Some things!

I just had some good news which I won't mention because it's not 100% definite. So here are some good things!

1. Radical tea towels! By the time you read this I will probably have bought this March of the Women tote bag.

2. This story of an 18-year-old Somalian refugee bought tears to my eyes in both a bad and a good way.

3. My small nephew is only three so he doesn't enunciate very clearly. At the moment he seems to be confused about the difference between an adventure and a bench. "Let's go on a benchure!" he'll say when in the park, and confound his parents by then running up to and sitting down on a bench. My brother feels a bit guilty that they're clearly not providing him with a very adventurous life. Also when we play "football" and he gets the ball in the right place he shouts "Gold!". I love my nephew. And my eight-month-old niece is getting fun too. She likes to pick things up and then drop them. Then she looks at you with this excellent expression of wonder and joy as if to say "that was both awesome and hilarious!".

4. If you want to upgrade your laptop's memory Crucial have a tool that lets you select its manufacturer and model and then shows you the right things to buy and a video to help you do it. I'm going to try upgrading mine to 8Gb. (Thanks Adrian for the link.)

America!

I have a sense of the American literary scene (or more likely one particularly vocal aspect of it) because I subscribe to various literary blogs, including the Millions, which sometimes prefaces its longer blog entries with as many as three epigraphs. The McSweeney's and Dave Eggers lot are quite ascendant. And because I like it when things are very much themselves, without fear of parody, it made me happy when I saw that the latest issue of the Believer has an actual audio cassette taped to its front cover. Apparently it has music on it which is exclusively available in audio cassette form. But Beck has gone one step further by only releasing his latest album as sheet music, in, where else, McSweeney's.

It includes ukelele notation, obviously.

On the other side of things enthusiastic Americans get up to, this project to make a 3D motion sensor from tin foil and cardboard (and also an Arduino board, some crocodile clips, and free software) is pretty cool.

Dansk höspitalitet

I made up the word "höspitalitet", sorry. But I did go to the Danish Olympic hospitality house at St Katharine's Docks. They had one of the Roskilde museum reconstructed Viking ships there, a little one called the Helge Ask. This was just a coastal defence ship, not a full-on raiding vessel, but it's very nice anyway.

The Helge Ask

Putting up the sail

Taking the sail down

There were also Vikings fighting, which was great:

And a lego model of the Olympic park:

Well done the Danes.

Pet Shop Boys yay!

The latest Pet Shop Boys single, Winner, is not that great. So it's lucky that popjustice exists to point out that its b-sides are much better ("Well the third Pet Shop Boys b-sides album is off to a good start"). There's a sad Beegees cover, a long atmospheric piece which I think is based on a poem I read as a kid, and this excellent song which they wrote for but did not give to Kylie, possibly because they realised that "I like the cut of your jib" is not a very Kylie lyric. Hurray!

(Is it just me or is the beginning a bit like that saucy Bloodhound Gang song?)

Snooker is not an Olympic sport

I'm not one for watching sport, with two exceptions. I used to watch a lot of snooker, because I find the combination of abstraction and seediness very appealing. I also had a big crush on Stephen Hendry as a teenager -- I think it was his shyness, spottiness and firm grasp of geometry that did it for me. Also I watch showjumping when it's on, but I do find it a little stressful as well as beautiful because of the partnership aspect.

So I have watched almost none of the Olympics, even though unlikely people like my mother have been finding themselves glued to the TV. Still I'm quite enjoying them. I thought London would be a nightmare but it's actually quite pleasant. There's a bit of a party atmosphere, with tube train drivers announcing medal results as they come through, and visitors wandering around in Olympic uniforms of various countries, as well as lots of people carrying children waving British flags. Yesterday I met up with my friend Laura who is one of the Olympic volunteers. She's come down from Manchester to spend her fortnight's summer holiday sleeping on a friend's sofa and getting up ridiculously early to steward people through security at the Olympic park. We went to St Paul's for evensong and then had a coffee. The marathon route was still closed to traffic, which had essentially turned the whole St Paul's area into a large pedestrian precinct, and the cafes, which in the City usually close at weekends, were open and bustling. The City is usually a depressing ghost town at the weekend. Then we walked across the Millenium Bridge down to Southwark. Lots of the visiting Olympic nations have hired large places and set up hospitality houses. I think they're mostly open to the public, and many of them are free. (The Londonist has a list.) We went to the Swiss one, right next to Southwark Cathedral. Perhaps immediately after Murray's surprise victory over Federer wasn't the most tactful time, but actually we had a tremendously polite conversation with a lovely Swiss lady, where we extolled the virtues of Federer as both tennis player and human being while she did the same about Murray. They had free biscuits and Lindt chocolate, as well a woman yodelling along to accordian music, and one of those massive long alpine horns. Also climbing, cheese rolling, and other Swiss 'sports'. Laura picked up a few free lapel pins, which apparently are collected by the Olympic volunteers, and have swapping value.

Anyway, in short: the Olympics are quite good fun. (A lot more interesting than my M.Sc. summer project...)

Endearing things

I've realised that I find the Scissor Sisters very lovable. I'm not sure why since they're not particularly tame.

In that video I think Jake Shears is channelling a certain amount of Techno Viking. If you haven't see the Techno Viking you should watch it because it's one of the precious things of the internet:


Also here is a walrus making noises:


London isn't half as bad as people were expecting during the Games. There's quite a nice friendly atmosphere -- to the extent that people who stand on the left on the elevators who also have small children with them are generally being left alone by the London populace, even if it's busy. Forgiving someone for standing on the left on the elevator is the hardest thing for a Londoner to do. And we got silver in the eventing! Not only is it Mary King's sixth Olympics, she also recovered from a broken neck to compete again.

Some interesting things

This review of Fifty Shades of Grey is truly excellent -- great use of .gifs, especially the last one.

This small girl guesses what books are about based on their cover. I particularly like her take on Jane Eyre.

When I was a kid I loved The Secret Life of Machines, and now mental floss has collected some of the episodes together. This sort of thing made me really frustrated about how boring Physics was at school -- it just seemed like there was no need for it not to be interesting. They're really worth revisiting. I love the bit in the fax machine one where they act out the handshake that starts a connection by saying things to each other like "Can you understand me if I speak this fast?" Something like that would actually have been very useful when I was learning about TCP connection for my networks exam. Also, generous cattage.

Programming query

How did anyone program anything ever before the internet? Maybe that's why my childhood programming was so ineffective. But my brother rewrote minesweeper from scratch for me when he was about 14 -- perhaps I should ask him.

Weather

I've been finding all this rain a little tedious and inconvenient for obvious reasons, but I'd forgotten to think of it more broadly until I was talking to a farmer after church today. I wish I could have recorded what he said, Devon accent included. Basically the farmers are at their wits' end. His potatoes are rotting in their banked-up rows, with standing water as high as the base of the mounds -- expect potato prices to rise. And there will be almost no millable British wheat to make bread unless we get some proper sunshine. Every possible shed is full of livestock which should not be indoors at this time of year, and you can't take tractors out because they just sink in the muddy fields, even if you only half-load them, so lots of jobs are having to be done laboriously by hand. No hay can be made, though some people have managed to get some silage done. Today's St Swithun's day so let's hope the old saying doesn't hold this year. Right now it's actually rather pleasant here in Devon.

Some various things

I have a raspberry Pi. And I'm going to try to do this with it!
http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/desktops/how-to-turn-your-raspberry-pi-into-an-xbmc-media-centre-50008599/
The raspberry Pi is beautiful.

The problem with London at the moment is that everywhere you go you are constantly bombarded with public service announcements suggesting that you avoid this place in the near future, especially at this particular time of day, and also places near to it or connected to it in any way. It's getting a bit tedious.

Andrew Prescott used to be a BL person and is now head of the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at KCL. Here he talks about this sort of thing. I only ever skim-read anything that's to do with the digital humanities because it tends to provoke my unhelpful thinking patterns, but I did notice this true sentence:

We try and suggest that we are collaborating in new ways, but at the end of the day a unit like that at King’s is simply an XML factory for projects led by other researchers.

