derekwalker.org

Just in case someone notices

2008-09-07T13:21:00.002+01:00

I'm taking the opportunity to reset and update a lot of things around the back-end of the website, so it may disappear, reappear, act funny, look funny, or something else along those lines at any point in the next couple of days. This is a near-infinitely expandable project that may go all the way to changing content systems, layouts, directions, whatever, depending on my ambition. As always, the goal is to have something that I actually feel like doing something with, rather than a stagnating old page. As always, we'll see.

Life goal accomplished

2008-08-24T13:30:00.003+01:00

I just for the first time ever single-handedly completed a cryptic crossword - the Sydney Morning Herald puzzle for Wednesday August 20th. Time spent: just under an hour (57:25). You can tell the packing is going splendidly.

The Times and the Guardian, here I come.

Home

2008-08-21T22:37:00.003+01:00

Having arrived safely if a little delayed (see picture below for the queue of planes waiting to take off), the tube strike had been magically delayed (and by magically I mean by means of last-minute negotiations) and so I was able to get home with relative ease and in relative comfort.

I now have about 700 photos to sort (mostly of cars crashing into each other), about 100 more books to pack, and then everything else to sort out before it all has to be done, and then it's time for the next round, in a new level.

Picture time:

At this point we were near the front, but as tends to happen with queues, we had started at the back. After pulling away from the gate we had an interval of taxiing and standing, with the pilot periodically announcing that we were 15-20 minutes from taking off; and then we got the announcement that we had reached the point where the front of the line was visible, and we were about 19th, so it would be, oh, 15-20 minutes.

Dreams and nightmares

2008-08-13T17:58:00.003+01:00

Last night I had two dreams, both set in the same strange night-time London/Montclair hybrid: in the first I was a detective, attempting to solve the murders of pairs of Police Community Support Officers while it drizzled with rain and new bodies turned up in cordoned-off roadworks; in the second I wandered around a museum (very like the Tate Modern) with Roy Harper, who once stopped to perform a song in one of the rooms.

In other news, the Tube staff have announced more strikes, including one that will presumably shut down the Piccadilly line on the day I will be flying into Heathrow. So that I remember the alternate route, it appears that I will need to take the Heathrow Express to Paddington, the Circle line to King's Cross, the Victoria line to Finsbury Park, and then the bus home. How exciting.

More to come.

This post is not like all other posts

2008-08-03T09:39:00.001+01:00

Because it is very short. It is in fact a test post, but don't tell
anyone I said that.

A silly book

2008-06-11T21:55:00.005+01:00

Today I (oh the shame! oh the horror!) succumbed to a truly remarkable amount of hype and bought a copy of The Gone-Away World.

It has prominent front-table displays at every bookshop I've been in, an Underground ad campaign (with the slogan "love, pirates, mimes, greed, and...ninjas?"*), apparently involved an enormous advance for an unknown author (£300,000 or so), and had a lot of money poured into the book production: the jacket, rather curiously, has a trompe l'oeil depiction of a book facing the other way (i.e. with page ends shown on the spine) and is both glossified and embossed. The flaps are generous, and show snippets of Bosch embellished with chaotic red overprinting, a design that matches the decorated boards and the glossy endpapers. They even went to all the trouble of fitting fake headbands on the spine ends, although the book is of course cased and not sewn. My own copy is signed, although I suspect that this has been done by the same method used for the newest Bond novel (which Faulks allegedly refused to sign in person and so at least one in-store signing instead featured a Bond girl), that is, a group of copies had the title page excised, signed in bulk by the author, then tipped back in.

All this made me curious - I figured someone must have really liked the book. Once I'd brought it home and thought to google it, however, the truth was immediately apparent. "Nick Harkaway" is a pseudonym for Nicholas Cornwell, see? No? Well, Nicholas Cornwell is the son of David Cornwell, see? No? Well, David Cornwell is better known by his own pseudonym, John le Carré, see? Ah, yes.

Now, Cornwell père adopted his pseudonym because, as an actual member of MI6, it wouldn't do for him to be publishing spy "novels" under his own name, especially after he was outed by a double agent. Cornwell fils, having previously been nothing more state-secretive than a script-writer, has presumably adopted his pseudonym in order to avoid (accusations of) trading on the name of his famous father...even though no one knows the name with which his famous father gifted him. (The dedication reads "For my parents. You know who you are", which would be coyish except everyone else knows who they are too, once the publicity machine has geared up.) Furthermore, one can only wonder if his book, which is clearly expected to become a top bestseller given the sheer expense put into it by the publisher, would have attracted such expense if he had begun by submitting the manuscript under his assumed name so that his authorial inheritance was actually concealed, instead of being a completely open secret. What gives?

