2014 — 3 May: Saturday
Peter and Peter's g/f — half of which pair is my living link to Christa — arrived shortly before midnight but were both clearly nearly as zonked as I was by then. So it was off to Bedfordshire we all went. And now it's a gloriously sunny morning, too early1 yet for them to wake, or indeed for Brian Matthew's brand of 1960s audio cheer.
Given my re-reading...
... just last night, of Hal Draper's 1961 story "Ms. Fnd in a Lbry" this polemic on the Digital Humanities is very timely. Having browsed two of Franco Moretti's works recently (as a taster) I think I'll just let this summary of a profound piece of "research" speak for itself...
Moretti gives an example of this kind of not-reading in an essay revealingly titled "Style, Inc.: Reflections on 7,000 Titles." Rather than read every novel published in Britain
between 1740 and 1850, a task that would fill a lifetime, he takes only the titles of all those novels, and uses a computer program to find
patterns2 in the data. One such pattern emerges right away: over the period in question, the average length of a title decreases
dramatically, from fifteen to twenty words at the beginning to six words at the end. This is owed especially to the disappearance of very long titles, which were conventional in early novels but became unfashionable.
By examining those long titles, Moretti shows that what changed was the function of the title itself. From a miniature summary of the book, it evolved into a catchy, attention-grabbing
advertisement for the book.
... and continue to plough, as it were, my own tedious, furrow-browed, way of reading and thinking about what I've read. I won't even comment on the fact that titles themselves are all too often simply imposed on the original author by editors and marketing wonks in publishing houses.
What must it be like, these days, to be a professor with tenure in an academic ivory tower?
Here's a nice contrast...
... presenting the viewpoint of an actual author, on meeting "the public":
Most of the people who attend these events are regular readers. And of course they have come to events before. They are not fools. They have long since understood that almost nothing of interest can really be said about books at an event. They know that a novel is too sprawling and too complicated and the meshing of minds that occurs when novelist and reader meet on the page too intimate and elusive a process really to be tackled in forty public minutes with iffy microphones and occasional entries and departures.
Clearly, it would be much better just to analyse the title by computer :-)
Having developed...
... a mild (and, probably transient) enthusiasm for these Blu-ray "Pure audio" discs, I'd been looking forward to hearing what had been made of that rock classic "Tommy". Not a good job, according to Mike. In producing a 5.1 surround mix, tricks have been played with the phasing, and if you then try to re-constitute a simple stereo mix — stereo being all I now have, and all I now want — bits of the sound stage cancel out, and thus disappear. Not clever.
You just never can tell, can you?
Four large green bags of "garden waste" are now (just about) en route to the tip, having until a few minutes ago been contentedly basking in the sun, sucking up the rain, and generally turning the front garden into more of a jungle than is necessarily deemed appropriate for suburbia. I even helped. It's strangely satisfying. [Pause] Make that six bags. Mother Nature is nothing if not ridiculously fecund on the floral side.
A (very) late...
... lunch (or was it an early evening meal?) at the Fisher's Pond, for which we were fortuitously joined by Len, and now the youngsters have just (20:10) returned from a second run out to the tip and some shopping. Or something.