04.03.06
Posted in Dreaming of England at 8:45 am by Jon
My little son came to see his daddy playing park football for the first time last weekend. He loved it of course, with all of its sound & fury, running, jumping, falling over in the mud.
He watched, saucer-eyed and squealing, as I did my once-a-game charge up the left wing, cutting inside to smash the ball against the post. Trouble is, he enjoyed it just as much when I tracked back, and in trying to block a cross from the right, only sliced it into my own net.
Oh my son, how hard I work to prepare you for the troubles of the world! I hope one day you will thank me, or at least have the grace not to laugh out loud.
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03.31.06
Posted in Books at 9:03 am by Jon
Goodbye to Stanislaw Lem, the Polish giant of science fiction, who died this week.
One of the things that made Lem a genuinely interesting writer was that, despite including a great deal of gently satirical ’space travel’ fare in his output (particularly the Ijon Tichy stories), he didn’t really see himself as doing science fiction.
Reading Lem in English was always a curious experience. Whole books are predicated on fecund streams of puns, portmanteau words and neologisms. He was fortunate in his translators, but the suspicion always lingered in the mind, a very Lem-like suspicion, that perhaps there was no Polish original, and that the translation was a free-flying construct boiling out from the mind of the biggest computer in the world.
But Lem was real, despite being denounced to the FBI by the increasingly paranoid Philip K. Dick as being a collective of communist writers aiming to subvert the USA.
Lem was also second only to Borges in his creation of imaginary books. I recall my surprise on finally reading Solaris and finding that much of it is a survey of various (invented) books. There ought to be a term for this tendency: bibliofantasism? What’s unarguable is that a list of books invented by Lem would be almost as interesting as his books themselves.
My friend Paul, who introduced me to Lem’s work, sent me through this typically mad and maddening tribute, culled from Lem’s own Cyberiad:
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
I’ll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou’lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love’s lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.
Cancel me not — for what then shall remain?
Abscissas some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
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03.22.06
Posted in Cricket at 2:32 pm by Jon
A mention in dispatches, by the way, for anyone who can explain the title of this post.
It wasn’t quite the same as the “were-you-watching-THAT?” intensity of last summer’s Ashes, but this morning’s end of the Test series in India was sumptuously improbable for any follower of English cricket.
The 4.30am GMT starts have meant that many of us having been living the last few days in split-screen fashion: at 6.30am, as I’m woken up, I get to see the lunchtime score. Then I get to follow the afternoon session on the radio as I breakfast and travel into work. Finally, Cricinfo and Guardian Unlimited’s infamous over-by-over coverage keep me company while I sift email and get on with the working day.
This morning was all about whether England’s rag, tag and bobtail bunch of debutants and one old county pro could force a series-drawing result against India’s justifiably proud batting line up (Dravid, Sehwag, Tendulkar and all).
The consensus yesterday had been that England could nick the win, but only as the result of hard slog deep into the final session of the series. Astonishingly, it all happened in the time between finishing my breakfast and finishing my train minute train into London Bridge.
I was reminded of the time I tried to explain cricket to a German housemate. It happened to be South Africa’s tour here in 1994, when Devon ‘You guys are history’ Malcolm blasted the tourists away in 50 overs. “Hm,” commented Jurg, “I thought this game was slow”. I bit my lip.
You can read the glorious details for yourself, but treasure this moment, 37 year-old county twirler Shaun Udal removing the revered Sachin Tendulkar to speed England on their way to a daftly thrilling win. Udal took 4-14.
You can retire now, Shaun. It can’t get any better.
Update: As has been pointed out, the story of Andrew Flintoff playing Johnny Cash’s ‘Ring of Fire’ to inspire his side during the lunch interval was exclusively reported this morning to seemingly every paper in the world. Given Monty Panesar’s troubles locating the ball, it’s a surprise he didn’t choose ‘The One on the Right is on the Left’.
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03.20.06
Posted in Flotsam, Bloggery at 4:15 pm by Jon
An artefact of running a blog that is never apparent to most readers is the phenomenon of visitors commenting on old posts. It doesn’t happen all the time, but it is a common occurrence, and it always brings me up short.
