your benevolences should by occasion of my obstinate untowardness jeopard me into prison; yet there shall I bear you my good heart, which I had rather suffer in a quiet conscience, than to be intruded into such room and vocation, wherein I should not be able to answer the charge to God nor to the world, wherein I should not serve the Queen’s honour, which I would wish most heartily advanced in all her wise and godly proceedings; nor yet should I live to the honour of the realm, and so finally should but work a further displeasant contemplation to my good friends who preferred me.
But Elizabeth had decided, and Parker couldn't do much about it. Being archbishop of Canterbury made Parker miserable, and his last letters, after the death of his wife, are very pitiable.
Here is an excellent Pet Shop Boys remix which is helping me to feel better through expressing my melancholy.
Wednesday, 21 July 2010
Closing tabs
I don't care if I'm far from his target audience, I still think Tony Hawk is really cool:
And he's 42! That gives me eight years to become that cool. I'd better go and buy some elbow pads.
Quantum biology is also cool. According to this article, which you won't be able to read without going "whoah!" at least mentally, quantum tangling may help to keep our dna together. At some point the right-wing American loony-Christians will catch on to the fact that if evolution made God sound a bit uninvolved, or cruel, or whatever it is they object to about evolution, then quantum theory makes Him sound, like, totally stoned. (My Christianity involves believing that God is complex, unexpected, and mind-blowing, so it's all good for me. Hurray for science which reconfirms one's prejudices!)
Kids are getting high on digital drugs! Don't they know there's quantum biology out there, or skateboarding? Anyway, this is not surprising, because Chris Morris is clearly some sort of cleverly-disguised prophet, or like those medieval genres where the parody emerges before the thing it's supposed to be parodying.
The iPhone has no app for making your own apps, and it never will. This is why Android is better.
In darker news, Boing Boing has the advert for prison experiment guinea pigs. Chilling. You can't observe things without changing them, you see.
Popjustice has launched a record label.
According to this website, I write like James Joyce. I think it means that computers can't understand me. Hurray!
And here is a kaleidoscope thing. It goes round and round.
And he's 42! That gives me eight years to become that cool. I'd better go and buy some elbow pads.
Quantum biology is also cool. According to this article, which you won't be able to read without going "whoah!" at least mentally, quantum tangling may help to keep our dna together. At some point the right-wing American loony-Christians will catch on to the fact that if evolution made God sound a bit uninvolved, or cruel, or whatever it is they object to about evolution, then quantum theory makes Him sound, like, totally stoned. (My Christianity involves believing that God is complex, unexpected, and mind-blowing, so it's all good for me. Hurray for science which reconfirms one's prejudices!)
Kids are getting high on digital drugs! Don't they know there's quantum biology out there, or skateboarding? Anyway, this is not surprising, because Chris Morris is clearly some sort of cleverly-disguised prophet, or like those medieval genres where the parody emerges before the thing it's supposed to be parodying.
The iPhone has no app for making your own apps, and it never will. This is why Android is better.
In darker news, Boing Boing has the advert for prison experiment guinea pigs. Chilling. You can't observe things without changing them, you see.
Popjustice has launched a record label.
According to this website, I write like James Joyce. I think it means that computers can't understand me. Hurray!
And here is a kaleidoscope thing. It goes round and round.
Wednesday, 14 July 2010
Pictures
I've been browsing the Guardian's Galleries, in one of those displacement activities brought on by the need to format bibliographies. There are some great ones:
Here are pictures of some of Edmund de Waal's netsuke which inspired his recent book. (I covet all rat netsuke, and every now and then I look for them on ebay, but the nice ones are too expensive.)
Here is a nineteenth-century French photographer's views of London people. I love the penultimate picture. It should be the front cover of a novel.
These competition entries for a London Transport competition for a cycling poster are really very good.
I love this illustrated blog post about dog training. Wanting so much to be a good dog, and trying everything in the hope that something is right, is such a typical dog thing.
This xkcd thing is very true. I have learnt the hard way that if someone is doing computer things in a wierdly roundabout way you need to think twice about trying to sort them out with something more sensible. Only do it for people you really love and for whom you are prepared to be IT support until one of you dies.
