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[Jul. 9th, 2008|10:02 am]
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[Current Location |lincoln]

Did you ever wish there was a word for the gap between the bed and the wall?  Turns out there is: it's called the ruelle.  Personally, I find it comforting to push my face into the ruelle when I can't sleep.  I think there are a couple of paperbacks down there somewhere too. . .

Anyway, can't stop – I'm off to get a Polish haircut.
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[Jul. 7th, 2008|11:56 am]
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[Current Location |'ull]


It was a frustrating drive to work this morning, listening to a long debate on the Today programme about the ordination of women bishops. A convention of the synod today will decide whether or not we will get any; over a thousand priests have said they will leave the church if women are allowed to become bishops. In case they start menstruating in the fonts or something.

The terms of the debate are so stupidly narrow! For one thing, the media here have all been talking about a potential split in the "Anglican" church, but in fact this is about only a very specific part of Anglicanism, namely the Church of England. North of the border in Scotland women bishops are already allowed (although none has actually been ordained yet), and there are Anglican women bishops in New Zealand, Australia, Canada, AND EVEN THE GODDAMN UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

More to the point, I am irritated by the sheer audacity of anyone from within Anglicanism appealing to notions of conservatism or tradition, when the whole of their denomination was only invented in 1531 because Henry wanted the authority to boff as many European princesses as he could get away with.

Because I am someone whose answer to most important questions is a firm "I don't know", I am also amazed by how everyone involved is so convinced they are right. The scriptural basis is very thin. Conservatives like to quote Genesis III.16, "To the woman he said [...] Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you", although to a certain extent the die-hard literalists have shot themselves in the foot here, because if this is to be taken as literally true rather than an instructive story then it's not clear why we should give a toss about how Adam and Eve managed their own relationship.

On the other hand, other passages are pretty clear. 1 Timothy II.11-14:

Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness. I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor.
Leaving aside the woolly logic of this guff, it makes me even more fascinated by the confidence with which everyone seems to feel that God essentiually agrees with their own views on everything. In actual fact, if there is a God, and if the Bible really expresses what he's like, then surely God is sexist, homophobic, and basically extremely unpleasant. Yet no one is prepared to say that . . . they are all convinced that God essentially shares their own moralities because they are unable to consider that their own moralities are wrong.  Hence many liberals who are not prepared to accept that God dislikes homosexuality (even though the Bible is clearly against it), because they cannot conceive of a God whose morals differ from their own.

I would have a lot of respect for someone who said, "Yes, I believe in God, and I disagree with him." And yet, if anyone did say that it would almost seem like psychosis, so closely does the word "God" seem affiliated to one's sense of self.  Everyone's god is unique to them.

My own two cents (or 1.02p if you prefer) is that churches should be there to show us how modern social ideals fit into the wider religious tradition, rather than rushing to find scriptural objections.  All religions of the world boil down to the so-called "Golden Rule", of treating other people the way you would like to be treated, and to the extent that we can be sure of anything a God might agree with we can be sure he agrees with that.
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[Jul. 5th, 2008|02:25 pm]
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[Current Location |lincoln]

Today's Guardian has an interesting list of the ten best last sentences in literature.  I thought it was quite a surprising, if not downright weird, selection.  There are two obvious canditates I think of immediately, and neither of them were there:

  • ‘She walked rapidly in the thin June sunlight towards the worst horror of all.’  —Graham Greene, Brighton Rock
  • ‘. . . yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.’  —James Joyce, Ulysses

The Greene one is a masterpiece of compressed relience on the reader's knowledge.  And as for Joyce – well, if you don't immediately think of this passage when someone says "famous last sentences" then you surely have no business complining this sort of list.  Although admittedly to actually quote the whole of the last sentence of Ulysses would require you to go back fifty or sixty pages.

Are there any others you can think of?  I have so many fewer last lines in my head than first lines, it's strange.
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[Jul. 5th, 2008|12:16 pm]
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[Current Location |lincoln]


I HAVE WON WIMBLEDON, CLAIMS MUGABE

The de facto president of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, announced today that he is the outright winner of the Wimbledon All-England tennis championship.  The two designated finalists, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, had previously pulled out, claiming that a decisive backhand smash or a well-executed lob-volley might have put their lives in serious danger.

