Friday, May 24, 2002

Looking for the Beast of Bodmin

I am currently at the Post Office in The Minions which is high up on Bodmin Moor close to The Hurlers standing stones. We are going to walk to them in minute though the wind is blowing quite strongly. If there are no more posts then I have been caught by the jetstream and am probably somewhere over Albania.

For all things mysterious and possible related to The Beast of Bodmin visit here.

We are staying at Boscastle right next to Tintagel so with this page you get loads of postcards instead of just one. Martin is probably calling me a cheapskate for using the Internet in place of the Post Office but you may get a real postcard when I can locate a pen.

We visited the Eden Project the other day - it was pouring with rain. The bubbles are very impressive in a sort of large scale McAlpine engineering sort of a way but I couldn't help thinking it was a corporate vision of Environmental Friendliness. My daughter liked it and keeps going on about the bubbles but it was far too crowded to get any real sense of what it was like. What it must be like in the middle of high season I can't imagine.

Time to finish now. A walk up to the standing stones beckons.

Friday, May 17, 2002

Music for Airports

All possible collages exist here. All possible musics will never exist. I want to teach machines to read. It can't be that difficult, after all some machines I have known have a nicer personality and higher IQ than some people I have met. This page, today is for all possible ideas starting with the first thing which comes into my head. At ..... this moment, that is what do the pedals ona piano do? They extend the note, so extending this idea and those of Michael Brook ("Cobalt Blue"), you get the infinite piano. Of course the sampler makes this totally possible. In one ear, from one channel goes medieval lute music and in the other goes the sound of a fan. I am not ill but is this not the rebirth of Ambient music? Stephen Dedalus is not alive but his head is open to all of us. Stately and plump I think, descending a stair but this is not him. Did his father, his author scream "This is Dublin Calling"? or was that another Joyce? the reader of the statistics in nineteen-eighty-four; the chocolate ration has been altered but no-one knows whether it is up or down. It will bear no relation to the actual amount you receive anyway. Tokyo Rose - there was another one - a traitor; but she was Japanese wasn't she? How can you be a traitor in your own country supporting your own Government. Ah! but she was American. Where do we go when we are asleep? I am not aware of my own existence but I am still here and this paragraph is more like a dream than anything else I experience. Back to samplers. Infinite Collage - sound pictures and bad references - we are the KLF. Why bother with a link to the KLF? They will not exist in a few days. Maybe they never existed. Maybe they burnt themselves out of existence on an island somewhere along with their bank-account. Did that really happen? Madness. Maybe they burned play-money and sent the real stuff to something useful - like me. I should check my bank-account. What about that man who destroyed ALL of his possessions? Michael Landy's Breakdown. Michael Landy's Breakdown. Two links for two articles. A brave man. I cannot throw out a rail ticket without feeling anxious. The absence of something as art is probably not a new idea. I will destroy all my thoughts and by having an empty mind I will be the ultimate art work. I have done this bit before. Nothing here is real. What do you think? Oh for breakfast in that pub, a pint of porter and then crack with The Third Policeman. This is my copy - or at least a copy of my copy. The other version is not a copy of my copy and therefore is not the same book. I suspect some of the words are actually different but I am becoming one with my copy and it is very difficult to tell where the book ends and I start. Same with Ulysses I imagine. Old Ulysses turned up in the Divine Comdey I think but I am not supposed to know anything about that before I read it so I will stop there. I don't know anything about that. It just happens when I hit the keyboard. Automatic Typing you could call it. I was going to put a link, but they are all kooks who do this. Don't believe a word they say. It is all rubbish. Klee, Kandinski and Chagall. Now they knew how to do things automatically. Kandinski was a fellow. All perfect, every one. Not a brushstroke wrong. Beautiful. Andrew Wyeth might paint real things but he knows how to add a surreal note. What exactly is Christina doing? I know that she has a slight disability. Does that change the picture for you? Not for me. She must be so happy in that field but is something bad going on in the house or is she just being called in for dinner. Grits? You only have those for breakfast surely. Re-invent the past and we cannot say anything. Christina's World is our world after all. Too much Football. Too much of everything. I have to go home now because my head is full. I can never emtpy out everything. The Grid - Pruitt-Igoe - one bad building made by the same man who made two good buildings. He did not live to see the two good buildings destroyed. Maybe I have the wrong man, but the right buildings. Sentience is a privilege that only humans know. Find all the links on this page and you must be me. It is nice to see you again after all these years. "My God! It's full of stars". The ending of that film is like now. When in time are we and can we light the whole world? Re-invent a tense and define time-travel. We have no visitors from the future so they must be returning to other possible universes. Or maybe they are not returning at all because we never will be able to. Spin a mass the size of a black hole at nearly the speed of light and you might manage it but only with anti-matter. An·ni·hi·la·tion - thats the thing. (I couldn't be bothered to take out the dots and I couldn't spell it without looking it up). Create a lot of anti-matter and the Universe becomes your Lobster or maybe Turtle. Alll the way down they are - right to the big bang. That is the end of everything in one direction. Time has no direction you see but we do so the end for us is just one boundary. Maybe time has three dimensions and there is another end of time perpendicular to us. It is not here. There is plenty of time left in all directions.

