Preoccupations

Life in hypertext

My laptop needed some repair work. Limping by on a school machine during the day was made more than bearable by having the use of an iPod touch the rest of the time and access to an N810. None of these are my own. Of the three, the iPod touch is a revelation — so easy to use, the Gmail interface is (as of now) outstanding and surfing the web on it is often a joy. I don't yet know the N810 well enough to comment about it, but one thing that lets the iPod touch down is the laboriousness of entering text. I look forward to putting the N810's keyboard through its paces, but somehow I doubt it will prove as comfortable to use as the E70's thumb keyboard. The E70 is simply the best device I've ever owned for texting.

As ever when my laptop's down, I learn things. One thing I learned this time: wireless, mobile computing is getting pretty enjoyable all of a sudden. Like everyone else, I now want to try the Asus EEE. These are all devices we need to trial in school.

Meanwhile …

I  William Gibson (my bold):

One of the things I discovered while I was writing Pattern Recognition is that I now think that any contemporary novel today has a kind of Google novel aura around it, where somebody's going to google everything in the text. So people--and this happened to me with Pattern Recognition--would find my footprints so to speak: well, he got this from here, and this information is on this site.

(Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine — 1998, pdf: "Google is designed to provide higher quality search so as the Web continues to grow rapidly, information can be found easily. In order to accomplish this Google makes heavy use of hypertextual information consisting of link structure and link [anchor] text. Google also uses proximity and font information. … The analysis of link structure via PageRank allows Google to evaluate the quality of web pages. The use of link text as a description of what the link points to helps the search engine return relevant [and to some degree high quality] results. Finally, the use of proximity information helps increase relevance a great deal for many queries.")

II  Adam Greenfield:

… the book is an obsolete mediation between two different hypertext systems. For everything essential is found on the del.icio.us page of the researcher who writes it, and the reader who studies it assimilates it into his or her own blog.

Technorati tags: mobile computing, writing, knowledge, Google, del.icio.us

On not rushing to disparage the internet

Vint Cerf in last Monday's Guardian:

It is not often that a technological innovation changes fundamentally the way people communicate. In the 15th century the printing press made it possible to distribute the written word. In the 19th century, the telegraph enabled rapid point-to-point communication over long distances. Then there was the telephone. And we're still coming to terms with the social effects of radio and television.

It takes decades if not generations to fully understand the impact of such inventions. We are barely two decades into the commercial availability of the internet, but it has already changed the world. It has fostered self-expression and freed information from the constraints of physical location, opening up the world's information to people everywhere.

Shelley Powers, responding two days ago to Doris Lessing's bleak assessment of the internet's impact on culture, education and reading:

The internet is no more culpable for people 'wasting' time away than the television was, and the radio before that, and the electric light before that–on back through history marked by one invention or another. Technology does not change culture, as much as technology and culture impact, equally, on each other. …

… Amazon has grown fat on the profits of selling that which we supposedly disdain: books. Entire web sites spend most or all of their space providing reviews of, what else, books. The Gutenberg Project actually makes books available online for free. Ms. Lessing mistakes our assumptions of easy access of books for indifference to books. A very romantic thought, but not a very logical one. …

As for the banalities of this space, among the items I've read this week were [detailed summary of online reading, viewing and web-led book discoveries follows] … I would be curious to know at what point in all of this reading is the moment where I stepped over the line from spending time in banal pursuits, to spending time usefully? What makes one piece of writing more important and therefore more worthy than another?

Technorati tags: Vint Cerf, innovation, Shelley Powers, Doris Lessing, reading, culture, web

Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World

— the title of a very long report by Harris Interactive on behalf of the OCLC, available for download (pdf) here. (You can also download sections of the report from here.) In its conclusion it poses the question, 'what are the services and incentives that online libraries could offer users to entice them to come back or to visit more often or even devote some of their own time to help create a social library site?'.

This OCLC membership report explores this web of social participation and cooperation on the Internet and how it may impact the library’s role, including:

• The use of social networking, social media, commercial and library services on the Web
• How and what users and librarians share on the Web and their attitudes toward related privacy issues
• Opinions on privacy online
• Libraries’ current and future roles in social networking

Any report this long is going to take time to read and digest, but a look at some of the conclusions should whet the appetite:

The drive to participate, to build, to seek out communities is certainly nothing new. “Connect with friends,” “be part of group,” “have fun” and “express myself” are the top motives for using social networks according to our research. We could as easily be describing the motives behind the rise of the telephone, civic associations or, more recently, the cell phone, or the motivations that drew e-mail from the office into the home. The motives that are driving the rise of social networking are not unique. And yet, this particular Internet innovation, the social networking craze, feels different. It doesn’t seem to be playing out like the digital revolutions that preceded it. Social networking is doing something more than advancing communications between individuals, driving commerce or speeding connectivity. It is redefining roles, muddying the waters between audience and creator, rules and relationships, trust and security, private and public. And the roles are changing, not just for a few but for everyone, and every service, on the Web. Whether one views this new social landscape as a great opportunity for improved information creation and exchange or as a messy playground to be tidied up to restore order, depends on one’s point of view. …

We see a social Web developing in an environment where users and librarians have dissimilar, perhaps conflicting, views on sharing and privacy. There is an imbalance. Librarians view their role as protectors of privacy; it is their professional obligation. They believe their users expect this of them. Users want privacy protection, but not for all services. They want the ability to control the protection, but not at the expense of participation. …

… librarians have pioneered many of the digital services we now see in broad use on the Web: intranets to share resources, electronic information databases and “ask-an-expert” services. And although it took some librarians a while to embrace the use of search engines as hubs for information access, librarians are now Googling more frequently than their users and teaching users how to maximize the potential of this powerful tool. But, unfortunately, librarians are not pioneering the social Web.