Independent umpires claimed that the contest was "not free and fair" and called on the International Tennis Federation to take action.  But the unseeded 84-year-old responded, saying, "The people have spoken.  They mostly said: please stop hitting me."  He followed his victory with moves to "reclaim" Centre Court from "imperialist white settlers" and turn the land over to the State.

"I hoped that my record on grass would stand me in good stead," reflected world number one Roger Federer.  "But Mugabe came back angrily, telling me, ‘You cannot be serious.  Your balls are on the line.’  It was then that I decided to withdraw from the tournament."

"At one point I succeeded in breaking his serve," added Nadal.  "He responded by breaking my legs.  It's very difficult to play in those conditions."

BBC commentator Tim Henman was more sanguine about Mugabe's first grandslam victory.  "I suppose it's nice to know that Federer can be beaten," he told reporters.  "Even if it does take a mass-murdering delusional dictator backed by a mob of armed supporters to do it."


ENDS
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[Jul. 4th, 2008|05:01 pm]
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[Current Location |'ull]

I am bored.  This is nicked from [info]cicipsychobunny.....

Would you do meth if it was legalized?
Meth?  Er – it doesn't really appeal to me.  Maybe once I suppose.

Abortion: for or against?
For....but I agree with having a time limit.  After a certain point a woman is not just making a decision about her own body but about someone else's too.

Would our country fall with a woman president?
Please, do people really think this?  Of course not.  It didn't do us any harm. . .well, unless you subscribe to the view that Mrs T was a complete disaster for British life, which I do, but that was almost certainly not to do with her gender.

Do you believe in the death penalty?
I do not.  If we ever reintroduced it here I would literally emigrate.

Do you wish marijuana would be legalized already?
I don't wish it, but it wouldn't bother me and if it were legal I would probably have some now and again.

Are you for or against premarital sex?
For.  I really can't stress enough how much I am for it.

Do you believe in God?
Basically, no.  For a certain value of "god" perhaps, but not in terms that most people would understand the word.

Do you think same sex marriage should be legalized?
Yeah I guess so.  It doesn't keep me up at night or anything....the main battle was getting civil unions recognized.

Do you think it's wrong that so many Hispanics are moving to the USA?
Are they?  Well...no, then.  I love multiculturalism as a phenomenon, and although the US isn't a model of good integration, I grew up in a very mixed neighbourhood and have appreciated it ever since.
People often say the UK is a soft touch and that immigrants cross through all the other countries to settle here.  Er....good.  Bring em on, and preferably chuck out half the chavvy locals.

A 12-year-old girl has a baby... should she keep it?
Oh I don't know.  I suppose if she has good support it could be reasonable.  Presumably it would often not be.

Should the alcohol age be lowered to 18?
Absolutely.  It was infuriating in NYC going out with Hannah's 19-yo brother who had to have lemonade everywhere.  It's no wonder everyone over there does cocaine...I've never heard anything so ridiculous.  In France they're necking claret at 14 for god's sake.  If you're old enough to join the army and kill people then you should at least be able to embrace the sweet amnesia offered by Jack Daniels.

I think it was outrageous of Reagan to bring in the drinking limit in the way he did - as state law rather than federal....completely caving into pressure groups.  It's nonsense.

Should the war in Iraq be called off?
Bloody hell, that's tough....I think they should certainly start withdrawing, yeah

Assisted suicide is illegal ... do you agree?
I think it should be allowed....but how that would be enshrined legally, in such a way as to protect vulnerable people, seems difficult to say the least.

Do you believe in spanking your children?
I don't feel especially strongly about it . . . I don't really like it but I don't call a smack child abuse.  I think my position is that I don't believe in it but I wouldn't feel comfortable having that view imposed on everyone else by law.

Are you afraid others will judge you from reading some of your answers?
Nope.
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[Jul. 3rd, 2008|11:02 am]
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[Current Location |lincoln]

Because I spent my formative years wandering half-drunk around as many foreign countries as I could get to, I have always loved books and poems about travel and what it means.  One of the reasons I fell so hugely in love with Old English when I first started learning it is that they kept alive this Germanic heroic tradition of deep metaphysical poetry about travelling and journeys.

There is one smallish poem called Widsiþ about this travelling scop, or minstrel.  It starts:

Widsið maðolade, wordhord onleac,
se þe monna mæst mægþa ofer eorþan,
folca geondferde . . .