As I've gone and bought a copy of the damn thing, we shall see.

-----
*I didn't write down the actual ad slogan, so that's come from other marketing materials. It does make me wonder why ninjas are implied to be so unexpected. Surely once pirates are there ninjas are simply an occupational hazard? Really it's the mimes that nobody expects, mimes having run the Spanish Inquisition. Or something. Certainly they are evil On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness.

The goodness that's in Milky Bar

2008-06-04T22:05:00.002+01:00

Is it a sign of the politicization of public discourse that there is an "incumbent" Milky Bar Kid?

In other candy news, Starburst Twisted (no relation to Cadbury Twisted) are now available, and are also very, very good. At least, the Strawberry & Lime and the Cherry & Lemon can go into the Starburst flavour hall of fame with the original Strawberry and the Baja Dragonfruit from the Baja mix. Blueberry & Banana is even surprisingly edible for a candy with banana-flavour in it.

More Fry

2008-05-19T20:52:00.002+01:00

After last week's anecdote regarding the Archbishop of Canterbury, a minor rant (and I specify rant as he's clearly too worked up to ensure complete grammatical accuracy) on education:

It's an extraordinary thing - it's always the children who say "Sir, sir, what's the point of geometry?" or "What's the point of Latin?" who end up having no job, being alcoholic, and they don't notice that the ones who actually find knowledge for its own sake, and pleasure in information, in the history and in the world and nature around us actually getting on and doing things with their fucking lives.

(From the QI season 2 blooper reel)

De superciliis

2008-05-15T21:21:00.003+01:00

Some time ago, the Daily Telegraph asked the secret of Salman Rushdie's success with women, prompted by his appearance in the first music video from Scarlett Johansson's upcoming album, in which he "nuzzles her neck". Scarlett's strangeling album has been made freely available to listen to on the internet - like, for legal - and can be seen, among other places, at Wil Wheaton's blog, but that's not the point at the moment.

Sir Salman has been married four times and reportedly forwent a bachelor party in favour of a hen night full of younger women. What is his secret?

It's the eyebrows.

A grand set of brows can be a remarkable thing. There are people who lump together truly impressive natural outcroppings with awful pluck jobs under the heading badeyebrows, but sometimes they would more accurately be called magnificent. As in fact are the brows of the Right Reverend Robert Duncan, Bishop of Pittsburgh, which have been described thusly: "They extend at least an inch from his skull, shielding his eyes like the visor of a baseball cap. These are the eyebrows of Norse mythology. Centuries ago, they would get their own funeral upon the death of their bearer, and not simply because both wouldn't fit in the same boat."

Duncan is not the only holy man with eyebrows from God; Stephen Fry includes the following passage in Moab is my Washpot:

Michael Ramsay, Archbishop of Canterbury during my childhood and during my religious phase a hero and profound influence, was once accused by an interviewer of being wise.

"Am I?" he asked. "I don't think so, really. I think it is probably just the impression given by the absurd fecundity of my eyebrows."

As I said, the secret is the eyebrows.

-------------------------

In other news, Boris Johnson is the mayor of London. So far he has done at least one thing for which he ought to be applauded; he has spoken a sentence with a semicolon clearly audible (at least to the transcribers at the BBC). "I remind [Londoners] that their previous mayor wrote for the Morning Star; indeed I think he wrote for the Independent." Well done, Boris.

Another three things

2008-04-28T20:30:00.003+01:00

I've had a few URLs kicking around on my desktop waiting for me to say something about them (you know how these things happen). I might as well say something about them.

Firstly, The Manolo at his best: '"Gladiator sandals," you think to yourself, the sound of Betsy's whimpering at the edge of your consciousness, "I need gladiator sandals."' I can't say I like the shoes as much, but that's not the point.

Secondly, take a guess at how many brown-haired women named Amy Briggs worked developing software in the mid-1980s before returning to graduate school. It's at least two: one went to Macalester and worked for Infocom before getting her PhD in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Minnesota, the other went to Dartmouth and worked for Hewlett Packard before getting her PhD in Computer Science from Cornell. Is it just me or do they look alike as well?

Lastly, today I went to the supermarket and, by masterful manipulation of store- vs name-brands and buy-two-and-save offers, thereby demonstrating my absolute pwnership of said supermarket, spent exactly £13.37.

On the internet

2008-04-13T20:55:00.005+01:00

Alex Ross (whose book I want) has quoted the "Snakes on a Plane rule" in a New Yorker article: "things invariably appear more important on the Internet than they are in the real world".