And from the final section of the conclusion, 'Open the Doors':

Our perceptions become our realities, and often, also our limitations. This was clearly the case for the authors of this report when we began our research on social networks a year ago. There is no doubt that our initial perceptions of social networks influenced our approach to this study. Handicapped by only limited personal experiences with sites, we began our study as we had every study before it—by looking at social networks as a service or set of services to be studied, learned and implemented. We conceived of a social library as a library of traditional services enhanced by a set of social tools—wikis, blogs, mashups and podcasts. Integrated services, of course, user-friendly for sure and offering superior self-service. We were wrong. Our view, after living with the data, struggling with the findings, listening to experts and creating our own social spaces, is quite different. Becoming engaged in the social Web is not about learning new services or mastering new technologies. To create a checklist of social tools for librarians to learn or to generate a “top ten” list of services to implement on the current library Web site would be shortsighted. Such lists exist. Resist the urge to use them.

The social Web is not being built by augmenting traditional Web sites with new tools. And a social library will not be created by implementing a list of social software features on our current sites. The social Web is being created by opening the doors to the production of the Web, dismantling the current structures and inviting users in to create their content and establish new rules. Open the library doors, invite mass participation by users and relax the rules of privacy. It will be messy. The rules of the new social Web are messy. The rules of the new social library will be equally messy. But mass participation and a little chaos often create the most exciting venues for collaboration, creativity, community building—and transformation.

Technorati tags: OCLC, libraries, social networking, privacy, trust

Are you addicted?

Take the Internet Addiction Test and substitute 'read' or 'reading' or 'book' for 'on-line', 'internet', etc. For example:

How often do you find that you stay on-line read longer than you intended?

How often do you neglect household chores to spend more time on-line reading?

How often do others in your life complain to you about the amount of time you spend on-line reading?

How often do you block out disturbing thoughts about your life with soothing thoughts of the Internet a good book?

How often do you find yourself anticipating when you will go on-line be reading again?

How often do you fear that life without the Internet reading would be boring, empty, and joyless?

How often do you snap, yell, or act annoyed if someone bothers you while you are on-line reading?

How often do you lose sleep due to late-night log-ins reading?

Over the course of my life, I have failed, and still fail, with both books and the web on all these questions — if failure is what is meant by answering 'often'. And so would just about any of my friends and family — for at least one, if not both, of the … er … addictive substances.

I've seen some evidence of the Internet Addiction Test being used in, or considered for use in, UK schools. If the aim is to convince our students that we really are very out of touch, then that's a good idea. Otherwise, bin it.

Technorati tags: Internet Addiction Test, reading, schools, digital natives, digital immigrants

Super-Cannes: 'actors in our own self-referential drama'

John Preston, reviewing Super-Cannes in the London Evening Standard, quoted by Stephen Moss in the Guardian:

Ballard loves to go that bit further out than anyone else, to nose around the outer limits of human behaviour and to rub up against the inconceivable. What ought to be daft becomes instead extremely disquieting. His is a world in which anything has become possible. In this twisted scheme of things, it comes to seem quite logical that the one upright citizen in Eden-Olympia [Ballard's suburban madhouse] should be a mass murderer. Morality has disappeared, so has sanity, and all that's left is a kind of institutionalised madness. Reading Ballard is like viewing the world through a completely new set of lenses.

I've quoted Ballard himself before. Here he is on tourism and travel:

Travel is the last fantasy the 20th Century left us, the delusion that going somewhere helps you reinvent yourself. There's nowhere to go.

On Cronenberg's A History of Violence:

The title, A History of Violence, is the key to the film, and should be read not as a tale or story of violence, but as it might appear in a social worker's case notes: "This family has a history of violence." The family, of course, is the human family, a primate species with an unbelievable appetite for cruelty and violence. If its behaviour in the 20th century is any guide, the human race inhabits a huge sink estate ravaged by unending feuds and civil wars, a no-go area abandoned by the authorities, though no one can remember who they are, or even if they exist. …

On Blair:

Perhaps only damaged actors can lead modern societies down the crooked paths that they prefer.

Having come to Ballard very late, I've recently finished Super-Cannes — and it's not yet left me alone. Tim Adams' Observer review catches some its darkness and power:

… Eden-Olympia, Europe's ultra-sophisticated answer to Silicon Valley in the hills above the French Riviera. The business park is the world's first intelligent city, one horribly logical conclusion of a corporatised continent in which 'freedom was the right to paid work, while leisure was the mark of the shiftless and untalented'; dreams here come equipped with airbags, and the only sounds are the whispers of sprinklers on lawns and the effortless combustion of computer-navigated German sports saloons.

The city is home to techno-chic supernationals - Ciba-Geigy and Siemens, Mitsui and Monsanto - and to the Euro-elite of chief executives who control their strategies, a post-leisure class which derives its excitement from the imposition of systematic efficiencies. There is no need here for law or religion; Eden-Olympia polices itself; decisions are corporate not ethical, and sex is something one watches on customised adult channels.