Widsith spoke out, unlocked his wordhoard,
he who most of all men had travelled through peoples
and tribes over the earth . . .

My translation entirely fails to do justice to the original.  When I first started reading it it made my heart race and my balance go.  And it was around then that I left my job and decided to go and make a film in Morocco – where I started this journal to try and stay in touch with people.  Unfortunately, [info]widsithwas taken – by some IDIOT WHO NEVER USES IT (check it out – piss or get off the pot, you name-hogger!).  So I just added another W, because my actual initials are WW so it seemed to make sense.

AND THAT IS WHY I AM CALLED THAT.

Where did your name come from?  (That's not a rhetorical question; tell me.)
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[Jun. 30th, 2008|11:20 am]
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[Current Location |'ull]

Someone who knew of my admiration for Clive James pointed me to an interesting piece in the Independent from a few weeks back in which Johann Hari talks up James's poetry. It's nice to see him getting some recognition, especially at a time when most modern poets seem content to knock off early drafts and call them free verse.

Here is one of his I discovered recently . . . I love this one for the way it manages to capture the sadness of grammatical sloppiness without dropping into prescriptivism:

WINDOWS IS SHUTTING DOWN

Windows is shutting down, and grammar are
On their last leg. So what am we to do?
A letter of complaint go just so far,
Proving the only one in step are you.

Better, perhaps, to simply let it goes.
A sentence have to be screwed pretty bad
Before they gets to where you doesnt knows
The meaning what it must of meant to had.

The meteor have hit. Extinction spread,
But evolution do not stop for that.
A mutant languages rise from the dead
And all them rules is suddenly old hat.

Too bad for we, us what has had so long
The best seat from the only game in town.
But there it am, and whom can say its wrong?
Those are the break. Windows is shutting down.


In his article, Hari talks Clive James up as a popular alternative to the deliberately obscure mainstream of poetry which he traces back to the baleful influence of TS Eliot. (In actual fact CJ already lampooned Eliot in his parody "The Wasted Land", published under the name of Edward Pygge – a pseudonym shared by a few Aussie writers of that circle.)  Unfortunately, having described Eliot as a "monstrous snob, appalled that reading was no longer the preserve of a small elite" (hear, hear!), Hari then ends the piece with this reflection:

the words of a poet – Emerson – made this point best: "For most us, there is only the unattended/ Moment, the moment in and out of time,/ The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,/ The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning/ Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply/ That it is not heard at all, but you are the music/ While the music lasts.

As a correspondent to the Indy pointed out, these excellent lines are not Emerson at all (and sound nothing like him), but Eliot himself – from the third of the Four Quartets. (As Eliot went on to say, "These are only hints and guesses...")


Most poetry that I love is melancholy and kind of depressing. I have been trying to think of something happy for [info]rag_and_bone 's collection.....so here is one of Bukowski's, read by Tom Waits. (I know I said I hate free verse...but Buk is the exception that proves the rule I guess...he always seems to get away with it):



 

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[Jun. 29th, 2008|10:59 am]
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[Current Location |lincoln]

Well it's taken me a week to summon up the willpower to post again, the last few days having passed in a welter of post-holiday blues compounded by acute jetlag.  We flew with Zoom, a budget airline, and the plane we came back over the Atlantic in was tiny – like the little planes you use to go over to France.  I was terrified.

I don't know if I'd want to live in Ontario, but I liked it a lot.  Everyone is so amazingly friendly over there, it is just bizarre.  At first I thought people were a bit mental when they kept asking me in shops and cafes how I was doing or how my day was going – but they were really genuine!  It's great.  I am infuriated by these miserable bastards like Thom Yorke who complains that he doesn't want to be told what kind of day to have.  I love it!  In England everyone who works in a shop or restaurant is unremittingly indifferent to you and often nurtures a deep loathing of the general public.  The service industry in general here is shite, compared with North America where people seem to regard these jobs as perfectly worthwhile.  I can't stress enough how weird it was for me to sit down in a bar, and get table service – and have them come over when my pint was finished and ask if I wanted any more.  It's no wonder everyone tips so much over there.

