Les carbonisateurs

An extraordinary piece by Daniel Howden at the Independent on the attempt to preserve gorilla habitat in Virunga National Park.

"Six working Colossi"

Courtesy of my father, a very good letter at the FT (in response to this piece on the top-secret room-sized computing machine named Colossus, invented by Tommy Flowers - site registration required):

A rebuild of Colossus can be seen by the public at The National Museum of Computing in Block H at Bletchley Park. Block H also happens to be the world’s first purpose-built computer centre and housed six working Colossi in the 1940s.

Before his death in 1998, Tommy Flowers took a great interest in the rebuild of Colossus, which began in 1994, and visited us to give his thoughts, reminiscences and moral support.

The rebuild took 14 years and in the Colossus Cipher Challenge two years ago it once again broke a Lorenz coded message in three hours and 40 minutes. However, a German using a laptop broke the code in just 47 seconds and won the challenge.

Tony Sale,
Head of Colossus Rebuild Team and Trustee of The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park

"I'm the last of our little foursome, the last remaining"

Erica Wagner has an excellent piece about Philip Roth at the Sunday Times.

The courtesy minute

Fascinating.

The great game

It is far from the usual Light Reading fare, but I cannot resist the opportunity to link to two major pieces published this week by my dissertation advisor David Bromwich. In general, I have been extraordinarily lucky in my teachers; but perhaps I learned more from David Bromwich than from almost anybody else, not just in terms of an abiding obsession with the writings of Edmund Burke but by virtue of a language for talking about the connections between thought and intellectual temperament and character that I rely upon very heavily in daily life.

The first is at the LRB, on Obama's delusion ("His way of thinking is close to the spirit of that Enlightenment reasonableness which supposes a right course of action can never be described so as to be understood and not assented to"). The second is this NYRB review of Taylor Branch's Clinton book:

Maybe Clinton in his final year in office spoke more easily; in any case, the narrative has a sharper focus now, and the anecdotes fall into a characteristic rhythm:

The president was eating a bowl of bran in January. He said Bob Squier, the campaign consultant, never had a colonoscopy in his life. They diagnosed him six months ago, and he died today at sixty-five. The end comes on quickly if you don't catch it early. "I always eat bran when a friend dies of colon cancer," Clinton said.

Total immersion?

Your brain on e-books.

"Olympic and recessional dragons"

At the TLS, Alex Burghart (who has written a funny last paragraph and contributor's note here!) on the artefacts of the Staffordshire hoard:

I joined the thousands of others visiting the Birmingham Museum earlier this month to fog the glass of the display cases housing the choicest items. “Wow!” came the exclamation to my left. “What is it?” said a second. “I don’t know.” That exchange just about summarizes current knowledge. The artefacts are undoubtedly (as Howard Carter said on first leaving Tutankhamen's tomb) “wonderful things”, but the facts behind their wondrousness are not immediately obvious. Even speculating about the hoard before the earth is removed from all of its components is a dangerous business. Yet the early suppositions of those lucky enough to have handled and examined the material already seem to carry weight. Kevin Leahy, of the Portable Antiquities Scheme, has suggested that this is the spoil of battle – goods taken from the dead after a fight – and from what I have seen, the analysis fits. Were the hoard merely plunder we would expect to find everyday riches (coins, hairpins, ingots, etc) in amongst it. Instead we have as many as eighty-four sword and dagger pommel caps, seventy-one hilt collars, two or three gold crosses, a number of twisted-metal rings, what is probably a shield decoration, and at least one cheek-piece from a helmet. Tellingly, several of the items have bent pins still sticking out of them, which means they were ripped from their original mounts. Perhaps most wonderful of all is the resonance with a passage in Beowulf describing the gathering of sword hilts from the dead after battle. “One warrior stripped the other, / looted Ongentheow’s iron mail coat, / his hard sword-hilt, / his helmet too, / and carried the graith to King Hygelac”.

