Aaah. Military environmentalism and Disney. This pushes all my buttons. I just wish I could go to it and blog about it, Dave Foster Wallace style.
Friday, June 29, 2007
Swords and ploughshares
Aaah. Military environmentalism and Disney. This pushes all my buttons. I just wish I could go to it and blog about it, Dave Foster Wallace style.
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Are you local?
So, the conference went well. Most academic conferences make me want to sleep, or scream, but this was actually exciting. It was thought-provoking! So this post probably dips into pretentiousness, but I want to get all this out in words, because it has been exercising my noddle a great deal.
Patrick Wright, one of my great historian gurus, has written beautifully on all sorts of things. On tanks. On Chesterton. On camouflage. His talk was complex and considerate. It dealt with the concept of nativity. Of locality. And one of the things he raised was the point that there has been a long tradition in England of assuming that great love for the local, that love for the land, has to be founded on some kind of presumed organic connection to it. Something forged by blood, and history. Which is why the BNP thinks it's on a winner when it leaflets folk gigs. As soon as you posit organicism, you end up excluding people. This is a great and grave problem for anyone like me, whose political intuitions tend to the Left, but who find themselves stymied by the political landscape attendant to expressing love for the countryside, for the landscapes of England.
Wright played some raucous, rabble-rousing folk music to the audience, and told a splendid story about the painter Stanley Spencer, who, rather astonishingly, accompanied a group of Labour MPs on a cultural delegation to China in 1954. It seems they found his company rather trying. But he aced them all when they finally filed in to their grand meeting with Premier Chou En Lai. Who talked and talked, and asked the group for a response. There was dead silence. None of the MPs said anything. They were all too scared to be seen to commend Chinese Communism. And suddenly, Spencer spoke.
"Let me tell you about Cookham" he said. "I feel at home in China because I feel that Cookham is somewhere near".
Patrick offered us this little story as evidence that the local does not have to be insular.
I have thought about this a lot, since. In Uzbekistan last October we camped in the Fergana Valley's last remaining stretches of desert—dunes and flats squeezed between cotton fields and acres and acres of remnant marsh. I filmed hunting wasps dragging paralysed tarantulas, I tracked hares, and jackals, and spent a scared, sleepless night convinced that I'd be struck dead by lightning. My camping nous is not brilliant. I failed to remember not to pitch my tent at the top of a hill. In the morning, still with the refrain "carbon fibre rods! carbon fibre rods!" running through my exhausted brain, I got out of my tent and wandered about in the foggy dawn and the hulks of dunes. The world looked like this:
Ecologically, these remnant deserts and marshes are in a pretty ruinous state. The desert is overgrazed. The sand is salinating fast. The water buzzes with hot particles washed down from uranium mine tailings in Kyrgyzstan. Cotton survives only through the application of frightening, frightening amounts of fertiliser. And yet. And yet being in this watery land was amazing because it reminded me of something I had never seen: an ecological plenitude far greater than that found in modern-day England. The dripping bushes were full of warblers—big, damp Siberian chiffchaffs and whitethroats preening their coverts and rousing to rid themselves of dew. I wandered across wet dune sand — leaving huge, crumbling footprints — occasionally flinching as a sound exactly like a small jet plane passed overhead. A dopplering long-width roar, like the sound of a bottle rocket launching, about ten feet above my head. I stood for a while trying to work out what the hell was going past, up there, in the fog. Couldn't see a thing. The roar came maybe twice a minute, or more. And then I worked it out. Each roar was a flock of two hundred or so sparrows flying from their roosts in the reeds out to the rice fields the other side of the marsh. Their flap flap flap glide flight-style had synchronised through the whole flock, so that the roar had ripples in it, like a diagram of propagating waves, and it was damn exhilarating, amplified as it was by the wetness in the air.
And as the sun rose and broke the fog, the flat expanses of reeds stretched and glowed into the distance. The air was full of a host of marsh harriers. Everywhere you looked, they sailed over the flat planes of reed, wings set in a characteristic half-raised plane, like a self-willed paper aircraft. I have never seen so many harriers in my life. They were the single most obvious, most dramatic, and most moving animal in the landscape.
I met a farmworker there, an old chap in a felt waistcoat, a square Uzbek hat, muddy trousers tucked into his boots. We sat and chatted for ages. In 1939, he said, this was all marsh, with dunes only on the high ground. Everything else was water thick with reeds. The path from Namangan to Fergana was so dangerous that people wouldn't travel it alone; they'd wait around until they could travel in groups, to keep them from safe from wolves. Locals farmed plots on the higher ground, hunted ducks and boars, and fished in the marsh.
In the 1940s the authorities started draining the marshes. Even then, his father's job was to send tonnes of fish from the marshes to the front lines during the war. By the 1970s most of the marsh had vanished, because Soviet Central Planning had dictated that most of the region become cotton monoculture. The fish have nearly all gone. "I used to spend all night fishing" he said, "and I'd come back in the morning with anything from 40 to 80 kilos of fish". "Now, there's no point. You won't get more than a couple of kilos, and that's not worth spending a night awake for. None of the young people here fish any more." He was terribly, terribly sad about this.