I want an etching by Glyn Thomas. You could argue that they're too easy to like, but I really really like them, and I don't think they would wear out over time. I like the way he draws flat spaces a bit curvy, because that's what they feel like somehow when you're there.
I'm usually not that interested in "save this work of art" stuff, and I couldn't be less bothered about this new plan to build a theatre over the remains of the actual Globe, but this portrait of Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, a West-African muslim who was freed from slavery by public subscription in London in the eighteenth century, and who sounds like a significant figure but isn't in the Oxford DNB, really should be in the National Portrait Gallery.
Here are pictures of some of Edmund de Waal's netsuke which inspired his recent book. (I covet all rat netsuke, and every now and then I look for them on ebay, but the nice ones are too expensive.)
Here is a nineteenth-century French photographer's views of London people. I love the penultimate picture. It should be the front cover of a novel.
These competition entries for a London Transport competition for a cycling poster are really very good.
I love this illustrated blog post about dog training. Wanting so much to be a good dog, and trying everything in the hope that something is right, is such a typical dog thing.
This xkcd thing is very true. I have learnt the hard way that if someone is doing computer things in a wierdly roundabout way you need to think twice about trying to sort them out with something more sensible. Only do it for people you really love and for whom you are prepared to be IT support until one of you dies.
I want an etching by Glyn Thomas. You could argue that they're too easy to like, but I really really like them, and I don't think they would wear out over time. I like the way he draws flat spaces a bit curvy, because that's what they feel like somehow when you're there.
I'm usually not that interested in "save this work of art" stuff, and I couldn't be less bothered about this new plan to build a theatre over the remains of the actual Globe, but this portrait of Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, a West-African muslim who was freed from slavery by public subscription in London in the eighteenth century, and who sounds like a significant figure but isn't in the Oxford DNB, really should be in the National Portrait Gallery.
Sunday, 11 July 2010
Infantility
Although our village has no shop it has a small pub, which serves Otter beer (motto: relax with an otter) and very good chips, and there's a small church. The church is actually a chapel of ease, which means it was built so that people could have services nearer at hand. There have been three weddings there in its whole existence: some people I don't know, who had to get the church licenced first; my brother and his wife; and a fake wedding which Joss Stone recorded for a music video. (She comes from here.)
It's very nice to be able to walk a few minutes down the road to go to church, and the people are pleasant too. But I am being driven slightly distracted by its infantilism. Admittedly a lot of the services there are specifically for children. But there are endless colouring-in activities, and sometimes we don't even get sermons, we get Christian children's stories read aloud (actually these fascinate me in the way they revive sentimental medieval apocrypha which were just the sort of thing to which Protestants strongly objected at the Reformation, in my view rightly). Today the usual person was away because of a family illness, and so we went one step more inane. We didn't even get a Bible reading, instead we had our next-door neighbour telling the story of the early years of Moses extempore, with a long digression about how he sort of sympathised with Pharoah because he went to London yesterday and no one there looked English and he couldn't read the signs in the shop windows. You may be thinking, well, the King James Version is hard work for a child and maybe it's better for them to have something easier to digest: but we're not talking about the King James here, or the RSV, or the NIV, or even the Good News. (I didn't come across the King James until I discovered it for myself as a literary teenager, and loved it -- "I feel like a bottle in the smoke", etc, though it still wouldn't be my first call for trying to understand what the Bible is actually saying -- and we always had the NIV and the Good News at church.) At the best we're talking about one of those books of Children's Bible Stories which I really hated as a child. (It wasn't a religious thing, I also hated those Children's Stories from Shakespeare books, which really put me off Shakespeare until I was old enough to realise that the point of Shakespeare is not so much the plot as the mad vertigo of the language.) And I fear we might even be talking about one of those "modern" translations written in a mixed slang which is about ten years out of date. (Peter said, What up dog! That was like, so totally rad.) But this would still have been a step up from someone randomly dredging the story out of their memory, with splashes of Martin-Amis-style, I'm-just-saying-what-we're-all-thinking racism mixed in.
