Pops!

Dad's memorial is tomorrow, and my address is neeeearly finished. Last minute, as usual. Slightly unnerved that I'll be speaking with Alastair Campbell, but hey. It's going to be an extraordinary occasion: a big service at St. Bride's, in Fleet Street, and then the Press Club afterwards for a big knees-up. A proper goodbye.

But Thomas Love Peacock isn't

Depressing.

Having just viewed, and for the first time, a photograph of Jeffers' self-built "Hawk Tower", I must immediately post an extract from Thomas Love Peacock's Nightmare Abbey, one of my favouritest books ever. No-one but Peacock ever mocked poetic pretensions with such love and humour. [Yes, Scythrop is a thinly-veiled Shelley; Flosky, a version of Coleridge].

Shortly after the disastrous termination of Scythrop's passion for Miss Emily Girouette, Mr Glowry found himself, much against his will, involved in a lawsuit, which compelled him to dance attendance on the High Court of Chancery. Scythrop was left alone at Nightmare Abbey. He was a burnt child, and dreaded the fire of female eyes. He wandered about the ample pile, or along the garden-terrace, with 'his cogitative faculties immersed in cogibundity of cogitation.' The terrace terminated at the south-western tower, which, as we have said, was ruinous and full of owls. Here would Scythrop take his evening seat, on a fallen fragment of mossy stone, with his back resting against the ruined wall,--a thick canopy of ivy, with an owl in it, over his head,--and the Sorrows of Werter in his hand. He had some taste for romance reading before he went to the university, where, we must confess, in justice to his college, he was cured of the love of reading in all its shapes; and the cure would have been radical, if disappointment in love, and total solitude, had not conspired to bring on a relapse. He began to devour romances and German tragedies, and, by the recommendation of Mr Flosky, to pore over ponderous tomes of transcendental philosophy, which reconciled him to the labour of studying them by their mystical jargon and necromantic imagery. In the congenial solitude of Nightmare Abbey, the distempered ideas of metaphysical romance and romantic metaphysics had ample time and space to germinate into a fertile crop of chimeras, which rapidly shot up into vigorous and abundant vegetation.

He now became troubled with the passion for reforming the world. He built many castles in the air, and peopled them with secret tribunals, and bands of illuminati, who were always the imaginary instruments of his projected regeneration of the human species. As he intended to institute a perfect republic, he invested himself with absolute sovereignty over these mystical dispensers of liberty. He slept with Horrid Mysteries under his pillow, and dreamed of venerable eleutherarchs and ghastly confederates holding midnight conventions in subterranean caves. He passed whole mornings in his study, immersed in gloomy reverie, stalking about the room in his nightcap, which he pulled over his eyes like a cowl, and folding his striped calico dressing-gown about him like the mantle of a conspirator.

'Action,' thus he soliloquised, 'is the result of opinion, and to new-model opinion would be to new-model society. Knowledge is power; it is in the hands of a few, who employ it to mislead the many, for their own selfish purposes of aggrandisement and appropriation. What if it were in the hands of a few who should employ it to lead the many? What if it were universal, and the multitude were enlightened?
No. The many must be always in leading-strings; but let them have wise and honest conductors. A few to think, and many to act; that is the only basis of perfect society. So thought the ancient philosophers: they had their esoterical and exoterical doctrines. So thinks the sublime Kant, who delivers his oracles in language which none but the initiated can comprehend. Such were the views of those secret associations of illuminati, which were the terror of superstition and tyranny, and which, carefully selecting wisdom and genius from the great wilderness of society, as the bee selects honey from the flowers of the thorn and the nettle, bound all human excellence in a chain, which, if it had not been prematurely broken, would have commanded opinion, and regenerated the world.'