The pre-war life here, then, must have been very like the life of the fen tigers a couple of centuries ago, a few miles from here, in the long tongue of swamp, lake and carr that extended down from east of Ely down to the very edge of Cambridge. The fen-dwellers hunted eels with barbed iron forks, caught fish in woven, reed traps. Cut sedge for kindling and roofing. Killed and salted down wigeon, teal, pintail and mallard in winter. On the higher ground they grew wheat. On the lower ground they caught fish.
On Sunday, the day after the conference, a pack of conference delegates went for a guided walk around Wicken Fen, an area of remnant fen that is being rewilded: enlarged, with great care. Over the next century or so it's hoped to reflood the whole long tongue of wetland, all the way from Wicken to Cambridge. It's a vast project, and a difficult one, involving tricky negotiations with local farmers, with hydrologists, with local authorities and all the user-groups involved.
Wicken looks wonderful. In fact, it looks exactly, exactly like the wetlands in Uzbekistan. Here is Wicken in the evening:
And here is Uzbekistan in the morning. Although there is a difference, because those aren't clouds you see in the background, all soft and purply: they're mountains.
And this is where I discovered for myself that the local can be the local without being insular. It would be an arrogant mistake to pin history to any of this: to see Uzbek farmworkers, living in reed shelters during the harvest season, to be remnants of historical process. Old-fashioned. To see them as fen tigers. And this is where Patrick's assertion, pace Spencer, crept in.
What I failed to work out was that the marshes in Uzbekistan were local to me too. I talked to people there who were harvesting reedmace fluff, because they used it to stuff pillows. I talked about paths and traversing the marsh, because these seemed important questions because I have spent so long trying to navigate this kind of terrain in the East Anglian fens. I watched carefully to see where the locals knew they could ford drainage channels and runnels by wading, or by balancing a sturdy stick from bank to bank to run across. I talked duck-flighting, because I know about ducks, and talked about the capacities of ancient Soviet rifles. We talked long about what this place meant to them. And this was all very easy to do, even through an interpreter. There seemed some robust, shared understandings, a shared cognitive map, even though the difference between me and an Uzbek rice-farmer might be as wide as that between an eccentric Surrey artist and the Chinese Premier. I felt close to home in the marshes of Uzbekistan, because western hemisphere marshes are a landscape I understand. Cognitively, I knew where I was. I felt local there. This the world smaller, and bigger, all at once. It was not an organic connection. It was an experiential one.
During the conference, a speaker mentioned Richard Mabey's theory about the double hammer-beam roof at St Wendreda's Church, in the fenland village of March. It is quite the most extraordinary piece of spiritual architecture I've ever seen. It reduced me to tears, literally, when I first saw it. Two hundred carved angels. It is sublime.
Mabey thinks that the wings of these angels were modelled on those of the most obvious bird of the fens, the Marsh Harrier, which must have been as common a sight then as it was to me in Uzbekistan. Wherever you looked, there would have been a harrier sailing past, a sort of motivating spirit of the air. I love this theory. It seems intuitively bang-on. And I love it because it makes religion local, too. In all the right ways.
Patrick Wright, one of my great historian gurus, has written beautifully on all sorts of things. On tanks. On Chesterton. On camouflage. His talk was complex and considerate. It dealt with the concept of nativity. Of locality. And one of the things he raised was the point that there has been a long tradition in England of assuming that great love for the local, that love for the land, has to be founded on some kind of presumed organic connection to it. Something forged by blood, and history. Which is why the BNP thinks it's on a winner when it leaflets folk gigs. As soon as you posit organicism, you end up excluding people. This is a great and grave problem for anyone like me, whose political intuitions tend to the Left, but who find themselves stymied by the political landscape attendant to expressing love for the countryside, for the landscapes of England.
Wright played some raucous, rabble-rousing folk music to the audience, and told a splendid story about the painter Stanley Spencer, who, rather astonishingly, accompanied a group of Labour MPs on a cultural delegation to China in 1954. It seems they found his company rather trying. But he aced them all when they finally filed in to their grand meeting with Premier Chou En Lai. Who talked and talked, and asked the group for a response. There was dead silence. None of the MPs said anything. They were all too scared to be seen to commend Chinese Communism. And suddenly, Spencer spoke.
"Let me tell you about Cookham" he said. "I feel at home in China because I feel that Cookham is somewhere near".
Patrick offered us this little story as evidence that the local does not have to be insular.