Ballard carefully constructs this serpentless paradise in perfectly engineered sentences. His images come together with the satisfying hiss of Japanese micro-hydraulics. 'There was a vast car park concealed behind a screen of cypresses, vehicles nose to tail like a week's unsold output at a Renault plant,' he writes. 'Somewhere in the office buildings the owners of these cars were staring at their screens, designing a new cathedral or cineplex, or watching the world's spot prices. The sense of focused brain power was bracing, but subtly unsettling.' …

Ballard unravels the secrets of his post-industrial elysium with panache, leading us into a society which is both an exaggerated parable for our times and a chill piece of futurology. Along the way there are some signature themes: Ballard's books always feel as though they are shot on security cameras and spotlit by police flash photography; their violence is both sterile and graphic. The worlds he describes are frequently immunised against human emotion. And in Eden-Olympia that deficiency has become a potentially fatal threat.

Much more there. (Adams is good on Ballard's satire: 'His satire, however extreme, is always convincing because its governing ideas inhabit every detail. He sees a strain of totalitarianism running through particular dehumanised philosophies of engineering and design and management; sees the potential for dictatorship in the absence of democracy engendered by the colossal power of corporations.')

Just now, I found a long piece (essay and interview) by Jason Cowley:

The twin engines driving so much of British contemporary fiction have long been a kind of enfeebled realism-with its class and social anxieties-and nostalgia. But Ballard operated outside this loop. The drowned worlds, scorched cities and overgrown jungles of his early fiction; his focus on the media landscape of global celebrity and stylised catastrophe; his exploration of the connections between sex, eroticism and death; his fetishism of motorways, highrises and car crashes-almost alone among contemporary British writers, Ballard wrote about the 20th century in its own idiom. As a result his work is exaggerated, pumped-up, often preposterous; a prose surrealist mining a strange, blurry, psychopathological landscape. It is hard to believe in his fictional world precisely because it is so invented, so radically imagined. Like the paintings of Dali, Max Ernst and de' Chirico which he so admires, Ballard transports you into a fabulous realm, at once real and hysterically unreal.

You can read a Ballard novel without believing a word of what is written. Yet something lingers disturbingly in your imagination, something to do with his understanding of the inherent instability of the contemporary condition-as if we are all actors in our own self-referential drama, as if we are all trapped within a set of immense inverted commas.

So, I'm just starting out on Ballard, after some initial flirtation, and from Super-Cannes so many scenes and ideas and conversations stick in the mind. One I made a note of early on was the scene in the car-park — an 'impromptu piece of garage theatre':

Two Eden-Olympia limousines were making their way down the circular ramp. The chauffeurs stopped their vehicles on the third level, slipped from their driving seats and opened the rear doors, giving their passengers a ringside view of the ugly tableau being staged in an empty parking space.

Or there's this, from much later in the book:

Eden-Olympia's great defect is that there's no need for personal morality. Thousands of people live and work here without making a single decision about right and wrong. The moral order is engineered into their lives along with the speed limits and the security systems. … Places like Eden-Olympia are fertile ground for any Messiah with a grudge. The Adolf Hitlers and Pol Pots of the future won't walk out of the desert. They'll emerge from shopping malls and corporate business parks.

Penrose's deranged vision of 'a carefully metered measure of psychopathy', the answer to the 'suburbanisation of the soul' that 'has overrun our planet like the plague', is explored by Penrose and Sinclair in chapter 29, 'The Therapy Programme'. This is Penrose:

A  controlled psychopathy is a way of resocialising people and tribalising them into mutually supportive groups. … Violence is spectacular and exciting, but sex has always been the main hunting ground of psychopathy. A perverse sexual act can liberate the visionary self in even the dullest soul. The consumer society hungers for the deviant and unexpected. What else can drive the bizarre shifts in the entertainment landscape that will keep us "buying"? Psychopathy is the only engine powerful enough to light our imaginations, to drive the arts, sciences and industries of the world.

Towards the end of the novel, and despite himself, Sinclair remembers 'the brutal hazings at the RAF flight school, and how they had energised us all': 'At Eden-Olympia, psychopathy was being rehabilitated, returned like a socialised criminal to everyday life'.

Ballard, interviewed in 2004:

My real fear is that boredom and inertia may lead people to follow a deranged leader with far fewer moral scruples than Richard Gould [in Millennium People], that we will put on jackboots and black uniforms and the aspect of the killer simply to relieve the boredom. A vicious and genuinely mindless neo-fascism, a skilfully aestheticised racism, might be the first consequence of globalisation, when Classic Coke® and California merlot are the only drinks on the menu. At times I look around the executive housing estates of the Thames Valley and feel that it is already here, quietly waiting its day, and largely unknown to itself. … I suspect that (as I pointed out in Super-Cannes) the human race will inevitably move like a sleepwalker towards that vast resource it has hesitated to tap - its own psychopathy. This adventure playground of the soul is waiting for us with its gates wide open, and admission is free. In short, an elective psychopathy will come to our aid (as it has done many times in the past) - Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, all those willed nightmares that make up much of human history. As Wilder Penrose points out in Super-Cannes, the future will be a huge Darwinian struggle between competing psychopathies. Along with our passivity, we're entering a profoundly masochistic phase - everyone is a victim these days, of parents, doctors, pharmaceutical companies, even love itself. And how much we enjoy it. Our happiest moments are spent trying to think up new varieties of victimhood ...