In a funny development, the bloke who usually does the service had e-mailed his 5-min talk to my mother, who read it out, and it turned out to be all about how we should welcome people from foreign countries and try to protect them from exploitation. It's heartening how often the people in charge in the church are in charge for a good reason.
Anyway, I fear that I need to find myself a church which is a bit less inane. It's not that I actually disagree in general with these things, it's just that I know that my own religious life has to involve some intellectual content. (Is it any wonder that so many people think Christianity is just a matter of accepting a series of children's stories?) I need to read things written by intelligent Christians, and here's the difficult bit, I could really do with some people to discuss them with me. In Cambridge this was achievable, although even in Cambridge it was pretty difficult to find people who are more interested in theology than aesthetics.
On the plus side the good thing about these lightweight services is that I flee them yearning for some serious meaty Christianity. I read Rowan William's Dostoyevsky book as a direct result of a Christmas eve service of peculiar inanity, and now I feel all driven to read Marianne Robinson's Absence of Mind. (She was on the Daily Show the other day, doing pretty well I thought at pointing out how the people engaged in the Science vs Religion debate are not the brightest minds from either tradition.)
PS Do children really need things to be so thoroughly digested for them? I remember that it completely blew my mind when I was eight and my mother told me that thing Augustine said, that we should love God and do whatever we wanted. I said but what if you love God, but you want to steal things? And my mum said, but if you really loved God like he loves us, you'd know that stealing things wasn't a God-like thing, and that it would pain him, and you'd be revolted by the idea of stealing and try your hardest never to do it even by accident. And this totally blew my mind. I remember thinking about it for some time, and when my mother came up at light's out (9 pm) to check I wasn't reading under the covers, I said that I had had an idea that could make everything alright. If we didn't only love God, but if we loved everyone, and loved them properly, then we could all do whatever we wanted all the time, and everything would be fine. My mother, bless her, said that she knew some people who had said that, and she thought maybe they were right. But I remember it vividly as seeming utterly amazing to me at the time.
PPS Wouldn't it be great to love God like that, so that all the commandments just became descriptions of what you were like? Wouldn't it be amazing to be that person out of love, not duty? I think that's what Paul is saying in Romans.
It's very nice to be able to walk a few minutes down the road to go to church, and the people are pleasant too. But I am being driven slightly distracted by its infantilism. Admittedly a lot of the services there are specifically for children. But there are endless colouring-in activities, and sometimes we don't even get sermons, we get Christian children's stories read aloud (actually these fascinate me in the way they revive sentimental medieval apocrypha which were just the sort of thing to which Protestants strongly objected at the Reformation, in my view rightly). Today the usual person was away because of a family illness, and so we went one step more inane. We didn't even get a Bible reading, instead we had our next-door neighbour telling the story of the early years of Moses extempore, with a long digression about how he sort of sympathised with Pharoah because he went to London yesterday and no one there looked English and he couldn't read the signs in the shop windows. You may be thinking, well, the King James Version is hard work for a child and maybe it's better for them to have something easier to digest: but we're not talking about the King James here, or the RSV, or the NIV, or even the Good News. (I didn't come across the King James until I discovered it for myself as a literary teenager, and loved it -- "I feel like a bottle in the smoke", etc, though it still wouldn't be my first call for trying to understand what the Bible is actually saying -- and we always had the NIV and the Good News at church.) At the best we're talking about one of those books of Children's Bible Stories which I really hated as a child. (It wasn't a religious thing, I also hated those Children's Stories from Shakespeare books, which really put me off Shakespeare until I was old enough to realise that the point of Shakespeare is not so much the plot as the mad vertigo of the language.) And I fear we might even be talking about one of those "modern" translations written in a mixed slang which is about ten years out of date. (Peter said, What up dog! That was like, so totally rad.) But this would still have been a step up from someone randomly dredging the story out of their memory, with splashes of Martin-Amis-style, I'm-just-saying-what-we're-all-thinking racism mixed in.
In a funny development, the bloke who usually does the service had e-mailed his 5-min talk to my mother, who read it out, and it turned out to be all about how we should welcome people from foreign countries and try to protect them from exploitation. It's heartening how often the people in charge in the church are in charge for a good reason.