Something to do when it rains or Experiments in vertical takeoff

Oblique Strategies must have been used to write "Red Frame, White Light". As you may have guessed, I located the OMD Peel Sessions and this is the currently playing track. I can only despair at the fact that OMD did not continue with these off-the-wall songs. When you name a band (VCLXI) after the number on a valve on the sleeve for Radioactivity by Kraftwerk, you have a serious outlook on music - or a very sad life - maybe both.

Ideas Collage

I have added an additional media to my list of all possible collages. Ideas. How do you record an idea as part of an artwork? A collection of Memes could just be a book, but does the book have to be true? Could it be a list of completely fictitious ideas like a collection of pretend film music ("Passengers") or the life of a non-existent artist (Nat Tate). or a website of made-up recollections and ideas(TRVDWCP and others). Chaos will build up a completely separate world that seems to exist but is simply a version of our own. Quantum Theory will choose a single alternative reality and we will experience real life as the interference patterns between the real world and our made up version of it. This is beginning to sound like the rubbish that all those early 90s French Philosophers were criticised for. Genuine scientists were getting annoyed at the pseudo-scientific claptrap which supposed intellectuals were writing about. eg "The real world is a sort of artifical pomegranate where life is the soft juicy pith and we are the seeds embedded within it" - yuk. The whole of France was taken in by these charlatans. I am not having a go at the likes of Sartre or Mrs Jean-Paul Sartre, just the fact that what we see through as rubbish in most cases seems to have made it to main-stream acceptability. Never forget that all Science was once seen as "Natural Philosophy" so why should Philosophy be outside normal scientific method (even if you have to apply scientific method to concepts such as existence, the nature of thought or reality or religion. Blind Faith is worth little.

Thursday, May 16, 2002

Leonard Bernstein doing the vacuuming with the lights off.

I need a picture to keep things interesting.



From http://www.steroelab.co.uk

Currently listening to Emperor Tomato Ketchup which is true space jazz. I meant to bring the John Peel session recordings of OMD but it has got lost somewhere in the house. I listened to it last night. OMD have become the beacon of my early eighties existence. "Souvenir" makes me cry because of the memories associated with it - a very apt name as well? And Julia's song. It all brings back half-remembered images of rain and college and bedsit blues. I watched all my schoolmates go through fetishes for a progression of various bands from Led Zeppelin to Spandau Ballet via the Sex Pistols but the Kraftwerky electronic New wave was my thing. Julian Cope - go there. Which reminds me - "The Modern Antiquarian" - go there too. The book is a beautiful object - a vital and academic tome. We visited Callanish one summer. We went during the day first and it was very busy, though even then we found it quite spiritual. That maybe just the internal feelings created by the thought of the distance in time between it being built and you actually seeing it but it was there nonetheless. Of course, I wanted to photograph it without all the people there and attempted to take all the pictures when people were hidden behind the stones. In the end I got fed up and we decided to come back very early one morning (we were staying about 20 miles away) and we got there on one of the few overcast days of our entire holiday. I took loads of black and white photos trying very hard to get the exposures correct. I was happy. When we got home and had the pictures developed we had about three films worth of Callanish and spookily, not one of them had any people in them; I had managed to avoid everyone. Maybe that detracts from the real purpose, obviously I thought that loads of 20th century people would not be cool enough for such an ancient monument.

Here is one of the pictures I took. (A Join-up as you can see)





From - http://www.bbc.co.uk/homeground/the_village_in_the_stones.shtm

I watched a program about Avebury called "The Village in The Stones". I knew that some of the stones had been re-constructed but I didn't realise the extent to which the whole village had been re-modelled in order to set the stones in an environment like that when they were erected. Some of the Villagers who were moved just before and after the war are still quite bitter about what Alexander Keiller and, after him, the National Trust did to Avebury.

Just look at the difference between Julian Cope's website and The National Trust's. I support the National Trust - sometimes - but they are a bit old-fashioned. History is about the people who lived in houses - not the houses and definitely NOT rows of supposedly genuine jars of Lavender Oil and Olde Worlde Fudge. Of course, the Elizabethans had nothing better to do than bath with Lavender Oil and eat Fudge. Having said that, "Treats from the Edwardian House" with Hugh Fearnley-Wittingstall looks good tonight, though why a firm of solicitors has decided to make a film about early 20th century food is beyond me.

Belle et La Vie

Wednesday, May 15, 2002

Can you find Llandanwg Church?

To Llanbedr

This is a virtual tour of quite a large slice of North Wales though I know it because we used to spend holidays in a cottage called Hedd in LLandanwg which is just down the coast from Harlech. I have started off up by the end of the road up to the Roman Steps above Cym Bychan. If you get here and there are not many people, this place is so quiet it is scary. Even with a few people there, any loud conversation seems to swallowed up. We went there once when we were the only people and we got caught up in some surreal sheep drive. A huge flock of sheep seemed to appear from nowhere and every one stood there just watching us; swivelling their heads as we walked in a small amount of panic back to the car.