Seeing the finds with Leahy’s interpretation in mind is slightly chilling. The rows of unperished pommels become personal possessions, each one unique, as though fashioned for its owner’s particular fancy, each one a life. The seeming immortality of the gold, which the Anglo-Saxons so loved, somehow drives home the mortality of those who briefly wore it. Sutton Hoo is, above all, a testament to loyalty and love – whoever hauled that boat up that hill and filled it with precious gifts did so out of a profound sense of duty. The Staffordshire Hoard is almost the opposite.

The Meerkat-Mongoose War of 1728

At the Independent, Simon Usborne lays out why there's never been a better time to be a meerkat.

Tufts and tuft-hunters

The etymology of "toffee-nosed."

The quintessential wink

Somehow over the course of the many years of reading and writing in which I have indulged I have come to develop (it is perhaps partly by blogging and writing e-mails?) an unusually baroque way with the sentence; I have sometimes been charged with speaking a curiously elaborate English (I speak more and more in sentences!), and I am greatly enjoying rereading The Golden Bowl for the class I'm currently teaching on style. I have never steeped myself so thoroughly in James as to claim him as an influence; but certainly I see in him some cast of thought that makes me feel I am among my kind...

It really came home to her friend on the spot that this free range of observation in her, picking out the frequent funny with extraordinary promptness, would verily henceforth make a different thing for him of such experiences, of the customary hunt for the possible prize, the inquisitive play of his accepted monomania; which different thing would probably be a lighter and perhaps thereby a somewhat more boisterously refreshing form of sport. (I.ii.6.181)

‘You’re strange, cara mia,’ he consentingly enough dropped; but, for whatever strangeness, he kept her, as they circulated, from being waylaid, even remarking to her afresh, as he had often done before, on the help rendered in such situations by the intrinsic oddity of the London ‘squash’, a thing of vague slow eddies, revolving as in fear of some menace of conversation suspended over it, the drop of which, with a consequent refreshing splash or spatter, yet never took place. (I.iii.1.209)

"A consequent refreshing splash or spatter"! "A somewhat more boisterously refreshing form of sport"!

Interstellar cheese

"I am driving back from High Wycombe with the cheese now."

Eye vs. ear

From Henry James' preface to the New York Edition revision of The Golden Bowl:

It is scarce necessary to note that the highest test of any literary form conceived in the light of 'poetry' - to apply that term in its largest literary sense - hangs back unpardonably from its office when it fails to lend itself to viva-voce treatment. We talk here, naturally, not of non-poetic forms, but of those whose highest bid is addressed to the imagination, to the spiritual and the aesthetic vision, the mind led captive by a charm and a spell, an incalculable art. The essential property of such a form as that is to give out its finest and most numerous secrets, and to give them out most gratefully, under the closest pressure - which is of course the pressure of the attention articulately sounded.

Delightful light reading

Strange to say, the supply of truly delightful light reading in the world is NOT infinite, so I have been very lucky to have within the last couple days the final installment of Stieg Larsson's trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (very good, but not as much character-driven stuff as the previous books; still a page-turner, though), and Terry Pratchett's Unseen Academicals - more of a sport-related novel than an academic novel, truly, but very delightful to me nonetheless! (The closing pages, describing the culminating "football" match, are almost as pleasing to me as the stories of Caymanian sports journalist Ron Shillingford!)

The snake-and-primate nexus

Snake Detection Theory!

"Not silence, only publicity could protect us in the west"

At the Guardian, this year's Nobelist in Literature Herta Müller on the file kept on her by the Romanian secret service:

In my file I am two different persons. One is called Cristina, who is an enemy of the state and is being fought. To compromise this Cristina a dummy is produced in the falsification workshop of Branch "D" (Disinformation), with all the ingredients that harm me the most – party faithful communist, unscrupulous agent. Wherever I went, I had to live with this dummy. It wasn't just sent after me, it hurried ahead of me. Even though I have, from the beginning and always, written only against the dictatorship, the dummy goes its own way to this day. It has become independent of me. Even though the dictatorship has been dead for 20 years, the dummy leads its ghostly life. For how long yet?