I was a bit bewildered by how prevalent the whole sports bar concept was.  Literally every bar I went into had a few TVs up showing football or baseball, even posh cocktail bars.  Very strange.  The Canadians certainly love their sports.  In fact when we were in Toronto (a city I didn't love that much), we went to see the Blue Jays have their asses handed to them by the Baltimore Orioles.  It was a genius afternoon, and by the ninth innings I had even managed to work out most of the rules.  Essentially it's like cricket, only more American - i.e. faster and with commercial breaks every ten minutes.  In actual fact, the ball game is secondary – people only go because it's a socially-acceptable excuse to snack.  The stadium was filled with every kind of fast food you could imagine, it was awesome.  I spent the whole game eating hotdogs and drinking draught beer, while the guys behind me yelled insults at Lyle Overbay.

We have basically got no money now, having had two overseas trips this year already.  Looks like we'll be staying in England and not going out much for the forseeable future.
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[Jun. 17th, 2008|08:57 pm]
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[Current Location |waterloo ON]

NEW YORK CITY IS AWESOME. 

I fell in love with a place once before, in Marrakesh in 1997, and this weekend in NYC I felt the same kind of feelings creeping up on me.  I have never felt so at home and so inspired by a new place before -- maybe because it all seems so familiar.  Look, over there, isn't that where they crossed the streams at the end of Ghostbusters?  And isn't that the place that got blown up in Independence Day?!  The iconic nature of the quotidian here is incredible.  A taxi stopping at lights, someone drinking coffee on the sidewalk, steam rising from the streets as though (in Tom Waits's words) "the whole goddamn town's about to blow" -- all of it looks beautiful and fills me with a sad kind of delight.  Other cities have extraordinary attractions, but New York is unique in that the whole town is the attraction.  Sure, there are the sights -- the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building -- but the real magic just seems to reside in those endless intersections of avenues and streets, the very normal interactions which make it easy for a visitor to feel like they've had an amazing experience with little effort or expenditure.

And people this side of the Atlantic, of course, are amazingly friendly and welcoming.  At first when people kept asking me how I was, I thought they were a little mental....then I realised they actually mean it here.  It's so nice!  I am furious with people like Thom Yorke who are always complaining about being told to have a nice day in America --- it's awesome!  I have spent the last week at least on a constant high of goodwill...."How's it going?" people keep asking me.  "I hope you're having a great time here?"

"Yes!" I find myself gabbling incoherently, "yes!  I pledge allegience to the United Stateside of apple pie!"

The food is so delicious and so ridiculously unhealthy.  If I lived here I'd be the size of a house.  I'm having four or five meals a day just to try and fit it all in.  On Sunday I had breakfast in the Village with the wonderful

[info]herself_nyc , and ate challah French toast with bacon and maple syrup....when the hell was this invented, and why has no one told me?!

I haven't spent too much money -- just bought a few books and a couple of T-shirts.  Hannah and her sister took me on a mammoth trek down Fifth Avenue, which was surprisingly fun given how much I hate shopping for clothes.  We actually queued to get into Abercrombie & Fitch, a ridiculous place which sells the same stuff as every other high street store but which thinks it is the cornerstone of a remarkable countercultural revolution.  There is a branch in Covent Garden but I don't remember it being that busy.  Here it's like some kind of club, filled with topless male models and aggressively cute shop assistants swinging their hips irritably at you in time to the euphoric trance mix.  I tried not to express too much annoyance though, since the staff outnumbered the actual customers by about three to two, so if it came to it they could probably take us down.

But I guess I was prepared for the great food, the busyness, the awesome shopping.  What I hadn't expected was how affected I would be by the buildings.  I have a crick in my neck from walking around with my head back, staring in awe at the skyline.  Nothing is old here of course, by Euro standards, but there is something about that 1930s borderland between art deco and gothic which moves me deeply and which New York has in spades.  The Empire State Building, obviously, and the Rockefeller centre -- the Hyatt, the old Paramount building, and my favourite, the Chrysler Building -- all of them have this extraordinarily solid, brooding, almost Stalinist intensity which I just love.  It looks like Batman should be standing, cape flapping, on every rooftop.  This weekend, with the peaks of the skyscrapers reaching into a high mist made sepia from the light pollution, the whole town had me speechles, totally speechless, with appreciation.