The poem "National Theatre of Wales" which I posted some while back was written about the Small Theatre outside Harlech which you may be able to find if you get to Harlech. Directions - down into Llanbedr - turn right onto the road to Harlech - just before you reach Harlech turn down the road towards Porthmadog and the theatre is on your left. I know it's not the National Theatre of Wales but that is poetic Licence - literally. They have a virtual tour as well which is linked from the main tour. I went to see a puppet version of "Hiawatha" there. when I was about fourteen but the poem is really just about the general atmosphere of those holidays. The house we stayed in was a white clapboard house and creaked in the wind. We were told that in the very worst weather, the waves broke over the dunes and splashed the windows. From the dining table we could see a great swathe of the beach and the top of the Lleyn Peninsula. At night we could see the lights of Criccieth which sparkled as the wind moved water vapour about in the bay; my brother and I used to call it "twinkle town". Once a small sailing boat was driven onto the rocks right opposite the house and the family on board had to climb to the safety of the beach. I don't remember what happened to the boat but we found various bits equipment on the beach later. I think my dad found a Stanley Knife which he probably still has. We found a distress flare which we aimed to let off but bottled out when we realised that the Royal Aircraft Establishment across the river at the entrance to the small harbour would probably scramble some sort of rescue craft. We eventually and very foolishly fired the flare into a sand dune. This reminds me that may brother actually climbed through the fence of the Air Station to steal a piece of a crashed Canberra aircraft about 100 yards inside the perimeter. (He once also pinched a small piece of a Jaguar fighter which crashed near Malvern while the RAF team were still digging it up.) I have just found out that the very Canberra is listed here so on the web I have found out that my brother has a piece of either WH887 or WK145. The road to the beach on the other side of the harbour entrance goes across a causeway the middle of which lies at the end of the Air station runway. We once stood right under a Canberra coming into land not quite like Wayne and Garth on the bonnet at the end of the runway but close. It was bright yellow which I thought at the time would make it a very easy target.

There was a debate recently about a Canberra pilot who raised the undercarriage of his aircraft while still on the runway as a protest against the British and French Invasion or Eygpt in 1956. My dad was in Suez. He did his National Service in the Royal Engineers. I used to say that the Army taught him how to blow up bridges and that the council taught him how to build them. I seem to remember him saying that he passed by the Statue of De-Lesseps just before it was blown up. I will have to ask him. Anyway for a description of said event by the man who set the charges, go here.
Disappearing in a puff of Logic

From the "Talking Point" on the BBC News website

From looking at the anti-euthanasia postings in this forum, it seems that most of the arguments are based on quite flimsy logic. Thus platitudes like; 'the sanctity of life', or abstract concepts such as 'mother Nature taking its course' are too easily bandied around. What does "Mother Nature taking its course" actually mean? Surely humans have the ability to intervene in any number of moral and ethical issues purely by virtue of their sentience? Surely if Mother Nature were to take her course more often then there'd be no room for life prolonging procedures such as transplants and resuscitation in A and E departments. Surely the way forward with such a contentious issue is to keep an open mind, engage in dialogue & be pro choice?
Martin K, London, UK


I sometimes feel unable to put controversial stuff on the post but this posting sums up a very dangerous subject. As you have guessed what I really mean is that this sums up my feelings on the subject. It seems that "Sentience" in some peoples' minds is actually blind faith and fingers in the ears when other people express opinions. Arguments about God fall down now because of the awareness of other Religions. Who is right? "I am right and you are wrong" seems like a cop-out. Religion is a door to spirituality and different people use different doorways. The basic tenets of most religions (might I add even Witchcraft) are found in what have traditionally been regarded as "Morally Correct". The ADDITIONAL tenets of "my religion is the one true one" seem to be added by various bands of humans to justify their own life and culture and deny those of others. Maybe God does create the basic moral aspects of ALL the religions. It is us fallible and weak human beings who pervert them for our own ends. I remember reading about attempts by philosophers to determine what was the oldest language by bringing up infants in the absence of language, the argument being that the "right" language for humans would be the first and this is what an uncorrupted baby would develop. All rubbish of course. But extend this to finding the "True Religion" and you show up the absurdity of both.

On first looking into Chapman’s Homer

Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

I read this last night in a book of happy poems edited by Wendy Cope. It has two links to recent reading. "Then felt I like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken;" was quoted by Isaac Asimov in his book about Astronomy - "Eyes on the Universe" and the last bit about Cortez and "a peak in Darien" is used at the beginning of "Swallows and Amazons". All these links exist in the world and are just waiting for co-incidence in time to be revealed. I wrote something about this after the bit about natives of Nottingham but it got lost in the posting. Nigel, who is a colleague here, said that he felt that the revelation of such obscure links detracts from the information. I think I see what he means; the world is a mysterious place and the fact that communication now makes these obscurities more available to us, takes away some of the mystery which makes the world interesting. If you prove or disprove the existence of, say, the Loch Ness Monster, you remove all the mystery which has made it so attractive to people. Oh well - All is Blue.






Monday, May 13, 2002

Telescopes II

The telescope was £120 and looked like it would probably infect the whole house with something very unsavoury. ("What's that green mould growing across the Moon Carruthers?."). I didn't even bother going in to see if it was an astronomical telescope or not. It was definitely an Astronomical price anyway. I'll have to make do with the Binoculars I bought from my Dad. When I was very little (under 5) I had a pair of my Mother's binoculars. I remember dropping them in the mud at the Attenborough Nature reserve. I think it was the first time I can remember being in big trouble though it might not have actually been really BIG TRUB. It's funny how you remember really trivial events as earth-shattering at the time. It seems to have made me sad just because they were my Mother's binoculars and she is dead now. I don't really want to ask my dad what actually happened but I know I was never in really hot water even when my brother and I cut down a tree in the garden. We didn't lie, just like George Washington. The difference was that we were caught in the act so we couldn't deny it.

