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Friday, 19 January 2007
Here they come
Reproducing a cartoon from a magazine in your blog is a fairly contemptible thing to do, so I must make it clear that it is only in order to let American readers know of the fun in store for them in a few months' time that I offer the following, which appeared this week in Private Eye:
Wednesday, 17 January 2007
Dan Brown’s Body
When I last wrote a post mentioning The Da Vinci Code I had not read the book or seen the film. I still haven’t, so remain unqualified to express any opinion about either. But I did enjoy reading in the magisterial Language Log some notes by Geoffrey K Pullum on Brown’s prose style, from which I extract:
I am still trying to come up with a fully convincing account of just what it was about his very first sentence, indeed the very first word, that told me instantly that I was in for a very bad time stylistically.
The Da Vinci Code may well be the only novel ever written that begins with the word renowned. Here is the paragraph with which the book opens. The scene (says a dateline under the chapter heading, 'Prologue') is the Louvre, late at night:
Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum's Grand Gallery. He lunged for the nearest painting he could see, a Caravaggio. Grabbing the gilded frame, the seventy-six-year-old man heaved the masterpiece toward himself until it tore from the wall and Saunière collapsed backward in a heap beneath the canvas.
I think what enabled the first word to tip me off that I was about to spend a number of hours in the company of one of the worst prose stylists in the history of literature was this. Putting curriculum vitae details into complex modifiers on proper names or definite descriptions is what you do in journalistic stories about deaths; you just don't do it in describing an event in a narrative. So this might be reasonable text for the opening of a newspaper report the next day: Renowned curator Jacques Saunière died last night in the Louvre at the age of 76.
But Brown packs these details into the first two words of an action sequence—details of not only his protagonist's profession but also his prestige in the field. It doesn't work here. It has the ring of utter ineptitude. The details have no relevance, of course, to what is being narrated (Saunière is fleeing an attacker and pulls down the painting to trigger the alarm system and the security gates). We could have deduced that he would be fairly well known in the museum trade from the fact that he was curating at the Louvre...
…Brown's writing is not just bad; it is staggeringly, clumsily, thoughtlessly, almost ingeniously bad. In some passages scarcely a word or phrase seems to have been carefully selected or compared with alternatives. I slogged through 454 pages of this syntactic swill, and it never gets much better. Why did I keep reading? Because London Heathrow is a long way from San Francisco International, and airline magazines are thin, and two-month-old Hollywood drivel on a small screen hanging two seats in front of my row did not appeal, that's why.
… "Dan Brown has to be one of the best, smartest, and most accomplished writers in the country", said Nelson DeMille, a bestselling author who has himself hit the #1 spot in the New York Times list… And there are four other similar pieces of praise on the back cover. Together those blurbs convinced me to put this piece of garbage on the CostCo cart along with the the 72-pack of toilet rolls. Thriller writers must have a code of honor that requires that they all praise each other's new novels, a kind of omerta that enjoins them to silence about the fact that some fellow member of the guild has given evidence of total stylistic cluelessness. A fraternal code of silence. We could call it... the Da Vinci code; or the Dan Brown code.
The whole piece is well worth reading as a fund of lessons in how not to write; it also provides links to some other articles about Brown’s genius.
I am still trying to come up with a fully convincing account of just what it was about his very first sentence, indeed the very first word, that told me instantly that I was in for a very bad time stylistically.
The Da Vinci Code may well be the only novel ever written that begins with the word renowned. Here is the paragraph with which the book opens. The scene (says a dateline under the chapter heading, 'Prologue') is the Louvre, late at night:
Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum's Grand Gallery. He lunged for the nearest painting he could see, a Caravaggio. Grabbing the gilded frame, the seventy-six-year-old man heaved the masterpiece toward himself until it tore from the wall and Saunière collapsed backward in a heap beneath the canvas.