Elsewhere, Jason Cowley writes of the character, Paul Sinclair, through whose eyes Super-Cannes is told:

In his quest to uncover the truth … he becomes a kind of detective of the self: the more he discovers about Eden-Olympia, the more he discovers about his own potential for deviance and violence, and the more alienated he feels.

Reading Ballard is a peculiarly enriching experience. Every sentence is absolutely characteristic. His novels, at their best, resemble surrealist tableaux, representations of tortured interiority, and Super-Cannes is one of his best.

 

Technorati tags: Ballard, J G Ballard, Super-Cannes

Typefaces: our lives and theirs

A couple of fascinating sites have come across my screen this week.

1) Cooper Black: a great little flash film of the life and times of this typeface, from its origins in the 1920s (Wikipedia) to its use in 1966 on the cover of the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds — and more.

In fact, this film was a revelation to me: I had no idea how many of the signs in our streets are in this font. A quick search on Google Images or on Flickr will show you what I mean. About the font:

Cooper Black is a very heavy version of Cooper Oldstyle (also known simply as Cooper), an innovative typeface with rounded serifs and long ascenders designed in 1919. The Cooper family was the work of Oswald Bruce Cooper, co-owner of the Bertsch & Cooper design firm in Chicago. Cooper Black was first released by the Barnhart Brothers & Spindler foundry of Chicago in 1922. Oz Cooper was fond of saying that the Black fit the needs of “far-sighted printers with near-sighted customers.” Cooper Black set a trend in ad types which prompted such designers as Fred Goudy (one of Cooper’s early teachers) to follow suit with their own black faces (compare Goudy Heavyface).

2) Helvetica: 'a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface (which will celebrate its 50th birthday in 2007) as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives. The film is an exploration of urban spaces in major cities and the type that inhabits them, and a fluid discussion with renowned designers about the choices and aesthetics behind their use of type.' From the site:

Helvetica was developed by Max Miedinger in 1957 for the Haas Type Foundry in Munchenstein, Switzerland. In the late 1950s, the European design world saw a revival of older sans-serif typefaces such as Akzidenz Grotesk. Haas' director Eduard Hoffmann commissioned Miedinger, a former employee and freelance designer, to draw an updated sans-serif typeface to add to their line. The result was called Neue Haas Grotesk, but its name was later changed to Helvetica, derived from Helvetia, the Roman name for Switzerland, when Haas' German parent companies Stempel and Linotype began marketing the font internationally in 1961.

Introduced amidst a wave of popularity of Swiss design, and fueled by advertising agencies selling this new design style to their clients, Helvetica quickly appeared in corporate logos, signage for transportation systems, fine art prints, and myriad other uses worldwide. Inclusion of the font in home computer systems such as the Apple Macintosh in 1984 only further cemented its ubiquity.

I would appreciate recommendations for books on the life and times of typefaces and the role they play in the contemporary world. I have an amateur's interest in fonts and amongst the books I treasure are books about typography and the design of books: Stanley Morison's Letter Forms, Jan Tschichold's The Form of the Book, Geoffrey Dowding's Finer Points and, of course, Robert Bringhurst's The Elements of Typographic Style (all published by Hartley & Marks, but not all still in print — at least, not from them). But my eyes are just being opened (very late!) to seeing the fonts which surround us everywhere else.

Meanwhile, if you like Helvetica — or Futura or Garamond (or Chicago … or Courier), you can sport a T-shirt to that effect.

Technorati tags: typefaces, fonts, typography, Cooper Black, Helvetica

Looking forward to London

I'm really looking forward to living in London. Some time ago, I looked at this page on Edward Tufte's site about Harry Beck's London Underground Map. Tufte praises Harry Beck's map, but adds:

The Underground Map and Minard's famous Carte Figurative of the French Army's disaster in Russia in the war of 1812 are alike in important respects: both are brilliant, and neither travels well. The Underground Map and Napoleon's March are perfectly attuned to their particular data, so focused on their data sets. They do not serve, then, as good practical generic architectures for design; indeed, revisions and knock-offs have usually been corruptions or parodies of the originals. Both, however, exemplify the deep principles of information design in operation, as well as the craft and passion behind great information displays.

Tufte also praises Mr Beck's Underground Map by Ken Garland:

Looking that up on Amazon (UK) linked me to:

The Way Out Tube Map, Roger Collings

What's in a Name?: Origins of Station Names on the London Underground, Cyril M Harris

London's Disused Underground Stations, J E Connor

The London Underground: a diagrammatic history, Douglas Rose

One Stop Short of Barking: Uncovering the London Underground, Mecca Ibrahim

Underground Maps After Beck, Maxwell J Roberts

London's Lost Tube Schemes, Antony Badsey-Ellis

Subterranean City: Beneath the Streets of London, Antony Clayton

The Subterranean Railway: How the London Underground Was Built and How It Changed the City Forever, Christian Wolmar

Blimey.