SOS and GON? The link? The light of Cigarettes in a dark locale. Now you know.

Alice the Tree.

I got Dead Famous: Isaac Newton and his Apple from the library this weekend and finished it in about two hours. These books are excellent, a kids version of the Beginners guides. There are loads of things in it which I didn't know about Newton. There are plenty more in this series. The ones on Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots are excellent but they are all un-put-downable. I am waiting for the one on Joan-Of-Arc. The books realise that Kids like the gory bits. My wife who taught Infants children, tells me that one group of children were particularly taken with the gory details of the preservation of Egyptian Mummies. I think I remember her telling me about them also particularly "enjoying" hanging, Drawing and Quartering. I hope that gives you an idea of how gory these books actually are. Anyway, I like to think of myself as having a scientific mind but the book on Newton gave the clearest view of Gravitation I have ever seen. We seem to have conveniently ignored his more outlandish ideas which bordered on Witchcraft. The understanding of the world starts with Magic and works its way towards science. Anything which cannot be satisfactorily explained must lie within the realm of "magic". Scientific method could be thought off as the shifting and expansion of the window of truth over reality. I like to think, however, that some of the reality may never be totally explainable.

The book made be begin to think about trying to read my calculus book again. I did calculus at School but my degree did not require it so I forgot it all. I can remember roughly how to differentiate a standard xy formula but sines, cosines and tangents are a mystery. I have just found a very good site here. Am I sad? Most of management these days think that IT is a matter of addition and subtraction - they don't even get as far as powers. In reality most real world situations require an element of Calculus. I don't mean literally though I did once use Standard Deviation in a WIP system and although the guys using the system said they were never really aware of what Standard deviation was in their tracking, the figure I provided on the report seemed to "mean something" in terms of the efficiency of the system.
Dangerous Stakhanovite Tendencies



I forgot to mention something last week which was one of the most moving things I have seen on TV for a long time. It was Dan Cruickshank visiting Afghanistan earlier this year to see what had happened to the various wonders of Afghan culture over the last few years. I thought at first that it was a bit premature to concentrate on a few statues and paintings while a whole people were still suffering from every kind of privation. However, after a few minutes it became clear that Afghan popular culture had recovered remarkably well at least in the capital - Kabul Koffee Kulture ( Probably tea but I do like alliteration) is alive, thriving and rather attractive in a backpacker / adventurer sort of way. What was really moving was the extent of the efforts made by ordinary Afghans to safeguard treasures from the Taliban drive to remove all references to cultures other than their own limited version of history. Dan first visited, the Afghan National Gallery where the curator had risked his life to save the paintings. He had covered up all images of living beings which were banned as Iconography. The water colour has now been carefully removed to reveal the images. In Kabul Museum, many beautiful statues, Buddhas and other wonderful things had been smashed. He held in his hand half of the face from one of the smaller statues and it was heart-breaking; even more so later when he bargained for a copy of the Museum handbook in a small roadside bookshop and found a black and white photo of the very statue he had just been holding.

Any worries that this programme was inappropriate in the face of so much suffering were dispelled by the comments of a local "Commander" who made a speech which seemed genuine even through the translator. The main theme was that stealing the past of a country was one of the worst things you can do. It's evil to steal national treasures to sell them, but it its worse to destroy them simply to remove references to them. It is re-inventing the past like 1984 or more nearly analogous Napoleon's re-working of the "commandments " in "Animal Farm".

The final point was won by the Angels. The crew travelled over dangerous territory to visit the Bamiyan Buddhas ( I couldn't bring myself to put in any pictures of the Buddhas being blown up.) The giant spaces left by the Statues are powerful in themselves. They speak far more of religious Tolerance than the original images ever could. I have never been able to find a use for "the sound of one hand clapping" until now. That space describes the people who created it by their destruction ("Hate leads to suffering") just as the Buddhas themselves defined the people who created them. Good wins by either the presence of the Buddhas because they are images of peace and enlightenment or by their absence because this condemns their destruction. Excuse the mixed mythology but Siva wins every time.

Friday, May 10, 2002

Telescopes and Terrapins

I got the bus home the other day and it stopped briefly outside an "antique" shop in the window of which was a wooden telescope and tripod. I was going to stop by yesterday to have a closer look but there were road works which made the whole area a mess. Everyone here seems to think that I already have a telescope and have been asking me what I think of the planetary lineup. I don't think that any telescope would be able to get two of the planets involved in one view so the question is really irrelevant. Having said that, the naked eye arrangement is quite spectacular and if you think about it for a few seconds, you get a real idea of the arrangement of the plaqnets in their orbits; you can almost see the white orbital paths in your mind to give you a 3d view. My dad had a 50x mag terrestrial telescope - probably still has it - which he occasionally (too occasionally) set up with a clamp on the window sill so we could look at the moon. We never looked at anything other than the moon; I don't know why. I once "borrowed" the telescope and set it up in the school chemistry lab pointing out in a random direction. We located a Motorway service station which must have been at least 10 miles away and could see the lorry drivers in the canteen and a tractor in the field beyond. I seem to remember it being quite spooky to see all these people at such a distance. Its almost as spooky as seeing live messages on the PC or Blogs which have just been updated. I know that anyone growing up now will find all these distant communications as normal but will they get the sense of size in the world that we have? I try to tell myself that I can understand the distances in the Solar system in my head but get beyond that and the distance is just too vast to comprehend. I try imagining a cube of space which is 10x bigger on a side than the cube I am imagining but that only works so far. Even the zoom out from the Earth which was at the beginning of "Contact", fails because the zoom speed seems too consistent when in reality you would be accelerating at an enourmous rate (it was still jaw-dropping though).

