Forelock Tugging!

Listening to Miranda by Tappi Tikarrass

We took advantage of the National Garden Scheme yesterday and visited Crosby Hall. I have driven along the garden walls many times but have never been inside though it is often open for various events and indeed is the location for Crosby Hall Educational Trust which lets local kids see various rural things. It might have been more atmospheric if there had not been several hundred other people there but you can’t really expect to get personal invitations to these sort of places. The children were very much interested in the Peacocks but they seemed very wary and can you blame them. The gardens are divided up with many out-buildings and high-brick walls which gives it a rather intimate feel. The close-cropped lawns around the main house, give way to pasture from which they are separated by a ha-ha. All very civilized. Nationalise it now! That of course is a joke when you remember the civic-minded attitude of the owners. I think Orwell would have liked it.

Talking of Eric Arthur reminds me of the Senior Policeman who worries about the number of cameras about. The reporter on the news yesterday said he had counted 20 cameras within a few yards of Orwell’s blue-plaque in London which must have resulted in surely spectacular post-mortem rotation in the old plain speaker. I did not realise that CCTV images are covered under the data-protection act and you can request images of yourself for a SMALL FEE. It seems that a lot of the agencies holding these images either do not know the rules or do not want you to know the rules. I wonder if Mark Thomas has been informed? He could possibly organise a mass of individual requests of footage. If enough people did it then it would not be worthwhile carrying on. There is no difference between the replacement of Beat Policemen with Cameras and the substitution of ATMs for bank tellers – It’s all about money rather than “to improve the service to you - the customer”. Someone has just made a movie entirely from bits of CCTV footage of herself.

Anyway, big news is that I have finished Cloud Atlas having been drawn into it by a structure far more complicated than a sneering reviewer on Amazon would admit. The prose in each section never seemed contrived to me and yet every so often a corresponding event in one section would be recalled by one in another though one might evoke horror and another just amusement. It is a much more sophisticated example of an idea I had myself though of course the idea has surfaced in someone’s head many times over the course of history. In fact I think there is a paragraph stating exactly that in one of the sections. All in all a very satisfying book despite the shaky false start on my part. I actually felt a bit lost last night and floundered around trying to find something which I considered able to compete with CA. I have resorted to the palate-cleanser of Rendezvous with Rama which I haven’t read for at least 15 years.

Diary of a Somebody

It was nice to see (a clean-shaven) Hugh “Pooter” Bonneville reading the bedtime story on CBeebies yesterday. The BBC must have something their actor’s contract which says that the Children’s TV producers can bags any actor they like as they come and go about the BBC studios, dress them up in causal clothes and sit them down to read the stories. It might also be a sly way of putting the programmes that the actors are in later in the minds of any adult minders who might happen to watch as well. Mr Bonneville was indeed on BBC 4 later in the last episode of Diary of a Nobody which had a satisfying and poignant ending – much more poignant than I remember from reading the book. The main problem with watching it is that Mr Pooter looks uncannily like my dad though that might just be the beard.

I have to say that I was worried that I wouldn’t get into the central story of Cloud Atlas after reading that some people skimmed it because of the strong dialect form but it’s actually quite intriguing – I was fearing it would be like A Clockwork Orange but it’s quite easy to follow most of it. It also has a strong ability to lead you forward to wanting the next bit. As this story is the central one in has no split – at least one story would have to be left unsplit in order for the book to finish – but I wonder if there is a point somewhere in the middle where the split would go. I already know the link between this and the previous story so I have an idea where the split could be.

There were fewer correspondences between Cloud Atlas and yesterday’s tranche of I am a Strange Loop. I think I dreamed something connected with it the other day though – it was very vivid at the time though of course without writing the details down at the time it is now just a fuzzy memory. There was a book of poetry in it somewhere – an icon of something – I could see the cover in great details though I didn’t get to see any of the actual words. This was probably triggered by the poetry I was reading at the Viking demonstration at the weekend. I did also think of something which I thought really quite staggeringly interesting while I was getting the boy to sleep yesterday – something regarding structure of systems – but the detail of that has vanished as well.

Stepping Over Non-existent Barbed Wire

I suppose I am currently much more aware of links and loops because of current reading matter and also I suppose that Cloud Atlas and I am a Strange Loop share some themes but some of the correspondences are quite strong. The first chapter of I am a Strange Loop, which I read yesterday, talks about units of measuring what Hofstadter calls ‘soul’ though he does allow what he calls the old standby of ‘being conscious’. He gives the name Hunekers to these units after an American music critic who said of one particular Chopin etude, that it should not be attempted by “small-souled men”. Hofstadter also points out that the measurement of soul does not have an upper ceiling rather like IQ and maybe we should say that people tend to a level of 100 Hunekers.

In Cloud Atlas, one section deals with the experiences of a genetically engineered ‘fabricant’ one of many produced to do the dirty work in human society; a central theme of this being the ascendancy of these fabricants from ‘genomed’ stupidity and obedience to genius level – a sort of increase in soul – of Hunekers I suppose. Indeed, the humans or ‘purebloods’ in the story can choose to give fabricants a soul ring which allows them access to areas normally forbidden to them.

In general Cloud Atlas fits together very neatly; each section having several links with the previous one, though some are concrete, rational things such as the existence of material evidence of something from the past while others are mystical Jungian coincidences which as you know always put me on my guard. However, what has struck me is that the links between the sections are entirely arbitrary – from the same starting section you might well choose a completely different set of tales still linked but now in a different way. I suppose that had the links between the sections been stronger I might have been a little dismissive of them but because they just suggest a random path through life, they are much more believable. It all reminds me of Connections where James Burke made seemingly random links through the history of science and technology which always made me slightly uncomfortable with the arbitrariness of his selections. Looking at it now, that is the fuzzy way the world actually is and proof of the interconnectedness of everything. Apologies for the long constructions but they all spell-check happily.

Spaghetti Aural

I am deep into Cloud Atlas. There is no link from here so you can avoid the spoilers that might crop up in any reviews though I am not sure that knowing the structure would harm your enjoyment of this book. I cannot describe my feelings about it without revealing this structure, other than to say that they are positive. Thanks to the netty-type person who persuaded me to have another go at it after I noted that is was in the top ten of most-bought-least-read books. As well it does seem to have some of the elements of the push-pop story in Godel, Escher, Bach though I hope that the final story of Cloud Atlas is not omitted to make the point that Douglas Hofstadter did. It also reminds me a tiny bit of Thinks but I am not sure why.

Now a complaint. You know those stock photos that you see in presentations or used to illustrate brochures? They show a tidy office, all shiny, clean desks and the appearance of calm busyness. The people are all occupied, their attention taken by atmospherically lit computer screens, the very epitome of what non-office monkeys used to think offices were like before offices began to filter into the reality television shows and sitcoms. Well that is the image! The sound however is the aural equivalent of Yellow Submarine. Mobile phones! That’s what this rant is about – that and the alert sounds on IM. The professional ambience is routinely shattered by nursery-style jingles and tinny approximations to chart music which has no hook or worse, some supposedly humorous sound, such as the cartoon noises of birds or a comedy splash. I think I may even have once heard a Wilhelm Scream. I would like all phones to go back to a simple ringing noise but the argument against that is How would we know whose phone was demanding to be answered? Maybe we should have the voice of HAL calling out the name of the phones owner but that might be creepy I suppose. Some phones use the generic US phone ring which makes me think someone has started watching an episode of The Rockford Files.

I did have something I wanted to say about test plans but it has been lost.