At the TLS, Kate Brown reviews books on the Siberian gulags by Lynne Viola, Nicolas Werth and Tomas Kizny:
Lynne Viola argues that Soviet leaders ordered reports because they begrudged the lost economic potential of famished labour forces. Nicolas Werth lays the blame on a stubborn insistence on engineering a utopian world, despite all evidence of its failure. They are, of course, both right. Economic rationale drove the creation and elevation of the special settlements. And ideology propped them up. Ideologically and physically, kulaks and “social undesirables” were expendable in the drive for socialism. But I am not wholly convinced that these were the only reasons for the excess of documents chronicling government-issue nightmares. I have sat in the tiny reading room in the Moscow “special archive”, and read the accounts from Gulag agents in the field. Many of these are dry texts, ground out at the end of a wearying day. But others are startling in their immediacy and poignancy. There is something to the full-throated disgorging of horror in these reports that emits a mournful human cry. The men express shock, sorrow but also offence at being forced to witness and take part in human degradation and destruction. In other words, in 1930, the utopian visionaries reconceived industry, agriculture and penal detention, aspiring to remake “The World” in the image of socialism. In 1933, local security officers inherited the violence and suffering of the dystopia these visionaries inspired. I have often thought that some of these “company men”, the dutiful Soviet security officials, were trying, however feebly and hopelessly, to make their world a little less awful.
Thursday, June 07, 2007
Wednesday, June 06, 2007
Terrors of the terrace
Toni Schlesinger at the New York Observer:
In Manhattan, where people already have a complicated, neither-with-you-nor-without-you relationship with the outdoors, furnishing the outdoor space, however large or small, can send one into the house of Bedlam. Wind on a large terrace, penthouse deck or balcony will blow lightweight furniture away, and then you will lose it, a sinking feeling—or, worse, the furniture will hit someone or crash into his topiary, and then he will sue you. Plastic furniture, if it is too light, will make you run after it. You will find yourself going down with your bubble chair to the ground. People with a small yard in between buildings should really rejoice. They are protected on the sides and can get the snazzy synthetics—a polyethylene chair named Jellyfish or foam-injected sofas or seating made of “eco-friendly” vinyl webbing, the new wicker. Vast penthouse terraces—the higher you go, the harder you fall—are open to everything, sparks dropping from Blade Runner flying machines in the night sky.
In Manhattan, where people already have a complicated, neither-with-you-nor-without-you relationship with the outdoors, furnishing the outdoor space, however large or small, can send one into the house of Bedlam. Wind on a large terrace, penthouse deck or balcony will blow lightweight furniture away, and then you will lose it, a sinking feeling—or, worse, the furniture will hit someone or crash into his topiary, and then he will sue you. Plastic furniture, if it is too light, will make you run after it. You will find yourself going down with your bubble chair to the ground. People with a small yard in between buildings should really rejoice. They are protected on the sides and can get the snazzy synthetics—a polyethylene chair named Jellyfish or foam-injected sofas or seating made of “eco-friendly” vinyl webbing, the new wicker. Vast penthouse terraces—the higher you go, the harder you fall—are open to everything, sparks dropping from Blade Runner flying machines in the night sky.
The body is a trench coat
I have found myself again and again thinking of this passage from Lionel Shriver's Double Fault (here were my extended musings on the novel last year). The protagonists--both aspiring professional tennis players--are having sex on a tennis court, giving rise to the main character's musing on what a different writer might call body and soul: “She always felt naked playing tennis, each blemish on her character laid bare: every unjustified conceit or nascent timidity, the least laziness, flagging, or despair. The body, in comparison, was a trench coat." I don't know enough about tennis to see character blemishes in someone's tennis game, but of course the thing this is really true of is writing. There is something magical about really clean pure naked writing that will survive this level of scrutiny, and surely the only ultimately really exciting thing in life is holding ourselves to the highest possible standards in this regard. It is very much like running, you work with what you've got & it's a question of doing your utmost within the limits of your natural abilities rather than hankering after something outside your capabilities. Laziness in particular becomes a kind of dishonesty; this may be the single most common weakness among otherwise talented writers.
Tuesday, June 05, 2007
A foot a day
An appealing article at the Times about goats as a kudzu-control measure. The picture is especially enchanting, those goats look quite demented (apologies to anyone who's using a dial-up modem, I switched over recently enough myself that I remember how annoying it is waiting for pictures to load...):
Lie back and think of the publicity
A very funny 'digested read' at the Guardian. The book actually sounds quite enjoyable--pointless, but enjoyable--at least Crace isn't as irritable as he often is!
Monday, June 04, 2007
Perfection
I must say that I am absolutely overwhelmed with the goodness of Jo Walton's writing--seriously, she's one for the very short list of favorites, I have been trying to slow down so as to eke out the remaining books but it is simply not possible to resist such excellent novels.