Why Terrapins? Nigel who works here, comes from Chester and I incorrectly guessed that a Native of Chester is a "Chelonian" when it is in fact a "Cestrian". I have just found out that the unfortunate name for a Native of Nottingham is a "Snot". I had to ask my Dad that but afterwards while searching for the fact I learned that "Snot" is what they call men in Estonia who's first child is a girl. The world is full of these strange links most of which can only become evident because the internet puts all this information within easy reach.
A Very fine Mess Stanley

I was looking for a site on the programme "Omnibus" and only found a very limited list of old programmes on the BBC site. However I have found a subject for today's entry. I am afraid it is art again. One of my favourite paintings is The Resurrection, Cookham I am afraid that this online version at the Tate is far too small to give you any real insight into the depth of this work. The painting is 5.5 metres wide by 3 metres high and filled one wall of the ground floor gallery when it was exhibited at the Tate in Liverpool. I used to spend long periods just looking at at and every time I found more detail. At first sight it doesn't seem to have that much detail; it just seems to boil with things happening, so much so, that you begin to think it is a film rather than a painting. It is so far removed from the horrors of Jheronimus Bosch. that you begin to wonder how one religion can bring forth two such visions of the same event. In analysis, I suppose it is because I am familiar with the environment of Cookham and I am not familiar with 15th/16th century Europe. Spencer's paintings seem to be about making religion familiar and knowable and attractive rather than using fear to keep people in line. The Cookham Resurrection suggests a colourful but comfortable summer with extensive foliage and hiding places for children. Sometimes, when the worst of the modern world throws up something to worry about, I imagine a shady hiding place in a wood somewhere; it can be raining which is even better. When I was a child, although there were things which made me unhappy, they never lasted too long. Nowadays, worries extend because my mind analyses them. I keep telling myself that I should accept that there is pain and worry in everyone's life. It is only by accepting this that you can begin to rise above it. This, of course is Buddhism :-

The Four Noble Truths

At the core of the Buddha's enlightenment was the realization of the Four Noble Truths: (1) Life is suffering. This is more than a mere recognition of the presence of suffering in existence. It is a statement that, in its very nature, human existence is essentially painful from the moment of birth to the moment of death. Even death brings no relief, for the Buddha accepted the Hindu idea of life as cyclical, with death leading to further rebirth. (2) All suffering is caused by ignorance of the nature of reality and the craving, attachment, and grasping that result from such ignorance. (3) Suffering can be ended by overcoming ignorance and attachment. (4) The path to the suppression of suffering is the Noble Eightfold Path, which consists of right views, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right-mindedness, and right contemplation. These eight are usually divided into three categories that form the cornerstone of Buddhist faith: morality, wisdom, and samadhi, or concentration.

"Buddhism," Microsoft(R) Encarta(R) 98 Encyclopedia. (c) 1993-1997 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.


I am not sure about all that right views etc. How do you decide what is right? Maybe when it is "right" you just know. Kids do many things which are wrong but most of them know that a wrong thing is a wrong thing. Maybe we just know that a right thing is a right thing. Maybe the pain is caused by living your life doing wrong things but knowing that they are wrong. The trouble is these days that it is pretty obvious that the meek are not inheriting the earth and that the only way to get ahead is to stand on everybody else's toes. I wear soft shoes though.

Of course, you have to visit here :-




All this of course links cleanly back to resurrection.

Thursday, May 09, 2002

Old joke - even older source

"Back on your heads, Lads" is the punchline to a very old joke which I heard as soon as I started working here. As I have told you the punchline, I only need a general overview of the rest of the Joke. It involves a man who is sent to Hell. As his punishment, he is shown into a room where a large group of men are standing around up to their ankles in excrement drinking tea. He joins them and is handed a cuppa. He thinks to himself that this punishment is not so bad as the Tea is warm and the conversation is quite interesting. Suddenly, a bell rings and a voice shouts "Right lads. Tea Break's over. Back on your heads". Quite funny maybe but it was only last year that I found out that the Joke is actually based on something a lot older. There was an Omnibus program on about Boticelli's drawings for Dante's "Divine Comedy" and it described the scene in part of the eighth circle of hell where Corrupt Clergy were forced to crouch down with their heads in holes in the ground. Ones of the sinners turns out to be a Pope who's fate will be to be pushed further down by the Pope who comes after him and so on. Ouch! I suspect the excrement part of the joke comes from the section next door where flatterers are immersed in it. Click here to read further and for a set of wonderful pictures go here.

così de l'atto suo, per li occhi infuso
ne l'imagine mia, il mio si fece,
e fissi li occhi al sole oltre nostr'uso
.

The drawings of Dante and Beatrice rising through Paradise are enchanting though the whole thing from Inferno to Paradiso is quite brilliant. I'd like to say that the Dante of Botticelli's drawings is the sort of guy you would like to meet and talk to. Indeed, going on the complexity and cultural diversity of "The Divine Comedy" his conversation would be interesting. However, I suspect bearing in mind that even Flatterers end up in Hell (Not even Pugatory) he might find fault with almost everyone. Nice try, Alighieri but you won't get me into Hell just for Self-reference.

