Thursday, August 29, 2002


Lost in Malvern

Reporting in from Malvern. More later.

Friday, August 23, 2002


Heavy Weather Traffic Again

I promised not to write any poetry today and I am trying to stick to that promise. You are lucky that I have not yet found one of my early poetry notebooks. I found it briefly the other week but it has submerged itself in the garage again. There were loads of great ideas in it but without any proper grammar. I have at least managed to write in sentences now and can even turn my hand to a mean bit of prose. (full of cliche of course but who cares). I was looking back through the archives yesterday. This is the most I have written in anyone place ever. Even my thesis (on Linked ATM systems - I was nearly arrested for taking pictures of ATMs) was shorter. I found that in the garage as well the other day but I couldn't bring myself to look at it further than noticing the hand-drawn diagrams. I was into Rotring pens at the time but even they couldn't make the drawings any more than hand-drawn. I still have the pens somewhere but I am sure they will take a week of running under the tap before they are fit to use, if ever.

In my strangely wired brain, I have remembered that my daughter wants to take some of the pebbles from the garden down when we visit my parents next so that my step-mother can put them in her rinky-dinky little rock tumbling machine and make them all shiny. I have yet to convince her (my daughter) that they will have to be in the machine for weeks rather than a few days before they get shiny. It takes four goes of 7 to 10 days each with different size grits. Just the thought of 40 days with a machine tumbling away in the garage makes me wince. It would be far worse than laying awake worrying about whether the light had gone off in the fridge. Is there a name for worrying about whether the light is off in the fridge? They should make fridges with little windows in them so you can be sure the light is out. I have to add that I don't worry about the light in the fridge. Not any more anyway. I would have to set up a microphone right by the rock tumbler so that I could check it was still going or hadn't caught fire or anything. Maybe you could set one up to run on wind power with some sort of measuring device to check that it had turned over enough times at a high enough speed. Some sort of centrifugal device that only triggered the counter if it was activated by the centrifugal force of the drum turning.

I still havn't set up my daughter's windmill / lighthouse. There is an electrical shop just across the road where I can get the motor, bulbs and wires and it wouldn't cost much. Making it work so that the rotor turned into the wind is the difficult bit. Why am I so lazy? The conversation here has just gone downhill and I am afraid that I am the instigator. We have had a quiz passed round where you have to guess the names of groups based on slightly cryptic clues. One of the clues is simply "palidrome". I will not embarrass you with the details of how long it took for use to get Abba but I have found another group - Releveler and there is yet another Scandinavian group with a Palindromic name.

What is the fear of Palindromes?

Why aibohphobia of course.

Appropriate Musics

I was listening to Music Restored as I drove home last night and they played loads of gorgeous early music, folk/Gregorian Chants etc. It reminded me of when I was at college and used to listen to Gregorian Chant on my Walkman as I walked out to the phone box (The heady pre-mobile days). In the winter of 1983, we had the coldest spell of weather I have ever known, and I remember those walks in the evenings with the most calming music you could imagine. All this got me to thinking more about the appropriateness of various bits of music for the situation in which you hear them. Of course this is often the other way round and simply that you associate a piece with a certain situation and it becomes 'right'. However, sometimes, some music genuinely fits the ambience exactly and the Gergorian Chant was such a case. Another one was when I listened to Drumming by Steve Reich while reading the last chapters of Bitter Fame, a biography of Sylvia Plath. The music fitted perfectly though of course the association is now so strong it has become a form of synthesesia of even something reminiscent of Pavlov's Dogs. As I have said before, maybe it is just that some music always fits the situations over which it is played. If you want to listen to the relevant piece then click here but of course you can't listen to it on just any old Tin boxes no matter what they are fitted with. I suppose you could listen to it on a Sony Walkman at a pinch.

All of which has led me to the 'proper' version of the Sailor's Hornpipe.

Absolutely no integrity and absolutely no poetry. Absolutely no will whatsoever.

Thursday, August 22, 2002



There will be no demonstrations.

I apologise for the lack of preamble to yesterday's last post. I think it should stand on its own and if you don't know what it is about then don't worry.

What about the big stuff? You can't let bad stuff get you down otherwise who or whatever has won.

Much of this entry has been deleted. Things could be far worse. Anway, I am afraid you get another poem, which I realise is only filler but there you go.



Chromatography 30/06/1992

Fat with the tired lines
of a Thailand doctor,
I rest just in shelter.

She has talked of tropical weather
and sealed it in her missive
but did not warn me of the joke.