Here's what I said at the end of April about Farthing, and here are a few thoughts on The Prize in the Game. Now I've read an advance reader's copy of Ha'penny, and it is an absolutely wonderful follow-up to Farthing, everyone should read both of these books!
Seriously, they are so cunning and subtle and beautifully written, very much in the spirit of Peter Dickinson but also with a distinctive quality that's really not quite like anything else I've read--they should appeal to crime fiction readers and to SF/fantasy readers and really just to anyone who loves novels, they're that kind of book. Only a reader with a heart of stone will not fall for their subtle charms! (And it looks like they're getting some attention, too, award nominations etc. Colleen's just posted about them also and quite rightly observes that there is no reason Walton should be known exclusively or primarily in the science fiction/fantasy world, it's more than overdue for the crossover thing to be happening.)
So anyway, before that I read The King's Name and The King's Peace, and these two books are almost even more the kind of thing I most love. They're strongly Arthurian/Roman Britainish, only it's an alternate kind of place, all the names and nationalities a bit different; just wonderfully well-written, beautifully done all round. I loved these books! They've got the hard clear-headed pleasure of the Robert Graves-Mary Renault-Rosemary Sutcliffe school of historical fiction, with amazingly compelling first-person narration. In fact I must just say that I have the feeling reading Walton that she and I must have been reading pretty much the exact same books growing up, or perhaps it's just a temperamental-intellectual affinity. I love, love, love these books!
(I've got one more left to read, Tooth and Claw, which is like Trollope with dragons and whose dedication includes the statement that the novel is the result of imagining a world in which "the axioms of the sentimental Victorian novel were inescapable laws of biology." Perfect! Also I was laughing quietly to myself as I read through her recent blog entries, she makes the eminently sensible observation that really Patrick O'Brian's novels are fantasy and that you read them thinking each time that the next one might feature Napoleon beating Wellington at Waterloo! Perfect!)
One complaint/quibble/plea for justice to be done to these books--the covers on The King's Name and The King's Peace are absolutely dire. I don't mean to disrespect the artist and book design team & such. I personally have nothing against this style of cover design, I like the way that you get the diamond-in-the-rough effect reading a really wonderfully well-written book that's packaged in this sort of mass-market paperback clothing, and of course I totally grew up, you know, spending my baby-sitting money in Waldenbooks on the Del Rey kind of science-fiction paperback (when I was eleven or twelve there was nothing I coveted more than the complete works of Anne McCaffrey and Piers Anthony). HOWEVER it must be said that many, many people are not even going to think about picking up a book that looks like this. It's their loss; but won't Tor please reissue Walton's back-list in nice trade paperback editions with tasteful covers?!? Everybody should be reading these books!
Here's what I said at the end of April about Farthing, and here are a few thoughts on The Prize in the Game. Now I've read an advance reader's copy of Ha'penny, and it is an absolutely wonderful follow-up to Farthing, everyone should read both of these books!
Seriously, they are so cunning and subtle and beautifully written, very much in the spirit of Peter Dickinson but also with a distinctive quality that's really not quite like anything else I've read--they should appeal to crime fiction readers and to SF/fantasy readers and really just to anyone who loves novels, they're that kind of book. Only a reader with a heart of stone will not fall for their subtle charms! (And it looks like they're getting some attention, too, award nominations etc. Colleen's just posted about them also and quite rightly observes that there is no reason Walton should be known exclusively or primarily in the science fiction/fantasy world, it's more than overdue for the crossover thing to be happening.)
So anyway, before that I read The King's Name and The King's Peace, and these two books are almost even more the kind of thing I most love. They're strongly Arthurian/Roman Britainish, only it's an alternate kind of place, all the names and nationalities a bit different; just wonderfully well-written, beautifully done all round. I loved these books! They've got the hard clear-headed pleasure of the Robert Graves-Mary Renault-Rosemary Sutcliffe school of historical fiction, with amazingly compelling first-person narration. In fact I must just say that I have the feeling reading Walton that she and I must have been reading pretty much the exact same books growing up, or perhaps it's just a temperamental-intellectual affinity. I love, love, love these books!
(I've got one more left to read, Tooth and Claw, which is like Trollope with dragons and whose dedication includes the statement that the novel is the result of imagining a world in which "the axioms of the sentimental Victorian novel were inescapable laws of biology." Perfect! Also I was laughing quietly to myself as I read through her recent blog entries, she makes the eminently sensible observation that really Patrick O'Brian's novels are fantasy and that you read them thinking each time that the next one might feature Napoleon beating Wellington at Waterloo! Perfect!)
One complaint/quibble/plea for justice to be done to these books--the covers on The King's Name and The King's Peace are absolutely dire. I don't mean to disrespect the artist and book design team & such. I personally have nothing against this style of cover design, I like the way that you get the diamond-in-the-rough effect reading a really wonderfully well-written book that's packaged in this sort of mass-market paperback clothing, and of course I totally grew up, you know, spending my baby-sitting money in Waldenbooks on the Del Rey kind of science-fiction paperback (when I was eleven or twelve there was nothing I coveted more than the complete works of Anne McCaffrey and Piers Anthony). HOWEVER it must be said that many, many people are not even going to think about picking up a book that looks like this. It's their loss; but won't Tor please reissue Walton's back-list in nice trade paperback editions with tasteful covers?!? Everybody should be reading these books!