I have thought about this a lot, since. In Uzbekistan last October we camped in the Fergana Valley's last remaining stretches of desert—dunes and flats squeezed between cotton fields and acres and acres of remnant marsh. I filmed hunting wasps dragging paralysed tarantulas, I tracked hares, and jackals, and spent a scared, sleepless night convinced that I'd be struck dead by lightning. My camping nous is not brilliant. I failed to remember not to pitch my tent at the top of a hill. In the morning, still with the refrain "carbon fibre rods! carbon fibre rods!" running through my exhausted brain, I got out of my tent and wandered about in the foggy dawn and the hulks of dunes. The world looked like this:
Ecologically, these remnant deserts and marshes are in a pretty ruinous state. The desert is overgrazed. The sand is salinating fast. The water buzzes with hot particles washed down from uranium mine tailings in Kyrgyzstan. Cotton survives only through the application of frightening, frightening amounts of fertiliser. And yet. And yet being in this watery land was amazing because it reminded me of something I had never seen: an ecological plenitude far greater than that found in modern-day England. The dripping bushes were full of warblers—big, damp Siberian chiffchaffs and whitethroats preening their coverts and rousing to rid themselves of dew. I wandered across wet dune sand — leaving huge, crumbling footprints — occasionally flinching as a sound exactly like a small jet plane passed overhead. A dopplering long-width roar, like the sound of a bottle rocket launching, about ten feet above my head. I stood for a while trying to work out what the hell was going past, up there, in the fog. Couldn't see a thing. The roar came maybe twice a minute, or more. And then I worked it out. Each roar was a flock of two hundred or so sparrows flying from their roosts in the reeds out to the rice fields the other side of the marsh. Their flap flap flap glide flight-style had synchronised through the whole flock, so that the roar had ripples in it, like a diagram of propagating waves, and it was damn exhilarating, amplified as it was by the wetness in the air.
And as the sun rose and broke the fog, the flat expanses of reeds stretched and glowed into the distance. The air was full of a host of marsh harriers. Everywhere you looked, they sailed over the flat planes of reed, wings set in a characteristic half-raised plane, like a self-willed paper aircraft. I have never seen so many harriers in my life. They were the single most obvious, most dramatic, and most moving animal in the landscape.
I met a farmworker there, an old chap in a felt waistcoat, a square Uzbek hat, muddy trousers tucked into his boots. We sat and chatted for ages. In 1939, he said, this was all marsh, with dunes only on the high ground. Everything else was water thick with reeds. The path from Namangan to Fergana was so dangerous that people wouldn't travel it alone; they'd wait around until they could travel in groups, to keep them from safe from wolves. Locals farmed plots on the higher ground, hunted ducks and boars, and fished in the marsh.
In the 1940s the authorities started draining the marshes. Even then, his father's job was to send tonnes of fish from the marshes to the front lines during the war. By the 1970s most of the marsh had vanished, because Soviet Central Planning had dictated that most of the region become cotton monoculture. The fish have nearly all gone. "I used to spend all night fishing" he said, "and I'd come back in the morning with anything from 40 to 80 kilos of fish". "Now, there's no point. You won't get more than a couple of kilos, and that's not worth spending a night awake for. None of the young people here fish any more." He was terribly, terribly sad about this.
The pre-war life here, then, must have been very like the life of the fen tigers a couple of centuries ago, a few miles from here, in the long tongue of swamp, lake and carr that extended down from east of Ely down to the very edge of Cambridge. The fen-dwellers hunted eels with barbed iron forks, caught fish in woven, reed traps. Cut sedge for kindling and roofing. Killed and salted down wigeon, teal, pintail and mallard in winter. On the higher ground they grew wheat. On the lower ground they caught fish.
On Sunday, the day after the conference, a pack of conference delegates went for a guided walk around Wicken Fen, an area of remnant fen that is being rewilded: enlarged, with great care. Over the next century or so it's hoped to reflood the whole long tongue of wetland, all the way from Wicken to Cambridge. It's a vast project, and a difficult one, involving tricky negotiations with local farmers, with hydrologists, with local authorities and all the user-groups involved.
Wicken looks wonderful. In fact, it looks exactly, exactly like the wetlands in Uzbekistan. Here is Wicken in the evening:
And here is Uzbekistan in the morning. Although there is a difference, because those aren't clouds you see in the background, all soft and purply: they're mountains.
And this is where I discovered for myself that the local can be the local without being insular. It would be an arrogant mistake to pin history to any of this: to see Uzbek farmworkers, living in reed shelters during the harvest season, to be remnants of historical process. Old-fashioned. To see them as fen tigers. And this is where Patrick's assertion, pace Spencer, crept in.
What I failed to work out was that the marshes in Uzbekistan were local to me too. I talked to people there who were harvesting reedmace fluff, because they used it to stuff pillows. I talked about paths and traversing the marsh, because these seemed important questions because I have spent so long trying to navigate this kind of terrain in the East Anglian fens. I watched carefully to see where the locals knew they could ford drainage channels and runnels by wading, or by balancing a sturdy stick from bank to bank to run across. I talked duck-flighting, because I know about ducks, and talked about the capacities of ancient Soviet rifles. We talked long about what this place meant to them. And this was all very easy to do, even through an interpreter. There seemed some robust, shared understandings, a shared cognitive map, even though the difference between me and an Uzbek rice-farmer might be as wide as that between an eccentric Surrey artist and the Chinese Premier. I felt close to home in the marshes of Uzbekistan, because western hemisphere marshes are a landscape I understand. Cognitively, I knew where I was. I felt local there. This the world smaller, and bigger, all at once. It was not an organic connection. It was an experiential one.