Though possibly it would be more accurate to say that they are consultants for setting up and helping to run an external XML factory staffed by some poor research associate. Anyway, the situation is not healthy for "digital humanities" and it's not healthy for the humanities who are working with them.

I made my mother a cover for her new little Kindle. I suppose it's the fault of jpeg that in this picture the beautiful soft brown colour has been replaced by splotchy purple and grey-green:

I was oddly alert to gender stereotyping as a child so I'm glad I learnt to sew when I was too young to know that it was seen as a typically female thing to do. I don't sew well, but given that I spend so much of my life not managing to do things it's nice to make something simple from time to time. This is made from alpaca cloth woven out of our herd's fibre, and it's lined with unbleached cotton. The button I got off of etsy, from this bloke.

I'm trying to learn Ruby on Rails. It's making me feel stupid. It's very simple in many ways, but it involves information passing between lots of different files, and that's where I'm having trouble. One vital thing in programming is understanding a program's flow of control, which is simply which bits of code are executed in which order, and therefore understanding what all the variables are at any point in the program. Ruby is a programming language and Rails is a framework which sets up automatic groups of folders and customisable files which work together in a pre-specified manner. The idea is "convention over configuration", e.g. instead of having to tell a file where to find another file it just assumes it's in a particular place unless told otherwise. It makes it very quick to set up fast websites that deal with data. But if I ask it for a particular page via a browser, it looks first at a routes file, then at a controller file, then at a model file, then at a view file, then at a layout file, then at a template file, and then (probably using a stylesheet as well) it makes html out of all these things. I think I am being a bit slow, but it can be very hard to work out just where exactly you are when you work on a particular file, especially given that it might have just one line of code and make no sense out of context. (And also in Ruby you can pass blocks of code around as parameters to methods, and that's just wierd, frankly, though I can see that once I get used to it I'll use it all the time and think it's fantastic.)

Lastly, a friend of mine takes great photos, and I really love this one of part of Mill Road, Cambridge, at 6am.

Brief observation, query

I have been living alone for about eight hours and already I am talking to myself like a loon.

In other news, if anyone has an idea for a reasonably straightforward Android app I could make then I'd be interested to hear it. It doesn't need to be useful for more than 2 or 3 people in the whole world. I used to have a database set up to produce the most efficient route round the UL from a given set of classmarks, so maybe I could try to do that, though it wouldn't be much use to me these days. Or I did wonder about an app for making a brief note whenever I see tube mice. Tube mice make me happy.

Music makes me feel good

K-pop -- is it the new Italodisco? Don't ask me, I'm 36! Anyway here's an excellent Korean pop song:


George Michael is glad to be alive. Good! I too am glad that George Michael is alive.


Little Mix have a great single coming out. It's Beyonceyish in a good way:


Who is Charli XCX? I can't remember. But I like this song:


Benny Benassi is a figure of mixed blessings but I love this rather soulful remix of a song by Temper Trap.


Noisettes have a great song called Winner which I hope will make them lots of London 2012 money. Here it is remixed:


Of course I saw all these things originally on popjustice, I always do. I'm only really putting them here so I can play them all from one tab.

Miaow

I went to a choral eucharist at Southwark Cathedral yesterday evening. During the consecration a cat appeared and curled itself up luxuriously in the middle of the kneelers in front of the communion rail, having accurately worked out where in the whole of that huge church it could most comfortably get in everyone's way. It was very annoyed when someone moved it and yowled loudly. In honour of this cat I am posting some cat-related links. Because as we all know, the internet is made of cats.

4OD has lots of good stuff on Youtube, including Chris Morris pointing out in Brass Eye that the ancient Egyptians worshipped cats because they thought they were funny. (Morris was ahead of his time in this as in many things -- this was about eight years before the invention of YouTube itself and ten before I Can Has Cheezburger, and as I recall back in the 90s cats were not seen as intrinsically amusing.)

Google built a neural network and let it loose on the interweb and it came up with a Platonic ideal of a cat.

Here is an excellent illustration of the Smart poem "For I will consider my cat Jeoffry". And by the same artist an excerpt from Edward Lear's poem "How pleasant to know Mr Lear", featuring Old Foss his cat.

And two quick things not to do with cats but I want to close the tabs: 1) a ten-year-old girl bursts into tears in a room full of Rembrandts; her parents take her to a psychiatrist whom she eventually marries; apparently a true story though it sounds like a novel; 2) two small girls interviewed about a bad haircut.

June's reading

By far the best thing I read in June was Great Works: 50 Paintings Explored by Tom Lubbock. It was my (requested) birthday present from my brother. It's a series of short newspaper columns by a since-deceased art critic, each on a single painting. The way he discusses pictures is unusual and and interesting -- for example to explain the power of an El Greco of a boy blowing on a candle he makes you visualise three short films. The book is quite well illustrated, though the pictures are constrained by its size. I really enjoyed it and discovered people I hadn't heard of like Peter Doig and Philipp Otto Runge. I wish Tom Lubbock had written more I could read. He was only 53 when he died. His obituary tells me that more may be published -- and also that he was a philosophy student at Corpus Christi, which is interesting. Next time I go back I'll see if any of the older fellows remember him.

Otherwise the things I enjoyed were mostly rereading -- Mason and Dixon, Anathem, Moo -- but I did read an excellent New Zealand book called Uncle Trev and his Whistling Bull by Jack Lasenby. This is the sort of book which any age of person could enjoy. It's about a boy in the 1930s who has to spend a long time in bed with some illness. When his mother goes out his bachelor Uncle Trev sneaks in to eat biscuits and tell the boy tall stories about his farm. Very good and unostentatiously charming.

There is no Latin word for TLDR

The Vatican Library newsletter pops into my inbox every few months, and it brings a smile to my face despite being pages and pages long. This time I was quite struck by the question of translation. The Cardinal in charge has recently retired from the post, and here is just a small part of what the newsletter had to say about this:

We had known for some time that the Cardinal had presented to the Pope his request to be relieved of so heavy a commitment, and we had adopted the attitude of those who understand, who do not wish a loved one to be afflicted with burdens beyond what he is able to bear. But this does not take away from the sorrow of a separation that each individual experiences by retracing the memories of the years, whether many or few, which he or she spent with Prefect, and later with Cardinal Farina.

The language of the Vatican is, of course, Latin. But I still think this was written in Italian and translated into English, not just because the writer is Italian but because there are a few untranslated Italian phrases in the middle, somehow passed over. Have I just never noticed before that Italian is very Latinate in style as well as in actual vocabulary and grammar? You could translate this into Latin without much rearranging.

Plus I love the closing paragraph:

After all that I have told about us, sometimes the thought comes that we are able to do many beautiful things, and sometimes somebody says so explicitly with expressions of appreciation. It is not that we are unhappy about this. But you will allow me not to forget the Biblical passage from the Book of Judges (chapter 7) which tells the story of Gideon and his fight against the Midianites. Gideon had gathered thirty-two thousand men, but the Lord made him reduce the number to only three hundred fighters because – he explained – if they had been so many, they would have been able to boast before him, saying: "It is my own hand that has saved me." I quickly found that in the Library we are about a hundred, only one third of Gideon's three hundred. We are thus even more protected against that sort of dangerous arrogance! Also for this reason, and through Him who has filled our hands, has enlightened our minds and enlivened our hearts, we give sincere thanks.

To be honest, if you told me that this had been translated straight from Augustine or Anselm I'd probably believe you. (Although they were a bit less likely to congratulate themselves on their escape from dangerous arrogance, which is a little Pooterish.)