A long confessional post about mental turmoil and decision-making!
Oh dear, I have spent the weekend consumed in mental turmoil, it is ludicrous because really I should adopt a more "sufficient unto the day" policy, surely enough to worry about today and tomorrow rather than this excessive months-in-advance-type worrying! But the upshot is that I have made a sensible and grown-up decision, even though it pains me, that I will not run the marathon this fall.
The New York Road Runners announce the results of the lottery for places in mid-June, so I don't know yet about that, but I had in any case become feverishly caught up with thinking about what to do if I didn't get a spot--initially I thought I'd run in Philadelphia instead, but I found myself thinking that the New York Marathon really is special and that it would be worth waiting for that.
More pressing are the questions of injury. My stress fracture really is healed, but you know how it is if you've ever had an injury of some sort, all the other stuff around there is just kind of messed up still--the hip flexors are much tighter on that side, for one thing, which can be partly remedied by stretching, but there's something going on with ligaments or tendons or some such that's not ideal--I am going to get some sports massage to see if it can get fixed that way, and it doesn't hurt at all while I'm actually running, but it's worrisome enough, I think, to prevent me undertaking marathon training this year. The conventional wisdom is that you should have two years of serious running before you do a marathon, and if I wait till next fall, that's what it will have been--I did run on and off in my twenties, but never as regularly and consistently as this, so it's definitely the recommended mode.
(If I get a lottery spot in NY, I will defer it to next year, and then I won't need to worry about doing the nine races this year that will qualify me for a next-year spot. And if I don't get a spot, I'll keep on doing the races to ensure a spot, just again keeping injury risk in mind and not putting the nine-races goal over the run-safely-and-injury-free goal.)
This decision pains me because it is my heart's desire to run the marathon and I am not really a very patient person at all, though I put up a good show of it! I am more on the "but if I work fiendishly hard and drive myself into the ground, can't it happen sooner?" line of things.... If the world was definitely going to come to an end in December of this year, in other words, I would totally run the marathon in November. If the world does in fact come to an end and I haven't run a marathon, my thoughts in the last five minutes officially allowed for reflection under such circumstances will be the most intense self-reproach!
However in reality the world is not especially likely to come to an end in December, and meanwhile various other factors are mitigating against marathon-running anyway, chief among them being the fact (this is more than I usually say here about work stuff, but it's relevant in this case) that my tenure case has been pushed back for also quite sensible reasons altogether beyond my control. So I'll be submitting more materials at the end of the summer, and won't know about that till April or May 2008, and meanwhile (oh, dreaded thing!) must apply for jobs elsewhere in the fall so that I'm covered if the desired results don't come through.
I will need my wits about me in September and October, in other words, rather than collapsing every Saturday into the pleasant haze of post-long run syndrome! And even more than that, I will need to have running as a mental-health resource during the stressful waiting period over the winter, so I cannot risk blowing it all on the marathon and then having to sit out for months afterwards just when I most need it!
On a brighter note, there are some real advantages to doing it this way, advantages I will now list in order to persuade myself that I have fully embraced this difficult decision:
1. My dear friend and favorite training partner Liz is waiting till next year also, so this will mean we can run it together for the first time, very exciting.
2. TRIATHLONS! Marathon training would really mean having to back off a bit more from the other stuff, and I am mentally consumed with the allure of triathlon (I am going to save this for a separate post, this one's long enough already)--suffice it to say that I purchased a bicycle on Saturday, though it's still at the shop having a couple things done to it, and that my serious non-running project for the summer is to keep working on swimming and become a decent cyclist.
3. I am still running the Nike half-marathon in August, and I hope to run another half-marathon every couple months over the fall and winter and keep improving on my times, so it truly is ludicrous to be making such a big deal of this, it's not as though I'm not going to be able to have tons of delightfully enjoyable training and racing in any case!
4. And right after that half-marathon, if I'm not doing marathon training I can totally sign up for the NYRR BRiX bike-run class which has me salivating with desire in any case. (This is the most positive reason to wait.) It's a six-week class on doing the bike-run transition--you cycle for 10-12 miles, run a couple miles, learn techniques for doing the transition quickly, etc. This is especially useful because since I live in an apartment building with the slowest elevator in the world I've already been fretting about how I'm going to be able to practice this stuff--for the non-triathletes amongst you, it should be observed (I know this only from reading about it!) that when you switch from biking to running all the muscles in your legs are just wobbly and weak in protest at the changeover (the swim-bike transition has different challenges, namely getting out of the wetsuit and into the bike shoes and stuff, but these are not muscular challenges so much as logistical ones that you could either practice poolside, though it would be mildly embarrassing, or even at home with a bathtub of cold water if you're just thinking about the mechanics) so that it is very important to get your body used to it by doing it regularly. At this class, they've got one of the instructors supervising the bike area so you can really leave it there without worry--as a cautious and security-conscious person who has just bought a rather expensive bicycle, I do not think I'm going to be comfortable just chaining it to something & hoping for the best while I do my run, it is going to have to be stashed inside.