To me, looking at my old posts are an indulgent excavation, too frequently a surprise for me to feel entirely comfortable about the state of my memory, but at least quite commonly a pleasant surprise. For the most part, any sentimental journeys I make into the archives are prompted by someone wandering past and dropping in a comment on some (to me) long-forgotten post. It’s always nice to be reminded that, once written, the words are not dead, even if they seem irretrievably distant from me-now. To whoever reads something you’ve written for the first time, the dialogue is taking place now, this very alive moment.
And so we get the curious encounter of some passing web traveller now with the ghost of me two years ago. Sometimes, as in this exchange on stone-sucking, it’s a Note & Query that can happily take place over the span of years. Sometimes, as in this shared journey back to beginnings, returning to the past feels very appropriate.
On other occasions, as with this ongoing and increasingly Byzantine thread on academic conferences spam, I feel as though it would be rude of me to step back in with my casual opinion when so many people feel so much more strongly about than me.
Best of the lot, the comment that asks or offers no explanation, but quickly sketches a picture of a place where, frankly, I’m very happy not to be.
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03.13.06
Posted in Flotsam, Bloggery at 4:30 pm by Jon
No, not how to beat spam, Beat spam.
I’ve been noticing, after a large clearout of the old spam comments folder, a marked increase in the quality of the junk coming in. A large amount at the moment seems to be created by throwing together short phrases of random dictionary words, obviously in an attempt to circumvent analysis. What’s nice is that, while there’s an infinitessimal chance of creating real meaning this way, the word patterns produced often take on the cadences of real English, producing a pleasant illusion of literal meaning in the obvious gibberish.
To be honest, it makes me think of a lot of the incandescently incomprehensible poetry I encountered around university arts departments when I was in the USA. Like listening to beat poets ranting from behind a closed door: it sounds as though it probably makes sense, though you’d be hard pushed to say what it is.
I call this one ‘Increase your performance’:
Mint fiat bakery as oaks
Hopefully list interconnecting tremor potting
Scribbled saucepan crutch Catholicism
Weight opened, humiliated wariness.
[goes on for another 12 stanzas]
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03.01.06
Posted in Forteana, Books at 10:05 am by Jon
Athanasius Kircher’s illustration of the Tower of Babel, as posted on the just-found blog of the Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society. You may wish to follow up with Kircher’s sketch demonstrating exactly why the tower couldn’t have reached the moon (it would have been so large that it would have tipped the Earth out of balance.
The Kircherblog, in the spirit of the man, covers everything from Kircher’s own notorious cat piano to feral children (a topic of interest to Kircher because of the chance they might spontaneously speak the original Adamic language) to buildings made out of trees and shaped as elephants.
Sometimes I still love the internet as a child loves its favourite bear. This is why.
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02.28.06
Posted in Forteana, Dreaming of England, Film, Flotsam at 1:17 pm by Jon
I’m horribly aware that I’m not posting much here again, as the parcels of time I have to hand tend to be small right now. So, the last resort of the harrassed blogger, I resort to lists. Here are five things that have been giving me great joy over the last few weeks:
- The North York Moors
- Life on Mars, starring the equally excellent John Simm and Philip Glenister (who, in a moment of brilliance, seems to have partly based his rough & ready copper on Brian Clough)
- Battrick, the cricket management game
- Kate Bush
- Babies who sleep through the night
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02.23.06
Posted in Signs of London at 1:03 pm by Jon
In a moment of quality I wish he would extend more frequently to his floral selections themselves, our local florist has on his van the very smart:
ALL STEMS FROM COVENT GARDEN
At the very opposite end of the scale, a local barber has decided that he really grab a piece of this upmarket “hairdressing” malarkey. Sadly, his sign doesn’t really do his bold offer any justice:
ANY HAIR
CUT ANY
STYLE £8
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02.13.06
Posted in Forteana at 4:05 pm by Jon
Cheers all round as we realise that Strange Attractor, a fortean publication unusually redolant of deep bookshelves and leather-topped reading desks, has a blog.
Further cheers as the first story we find there is a thigh-slapper about déjà vu:
One man had it so badly that he stopped watching TV because everything seemed to be a repeat, even the news, recalls psychologist Chris Moulin of the University of Leeds, U.K.
Yet when Moulin offered to help him, he adds, it was futile at first. The man “said there was no point visiting the clinic because he’d already been there.”
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02.08.06
Posted in General at 6:53 pm by Jon
Why is it that when you’re struggling to retain balance, say, almost pitching off the log you’re using to cross a small brook that’s tumbling off the moors, you lean the wrong way? Imagine slipping to the left: you push your body weight out to the right. But this is your hips and your trunk. Your head and shoulders almost inevitably end up canted to the left, that is, the way you’re falling. More logically, you would make a simple pivot at the hips, angling your whole upper body away from the direction of fall.