Scythrop proceeded to meditate on the practicability of reviving a confederation of regenerators. To get a clear view of his own ideas, and to feel the pulse of the wisdom and genius of the age, he wrote and published a treatise, in which his meanings were carefully wrapt up in the monk's hood of transcendental technology, but filled with hints of matter deep and dangerous, which he thought would set the whole nation in a ferment; and he awaited the result in awful expectation, as a miner who has fired a train awaits the explosion of a rock. However, he listened and heard nothing; for the explosion, if any ensued, was not sufficiently loud to shake a single leaf of the ivy on the towers of Nightmare Abbey; and some months afterwards he received a letter from his bookseller, informing him that only seven copies had been sold, and concluding with a polite request for the balance.

Scythrop did not despair. 'Seven copies,' he thought, 'have been sold. Seven is a mystical number, and the omen is good. Let me find the seven purchasers of my seven copies, and they shall be the seven golden candle-sticks with which I will illuminate the world.'

Ferret

Robinson Jeffers is depressing.

Sorry. Just had to get that out of the way.

"Name My Ferret" is now a group on Facebook. I know that, because I just made it. Someone told me that Facebook now comprises 1% of all web traffic. More now, I should think: the digital pipery is teeming with suggested names for a ferret I'm not even sure I want. Should one look a gift mustelid in the mouth?

I am still a bit weirded out from having my tent mugged by a mink—or "riverine mustelid" as the Professor called it — in Uzbekistan. That's like the "Arms Fair by Mistake" story. Which I'll have to get around to telling eventually.

On a quiet day in the bookshop, way back, I was leafing through a bizarre American book on ferrets. Not your average long-dogger, rabbit-netter ferret book. No, this one was very different. It consisted of pages and pages of ferrets dressed in fancy dress. Takes all sorts, I know, but what made me giggle was right at the end of the book, a little proviso:

Take care when introducing your ferret to your pet rabbits, because in the ancient past, the ancestors of ferrets were used to hunt them.

What precisely does "take care" mean, do you think?

Aimee's knitted badgerclava

Let's hope the government chief scientist doesn't suspect her of transmitting bovine TB...

Sea Dragon / Photosynth

I know it's old. I just want to watch it over and over again....

!!

I can't believe this article has appeared on the BBC News website.

This kind of dangerous, ridiculous nonsense is rampant in 1920s literary journals: there, anxious drama critics wrote that poverty and fertility were allied and recommended that workers should be sterilized, because the ruling classes had such low birth rates. You know, the sort of thing that got quite popular, I hear, in Germany. In the 1930s.

But this is 2007, and this is the British Broadcasting Corporation. Nation shall speak truth unto nation, right? In the words of my friend Nick, who sent me the link: WHAT THE FUCK?

Sprawk

Lovely photos from Katie at Bogbumper

Huh?

Yes, we know that google automatically scans your gmail emails and then sticks a bunch of "context-sensitive advertisements" next to them. I have in front of me a series of emails between me and my practical criticism students. The content of these mails strays not one whit from arranging suitable times for lessons. That's all. That's all they say.

Google has scanned these innocent mails. The adverts it gives me, based on these mails, are as follows. Should I worry?


User Acceptance Testing
Expert testing and practical advice for websites, systems or products

Krav Maga, self defence
Practical, effective & proven Waltham Abbey, Elstree & Loughton.

Accident Investigation
Practical training qualification in civil and criminal investigation

The Knight Shop - UK -
Massive range of Swords & Armour U.K. Based Showroom

Lexical horror

Unsettling, this is

Drugs!

Wow. I fully recommend Imigran as a migraine-stopper. Amazing. First thing I've ever tried that works. But I don't recommend attempting to lecture while on it. Totally spaced. Traumatised by the looks on the students' faces as I flailed around trying to remember how to speak English. This kind of thing can give an academic an unwelcome reputation...though I found it all rather enjoyable, to be honest.

Smoke Angel

For this, you need a Globemaster and a lot of flares.

Search terms that led readers to this blog today

goshawking
beetle bots
anthropy definition
five stages of receiving catastrophic
cocaine in laptop
he went to stellar cartography
parka bondage
fretmarks
ben sawick
was sitting on my tongue

Limericks!