5. The other most positive reason, though somewhat excessively type-Aish also: I'm pretty sure that if I wait till next fall, I'm more likely to be able to aim for a time that will really please me. Obviously you need to be somewhat conservative for the first one (people tend to have three different time goals, the first and most cautious of which is just "Finish"!), but if I've run six or seven half-marathons by then and continued to improve my times, I will have a much clearer sense of what I should be able to do, and I'll be able to set more ambitious goals.
My goal for the August half-marathon is to do it in under two hours; this is a challenging but eminently attainable goal. My dream goal, but I think it's something that will almost certainly take longer (of course I am secretly wishing for a dramatic increase in speed over the next couple months, but this is not within my powers to ensure!), is to turn the 10K pace I had a couple weeks ago into half-marathon pace: that's to say, completing it around 1:48-1:50, for a roughly 8:45 mile pace.
The long-distance runners amongst you will see where I'm going with this: if I did the marathon this fall, it would be pretty certain that I should aim for 4:20ish kind of time, but if I wait until fall 2008 and keep on working on speed and endurance in the meantime, it seems to me there's a good chance I could pull off a just-under-four-hours kind of time. 3:59:50, irrational as it may be, will make me immeasurably happier than 4:05! (Don't get me wrong, 4:05 would be amazing, and it may well be that my first one is still an over-four-hour time like 4:10 or 4:15, that's fine and very realistic also, but wouldn't it be good if I could get under four hours?!?)
(Also for the non-runners, the reason I keep on saying that I want to qualify for the Boston Marathon the year I turn 40 is that you get a bump up on qualifying times when you move up to that age group--here are the details--currently I would need to make 3:45:59 to qualify, but when I turn forty it will go up to 3:50:59. I'm certainly holding out for the possibility that I might really be able to get quite a bit faster and make the 3:45 goal, but I've got a strong suspicion that my natural speeds are kind of right on the boundary where I will have to scrape under, and the crucial extra five minutes will make a real difference. Mile pace for the slower qualifying time is 8:48, and for the faster is 8:37--of course this is all speculative, I am nowhere near capable of doing long runs at either of those speeds for now, but I can imagine very clearly being able to do so in future.)
(Here's the calculator that helps you work this sort of thing out, and here's a table that lets you make a rough guess as to how paces for shorter distances might translate into longer ones--the paces are dismayingly slower, of course, for long races, so that my current 10K pace/time would basically translate into a 2:00 half-marathon and a 4:13 marathon, which sounds to me about right, I know I could do those in my current state of fitness. I also know that these times are definitely improvable upon, I know I can get quite a bit faster than this if I keep working very steadily and sensibly on it--I've only been running seriously for a bit less than a year, with some months off over the winter, and I can expect substantial improvement for some years more before it kind of levels out and becomes hard to improve on times.)
Oh dear, I am not sure it is to my credit, I admire people who sunnily breeze through life without thinking so much about the future, but I do like having absurdly specific long-term goals, for some reason I've always had very strong powers of visualization of this sort. So here's to me being the slowest runner in my age-group in the Boston Marathon in 2012 or so!
The New York Road Runners announce the results of the lottery for places in mid-June, so I don't know yet about that, but I had in any case become feverishly caught up with thinking about what to do if I didn't get a spot--initially I thought I'd run in Philadelphia instead, but I found myself thinking that the New York Marathon really is special and that it would be worth waiting for that.
More pressing are the questions of injury. My stress fracture really is healed, but you know how it is if you've ever had an injury of some sort, all the other stuff around there is just kind of messed up still--the hip flexors are much tighter on that side, for one thing, which can be partly remedied by stretching, but there's something going on with ligaments or tendons or some such that's not ideal--I am going to get some sports massage to see if it can get fixed that way, and it doesn't hurt at all while I'm actually running, but it's worrisome enough, I think, to prevent me undertaking marathon training this year. The conventional wisdom is that you should have two years of serious running before you do a marathon, and if I wait till next fall, that's what it will have been--I did run on and off in my twenties, but never as regularly and consistently as this, so it's definitely the recommended mode.
(If I get a lottery spot in NY, I will defer it to next year, and then I won't need to worry about doing the nine races this year that will qualify me for a next-year spot. And if I don't get a spot, I'll keep on doing the races to ensure a spot, just again keeping injury risk in mind and not putting the nine-races goal over the run-safely-and-injury-free goal.)