It is because of this that I find a pair of recent phenomena so fascinating; they demonstrate that the rule is not unbreakable, that the internet is growing in power, that it has merely been biding its time while amassing resources, shrewdly picking its battles. Snakes on a Plane was a sortie merely, a toe dipped in unsure waters, a test of strength. While I have not yet encountered captioned cats in the cold light of reality, the Anonymous protests against Scientology built (and seemingly continue to build, though I missed the last one) little outposts of internet in cities worldwide.

Then, this past week, an entire London train station was rickrolled. Hundreds of people did it. The BBC reported it. Only confused commuters suffered - this time. Who can say where it will end? Already nothing happens in reality without its twisted reflection turning up in pieces across Flickr, Youtube, and blogs. Actual events spawn digital eddies. When digital events spawn actual eddies, no one will be safe. This is not Kurzweil's Singularity, this is the Immanentization of the Internet. Guard your buckets, your badgers, your bananas, and all your base. RLY.

-----------------

In other news, the Rather Difficult Font Game didn't quite live up to its name - largely because of the multiple-choice format and too many questions for which all but one answer was obviously wrong. I got 30 out of 34 but at least half of those points were due to good SAT-style wrong-answer-elimination rather than font-recognition-proper.

Also, McIntyre and Moore have moved, and even had a moving sale, and where was I? Miles away.

A public poem

2008-04-03T23:27:00.002+01:00

I have been browsing my way through a selection of the work of past poets laureate, and pondering their public duties. They are from time to time expected to produce poetry of the official kind, being official poets. But this has always been problematical: Wordsworth refused to write anything on demand, having his one official contribution ghosted by his son-in-law, while Thomas Gray was offended at being offered the position without any accompanying duties, though he knew well "the bland emollient saponaceous qualities both of sack and silver" (at that time laureates were still part-paid in wine). As it now stands, the laureate isn't required to do much, but at least more recent appointees tend to write a bit anyway.

Poetry, increasingly marginalised as it is, would I think only benefit from being produced more in an official capacity. Not only state occasions but significant events should prompt a memorably rhymed statement from the laureate, or from any other public-minded poet. We need more strained crap written to order on anything that makes the news, I say.

I happen to have a modest example here:

Quintessence

Heathrow! Most overloaded port of call,
You link by air the world to the world;
The winged ships arise from you and fall
To earth on you again, by turbines hurled.

Inevitable growth has brought you here:
Tri-terminaled to square, and now a fifth
Has won its way onto your west frontier
For millions more a year to wrestle with -

O auspicious day! So many years of graft,
Committees, meetings, plannings, workings-out,
Have fruited in your form: the waving roof
And well-lit halls, the smiling BA staff,
The name. T5, how could one ever doubt
You'd open to the skies without a goof?

Three things

2008-03-30T23:28:00.003+01:00

Periodically I try again to find a half-remembered quote about the three uses of poetry. The most recent fruitless search did remind me of the Trecheng Breth Féne (online as translated by the German scholar of Irish Kuno Meyer), of which three are:

Three slender things that best support the world: the slender stream of milk from the cow's dug into the pail, the slender blade of green corn upon the ground, the slender thread over the hand of a skilled woman.

Three keys that unlock thoughts: drunkenness, trustfulness, love.

Three smiles that are worse than sorrow: the smile of the snow as it melts, the smile of your wife on you after another man has been with her, the grin of a hound ready to leap at you.

I have also been flipping through The Notebooks of Robert Frost, and found this interesting misunderstanding of Plato: "Plato and Emersons [sic] belief that everything we have is an imperfect copy of a perfect model in heaven. A ~~man~~ womans [sic] husband is an imperfect copy of another womans [sic] husband". On which grounds he rejects Platonism, though I wonder if there is not a certain amount of truth to each person being an imperfect copy of him- or herself; but of course logic dictates that one woman's husband is an imperfect copy of the same woman's husband - or of the original from which said woman is copied, at least.

And one other: in an Oxfam I found a copy of Max Heindel's The Rosicrucian Cosmo-conception, in the second edition of 1910, from which the original dedication to Rudolf Steiner was removed. The grounds for the removal, explained in its place in this edition, were that the dedication had been promised to Steiner, who inspired Heindel and first taught him, but in the meantime Heindel had been visited by the dense (i.e. physical) form of the Elder Brother, who gave him much knowledge directly. With the dedication to Steiner being taken to suggest that Steiner's theories had something to do with the content of the book, it was thought better to remove it, though Steiner and the Elder Brother largely corroborated each other's teachings. Either way, the result is an explication of the seven worlds and each one's seven parts, the form of man's body, and, wherever possible, the division of each thing into its component branches, and each of those into parts, and those into forms, and so on and so forth, until a sufficient level of esotericity is reached. What fun.