Anyway, I fear that I need to find myself a church which is a bit less inane. It's not that I actually disagree in general with these things, it's just that I know that my own religious life has to involve some intellectual content. (Is it any wonder that so many people think Christianity is just a matter of accepting a series of children's stories?) I need to read things written by intelligent Christians, and here's the difficult bit, I could really do with some people to discuss them with me. In Cambridge this was achievable, although even in Cambridge it was pretty difficult to find people who are more interested in theology than aesthetics.
On the plus side the good thing about these lightweight services is that I flee them yearning for some serious meaty Christianity. I read Rowan William's Dostoyevsky book as a direct result of a Christmas eve service of peculiar inanity, and now I feel all driven to read Marianne Robinson's Absence of Mind. (She was on the Daily Show the other day, doing pretty well I thought at pointing out how the people engaged in the Science vs Religion debate are not the brightest minds from either tradition.)
PS Do children really need things to be so thoroughly digested for them? I remember that it completely blew my mind when I was eight and my mother told me that thing Augustine said, that we should love God and do whatever we wanted. I said but what if you love God, but you want to steal things? And my mum said, but if you really loved God like he loves us, you'd know that stealing things wasn't a God-like thing, and that it would pain him, and you'd be revolted by the idea of stealing and try your hardest never to do it even by accident. And this totally blew my mind. I remember thinking about it for some time, and when my mother came up at light's out (9 pm) to check I wasn't reading under the covers, I said that I had had an idea that could make everything alright. If we didn't only love God, but if we loved everyone, and loved them properly, then we could all do whatever we wanted all the time, and everything would be fine. My mother, bless her, said that she knew some people who had said that, and she thought maybe they were right. But I remember it vividly as seeming utterly amazing to me at the time.
PPS Wouldn't it be great to love God like that, so that all the commandments just became descriptions of what you were like? Wouldn't it be amazing to be that person out of love, not duty? I think that's what Paul is saying in Romans.
Friday, 9 July 2010
Visiting Oxford
I've had a lovely few days in Oxford, catching up with lots of old friends, especially my little god-daughter, who doesn't really count as an old friend because she's only two and three quarters. She's lovely, and has an air of responding to the world in quite a considered way which is very reminiscent of her mother. Also she loves books, and can even read a bit already, which is luck for me -- I am figuratively rubbing my hands planning birthday after Christmas of interesting book presents. She now has a little sister who is one of those babies who looks at you very steadily for a long time in a way which is oddly flattering and disconcerting at the same time.
It would be fatuous beyond words to say that the Bodleian Library is an old friend, but as libraries go it's certainly a grower. Once you get used to its ways, and find out about its unusual resources, it's one of the best places I know to do research. Almost all the manuscripts are currently in a temporary reading room at the Radcliffe Science Library. A science library is a bit of a quaint thing, and it was very quiet, though I suppose it is out of term. Contrariwise the special collections area was packed. Now, the Science Library has free photocopying to a USB stick or e-mail (unlike the UL which charges 8p!!!! per incorporeal sheet), and it's very easy to print things out, and get books ordered there, etc. But it was nice that my work also took me to Duke Humfrey. I may not have many more chances to read there, because eventually even the Select manuscripts and the reference resources will be moved out, and in a few years' time it won't really be a reading room at all, but part of the tourist tour. No more sitting by the shushing gargoyle; no more Selden end. You're allowed to take your own pictures of manuscripts now, after filling in a form to say what you require, so while I was trying to get a good image of an original ninth-century limp binding (very exciting!) I took a picture from the window, out across the gardens to the Radcliffe Camera and St Mary's Church (where you can get nice teas).
And it's a lovely building inside too, full of paintings I never look at properly.