This decision pains me because it is my heart's desire to run the marathon and I am not really a very patient person at all, though I put up a good show of it! I am more on the "but if I work fiendishly hard and drive myself into the ground, can't it happen sooner?" line of things.... If the world was definitely going to come to an end in December of this year, in other words, I would totally run the marathon in November. If the world does in fact come to an end and I haven't run a marathon, my thoughts in the last five minutes officially allowed for reflection under such circumstances will be the most intense self-reproach!
However in reality the world is not especially likely to come to an end in December, and meanwhile various other factors are mitigating against marathon-running anyway, chief among them being the fact (this is more than I usually say here about work stuff, but it's relevant in this case) that my tenure case has been pushed back for also quite sensible reasons altogether beyond my control. So I'll be submitting more materials at the end of the summer, and won't know about that till April or May 2008, and meanwhile (oh, dreaded thing!) must apply for jobs elsewhere in the fall so that I'm covered if the desired results don't come through.
I will need my wits about me in September and October, in other words, rather than collapsing every Saturday into the pleasant haze of post-long run syndrome! And even more than that, I will need to have running as a mental-health resource during the stressful waiting period over the winter, so I cannot risk blowing it all on the marathon and then having to sit out for months afterwards just when I most need it!
On a brighter note, there are some real advantages to doing it this way, advantages I will now list in order to persuade myself that I have fully embraced this difficult decision:
1. My dear friend and favorite training partner Liz is waiting till next year also, so this will mean we can run it together for the first time, very exciting.
2. TRIATHLONS! Marathon training would really mean having to back off a bit more from the other stuff, and I am mentally consumed with the allure of triathlon (I am going to save this for a separate post, this one's long enough already)--suffice it to say that I purchased a bicycle on Saturday, though it's still at the shop having a couple things done to it, and that my serious non-running project for the summer is to keep working on swimming and become a decent cyclist.
3. I am still running the Nike half-marathon in August, and I hope to run another half-marathon every couple months over the fall and winter and keep improving on my times, so it truly is ludicrous to be making such a big deal of this, it's not as though I'm not going to be able to have tons of delightfully enjoyable training and racing in any case!
4. And right after that half-marathon, if I'm not doing marathon training I can totally sign up for the NYRR BRiX bike-run class which has me salivating with desire in any case. (This is the most positive reason to wait.) It's a six-week class on doing the bike-run transition--you cycle for 10-12 miles, run a couple miles, learn techniques for doing the transition quickly, etc. This is especially useful because since I live in an apartment building with the slowest elevator in the world I've already been fretting about how I'm going to be able to practice this stuff--for the non-triathletes amongst you, it should be observed (I know this only from reading about it!) that when you switch from biking to running all the muscles in your legs are just wobbly and weak in protest at the changeover (the swim-bike transition has different challenges, namely getting out of the wetsuit and into the bike shoes and stuff, but these are not muscular challenges so much as logistical ones that you could either practice poolside, though it would be mildly embarrassing, or even at home with a bathtub of cold water if you're just thinking about the mechanics) so that it is very important to get your body used to it by doing it regularly. At this class, they've got one of the instructors supervising the bike area so you can really leave it there without worry--as a cautious and security-conscious person who has just bought a rather expensive bicycle, I do not think I'm going to be comfortable just chaining it to something & hoping for the best while I do my run, it is going to have to be stashed inside.
5. The other most positive reason, though somewhat excessively type-Aish also: I'm pretty sure that if I wait till next fall, I'm more likely to be able to aim for a time that will really please me. Obviously you need to be somewhat conservative for the first one (people tend to have three different time goals, the first and most cautious of which is just "Finish"!), but if I've run six or seven half-marathons by then and continued to improve my times, I will have a much clearer sense of what I should be able to do, and I'll be able to set more ambitious goals.
My goal for the August half-marathon is to do it in under two hours; this is a challenging but eminently attainable goal. My dream goal, but I think it's something that will almost certainly take longer (of course I am secretly wishing for a dramatic increase in speed over the next couple months, but this is not within my powers to ensure!), is to turn the 10K pace I had a couple weeks ago into half-marathon pace: that's to say, completing it around 1:48-1:50, for a roughly 8:45 mile pace.
The long-distance runners amongst you will see where I'm going with this: if I did the marathon this fall, it would be pretty certain that I should aim for 4:20ish kind of time, but if I wait until fall 2008 and keep on working on speed and endurance in the meantime, it seems to me there's a good chance I could pull off a just-under-four-hours kind of time. 3:59:50, irrational as it may be, will make me immeasurably happier than 4:05! (Don't get me wrong, 4:05 would be amazing, and it may well be that my first one is still an over-four-hour time like 4:10 or 4:15, that's fine and very realistic also, but wouldn't it be good if I could get under four hours?!?)