Updates on old things plus a one-liner

2008-03-16T14:15:00.004Z

I found somewhere the OVA of Read or Die (having first learned of its existence some time ago), which I am loading onto one of my pocket devices to watch on trains, boats, &c.

I also found somewhere a remaindered copy of Madder Music, Stronger Wine, the biography of the earlier-mentioned Ernest Dowson, decadent poet(aster). Flipping through the pages, I saw that at least two poems are reproduced in full - which happen to be the same two that are quoted in his Wikipedia page, and the two that I reproduced in full earlier. I know he wrote other things; perhaps some will be quoted elsewhere in the biography, and perhaps one day I will find an actual book by him somewhere.

[Edit: I have just refound William Monahan's brilliant review of MM, SW: "Yeats generously said of Dowson [...] that he 'had what I lacked, conscious deliberate craft, and what I must lack always, scholarship.' This is a nice way of saying that Dowson was second-rate. Yeats had genius, which eats scholarship."]

One of the above recent acquisitions was carried home in a plastic bag with a note on it proclaiming it to be made of "Degradable Material". So I called it worthless and threw it in the trash.

A welcome piece of hilarity from the news

2008-03-12T23:28:00.003Z

Former Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski (insert diacritics as required) has declared that he is "not an enthusiast of a young person sitting in front of a computer, watching video clips and pornography while sipping a bottle of beer and voting when he feels like it" (Reuters).

The solution is simple. Embed the voting application in the entry pages of pornographic websites. Not only will that guarantee that the internet users vote before they watch pornography (instead of whenever they feel like it), but it could do incredible things for voter turnout as well.

Plus all the controls to prevent minors from participating are already in place, right?

I still like my glasses

2008-03-07T01:28:00.002Z

My mobile phone, which I carry around in my pocket, has a faster processor and more memory than the desktop I owned ten years ago. It allows me to speak to people on the other side of the world by pressing a few buttons, as long as I'm not underground. A chip smaller than a penny but capacious enough to hold the entire text of Wikipedia fits into its side to provide extra storage space. That is progress, and only to be expected.

When centuries CE were still in their early teens, someone (probably Italian) invented eyeglasses. Several hundred years later Kepler figured out why the work. Nearly three hundred years ago they were first extended over the ears. Still, every time I take this construction of metal and glass out and attach it to my face, thereby significantly enhancing one of my basic senses, I get a little cyborg thrill. This is science fiction, and totally cool.

Birds, trivia

2008-03-04T20:40:00.003Z

The University of Pittsburgh has posted a digital edition of Audubon's oversized (and to my mind just a little overrated, as any high-spot book is these days) Birds of America, which makes for a bit of nice browsing, although I'd like to be able to download the entire large image instead of fussing about one tiny detail at a time in their flash viewer. I see they do sell high-quality full-size reproductions at relatively reasonable prices. Personally, I'd go for the Great American Shrike, mostly for the one with its beak buried happily in another bird's neck.

If I had a pet shrike I'd name it Vlad, for the obvious reason.

...

I just watched the University Challenge final, as usual shouting answers at the screen when I knew them (less frequently than I'd like). Christ Church took the trophy, clearly because they had a classicist on their team. Sheffield's linguist was a good try but not quite the thing.

A capital show, I imagine

2008-03-01T00:10:00.002Z

As I walked past the Astoria this evening, the touts were calling "Tickets for the Gallows! Tickets for the Gallows!"

Come the end of May, it will have been 140 years since that was made illegal.

Strange conversations with customers redux

2008-02-27T21:07:00.005Z

An older man walked in and asked if he could sit and read his computer book somewhere a bit quieter. And then he asked where I was from.

Oh, a true American (he said). So you're here doing a PhD in astrophysics? Oh, Latin and Greek? So you've read the Aeneid? What about the story of David and Goliath? Do you think that David was lying when he said that he defeated Goliath because God was with him? What about the millions of Catholics who regularly partake of the blood and body of the Lord? Are they stupid? Or misguided? Did you know that America was the first country to put a man on the moon because they had the courage to say "In God We Trust"?

7:53 on the 29: A Villanelle

2008-02-26T23:18:00.004Z

I want to utterly destroy
So many things while riding home.
This bus would only be a joy

If I could stab what things annoy—
Instead, a scribbled useless poem.
I want to utterly destroy

That loudly cell-phone-yapping boy,
Why not shut up your fucking phone?
This bus would only be a joy

Without that stupid stop tannoy.
Although I'll only ever groan,
I want to utterly destroy

This thing, like Carthage, or like Troy.
If I could strip it to the bone
This bus would only be a joy.