Technorati tags: London, underground, the tube, railways, maps, mapping, Tufte

John McGahern

via John Naughton, a beautiful account of John McGahern's funeral. It should be read there, in full. A brief excerpt:

It was a traditional Irish funeral in a country church. There was no music, and there were no speeches by the graveside. His first cousin said the mass and gave the homily, which had been worked out between the two of them for several days and contained McGahern’s own directions as to what should be in — lines from John Donne, from Proust, from Yeats, and then a version of himself, why he ended up back in the church, though he was an unbeliever. For all his differences with the church, it was where he first discovered his first book, his first magic, his first aesthetic, his first sense of beauty, and he could no more turn his back on it than he could turn his back on a part of himself. … The locals turned out for him. He was brought from Dublin this morning, and at every village in Leitrim the route was lined by locals. Apart from anything else, there was a sense of silent gratitude to him for his redemption of other people’s shame — because the Ireland that hammered him is now coming out in the tribunals looking into corruption, child abuse and the rest. And people who did nothing then were just so grateful that there was a wholesomeness about him that they hadn’t realised at the time. There was sense of gratitude to him for having stayed rather than having gone. It would have been awful if he had died in exile in Italy or somewhere. But to have stayed on and then to have seen through the change was what everyone was grateful to him for. He had extraordinary integrity. 

And John Naughton quotes from Colm Toibin's piece in the Irish Times (subscription required):

One night in Co Leitrim, when he had recovered from his first bout of illness, Catriona Crowe and myself sat up late with him. We drank and talked. He’d found the hospital and its community of doctors and nurses interesting and funny but also difficult. He was half amused and half annoyed at being offered professional counselling in the face of death, he said. He sighed at the very thought of it. Then he lifted his glass, drank his whiskey and having left a few seconds of silence he spoke again. “We bloom only once and you’d want to be very foolish not to know that”.

Technorati tags: John McGahern, Ireland

A bit of a gap

At my school, the last three weeks or so of the term that's just died are dominated by mock exams for the final year GCSE and A Level groups — and therefore, for us, the teachers, by marking. Hence, in part, my silence. This last week (the start of our holiday), I have been absorbed in things literary: John Burnside came and read for us a few weeks back, and then I wanted to finish his new book, the memoir about his father, A Lie About My Father, before he read from the book at the end of the Oxford Literary Festival (event 136, yesterday).

This is a great book and one that exhausted me: for all the difference between our backgrounds, there is enough in common between my father and John's for the effect to be both illuminating and draining. Blake Morrison reviewed John's book well in the Guardian, but it's to Hilary Mantel in the LRB that I keep going back:

The book ends as it begins, with Halloween, or rather in the light of the day following, as the writer leads his small son along the quay of a small Scottish fishing town on the east coast. We see that this is the child for whom the phantom of fatherhood must be raised. The writer leaves us with a final sharp picture of the man of lies whom the book has transfigured into truth. He sees him, on a distant night, standing on the edge of woodland; white shirt visible against the dark, a cigarette in his hand, he is captured in a moment which holds, on an indrawn breath, all the events and non-events of his life, all that happened and all that ever could. He did not want to die in public, but that was his unheroic fate: collapsing at the Silver Band Club, on his way to the cigarette machine. An ordinary man with an ordinary death, a nameless man with thoughts that few would care to name, he is now one of the ‘spirits’ who ‘feed our imaginations’. To move from the interiority of this memoir back to what passes for ordinary life is like surfacing from under the sea, reshaped by its strong and unforgiving currents. It is a book by a master of language, pushing language to do what it can. Fastidious, supple and unsparing, it is a book about lies that is more true than you can say.

It was a great pleasure to hear John and to have so many friends together: Tim, Colin and Molly, Olly and Ben, Karl, Mark and Georgie … Like that evening when John read at Radley, a couple of weeks back, this one wound up in the wee hours.

The day before, Karl and I had gone to hear Tim talk (event 97; capacity audience) about his latest book, What is the Point of Being a Christian?, and yesterday afternoon we'd taken in Tsotsi, a profoundly moving film — the book of which I'd read over two decades ago. (See also this Guardian piece.)

Tonight, I had the chance to read John's as yet unpublished sequence of poems centred on/inspired by Saint-Nazaire (which he read at Radley a few weeks back). My head is full of these beautiful, resonant poems — annunciation, tradition (Eliot!), the 'actually loved and known' …

On Molly's recommendation, I've just ordered Keeping Mum and am about to start on Memoir — and then news tonight that John McGahern has died. A bit of a gap.

Technorati tags: John Burnside, Molly McGrann, Timothy Radcliffe, Tsotsi, John McGahern

Prospect Books and La Varenne

Light blogging of late (but plenty still going through to del.icio.us) — so much on at school and elsewhere. Many things have had to go on hold. Cooking is one.

Returning home on Saturday, I found a fat parcel waiting for me: Prospect Books' newly published translation of La Varenne's three books, The French Cook, The French Pastry Chef, The French Confectioner. (You can get the index here as a pdf file.)

These three books by François Pierre de la Varenne (c. 1615–1678), who was chef to the Marquis d’Uxelles, are the most important French cookery books of the seventeenth century. It was the first French cookery book of any substance since Le Viandier almost 300 years before, and it ran to thirty editions in 75 years. The reason for its success was simply it was the first book to record and embody the immense advances which French cooking had made, largely under the influence (of) Italy and the Renaissance, since the fifteenth century. Some characteristics of medieval cookery are still visible, but many have disappeared. New World ingredients make their entrance. A surprising number of recipes for dishes still made in modern times (omelettes, beignets, even pumpkin pie) are given. The watershed from medieval to modern times is being crossed under our eyes in La Varenne’s pages.