I think what enabled the first word to tip me off that I was about to spend a number of hours in the company of one of the worst prose stylists in the history of literature was this. Putting curriculum vitae details into complex modifiers on proper names or definite descriptions is what you do in journalistic stories about deaths; you just don't do it in describing an event in a narrative. So this might be reasonable text for the opening of a newspaper report the next day: Renowned curator Jacques Saunière died last night in the Louvre at the age of 76.
But Brown packs these details into the first two words of an action sequence—details of not only his protagonist's profession but also his prestige in the field. It doesn't work here. It has the ring of utter ineptitude. The details have no relevance, of course, to what is being narrated (Saunière is fleeing an attacker and pulls down the painting to trigger the alarm system and the security gates). We could have deduced that he would be fairly well known in the museum trade from the fact that he was curating at the Louvre...
…Brown's writing is not just bad; it is staggeringly, clumsily, thoughtlessly, almost ingeniously bad. In some passages scarcely a word or phrase seems to have been carefully selected or compared with alternatives. I slogged through 454 pages of this syntactic swill, and it never gets much better. Why did I keep reading? Because London Heathrow is a long way from San Francisco International, and airline magazines are thin, and two-month-old Hollywood drivel on a small screen hanging two seats in front of my row did not appeal, that's why.
… "Dan Brown has to be one of the best, smartest, and most accomplished writers in the country", said Nelson DeMille, a bestselling author who has himself hit the #1 spot in the New York Times list… And there are four other similar pieces of praise on the back cover. Together those blurbs convinced me to put this piece of garbage on the CostCo cart along with the the 72-pack of toilet rolls. Thriller writers must have a code of honor that requires that they all praise each other's new novels, a kind of omerta that enjoins them to silence about the fact that some fellow member of the guild has given evidence of total stylistic cluelessness. A fraternal code of silence. We could call it... the Da Vinci code; or the Dan Brown code.
The whole piece is well worth reading as a fund of lessons in how not to write; it also provides links to some other articles about Brown’s genius.
Monday, 15 January 2007
The mystery of Napoleon’s hat (Part 2)
Many famous men have been distinguished by idiosyncrasies of appearance. Both Solomon and Louis Quatorze were known for the glory of their apparel; Charlemagne was renowned for the length of his beard (it is said he could kneel on it, though it is not recorded why this was necessary). Lloyd George had his hair bobbed; Cromwell had warts; and Keir Hardie wore a tweed cap. But a tweed cap, even though a contemporary photograph shows it to have had a retractable undercarriage which fastened on top with a piece of string, is not, for sheer étalage, in the same class as Napoleon’s hat.
The principle on which this singular headpiece was designed is said to be a mystery even to experienced hatters. It is not known, for example, whether the back could be let down to facilitate the heaving of coal, or whether the front could be folded up to form the thing into a watering can. Its possibilities as a muffin dish, a font and an umbrella stand have also been canvassed from time to time by interested parties.
T
hose who have seen in a museum the hat which is treasured as a genuine Napoleonic relic have been impressed not only by its shape but by its size: it is enormous, and it is hard to imagine what went on inside the part of it that was not filled by the imperial cranium. Was it stuffed with despatches from the battlefield. Or with old newspapers? Did it perhaps contain a secret drawer for Josephine’s letters? Or was there a packet of sandwiches there and a flask of cognac for sudden emergencies?
That there must have been more in it than meets the eye seems certain, or how else could the little chap have kept the thing aloft? For on anyone with a head of even medium size it must have fallen about the shoulders like a cape.
The principle on which this singular headpiece was designed is said to be a mystery even to experienced hatters. It is not known, for example, whether the back could be let down to facilitate the heaving of coal, or whether the front could be folded up to form the thing into a watering can. Its possibilities as a muffin dish, a font and an umbrella stand have also been canvassed from time to time by interested parties.