I supposed that it must be more to do with the need for the head to feel as though it’s vertical, but this is completely wrong: the head ends up at a more severe angle than otherwise. I think it must be two things.
First, it’s about keeping your weight above your feet, reducing the likelihood of trying to maintain an impossible angle and slipping off entirely.
Second, once you lean your whole trunk over, you can’t correct: you’re committed, and you might just as likely overcompensate and fall over the other way. With hips out one side and head the other, you can perform that recognisable finessing wobble until you’ve recovered fully.
Me, I cheated. The dog, on a retractable lead, had already crossed, and was ahead and to my right. Fixing the lead and giving a sharp tug pulled me back upright and on over the bridge. Good dog, as I effused afterwards, to her bewilderment.
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02.07.06
Posted in Dreaming of England at 12:13 pm by Jon
We have escaped for a week to the North Yorks moors.
I had thought that this would mean that updates will be non-existent. Now I think that, perhaps, updates were virtually non-existent anyway from London, so you might get something resembling normal service for a few days.
The various evils of the smoke (greyness, too much coffee, too much dirt, lack of horizons, illness) seem to be slowly dropping away. More than anything else, here there seems to be more time: time to unwind, think, eat, sleep.
London, I fear, eats time: not just hours, but whole months and years.
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01.31.06
Posted in Bloggery at 2:13 pm by site admin
Comment spam is getting interesting again. I’ve been receiving some lovely comments from, among others, Bob Dylan, Stewart Granger, Harry Houdini and Erich Weiss (hm…), Charles Dodgson and Eric Clapton, all of whom seem to have developed a late interest in MP3 files. My favourite must be this from a novelist who knew all about publishing under assumed names, George Eliot:
I used to use a program called Cool Edit to do this kind of work as well as other audio editing things. I’m not even sure if it’s around anymore. This was a long time ago.
If Our George was using it, it surely must have been a venerable piece of software.
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Posted in General at 9:54 am by Jon
Andy thinks the good news about his play has been trumped.
It’s a great anecdote, but it’s a false premise. The poster looks fabulous and I just know the play will live up to it. I’m looking forward both to the reviews and to its UK premiere.
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01.30.06
Posted in General at 11:29 am by site admin
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Posted in Dreaming of England at 9:48 am by Jon
More than superficially busy partially on account of heading off next week to the North York moors for eight days on top of the world.
In passing, however, you should know that I got the “Emile Heskey award for balance in front of goal”. In other words, lack of. Far more pleased with runner-up in the goal of the season category, probably earning votes on scarcity value.
This Sunday’s game was marred by a complex territorial dispute where a horde of gaelic footballers claimed our usual space on the common. It transpired that the council had convinced them that they need to pay £100 to use the part of the common marked out as a rugby pitch. We ceded to them, but disputed with the busybody who suggested that what we really wanted to do was apply to the council for the right to pay them £1000 for a year-long licence and the ability to play against stroppy strangers.
I felt particularly sorry for the gaelic footballers having to shell out for the use of public ground. Historically inclined readers can draw their own sad conclusions about which trends this continues.
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Posted in General at 9:20 am by site admin
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01.24.06
Posted in General at 1:36 pm by site admin
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Posted in General at 9:11 am by site admin
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01.23.06
Posted in Dreaming of England at 9:38 am by site admin
Father and son time in the park yesterday was enlivened by the overwhelming amount of play going on everywhere. Every twenty yards a little kickabout was going on, underneath a sky bright with frisbees and tennis balls. A raucous scratch game of rounders (Peckham rules, which is to say very few that I could make out) descended into fits of laughter every couple of minutes as someone slipped, dropped or ran in circles.
Most notably, from where we were sitting, I could see half a dozen small groups playing cricket, an obvious carryover from last year’s Ashes. A group of under tens played the unpredictable bounce with steely concentration. A dad bowled endless long hops to his straight-driving son. If we had been looking to fill out all the stereotypes, there would have been an asian father slowly unveiling the mysteries of spin to his sons. They were, in fact, off to my right, under a chestnut tree.
The only thing I couldn’t spot was a Flintoff Flame. The bats and balls were all cheap and cheerful, and I’m very glad.
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