I've just been looking at the various illustrations for "The Divine Comedy". The one by Botticelli for the First and Second Bolgias has six instances of Virgil and Dante around the two Bolgias. It is as if Botticelli wanted to make an animation of the whole thing. You could edit out all but one pair from each of six copies of this painting and then slow-dissolve them the get a sort of Renaissance movie. I seem to remember that other images by Botticelli have the same extended time period. Excuse the jump from high to low culture but this reminds me of Giles Cartoons. There is one which especially reminds me of this time compression. It shows a pedestrian who, after thinking about some Government Road safety campaign has returned to the pavement as shown by his U-turn in the middle of the road while a huge pile up is in mid air frozen at some point of contact. Bet you never thought I could link those two. Now if Giles ever referred to Dante we will have a backward link.

A l'alta fantasia qui mancò possa;
ma già volgeva il mio disio e 'l velle,
sì come rota ch'igualmente è mossa,
l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle.
Nietzsche Schmeitzsche

Nietzsche does seem to have far too many letters just to specify that particular sound - surely "Neetsha" would be much better.

The reason for references to the aforesaid German Philosopher is this blog which is a blog of note and links FWN, Stephen Fry and Harry Potter (though only obliquely) on the front page. I am not sure "Small Pieces Loosely Joined" is actually the book for me but the style of the references to it have some power. All the references to various philosophers seem to add up to pretension but then again what is the difference between an intellectual and one of Private Eye's Pseudo Intellectuals? I particularly like this month's :-

Wales and Wessex services to Looe are delayed owing to a bovine incursion on the Branch line.
BBC Ceefax transport update

There are of course two levels of Pseud's corner. Those who write and those who are written about. There! Is that pompous enough to get a mention. I do remember one entry in PC which I think commented that something was bad enough to get a mention on Pseud's Corner in a way that made itself a candidate. I love self-reference and for an interesting perspective on that very subject, click here.

It is very quiet here again and all those strange office sounds which I mentioned a few entries ago have returned suddenly to my head. Somewhere there is a disk drive which is unstable and making a wobbly sound like a faint beep which fades up and down. There is an undefined hiss like air escaping but right now that is it. All the other sounds have faded right away. In ten minutes the office will be full - well as full as it can be after our recent decimation (Technically only the removal of 10% of a number). I think that I can hear a wolf howling in the far distance but that is unlikely to be the real source. I think I have a photograph of this office from some years ago which I will scan in at some point so you can get a picture with this sound.

Office Worker's Relaxing Task for today. If you have a right angled desk with screens behind it, then curl up underneath it during your break. It is wonderfully relaxing and if you get any funny comments from your colleagues, then tell them to do the same. Claustrophilia is the word for it. This word is not in MW but it is out there on the web and there is even a play with that name.




Wednesday, May 08, 2002

Trying to be more like Kurt

I read somewhere that it is impossible to tell if a collage is a Genuine Kurt Schwitters or not. If real, they are worth hundreds of thousands of pounds; if fake, they are worthless. Does this not then apply to any other art. Who owns the genuine Simon Patterson of "The Great Bear". As this was a limited edition (50) lithograph, what is our poster? Is it a print? I know of course, that it counts as a print, but if the print is made by the same process, then is it not original? If the original was done on a computer then it does not really exist anyway, and if it was done as a cut-and-paste (It looks too good to be that), then the original will not look like the print. What makes one copy of a photograph the original? Why would you pay thousands of pounds to get one copy of the photograph when you can get a copy which has all the detail of the original? That is why the whole point of art these days is the idea behind it rather than the talent that goes into producing it. When a painting was the only copy, then the value was in the talent that went into producing that single copy. Now, art has to be at the cutting edge and the only thing to praise is the idea behind it. Which is why a walk from one defined place to another is considered art. I wanted to put a framed plaque on our old house declaring the whole thing to be a work of art because of the changes which I introduced to it. A sort of limited edition of one. I could even go as far as describing my brain with its unique experience (and I do mean unique as no Brain in this Universe has experienced the exact same life - see the previous entry about defining brain states) as a unique piece of artwork. I further define that anything which I create is a work of art. I am probably not the first to define myself as an artwork by virtue of my uniqueness which means that the value is lost. I could find something that no-one else has yet suggested - that EVERYONE's brains and the experiences taken together are works of art. In that case, the credit and the value resides with me. Unfortunately, I am not sure there is a law of copyright or patent on this sort of declaration and so the daily struggle continues.

I could define that random fragments of my brain experience are artworks and create a sort of experience collage, backwards and forwards in time and space, which leads me back nicely to Herr Schwitters. Can you tell which of the experiences that I have described on various Blog entries are actually mine and which are not? Unless you can monitor key stokes and then tie them to a particular pattern which identifies me, then you will not be able to tell what is "REAL" and what is "FAKE". I have not knowingly lied on any of these blogs and I am not from Crete.

