Friday, July 31, 2009

Dinosaurs DO exist!



Listening to all of the PJ Harvey in the library.

Yet another small step towards the disenlightenment in the form of the sanctioning of Creationist theories as part of lesser-known exam authorities. The idea that the teachings accept the existence of The Loch Ness Monster but NOT any of the mechanics of evolution is breath-taking - let it be taught in the crazy schools but please do not let us examine children on the subject. Having said that I can understand how it seems easier to read one simple book rather than a lot of hard ones.

Talking of easier books, here is proof of the imminent publication of the next volume of the Adrian Mole Diaries. I was sure that The Prostate Years was a joke but as I came to the end of The Lost Diaries (the Guardian column collected), there was an advertisment for it. And with The next volume of Michael Palin's diaries out in time for Christmas as well, a lot of quiet time will be required over the winterval this year. The trouble is, the pile of books to complete is possibly going to take longer than until Christmas to get through so I need to stop going to the library. Oh dear! Failed again! Just ordered this from the online catalogue. But I can stop anytime. I can. I just don't want to.

I am also within 10 pages of the end of the notebook and so the question of what version is required next. I chose a squared Moleskine last time and that suits my rather inexact writing but I should really go for just ruled next time. I haven't really been keeping it up to the standard it deserves. The first pages had lots of multi-coloured stuff, mind maps etc. but recently it has just been a collection of hastily-scribbled notes with the writing deteriorating enough so that I can't read it a week later. However, I suppose the contents of the writing is the important thing but I really would like it to be well-laid-out. My father has a much better eye for me, probably from being an engineer. He makes his own birthday cards on the computer and his last one was a large picture of Zebras at a water hole. It was borderless and took up the whole outside cover of the card, with the subject positioned exactly.

Thursday, July 30, 2009

Vortex Cannon

I'm not sure if this is the first poem from Carol Ann Duffy but as a tribute to mark the deaths of Harry Patch and Henry Allingham dare I say it is up there with Dulce et Decorum Est. It needs no analysis other than that provided by reading it. Please read it.

I cannot put my experience on the bus going home last night in any more PC way - I just have to say that we were accompanied by a mad woman. It wasn't the continuous swigging from a cheap bottle of cider than got to me. It was not the random asides to an invisible companion whose location was all the time defined by her creator's wide, staring, wandering eyes. It was neither the illicit fag smoked and stubbed out in the space of a minute (and being British no one dared berate her for it) nor the loud outbursts of swearing and sudden wordless noise. It was none of these. It was the pathos - "Is that me dad? I so miss him!." Had me filling up I can tell you. And then she was off the bus at the same point as me, and all at once she straightened up, stopped the ticks and Turettes and marched determinedly in the direction of some place she obviously had to get to, like Keven Spacey at the end of The Usual Suspects. Some Golem perhaps - all the rational people avoiding eye-contact, leaving her to her own seat even when the bus was full. And her age! From behind she had the unwashed hair of a latch-key kid, but when she turned, she had the face of Auden - lines and furrows, deep cares etched into her skin and then forgotten in the stupor of alcohol. And then the horror of revelation - she was perhaps younger than me. Her songs ranged from traditional folk to stuff by Yes so that was no clue as to how old she was. Internal tales sparked from this derelict - what gets someone so badly at odds with normality? How could she get it together enough to get on a bus - how did she manage to keep focused on her destination? How would she be sobered up or had the years of drinking turned even her sobriety into madness compared to the rest of us.

Then I remember my own life and so this just comes back to the old cliche of who decides who is mad. Madness is defined by distance from one's own mind and so outside of my own prejudices and desires, you are all mad to some degree. And then because of my sympathy for this woman, maybe I am closer to her than all the general nervous giggling than surrounded her on this bus. define a real rebel, not by his preparedness to stand around handing out radical political treatises, trying to drag the bourgeoisie into his world of socialism; he is as much hide-bound as the rest of us. Liberal at Twenty and Conservative at Forty defines your heart and your head. I steal all their ideas and hide them in boxes under then bed, never looking at them and so they will be thrown out with me when I die.