A good book

It's a sad truth, for which I am prepared to take no responsibility whatever, that the better people know me the less seriously they tend to take my book recommendations. So here's somebody else, with the authority of the New York Times behind him, talking about how great Pynchon's Mason and Dixon is. He describes it as

less willfully cerebral than the author’s earlier masterworks

Hurray for Rowan Williams

I went to an excellent talk by Rowan Williams -- in the dialogue format with another poet -- where he talked about language, poetry and translation. Because I went to his difficult Clark lectures on aesthetics some years back in Cambridge, which were published as Grace and Necessity, I was able to follow more than otherwise. I do like the archbishop. He's good at gentle self-deprecating humour, and he is so startlingly but unostentatiously bright. His adoption of Simone Weil's idea that one should always approach other humans with hesitation, e.g. a sort of expectant humility, is something you can actually see him doing as well talking about. It means not putting a name or label on a person but instead being open to them as a human. The Franciscans who used to live in Cambridge were like that. I suppose it's part of the reason why he seems undefinite to the world in general, his refusal to condemn. And certainly many Anglicans (and journalists) would like him to do a bit more condemning -- my evangelical relatives on my father's side don't really approve of him. I think he's just what we need. The Church of England is sometimes called the only organisation that exists for the benefit of its non-members, and I think he provides a good sign for both the church and the non-church. The church needs to be just a bit skew-whiff from the world. It needs not to copy the name-calling style of modern politics. It needs to measure its success by things that are neither worldly nor unworldly but aworldly, or refuse to measure its success at all.

Also it was cool to hear him talk about the poetry culture of his native Wales. I hadn't realised that he was brought up bilingual in Welsh and English. And I enjoyed that he talked intelligently about Geoffrey Hill. An elderly bishop used to bring Hill into lunch sometimes when I was a research fellow. I liked that bishop, since deceased, and a few times actually sat next to Geoffrey Hill. Whereupon I found myself completely unable to say anything at all intelligent to him about his work, much as I like it. It was one of those moments that seems frustratingly bigger than itself, and actually emblematic of a whole part of life. Maybe I should write a poem about it.

Attempts to forget a depressing fact

I'm now in the part of my course where I do my project.  I've more or less accidentally ended up with a very odd one, which involves learning about early brain development.  This involves quite a few rather depressing things; for example I recently found out that there is a thing called the Kazdin hopelessness scale for children. We live in a world in which someone has successfully quantified the hopelessness of children. So I googled Kazdin, worried about the toll that sort of work would take on someone, and discovered that he (presumably the same man) is also the author of The Kazdin Method: Parenting the Defiant Child. Defiant children are probably more fun to work with than hopeless ones, so I've stopped worrying about Kazdin. I'm not going to look into it for fear of what I find, but if Kazdin is the man who did the Learned Helplessness experiments on rats which involved timing how long it took them to drown then a) I really hate him and b) he shouldn't be allowed anywhere near children anyway. I hope someone's looking after the hopeless children.

As always, there are likeable things out there too. Here for example is a good song:


If you go to this website and then click on "Digitale Gemälde" you get the artist's meldings of Renaissance faces with modern photographs. I rather like these, even though the heads of famous madonnas on the bodies of semi-clad ladies are a bit odd.

It's Laurence Durrell's Centenary. There's an exhibition.

You can get The Alexandria Quartet on Kindle now. I prefer The Avignon Quintet, which isn't available on Kindle yet. Also recently available on Kindle are the books of Thomas Pynchon. My favourites are Mason and Dixon, Vineland, and V. (which includes Fairing and his parish among the rats). Plus Neal Stephenson's Baroque Trilogy (Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World) are available at last. Hurray!

Also, I went to an Art History in the Pub event, which was quite good. It was organised by an art historian who was covered in tattoos -- he even had some small ones on his face. I wished it were socially OK to ask him about this, because I'd imagine that as an art historian either the choosing of tattoos would be fraught with significance, or else alternatively maybe tattoos are sufficiently outside the bounds of general art that they are a liberating opportunity to choose entirely for yourself. The talk was given by a young woman sitting in a big velvet chair on a raised platform, which gave the whole thing a soothing atmosphere. It was about Tudor and Stuart portrait sets, an interesting topic. The person I sat next to writes for the Fortean Times and we talked about cryptozoology for a bit -- a friend of my parents in Devon had an alpaca killed, she swears by a Big Black Cat.

Plus the National Art Pass is doing a three-month free trial. I like the Art Fund. My housemate/landlord dislikes them because their rhetoric is very much about "saving" things for the nation, as if foreigners are likely to set them on fire, drop them in the bath, or something, and I agree that that's a bit dodgy. We "saved" the Macclesfield Psalter from going to the Getty, for example, where they would lavish ridiculous amounts of money on its conservation and what's more, on its scholarship. (My landlord/housemate is going to the Getty on a three-month research jaunt to study a manuscript they have there just for an exhibition, because increasing knowledge is part of their remit and even now they have cash.) (Though of course the Fitzwilliam looks after it beautifully -- they do a wonderful job despite being cash-strapped to the extent that most things that happen there seem to do so as a result of ad hoc donations by rich people.) Anyway, although I don't think things need "saving" I do like the idea of paying some money towards a big fund that can buy things for UK museums, and also you get very good discounts off entry into museums, galleries, and exhibitions. I used to have an Art Pass but I let it lapse because of student poverty, but it was great when I did have it because I rarely went to a paid-entry museum or exhibition where it didn't get me some money off.

Ashill beer festival 2012

I went down to Devon for the Ashill Village Beer Festival, and my friend Adrian, a beer-festival fan, came with me. My brother and family came along too, so I introduced Adrian to my little nephew. I mentioned that Adrian's father is a builder and his name is Bob. Even though I did say that this wasn't the same person as on TV, I think that Bob the Builder is just a figure of too great mythic resonance for qualifications -- like the Knights Templar or Leonardo da Vinci or the Holy Grail, which distort all the stories in which they appear. In short my nephew was quite sure that Adrian was in fact Bob the Builder himself, and treated him all weekend with a sort of cautious awe. When he said his prayers with his father on Saturday evening* apparently he said thankyou for meeting Bob the Builder, and on Sunday morning he read his Spot the Dog book with Adrian and told my father when he came into the room "Grandad, I'm sitting next to Bob the Builder!". I felt a bit bad about this, but my Mum tells me that they talked to him about it later and he did know really that he was playing a game, like when he pretends to be a cat. (On the other hand, I sort of wish I'd said Adrian was Peppa Pig...)

Between us we both managed to taste all 22 of the beer festival beers, which was a better achievement than last year when I only managed something like 16 out of 18 over three days not two. The problem with living in London is that you ask yourself a lot "Do I want to do this? Will I enjoy it?" whereas in the village you just take what you're given. They actually call it the Ashill Beer and Music Festival, but unlike many music festivals in between two of the bands on the Saturday evening they had a half-hour zumba class. My nephew thought that was amazing. There were tons of kids there and it was generally a huge success. When my parents went to clear up the field they had lent for parking they found very little litter, and generally everyone was really well behaved.

*Yes, Richard Dawkins wouldn't approve of my brother saying prayers with my little nephew, but then again the mindfulness people would approve of going back over the day to pick out and feel glad for good things. Praying with my parents is one of my favourite childhood memories -- I think it was really good for me to know that my parents weren't the highest authority.

I read it in May

Here are my May reading highlights, in order of excellence:

1. Londoners: The Days and Nights of London Now -- As Told by Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It, and Long for It by Craig Taylor
This is a very good book indeed, a series of interviews about London. It's a good concept, but the thing that really makes the book great is the quality of the interviews and the diversity of the people he found to talk to.

2. Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time.
Although it's made of 12 books they are actually all quite short -- about 200 pages. Not much really happens in the first and second books, and limited amounts in the books after that, but I did find it very enjoyable once I'd stopped worrying about this. It's a bit like a cross between Proust and Nancy Mitford -- it's not quite as funny as Mitford but then again, it's nowhere near as French as Proust. I would recommend it not as something one ought to read but as something that you might well enjoy reading. There's always an anxiety about starting a long set of books, because if they're hard work you either have to decide to give up or try to power on through. But when you start a long set of books and realise that you enjoy them then that's a very pleasant feeling, you can abandon any pressure to finish and just read them at your own pace, and you know you've got good reading material lined up for some time to come. And there's something very comfortable about novels which take you into a different but entirely sustained world, and because one of the themes of the series is how fate throws people together in a complicated pattern there are many recurring characters. In fact if I were to summarise it in seven words they would be these:
The man turned round. It was Widmerpool.