The retinal storm has scattered
and we breath water,
dream of the white noise
and sleep with the fear of drowning.

She is the weather god,
sent to trap such magic,
weather control in ink and paper.

All expertise is lost in this grey wall,
a scream in the ears
on the cleared borders,

the wired forest
which invades the medicine,
dilutes the fluids heavily
andf soaks away prescription ink.

In the black percussionary weather
she introduces temperate ice
to all her Asian children,

the heretical infants
of gutted rhythm in the minefields
where the weather never ends.

Wednesday, August 21, 2002



The Storm which Shakes the Flames 20/08/2002

The wind has found its way this far
and plays the candles like a harp.
It makes music of the light in here,
the depths of calm in such a storm.

There is fury in these fields,
an eddy made to carry stones,
to suck in all the emptiness
and fill our world with fear.

Yet herein, lies a silence
still, beautiful and chanting;
with a scintillating focus,
a light in face of all thats meaningless.

Humidity and Summer rain
have pressed this town to nothing.
But who can say no spirits live,
reflected in this flow of love?

And who can say no spirits live,
as love flies over all?
and life continues through
the storm which shakes the flames.


31 Angry Polar Bears

... which as my javascript books says is most unfair because Polar Bears never get angry and seldom go around in such large groups. I only hope that _Total_Number_of_Fish is enough to satisfy them though I think that this many fish might be enough.



At Chaos Dreaming in the Kleistos Gamos 23/03/1992

The rain is swallowing the radio
and stealing the tall, thin rocket scientist,
her interest destroyed
by slow economies
while blitz and sterile things
are multiplying.

The only spirit has a curve of glass
and smells of armaments,
that burning, sticky jelly,
bloody in my conflict,
dressed to spin
in the naked temple
where faith will always fail,

Here is the face of a forest killer,
alert and panicked in the Summer glass,
at Chaos dreaming
and thick like our expectancy.

The viewers burn before the resurrection
with the fear of creeping from their graves
through broken covers
to a sun-lit judgement,
footless banshees
fading to the burning edge.






Tuesday, August 20, 2002



More hair than Ted Hughes

My wife tells me I need a hair cut though she did use the unusual phrase above to tell me that. I am also very smug at the moment because my daughter got one of the questions on University Challenge right yesterday (she is just four but the question was about ballet positions). Why did Mr and Mrs Gascoigne call their son Bamber?


The Mistress of the Red Revolt ...

... lies deep in putsch,
putsch in blue sneakers,
and is poisoning the water
from another place.
The water is clear
but cold enough
to freeze the organs,
slow your growth
and kill the unprotected.

I am lost in the curve,
a Soyuz Ogive,
and the east has dropped
below me
to the plains of Baikonour
where Komarov
has lost his mistress
to the air-force jitter.

They want for a doctor here
to warm the guts
of Cosmonauts.
The mistress flies
out of the arms
of the chief designer,
standing on nothing
and spinning
from ship to ship.



Ennui

Of course this is definite proof that Sir William Gull was Jack the Ripper. The 1000th issue of Private Eye had a cartoon of various people who have figured in the life of that august organ, one of whom was Prince Philip. He had a seagull on his shoulder just like the picture of Queen Victoria in the above linked picture by Walter Sickert. I should have written in with the immortal line "are they by any chance related?". Nothing on the web about it though. Should I write? I once read that one of the signs of growing up is when one stops buying Private Eye. I don't actually buy it any more but I will read it. Maybe they meant Viz magazine.

Time for some more Poetry



Autumn Blind and Organ Drunk

There was darkness and death
in the marches,
hidden in the drifts and earths,
waiting to be dug out
and dragged before the fire
to answer that ringing smile;
to be hefted, yelping
on the smoky floor,
new-born, blind and drunk,
retracting from the smoke of men
but hidden safe from them.

"I hate you" she said
and all was swept before her
into the snowy ditches,
home of the damp rats.
I was of the bomber's kind,
consumed and king
of the broken phrase.
I dreamed of rooves falling
softly into the white,
of waking to a cold smog
of dry powder
and a bomber's moon.

We fought in the ice-lock,
starved with out mouths frozen closed,
turning white under the barrage
and waving bright things.

What squares there were.
In those gold borders I lived
apart from the happy,
academic families,
with their distant stasis
of ancient language,
tangible musics
in portraiture, in sleep walk.
I crossed Ice bridges
through my mind
to die at the feet
of that tall musician.