It rains a lot here today - thunder and lightning - powerful downpours - the full works. It has been so heavy as to be audible inside - behind these layers of glass that usually keep the sound of the world outside at bay as much as the drawn blinds keep the view hidden. But now it is sunny, a clean, polished sort of sunlight. You can tell the temperature just by looking at it - the clarity and lack of haze makes it clear that it is cold out there. I wrote down that I need to break routine. So many on the web have ways of refreshing the whole daily experience but all I had in the notebook was to park somewhere different in the car park, to break out of my imagined Aspergers and to stop stopping in the same space I have done since I first came to this site. And by the time I remembered this sad note to self, I was out of the car and on the way to reception. I can spot my car on Google Earth because of this regularity. Who is mad indeed!

But then again, is not a poem worthy as a distraction from the mundane and bathetic? I have written plenty of them recently, far more than are up here which tend to be what I consider the throw-aways - the proper ones are kept back and why might that be? With this music in my ears and the unheard voices of the people moving only slowly at their desks, today is like a dream. The music pauses between tracks and in comes the wordless murmur of the workplace, the lowered voices of phone calls, the tantalising, one-sided conversations of business, all important and all full of meaning far beyond the information conveyed in just the words. Hear the timbre of one sentence compared to another. It conveys truth and lies, justice and beauty. But sometimes it is just plain information - illicit information not suitable for electronic conveyance, the program details of whatever it is that we do here. Sometimes I do not know what it is we do, being lost in the details of the sea-bottom to the ocean that contains our work. I have to end in the middle of this conceit for it is time.

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Impotence is our Only Hope!



Apologies for the exclamation mark and also for yet more Desperate Romantics. The quote is from the trail for next week's episode and is virtually certain to make anyone watch it again. I must just be at that funny age. Historical Revisionism at its best! And all that poetry. No sign of Christina yet.

Monday, July 27, 2009

Petrichor Wombat and the Temple of Dust



More on that story later.

To the Tate Liverpool on Saturday for the first time in ages. And hasn't it all changed - Dali's Lobster Telephone and Autumnal Cannibalism are back for the first time since the gallery opened as far as I can remember but the real draw is the colour exhibition on the top floor (where you always have to pay for the privilege of walking up the stairs). Lots of coloured squares including 4096 in a 64 x 64 grid all apparently different colours, and lots of dots from Damien Hirst. And each main picture seems to be accompanied by many austere display cabinets of various books purporting to define colour standards. What struck me was the fact that although each book is supposed to define colour exactly, the existence of rivals (even just one would be enough) brings the whole idea to the floor. No one is right! Life's a bit like that isn't it? I did look out for Pantone 294 and Pantone 298 which are the two colours I know from this (now defunct) logo. In fact I couldn't find any mention of Pantone in the exhibition itself though the shop was awash with mugs of single and multiple Pantones. There was an interesting computer programme which allowed the calibration of a computer screen without reference to base colours - it relied instead on people selecting numbers of coloured disks from collections and seems a much cheaper way of calibrating a screen than the various bits of hardware used at the moment.

The sculpture downstairs was also very good (and free) and included a flashing dance floor on which anyone was permitted to dance to a selected headphone soundtrack. Of course this just meant that all the children shouted to each other to the tutting of all the parents. There was also a Carl Andre piece which resembled (was identical to a stone kitchen floor) which was also for walking on. It is a great pity that there is now a blanket ban on photography of any kind where you used to be able to take any flashless picture you liked, though I'm not sure how rigid the attendants are about this- I didn't test them.