3. Mrs Robinson's Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady by Kate Summerscale
This story isn't quite as engrossing as The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, but then that was a truly phenomenal book, one you could enjoy yourself while also being sure that your Grandma and all your other relatives would love it too. This is about one of the earliest divorce cases brought in England when the switch was made from divorce being something only achievable by Act of Parliament, e.g. for the very very rich and influential only, to being handled by the courts. Isabella Robinson kept an ill-advised diary, and she had ill-advised crushes on handsome men. When it gets really interesting (after a rather slow beginning) is when those diaries are advanced by her husband as evidence of her adultery, and are considered in the courts and the newspapers as possible evidence of her mental derangement. It was one of those issues around which the mores and assumptions of the day crystallised and Kate Summerscale does a great job of putting it all in its context. I was amazed by the young man from a genteel Edinburgh family who faked his own death in order to spend a few years undergoing painful penis-cauterising operations in the hope of curing his tendency to masturbation. He finally found peace when someone suggested to him that he try having sex with women -- he turned to prostitutes and found the urge to masturbate became less. Now I'm not a fan of prostitution, but however much one disapproves of it you'd think someone might try that before convincing their large loving family that they're dead and then repeatedly attacking their private parts with hot wires. Wierd.

4. The Mongoliad: Book One of the Foreworld Saga by Greg Bear, Neal Stephenson, etc etc etc.
This isn't a brilliant book but it's enjoyable, and it sneaks onto this list because it was better than I had feared. It's a jointly written book which arose from some fantasy-writers' sword-fighting classes. It's set in the (more-or-less) past, at the time that the Mongolian hoards were starting to threaten Europe. This book is part of a wider project that's experimenting with what a book is, something which I approve of people doing but in which I don't really feel that interested in taking part. I posted about it before.

1. This child's to-do list is rather good. Maybe I'll add a few of those things to my to-do list.

2. I had an argument with a friend of mine because I honestly really like this painting of Mr Spock with a cat. He thought I liked it as kitsch, or ironically, but I don't believe in liking things like that, you should either like them or not. If I owned this picture I would put it on my wall. I don't know much about art and I'm not really sure what I like but on the whole I like things which have energy and don't quite follow the usual rules. I do buy art from ebay and etsy in the form of ACEO cards, about which I will blog someday. You have to wade through a lot of rubbish but I have some I really love, and they are embarrassingly cheap.

3. Sound of Arrows, I love you so:


4. These LED shades seem very Pet Shop Boys to me, and therefore I think 1984 would have been more appropriate than 1981. I like the sine wave best:


5. The US Library of Congress has an Ask A Librarian feature. Because I had enjoyed reading about the Comanches in Empire of the Summer Moon, I asked for recommended reading on all the various North American native peoples before the Europeans came. Within a few days I had been sent a list of four suitable books. I'm really impressed by this. Go Librarians! (In the meantime I had started reading a book which turned out to be mostly about how the Indians were wiped out. It was very upsetting and I had to stop reading it, like the coward I am. Basically the US was founded on acts of deliberate genocide. At least the Comanches were genuinely horrible and fought back well. The stories of most of the tribes go: Chief XXXX made a reasoned and eloquent speech about how the Europeans were doing bad and unjust things; the tribe was then wiped out; now the only reminder of its existence is in the name of one small mountain and a 1960s car.)

6. I listened to this song twice more or less accidentally, and it's a real grower, and got stuck in my brain for ages. St Lucia, Before the Dive:

It continues

Life! It's full of challenges, but sometimes it's unexpectedly joyful. I walked from Imperial to the tube today via Exhibition Road, down past all the museums, and felt suddenly meaninglessly happy. Of course the underground soon saw to that -- a ten-minute stop in the tunnel outside Sloane Square, oven-hot and crowded in -- but sometimes I think that moods have wierdly little to do with actual circumstances. And if you're in a bad mood there's always some convenient reason to hand.

Here is a good song, "The Way I Like It" by Mandy Capristo:


I have finished my exams. They were more or less OK except for one but I won't worry about it now. I also helped out with my parents' alpaca auction. This went far better than I feared. They have six left now, including, I'm glad to say, Beth, the matriarch, my favourite. I blogged about her a bit last June. I'm sorry to see the others go but it's the sensible thing to do. The auction itself was nervewracking but rather fun in retrospect. There were two auctioneers -- the first was very country, the second very county -- and lots of people came. I met a ridiculous little dog which looked like someone with curly black hair had had a haircut and the sweepings had come to life. Apparently it was a King Charles cross toy poodle. My nephew thought she was great but wasn't utterly convinced she was a dog at all -- "Mummy," he said, "we saw a dog and it squeaked at me!" The dog's owners bought Jemima the alpaca, who went for by far the most money, which made me feel quite proud when I remembered that I was the only one home when she was born and had to call the vet out amid much stress (part 1; part 2).

My parents were being very like themselves while I was there. I overheard with amusement my father trying to give some poor woman directions from Honiton to the auction entirely in terms of trees -- "Turn right at the Monterey pines". My mother is annoyed with him because he's planning to go tree-hunting in Arunachal Pradesh again this autumn. (When asked exactly when in autumn he just said "After the Deanery Synod" and I haven't yet got around to googling this so am no wiser.) My mother says it will be a tremendous hassle if he dies out there and she has to go to fetch him, so I suggested good travel insurance would take care of that, but that just started an argument about insurance providers. My father has bought a very large number of pheasant eggs -- he did this last year as well, giving me serious regrets about introducing him to ebay. Last year they all either failed to hatch (disappointing) or died in small batches from odd but preventable things (traumatic), and only one lived to adulthood. It was a Reeves pheasant, a notoriously vicious breed, and it has no toes because its siblings pecked them off before succumbing to various ailments (except I think one was eaten by a badger). Consequently my mother and I call it The Pobble, which annoys my father, after the Edward Lear poem: "The Pobble who has no toes, had once as many as we". Anyway my father purchased a bride for the Pobble, and she laid fifteen eggs, and of all the eggs he's been trying to hatch so far this summer, none have except thirteen of those. Which means that he now has thirteen little monsters to try to rear. Reeves pheasant chicks are scrawny and vicious and remind one of the things which pecked the fat computer man to death in Jurassic Park. But my father is so eternally optimistic that I expect he'll be surprised when they all manage to kill themselves and each other, and he'll be upset, and my mother and I will both be nice to him but still aggravated that he didn't see it coming, because that's how families work.

Noble in reason, etc

So, I'm the middle of exams for the first time since 1997.  They issue us with calculators in the exams, just in case a topic comes up with logs in it or something.  But I don't think I've used a calculator since 1994, when I had a nice graphing one for my Maths A-levels.  (These days I do all my sums in Excel, which is a good deal more civilised.)

Probably everyone ought to have to do exams from time to time just to remember how hideous they are and bad for mental balance.  I'd forgotten quite how crazy they make one.  I'm a good deal more wise and have a better sense of perspective than last time I took them, and although this is nice for me as a person, I don't think it's going to affect my results positively.  I seem to have lost all academic competitiveness and just want to pass -- but my failing one or more module is a very real prospect.  It'll be annoying if I do.

It's good for me to be forced to go back through this stuff under pressure, because parts of it are tremendously cool really.  And I like the general attitude of Computing Science.  Our slides are full of sentences like this: "Writing device drivers can be fun but must be taken very seriously", written by lecturers clearly worried that if not checked we'll be out there writing frivolous device drivers with the innate carelessness of youth.

And basically I can't think of a bigger human achievement than the computer.  Our exam tomorrow is a very tough one which takes us from the absolute basics up to the operating system level.  It's amazing that within the last sixty years or so people have taken two very simple concepts -- the difference between 1 and 0, and the everlasting loop -- and built on them to make such incredibly complex machines.  Cities are very impressive things, and so are buildings, and industries, but I don't think there's any way that humanity can compete with the mind-bendingly massive stretches of space except in the mind-bendingly huge number of tiny logic gates constantly flicking between 1 and 0 as huge amounts of data stream through them every time I type a simple letter a.  When I post this, and someone views it elsewhere, the protocols and formats that will be casually invoked and discarded, the codings and decodings, the transmutation of pulses into different forms as they travel through different media, are so complex and abundant -- and all just to do this trivial thing, to put some throwaway thoughts I had onto a screen.  It's very disconcerting, in a good way.  (Though this may be just the exam craziness talking.)