So important was this book that English cooks of the time immediately bought copies and one (anonymous) even translated it into English in the middle of the Puritan rule of Oliver Cromwell. This translation, as is the original, is extremely difficult to understand: there are difficult words, omissions, mistranslations, and other opacities. Terence Scully has solved all modern readers’ problems by undertaking a modern translation with detailed commentary of the original French texts. His work takes cognisance of the early English translation, as well as not ignoring contemporary works available to those early cooks for purposes of comparison and contrast. Even French people will want to buy it for what he tells us of the workings of the French kitchen in the seventeenth century.

That's from the publisher's website. It's a tome and a half (628pp):

So, definitely another holiday job pleasure.

It's a (characteristically) beautifully produced book — kudos to Tom Jaine. If you don't know Prospect Books, you can read about Tom and the history of this independent publisher here. And don't miss the Telegraph's profile of him:

Prospect publishes between six and 12 books a year. "We are not talking Grub Street, we're talking micro-publishing. I never expect to sell more than 1,000 books, and some only sell 50. I edit, re-write, typeset, design; the authors get no advances, only royalties. We just keep afloat."

Alan Davidson's entertaining account of the inception of Prospect Books is here — worth reading for the story of Richard Olney's involvement alone.

Technorati tags: Prospect Books, La Varenne, Tom Jaine, Alan Davidson, Richard Olney, publishing, small publishers, independent publishers

DC Confidential

Sir Christopher Meyer has been defending his book. I for one am glad to have more insight into the run up to the Iraq War. This titbit puzzles me, however:

The Cabinet Office had approved the manuscript for publication, after consulting the Foreign Office. However, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has been among senior officials to criticise its publication - a stance that has caused Sir Christopher some concern.

"[It was] cleared to be published - what exactly is going on here? I write a book, I made a judgement between what I think is right to keep confidential and what it is right to bring out into the public gaze. It goes into the Cabinet Office, it pops out a couple of weeks later, and I am told they wish to make no changes to the text and then we publish." BBC

Labyrinths and Internet

Fascinating, and frustrating, posting at things magazine: I'm not sure why the advent of 'global communications technology' is seen as leading to the demise of reliquaries, and I certainly don't date the going of the 'divine on the defensive' to about a 100 years ago — that's being going on since at least the sixteenth century. As Cornelius Ernst (see here, paras 6 & 7; Tim's address), my favourite twentieth century theologian, puts it: 'I cannot think of a single clerical philosopher of real distinction since the Middle Ages (and whether it is appropriate to speak of any medieval thinker as a 'philosopher' is of course problematic)'.

But I was interested by this (thanks to Matt Webb for drawing my attention to it):

The internet feels like a giant reliquary at times. … The web is also like being stuck in a giant uncatalogued library, with every dusty shelf offering up hidden treasures; you just have to hunt for them. Our mental picture is a combination of the Gormenghastian, before the great fire, and the octagonal library in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose. The latter was apparently inspired by the Robarts Library at the University of Toronto, a brutalist construction by Mathers and Haldenby, in collaboration with Warner Burns Toan & Lunde. The library does have a medieval aspect , a fortress of knowledge (according to the Wikipedia, one of its nicknames is 'Fort Book'. It's also the subject of the widespread 'sinking library' urban legend).

Eco's fictional medieval library was strongly influenced by Jorge Luis Borges, in particular the Argentinian's Library of Babel, an unfolding, labyrinthine, almost infinite space, that apparently contained all knowledge:

'When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal or world problem whose eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon. The universe was justified, the universe suddenly usurped the unlimited dimensions of hope.'

… Perhaps the internet is also best understood as a dual system (and not just the DOS vs Mac hierarchy that Eco playfully compared to religion back in 1994). We suggest that rather than just a cabinet of curiosities (the traditional wunderkammer remains a popular web metaphor), the internet is in fact a combination of reliquary and labyrinth, both a maze of one's own making and a receptacle for wonder, a place where getting lost is a self-conscious act, portals act as balls of twine, to be unwound or ignored at your peril.

The internet as 'a receptacle for wonder': I linked last year to something Matt Jones posted about awe and wonder and the net. The image of the net as labyrinthine library containing all knowledge makes me think of Dante's great image in the Paradiso (Canto XXXIII; Borges' fantastical library of course recalls this, in deliberately distorted form), when he looks into the heart of the eternal light and 'Within its depths I saw ingathered, bound by love in one volume, the scattered leaves of all the universe' ('Nel suo profondo vidi che s' interna, / legato con amore in un volume, / ciò che per l'universo si squaderna', Temple Classics translation).

'Reliquary' I am less sure about. I think it more useful at this point to do more work on the net-as-memory (individual +) and on what light might be (unexpectedly) shed upon this by studies such as Penelope Reed Doob's The Idea of the Labyrinth — which dedicates some pages to the relationship between labyrinth imagery and medieval understanding of memory and memory practices (on which, I recall, there's Mary Carruthers' book, The Book of Memory, amongst much else). Gabriel Josipovici years ago drew attention to the labyrinth as 'the favourite image of modern literature', 'the mazes of Kafka, Proust, Beckett, Borges and Robbe-Grillet' (The World and the Book). It takes me further than I meant to go in this post, but I can't resist quoting this from Gabriel's book:

In place of Dante's ordered journey we find ourselves involved with heroes who wander without map or compass along paths which are endless for the simple reason that we would not recognise the end even if we came to it. … there is no emergence for the heroes of modern fiction from the labyrinths of reflecting mirrors and demonic analogy. At the end they are no nearer the exit than they were at the beginning. All they have done is move through all the arteries of the labyrinth. Yet this, if they but knew it, is both the exit and the answer. … the writing was the travelling.