T
hose who have seen in a museum the hat which is treasured as a genuine Napoleonic relic have been impressed not only by its shape but by its size: it is enormous, and it is hard to imagine what went on inside the part of it that was not filled by the imperial cranium. Was it stuffed with despatches from the battlefield. Or with old newspapers? Did it perhaps contain a secret drawer for Josephine’s letters? Or was there a packet of sandwiches there and a flask of cognac for sudden emergencies?That there must have been more in it than meets the eye seems certain, or how else could the little chap have kept the thing aloft? For on anyone with a head of even medium size it must have fallen about the shoulders like a cape.
Saturday, 13 January 2007
The mystery of Napoleon’s hat (Part 1)
I wouldn’t call it a fetish, perish the thought, or even an obsession, but I do find hats fascinating and often write about them, sometimes speculating on the wearers’ motives. What prompted Zoran Acimov, for example, the director of the Retezat National Park in Romania, to put this on his head?What we have here is clearly just a personal fancy, but in other contexts spectacular hats can have great historical significance. The writer and cartoonist Nicolas Bentley well understood this:
Many reasons have been put forward to account for Napoleon’s fame, apart from those put forward by Napoleon himself. Historians, politicians, novelists and film directors never seem to tire of airing their theories about the small corporal. But I know of no theory that takes into account the importance of the Emperor’s hat.
Imagine, for instance, how different things might have been at Jena or Marengo with Napoleon in a white topper such as was fashionable at the time, the crown being rather larger at the top than at the base. Imagine the effect, especially on Josephine, of a small sugar-loaf hat surmounting that dumpy imperial figure. Imagine the Emperor at Austerlitz with the plumed casque of a French dragoon coming down well over his ears. Imagine a flat tricorne precariously balanced on that rounded pate, so that a sharp turn of the head must have left the hat facing towards the front.
The fate of nations cannot be sealed by a man whose hat causes the bystanders to grin, and Napoleon knew this.
His genius showed itself in an astonishing variety of ways. It was apparent not only in war and in diplomacy, but also in the art of good government, in his judgement of men, and still more in his judgement of moments. Above all, it was shown in his choice of a hat....
Part 2 follows...
Thursday, 11 January 2007
Don’t try this at home
Given my total lack of interest in the tedious activities which are called sport, it is surprising that I seem to have written, so far, around twenty posts with this tag, but this is because I use the word very loosely*, applying it to any pastime which can be indulged in competitively (like growing a beard) or which involves physical exertion or danger without any real point (like sewer exploration).
Here is another, which is certainly dangerous but does have a real point, or several.
This may look like Ricky Gervais, but it is not; it is a man called Brad Byers, who claims to be the current holder of the World Record for Sword Swallowing; he is also a top man at Hammering a Nail Into One’s Face. However, it should be noted that, according to The British Medical Journal, Matty "Blade" Henshaw swallowed a total of 3,782 swords in 2003 (not, I suppose, all at once), 50 swords were swallowed simultaneously by 19 individuals at a swallowers' convention in 2002, and a belly dancer has swallowed 11 swords at the same time.
Really Magazine has further notes on all this and tells us that the BMJ’s December edition carried a study on Sword swallowing and its side effects.
* Probably none of the sports I have mentioned here is highly esteemed among sports people. For a note on which sport has the highest status, see HERE.
Here is another, which is certainly dangerous but does have a real point, or several.
This may look like Ricky Gervais, but it is not; it is a man called Brad Byers, who claims to be the current holder of the World Record for Sword Swallowing; he is also a top man at Hammering a Nail Into One’s Face. However, it should be noted that, according to The British Medical Journal, Matty "Blade" Henshaw swallowed a total of 3,782 swords in 2003 (not, I suppose, all at once), 50 swords were swallowed simultaneously by 19 individuals at a swallowers' convention in 2002, and a belly dancer has swallowed 11 swords at the same time.Really Magazine has further notes on all this and tells us that the BMJ’s December edition carried a study on Sword swallowing and its side effects.
* Probably none of the sports I have mentioned here is highly esteemed among sports people. For a note on which sport has the highest status, see HERE.