It would be fatuous beyond words to say that the Bodleian Library is an old friend, but as libraries go it's certainly a grower. Once you get used to its ways, and find out about its unusual resources, it's one of the best places I know to do research. Almost all the manuscripts are currently in a temporary reading room at the Radcliffe Science Library. A science library is a bit of a quaint thing, and it was very quiet, though I suppose it is out of term. Contrariwise the special collections area was packed. Now, the Science Library has free photocopying to a USB stick or e-mail (unlike the UL which charges 8p!!!! per incorporeal sheet), and it's very easy to print things out, and get books ordered there, etc. But it was nice that my work also took me to Duke Humfrey. I may not have many more chances to read there, because eventually even the Select manuscripts and the reference resources will be moved out, and in a few years' time it won't really be a reading room at all, but part of the tourist tour. No more sitting by the shushing gargoyle; no more Selden end. You're allowed to take your own pictures of manuscripts now, after filling in a form to say what you require, so while I was trying to get a good image of an original ninth-century limp binding (very exciting!) I took a picture from the window, out across the gardens to the Radcliffe Camera and St Mary's Church (where you can get nice teas).
And it's a lovely building inside too, full of paintings I never look at properly.
Sunday, 4 July 2010
I love you, Literary Review
The reason the Literary Review is great is that its book reviews address the question: do you, a reader, want to choose to read this book for pleasure? Academic reviews concentrate on the value of a book to academics who are users more than readers: some journals, like the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books, project the attitude that reading is a duty, imposed on us by being the sort of terribly well-educated people that we are. But the Literary Review is interesting, and its reviews tend to be as much about the book's subject as the book itself. I suppose an author might feel a bit aggrieved if a review makes little mention of their book -- sometimes in the Literary Review judgements on the actual volume are limited to something like "this well-written but over-long book" -- but as a reader I like it when a reviewer tackles the interest of a book's subject. You can tell me that someone has written an excellent book on Pavel Florensky, for example, but I need some context to tell me why I should care about Pavel Florensky.
Pavel Florensky sounds absolutely fascinating: apparently he was a brilliant mathematician, physicist, and theologian; helped electrify Russia (turning up dressed as a priest to meetings with Trotsky); spent his time as a prisoner in an Arctic labour camp working out how to extract useful chemicals from sea water; and was a brilliant geologist who refused to prospect for gold on moral grounds. Furthermore he lived a good life, loved his family, confessed to crimes when interrogated by the NKVD so as to spare others from torture, and worked hard for his country despite persecution. He ended up in one of Stalin's mass graves and is a candidate for sainthood in the Russian Orthodox church. I know about this because of the June issue of the Literary Review, and I intend to read the biography at some point. (By Avril Pyman.) Also in the June issue are reviews of a biography of Cardinal Newman which makes him sound very interesting, and a book about the battle of Little Big Horn, both of which I might read if they come out in paperback. There's a piece by Diana Athill about the Edmund de Waal book on his inherited netsuke. There's also a review of a book by Paul Bloom on pleasure. I don't think I will read the book, but the review, by Michael Bywater, says some quite interesting things about the subject in general, and about what Bloom's book doesn't tackle. And there's a review of Marilynne Robinson's Absence of Mind which makes me feel that I really have to get to grips with her work at some point. I've always been daunted by her, because the archbishop of Canterbury reveres her intellect. The archbishop of Canterbury eats languages for breakfast and when given a sabbatical to refresh himself spiritually before the Lambeth conference spends it lightheartedly making a serious contribution to the study of Dostoyevsky. Marilynne Robinson sounds even tougher.
But it's not just about the books I decide to read, it's also about the books I don't. I read somewhere that art is reading books and going to the theatre and such, and culture is reading the reviews of books and theatre and such, and still being able to discuss them. It struck me the other day that although I have never read anything about the Dreyfus affair, I have read enough reviews of books about the Dreyfus affair to have a reasonable sense of what happened. You could see that as a bad thing, because strictly speaking it would be better if I had read and assimilated all the different books about it and come to my own conclusion (or even better, the actual sources). But what could be attacked as superficial knowledge could also be defended as a broad and persistent curiosity about the world and its history. And there are worse ways to be self-indulgent.
The closest parallel I can think of to the Literary Review's attitude to books is the attitude of Boing Boing to science. Boing Boing often has items about interesting new scientific or technological stuff just out of a sense that these things are genuinely exciting, and no one's duty. Hurray for enthusiasms! The world is wierd and complex in a good way.