I have been away from a computer for so long, this is just a frenzied splash of thoughts on the place now I've got five minutes with a friend's laptop.  I flew out midnight last night.  Man, I can't wait to go back.

 

 

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[Jun. 5th, 2008|02:16 pm]
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[Current Location |'ull]

The usual word for and in Latin was et, of course, which is what has survived into the daughter languages. But one of my favourite features of Latin is their alternative word for and, the -que which was tacked on to other words. It features most famously, perhaps, in The Aeneid's opening line:

Arma virumque cano
Which needs a full eight seven! words in English: "Of arms and the man I sing". And again in the second line, Italiam ... Laviniaque venit litora, "(I) came to Italian and Lavine shores". How elegant is that! Just to stick the little -que on the end there. . .so neat. Linguists no doubt refer to it as a conjunctive enclitic, or a copulative particle, or something.

What I didn't realise until recently was that a cognate existed in Proto-Germanic, in the form of a velar fricative of some kind (this is all through regular sound-changes), usually written *-h or *-x. Sadly, it didn't survive anywhere except Gothic, which has now also gone.

However, there are traces left in English. At least one, anyway: though, which etymologically means something like "and in that case", the -gh being a remnant of that delightfully subtle conjunction.

Can anyone think of any other examples of this Germanic *-h? I certainly can't, but to be honest I've only been thinking about it for the last hour an a half, and I'm sure there must be some.
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[Jun. 4th, 2008|05:44 pm]
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[Current Location |lincoln]

OK, I have a piece of awesome news.  An awesome new, if you will.  On Friday I'm going to Canada to see Hannah's sister, who lives in Ontario.  I have NEVER BEEN TO NORTH AMERICA BEFORE.

But what makes this twenty times more exciting is that while we're there, we're going to be flying over for a weekend in New York!!  Hannah's uncle and aunt have a flat in Manhattan which we are going to stay in!!  I have never used so many exclamation marks before!

It's just – it's New York!  And it's America, where I've never been.  Hannah and I were kind of saving it up for when we're married – we have this plan to go on a months-long roadtrip through the States for our honeymoon – but a weekend is just fine too.  So many writers that I love have come out of NYC, not to mention the music.....oh man, I just want to go to Birdland and, like, Blue Note, and eat meatballs in Little Italy, talk to girls at the Met, get mugged in the subway, take the A-train to Harlem, and get hauled up for jaywalking, whatever that is, by a pair of cops who have some kind of interesting buddy dynamic going on.  And have a hotdog with the works.  Or pancakes for breakfast in some little diner run by someone called Eddy Pernetti who says things like, "Hey buddy, you can have that heartattack on the sidewalk!"

I am just ridiculously excited.  It's pathetic!
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[May. 31st, 2008|11:04 am]
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[Current Location |lincoln]

Nicked from [info]antarcticlust:


1. One book that changed your life.
A History of God by Karen Armstrong.  Arguably it's not as important as her exemplary study of fanaticism, The Battle for God, but this one meant more to me personally.  I don't believe in god but I do believe in the way people feel about him, and this book helped me sort all those feelings out; it totally gave me a vocabulary with which to describe how I felt about religion.  It's the balanced historical view on religion that I always hoped would exist, and amazingly it does.

2. One book that you've read more than once.
Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake.  I can't think of a book which more strongly gives me an immediate sense of place and mood and character.  I've read it a few times and I still don't really understand how it was written, it just seems like the most astonishing achievement.  The death of a character halfway through this book is the one which has affected me most in literature – I still think about it, and the whole scene was written better than seems possible.

3. One book you'd want on a desert island.
Not that I want to sound like a twat, but I'd probably take Finnegans Wake by James Joyce.  You can spend hours reading one sentence, or you can read the same paragraph a week later and it seems to mean something different.  Also, it has a formidable reputation, yet 90% of it is just great jokes, strange sexiness, or beautiful writing.  So this would probably have the most re-read value.

4. One book that made you laugh.
The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold by Evelyn Waugh.  I'm not sure why, out of all his books, I have such a strange affiliation with this one, but I love it.  I'm just looking at my shelves to find a good quote from it, and I realise I gave my copy to a friend about 6 years ago – dammit!  It has some of Waugh's best insults in it though, and there is something wonderful about seeing extreme paranoia explained so well, with such a constant awareness of its own absurdity.