The books of April

I read too many books this month. I read a lot while I was in Devon over Easter, and then carried on doing it when I got back, during breaks in revision which were rather longer than they should have been. Here are the ones I enjoyed most:

1. The Gil Cunningham books by Pat McIntosh. This series, starting with The Harper's Quine, is about a clerk in late fifteenth-century Glasgow who solves crimes. It's amiable and interesting, and I do like the use of proper Scots. (There's a glossary but it's more appealing without.) They were all on kindle for 99p each when I read them.

2. I've read quite a lot of twentieth-century social history, and I would strongly recommend Call the Midwife by Jennifer Worth and Nella Last's War: the Second-World-War Diaries of 'Housewife, 49'. The first is the memoir which lies behind the BBC tea-time drama, and though I haven't seen that I do think they must have toned it down a bit to get it pre-watershed. It's shocking how recently this happened -- the kids in the book would be contemporaries of my mum and dad. I read it on a day when I was feeling a bit sorry for myself and it made me feel like I had been mentally slapped. Nella Last's diary is a great thing. She was one of the people recruited into the Mass Observation Project in the late 30s, an attempt to do the "anthropology of ourselves". She clearly had a flair for diary-writing, and her account of the great stresses of the war -- and also of marriage -- are compelling and very readable.

3. Two good American history books: The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara, and Empire of the Summer Moon, by S.C. Gwynne. The Killer Angels is a novelisation of the battle of Gettysburg. It won the Pullitzer, and is kind of a big deal in America. It's very well done; the sort of novel that teaches more about history than a history lesson. I read it because I heard it inspired Joss Whedon to write Firefly, but actually it doesn't have anything much about the post-war era in it, except for a brief summary of what happened to each of the main characters. Empire of the Summer Moon, about the last Comanches and particularly their great leader Quanah Parker, is a startling book if, like me, you don't know much about American history. The Comanches were violent and lived by war, and were really the frightening killers of playground Cowboys and Indians games. The Texans weren't much better of course. The author is good at conveying both sides of this culture clash, and the tragedy of Cynthia Ann Parker, captured in a violent raid by Comanches at the age of 9, and then captured back again in another violent raid by Texans decades later, and never allowed to rejoin her two young sons despite her increasingly desperate attempts to escape back to the Comanches.

4. Iain Pears, Stone's Fall. Iain Pears is one of my favourite novelists, and perhaps the one I'd most like to be like. He usually writes about art, but in this book he brings out the elegance and beauty of industry and finance. It's also one of those satisfying books in which you learn more and more about the past -- there are three narratives each of which is from further back in time. Go Iain Pears!

5. Vanessa Gebbie, The Coward's Tale.  I think this was another Kindle book I took a chance on for 99p and it turned out to be very good.  It's about a small Welsh mining town still traumatised by a terrible pit accident a generation before.  A boy moves there to stay with his Gran while his parents have problems, and gets to know the town beggar who tells stories to the people in the cinema queue in return for toffees.

I also read three books by Jonathan Carroll who may or may not be great -- I haven't decided yet. He's an odd one.

P.S. I've scheduled this post to appear while I'm in the middle of one of my exams. I'd forgotten quite how truly horrible exams and revision are, and young people have my sympathy.

A note regarding last post

In my last post I linked to Charlie Stross's thoughts on ebook DRM and the US anti-trust suit about Apple. He's just put up a follow-up in reaction to the fact that Tor (part of Macmillan) are going to abandon ebook DRM -- it seems they actually asked his opinion on this. I think it makes interesting reading. I like that he talks about midlist sales, and considers those people who buy 20-150 books a year as well as those who buy 1-5. Did you know you only have to buy 20 books a year to count as an avid booklover?

Metareading

1. I enjoyed this piece about rereading. I am a rereader myself -- saying that you don't reread because there are so many unread books out there seems to me a bit like saying you don't want to go out with your friends during valuable time when you could meet new people. But who would have thought that Philip Hensher regularly rereads Little House in the Big Woods, and Ian Rankin rereads Jilly Cooper's Rivals? (As is appropriate he does so without guilt.) I reread lots, but the problem is that the things you really love need longer and longer between each rereading. It will be quite a while before I can reread Robertson Davies' Cornish Trilogy again, or Neal Stephenson's Baroque Trilogy, or Pynchon's Mason and Dixon.

2. I find fan fiction a very interesting concept, so I read this piece on it even though I don't usually read the Millions' long-form stuff. I had not heard before that there were women corresponding with Richardson while he was releasing Clarissa in installments. I read Clarissa a while ago because I read somewhere that all novels were descended from Clarissa and Tristram Shandy in varying proportions.* I found it readable but absolutely horrible. It reminded me of Hitchcock's sadistic recipe for drama (which I think he actually got from someone else) "torture the heroine". Nasty things happen in a lot of books but in this one for some reason I could feel the mind of the author all the time. Richardson created Clarissa, not perfect but very lovely and loveable, a good person, and then he slowly and precisely handed her over into Lovelace's power, and he made Lovelace torment her and rape her. Lovelace's announcement of the rape when he writes to his friend "Clarissa lives" is somehow the more evil for its understatement. So I find it fascinating to know that while Richardson was slowly building up to this -- it's a really massive book -- women were writing to him suggesting that perhaps Lovelace might not rape Clarissa after all, and perhaps Clarissa could live a long and happy life. I don't think I'll ever reread Clarissa, and I would cross the street to avoid meeting Samuel Richardson. (Not that there's any need, he's dead of course, but you know what I mean.)

3. I love my kindle and I read a lot on it right now. I went into Waterstone's the other day to use up some reward points I'd built up, and it made me feel all sad because now that their 3 for 2 offers are dead I have no real reason to go there. At the moment all the books I buy are either a) cheap and electronic b) cheap and secondhand c) too obscure to have any chance of being in stock in Waterstones. However it is pretty scary how much control Amazon now have over my book-buying, even though Awesome is quite often cheaper and Abebooks can be better at sourcing oddities. Even more worrying is the power they are building up over publishers. Every publisher who insists on DRM for their books is selling themselves into the hands of Amazon, because Amazon are rich and can afford to lose some money on physical devices in return for a long-term monopoly over both book-buyers and book-sellers. Every reader who buys a book published by, say, Penguin with Kindle DRM is that much less likely to switch to another ereader in future, and with every sale like that Penguin gives Amazon power over its business. Charlie Stross thinks that for this reason the anti-trust suit against Apple in the US over its publishing agreements means the end of ebook DRM. I hope that's the case. The whole situation is quite interesting, but a bit worrying. I suppose in the meantime one can buy more things from independents like Weightless Books, like Carol Emshwiller's The Mount.

* I tracked this down! Salman Rushdie, writing about G. V. Desani's brilliant Shandean All About H. Hatterr, attributed this statement to Milan Kundera. It's quoted in this article about Desani (which makes him sound much harder work than he is -- I've never really coped with Joyce and I can take or leave Flann O'Brien but I loved All About H. Hatterr).

Some things

1. I like big books and I cannot lie. I really want this bag but it's too expensive.

2. Otters who look like Benedict Cumberbatch. 

3. A laser unprinter to help you reuse paper (but possibly increase subsequent paper jams).

4. At the end of last term several people on my course were announcing that they had stayed up all night in the library, as if they thought it were in some way a good thing.  This author says that when you work long-term for more than 40 hours a week your productivity goes down not up, which seems like common sense to me.

5. Also some of them just invited me to go to see an exhibition, which I had to point out to them closed last week. Oh, young people! It's actually quite heartening the way they make me feel all together and sensible.

6. I'm in Devon at the moment. I went with my parents to the local farmers' shop, Mole Valley Farmers. They spent enough there to get a voucher for a free faecal worm count. (For livestock, I should say, not humans.) Take that, Nectar points.

7. Soon after I got back here, over dinner my parents asked me what I thought of the Schmallenberg virus. I forgot that they talk about different things in the country. At least the conversation has moved on from badger death. By the way, the word round here is that the Schmallenberg virus is not new, if you keep up with these things.

