Orwell im Suus Sepulchrum Rotatus est

Listening to a Wiretapper CD

If any of you have managed to reach here despite having an education in excess of that possessed by the robots and spammers who normally trawl these depths, then do not bother to tell me that the latin up there is not correct. It is for pretentious ambience rather than anything else.

I am quite enjoying Rendezvous with Rama in a sort of non-threatening everyday sort of a way though I am beginning to get slightly concerned that technology that is readily available to us today is not even thought of for the 22nd century. For instance, the explorers of Rama send in time-delayed flares to allow them to photograph the inside of the cylinder but surely they would have remote-control vehicles that would be able to map objects in 3d and allow the creation of computer models. I know that the ship that Rendezvous with Rama (see what I did there?) has been diverted, at short-notice, from another mission, but that mission was checking and emplacing beacons on Asteroids which surely must involve quite a bit of 3d mapping anyway. Not sure why I bother with this pedantry – it’s a good book and without any real drama, manages to drag you in – a tale told by ambience rather than by plot or character. I look forward to the film though if it turns it into Star Wars I think I might be a little disappointed.

We watched a gem of a programme on BBC 4 yesterday – a discussion in the form of a contest about the work of Walter Sickert and John Singer Sargent. I have to admit that I had not heard of Sargent though I think I have probably seen some of his work. It seemed at first that these two artists had been chosen for comparison simply because they were both at their prime in Edwardian times but it soon became obvious that they were absolutely complementary to each other – Sargent the dashing socialite and recorder of the celebs of the time with Sickert as the recorder of low-life darkness and despair. You can easily see how various levels of connection to Jack the Ripper have been made for Sickert – he documented a world that in a film director’s slap dashed stereotyping is exactly what we imagine was the background to the 1880s’ murders. The contrast between the wonderful, fairy-tale light of Sargent’s Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose and the dark, smoke-smudged painting of Sickert’s Ennui is intense and yet both describe the same world. The Sickert paintings remind me of the early part of Prufrock.