Plath Rotatus Pariter

Listening to Pooka by Pooka

I don’t like synchronicity – it seems artificial and meaningless in a world that is just so big. In an infinite universe everything happens eventually and what we have to bear in mind is the match between the number of people in the world and the number of events that people can ascribe to synchronicity. Forgive me rationalising but when you compare the number of people who DON’T find their long-lost rings in the stomachs of the very fish that they have just caught 30 years down the line with the number who do then it all falls into place. It is exactly because the event is rare that it makes the news. So the gee-whizz reaction to just such a coincidence is self-deflating. If everyone found rings in fish then they’d just shrug and get on with things. However, this paragraph was sparked into being by the similarity between two things I have been reading. One is an entry in The Old New Thing regarding being competent enough in a foreign language to be able to understand without having to translate it into your own language. Douglas Hofstadter talks about wondering what it would be to think like the speaker of another language as part of trying to get inside other consciousnesses. I have to say that without really having it formally defined in my head, I have thought about this myself. You come across words from a foreign language which match with words in English and they make me wonder about whether jokes and puns work in specific languages. In GEB, Hofstadter printed version of Jabberwocky in French and German to show that it is possible to muck around with language however you speak.

I’m apparently on the down escalator. See Theologian damns most Britons to hell. You may argue with my intellectual analysis of this but I struggle to see how anyone who believes in such nursery views of theology can actually manage to get to be a Doctor (of whatever) . I’m not sure whether I mention it because giving credence to such a view is – in a comparison that the good doctor may have heard of in his professional career – like discussing how many angels can dance on the point of a needle. Now I know that this question is in itself a bit like Knut attempting to turn back the waves – usually completely misunderstood but the proverbial nature of the Angels dancing question conveys the pointlessness of what so many people will talk about for hours. I suppose I am dangerously close to trying to find a divide between what is legitimate religious discussion and irrelevance. I recall the statement by some Christians during a large scientific trial in to the power of prayer which included people of all religions that they thought that the people that THEY prayed for would be helped but that they could not see how any other denominations could possibly get their messages across – in effect – everyone else is a heretic. All or nothing people. This has reminded me that an ex-colleague of mine has just completed a second MA and is considering a Ph.D. Importantly this will be in a discipline which might actually be of some use rather than to back up a position of authority to be used for damning 90% of the population to a place which absolutely, positively does NOT EXIST. Stuff that in your incense burner!

I finished Rendezvous With Rama last night – went upstairs to read so as to avoid being a Jinx to our brave lads but failed miserably. I am pleased with the redrawing of the images in my head – though I still feel that my youthful images were better than the illustrations. I loved the tension that wasn’t particularly tense, the final images of the Endeavour craft being spun by the backwash from Rama’s space drive, the general reality of space travel which is what you expect from Arthur C Clarke. I do hope the film does it’s best to stick to reality. I’m not sure what to read now – I do have nineteen-eighty-four by the bed but it might be a bit heavy for current times.

Never in This Field of Cows …

Listening to V-At by Tarwater

Damn-near-perfect TV programme last night to go with this damn-near-perfect music from the Wiretapper CD. Music is V-At by Tarwater which has a certain indefinable magic that summons up all sorts of memories. Play loud in the car and have a great driving moment of quality.

The great TV was Andrew Marr’s History of Modern Britain which concentrated mostly on the politics of this fair land since the end of WWII. I was worried beforehand that it might be dusty and boring and indeed the review had said something along the lines of it just being Mr Marr talking to camera interspersed with archive. Well it was exactly that but with an authoritative and interesting delivery it raises AM up there with Kenneth Clark and Jacob Bronowski as a documenter of how things are. Now I am not clever enough to know whether the whole approach was different to anything I have seen before or whether I just do not generally know about the period covered in last night’s programme but it did seem to be packed with information that seemed fresh and unknown – of course the general big stuff was somewhere in my head but the juicy way it was presented made it seem new. My dad said he wasn’t going to bother watching because he had lived through it all – I hope he changed his mind. I’m not sure that the impressions of Churchill (the statesman – not the dog) were really necessary.

I’m fair whistling through Rendezvous With Rama – more than half-way through and with so much I remember still to come. What is interesting is that the gap between last reading it and now had wiped my brain clear of the memories of what I though the place looked like and so I am able to create a new picture. I also notice that I am much better at creating images from the descriptions. Actually I lied about all the old images having been wiped – what I mean is that they are so faded that my more-mature mind is able to overwrite them. The thing that strikes me about the various illustrations (the one on Wikipedia for example) is that they have far too much detail. The overwhelming impression in my head is of wide vistas of featureless grey material broken only by small islands of complexity rather than the fields and roads of the drawings. No one seems to want to illustrate the stairways down which the crew of Endeavour had to descend to reach the interior of Rama (and of course climb up again).

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.

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.