Pavel Florensky sounds absolutely fascinating: apparently he was a brilliant mathematician, physicist, and theologian; helped electrify Russia (turning up dressed as a priest to meetings with Trotsky); spent his time as a prisoner in an Arctic labour camp working out how to extract useful chemicals from sea water; and was a brilliant geologist who refused to prospect for gold on moral grounds. Furthermore he lived a good life, loved his family, confessed to crimes when interrogated by the NKVD so as to spare others from torture, and worked hard for his country despite persecution. He ended up in one of Stalin's mass graves and is a candidate for sainthood in the Russian Orthodox church. I know about this because of the June issue of the Literary Review, and I intend to read the biography at some point. (By Avril Pyman.) Also in the June issue are reviews of a biography of Cardinal Newman which makes him sound very interesting, and a book about the battle of Little Big Horn, both of which I might read if they come out in paperback. There's a piece by Diana Athill about the Edmund de Waal book on his inherited netsuke. There's also a review of a book by Paul Bloom on pleasure. I don't think I will read the book, but the review, by Michael Bywater, says some quite interesting things about the subject in general, and about what Bloom's book doesn't tackle. And there's a review of Marilynne Robinson's Absence of Mind which makes me feel that I really have to get to grips with her work at some point. I've always been daunted by her, because the archbishop of Canterbury reveres her intellect. The archbishop of Canterbury eats languages for breakfast and when given a sabbatical to refresh himself spiritually before the Lambeth conference spends it lightheartedly making a serious contribution to the study of Dostoyevsky. Marilynne Robinson sounds even tougher.
But it's not just about the books I decide to read, it's also about the books I don't. I read somewhere that art is reading books and going to the theatre and such, and culture is reading the reviews of books and theatre and such, and still being able to discuss them. It struck me the other day that although I have never read anything about the Dreyfus affair, I have read enough reviews of books about the Dreyfus affair to have a reasonable sense of what happened. You could see that as a bad thing, because strictly speaking it would be better if I had read and assimilated all the different books about it and come to my own conclusion (or even better, the actual sources). But what could be attacked as superficial knowledge could also be defended as a broad and persistent curiosity about the world and its history. And there are worse ways to be self-indulgent.
The closest parallel I can think of to the Literary Review's attitude to books is the attitude of Boing Boing to science. Boing Boing often has items about interesting new scientific or technological stuff just out of a sense that these things are genuinely exciting, and no one's duty. Hurray for enthusiasms! The world is wierd and complex in a good way.
Friday, 2 July 2010
Dialect; Big Bird
This list of management-speak contains some impressive terms. I like the statement that nine women can't have a baby in a month; it sounds so reasonable. I have escaped from management-speak land, hurray! To be fair, the salary was handy, and the management-speak was really only a few times a year when our project-partners visited from America. Though it was vital not to think about how the people speaking the management-speak were paid at least two or three times as much for being about half as effective, about a quarter as bright, and about a tenth as knowledgeable as us embittered academic types sitting on the other side of the table writing each other notes in Latin. Being able to emerge from meetings with your self-respect and cheerfulness intact should be added onto Kipling's If poem in an extra verse at the end.
"Mission creep" was one we used to get accused of a lot. It made us (maybe just me) want to scream "This isn't mission creep! It's just actually deciding to do something in a way that will work! Making the thing bloody work is not mission creep!" Instead I would be repressed and snarky and then go home and hate myself.
What is Big Bird? This is quite an interesting presentation. I like the concept behind Pecha-Kucha; it's essentially presentations of 20 slides which advance automatically every 20 seconds, while the speaker tries to keep up. It sounds like it could be a really interesting way to introduce people to research in areas not related to theirs. I'm tempted to make one and just put it online, but that's mostly because there are other things I should be doing right now.
"Mission creep" was one we used to get accused of a lot. It made us (maybe just me) want to scream "This isn't mission creep! It's just actually deciding to do something in a way that will work! Making the thing bloody work is not mission creep!" Instead I would be repressed and snarky and then go home and hate myself.