Unlike Dante, we have no vantage point from which to 'look back, standing on solid ground, over the winding uphill way, with its little figures of men and women dotted about at various stages of their own ascent' (The World and the Book). The internet, without end, is our own faithfully reflecting mirror, or demonic analogy.

Dylan

Alas, I've been way too busy this week to watch the TV screening of Scorsese's Dylan documentary, No Direction Home — but it's available very soon from Amazon UK on DVD. Gratitude to Book World for bringing the extensive press coverage to my attention (it really has been a very busy week!):

• Definitive Dylan (Mick Brown), Daily Telegraph


• Voice of America (Simon Schama), Guardian


• And SEVEN pieces in The Independent:
  Behind the hits and the myths (Terence Blacker)
  His top twenty albums (Andy Gill) + Christopher Ricks on Like a Rolling Stone
  How I found the man who shouted 'Judas' (Andy Kershaw)
  The times they are still a-changin' (Clare Dwyer Hogg)
  Stories of the songs (Ed Caesar)
  A meeting of minds (David Hepworth)

Philip has a good post-Scorsese-watching piece here. Time for me to catch up and read Chronicles …

QI

This is a bookshop designed for browsing. The shelves don't follow the usual classifications. Instead they collect books together thematically, so a novel or biography might end up next to a work of popular science, or a reference book. The selection criteria are simple: they are either the best books on a subject or a book one of us feels strongly about recommending. The selection and the categories are designed to stimulate thought and discussion. …

'Besides the libraries of Radcliffe and Bodley and the Colleges, there have been of late years many libraries founded in our coffee houses … in these instruction and pleasure go hand in hand; and we may pronounce, in a literal sense, that learning no longer remains a dry pursuit.' Thomas Warton (1728–1790)

So runs the card that you can pick up at the QI bookshop (16 Turl Street, Oxford OX1 3DH). A number of friends have asked me about QI and I said I'd post a few notes, beginning with the bookshop. Last time I was there I took a few photos and the one I'd intended to serve as illustration of the unusual classification system only gives a suggestion of what it's like to browse shelves where books are grouped by themes: Informed Rants, Obsession, Revenge, Desire, Betrayal, Addiction, Experience, Innocence, First Love, Last Love … It's a great bookshop, with personality, run by Claudia FitzHerbert and her small team of enthusiastic, informed and intellectually alive assistants. Support it! Oxford has many bookshops already — but this one is different. We have thousands of books at home and yet this is a place where I am always discovering new authors, new books … new ideas to follow up — not least through chatting with Claudia and her team.

There's also a QI bar behind the bookshop. It's a cosy place for a drink with friends, relaxed and very sociable. It serves food and coffee, too, throughout opening hours. Upstairs is the club: this is private — members only. But it's the only club I've come across that I feel I'd like to join: two elegant Georgian rooms to relax in with drinks, light food and coffee always available, and a dining room and library where lunch and dinner is served every day. Taken with the bookshop and bar, it offers 'an eclectic mix of people, a place to meet, talk, shop, eat and drink in the centre of Oxford. It's a new version of the salon or the coffee house: a place you pop into regularly to buy books, read the paper, eat lunch, celebrate, argue, escape the office and listen to, or start conversations with, other quite interesting people.'

QI. Quite interesting. (Common code: 01865. Bookshop: 261507. Bar: 261508. Club: 261500.)

*****

Updates

(1) this from Claudia FitzHerbert's column in the Daily Telegraph, 9 August:

Dons don't come into my shop, much. Michael Gearin-Tosh, who died last week, was an exception. A distinguished English tutor at St Catherine's, who acquired a wider audience with Living Proof (2002) - an account of his long (and, for a long time, startlingly successful) battle against myeloma and conventional medicine - he was an irregular regular. On his first visit, I tried to pick his brains over which editions of Chekhov to stock, and where to put them. Chekhov, a doctor as well as a dramatist, saw a "dull-wittedness and tyranny" in medicine which he compared to Tsarist police. His genius hovers over Living Proof.

Gearin-Tosh seemed to get the shop categories at once. "He would," said my Fellow fellow, when I put it to him that a scholar had been in the shop and not fainted in disgust. "Contradiction and creative disorder are at the heart of Gearin-Tosh's talent. Your shop is just the retail version of his room in college." He said he'd think about the Chekhov before responding with feline courtesy to the placing of Living Proof. I don't think he was overly pleased to find it in Informed Rants, wedged in between Francis Wheen on mumbo-jumbo and Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication. He would, I think, have preferred to be in The Big Picture, along with War and Peace and The Selfish Gene.

(2) jinty (livejournal):

Harry Potter is filed under Revenge, and the assistant, Thomasz, spoke interestingly of how one particular book had been placed by him under one category -- let's say Desire -- but then consistently moved by someone else to another category -- let's assume Ha Ha. In the end Thomasz moved it to Turbulence.

No end to credulity?

… apparently intended to debunk lunatic and/or obsessive idée fixe eschatologique (?), so that's all right then … (Though it's elsewhere described as 'The End of the World For Dummies' and 'stealth evangelism' from 'a conservative evangelical publisher that embraces pop culture'.)