My favourite has always been:

While Titian was mixing rose madder,
His model posed nude on a ladder.
Her position, to Titian,
Suggested coition,
So he climbed up the ladder
And had'er.

My friend James P, who possesses a Big Brain, writes reviews for Important Magazines and shares my taste in Camels, has been trying his hand at that most tricky thing, writing the literary limerick. And masterful they are too: here's a taste:

The French Lieutenant's Woman

A couple who walk by the sea
meet a woman who turns out to be
a bit of bad news
(she ends up a muse).
— I'm the author — hello! look at me!

Midnight's Children

The hour of my birth was quite late,
I'm part psychic, my sense of smell's great.
I start out like Dickens,
and then the plot thickens:
Aha! I'm the Indian state!

The Line of Beauty

From Oxford, Nick's gone for the summer
to London, becoming a bummer.
He's reading the Master.
AIDS: what a disaster!
He'd have been better off as a plumber.

Glengarry Glen Ross

If Miller could do it, then — damn it!
I can write just as well if I cram it:
A play about salesmen
and how money ails men.
Yours Sincerely, &c., Dave Mamet.

©James Purdon 2007

Squidoo

I've been meaning to point everyone to this for a while. Better late than never.

The Dark Ages

My university department has an uncompromising attitude towards Powerpoint. If you are invited to speak, to give a paper, and demand PPT, you may well be on the receiving end of a faint, resigned shrug. And perhaps a slight raising of the eyebrows. Oh yes, we'll set it up, and uncomplainingly. We'll watch the presentation. But deep down we'll know you're a lesser person for needing it.

Of course, it's a different story if your talk actually needs images: photographs of scientific apparatus, images from bestiaries, pages of secretaryhand from seventeenth-century manuscripts, and so on. In such cases, Powerpoint is clearly useful. We understand.

But if you're a philosopher—particularly a philosopher—or a historian whose paper doesn't need high-definition pictures? Well now. Why do you need it? If you can't keep the audience's attention with words, what are you doing standing up there? That is what us Luddites think. If you need a diagram, and most of us do, what's wrong with an overhead projector, a pen, and a sheet of acetate?

We are living in the dark ages. La la la.

So it's nice to know there's backup out there, underpinning our departmental culture. In the form of Edward Tufte. Tufte thinks the cognitive style of powerpoint is problematic, shading to evil! There's a Wired article from 2003 here.

From Wikipedia:

Tufte has criticized the way Microsoft PowerPoint is typically used. In his essay The cognitive style of PowerPoint, Tufte criticizes many emergent properties of the software:

• Its use to guide and reassure a presenter, rather than to enlighten the audience;
• Unhelpfully simplistic tables and charts, resulting from the low resolution of computer displays;
• The outliner causing ideas to be arranged in an unnecessarily deep hierarchy, itself subverted by the need to restate the hierarchy on each slide;
• Enforcement of the audience's linear progression through that hierarchy (whereas with handouts, readers could browse and relate items at their leisure);
• Poor typography and chart layout, from presenters who are poor designers and who use poorly designed templates and default settings;
• Simplistic thinking, from ideas being squashed into bulleted lists, and stories with beginning, middle, and end being turned into a collection of disparate, loosely disguised points. This may present a kind of image of objectivity and neutrality that people associate with science, technology, and "bullet points".

Tufte's criticism of PowerPoint has extended to its use by NASA engineers in the events leading to the Columbia disaster.

Which you can read here: Powerpoint and the Columbia disaster.

I'm not saying all this to impress upon the world how endearingly sniffy about Powerpoint my department is.

But because I came across this document this morning.

WilcoxKillChain.pdf

And I could weep.

Very, very, very lonely and sad tonight. Birthday-eve lonely and sad. Oh, for this worst-ever year to be over. Or things to look up.

Both. Here, to cut the sad, and in commemoration of happier times and crustaceans, is baby me holding up a shore crab. Ta da!

Apple day!

Apples, originally uploaded by pluvialis.