(Also for the non-runners, the reason I keep on saying that I want to qualify for the Boston Marathon the year I turn 40 is that you get a bump up on qualifying times when you move up to that age group--here are the details--currently I would need to make 3:45:59 to qualify, but when I turn forty it will go up to 3:50:59. I'm certainly holding out for the possibility that I might really be able to get quite a bit faster and make the 3:45 goal, but I've got a strong suspicion that my natural speeds are kind of right on the boundary where I will have to scrape under, and the crucial extra five minutes will make a real difference. Mile pace for the slower qualifying time is 8:48, and for the faster is 8:37--of course this is all speculative, I am nowhere near capable of doing long runs at either of those speeds for now, but I can imagine very clearly being able to do so in future.)
(Here's the calculator that helps you work this sort of thing out, and here's a table that lets you make a rough guess as to how paces for shorter distances might translate into longer ones--the paces are dismayingly slower, of course, for long races, so that my current 10K pace/time would basically translate into a 2:00 half-marathon and a 4:13 marathon, which sounds to me about right, I know I could do those in my current state of fitness. I also know that these times are definitely improvable upon, I know I can get quite a bit faster than this if I keep working very steadily and sensibly on it--I've only been running seriously for a bit less than a year, with some months off over the winter, and I can expect substantial improvement for some years more before it kind of levels out and becomes hard to improve on times.)
Oh dear, I am not sure it is to my credit, I admire people who sunnily breeze through life without thinking so much about the future, but I do like having absurdly specific long-term goals, for some reason I've always had very strong powers of visualization of this sort. So here's to me being the slowest runner in my age-group in the Boston Marathon in 2012 or so!
Sunday, June 03, 2007
10 Scottish books that will change your life
Stuart Kelly has this rather wonderful list at the Scotsman, and I must say that with the exception of Sir Patrick Geddes, whose work I know only by repute (and in a more postcolonial-theory-type context), pretty much every other one of the books on the list really did change my (intellectual) life! (Well, maybe not Burns. But even Burns, in a way--and definitely the others, these are books that permanently reshape the brain, in the best possible way.)
Saturday, June 02, 2007
The simpering innocence of cocoa
From Kakuzo Okakura, The Book of Tea:
Like all good things of the world, the propaganda of Tea met with opposition. Heretics like Henry Saville (1678) denounced drinking it as a filthy custom. Jonas Hanway (Essay on Tea, 1756) said that men seemed to lose their stature and comeliness, women their beauty through the use of tea. Its cost at the start (about fifteen or sixteen shillings a pound) forbade popular consumption, and made it "regalia for high treatments and entertainments, presents being made thereof to princes and grandees." Yet in spite of such drawbacks tea-drinking spread with marvellous rapidity. The coffee-houses of London in the early half of the eighteenth century became, in fact, tea-houses, the resort of wits like Addison and Steele, who beguiled themselves over their "dish of tea." The beverage soon became a necessity of life--a taxable matter. We are reminded in this connection what an important part it plays in modern history. Colonial America resigned herself to oppression until human endurance gave way before the heavy duties laid on Tea. American independence dates from the throwing of tea-chests into Boston harbour.
There is a subtle charm in the taste of tea which makes it irresistible and capable of idealisation. Western humourists were not slow to mingle the fragrance of their thought with its aroma. It has not the arrogance of wine, the self-consciousness of coffee, nor the simpering innocence of cocoa. Already in 1711, says the Spectator: "I would therefore in a particular manner recommend these my speculations to all well-regulated families that set apart an hour every morning for tea, bread and butter; and would earnestly advise them for their good to order this paper to be punctually served up and to be looked upon as a part of the tea-equipage." Samuel Johnson draws his own portrait as "a hardened and shameless tea drinker, who for twenty years diluted his meals with only the infusion of the fascinating plant; who with tea amused the evening, with tea solaced the midnight, and with tea welcomed the morning."
Charles Lamb, a professed devotee, sounded the true note of Teaism when he wrote that the greatest pleasure he knew was to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident. For Teaism is the art of concealing beauty that you may discover it, of suggesting what you dare not reveal. It is the noble secret of laughing at yourself, calmly yet thoroughly, and is thus humour itself,--the smile of philosophy. All genuine humourists may in this sense be called tea-philosophers,--Thackeray, for instance, and of course, Shakespeare. The poets of the Decadence (when was not the world in decadence?), in their protests against materialism, have, to a certain extent, also opened the way to Teaism. Perhaps nowadays it is our demure contemplation of the Imperfect that the West and the East can meet in mutual consolation.
I highly recommend Hanway's Essay on Tea if you have not read it...
Given the choice between tea and coffee, I always want to say "Both!"--you know, a cappuccino with a tea chaser, or whatever. I don't really see why I have to choose one or the other as a permanent preference! However it must be said that though coffee is the more intense and useful stimulant, tea is perhaps dearer to my heart--I can imagine cutting out coffee, but I would desperately miss tea--in this sense it's like cats and dogs--really I am fond of both, and of all sorts of other animals--but if it really came down to it, cats seem indispensible to me in a way dogs are not (personally, to me, that is--truth is disputable, you know, taste is not). There is indeed a subtle charm in the fragrance of tea...