Tuesday, 9 January 2007
Nonce-words
These are words used only ‘for the nonce’, i.e. on one specific occasion or in one specific text or writer's works. The term was coined in the nineteenth century by James Murray especially for use in the OED (which in those days was still called A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles; Founded Mainly on the Materials Collected by The Philological Society).
Generally speaking, they are not found in dictionaries until they are considered to have come into general use. Thus Carroll’s brillig remains a nonce-word but his mimsy (unhappy) has become accepted, though rarely used.
Anybody can think up a word that didn’t exist before and use it a few times to impress their friends, but this is a rather sad thing to do; nonce-words can be amusing but are not really very interesting unless you streponitate* them.
A paperback published this week by the Oxford University Press, written by lexicographer Eric McKean and called Totally Weird and Wonderful Words, brings together two previous volumes listing unusual words and even includes a guide on how readers can construct their own words using Latin or Greek roots. (From the book's title, I guess it is aimed at the American market.)
Here are some of them; these may be obscure or obsolete but none of them are invented nonce-words and all are in the dictionary (at least, in the OED):
bablatrice - a female babbler
chaterestre - a talkative woman
erinaceous - like a hedgehog; a person with prickly manners
deuterogamist - someone who marries a second time
dictioneer - person who takes it upon themselves to criticise diction or writing style
finnimbrun - a knick-knack or trinket
flagitation - asking or demanding with passion; begging
funambulist - a tightrope walker; a person who thinks quickly on their feet
heterarchy - government by strangers or foreigners, literally "rule of an alien"
hibernacle - winter home of hibernating animal; a sunshine retreat for people
leighster - a female liar
loranthaceous - related to mistletoe family; kisses given or received under the mistletoe
lordswike - a person who deceives their boss; a traitor
nullo - someone who has undergone an elective amputation for the purposes of body modification, usually of a toe
rhinarium - the hairless and moist nose of some mammals
snollygoster - a dishonest politician, especially a shrewd or calculating one
solfeggist - someone who sings notes using do, re, mi, fa, sol, la and ti
woofits - an unwell feeling, especially a headache; a moody depression; a hangover.
* This word was never used anywhere until now, and will probably never be seen again.
Generally speaking, they are not found in dictionaries until they are considered to have come into general use. Thus Carroll’s brillig remains a nonce-word but his mimsy (unhappy) has become accepted, though rarely used.
Anybody can think up a word that didn’t exist before and use it a few times to impress their friends, but this is a rather sad thing to do; nonce-words can be amusing but are not really very interesting unless you streponitate* them.
A paperback published this week by the Oxford University Press, written by lexicographer Eric McKean and called Totally Weird and Wonderful Words, brings together two previous volumes listing unusual words and even includes a guide on how readers can construct their own words using Latin or Greek roots. (From the book's title, I guess it is aimed at the American market.)
Here are some of them; these may be obscure or obsolete but none of them are invented nonce-words and all are in the dictionary (at least, in the OED):
bablatrice - a female babbler
chaterestre - a talkative woman
erinaceous - like a hedgehog; a person with prickly manners
deuterogamist - someone who marries a second time
dictioneer - person who takes it upon themselves to criticise diction or writing style
finnimbrun - a knick-knack or trinket
flagitation - asking or demanding with passion; begging
funambulist - a tightrope walker; a person who thinks quickly on their feet
heterarchy - government by strangers or foreigners, literally "rule of an alien"
hibernacle - winter home of hibernating animal; a sunshine retreat for people
leighster - a female liar
loranthaceous - related to mistletoe family; kisses given or received under the mistletoe
lordswike - a person who deceives their boss; a traitor
nullo - someone who has undergone an elective amputation for the purposes of body modification, usually of a toe
rhinarium - the hairless and moist nose of some mammals
snollygoster - a dishonest politician, especially a shrewd or calculating one
solfeggist - someone who sings notes using do, re, mi, fa, sol, la and ti
woofits - an unwell feeling, especially a headache; a moody depression; a hangover.
* This word was never used anywhere until now, and will probably never be seen again.