No, really. Click for the photoset.

It doesn't need to be made human: it's better than that.

A wondrous bit of urban Romanticism from BLDGBLOG this morning.

No matter what you do in L.A., your behavior is appropriate for the city. Los Angeles has no assumed correct mode of use. You can have fake breasts and drive a Ford Mustang – or you can grow a beard, weigh 300 pounds, and read Christian science fiction novels. Either way, you're fine: that's just how it works. You can watch Cops all day or you can be a porn star or you can be a Caltech physicist. You can listen to Carcass – or you can listen to Pat Robertson. Or both.
That's how we dooz it.

L.A. is the apocalypse: it's you and a bunch of parking lots. No one's going to save you; no one's looking out for you. It's the only city I know where that's the explicit premise of living there – that's the deal you make when you move to L.A.
The city, ironically, is emotionally authentic.

It says: no one loves you; you're the least important person in the room; get over it.
What matters is what you do there. And maybe that means renting Hot Fuzz and eating too many pretzels; or maybe that means driving a Prius out to Malibu and surfing with Daryl Hannah as a means of protesting something. Maybe that means buying everything Fredric Jameson has ever written and even underlining significant passages as you visit the Westin Bonaventura; or maybe that just means getting into skateboarding, or into E!, or into Zen, Kabbalah, and Christian mysticism; or maybe you'll plunge yourself into gin-fueled all night Frank Sinatra marathons – or you'll lift weights and check email every two minutes on your Blackberry and watch old Bruce Willis films.
Who cares?
Literally no one cares, is the answer. No one cares. You're alone in the world.
L.A. is explicit about that.
If you can't handle a huge landscape made entirely from concrete, interspersed with 24-hour drugstores stocked with medications you don't need, then don't move there.
It's you and a bunch of parking lots.

Read the rest here.

Lessing!

In which Doris shows us the sublime heights to which curmudgeonliness can reach. Absolutely brilliant.

What a surprise

Which Black Books Character Are You?

This damp, autumn morning

I saw a page torn from a spiral-bound reporter's notebook sellotaped to the glass of a bookshop window. It carried this legend, in wobbly felt-tip:

Derek Gibbons, 1926–2007.

Aghast, I went inside. The chap behind the counter, squashed behind a tiny desk toppling with books and paper, was picking out phone-numbers on a handset in an abstracted manner. He looked up from behind his walls of books.

"Derek has died?" I say.
"Yep." He tapped out the rest of the phone number, left the phone ringing on loudspeaker, and confessed that the note outside might be wrong; it probably wasn't 1926, and that he was going to sort it out. "There's a requiem mass for him on Friday at Great St Mary's" he said, staring curiously at the ringing phone.

Ah, Derek.

Someone once told me Derek drank a pint of port in the bath every morning before coming to work. Can't vouch for that story. But he was a legendary curmudgeon among bookseller curmudgeons. A bookseller's bookseller.

Back in the day, I used to work in another bookshop, up on Castle Hill. Unlike Derek's, ours wasn't haunted. We had our regulars, though. The crazy archaeologist who'd sit down and talk at me for hours about either Jacques Brel, paleolithic burial mounds, or both. The madman who came in to recommend nuclear war as a way of cleansing the earth. A whole constituency of the erudite and grumpy. The man who talked to himself. The transsexual who was a good friend of the Yorkshire Ripper. The wall of death man. The Pet Shop Boys used to drop in quite often. We didn't like them. They always seemed a bit too good for our shop.

One of of our regulars was an elderly, emaciated and oddly gallinaceous old guy, always snappily dressed in a lilac polyester shirt and a huge, windsor-knotted purple tie. His name was Mr Reed. He had a proper old Cambridgeshire accent, the one that transforms "go home" into "goo hume". He'd come in and try and sell the most extraordinary things. I remember a WWII German shell casing. "Look at this: you should buy this" he said, holding it out. "This is a bookshop" said Andrew, the owner, with great good grace.