During the conference, a speaker mentioned Richard Mabey's theory about the double hammer-beam roof at St Wendreda's Church, in the fenland village of March. It is quite the most extraordinary piece of spiritual architecture I've ever seen. It reduced me to tears, literally, when I first saw it. Two hundred carved angels. It is sublime.
Mabey thinks that the wings of these angels were modelled on those of the most obvious bird of the fens, the Marsh Harrier, which must have been as common a sight then as it was to me in Uzbekistan. Wherever you looked, there would have been a harrier sailing past, a sort of motivating spirit of the air. I love this theory. It seems intuitively bang-on. And I love it because it makes religion local, too. In all the right ways.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
A bad course of reading and an unfortunate choice of friends
This is from Mark Girouard's The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman. I had to share:
"Charles Lamb, the son of a Sussex baronet, decided shortly after his seventh birthday in 1823 that he was going to write the history of his guinea-pigs, Minnikin, Pin and Toby. [They] were gradually transformed into guinea-pig heroes of chivalry. As Charles Lamb grew older, his history grew and multiplied. And so, for that matter, did his guinea-pigs. Charles Lamb transformed his guinea-pigs into knights, counts and dukes, constructed elaborate coats of arms for them, and made them the heroes or villains of an epic romance of the Kingdom of Winnipeg. In the end, The History of Winnipeg from the foundation to the Present time BY ROYAL COMMAND extended to eight miniature red-and-green leather volumes.
Meanwhile the estate carpenter at Beauport set to work to construct a Camelot of battlemented hutches set in a miniature kingdom of Winnipeg in which swarms of guinea-pigs could roam safely or in comfort. Here, King Geeny and Queen Cavia, Sir Coccus Wallai, the Knight of Killinger, the Prince of Rarribu and Turknine de Newton lived, bred and died well into the 1830s. Meanwhile Charles Lamb was growing up, much loved by his family but also a puzzle to them. As his elder half-brother later wrote:
Under the influence of a bad course of reading and an unfortunate choice of friends, he became I fear almost an infidel. He never went into society and spent his time entirely in the country among his shells, insects, and guinea-pigs, of which latter collection he had several hundred."
Saturday, June 23, 2007
Today's overhead conversation
Blokey, t-shirted tourguide to a semicircle of tourists outside the old Cavendish laboratory.
"And it was in this very building" he says, in hushed tones, "that a physicist succeeded in splitting an atom!"
One beat of silence, and he says "Whatever that means. I have no idea".
"And it was in this very building" he says, in hushed tones, "that a physicist succeeded in splitting an atom!"
One beat of silence, and he says "Whatever that means. I have no idea".
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Two overheard snippets of conversation
Earnest woman to older male colleague
Woman: "The thing about Brokeback Mountain that really got me was that the main characters, the two cowboy guys, were so....so....um....so...."
Man: "Inarticulate?"
Woman: "Yes!"
Two guys in black tie and a girl in a pink ballgown leaving college gates this morning:
Girl: (mid conversational flow) ".....eww, yes, that was gross. It was like that time I got groped in a Bolivian porn cinema!"
Guy: "You're going to have to explain that"
Girl: (in horrified tones) "Oh, it was awful! We went into this porn cinema in Bolivia, and this guy came and sat next to me and tried to grope me!"
Woman: "The thing about Brokeback Mountain that really got me was that the main characters, the two cowboy guys, were so....so....um....so...."
Man: "Inarticulate?"
Woman: "Yes!"
Two guys in black tie and a girl in a pink ballgown leaving college gates this morning:
Girl: (mid conversational flow) ".....eww, yes, that was gross. It was like that time I got groped in a Bolivian porn cinema!"
Guy: "You're going to have to explain that"
Girl: (in horrified tones) "Oh, it was awful! We went into this porn cinema in Bolivia, and this guy came and sat next to me and tried to grope me!"
Dawn
Last night's appalling night's sleep wasn't due to caffeine this time. Perhaps it was the wine. Perhaps it was spending much of yesterday evening comforting a friend who's had terrible news. Perhaps it was due to the unfortunate misunderstanding that freaked out a different friend this week (gah!). Definitely it had something to do with it being May Ball night last night. Bass thumped through the glass until the early hours. Boof boof boof.
I'm woken at 5am by an insanely jealous cock chaffinch beating up his reflection in my window. Bam, bam, bam. Bam clatter blam. You have to be joking. I throw back the duvet, trudge sleepily downstairs to tape newsprint over the reflection, and can't get back to sleep.
But it's a seriously beautiful morning, and so I shoulder the D2x and a telephoto and patter off, half-asleep into the early, sunny haze to photograph post-May Ball carnage. Which is always a bittersweet, beautiful, and glorious thing to witness.