Sunday, 7 January 2007
Bad scene
Writing the other day about a Mongol helmet topped off in a singularly unpleasant manner, I was reminded that for a long time I have been trying to find the full version of a poem of which only one verse has, for some reason, stuck in my mind.
O hark to the screams of the wounded and dying...
A mother who takes a last lingering look
At her infant aloft, understandably crying
Impaled on the spear of a Bashi Bazook
I can find no trace of it on the internet. Can anyone out there help? Can it be a serious poem or is it a parody?
(The Bashi Bazook were irregular Turkish cavalry and I think the poem described the aftermath of some terrible battle in the Levant.)
[See HERE for the full version and details of the source]
O hark to the screams of the wounded and dying...
A mother who takes a last lingering look
At her infant aloft, understandably crying
Impaled on the spear of a Bashi Bazook
I can find no trace of it on the internet. Can anyone out there help? Can it be a serious poem or is it a parody?
(The Bashi Bazook were irregular Turkish cavalry and I think the poem described the aftermath of some terrible battle in the Levant.)
[See HERE for the full version and details of the source]
Friday, 5 January 2007
Many very elderly men...
…just snooze under newspapers.
This is a frequently observed phenomenon and is also a mnemonic which enables you to remember the order in which the planets have their orbits outwards from the sun, though it is hard to see why anyone should want to remember this. If you forget which M comes first, remember that you should never put a Mars bar near the sun.
It is depressing to find that if you put planets mnemonic into Google you are offered 372,000 pages. This suggests that all over the world thousands of people have spent hours of their lives thinking up new ones, and no doubt many are busy thinking up more now that the International Astronomical Union this year agreed that there are currently eight planets and three dwarf planets known in the solar system*.
But here is a pretty visual representation of the relative sizes of some of them. On the same site there are similar pictures showing the others and the sun.
*The 2006 definition of "planet" by (the IAU) states that, in the solar system, a planet is a celestial body that:
• is in orbit around the Sun
• has sufficient mass so that it assumes a nearly round shape, and
• has "cleared the neighbourhood" around its orbit.
A non-satellite body fulfilling only the first two of these criteria is classified as a "dwarf planet", whilst a non-satellite body fulfilling only the first criterion is termed a "small solar system body". The definition was a controversial one, and has been both criticised and supported by different astronomers.
This is a frequently observed phenomenon and is also a mnemonic which enables you to remember the order in which the planets have their orbits outwards from the sun, though it is hard to see why anyone should want to remember this. If you forget which M comes first, remember that you should never put a Mars bar near the sun.
It is depressing to find that if you put planets mnemonic into Google you are offered 372,000 pages. This suggests that all over the world thousands of people have spent hours of their lives thinking up new ones, and no doubt many are busy thinking up more now that the International Astronomical Union this year agreed that there are currently eight planets and three dwarf planets known in the solar system*.
But here is a pretty visual representation of the relative sizes of some of them. On the same site there are similar pictures showing the others and the sun.
*The 2006 definition of "planet" by (the IAU) states that, in the solar system, a planet is a celestial body that:
• is in orbit around the Sun
• has sufficient mass so that it assumes a nearly round shape, and
• has "cleared the neighbourhood" around its orbit.
A non-satellite body fulfilling only the first two of these criteria is classified as a "dwarf planet", whilst a non-satellite body fulfilling only the first criterion is termed a "small solar system body". The definition was a controversial one, and has been both criticised and supported by different astronomers.
Wednesday, 3 January 2007
Happy New Year, Iraq
A sergeant in the US Marines called Gunny (or Jarhead) John writes a lively blog and lists his interests as fishing, hunting, cars, trucks, golf, and blowing shit up (one of the perks of the job)[sic].I’m not sure exactly what this last item involves but if many of his comrades also think of it as one of the perks of the job then this might explain why bringing peace and stability to Iraq is taking longer than expected.
Monday, 1 January 2007
Now we are three
Another birthday for OMF, now with 525 posts containing 136,000 words, 230 pictures, 476 links and 834 comments.A Happy New Year to almost everyone.