He would stay and witter on for ages. Sometimes this led to a near-breakdown of customer-owner entente cordiale. After one particularly long visit, he'd run out of things to say, and made as if to go; Andrew looked relieved. But then, on his way to the door, he turned to my friend Charlie and pointed at a poster for the latest Footlights review, the Barracuda Jazz Option. "What's that?" he said. Andrew visibly stiffened. "Don't tell him" he said, not quite sotto voce.

One morning, Derek, on one of his rare visits away from his own shop, came into ours, for a chat with Andrew. Mid-chat, Mr Reed walks in. Derek does a fantastic double take, turns back to Andrew and demands, loudly, "What do you let him in here for?", pointing at Mr Reed. Who turns and stares at them both. Andrew, sensibly, says nothing. Derek isn't going to let it lie. He points again. "Him", he says. "Why do you let him in your shop?"

Mr Reed feels the need to come to his own defence. "Andrew knows that if he ever needs good cricket books or Nazi memorabilia, he can always rely on me..."

Derek cuts through him. "Whenever I see him," he continues, equably, "I tell him to fuck off"

There is a pause.

"Even in the street" says Derek, with relish.

We shall not see his like again.

Helen is far from clear

Rebecca started it. It's the old game, the google definitions game. Only now someone's automated it. Not that it needed much automation, but hey. You'd have thought that any everyday female name would produce broadly similar results. Oh no.

Nice to be reminded I bear the name of the most beautiful woman that ever existed. And that I'm selling lake of the ozarks realty. Which sounds a bit like something from a Frank Herbert novel.

Ah, self-absorption is a good thing on a cold October morning, a day before the lectures start....particularly after a peculiar morning, waking in the early hours, putting on the radio, then falling asleep again. Wondering why I had bizarre dreams about driving around a circuit at high speed. Perhaps it's a metaphor, I thought, before realising I'd been listening to live coverage of the Grand Prix. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Raaah!

helen is sellin' lake of the ozarks realty
helen is a poor role model for women
helen is really no friend of mine
helen is a single ukrainian woman
helen is sellin
helen is a dream come true for any man
helen is listed
helen is going? *nm*
helen is bloody coolio
helen is leaving us
helen is yo daddy
helen is in mi
helen is really no friend of mine because she has gotten me to moderate this whole day
helen is good sucker
helen is leaving for a month
helen is one of the most beautiful of women to ever exist
helen is located
helen is glad that the judge wrote
helen is located 133 km west of alice springs at the end of the sealed section of road known as namatjira drive
helen is committed to helping organizations make this statement a truthful statement and a reality
helen is a lunatic
helen is going?
helen is here
helen is essentially the primal woman
helen is a tough fighter
helen is depicted as having strange abilities and powers
helen is gr8 and we luv her loadz
helen is in trouble
helen is an accomplished motivational speaker who speaks regularly to community and professional groups and conferences
helen is a soft
helen is quick to give credit to others for her success
helen is well known for its wide range of dining options
helen is home
helen is clearly an educator who thrives on challenges
helen is often missed
helen is always the first person to offer words of encouragement and support
helen is connected to the following things
helen is in 1984 geboren in jimma in het zuidwesten van
helen is such an
helen is an original
helen is far from clear
helen is the new voice for the new range of mercedes benz vans radio
helen is more flexible
helen is someone whom i respect for what she has chosen to do
helen is a modest but multi
helen is a former alcoholic who became a benedictine nun after the deaths of her husband and sons
helen is the most conspicuous instance of that perplexing
helen is depicted sittling calmly in the midst of men and women who have been greatly affected by the war
helen is born
helen is
helen is outside the cultural norms of india

Falconry in Afghanistan

In Idaho all those years ago I met a really smashing bloke, a falconer called Rob. He and his family (all completely lovely people) were widely travelled, funny, brilliant, and a real joy to know. I have happy memories of us all talking away nineteen to the dozen at an Irish pub in Boise. Where I ate the best Irish stew of my life.