NB we know from The Rape of the Lock that in 1711 in Britain "tea" was probably mostly pronounced "tay": "Here Thou, great Anna! whom three Realms obey, / Dost sometimes Counsel take — and sometimes Tea."
My goal for the weekend is to recover from acute overwork-induced insomnia and try and become calm--expect some more sustained blogging in the next thirty-six hours as a recuperative measure before I take a deep breath and plunge back into maniacal work...
Like all good things of the world, the propaganda of Tea met with opposition. Heretics like Henry Saville (1678) denounced drinking it as a filthy custom. Jonas Hanway (Essay on Tea, 1756) said that men seemed to lose their stature and comeliness, women their beauty through the use of tea. Its cost at the start (about fifteen or sixteen shillings a pound) forbade popular consumption, and made it "regalia for high treatments and entertainments, presents being made thereof to princes and grandees." Yet in spite of such drawbacks tea-drinking spread with marvellous rapidity. The coffee-houses of London in the early half of the eighteenth century became, in fact, tea-houses, the resort of wits like Addison and Steele, who beguiled themselves over their "dish of tea." The beverage soon became a necessity of life--a taxable matter. We are reminded in this connection what an important part it plays in modern history. Colonial America resigned herself to oppression until human endurance gave way before the heavy duties laid on Tea. American independence dates from the throwing of tea-chests into Boston harbour.
There is a subtle charm in the taste of tea which makes it irresistible and capable of idealisation. Western humourists were not slow to mingle the fragrance of their thought with its aroma. It has not the arrogance of wine, the self-consciousness of coffee, nor the simpering innocence of cocoa. Already in 1711, says the Spectator: "I would therefore in a particular manner recommend these my speculations to all well-regulated families that set apart an hour every morning for tea, bread and butter; and would earnestly advise them for their good to order this paper to be punctually served up and to be looked upon as a part of the tea-equipage." Samuel Johnson draws his own portrait as "a hardened and shameless tea drinker, who for twenty years diluted his meals with only the infusion of the fascinating plant; who with tea amused the evening, with tea solaced the midnight, and with tea welcomed the morning."
Charles Lamb, a professed devotee, sounded the true note of Teaism when he wrote that the greatest pleasure he knew was to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident. For Teaism is the art of concealing beauty that you may discover it, of suggesting what you dare not reveal. It is the noble secret of laughing at yourself, calmly yet thoroughly, and is thus humour itself,--the smile of philosophy. All genuine humourists may in this sense be called tea-philosophers,--Thackeray, for instance, and of course, Shakespeare. The poets of the Decadence (when was not the world in decadence?), in their protests against materialism, have, to a certain extent, also opened the way to Teaism. Perhaps nowadays it is our demure contemplation of the Imperfect that the West and the East can meet in mutual consolation.
I highly recommend Hanway's Essay on Tea if you have not read it...
Given the choice between tea and coffee, I always want to say "Both!"--you know, a cappuccino with a tea chaser, or whatever. I don't really see why I have to choose one or the other as a permanent preference! However it must be said that though coffee is the more intense and useful stimulant, tea is perhaps dearer to my heart--I can imagine cutting out coffee, but I would desperately miss tea--in this sense it's like cats and dogs--really I am fond of both, and of all sorts of other animals--but if it really came down to it, cats seem indispensible to me in a way dogs are not (personally, to me, that is--truth is disputable, you know, taste is not). There is indeed a subtle charm in the fragrance of tea...
NB we know from The Rape of the Lock that in 1711 in Britain "tea" was probably mostly pronounced "tay": "Here Thou, great Anna! whom three Realms obey, / Dost sometimes Counsel take — and sometimes Tea."
My goal for the weekend is to recover from acute overwork-induced insomnia and try and become calm--expect some more sustained blogging in the next thirty-six hours as a recuperative measure before I take a deep breath and plunge back into maniacal work...
An ossifiant theory of progress
John Ruskin, on political economy, in "The Roots of Honour" (originally published in the Cornhill Magazine, 1860):
Observe, I neither impugn nor doubt the conclusion of the science if its terms are accepted. I am simply uninterested in them, as I should be in those of a science of gymnastics which assumed that men had no skeletons. It might be shown, on that supposition, that it would be advantageous to roll the students up into pellets, flatten them into cakes, or stretch them into cables; and that when these results were effected, the re-insertion of the skeleton would be attended with various inconveniences to their constitution. The reasoning might be admirable, the conclusions true, and the science deficient only in applicability. Modern political economy stands on a precisely similar basis. Assuming, not that the human being has no skeleton, but that it is all skeleton, it founds an ossifiant theory of progress on this negation of a soul; and having shown the utmost that may be made of bones, and constructed a number of interesting geometrical figures with death's-head and humeri, successfully proves the inconvenience of the reappearance of a soul among these corpuscular structures. I do not deny the truth of this theory: I simply deny its applicability to the present phase of the world.