But not yet

I read a review of Peter Sarris's new book on the late Antique/early Islamic era. I had some dealings with him when he supervised some of my students a while back, and just by bad luck he had my two most troublesome ones. He was ultra-professional, and I have a lot of respect for him, the sort of respect that's tinged with dauntedness. I don't think he suffers fools gladly, and unfortunately for all four of us the two students I sent him, although both very far from unintelligent, were fools.* The review was by Christopher Kelly, who was a fellow of Corpus while I was a research fellow there, but was for most of that time away on a Major Leverhulme Research Fellowship -- or it may not have been Leverhulme, but I do remember that it was Major. I only met him a couple of times, and he never talked to me. His writing usually seems sensible. The thing that caught my eye particularly was about St Augustine.

It is certainly a relief that readers of this book do not have to share St Augustine's concerns, cried out in desperation to his friend Alypius: 'the uneducated rise up and take heaven by storm, and we, with all our learning, here we are, still wallowing in flesh and blood'. This is an embarrassing outburst from one of the finest minds of antiquity who should have known better. To be fair, Augustine was, as Sarris points out, a saint 'on the brink of a breakdown'.

Now, I may not be understanding this properly because I find it hard to make sense of it. It took me a long time to like Augustine, who was a complex individual. If you asked me to say what it is I now like about him, and why I would genuinely have liked to have known the (later) Augustine, it's for exactly the reason that Kelly is singling out as embarrassing. Augustine was a very clever young man, who excelled in his studies of rhetoric and had a high-flying academic career. It took him a long time, even with his "finest" mind, to realise that learning and intelligence are not enough by themselves to make you a good person -- aren't the criteria for valuableness in a human. And ever since I was quite young this has been one of the things I've loved about Christianity too. As a teenager I used to love that Church was a place that involved lots of studying, lots of close reading and discussing of the Bible, lots of explaining of things in cultural context and in wider terms, but no sense at all that to be intelligent was of itself the best thing to be. Intelligence and understanding were tools to be used towards another goal. I loved I Corinthians 1: "For the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man's strength".** (From the context Paul seems to be talking about God's love leading to his plan for our redemption, foolishness in terms of Jewish theology and weakness in terms of Greek theology.) And this is what I find in Augustine's vast Commentary on the Psalms, written over the course of thirty years. (I've been reading it over Lent for three years now and I'm still only on Psalm 78.) These mingled sermons and lectures are much more endearing than many of his writings in their concern to spread understanding to his congregation. This is the Augustine I'd like to have known, more than the Augustine of the Confessions or The City of God, or On Free Will or any of his more academic pieces, the seasoned bishop who cared about his flock. [Edit: some of the quotations I lifted from Chadwick's Life of Augustine are relevant here.)

So that's my point of view, and it's certainly informed by my faith. But surely it's not just Christians who would think this? Leaving Peter Sarris, fellow of Trinity, out of this on the grounds that the review can't be assumed to express his point of view, Christopher Kelly is a fellow of Corpus Christi. I have a true and unforced respect for the learning of all the fellows there. But you can't spend a lot of time in governing body meetings without realising the limits of academic intelligence. It will really only get you so far. It's not the same thing as wisdom, and it's not the thing that justifies people, not the thing that makes you valuable, useful, important, or whatever it is you think people should be. Does Augustine's realising this really count as "an embarrassing outburst" from someone who "should have known better"? Is Augustine's complex spiritual progress really, in modern eyes, "the brink of a breakdown"? Like most people I often feel profoundly alienated from modern life, but it's heartening when, as in this instance, it's in a good way.

*When I reread this I felt bad about calling those students fools, but they did act very foolishly. They were both of them just 20, though, and I'm sure they have grown wiser over time.

**It goes on like this: "Brothers, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things -- and the things that are not -- to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him. It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God -- that is our righteousness, holiness and redemption. Therefore as it is written: "Let him who boasts boast in the Lord"." [I Cor. 1: 25-31]

Amazingly revolting google project video

I am officially just too old now, and should probably be put out of my misery before I hold the rest of you up. Someone just posted this video on my M.Sc. course's facebook group. Maybe it's theoretically cool but it's also so nauseating I literally want to go ack ack and cough up a hairball:

From now on Buying Tickets for Monsieur Gayno is a euphemism, even if it wasn't before.

Books of March, and format

Nothing I read in March really enthused me. The Help by Kathryn Stockett is quite good, and doesn't deserve the complications of the hype that has grown up around it. Debra Hamel's Mutilation of the Herms is a specialist book for a non-specialist reader -- it's nice to be treated as intelligent. And Maria McCann's The Wilding is worth reading too. I can't think of anyone else who writes historical fiction in which the different attitudes of the past are so well conveyed.

I've been reading a lot on kindle because it's easy to take on the tube or bus, and I've got quite a few unread things on it because of the Kindle Daily Deal and the occasional sales they have. At the moment the truth about ebooks is that I want everything in both formats. I yearn for some shelves I can put books on and just know they're there. It would be really luxurious to have all my favourite books physically present somewhere accessible. I also want them on my kindle so that if I suddenly want to look something up I can do that too.

If you do have a Kindle I would strongly recommend using Calibre to set things up so you're less likely to lose what you've bought through some spasm on Amazon's part. Enough of us trusting them, let's force them to trust us for a change.

Hair

I miss my Cambridge hairdresser. He knew roughly how I like my hair to be cut, and he talked to me interestingly while he did it, and he is a nice person. He cut it with a razor, which made the most amazing "crrrrup" noise, and he would change the CD from jazz to Kraftwerk for me even though I didn't ask. My current policy in haircuts is to buy Groupon vouchers when they come up and use them when I need them. So yesterday I went to a really posh place on High Holborn. They had big screens everywhere with models walking up and down catwalks. I've watched too much reality TV so girls on catwalks make me feel quite sad. When I indicated with a gesture what length I wanted my hair, the hairdresser (or more probably, stylist) said "Really?" as if I had genuinely shocked her. With an obvious (and unsuccessful) attempt to keep her voice neutral she said "Hair that length makes people's faces look rounder -- is that something you would want?" So I told her just to do what she felt like. I remember caring so much about haircuts when I was about fifteen, and every haircut was a terrible emotional rollercoaster because I knew that my unreasonable mother probably wouldn't let me stay in my room for a month or two until my hair grew out. These days I seem to be substantially less invested in my hair style than the person cutting it. And in those stylized surroundings I didn't feel up to explaining that one of the main things I want from a hair cut is for my hair to be shorter so that I don't have to give any money to a hairdresser for a while. Anyway, she did cut it quite nicely at the back, but by drying it straight she amazingly managed to make it look longer than when I'd gone in. Sometimes I worry that I'm not meeting life's most simple challenges.

A groupon haircut voucher has come up for Exeter but it's at a place called "Wag's". So I think I might give that one a miss.

On the plus side I have pre-ordered a Raspberry Pi. And I have found a place which sells dog-poo composting wormeries for my new dog-owning Exeter life when I finally manage to arrange it. So it's not all bad. And here is Lady Gaga's brilliant song about Hair:

I looked at some art

Over the last few days I have looked at some art.

The National Portrait Gallery has revived an exhibition I saw a while ago at Montacute House in Somerset. It consists of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century pictures which were bought as being a particular person, but were then realised not to be that person, and left marooned as anonymous in the storage vaults of an institution that's all to do with the named. They got a few authors to write stories inspired by the pictures, though I didn't actually read those this time. It's the sort of exhibition that's good for the imagination, though it does suffer a little from being on a landing. There's also a little exhibition about Charlotte, Princess of Wales, and her cousin who later became Queen Victoria, and how Charlotte laid the way for Victoria's image.

I also went next door to the National Gallery, where they are showing the Titian Diana and Callisto. I do like the little free exhibitions which the National Gallery does showing one picture, or one main picture with a few related things, just in one room, and with interesting directed captions. In this case the Titian is alone and the room has lots of information about the collection it's from, the subject of the painting, and some translated Ovid. There's also a bench in front of it so you can sit and look at it properly. This is in striking contrast to the over-crowded, over-priced and under-captioned exhibitions which the National Gallery puts on in its basement blockbuster exhibition space.