There was snow between us
and scattered sweets,
sugar as juvenile gifts,
gifts to the thin,
malnourished government ideal,
never to be consumed.

In the twang of the cold strings,
there was desire;
In the beat of chaos,
there was the break,
the key to error,
a draw to me,
the ghost of exhibitionism.

Crimes of the patterned scarlet
leave me breathless,
low at the image leaking
through some hands to mine,
returning in the whirling jangle,
over green and under blue,
a blue which spins and thinks,
a concious shade,
alone in the city desert,
the rose of deserts
and in the midst of millions.






Thursday, August 15, 2002


ÉÍ `AANEÍÍGÓÓ 'ÁHOOT'É

As you can see from the two previous posts, I have located another poetry notebook. I have to admit I have carried out some editing on the rubbish that was actually written down. 'Tip-Toeing Through Java' is about 'Trunyan'. There is indeed, no smell at all, even right up close.

I just found this - Programmers as Bees - while using a random link site.

Work beckons again.




Tip-Toeing Through Java

They love their clothes
and demonstrate exquisite cuts
with dances and with touching.
Every child in every photograph
spins flowers
with unseen, ornamental melodies
above the beating bronze.

They touch the bones,
the coolest bodies,
just asleep, a sleeping relative
between the offerings.
They catch the spirits leaving,
exiting the bones for transit
to wait for birth and burnings.

It is cool here for them;
Their bodies catch the wind
and the boat shakes
with their trembling.
The shade is lit by smiles
scoured with fruit.

They are healthy, thin
desirable in song.
They are blank,
empty like some jar
awaiting rain
and temple dressing.

I see them home to Java,
to the metal city
where ones so small
are lost like trees
within this forest.
In rain and wanting food.





The Gold Fields

I am up to my waist,
rooted like the flowers
that I came to count,
burning darkly
as a miller's cloud,
sparked into explosion
by tiny clicks
of steel on steel.

I tracked him
through the capital,
a fat man as an error,
a city bomb,
who eyes the cool, cool student
and dies adrenalised,
so heavy under evil.

The booted, foul-mouthed,
razored men
are nothing matching you.

Wednesday, August 14, 2002


What not to write about

What demons are out there today? I am having trouble sleeping at the moment with all the things going on in the world. Why do I need to worry? There is no chance I will starve (Quite the opposite), no chance I will step on a landmine, no chance I will go without shelter. Sometimes I crave a simpler life. Why is my life so complicated? I don't think it really is; I just think it is so. I want to be like Bill Travers in 'Ring of Bright Water'. It was on TV the other day. We have been to the Western Isles but I don't think there is much chance we will end up there. It was very nice while it lasted but I bet the winters are awful. Even so, if you are inside with a fire and a house you know won't blow away, even a storm is quite nice. I am trying to find a webcam but they are a bit thin on the ground up there. The nearest I can get is this one at Kyle. I stayed in the hotel which you can see in the distance. I took a few days off and just drove up there in a day because I saw Michael Palin in Great Railway Journeys ( why isn't 'Journeys' spelt 'Journies'?). I suppose I should have made an effort and gone by train but it was raining and would have taken two days. Michael went to collect the 'Kyle of Localsh' railway sign. I just went to say I had been. I have been back since then, memorably on one day when the rain was horizontal. The sheep were lying down behind any wall they could find and I was glad that the wind was coming inland as we drove around the coast of Skye. For some good pictures of Scotland go here.

Short one today.


Genre bashing

How about a TV series where the style of each episode changes. For example, you would have it as a sitcom one week and then a Police Drama and then a documentary. The characters would remain throughout as would the overall story. What would change would be the style of writing and the way it was filmed. I got the idea some years ago while watching a Japanese soap on TV (I was in a hotel and very bored). One of the characters was played by someone I was sure had been on a previous show and I began to get the idea that this episode was just another in the same series and that the style of the film had changed. If you look at a recent episode of one of the long-running soaps, the look and feel is completely different from that from a decade ago. This is not only due to changing Technology and writing, but down to what society wants from its soaps. I have just been reminded of the album 'Service' by "yellow magic orchestra" where the songs are split up with what I think are excerpts from a Japanese Soap Opera.

Monday, August 12, 2002



Rope and Vertigo

Another empty lunchtime. A question (which may only interest UK readers). Which foodstuff has a dead and rotting carcass as part of its logo? Think about it and then go here to find out but do NOT press the RED BUTTON - no irony - just DON'T. You will be really sorry.