Observe, I neither impugn nor doubt the conclusion of the science if its terms are accepted. I am simply uninterested in them, as I should be in those of a science of gymnastics which assumed that men had no skeletons. It might be shown, on that supposition, that it would be advantageous to roll the students up into pellets, flatten them into cakes, or stretch them into cables; and that when these results were effected, the re-insertion of the skeleton would be attended with various inconveniences to their constitution. The reasoning might be admirable, the conclusions true, and the science deficient only in applicability. Modern political economy stands on a precisely similar basis. Assuming, not that the human being has no skeleton, but that it is all skeleton, it founds an ossifiant theory of progress on this negation of a soul; and having shown the utmost that may be made of bones, and constructed a number of interesting geometrical figures with death's-head and humeri, successfully proves the inconvenience of the reappearance of a soul among these corpuscular structures. I do not deny the truth of this theory: I simply deny its applicability to the present phase of the world.
Lousy with golden ratios
There are a handful of writers whose prose styles make me envious in a peculiarly enjoyable way--it is a miracle that people can write like this!--and my friend Bruno Maddox is one of them; check out his latest Blinded by Science column, on beauty:
As Los Angeles plastic surgeons go, Marquardt (now retired from clinical practice) was the serious, unsleazy sort. His patients weren’t the standard Valley girls and divorcées whose breasts a doctor could breezily augment to the tinkle of a Japanese water feature before checking his teeth in the shine of his scalpel and heading off for cocktails at Skybar. His patients were deformed. They were people who were born without chins or who had taken a speedboat turbine to the face. And they came to him with dreams not of gorgeousness or superstardom but of one day being able to ingest food orally.
(Thanks to Lowebrow for the link.)
NB does anyone still read Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, with its cubist nose? When I was a Young Person it was very popular--but the cult-following teenage favorites of the 1980s now seem incomparably unvoguish (last week I had to read a chunk of Aldous Huxley's After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, he's a highly readable writer but it seems almost inconceivably dated now--but I think people are still reading Kurt Vonnegut--no idea about, oh, say, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but I expect it's still pretty popular).
As Los Angeles plastic surgeons go, Marquardt (now retired from clinical practice) was the serious, unsleazy sort. His patients weren’t the standard Valley girls and divorcées whose breasts a doctor could breezily augment to the tinkle of a Japanese water feature before checking his teeth in the shine of his scalpel and heading off for cocktails at Skybar. His patients were deformed. They were people who were born without chins or who had taken a speedboat turbine to the face. And they came to him with dreams not of gorgeousness or superstardom but of one day being able to ingest food orally.
(Thanks to Lowebrow for the link.)
NB does anyone still read Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, with its cubist nose? When I was a Young Person it was very popular--but the cult-following teenage favorites of the 1980s now seem incomparably unvoguish (last week I had to read a chunk of Aldous Huxley's After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, he's a highly readable writer but it seems almost inconceivably dated now--but I think people are still reading Kurt Vonnegut--no idea about, oh, say, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but I expect it's still pretty popular).
Friday, June 01, 2007
Culture is neutral
Michael March interviews Aleksander Hemon. There's something about Hemon's use of language that I really love--you don't often read an interview where the language itself has such great diction--I remember reading and being very impressed with a few stories of his, I must get some more....
In happy news, I finished the novel revisions and sent them out. I didn't quite cut a hundred pages in the end (ninety-something, though: more than thirty thousand words!), but I'm very pleased with the improvements in pace and story-telling. It was liberating, too, thinking of it as a young-adult novel: I'm a very fast reader myself, which is part of why I write long & copious in the first place, but I like what happens when you strip out all the extraneous stuff. I do not admire Dan Brown, the only book of his I've read is Digital Fortress and it seemed to me fairly laughably thin in many respects, but I was reading it with the greatest admiration for his pacing and story-telling skills--John Grisham has that also--in fact I think that I read that book during a previous revision of Dynamite No. 1 and it led me to break it into much, much shorter chapters. So this is a good example of the edifying effects of even the most otherwise uninspiring popular fiction.
In happy news, I finished the novel revisions and sent them out. I didn't quite cut a hundred pages in the end (ninety-something, though: more than thirty thousand words!), but I'm very pleased with the improvements in pace and story-telling. It was liberating, too, thinking of it as a young-adult novel: I'm a very fast reader myself, which is part of why I write long & copious in the first place, but I like what happens when you strip out all the extraneous stuff. I do not admire Dan Brown, the only book of his I've read is Digital Fortress and it seemed to me fairly laughably thin in many respects, but I was reading it with the greatest admiration for his pacing and story-telling skills--John Grisham has that also--in fact I think that I read that book during a previous revision of Dynamite No. 1 and it led me to break it into much, much shorter chapters. So this is a good example of the edifying effects of even the most otherwise uninspiring popular fiction.
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