Combining Text and Images

My scrapbooks have fold outs in them and I am not sure how to reproduce that sort of functionality here. I am sure we are looking at some sort of Java or VBScript. The scrapbooks really have only pictures in them, though of course there are words in them. The Blogs are obviously mainly words with occasional pictures. How do I mix the two? I would scan each double page from the scrapbooks but I suspect that the images are copyright. I sometimes try to write in between the pictures but my handwriting does not seem to suit the style. I am looking for some sort of Unified Field Theory - The combination of Poetry, Scrapbook and Blog. Which reminds me that I have not written any poetry for some time.

A strange feeling that this blog has the voice of Will Self. I just looked for a picture of Mr Self and came up with the link above which links in very nicely (Though with no credit to any theory of Mr Jung - life is just a string of co-incidences) with what I have been ranting on about. Nice to see the Passport photo halfway down which links with "Amelie" and nice to see Mr Self at the bottom doing his inscrutable best to be himself.

Ok Lads - back on your heads.

Tuesday, May 07, 2002

No Sleep 'til bedtime

This BBC Article is quite funny. However, the link to Tony Hawks' website is even funnier. I am almost tempted to email him myself.
The Young Ones - Series 1 - Episode 3

Martin has just been on the receiving end of some surreal sametime chats. I am on helpdesk again and the world looks a nice shade of boring grey. The banana chat was especially interesting but I think Martin has things to get on with so I will leave off for the time being. I brought my scrapbook in with me today as I had some A4 docs in it I wanted to keep flat. The cover is "Nothing - A Special Report" which sums up here quite well. Maybe it will turn itself inside out. Thank goodness for :-



Cooler than a Popsicle at the South Pole in June.

Turning somthing inside out reminds me of a wonderful book I read when I was a kid. There is no reference to it that I can find other than in a dry list of books. It was called "Fairy Grammar" and was about a very Middle Class boy of about eight, who did not know his parts of speech. He was persecuted (gently) by a slate pencil called "Rammarg" who would make the boy unable to use various parts of speech. In the first chapter, he was unable to use Nouns which, I hope you will agree, limits human speech quite a bit. As he learned these various parts of speech by his inability to use them, his parents became increasingly worried about these problems. Shades of "The man who mistook his wife for a hat"? At the end when all the Doctors have given up (like they did for Henry King and his bits of string), the Slate pencil turns itself inside out and upside down revealing that it is in fact a very lovely (though rather Victorian) Fairy - and "Rammarg" is "Grammar" backwards.

The details of the book are as follows :-

Carpenter, J. Harold
Fairy Grammar - 210.08; [Copyright Renewals] - 442.15.

but as I said this is the only reference I can find to it. My Dad may have it somewhere.

Strangely, while looking for "Rammarg", I found this page of backward English. Maybe, the links at the bottom should be avoided if you are of a nervous dispostion.






Trying for a daily journal entry



(From
http://www.mystudios.com/vermeer/12/vermeer-girl-interrupted.html

It occurs in almost every diary - A resolution to make an entry every day. It is rare that this happens and certainly not in my case. Also, The word "journalis a lot sexier than "diary". Of course "log" fits in this position much better but it has so many implications - it implies a technical list rather than a personal one. The Enterprise captains always distinguish between personal and ship's logs. The real problem with a daily diary entry is that most people don't have enough going on in their lives to warrant detailing unless of course they are Nicholson Baker. A journal implies thoughts as well as happenings, internal discussions about external happenings. It is a talent to be able to make your own internal ramblings into something interesting.

Anyway, the happenings and thoughts of the weekend are as follows :-

I managed to get a copy of "The Ladybird Book of the Weather" (£2) and the drawings were just as evocative as I remember. A sanitised and beautiful depiction of Britain in the late fifties - early sixties. A bit "Blue Peterish" but attractive nonetheless. I also bought "The Ladybird book of Trees" which is just a collection of beautifully drawn pictures of British Trees, all drawn with blossom which reminds me of the tree outside our house. I would never have imagined that any house I would live in would have such a beautiful picture visible through the fron window. The Apple tree in next door's garden has just shed the last of its blossom which is piling up around the drive looking off-pink and rather tired but it was glorious while it lasted on the tree, so vivid as if our front window was acting as a polarising filter. It's a pity it's gone but at least there are leaves on the tree now. I like the stark details of a winter tree but there is something sad about them. An early summer tree is so much --- well just plain happy.

We watched "Girl Interrupted" (I link to the better of the book and the film but this copy of the book has the film as its cover). I only read the book last year but Sunday was the first time I had seen the film. I think they over dramatised it; It didn't have the swimming-through-treacle feel of the books (or indeed that other great book set in the same building - "The Bell Jar". I know the images you get in your head after reading a book are very peculiar to you but the building just didn't fit with my images. I may be wrong but I think the building used in GI was the same one used in Rain man. Having said the book was better, the film was quite good with the obvious tension in the question of whether Susannah would become sane. And then there was the un-resolved tension at the end over whether Lisa would eventually get out. I did have the uneasy feeling that it is difficult to tell who is mad and who is sane. Borderline Personaility Disorder describes many of the people I know and I would not put them anywhere near an institution.