5. One book that made you cry.
Vietnam: The Definitive Oral History by Christian Appy was the last one that did this, although it's long list as I lose it fairly easily.  A great book though, with interviews from Americans, Vietnamese, soldiers, civilians, protesters, spies – the lot.

6. One book that you wish had been written.
Will Self, who is always interesting even when he's not actually that good, has talked about a book he was preparing called The Fantastic Four, about four ordinary citizens who discover remarkable powers and become "Statman, Bigman, Crazy Cat Woman and Neurogirl".  The idea had to be shelved after Heroes started running on TV.  The mind boggles.

7. One book that you wish had never been written.
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho.  The whole mystic-knowledge-from-the-east schtick has always made me want to punch someone, and what makes it particularly annoying here is the amount of people you meet at parties who keep going on about how this book, like, totally changed their lives.  The formula is simple: only he who is stupid can be truly wise, only the poor man is truly rich, only up is down, only black is white.  It reminds me of the Chris Morris line from Blue Jam, ‘Only the very ugly is truly beautiful, and if the printed word is to have any meaning at all then it must come from the very edge of fucky bum boo boo.’

8. One book you're currently reading.
Sex and the Psyche by Brett Kahr.  In the US, this has the better-selling title of Who's Been Sleeping in Your Head?  It's the result of a long sexual fantasy project conducted in the UK.  Kind of like Nancy Friday, only more British, ie lots of fantasies about spilling tea on your uncle's cricketing whites.

9. One book you've been meaning to read.
Darkmans by Nicola Barker.  Kent has thrown up loads of interesting writers recently.  This one looks great – nominated for the Booker, set in Ashford, fixated on the Eurostar and unashamedly comic.  I think it looks brilliant.  Anyone read this?

Bonus question: What book scared you the most?
Brother in the Land by Robert Swindells, or pretty much anything about nuclear war.  There used to be a lot of these after-the-bomb books; they seem to have been replaced by eco-disaster novels.  This one is for kids and it terrified me when I read it age 11.  The ending was utterly bleak.  I couldn't get it out of my head.  I grew up living under the Gatwick flightpath, and every time I heard a plane going over the house I wondered if it was the sound of a nuclear wind rushing towards us.  Such a cheerful child.
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[May. 27th, 2008|08:22 pm]
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[Current Location |lincoln]

God, the new Indiana Jones movie was depressing.  I was in a bad enough mood as the long weekend ended, without having to see Indy hobbling around or deciding he wants to settle down with the right woman.  Whatever!  George Lucas, you bastard, what on earth was that all about?  I mean, the aliens?  The gophers?!  And don't even get me started on the way Indy can somehow survive a nuclear bomb impact by hiding in a cocking fridge.

(While we're on the subject of Indiana Jones, can I just make it very clear that Temple of Doom is by far and away the best of the four.  I can't understand why the critics all hate it.  The opening sequence in the Shanghai nightclub, with Anything Goes done in Mandarin, is one of the best opening scenes in cinema for my money, the insects crawling over Spielberg's wife ("Look, I broke a nail...") are real live insects (not like the CGI ants in the new film), every moment of the meal at Pankok Palace ("Chilled monkey brains!") is made of awesomes, the whole cut-out-your-heart Kali death cult is properly dark and scary, and the bit where Indy decides to save all the kids makes Hannah jump up and down on the sofa.  And there's that strange Dan Ackroyd cameo near the beginning which takes me by surprise every time I see it.)

I've been in such a bad mood recently!  OK...here are some things that have been cheering me up at the moment:

  • My lovely house and lovelier girlfriend, which I get to come back to every day.  It still feels like a novelty after 18 months working down south.
  • [info]rag_and_bone's awesome lists of happy things, which always make me feel better
  • Reading Beowulf, which for some reason always puts me in a great mood.  I'm currently going over Fitt 9, when Beowulf is finishing off his ridiculous story about competing with Breca.  Leoht eastan com, beorht beacen godes, brimu swaþredon þæt ic sænessas geseon mihte, windige weallas.  Wyrd oft nereþ unfægne eorl þonne his ellen deah.  Wo - o - ow.  There is something Rebecca West says somewhere about reading Homer in Greek – that you can read descriptions of incredibly simple and banal actions, like someone lifting their arm or turning their head – and it's as though you're seeing it described for the first time.  That's what I find with Old English, everything has this Edenic dew on it.
  • Very dry vodka martinis made with Noilly Prat and Polish vodka and two tablespoons of brine from an olive jar.  And some Edenic dew
  • This creative writing course I'm doing, which despite my reservations about the feedback has actually got me to finish more pieces over the past few months than I ever have done before.  Plus, the feedback is admittedly nice to have.  My tutor sent the last one back with "SEEK PUBLICATION NOW!" written on it.  Of course, she is actually a publisher so I might just ask her to print it herself if she's so keen...put your money where your mouth is, beeyatch
  • The fact that Hannah didn't know how Yeats's name was pronounced, and was so delighted to find out that now, whenever she is excited about something, she cries, "Yeeeaats!"  Which is apparently losing none of its power to make me laugh, because I am cackling again now just writing it down.
  • Home-made mackerel pâté with cornichons in it, on gluten-free crackers.  YUM
  • The words algedonic, eleemosynary, knickers, lusciouslessness, zenzizenzic and sheep.  The phrases "sloeblack, slow, black, fishingboatbobbing sea", "she was Dolores on the dotted line", "some infinitely gentle / Infinitely suffering thing" (and a billion more, but these three have been with me for the last day or two).  The fact that a glove in German is a handshoe, and the fact that there is a word in Old English for the anxiety you get in that part of the night just before the dawn (uhtcearu)
  • The fact that I put up some shelves at the weekend, and did a lot of drilling.  Hannah baked a cake.  It's like living in the 1950s round here
  • I left work two hours early today, and I don't even feel guilty.  I just feel awesome
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[May. 25th, 2008|12:44 pm]
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[Current Location |lincoln]
[music |the whistle of a country train muffled by a passenger's gentle weeping]

In case you missed this: Proust discovers LiveJournal.

In several ways this parody is somewhat better than actual Proust.
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[May. 21st, 2008|07:39 am]
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[Current Location |Lincoln]

So MPs voted to keep the 24-week limit.

Good debates on this issue again.  This is how the House of Lords works all the time, but it is rare to see such intelligent discussion in Parliament, where MPs seem to spend most of their time saying "Beeeeaah!" like Stephen Fry, and waving menus around.
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[May. 19th, 2008|12:50 pm]
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[Current Location |'ull]


"Where does the word tulip come from?" asked Hannah, as we sat reading in our back garden, where a few of these flowers have mysteriously appeared, unplanted.

"God knows," I started to say, "it's probably from. . ." – but then I realised I had no idea. My instinct was to guess Arabic, but I didn't because my lack of flower-knowledge meant I wrongly thought tulips had been around in England forever.

Gah! I should have stuck with my gut. Great etymology: tulip is actually just a form of the word turban, albeit after having been mangled slightly by the medium of Turkish. The source isn't actually Arabic at all, but Persian دلبند. Presumably the flowers were thought to resemble the headwear, which indeed they kind of do.

The OED offers this interesting backgrounder:

The first mention of it by a Western European is by Busbek (c 1554), the Emperor's ambassador, on the way from Adrianople to Constantinople, where ‘ingens ubique florum copia offerebatur, narcissorum, hyacinthorum, et eorum quos Turcae tulipan vocant’. [something that the Turks call ‘tulips’ – W] It was grown by the Fuggers at Augsburg, where it was seen and described by Gesner in 1561. It was introduced successively in Vienna, Mechlin, France, and England; it is mentioned by Lyte in his transl. of Dodoneus.
So if you're writing something set in early 16th century Europe, for God's sake don't go off on one about all the tulips kicking about.


Speaking of the OED, they announced recently that the new edition, which is about a quarter done, will not be published in print form – only on CD or via the website. Lots of people seem annoyed, but I think it's the right choice. The 2nd edition is already 20 volumes, and the third is on course to be rather more than twice the size. And that's a lot of trees.
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[May. 14th, 2008|08:16 pm]
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[Current Location |lincoln]
[music |obvious]

Scarlett Johansson's long-awaited/dreaded album of Tom Waits covers is upon us. The first single is this, and my general feeling is that it's a disaster.



I particularly love that song, it's a rare one, and one I like to play on the piano. I sing it rather worse than she does, but then I'm not inflicting my efforts on the general public. Bah.