Somerset House has a "contemporary graphic art fair" called Pick Me Up on in the Embankment Galleries. I'm not quite clear what "graphic art" is as opposed to just "art", but I think it implies lower pretensions, and more interest in the concept of illustration. I really liked some of the stuff there, particularly a watercolour by Rikka Sormunen of a tired woman being hugged by a monster under her bed. I also liked Jon McNaught's wildlife charts, and Paul X. Johnson's Rachael picture. Because I got lost on the way out I stumbled across a free exhibition of art by one of Japan's leading traditional tattooists, which was also good.

Then I went to the late night opening at the V&A. I foolishly took a friend who is not fond of loud crowds; the V&A late nights are very popular. I'm never quite sure what to make of the V&A. Sometimes it seems a bit like the nation's attic, full of high-class tat, and sometimes I stumble across cool things in there. For the late night opening they had a lot of music, and story-telling, etc. They had put a brightly-lit disco ball in one of the big dark sculpture galleries; I was quite enjoying this until I found out it was art. Apparently it was called "Mechanisms of Disorientation: Towards a Fragmented Understanding". According to the bumph, it "reflects on and distorts notions of space and cultural reflexivity. ... Reflecting on past histories vis-a-vis contemporary objects, [the artist] draws a parallel between how we observe history in relation to affairs in contemporary culture". I think that the phrase "I was quite enjoying it until I found out it was art" would probably describe my relationship with modern art in general.

The drought of march

It's surely spring, and even in London the sun is shining on grass, birds are singing, and all that. I'm recovering from the last few weeks, and in the meantime, I think this is brilliant summer pop. I had previously decided that Nicki Minaj is better in other people's songs than her own, but this one is great:

The Most Reverend and Right Honorable Dr

So Rowan Williams gets to stop being Archbishop of Canterbury.  I wonder whether that will free him up to talk more, or whether he will have to be quiet for the sake of his successor?  His talk called The Body's Grace given to a Lesbian and Gay Alliance church back when he was mere Professor Williams is remarkable for taking as its starting point the idea that to think about sexuality you have first to address the question of what it is about sex that matters.  And I do like this aside:

(Incidentally, if this suggests that, in a great many cultural settings, the socially licensed norm of heterosexual intercourse is a "perversion" - well, that is a perfectly serious suggestion.. .)

Requiescat

I've just heard that Ray Page has died. He was Emeritus Elrington and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, the one before the one who was there when I was an undergraduate, and a brilliant scholar of things Norse and Anglo-Saxon, especially runes -- he was the runemeister. He taught people who taught me, but I didn't know him until he was retired. He was also the Librarian of the Parker Library back when this was not a full-time job but something people did as well as being heads of departments, etc. If the two great early modern manuscript librarians were Parker and Cotton, Ray Page lived up to the Parkerian rather than Cottonian attitude, with a bias towards not letting people handle the manuscripts... Consequently he was not loved by art-historians. He was the man behind the setting up of the Conservation Studio at Corpus -- his concern was always for the manuscripts' survival more than for the vanity of scholars.

But I'll mostly remember him as tremendously good company. I first met him properly soon after I finished my PhD. I was working at the Wren Library putting some scanned manuscript-catalogue text into XML, and finishing off a book on calendars. One of my calendar-manuscripts had a runic inscription in it, and in some trepidation I wrote to Professor Page, asking him for his help. At this point all I really knew about him was his reputation as a scary beer-monster -- there were hard drinkers among our lecturers, one in particular, but even he prepared himself seriously for a drinking session with Ray Page. Ray wrote back pointing me at a French publication which dealt with the runic inscription in question (a bizarre invocation of Thor to deal with blood-pus demons, not at all the sort of text you'd expect to find at the monastery of Christ Church Canterbury in the late eleventh century). He also invited me to dine with him at Corpus Christi.

Occasionally Corpus has wine-tastings before the evening meal, and this was one of those times. We tasted 16 wines before dinner. After dinner we went to Combination. When the port came round I poured myself a glass with perhaps a centimetre of clear air at the top. "Half a glass, half a glass", Ray growled at me, explaining that it wasn't really a full glass until you could see the miniscus protruding slightly above the rim. (I noticed later that although his hands sometimes shook a little with age, this did not affect him when raising a full glass of port to his mouth -- then they were rock-steady.) I had three glasses of port. Good port is so delicious, and so different from bad port, and I've only ever drunk good port after Cambridge dinners.

(Also on this occasion I met a man called Geoffrey Styler, who told me about a recent party he'd had for the eightieth anniversary of his first ever piano lesson.)

As combination drew to a close, Ray asked me if I liked beer. I said that although I like beer I find the sheer volume of it hard to handle, and prefer whiskey. "Ah, whiskey!" he said, and invited me to the room, I forget its name, dedicated to the use of retired fellows. In the cupboard there he had some silver quaichs, and a large box of the sort used to conserve medieval manuscripts. It had been made for him by one of the great conservator-binders, maybe Nicholas Pickwoad, and inside it was fitted out in velvet to hold a bottle of Jura whiskey. On the spine where the title should be it had "The Runes of Jura" in stamped lettering. "Let us consult the runes of Jura", said Ray Page, and so we did.

By this point my mind was a little hazy. It was not at its sharpest. We talked about books mostly, I think, and he tested me on quotations, something which I didn't mind in the least because I caught them all, except one from Hamlet. You don't often meet people who have read the same sort of things as you, even the obscure things like The Wallet of Kai Lung and Lavengro. He was much better read than me; he was of the type of scholar for whom being well-read in general was part of having an active mind. I'm not well-read in an abstract sense, but I've read more than most people I meet, and being able to discuss books like that seemed like the most tremendous luxury to me. It still does.

I was tired after finishing my PhD, tremendously tired, and it took me a good few months to recover. That evening was the most I had enjoyed myself for ages, and a sort of illustration of old-style Cambridge at its best. Working out, as I stumbled home in an alcoholic haze, that Ray was exactly three times my age (26 to 78) I found myself wondering if he had any available grandsons... I made it into work the next morning despite my tremendous hangover.

A couple of years later when I was elected to a Junior Research Fellowship at Corpus Ray sent me a note saying how rare it was for the fellowship to make such a good decision, and at one of my first evenings dining in caused tremendous offence to a visiting manuscript scholar by introducing me to her as "A real manuscript scholar". I think he had been pretty fearsome in his younger years, but he was always very kind to me. He occasionally asked me to read some article he was writing on Parker's manuscripts, and they were tremendously refreshing, the best sort of scholarship, the kind that eschews academicy nonsense for clear, erudite commonsense. He had a great sense of humour, a very dry Scandinavian sense, the sort that does not involves laughing or smiling. "You might call that a beautifully rounded argument", he would say with exaggerated politeness -- meaning that it was circular. He got testy if the port stopped at combination, and would talk loudly about the Bishop of Norwich until it moved again. He insisted that the correct loyal toast was not "The Queen" but "The Church and Queen". And one of my favourite stories about him I am not going to put here, even though very few people read this blog, because of its potential to cause an international incident.

It's not a hundred percent accurate to say that I'll miss him, because he hadn't been quite himself for the last few years as old age caught up with him, and I missed him then. But from a selfish point of view, I do wish there were other people like him. But there just aren't; he was more than usually unique.

Some internet things mostly about brains

I just spoke to my little nephew on the phone. "Do you want to come home in a minute?" he asked me. Which is very sweet and has made me feel a bit sad. I told him I'd like to but I can't come home til Easter. Heigh ho. At least the internet remains to amuse us.

If you're interested in apocalyptic sci-fi scenarios coming true right now, why not read about this woman's experience of attaching electrodes to her head to learn how to shoot better? She's a journalist who tried the US military's enhanced sniper training involving 9 volt batteries attached to the temples. She seems to think that all the big ethical questions are changed by the fact that she enjoyed it so much, when really they're just intensified. I already find it a bit frightening that we pay people to kill people for us, but the idea of switching off their self-doubt while they do so might just be a step too far. All the same, I did feel a momentary urge to try putting a current through my mind. (Also I saw it on Boing Boing, where Cory Doctorow pointed out that "If you can't open it, you don't own it", which is quite funny.)