But there's this from Jim Pinkoski (and I can't remember where I first got this link, but credit to The Ferrett), A Creationist's View of Dinosaurs and The Theory of Evolution:

I found myself recalling the absurd El Niño/Al Nino confusion of 1998. (More links here. Wikipedia on El Niño.)

Pain, that cruel guest

I missed this last month: Robert McCrum, writing in The Observer, about 10 years of living with the aftermath of 'a devastating stroke (at 42) which left him paralysed down his left side. During his extended convalescence, he wrote a memoir. It was meant to close the door on his illness, but instead it opened another into a parallel world of other people's pain':

I have become a lightning conductor for a thunderstorm of physical calamity that is raging just over the horizon … my story is not unique. I am just a more visible representative of an army of sufferers across this country, and across the world. I have had letters from widows, orphans, hospital carers, parents. I try to answer these letters, but compared to the stories I'm hearing, my experience has been trifling - as more than one correspondent has pointed out. Sometimes, I feel ashamed to claim fellow citizenship with these sufferers, but there it is: they are writing to me and there's not a thing I can do about it. As well as looking through the eyes of someone who might have died, in these 10 years I have acquired a quite new view of the world. Of course, I recognise that people will want to communicate with those they feel are sympathetic to their plight, but now I have come to believe something different. It is this: that despite the stupendous journalism of feelings, there is still a vast unarticulated story out there that gets no publicity, a story of almost unendurable pain and desperation. Sure, I've been to hell and back, but these people are living in hell every day of their lives.

Oddly enough, the more everything is reported, analysed, expounded, categorised and explored in newspaper column after column, and the more people feel able to express whatever they think about virtually anything under the sun,the more deafening is the general silence that hangs over illness and ill health. There is a sea of horror lapping at the edges of the everyday world, and these messages in bottles are floating in on every tide. These are the messages from the world of pain, messages that describe the suffering of strangers.

From this, I have learned three things. First, that the world's frontline pain is the pain of Aids, cancer, heart disease and stroke (the big killers). Behind the line, there's the pain of despair, loneliness and loss. The aching void in the lives of the bereaved and the afflicted. Second, I now know that we are all, in some sense, in the doctor's waiting room. I used to be indifferent towards, and frightened of, illness. Now I recognise it as part of the human condition. Illness is OK. There's nothing wrong with infirmity. It's part of the way we are. In the famous words of Samuel Beckett's Worstward Ho: 'Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.' Failing better is something every stroke sufferer knows about.

Finally, there's this recognition. Despite the extraordinary progress of medicine, despite all the safeguards we have built into the way we conduct our lives, we are still in the world of our ancestors, when life was characterised by the poets as a sparrow fluttering out of the storm into the brightly lit mead hall, circling through the laughter and the smoke for a moment, before disappearing once more into the dark. Sometimes, when I read these letters, I sense that dark just beyond the window. And I feel grateful to be still alive, in the warmth and the light of summer, out of the storm.

I remember Alphonse Daudet's La Doulou, translated by Julian Barnes in 2002 as In The Land of Pain, the history of his own terrible suffering with tabes dorsalis, a form of tertiary syphilis where the back, in effect, wastes away. I gave my copy away a couple of years ago, but I remember how the great Charcot prescribed the Seyre Suspension, the patient being suspended for several minutes at a time, sometimes just by the jaw. Daudet endured this treatment 13 times:

I am suspended in the air for four minutes, the last two solely by my jaw. Pain in the teeth. Then, as they let me down and unharness me, a terrible pain in my back and the nape of my neck, as if all the marrow was melting: it forces me to crouch down on all fours and then very slowly stand up again while — as it seems to me — the stretched marrow find its rightful place again.

Morphine as a relief:

Each injection stops the pain for three or four hours. Then comes "the wasps", the stinging and stabbing here, there and everywhere — followed by the Pain, that cruel guest.

Other fragments I recall from when I read and had a copy of the book — and have found again now, online:

Torture walking back from the baths via the Champs-Elysées.

I've passed the stage where illness brings any advantage or helps you understand things; also the stage where it sours your life, puts a harshness in your voice, makes every cogwheel shriek.

The hotel. The bell-board. The bath times. Solitude. Encroaching darkness.

My poor carcass is hollowed out, voided by anaemia. Pain echoes through it as a voice echoes in a house without furniture or curtains. There are days, long days, when the only part of me that's alive is my pain.

Finally, two things. First, this moment, as introduced by Julian Barnes himself in The Guardian:

His response, both personal and literary, to his condition was admirable. "Courage... means not scaring others," Larkin wrote. Numerous witnesses attest to Daudet's exemplary behaviour. His last secretary, André Ebner, remembered Daudet sitting with a friend one morning, eyes closed, barely able to speak, martyred by pain. The door-knob gently turned, but before Mme Daudet could enter, her husband was on his feet, the colour back in his cheeks, laughter in his eye, his voice filled with reassurance about his condition. When the door closed again Daudet collapsed back into his chair. "Suffering is nothing," he murmured. "It's all a matter of preventing those you love from suffering."

And then, this:

Daudet … recounted to Goncourt a dream he had once had, in which he was walking through a field of broom. All around him there was the soft background noise of seed-pods exploding. Our lives, he had concluded, amount to no more than this: just a quiet crackle of popping pods.