Oh, and here's the original -- Tom making it sound kind of like a drunk singing at a funeral. She wants you to steal and get caught...for she loves you for all that you are not....

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[May. 13th, 2008|07:34 pm]
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[Current Location |kilmarnock]

Scotland is so beautiful in the sunshine. Of course you only really get about 48 hours a year to test this hypothesis, but it's certainly worth it when you do catch the good weather. The dour black bricks that I usually love in Scotland lose some of their melancholy intensity when brightly-lit like this, although the scenery has become spectacular. I'm over on the west coast – the best part, although this particular town is pretty rough and consists mainly of pound shops and kebabbies and CHEQUES CASHED HERE signs. The Kilmarnock sign includes the slogan ‘The UK's friendliest shopping town’, which is a laughable combination of ambitionlessness and mendacity. To be fair, whenever I thank anyone in a shop here, they all say Nae bother, pal, but that could just be the sunshine talking.

The locals are so unused to the blue skies. Everyone is crawling out of the houses, squinting suspiciously into the glare, as though emerging into some unknown post-apocalyptic landscape. I sense a latent belief that civilisation is just two hot meals and an all-over tan from anarchy.

On Friday, Hannah and I went to see Louis de Bernières, who was in town for the Lincoln Book Festival. I was curious to hear him talk, because I think he is a genuinely brilliant writer despite all the idiots who think he is a brilliant writer. Anyone who has listened to my standard pub rant about Why The Ending to Captain Corelli Is Not Shit will know that that book had a big effect on me, as did the trilogy he wrote about Colombia, which is extraordinary. What impresses me about him is that he's the only writer I can think of who writes so well about other cultures, without the usual fallback device of a Western character through whose eyes everything is filtered.

Anyway, in the event I didn't hear him talk about any of that – he had no intention of discussing his books, but instead turned up with a selection of stringed instruments and proceeded to play his way through a variety of Serbian folktunes. Hannah and I were rather excited, what with our trip to Serbia last year. He even played a couple on the mandolin.

In the middle he did do a little reading from his new one, A Partisan's Daughter, but I was actually a little disappointed by the admittedly brief extract we heard. Anyway. As a musician he is nothing special, and plays as you might imagine a middle-aged professional writer to play. During the tricky bits the tip of his tongue appeared in the corner of his mouth. But all in all there was something enormously satisfying in seeing someone who has had some success (after a long, long wait), and who is now contentedly filling his time with things that interest him, whether or not he's any good at it.

Plus, it does makes a change from the usual writer's talk – where, as he put it, ‘I read something out for about ten minutes and then someone asks me what I thought of the film.’
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[May. 8th, 2008|09:37 pm]
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[Current Location |lincoln]


The opening to Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood is one of the loveliest sentences:
It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea.
Oh Lord. I heard this poem on CD before I ever read it, and I could hear something interesting was going on with that "sloeblack, slow, black" but the orthography didn't slide into place until I finally saw it written down. Jesus that is good though, you can say it to yourself ten times in a row and it just keeps getting better.

My favourite opening to an essay – and the whole essay is one of the all-time perfect pieces of English prose – is Sir Thomas Browne's ‘On Dreams’. He begins:
Half our dayes wee passe in the shadowe of the earth, and the brother of death exacteth a third part of our lives.
Nails it. You only have to read it and you're half-dreaming already. His sentences are so beautifully paced and balanced, just see how easy it would be to write this out as poetry.


I should be working. Where is everyone today?
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[May. 7th, 2008|06:25 pm]
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[Current Location |lincoln]

The weather has become so beautiful so suddenly that people here hardly know what to do with themselves.  Young men swagger around topless, sniggering in a slight reflex of defensive embarrasment.  Office girls spend their lunch-breaks peeling clemantines in the park, knee-length suit-skirts hitched up an extra six inches.  More topless boys are skateboarding outside our office, performing exotic flips through the spray which is drifting downwind from the fountain.  A mass of melted ice-cream on the pavement now suggests a crying child about ten minutes earlier.  Everyone walking past has a vague air of being on their way home to have sex.

Our house looks amazing in the sunshine.  Every day when I get home from work I make a vodka martini and sit outside, reading Montaigne and getting slowly pissed.
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