I took my daughter for a walk along the beach by the Coastguard station on Sunday morning. She build a sandcastle with a razor shell on the top as a flag. She then spent half an hour beaming at evrybody who walked by and telling them not to walk on her sandcastle. She also likes "writing" in the sand with a stick but as she can't quite write properly it turns out looking like the speech that emanates from Woodstock in Peanuts. Miles and miles of it there are on that beach; I don't think the tide comes up as far as where we were very often so it's probably still there. When we were on Honeymoon on Lewis, we found a huge spiral sandcastle which was modelled on the Pharos Lighthouse. My Dad would have loved it. It was built in a tiny deserted beach stuck between high cliffs and I suspect that we were the only people who saw this construction. We hadn't got any spades so we couldn't make our own version. We will be taking plenty of beach equipment on Holiday this year so watch out for big stuff on the Beaches of Britain.

Thursday, May 02, 2002

PS - Self reference

Martin has asked me to include this reference which he thought of.

In France if a bakers is a Boulangerie and a Cake shop is a Patisserie then a shop selling Mechanical Astronomical Visualisation Devices would have to be an Orreryerie. Try saying it out loud. Click here for a picture which I find rather special. I suppose it could be in an Orreryerie and the guy on the left is saying "Dashed fine device sir!. I'll take one for the drawing room and two small ones for the nippers". I first saw this picture in the "Ascent of Man". It must have been in colour when it was on the program but it is in black and white in the book. The colour version is so much better. If you would like to see more pictures by Joseph Wright then click here.


Something to oppose

This is Malvern in a very strange guise.




Safety in Intifada

I wrote a poem called this once. It was during the Gulf War when we thought we were all going to be called up or that the war would spread and it would be like the blitz all over again (I don't think I really thought this but plenty of people did.) I longed for the routine of the Intifada which we could dismiss as some little, local difficulty. Of course, post September 11, it is obvious that this can never be true. Before I was married and a father, there was a sort of safety in even the most extreme happenings becaue they did not happen to me. I was safe whatever. The end of the Cold War made this feeling even stronger. I find enourmous solace in the weather. We don't have much extreme weather here and so most of it is quite comforting to me. There is a picture in The Ladybird book of the weather which shows a steady rain falling over a rural-type village green; you know the quality of light you get in Summer thunder storm. I must have a pluvial character because this sort of weather is my favourite. I can even remember as far back as when I was 5 and we still lived in Nottingham. I was in our front room when a Thunder storm started. At first I was frightened but after a while the lure of the strange light drew me to the window to look at the rain and the lightning. From then on I have wanted to sit out on the doorstep to watch storms. Now I am trying to find that Ladybird book and this guy has the same feelings about it that I do.

And here you are. I have found a picture of the front cover at least.



From Daddymonts books

I particularly like the "found object" quality given to this picture by the inch marks down the side.

All this has just reminded me of something really wonderful. Do you remember The Observer's books? - little hardback books about everything from the weather (aha - I see your link) to flags via military aircraft and butterflies. I think they are still going. Well there is actually an "Observer's book of Observer's books". Isn't that a wonderful idea? It's like all the self-referential annecdotes about libraries - should the index for the library be included in the index and should the index of the indexes include the index of the Indexes. As there are several editions of the Observer's Book of Observer' books, there could eventually be "The Observer's Book of Observer's books of Observer's books" and so on. It's like a window on the workings of the Universe, a fault line where reality breaks down and we see the works or the program behind everything.

For a list of Observer's Books - a sort of online version of the tortured mess I describe above, (including of course, "TOBOOB"), go here.

Isn't the world wonderful and strange. I must get a copy of "TOBOOB" for my Found Objects Cupboard - which I still need to attach to the wall. It has been in the garage since we moved. My father has a proper free standing Found Object Cupboard which allows him a lot more leeway about what he can include. It has all sorts of models and strange objects such as loom shuttles and obscure boxes. I can only say that my medicine cabinet sized cupboard has a slightly more amateur feel to it.

I cannot find the phrase "Found Object Cupboard" using my usual search engines but "Found Objects" comes up with many. A Blog is like a "Found Thoughts Cupboard"

Back to self-reference so time to refer back to what I was doing before I started this today.

Wednesday, May 01, 2002

Random Art from the Edge of the World

I have a picture of some ice-bound outpost in my mind at the moment. I don't know why. It's a bit like that annoying tune which gets inside your head and plays on an endless loop all day just because you heard somebody whistling it. (On a side issue, does anyone remember the short little tune which Richard Briers used to whistle at random intervals during "The Good Life"?) I wish I could trace the start of all this white stuff in my head though it's not particularly annoying (certainly not as annoying as the theme from the "A-Team") and indeed is quite calming if concentrated on. I once read a short story in Omni about a girl who had lost her arms and legs in a tanker explosion which killed both her parents. I think it was by Orson Scott Card but I can't remember the title. In the story, the girl told her therapist (The narrator) that she was to swap places with a spacegirl called Anansa; The space in the ship was just right for a small person with no arms or legs. I seem to remember a description of the gentle sounds which could be heard as the ship sped across space and this is what I can hear along with the pictures of the white stuff. If someone can tell me the title of the story then the email is :- RDeWeyden@Hotmail.com

A bit of serendipity for you now. Orson Scott Card has a link to a page called "Lost Books" which is worth a look. And does anyone remember a British TV show called "Serendipity"? I can find no references to it. AND did you know that "Serendipity" has been voted the Nation's favourite word (Though it was in 2000).It would have been onomatopoeia but no-one liked the sound of that. Next, in this list of random found sites, go here even if it is only for a laugh. I think it ranks with the Pylon website though the testcard page looks more interesting.

I had better post this lot before I go to sleep.