We lost touch, but I've just heard back from him, which has made me so very happy. He and the family now live in Cairo, but spent a good deal of time working in Afghanistan back during the early days after the war.

He tells me how much Afghans love birds — something also eminently the case in Central Asia— and how nearly everyone has a parakeet or two. And how shocked people were when he enthused about how he'd love to fly a merlin at doves, because doves are kind and loving creatures. (Again, in Uzbekistan, these same doves are known as "The Prophet's Chickens", are never to be harmed, and it is considered great good luck should they nest in your house.)

Rob wrote this, and gave me permission to reproduce it here. It gives me a lump in my throat every time I read it:

While I was there, I had the chance to go falcon trapping and visit the back alley falcon markets of Peshawar. It was fun but it was also frightening. On my last trip to Peshawar from Kabul our convoy was attacked. We were not hurt and I made it back to Kabul without a problem. It did shake me, however, and I don't think I am much interested in working in war zones again.

When I was in Kabul, I spent a lot of my free time talking to men who, before war, had hawks and falcons. To them those were truly their best years. Every chance I got, I went to the sprawling Kabul market asking about falcons and falconry. One day I met an old man who simply said "Those days are over". He handed me the hood from his last Peregrine. He cried—which really doesn't happen often in that part of the world—and asked me to use it on a falcon if I had a chance, because he was sure that he would never have another.

I struck up close friendship with Karim Rahimi, who is President Karzi's spokesman. Before the wars, Rahimi was an avid falconer .... we have plans to somehow bring falconry back to the villages of Afghanistan... but not until there is peace.

When I returned to Boise, I made sure to use that hood the old man gave me on my tiercel Peales.

Photo

Eternal return

It's that time of year. The sky's turned into an expanse of wet plaster. The Italian alders on the Backs are turning, and it's getting cold. And they're back. The students. All weekend, as I struggled backwards and forwards between old house and new, my overladen car sunk deep on its haunches, I saw mums and dads and boxes and bright, excited youngsters arriving for their first term at the Evil Empire. "Students Returning" said the sign on all the entrance roads into town. "Congestion likely on 29 and 30 September".

Congestion likely. Phoo. You know, they really do look nine years old, these days. They brim with that fantastically poignant air of new assurance. Ah, to be grown up. I've arrived! I'm an adult! And then anxious looks back at mum and dad, toiling behind, with an estate car full of lampshades and toasters.

Bless 'em.

Things I have noted, of late.

If you're feeling isolated and in need of company, do not look to a goshawk. Parrots are better. People are even better.

No matter how hard it rains, pheasants do not get wet.

Hornbeam is Pluvialis' new favourite tree: there's an avenue of 'em near this new house and driving through it is intensely lovely. Worrying that it's become a bit of a highlight of the day.

In December, I am the big bad scary person: I am interviewing would-be students who want to read Philosophy, and would-be students who want to read English. I'm a historian.

I am teaching practical criticism classes (no jokes, please) to final year English students this year. I'm a historian.

There's going to be a Gatchaman movie!

It takes a long time to move house when you're using a saloon car as your primary vehicle.

Haart estate agents employ this phrase on their website: "We challenge you to compare this house with any other house"

It is hard to write an address for your father's memorial service.

Spider ragnarok

Last night a fat garden spider spun a vast orb web in my car. It hung on the near-vertical between wheel and driver's seat. All night she'd toiled, and when I walked out to the car she was sitting right in the centre of her new web, a spider placed exactly in the space my heart occupies when I'm seated.

Opened the car door and heard a peculiar series of tiny, sticky clicks: snapping spider silk. And what was left of the web: a quarter or so, slouching at the top but still on the vertical, in the driver's space. She'd anchored it with heavy silken strands to the roof, the door and door frame, gearstick and windscreen. And wheel. Snap snap snap. And there she was, dropped onto the grey seat, clambering around like a fat crumb of gingerbread the size of a thumbnail. I picked her up and put her on a likely-looking bush. And felt terribly crushed on her behalf.

This is why.