2009 — 13 August: Thursday

Tonight's picture of Christa, taken in Old Windsor, dates back to December 1979 — four months before Peter was born:

Christa in December 1979

Exciting times. Meanwhile, the evening's entertainment was a small-scale overdose of the sublime West Wing interspersed with a book, some domestic administrivia, and the equally sublime music of Philip Glass. Violinist Gidon Kremer yet again. I can't really say why I find this repetitive, minimalist "organised sound" (as Edgar Varèse1 put it) is so deeply appealing, but I do know I can entirely lose myself in it, and it's very refreshing to have something I can get lost in from time to time.

G'night, at — crikey — 00:40 or thereabouts.

British culture

A white bread with no crusts attitude to culture, heh? British culture: a fine example of an oxymoron! Still, there's always Mary Beard. Or, at least, until that nice Mr Murdoch starts charging for all "his" content online. Not to mention David Byrne. Thirty years? Incredibubble! I enjoy Lauren Laverne, too, and had no idea she was a blonde! She gives excellent radio-related quote:

Anybody with a brain who does both TV and radio will tell you radio's better. It's more fun, it's immediate, it's engaging and people really care about it. It's for geeks and I'm a geek so it completely resonates with me and I've loved it from day one. But it's run by people who haven't left a studio in decades. Those kinds of boys just don't know what to do with girls; it's just a bit like [comic shop] Forbidden Planet. Would you want to go in there? It smells weird and sells funny stuff. That's what radio studios are like. Ladies just walk past.

Lauren Laverne in The Guardian


Only the "Grauniad" would feel it necessary to explain that Forbidden Planet is a comic shop, of course... John Wyndham similarly took a poke at a British newspaper when saying that they'd felt it necessary to define the word "ululation" in a footnote. I'd hoped Mrs Google would confirm this was in his superb novel The Kraken wakes to save me the bother of flipping through it. However, my search procedure led me to a wonderful cartoon on "procrastination" from the "Writer at Work" archives. Don't miss it!

I also learned that, back in 1996, "John Wyndham's papers are up for sale: trunkfuls of MSS, proofs, correspondence, etc. ... including the handwritten MS of The Day of the Triffids, four unpublished mystery novels, and much unpublished sf in draft form. The SF Foundation finds itself awfully tempted, but the price tag is £100,000." (Source.)

Time — 09:41 — for the first cuppa of the new day. I can be such a sloth sometimes. Mind you, the sight and sound of yet another neighbour finally getting a round tuit and having cavity wall insulation reminds me that we were quite quick off that particular mark. The latest installation is in my numeric next-door neighbour's house; he of the cat-that-drowned-in-my-water-butt disaster. Richard's house was actually the original show house on the little estate here. The garage had a sliding glass patio door and formed an office back in the warm summer of 1981. But the cold winter very soon convinced us that, despite the fact we were as poor as the proverbial church mice, we needed better insulation. We filled up with polystyrene balls2 long before we ever fitted carpets.

I need some breakfast, but it can wait until the end of Alan Hovhaness and his Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Op 282. I bought the CD of this performance (Michael York narrating) only this January. Right! Food! The clock ticks ever on.

Patience is a virtue...

... and, of course, virtue is its own reward. However, I prefer the kind I can collect, once a month, down in Borders even though I still have to pop out again to buy some more vital stuff, like food:

Mag plus CD

Still no sign of Linux Format however. It's 14:32 and lunch is just concluding with a refreshing cuppa and some lovely "Gotan Project" music. Meanwhile, I see that Helen Gurley Brown is still with us:

Born in an Arkansas hollow in 1922, fatherless by 10, Brown was poor — dirt poor — from the get-go, and she was raised by women who tended to step off the road and pee when the urge hit them. Clearly, there is something Appalachian about the easy truck with bodily functions that became so important to Brown's mission and message. While the Mount Holyoke grads were meeting in embarrassed little encounter groups to discuss possibly putting a mirror down there, Brown was telling her readers to embrace all aspects of their body, including the various functions and products of the alimentary tract.

Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic


And, in passing, I learned a lot about Lucrezia Borgia. I particularly liked the sentence "Works Consulted (please note that footnotes have been removed to reduce the temptation for others to present this work as their own in a classroom)". As it happens, I have a sentimental fondness for Dartmouth College as that's where John G Kemeny and Thomas E Kurtz developed BASIC. So as my little tribute to the articulate creators of BASIC here are that Institution's plagiarism guidelines. Very classy they are, too.

Later

It's 20:39, supper has been supped, I caught the small portion of the "Culture" show that featured Janeane Garofalo chatting to Lauren Laverne, and am now plotting my packed lunch for my planned walk tomorrow down in Exbury.

  

Footnotes

1  As it happens, Frank Zappa was a great champion of the music of Varèse. I still have an audio cassette I made of him hosting a two-hour radio programme (in the late 1970s) in which he played, and talked about, the music he admired. That was one of the cassettes I took with me on a railway journey up to Birmingham to rendezvous with Kathy Lang of the University there. She'd been commissioned by IBM to rework the CICS General Information manual and that also became my first task when I joined IBM as I'd been foolish enough to express my opinion of its truly lousy quality during my job interview in March 1981.
2  It was -12C on the day of that particular job. The water-based adhesive that was supposed to stick said balls together didn't do a very good job. So, over the years since, high winds have tended to blow some of them loose. Drilling though into the cavity also has a tendency to dislodge them, too. I discovered that when I was putting in the conduit for the electricity supply to the various pumps that lived in what used to be our pond.