This is my favourite. Looking into Clare College from the Backs. It's not technically a very good photograph, but it bears close inspection (click to enlarge) because of all of the pics here, this one has something of the mysterious and magical wozname that inheres in this small, crazy town. Cheers!
I'm woken at 5am by an insanely jealous cock chaffinch beating up his reflection in my window. Bam, bam, bam. Bam clatter blam. You have to be joking. I throw back the duvet, trudge sleepily downstairs to tape newsprint over the reflection, and can't get back to sleep.
But it's a seriously beautiful morning, and so I shoulder the D2x and a telephoto and patter off, half-asleep into the early, sunny haze to photograph post-May Ball carnage. Which is always a bittersweet, beautiful, and glorious thing to witness.
Barefoot in the park. Well, the small square of grass and lime trees in front of my house. It's sort of a park.
Jesus lane. My college ball, and I didn't go. Pah.
Yes, it's 6am. Cool, huh?
Barefoot not in the park. Barefoot on the cobbles. I got a horrendous glass injury doing this once, so watching this was a little harrowing.
I love this couple. Look how happy they are. Bless 'em.
Ya de ya, architecture, bicycles, ballgowns, blah. Constant exposure to this kind of thing tends to make it invisible. It is pretty though.
And then this carriage came around the corner, carrying tired ball-goers homeward. Brilliant.
Others go home by punt. The kind of transport that seems such an obvious solution when you've been knocking back vintage champagne and oysters all night...
This is my favourite. Looking into Clare College from the Backs. It's not technically a very good photograph, but it bears close inspection (click to enlarge) because of all of the pics here, this one has something of the mysterious and magical wozname that inheres in this small, crazy town. Cheers!
Sunday, June 17, 2007
"Milan airport shut by hare plague"
...might just be one of the best headlines ever.
Also, hares disrupting ground radar? Awesome.
Also, hares disrupting ground radar? Awesome.
Officials have been forced to suspend flights into an airport in the Italian city of Milan due to a plague of hares.The animals invaded the runways at Milan's Linate Airport - and affected the operation of vital equipment.I must admit that my possibly dubious assumptions about Italian attitudes to nature have been flummoxed by this. They're catching these hares alive and taking them to nature reserves? Waaaah! I shall be most displeased if I'm unable to scoff a plate of Lepre alla Piemontese next time I'm out there...
Airport bosses are baffled as to why the hare population at Linate has risen so dramatically in the past few months. Whatever the cause, the result has been chaos - in the past two weeks alone, two hares have ended up beneath the wheels of charter planes. They have also confused the ground radar that is meant to prevent a repeat of Italy's worst ever air crash, which left 118 people dead, at Linate in 2001.
Things have become so serious that officials have taken the unusual step of closing Linate for three hours - from first light on Sunday - while a team of local wildlife experts try to catch the 80 or so hares that have been causing the problem.
The hares will be taken to nature reserves around Milan - though officials have warned that they have not ruled out a cull if this fails.
Friday, June 15, 2007
Museum
So, in counterpoint to the creationist museum post: here is the museum of the history of science in my university department. Slide rules, astrolabes, glass fungi and calculators in display cases, and a plastic man next to priceless antique telescopes. It has a creepy gothic vibe when it's closed. Wouldn't want to spend the night here.
Crows & stories of owes
A public apology is partly what this is. I may be the worst correspondent in the history of letter-writing. My nasty habit of failing to write to my most dearly-loved old friends is appalling. It's baffling. It's something I really must stop doing. (Note: there are also people I don't write to because I don't want them to write back, which is a very different thing, and I'm hoping that these two sets of people can easily self-identify)
But mostly because yesterday I went to my college pigeonhole, and pulled out a small brown paper package, within which was this:
A tiny book made of folded paper and card, somewhat smaller than a matchbox.
Crow books are two a penny. Some are very, very bad. Some are middling. Some are excellent (I'm writing a review of an absolutely wonderful one for a magazine right now). But this is the best one of all. Here are a few pages from the beginning. Glorious stuff.
Bill is one of my oldest friends. We were undergraduates together, a long long while ago. Bill, if you're out there reading this, I promise to keep in touch better from now on. I owe you about 300 emails.
Bill has also written a vast number of superbly surreal and wondrous stories. Among which is one of the most inspired, funny and smartest things I have ever read.
"What are you working on at the moment?" I asked him once.
"Oh" he said. "A short story. I'm re-writing The Story of O, but without the sex."
Reader, I was baffled. And then, much later, I read it. And was so delighted when I saw what he'd done. Yes, the sex had been entirely written out. But it was exactly the same. It had become a dark tale of dominoes, crosswords and chess.
It is so, so much better than the original.
I hope, Bill, that is ok for me to post a tiny excerpt from it here.
But mostly because yesterday I went to my college pigeonhole, and pulled out a small brown paper package, within which was this:
A tiny book made of folded paper and card, somewhat smaller than a matchbox.