I don't need to name the two public figures, both with names beginning with B, to whom I wish bad scran (an Anglo-Irish expression, according to the OED).
Friday, 29 December 2006
Before the Arabs and the Israelis
Many others have owned the Middle East in the last five thousand years. This fascinating animated map reminds you in 90 seconds who they were.
This site, Maps of War, also has more brilliant animations, particularly of The History of Religion and American Wars 1775-2006.
View them Full Screen if you can.
This site, Maps of War, also has more brilliant animations, particularly of The History of Religion and American Wars 1775-2006.
View them Full Screen if you can.
Wednesday, 27 December 2006
Comment is free...
...but often not worth reading. The Guardian has “a collective group blog, bringing together regular columnists from the Guardian and Observer newspapers with other writers and commentators representing a wide range of experience and interests. The aim is to host an open-ended space for debate, dispute, argument and agreement and to invite users to comment on everything they read”.
This seems a nice idea, but the comments often provide little in the way of worthwhile debate, particularly when the original piece leans to the left a little, as Guardian writing occasionally does. There was a cool and reasonable article the other day by Melissa McEwan about nasty Republicans which inspired a couple of thousand words of comments, some of them merely making the obvious point that there are some pretty nasty Democrats too, but many of them (perhaps most, I couldn’t be bothered to count) consisting of abuse from simple-minded and often illiterate bigots who have nothing to add..
This wouldn’t matter too much—most such comments reveal in the first couple of lines how little the writer has to say, so really tedious mouthings can be skipped—except that others who comment are tempted to waste their time responding to people with whom it is pointless to argue, when they could be making intelligent comments on the original article.
When the collective blog (called Comment Is Free) was started I registered a name and participated for a while, but now I just read some of the articles and don’t join in the feeble ranting that follows many of them.
This seems a nice idea, but the comments often provide little in the way of worthwhile debate, particularly when the original piece leans to the left a little, as Guardian writing occasionally does. There was a cool and reasonable article the other day by Melissa McEwan about nasty Republicans which inspired a couple of thousand words of comments, some of them merely making the obvious point that there are some pretty nasty Democrats too, but many of them (perhaps most, I couldn’t be bothered to count) consisting of abuse from simple-minded and often illiterate bigots who have nothing to add..
This wouldn’t matter too much—most such comments reveal in the first couple of lines how little the writer has to say, so really tedious mouthings can be skipped—except that others who comment are tempted to waste their time responding to people with whom it is pointless to argue, when they could be making intelligent comments on the original article.
When the collective blog (called Comment Is Free) was started I registered a name and participated for a while, but now I just read some of the articles and don’t join in the feeble ranting that follows many of them.
Monday, 25 December 2006
Saturday, 23 December 2006
Warrior headgear
I was quite right to think that I wouldn't be able to keep writing about Christmas for a week. Enough of all that, let's move on to something else.
Here is a reconstruction of the rather splendid kind of helmet with visor, called a rhizopoda, worn by the Mongol horsemen, who, operating from the Mongol base in Persia and led by Genghis Khan’s grandson Hulegu Khan, destroyed the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad in 1250.
Halegu Khan himself used to top his helmet off with an impaled baby, which was said to give him a fearsome aspect and discourage the opposing forces.
[From an 1862 engraving by Dr Ernst Haeckel in the Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst, Berlin]
Halegu Khan himself used to top his helmet off with an impaled baby, which was said to give him a fearsome aspect and discourage the opposing forces.
[From an 1862 engraving by Dr Ernst Haeckel in the Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst, Berlin]
Thursday, 21 December 2006
John who?
And another thing about Christmas cards: the contemptuous way in which people with very common first names often sign without a surname, thus indicating that they believe you are a sad, lonely person and that your circle of acquaintances is so pathetically small that you will identify the writer immediately because you know no-one else with the same name. You can only hope that you didn’t send the idiots a card, whoever they are.