Visualisation

Jazz and Sirens in a rainy city. None of it means anything to you personally other than it adds components to your own mood. I thought I could live on the streets if they were always like this but I suppose it would become uncomfortable and boring after a while; 'If all the year were playing holidays ...'. No! There is no comfort here; the streets here are cold and all I want to do is to lie in the Sun when the City is empty and listen to that undefined roar that rings the limits of your perception. Remember those cold winter days when you walked through a park somewhere and the traffic in the distance merged into grey noise? How does sound become a homogeneous thing? Light stays distinct; each photon can be teased out of the stream and made to tell you things about its origin, though of course asking a Photon about its birth will make it lie. You cannot know everything about them for they are tricky and a little bit dangerous. Mad even. But sound; add too many sounds together and they become a mess of irrelevant rubbish. Add more and you just get grey noise, like the rush of water in your ears when you hold your head under water or the sound of rubber tyres on the concrete roads they sometimes put down to save money. Section deleted for reasons which will forever remain unvoiced.

Earcom
I look at conflicts where people can be persuaded (usually through some religious pressure) to blow themselves up in order to further a 'cause'. What do they think is going to happen? Will all their enemies shrug their shoulders and say 'Well! They must be passionate about this. Let us sit down and work out what we need to do to make them feel better.' All rubbish isn't it? In my deepest moments I think we should ban religion, but then all the good stuff comes flooding back though click below for another point of view.



I see the people flooding back to the Churches in Russia and remember all the wonderful and uplifting music from Tehillim to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan to Hildegard von Bingen and wonder what the world would be like without all this. People keep telling me that it is only a minority of people who support the violence in the name of religion but it keeps on happening. I know most people just want a quiet life in the woods with the rain.

A change of direction.



I found this while checking that the Fortean Times website was back up.

More at Lunchtime.

Wednesday, August 07, 2002


Almost but not quite, an armful

I gave blood yesterday morning and yesterday afternoon I received a call on my mobile asking for a Mr Hancock. Now this may not mean much to youngsters or Americans but to people of a certain age (though I think even I might be too young to be considered an original fan of the man himself), Mr Hancock as 'The Blood Donor' is the pinnacle of British Comedy. Strange co-incidence that I should be mistaken for him (or at least a man with his name) on the very day I donate. 'Why ... That's very nearly Jungian'.

The Writers of Hancock's Half Hour were Ray Galton and Alan Simpson who also wrote Steptoe and Son, another fabulous British Comedy from the 60s. There was an episode on TV at the weekend where they buy lead from a man (played by Leonard Rossiter) who purports to have been given it by his Vicar when the Church was demolished. The lead is in fact off their own roof.

(Almost) Random Picture of the week. Tell me why it is not random on RdeWeyden@hotmail.com.



(From http://www.vintagetractors.co.nz/index.html)

I have finished the first part of Godel, Escher, Bach (all the MIU stuff and Godel's theorem etc) and have launched into part two which starts with Fermat's last Theorem. This is of course, now proved and maybe puts GEB in a different light but who cares; now we have the Crab and The Anteater. MU is not in the system this time.

A week of short entries because I just can't get myself together. Roll on vb.net.

Monday, August 05, 2002


Wubbo Ockels

I came across this name in one of my old notebooks. There was no indication as to why I had written it down; it stood on a page on its own. I can only imagine that I liked the sound. I thought I had got beyond being amused by foreign names; after all my name is probably amusing in some language. I also found the phrase "Wilderness Taxidermy of Glendale", again appropos of nothing (Who used "Appropos of Nothing" in a song?). The old notebooks contain long poems in handwriting I cannot read, though sometimes a familiar phrase I might have used in a final version appears. They also contain these un-linked phrases which I obviously wrote down because I liked the sound of them.

Friday, August 02, 2002


Wow!

See this at QinetiQ.


Sheep 2002



I just phoned my Brother (who works for Particle Measuring in Malvern) and I asked him whether he had a better view than I do (All I've got at work at the moment is a brick wall). He works in a new business park near some old Nissen huts (co-incidently where my dad was based during part of his National Service) in the middle of fields and close to a Riding School. He said that he could see sheep and horses in the fields outside and then without any sense of the hilarity it might invoke, he said that they had just had "Sheep 2002" over at the showground nearby. I can tell you now that alll of us here have had a good laugh at the site (We are all schoolboys at heart).