What is Big Bird? This is quite an interesting presentation. I like the concept behind Pecha-Kucha; it's essentially presentations of 20 slides which advance automatically every 20 seconds, while the speaker tries to keep up. It sounds like it could be a really interesting way to introduce people to research in areas not related to theirs. I'm tempted to make one and just put it online, but that's mostly because there are other things I should be doing right now.
Thursday, 1 July 2010
Biblioteca apostolica Vaticana
I get the Vatican Library e-mail newsletter, and it usually makes me feel cheerful. The person who writes it has not heard of the five sentences rule which I mentioned in a recent post; he talks at length, and in an engagingly unfiltered manner. The library closed very suddenly about three years ago, and no one has been able to do any research on Vatican manuscripts in the meantime, which is a big deal considering their collections. Luckily I've only had one thing I needed to see, and I was able to get by without it by fudging a little, but many are anxious for it to reopen its doors. Anyway, here is one entire paragraph from the latest newsletter:
The combination of, on the one hand, awareness of the neurotic undercurrents in academics' conversations with, on the other hand, the naive expectation that academics will go to the effort of reading newsletters or checking things online instead of just bothering the first person they can find to ask, is really very endearing. The nearly-2000-word-long message ends with this:
Which is quite nice. I'm afraid I suspect that there are many among the other 15 326 whom I might find a bit trying, but I am doing my best to esteem them long-distance nonetheless.
In fact, in recent meetings with various people, I have often heard the question, "Say, when will you open the Library"? My initial reaction, which I always try to suppress, is to think that they have clearly not been paying attention to the newsletters we have sent; nor have they been reading the newspapers or the web pages where the news has been announced and passed on. Of course I tell them, affecting as much indifference as I can muster, that we will open on September 20. But then another idea occurs to me: could it be that the inquirers were well aware of the date, but had been seized by an "impertinent" doubt which made them fear that it might not be true? Perhaps this was their way of asking a different question: "Will the reopening actually happen as planned? Will you keep your promises"?
The combination of, on the one hand, awareness of the neurotic undercurrents in academics' conversations with, on the other hand, the naive expectation that academics will go to the effort of reading newsletters or checking things online instead of just bothering the first person they can find to ask, is really very endearing. The nearly-2000-word-long message ends with this:
The number of newsletter recipients has now reached 15.327: the population of a small city, united by a love for culture and certainly also by reciprocal esteem and friendship. In that spirit, in the name of the entire staff of the Library, I send my warm greetings and best wishes to all.
Which is quite nice. I'm afraid I suspect that there are many among the other 15 326 whom I might find a bit trying, but I am doing my best to esteem them long-distance nonetheless.
Star Trek
Slash fiction started out with Kirk/Spock. (Neil Gaiman explains it here, with the epitomical phrase "it would be logical for you to touch it, Captain".)
Kottke.org has a post on how there is now a musical genre of Kirk/Spock mashups, which are a little more easy on the brain. This excellent Tik Tok one is very light on the slash at all, and serves to remind me just how good-looking the young Shatner was.
On the other hand this Nine Inch Nails one is a bit more loaded. But because all the images come from Star Trek episodes it can't be explicit, and the whole thing would be SFW except that the song is pretty N. There's something amusing about slash fiction in general. I think it's because it's such a female phenomenon, and female attitudes to sex generally involve more deprecatory humour than male. (That's probably a ridiculous generalisation, but I think it's roughly the case among the small sample group of people I know.)
Kottke.org has a post on how there is now a musical genre of Kirk/Spock mashups, which are a little more easy on the brain. This excellent Tik Tok one is very light on the slash at all, and serves to remind me just how good-looking the young Shatner was.
On the other hand this Nine Inch Nails one is a bit more loaded. But because all the images come from Star Trek episodes it can't be explicit, and the whole thing would be SFW except that the song is pretty N. There's something amusing about slash fiction in general. I think it's because it's such a female phenomenon, and female attitudes to sex generally involve more deprecatory humour than male. (That's probably a ridiculous generalisation, but I think it's roughly the case among the small sample group of people I know.)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)