To smash it like a child's toy—
Right now it's this and this alone
I want. To utterly destroy
This bus would only be a joy.

Let's get some shoes

2008-02-23T19:12:00.002Z

It's about time I had a new pair. But which?

My top choice at the moment is the Mephisto Galdino, a brogued cap-toe in matte leather. A full-on wingtip is perhaps a little flashy, although there is the Galdry, which, in the same matte leather as the Galdino, isn't too bad. But the seams on the side of the Galdino form the shape of a curly bracket, and that is too excellent for words.

Yet at the same time I find myself oddly tempted by the shiny parts of the Fluevog T.S.E., even though the interior is gold, in the inimitable Fluevog fashion, and not at all in the similarly inimitable me fashion.

I wish I could have back my broken pair with the monk-strap (that looked a bit like this), or the velcro Doc Martens that must have been discontinued and erased from history shortly after I walked out of the store with them. I had photo evidence that they existed, once, but it may have since also been tragically erased.

I use geophysics, and I'm dead right

2008-02-15T23:02:00.002Z

Today the hammering was noticeably, thankfully, reduced.

Towards the end of the day, a man wandered in looking for what formerly occupied our current location. When he didn't find it, he asked what we had on Shakespeare, and proceeded to outline the following theory, prefacing this with the explanation that he "exposes a lot of things."

Shakespeare (he said) was of Ghanaian descent. Specifically, Shakespeare's father was born in Ghana. All the English people died out in the mid-16th century, due to famine. When the famine struck the Queen sent to Ghana to ask for help. The English people that didn't die fled to Wales. The Welsh are the historical English, and England was repopulated by Ghanaians. Shakespeare's African heritage is clearly visible in the painting of him where he's balding and has dark curly hair (i.e., the Chandos portrait). Not a lot of people have heard this but word is getting out.

Sound & fury

2008-02-14T14:58:00.004Z

I spend my weekdays sitting at the corner of a right-angled desk in the outer corner of a room positioned in the corner of a building built on the corner of two streets, beneath two large and drafty windows.

As part of the ongoing unending upgrade of the Victorian water mains in this diachronic city, the pipes beneath the roads that meet at the corner beneath my windows must be extracted and replaced with new plastic piping from which nothing known to be harmful will be leached into the water wending its wet way beneath the streets.

For the next six months men in high-visibility safety jackets will spend their weekdays at the corner beneath my windows hammering together safety barriers, hammering to break the tarmac, hammering to loosen the packed dirt beneath, hammering to separate the metal pipes, hammering to lay the plastic pipes, hammering to pack the replacement dirt, hammering to smooth the replacement tarmac, and hammering to take down the safety barriers.

If I were only closer to a Heathrow flight path I could shut my eyes and imagine it to be nothing more than a very long Einstürzende Neubauten concert.

There goes a car alarm.

My god, Borges.

2008-02-09T22:55:00.000Z

"I can't talk about my books. I have written them and tried to forget them. I have written once, and readers have read me many times, no?"

From a newly-translated interview with Borges (aged 85).

UK in sad state of pi

2008-02-06T21:01:00.000Z

In the chapter on Bodoni in his Anatomy of a Typeface, Alexander Lawson describes Giambattista Bodoni's job at the Vatican printing office: "Bodoni studied the Oriental languages and was assigned the task of cataloguing the exotics that had originally been cut two centuries earlier by such noted French punchcutters as Granjon, Garamond, and Le Bé, and which by the eighteenth century were in a sad state of pi."

I can find no meaning for "pi" that makes sense here, although the OED offers a adjective sense "pious, devout; sanctimonious" which might possibly apply to the Vatican's stores of type. Instead I expect there was a typo or similar error (the only one I've found so far, and I'm halfway through). But this raises the question of what the intended word was, and I'm struggling to think of a plausible answer. Neither "sad state of pie" nor "sad state of bi" would be any better. "sad state of ____" most firmly calls to mind "repair" - and so I must conclude that Lawson had intended to write "sad state of repair" and somewhere along the way the word "rear" was lost.

In other news, Prince Andrew has caused controversy by voicing a political opinion. The major difference between royalty in the UK and celebrity in the US is the degree to which they are allowed to meddle in the political process. It seems a little post-imperialist-paranoid to me - couldn't possibly suggest that anyone unelected has any kind of power! - but it is also delightfully backwards, so I suppose that's all right.