Crow books are two a penny. Some are very, very bad. Some are middling. Some are excellent (I'm writing a review of an absolutely wonderful one for a magazine right now). But this is the best one of all. Here are a few pages from the beginning. Glorious stuff.
Bill is one of my oldest friends. We were undergraduates together, a long long while ago. Bill, if you're out there reading this, I promise to keep in touch better from now on. I owe you about 300 emails.Bill has also written a vast number of superbly surreal and wondrous stories. Among which is one of the most inspired, funny and smartest things I have ever read.
"What are you working on at the moment?" I asked him once.
"Oh" he said. "A short story. I'm re-writing The Story of O, but without the sex."
Reader, I was baffled. And then, much later, I read it. And was so delighted when I saw what he'd done. Yes, the sex had been entirely written out. But it was exactly the same. It had become a dark tale of dominoes, crosswords and chess.
It is so, so much better than the original.
I hope, Bill, that is ok for me to post a tiny excerpt from it here.
Why some hotshot publisher hasn't snapped Bill up is beyond me. Really beyond me. One day, he's going to be very, very famous.
One evening René said to O: “There’s someone I’d like you to meet. An Englishman.”
“Oh ?” said O.
“He’s called Sir Stephen. He’s sort of my brother or something.”
A grey haired, athletic-looking man appeared. O liked him all the more when she discovered how well he could play chess. He had a FIDE rating of 2374. They played a long game of chess that evening, while René stared over her shoulder with stupefied admiration at Sir Stephen. Sir Stephen’s rooms were tastefully furnished in dark English mahogany and pale silks. On the walls were paintings of ancient worthies, holding up their fingers like smoking guns. Sir Stephen played White. 1 e4 e5 2 Nf3 Nc6 3 Bb5 Nf6 4 d3 How he seemed to hold himself back, O reflected. How willing he seemed to take his time. 4 ... d6 5 c3 g6 6 Nbd2 Bg7 7 Nf1 0-0 8 Ba4 “You will find me a more redoubtable master than those you have been accustomed to, perhaps,” Sir Stephen said. “If you mean those at ‘Fernlea’,” O replied, “they were absolutely rubbish.” Sir Stephen chuckled mirthlessly 8 ... Nd7 9 Ne3 Nc5 10 Bc2 Ne6 11 h4 Ne7 12 h5 d5 “Yes,” said O, “I could even beat them blindfold.” 13 hxg6 fxg6 14 exd5 “You should be careful,” said Sir Stephen. “You don’t know who you might be talking to.” ... Nxd5 15 Nxd5 Qxd5 16 Bb3 “Yeah right,” said O, and thought: like you were one of them ... ... Qc6 17 Qe2 Bd7 18 Be3 Kh8 19 0-0-0 “Well,” said Sir Stephen, “I’ll grant that you’ll receive different treatment here.” ... Rae8 20 Qf1! a5 21 d4! exd4 22 Nxd4 Bxd4 and what Sir Stephen did next greatly surprised her, 23 Rxd4! and O gasped and then blushed ... Nxd4 24 Rxh7+! while Sir Stephen smiled coldly ... Kxh7 25 Qh1+ Kg7 26 Bh6+ Kf6 27 Qh4+ Ke5 28 Qxd4+ “Should I resign myself ?” O wondered, but something would not let her, some pride, some desire to be brought low, to be brought really to her knees, and she said nothing Kf5 29 g4 mate.
“Oh bravo !” said René, “Sir Stephen, you are clever !” He picked up the knight. “What’s this funny piece that jumps all over the place ?”
Niece boot trolley
Photo by James Macdonald
Nice to see Aimee wearing at least one wellington. The pair before last were kicked off joyously into a tidal creek in Walberswick and presumably function now as refugia for hosts of tiny crustaceans.
Lunacy doesn't run in the family, but it'd be difficult to argue against the fact that there's a modicum of the strange.
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Sunday, June 10, 2007
Saturday, June 09, 2007
Fed Up
My old friend Erin used to get mightily cheesed off at the number of young women of his acquaintance who'd go all wide eyed and say "like, what I really want to do is live in the woods. In a cabin".
"No, you don't" he'd say. "You really, really don't".
And then he'd explain at length exactly what living in a cabin in the woods entails. It turned out they probably, all things considered, didn't want to live in the woods at all.
Yes there's literary precedent for the cabin-in-the-woods thing. Give yourself the solitary outdoors life to find the answer to big questions about the human condition. Find out how to live. Suffer privation and hardship (you would not believe how much a bit of suffering turns a fellow's witterings into persuasive testimony: it's a classic 19th century move. Read those field notes, and between the lines, you'll see "these observations are true, because oh, how I suffered in getting them).