Having made all these jokes, it is only fair to say that we used to enjoy visting the Three Counties Show each year when we were kids. I even had an exhibit one year - a tank of tadpoles (well they were almost frogs by the time they got to the show). My Sister used to work for the Council of Small Industries in Rural Areas (COSIRA) which is now the Rural Development Commission or the Countryside Agency and as part of that she had to work for the Blacksmith Competition at the show. Although I did enjoy the show, I get a residual feeling of anxiety because one year when I was quite young, we lost our Mother and I got very anxious, anxious enough to be thinking about going to the police and saying we were lost. My brother of course was quite happy as he filled a plastic bag with every leaflet for farm machinery he could find. Actually I did that as well. When I was older, I went out with a girl who kept goats which she showed at the .. er .. show. Her father was not a Farmer; he worked at the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment (Now QinetiQ) in Malvern; a bit like Bletchley Park I always imagined. She was a vegetarian but seemed to have no qualms about the goats being killed for food for other people. So the Three Counties Show had quite a wide-ranging affect on even quite non-agricultural people.

My brother used to work at the Royal Signals site; he actually did his apprenticeship there. This is the sort of thing they work on. I like to think that the man in the middle is my Girlfriend's father but I am probably wrong. The picture is quite fun though isn't it?



(From http://www.quiprocone.org

Quantum Singularity has been reached. The Black Hole that is lunchtime is over.

Thursday, August 01, 2002


Dzongkha Windows



(From
http://www.btinternet.com/~goldingfamily/DUKW.html)

I've just found these pictures of a Lego Taj Mahal and with that, it is the end of any mention of Lego for today. My Wife and Daughter are at this moment accompanying My Wife's friend and her son on a tour of the Liverpool Docks aboard a DUKW. My daughter has already been on one tour and will shout the company slogan - "Come with us and be a Wacker-Quacker", at the top of her voice whenever she is reminded of it. (For more on DUKWs and a rather good picture, go here). It is rather strange to see the docks from the water level. You feel that the whole city has vanished and you have sunk into a hole. I also learnt many things about Liverpool. I had an Airfix DUKW when I was a kid and it was on of my favourite models - just behind the 1/24th scale Stuka which as you can see, they still make. Now I know about Guernica my enthusiasm for Stukas is somewhat diminished. Good luck with the French by the way. I only put the link in because the picture is good but you may find some interest. I was going to write about my first Airfix kit but that sounded Naff. I have several unopened kits in the attic, many years old, still awaiting construction so I think all enthusiasm has vanished.


More GOD-Over-Djinn

I want to build some sort of hideaway. My daughter got more Big Lego Bricks for her 4th birthday which means that as an architect (though obviously not as a builder) she has enough bricks to reach the ceiling, in an unstable way. Of course, I have to put anything other than the lowest bricks onto the tower. Unfortunately, there are not enough of the biggest bricks which means that the cross section of the tower is only one lego element wide at the top and very unstable. It will fall at the slightest movement. Currently it is only just taller than she is but it does have a platform at the top for the placement of small dolls and other anthropomorphised things. I have found myself wanting to be up there myself, able to shut out the world and just look out at what is going on. It struck me that this is just like the 'hermits-on-a-pole' thing though I think I would require some sort of shelter on this pole. In the virtual lego on the PC, it is possible to build a tower many bricks high which is perfectly stable AND then build an entire house on that. Of course in the real world, I would be petrified of living in such a structure even if common-sense told me it was perfectly safe (though it wouldn't be). Despite having a reasonable appreciation of talls buildings and high bridges, I have not inherited my Father's complete lack of fear of heights. I know he is an engineer but such disregard for gravity is weird. I suppose it is like the Native Americans who work on the sky-scrapers in New-York without any fear. It must simply be exposure to the situation rather than anything inbuilt.

Try this experiment. Imagine you are designing some sort of labyrinth. You draw the walls on paper; they only have to be one line thick. Imagine that the real thing will be built of stone and roofed but located in some desert where it is hot and windy during the day and below freezing at night. There are no doors anywhere; any openings are straight onto the outside world. It must be very simple to start. Then imagine where you would have to sit to feel sheltered from the outside world. Keep drawing walls until you are comfortable with where you are to be placed within the building. This isn't part of the experiment but you might like to look at this page on Mathematics in Art and Architecture which has a bit about the Chartres labyrinth and so much more. Can I do this course?

The ultimate idea is to just be; not recognising even the methods which you use to reach that state of enlightenment. It is to deny everything that allows you to reach a state where you can deny everything. Sounds like double-think to me but at the same time strangely compelling. Still, if it nullifies the pain of existence.