And then there are the couples whom you may have met once in 1974 but who believe their personalities are so remarkable that you will remember them for ever.
And then there are the couples whom you may have met once in 1974 but who believe their personalities are so remarkable that you will remember them for ever.
Tuesday, 19 December 2006
Jolly Xmas fun for all the family
Christmas quizzes and Christmas competitions are among the most grisly of the things that Christmas brings; the mere thought of them is depressing. I have come across one which could actually be enjoyable, even though there isn’t much likelihood of me completing it, let alone winning one of the three prizes.
It is the Advent Calendar Competition run by the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. I doubt if many will accept my recommendation to follow the link I have provided but I shall describe it anyway, so there.
There are actually three competitions: one is closed, one ends today and one will go on over Christmas. In the first, every day from 1st to 8th December a page opened on the website illustrating someone who is listed in the ODNB. You click on the picture to get the full entry and on 8th December you had to answer the question: What festive theme links these eight people? The people were William Rossetti (brother of Dante Gabriel), Ewan MacColl, Quentin Bell, George Bernard Shaw and four others of whom I had never heard (so you see what I mean about me not getting anywhere near an entry or a prize), and the answer was: Like Father Christmas, each had a fine white beard at some time in his life.
The second part began on 9th December and ends on 19th (today). Those who feature are Bob Barclay (jazz musician), Dorothy Osborne (letter writer), Phiz (Dickens illustrator), Catherine of Valois (consort of Henry V), Sir Carol Reed, Nancy Astor, Anne Jane Thornton (sailor and cross-dresser), Constantine the Great, Sir Ebenezer Howard (founder of the garden city movement), Jacob Isaac (writer) and Ellen Ternan (Dickens' friend).
Today you are asked the question: Together, these eleven men and women point to a twelfth seasonal person. Who?
There is still time to enter this second part; you will have to fill in the form today. The third part starts on 20th December and goes on until 31st. Win either, and you might get OED books to the value of £200 (or the equivalent in US$).
Generous of me to urge people to go in for this, really, because the more entries there are the less chance I shall stand of winning a prize.
It is the Advent Calendar Competition run by the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. I doubt if many will accept my recommendation to follow the link I have provided but I shall describe it anyway, so there.
There are actually three competitions: one is closed, one ends today and one will go on over Christmas. In the first, every day from 1st to 8th December a page opened on the website illustrating someone who is listed in the ODNB. You click on the picture to get the full entry and on 8th December you had to answer the question: What festive theme links these eight people? The people were William Rossetti (brother of Dante Gabriel), Ewan MacColl, Quentin Bell, George Bernard Shaw and four others of whom I had never heard (so you see what I mean about me not getting anywhere near an entry or a prize), and the answer was: Like Father Christmas, each had a fine white beard at some time in his life.
The second part began on 9th December and ends on 19th (today). Those who feature are Bob Barclay (jazz musician), Dorothy Osborne (letter writer), Phiz (Dickens illustrator), Catherine of Valois (consort of Henry V), Sir Carol Reed, Nancy Astor, Anne Jane Thornton (sailor and cross-dresser), Constantine the Great, Sir Ebenezer Howard (founder of the garden city movement), Jacob Isaac (writer) and Ellen Ternan (Dickens' friend).
Today you are asked the question: Together, these eleven men and women point to a twelfth seasonal person. Who?
There is still time to enter this second part; you will have to fill in the form today. The third part starts on 20th December and goes on until 31st. Win either, and you might get OED books to the value of £200 (or the equivalent in US$).
Generous of me to urge people to go in for this, really, because the more entries there are the less chance I shall stand of winning a prize.
Sunday, 17 December 2006
Merrily On High
I have been told that my choice of topics in the pre-Christmas period so far has been shamefully inappropriate, and I suppose this is true: there are very few aspects of Tory policy, marine diatoms or prostitution which are likely to waken anyone’s festive spirit.
So here we go on a series of Christmas-themed posts; it’s a bit early to start this because I doubt if I can keep it going for a whole week, but we shall see.