This psychologist makes an interesting point about how the self-selecting personalities and long training of psychologists might make a serious difference to their view of what mental health is. I like this quote:

Having steered the higher-education terrain for a decade of my life, I know that degrees and credentials are primarily badges of compliance.

In other internet news, if you buy a copy of Pendulous Breasts Quarterly and put "Zing me!" in the comments they will hand-craft some insults just for you. It's mostly by Onion and Daily Show writers and others of that ilk. It's a bit hit and miss but there's something pretty cool about being able to buy random humour things from the other side of the world on a whim. I heard about it because it has some Kate Beaton cartoons in it. As the title suggests, though, it's mostly pretty boyish.

In contrast, you could celebrate International Woman's day, which I think is around here sometime, with this excellent Dragonette song. It's from a pink-covered album about being proud of being a woman. I'm not sure I think that's particularly admirable. I'd rather be a woman than a man, but shouldn't I try to suppress that feeling rather than exulting in it? Isn't it a bit like those playground arguments about whether boys or girls are better? Couldn't we grow up past that stage? Nonetheless it's a great song:

Bye bye AI

I'm a bit sad because today I hand in my Artificial Intelligence coursework, and this is probably the last time I get to use the logic programming language Prolog. It's a very cool language, essentially made of punctuation rather than words. I still have a few more AI lectures left though. We just had an interesting one about the problems with using Classical Logic for actual reasoning. In classical logic, if you have a set of things that are true, and another thing, let's call it P, follows from that set, then, whatsoever you may add to that set, P still has to be true. But we need a different sort of logic for practical reasoning, a defeasible or default logic. In this way of proceeding you have a default, e.g. birds can fly, and then you assume the default that if Tweety is a bird Tweety flies. When you find out that Tweety has a broken wing, or Tweety is a penguin, or Tweety is dead, you change that default. In classical logic you could only do that by stating that birds fly if they are not dead and don't have a broken wing, and aren't a penguin or an ostrich, and aren't glued to the ground, etc, etc, and then when you had Eddie (an eagle) you could only prove that he was able to fly if you could also prove that he wasn't dead, glued to the ground, unwell, an ostrich, etc, etc. Default reasoning is like the legal position where you assume that an accused is innocent until proven guilty. It's also known as the Closed World scenario, like in databases, where it's assumed that what is not recorded is not true. In Prolog it's called Negation By Failure. If you can't prove X then you act like for practical purposes you have proved not X.

This seems very interesting to me. It seems like the default reasoning method is a bit like the whole quantum, Schrodinger's cat thing, where only the observable is true. Does it make much difference to people's personalities and attitudes to spend their entire time in an environment where only the observable is true? This seems like almost the opposite of the Humanities approach, and I think this is what Imperial is lacking by having no Humanities here, just a loose association with the Royal College of Art and the Royal College of Music. Tomorrow I may or may not go to a talk by an anthropologist who works on people who work with mice, which seems like an interesting related thing.

Books of February 2012

I read a few very good books in February. Apart from a couple of poetry anthologies (I recommend Andrew Motion's From Here to Eternity) and an exhibition catalogue (for the brilliant Grayson Perry exhibition about which I have failed to blog) everything I read last month was on the Kindle, and most of it was stuff I'd got very cheap in various Kindle sales.

The Mighty Angel by Jerzy Pilcher
This was a lucky find. It's a strange and compelling book which I consumed avidly on the tube, but it's going to be hard to describe it without making it sound awful. It's mostly about an alcoholic drinking. Here instead is the first paragraph:

Before the mafiosi appeared in my apartment in the company of the dark-complexioned poetess Alberta Lulaj, before they wrenched me from my drunken sleep and set about demanding — first with dissembling pleas, then with ruthless threats — that I arrange for Alberta Lulaj’s poetry to be published in the weekly Tygodnik Powszechny, before there began the tempestuous events I wish to recount, there was the eve of those events, there was the morning and the evening of the preceding day, and I, from the morning to the evening of the preceding day, had been drinking peach vodka. Yes indeed, I had been drinking peach vodka, brutishly longing for one last love before death, and immersed up to my ears in a life of dissolution.

Tony and Susan by Austin Wright
Compelling and clever. Susan is more-or-less happily married to a brilliant surgeon and they have three children. But a long time ago she was briefly married to neurotic Edward, who was obsessed with what seemed an unrealistic need to be a writer. Out of the blue Edward sends Susan a novel he has written, with the double-edged comment that she was always his best critic. But it's not a pleasant novel and it's not clear what Edward's motive might be. If it's "about" something maybe it's about being a reader, or maybe it's about the creepiness of domesticity. It's very readable though, I stayed up late to finish it in one day.

Graven With Diamonds: the Many Lives of Thomas Wyatt, Courtier, Poet, Assassin, Spy by Nicola Shulman
This has been on my Amazon wishlist for ages. I'm quite fond of Wyatt's poetry, though I only really knew about the usual anthologised ones and the question of whether or not they were addressed to Anne Boleyn. Henry VIII was king for quite a long time, and most of this book is about the period when his court was very French-influenced, in the years between Henry falling in love with and marrying Anne Boleyn. Courtly love abounded:

Love was newly fashionable. In the previous reign, English continence in matters of love had greatly impressed a visiting Italian: ‘he had never noticed anyone, either at court or amongst the lower orders, to be in love’ he said, ‘… either the English were the most discreet lovers in the world, or they were incapable of love’. But now, in the 1520s, the young and chic of Henry’s court were all at it, tossing and pining on their pallets for love, or saying they did in lyric poetry.

Shulman is very good on the use that people made of the poems, how they got passed about and altered, and used in games which only later might look a little dangerous:

‘I write by this… I mean by that’ wrote one scribe at the bottom of his poem, just in case his surreptitiousness had gone unnoticed. Accordingly, they were often attracted to those works of Wyatt’s that could usurp their own apparent subject matter and turn into poems about the poems themselves. That may make Tudor courtiers sound like French doctoral students, which they were not; but they were young and self-involved and their poems were the vehicle for that most fascinating of all things, their own social drama.

I also really like her characterisations of the major figures, like Henry VIII:

A flash of this ribaldry comes down to us in a book that was doing the rounds of Wyatt’s circle in the early 1530s, in which someone has written ‘presto para servir’ (ready to serve) and others, beneath it, the doubtful coda ‘forse’ (perhaps). But the king would have no particle of sympathy for an ungallant sentiment like that. For him there could be no forse about his eagerness to serve. He was sincere in all his doings. If he were alive today, he’d be Canadian.

Anne Boleyn:

Anne was a bridge-burner by nature, not a conciliator, and a termagant to boot. As Henry’s companion, she had never been one to cut her cloth. Henry’s letters swim with mollification and – in response to some lost rebuff – the sort of shaken dignity one sees in a senior dog in retreat from an unexpected cat.

and Wyatt himself:

As for courtly skills, there was no shortage of these with Wyatt, one of the few Englishmen in history to be held suspiciously smooth by a senior French diplomat.

Also you have to love an author who, when discussing C. S. Lewis' interpretation of some poems, points out that "There is only one joke in the Narnia books" (and footnotes a reference to it -- it's in The Silver Chair, apparently).

A few small things

1. I saw this at Spitalfields in one of the dingy warehousey bits by the market where it stinks of piss.

They're spray-painted concrete blocks, the sort that get used as impromptu bollards.  I think they're quite good.

2. Think it would be nice to encourage thoughtful long-form journalism?  There's something that looks good on Kickstarter.  It's already funded.  I hope they can make it work.  Go responsible media!

3. This blog account of a trip to CERN makes it sound amazing.

4.  Crazy philosopher Slavok Žižek has a great accent.  Here he is talking about (what else) The Wire.  I haven't listened to the whole thing but people who have say it's very interesting.

5. My ipod on shuffle just came up with this excellent Pet Shop Boys song:

I want a positive role model!