Of course, Mr Millais who painted the gorgeous Ophelia up there was as much of an iconoclast as Damien Hirst or any of the New Brits and of course the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood have been sexed up for Desperate Romantics on BBC2, a gratuitously-raunchy view of the PRB for modern tastes. I was a bit snooty about this programme and a minute in I was still not convinced. However, five minutes in and I was hooked - it looks good at least and as a drama it holds attention. Of course it is full of expositions, mostly from the fictional Fred who is the PRB's fixer - I got the impression of a lot of "my mate wants to go out with you" style dialogue, and various concatenations of events to bring together people with dialogue from newspaper reviews but it has a pace which is obviously designed to draw people in. I'm pretty certain that Dante Gabriel Rossetti is played far too "in your face" - although his portraits show him with Byronesque looks, Desperate Romantics has him too large for what I imagine he was like - maybe he was like a cross between a lumberjack and Rob Newman but I doubt it. However Lizzie Siddal is spot on - rarefied in looks and forthright in outlook, though maybe there is something of Christina Rossetti in there too. Nice to see the Armadillo in there as well.

Friday, July 24, 2009

Anita Ekberg - a Tribute


Ten years away from an artificial brain hey? It started me wondering about whether it would be hooked up to anything external or would it be just "thinking" in the void. If it was to the standard of a human brain then surely deprivation of senses and the ability to manipulate its environment would be against its "human" rights. But if we did hook it up to the world and it went wrong and began a rampage of genocidal proportions would it have to have a trial or could we just turn it off? All these questions are far too difficult for me to answer. Of course it might just develop undesirable character flaws - Uncorrected Personality Traits maybe.

A friend of ours phoned up from Rome yesterday and while she was on her son fell in the Trevi Fountain - check his pockets I say! Teenagers hey!

Thursday, July 23, 2009

On the Loss of Arms


To whet your appetite the latest on the situation regarding Angels and Pins can be found here.

We finally watched Inherit the Wind after dragging it out of the depths of the PVR at the weekend and a fine 2 hours it was. Although it is obviously a fictionalised account of the Scopes trial which I imagine was a lot more good natured than current evolutionist/creationist debates, it manages to be both compelling and detailed. The evident heat of the deep south panders to my idea of Cat On a Hot Tin Roof and makes the whole thing almost physically uncomfortable in ways that modern processing of movie atmospheres never seems to match. There are obvious echoes of To Kill a Mockingbird and many other films of the time. The debate is intellectual without being technical and has some brilliant put downs that seem very modern. And finally in the list of films which it reminded me of is another Spencer Tracy one - Bad day at Black Rock and I've not actually see that one.

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Sneaker Putsch

A poem of absences is being developed at this time. It describes the world in terms of what is missing from a number of particular situations - the houses imagined when empty, the largest part of the planet that exists continuously without any of us to look at it or to justify its existence. The trees do continue to be while we don't see them or hear the sky-seen of the branches in the wind. In here somewhere is a poem for an anthropologist, a clever collection of ideas and talents that exceeds anything we could imagine in ourselves. This is of course, a practice piece, a piece of descriptive writing which has no purpose other than to allow the testing of words and sentence construction. It is like that bathroom, the battered afterthought added to some dank hotel room, the paint on the pipes peeling and flaking into a layer of dessicated rubbish across the bare boards of the floor. The light is bright, from low on the horizon and sneaks in under mostly-closed blinds, shadowing the objects on the windowsill up against the far wall. And sometimes this light is sad, a reminder of late afternoon in winter on a Sunday night, the day before school and boredom. And sometimes it is happy, the same time on a holiday, when the light of similar quality dances across the walls, bringing news of the universe to us from all those millions of mile away. There is music in the distance, a far radio playing something inane and untaxing, something unplaceable but triggering all the right memories. I cannot tell if the window is open but I think it must be for loose fabrics in this room seem to lift in tiny ways showing that the space is crossed with tiny currents of air. Outside, the trees show us that the day is still and yet something, maybe the pressure of air heated through glass has the air moving. How do I turn all this into a poem? Some poems I read, even some of mine, seem just to be prose like this, split arbitrarily and turned to verse. In these words are code for revolution, the trigger phrases for sleepers and deep cover operatives. At this command, they will turn away from their unremarkable lives and rise up like an army of estate agents to describe the world. This is mass observation for the modern age, a collection of diaries and literature to define this country and all others. We are the state. We are the state. We are the state.