I am being mean to Thoreau, and I don't mean to be. Walden rocks. (I went to Walden Pond once. It took the edge off the book, rather: like a Helen Hanff nut making a pilgrimage to 84 Charing Cross Road and discovering it's no longer a bookshop run by Anthony Hopkins, but an All Bar One)
There is no reason for this post other than just to say, ladies and gentlemen, this evening, I would like very much to go and live in the woods. Not because I want to find big answers to big questions, or because I'm feeling terribly 19th century and transcendental. But because right now, I have had it up to here with here.
"No, you don't" he'd say. "You really, really don't".
And then he'd explain at length exactly what living in a cabin in the woods entails. It turned out they probably, all things considered, didn't want to live in the woods at all.
Yes there's literary precedent for the cabin-in-the-woods thing. Give yourself the solitary outdoors life to find the answer to big questions about the human condition. Find out how to live. Suffer privation and hardship (you would not believe how much a bit of suffering turns a fellow's witterings into persuasive testimony: it's a classic 19th century move. Read those field notes, and between the lines, you'll see "these observations are true, because oh, how I suffered in getting them).
I am being mean to Thoreau, and I don't mean to be. Walden rocks. (I went to Walden Pond once. It took the edge off the book, rather: like a Helen Hanff nut making a pilgrimage to 84 Charing Cross Road and discovering it's no longer a bookshop run by Anthony Hopkins, but an All Bar One)
There is no reason for this post other than just to say, ladies and gentlemen, this evening, I would like very much to go and live in the woods. Not because I want to find big answers to big questions, or because I'm feeling terribly 19th century and transcendental. But because right now, I have had it up to here with here.
Thursday, June 07, 2007
Fresh faced and natural-looking
I had to share this with you all: from our departmental email discussion list.
We are currently producing a documentary for Channel 4 about Stephen
Hawking, that is to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the publication
of "A Brief History of Time".
As part of the documentary we would like to film a student walking
through Caius College holding a copy of "A Brief History of Time" and
also doing some punting on the River Cam with some fellow students.
We are looking for a young female student, about 21, who wouldn't
stand out too much on camera in terms of unusual looks or style,
someone fairly fresh faced and natural looking would be great.
Initially we would need them to join us on the 13th June, possibly the
19th or 20th June, and for a date in September. We would cover
expenses and provide a nominal fee depending on involvement.
Tuesday, June 05, 2007
Safe mode
Promised to myself to blog more. Must keep promises. But I'm sitting in my office looking out at a furry grey sky, realising that in my exhausted state the chance of me coming up with something pithy or interesting is nil. When in doubt, post poems! Old poems! Poems that are so old, they're no longer scary to read.
Mine
the aim is fine tune gradual
the peace of heavy rain is owned
blinked to set resuscitation of vision
flashes of brilliance distant, maybe recede
he is carrying dust, and his certainty was
no-one wished themselves to accompany him
dismissing the ground as level, discussing
its ease of use. No, we will not hurt.
The ground will fade into beauty as easily
and the hasp of the air with lead
as the figure of one who is carried by another
sand blowing through the wide, broken streets
where frames are weak near the ocean
warm grey air slides up the riverine edge
condensing on the grains, making them cohere
the figures persevere as differences in structure emerge
distortions in vision induced by the sun
we could call them mirages rather than justifiable
blunders of suspense. Now the figure is moving
and we deduce his plan from our own; under stands of palm
the rattle of darkness held in pandanus rags
hardly seems possible this pool here, brilliant calm
is walking towards it, as if every imagined harm
discarded the tiny surface tension of chlorinated
warm blue and left it alone, the weakest thing
peeling from the surface in long chains by the sun
plotting the destruction of some moment & time
movement, or its creation, the same
witnessing the arc of evaporative calm
watching the sand, the witless climb
the moving pool, the waterfall of glass
sun below fire, the returning man
Jack
where diviners are hauling water is a bump of turf
and a cloud caul low over old heather scurf, sleep.
Dodder wrapt and a mimic fit to klepe greenshank
cotton blowing eastward, a match-mime set in as ore
shoulders sunk, heavy as rain and thistlewool merlin
blinking at the roll of weather. New roles settle, ticking
gently at the yaw singing out an arc overland
a whisper of suspicious music like the stars are dead
and the real fact of succession is dripped over rock in a sincere bid
to stay. But there is no stay. There is ice at the steady damage
patterned ground and small burrows where air laps and falls
an emergency environment at the instant where the jack comes
parabellum of delicacy and mores
violent spoils as manuscript through drier air
manifest as movement
the video slips & marshalled antics fade
MIR
A fragment of paint, a carrying bolt
DERA had missed & the threat of rain
so prolonged that the dictation of miracles
was abandoned. These simplicities were useless to me.
though war was all there was to see; scat and hesitancy
the brilliance of a star, the sapphire’s boxed array
the cobra beside the stone & all I saw
was the nought on the scales as the snake moved, not the crowds
nor the pigeon-egg diamond in the hilt of the vizier’s armory
the lock of hair or the hand of bronze to kiss
only egrets, white through lignite and soft hydrocarbons
and each wing a scant line of cartilage broken into ribs
of light and shade. Every time the line progressed like silk
iron deer, tin diamond and blue sky over Topkapi
dismembering the fortuity of travel one stop and bracketing
this was the world as it existed for our amusement
satisfactions snipped from empirical brochures entire
Ginza, Hadramaut, Nazca in six by four, milled, screened
& bleached to cuttle-ink by months of sun and wind
there are twelve, including the pyramids,
the tower in Paris, the bowed milk of the Opera
House and the silver heaped about Bilbao
the thin crenellations of a wall about hills
and the lights of a city west of an inland sea.