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Moth Woods

Moths are wonderful things. They determine an English summer night in their thousands led to man-made light by mechanisms which we still do not entirely understand. It may be they mistake our lights for the moon and try to keep it on one side but because of their proximity they just spiral in. There are theories that the light causes one wing to move slightly faster than the other. We cannot be certain of any of this just as we cannot be certain of so much in the cosmos - from the propagation of viruses to the structure of the entire universe. All this is totally at odds with the way science books are written, with their defined formulae, there acceptance of the observed over the thought-about. And yet none of this matters because ultimately everything is defined. It may use some fuzzy logic which we struggle to apply to what we see but in the end it all comes down to numbers in the void, long lists of never-ending decimal places, things we may find in the fractals and Julia sets of Chaos. We have no need of intervention - everything is one way - human beings will get everything out and put nothing in.

Monday, July 20, 2009

Circle of Fifths


(From http://www.neverendingbooks.org/)

I do not pretend to understand this drawing, other than it shows the various groups that Marcus du Sautoy was talking about. It is here to mark finishing the symmetry book and finding myself in that rare state that usually only applies to novels of a certain type, in that I was racing to the end and yet wanting it not finish.

However a suitable replacement of equal magic has been found in the shape of a recommendation by Alice Roberts from the Tuesday edition of A Good Read (which by the way, started broadcasting in the middle - V. Poor I thought). Her chosen book was Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees by Roger Deakin - a plotless collection of pure observations, loosely connected by trees but mostly a celebration of the general nature of nature. It has loose echoes of Cider with Rosie and yet more of many other personal collections of natural history. It is very like an extended version of the Country Diary in the Guardian. Again I am drawn in to it at any spare moment. To come, an imminent celebration has brought us a trawl of books which should keep us occupied for some time, including one by the aforementioned Doctor Doctor Alice, which she has written and illustrated. I can only say stuff that Paxman!

Daughter will be most happy with this picture. I'm having slight problems with the bow tie - doesn't seem to fit my image of Matt Smith but as we have all been uncomfortable with many of the leaked details throughout the new runs of Doctor Who, and then been quite happy, I am sure that it will be carried off with ease. We were watching the new series of Coast last week in which Neil Oliver visited one of the Thames sea forts and I happened to mention that it looked like a good place to set a Doctor Who story. This was overheard through two closed doors and up the stairs leading to a speedy descent of firstborn to enquire about it. This is spooky in itself and suggests some sort of mental link with the Tardis. If only I believed in such things. All of which reminds me of the newly-ignited debate over the reality of the moon landings. I suspected that some newer high-definition pictures of the landing sites would be released this week - it is unfortunate that they are all provided by NASA rather than an independent organization. Never mind - the Chinese will land next to one of the sites pretty soon and it will all be over. The world is full of kooks.

Friday, July 17, 2009

Dimensionasaurus



Listening to Electric Guitar Phase by Steve Reich - Played by Dominic Frasca

After my mention of higher spacial dimensions, Marcus du Sautoy's book on symmetry has taken this to extremes and started talking about objects that exist in hundreds of thousands of dimensions and have quintillions of symmetries. I just cannot begin to imagine how a mind even contemplates the programs needed to run to create mathematical models of such objects. It amazes me that the human mind is able to memorise phone numbers let alone these sort of things. Praise is du(e) to du Sautoy for making his book about this so easy and compelling. It's real beauty however, is the direct link between the ancient mathematicians of Greece and the Islamic world, through the Renaissance solvers of cubic equations, the French revolutionary Mathematicians to du Sautoy himself, reach a peak with the planet-sized brain of his mentor John Conway, a man who seems able to 'see' in these dimensions as far as I can tell. Rudy Rucker has been informed.

On a completely different subject, Martin Amis has written a juicy article on Iran for the Guardian. No punch-pulling here I'm afraid but there is obvious recognition that the situation is far more complex than anything solvable with force. I'm not sure it actually makes me like Martin Amis any more but it maintains his position as one of the greatest living British Writers.