No distinction is offered; these are tokens only.
Your farewell is only the cuttings looking at me
their derivation is both more than ours and lessening;
the marketable and the promise of these cities both.
Either could be plain; though bells are ringing, it is only
the changes they are practising, fringes meshing into an airy
October night. And overhead a point of light travelling away
from the setting sun, the falling station describing its sere arc
before it passes behind clouds and enters the shadow of the world.
Monday, June 04, 2007
Saturday, June 02, 2007
Captain Benjamin L. Willard, Moorhen.
From Graham Catley's absolutely magnificent bird photography blog, Pewit. I bow my head. Go there and feast on this man's photographs!
Curriculum vitae
Ahoy there fretmarketeers. Have I not been pathetic? Excuses are as follows: I have been sick, and busy, and then busy, and then sick. This term has been a little like a rough transatlantic crossing on a plague ship.
Cage fighting? Sport of wimps. Try caretaking someone having a florid psychotic episode while you're running a high fever and can barely stand. Yes, it's exam term, and because one of my roles is to be on emergency call, I have been called out for oodles of emergencies. I have spent interminable days sitting in small, stuffy rooms void of phones with students who've missed their exams, and I've had early morning phone calls, and late night phone calls, and students who go missing, and students who don't turn up for their exams, but are later found eating breakfast, or fast asleep, or hiding under their desk. It's all too exhausting to relate, really it is. I am very, very tired.
What else? It has rained, it has been shiny, the starlings are still hammering on the inside of their bedroom window boxes and waking me up at 3am; an immature spoonbill has just flown off through the fog at Paxton Pits (my email has just told me) and I just can't keep the bloody house tidy.
There are bad things. One of my dearest friends is deeply unhappy at the moment, which is a special agony, because when all's said and done, you must crawl out of the hole on your own. And of course I'm still soaked in grief for my dad. It feels now as if every cell of my body is resonating with a very deep noise, a kind of dirge in infrasound. And I've realised that this isn't ever going to go away, that this low sound is not a stranger; it's a grief that will grow old with me. Part, now, of who I am. Which settles it. Oh, and all the goshawk eggs died at pip.
But there are good things. Cambridge is impossibly lush, and hot, and green. I have seen my niece bounce about, laughing her head off, on a spacehopper. I'm busy, and I'm working, and am still in a blisteringly good mood from the unexpected way a recent weekend worked out. I even sang in the shower yesterday, which hasn't happened for years. No, of course I can't talk about it here. It's not that kind of blog. And I've just learned, just now, that two of the very nicest people I know may well soon become parents. So: huzzah, bring on the scalextric. I'm already plotting to teach the future small person how to make bows and arrows.
Cage fighting? Sport of wimps. Try caretaking someone having a florid psychotic episode while you're running a high fever and can barely stand. Yes, it's exam term, and because one of my roles is to be on emergency call, I have been called out for oodles of emergencies. I have spent interminable days sitting in small, stuffy rooms void of phones with students who've missed their exams, and I've had early morning phone calls, and late night phone calls, and students who go missing, and students who don't turn up for their exams, but are later found eating breakfast, or fast asleep, or hiding under their desk. It's all too exhausting to relate, really it is. I am very, very tired.
What else? It has rained, it has been shiny, the starlings are still hammering on the inside of their bedroom window boxes and waking me up at 3am; an immature spoonbill has just flown off through the fog at Paxton Pits (my email has just told me) and I just can't keep the bloody house tidy.
There are bad things. One of my dearest friends is deeply unhappy at the moment, which is a special agony, because when all's said and done, you must crawl out of the hole on your own. And of course I'm still soaked in grief for my dad. It feels now as if every cell of my body is resonating with a very deep noise, a kind of dirge in infrasound. And I've realised that this isn't ever going to go away, that this low sound is not a stranger; it's a grief that will grow old with me. Part, now, of who I am. Which settles it. Oh, and all the goshawk eggs died at pip.
But there are good things. Cambridge is impossibly lush, and hot, and green. I have seen my niece bounce about, laughing her head off, on a spacehopper. I'm busy, and I'm working, and am still in a blisteringly good mood from the unexpected way a recent weekend worked out. I even sang in the shower yesterday, which hasn't happened for years. No, of course I can't talk about it here. It's not that kind of blog. And I've just learned, just now, that two of the very nicest people I know may well soon become parents. So: huzzah, bring on the scalextric. I'm already plotting to teach the future small person how to make bows and arrows.
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