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

There Will be no Demonstrations


Smoke Fairies - Frozen Heart

This came as a 5 track CD inside a beautifully austere 7 inch vinyl pack so it's back to the old days of limited edition music if only for a few minutes. And better still, they are supporting Richard Hawley at the Phil later this year.

It is probably this music which is making me feel slightly odd at the moment. Not unpleasantly weird but slightly offset from reality - maybe just the infinitesimal distance that hypothetically exists in the fourth dimension. I think Rudy Rucker actually suggested that we might have an additional sense that could actually detect this dimension. He also mentioned that educating oneself in the existence of the fourth dimension led one to be able to actually see it. he even gave techniques for imagining objects as collections of smaller units, actually keeping the internal structure of the object within your head. We actually do this with houses already - I can 'see' all the rooms in my house in my head and through the certainty and safeness of houses will be almost 100% certain to find the room I expect when I take myself there. Not sure if that ability has actually let me see a hypercube yet but I'm working on it. My current book is Finding Moonshine by the incomparably enthusiastic Marcus du Sautoy who is mainly writing about symmetry which can happily work with multi-dimensional objects - the maths works even if the visualisations don't. So I will look on my strange feelings as proof of my gradual moves into the fourth dimension. See you on the other side.

Monday, July 13, 2009

The 456 are not Aliens



I always liked Torchwood but there was a certain amount of having to accept a slightly camp and cartoonish aura. Not so in Children of Earth. Quatermass anyone? Beautifully done - you can imagine that from script-writing to editing, there was light touch on the levers - let's not go over the top - let's make it stand for itself - let's not show anyone the monsters. Let's show everyone as flawed - as in it for themselves. Let's scare everyone witless and let us have Rhys as our proxy in the Whoniverse. Above all let's have Ianto's death as tear-inducing as "Daddy! My Daddy!" (officially one of only three times that men are allowed to cry). It had the bureaucracy of Brazil and the nightmares of Elm street, it had everything and yet it kept the old excesses in check. It is not for children no matter how much they pester. It is to remember forever.

Tuesday, July 07, 2009

In Two Minds

What more gain is there from this,
the bile of generations poured out,
through the grey-green haze of putsch,
and other revolutions?

An engineer's love of distance,
calms my escalations, all my fears,
of panic; children going hungry
as we sell this land to enemies.

You'd break on knowing everything,
the things we shadows hide from you,
playing keeper of your strange ataxias,
your tics and false obsessions.

You fly over every occupying force,
with one immobile point of view,
the tormenter’s eye for justice,
honed from your bloody playgrounds;

Here’s you at break with terror weapons,
Standing, dominating the tired masses,
legs apart for stability in recoil,
as you pray and take them down.

The gun’s robust reply is no solution,
To the complexities of madness,
The money, the indulgences, the power
Of nightmares rolling on and on.

What goes around repeats like automatics,
Bounces off the rocks, returns like doves,
With claws, to strip your skin and burn,
at the knowledge of a job complete.

Ten years after, they might find you,
A stain of almost nothing in this sun,
Long since dried and powdered,
Your philosophy diffused and scattered,

Mingling with the minds of bombers,
Just so much dust and so much error,
Harmless in our air conditioning,
Toothless in the water cycle.

We are in the hot, white rocks of heaven,
Powering through the universe as gods,
The first to reach, to make the stars,
With all knowledge, with all history but you.

Friday, July 03, 2009

No Returns



Much culture this week. First in the form of an Imagine film about David Hockney which concentrates on the last few years where he paints many scenes of the countryside around Yorkshire including the fantastic Bigger Trees Near Warter which could wallpaper our entire house - well the east wing anyway. It was impossible to pick a favourite, though we are trying to get away from such gradings because daughter is continuously asking what our favourite Doctor Who Episode/Cast Member/Doctor is and it is beginning to get annoying.

Sunday will have us braving the elements for an outdoor version of A Midsummer Night's Dream in the grounds of Crosby Hall. Must iron my Oxford Bags and all that. See you all.