Many years ago when commercial silkscreen printing was in its infancy a friend and I started a little business making and selling, among other things, Christmas cards, in both secular and religious designs. Our artists were equally proficient at both but found the former enabled them to adopt a more uninhibited approach. Here are two of our designs; angels are timeless (obviously), but the style of the other drawing has dated a bit.
Sadly, the unsold stock is long since exhausted and nowadays we have to buy cards. Everybody knows that charity cards sold in shops give only a derisory share to the charities which produce them and most of them are awful anyway, so we get ours from a local voluntary organisation which pops up every year to offer a selection of cards from all the charities, and presumably passes on a fair slice of the proceeds.
Most of these designs are pretty awful too, and one also has to choose from those supplied by a charity of which one approves. Well, I suppose all charities are deserving in one sense (except maybe Eton and Harrow and all that lot, whose charitable status gets them £100 million a year in tax relief) but most people would rather give money to some than to others.
.
So here we go on a series of Christmas-themed posts; it’s a bit early to start this because I doubt if I can keep it going for a whole week, but we shall see.
Many years ago when commercial silkscreen printing was in its infancy a friend and I started a little business making and selling, among other things, Christmas cards, in both secular and religious designs. Our artists were equally proficient at both but found the former enabled them to adopt a more uninhibited approach. Here are two of our designs; angels are timeless (obviously), but the style of the other drawing has dated a bit.Sadly, the unsold stock is long since exhausted and nowadays we have to buy cards. Everybody knows that charity cards sold in shops give only a derisory share to the charities which produce them and most of them are awful anyway, so we get ours from a local voluntary organisation which pops up every year to offer a selection of cards from all the charities, and presumably passes on a fair slice of the proceeds.
Most of these designs are pretty awful too, and one also has to choose from those supplied by a charity of which one approves. Well, I suppose all charities are deserving in one sense (except maybe Eton and Harrow and all that lot, whose charitable status gets them £100 million a year in tax relief) but most people would rather give money to some than to others.
.
Friday, 15 December 2006
By any other name
The appalling events around Ipswich have inspired many thousands of words of media comment, much of it trite, prurient or fatuous. One piece I saw, by a female journalist who is usually fairly level-headed, was headed “Decriminalisation is the only way to safety” a pronouncement which apparently refers to the Green Party’s policy on prostitution.
Selling sex for money is not, of course, illegal in the UK (there is a useful summary here of laws throughout the EU), so it is presumably the ancillary activities such as advertising it, joining together in a co-operative, soliciting and perhaps pimping and brothel-keeping which they think should be legalised. To make her own version of the proposal absolutely clear, the journalist went on to say “we should stop regarding sex work as having any sort of stigma… It should be a job choice like any other…”
In other words, there’s nothing wrong with prostitution, we just have to tidy it up a bit, amend our attitude and regard it as something perfectly acceptable, and all will be O.K.
Exactly how this will work is not spelt out, and perhaps the Green policy-makers cannot see that a legal, properly regulated trade in prostitution, with every kind of protection afforded both to free-lance workers and employees—Health and Safety and employment rules properly enforced (minimum wages, contracts, pensions and so on), and the Inland Revenue keeping a watchful eye on tax evasion—would be a multi-billion pound industry. It would from the start attract the attention of our top entrepreneurs, not only as employers but in providing all the services needed, such as training, careers advice in schools, selection (head-hunting at universities) and the establishment of professional standards and qualifications. And, of course, marketing: Richard Branson would have a head start here with his already widely-known brand name.
Male prostitution, I suppose, might still remain a cottage industry.
All this, of course, is lunacy. The article prompted a sensible reply from someone who has seen what happens in places where there is legalised prostitution, and knows that it singularly fails to achieve what its proponents imagine. But it would not be fair to think of them as merely simple-minded: if you have a naive idea of what the trade is like, then the daffy notion that prostitution could become “a job choice like any other” arises naturally from adopting the term “sex worker”. It was George Orwell who first showed the extent to which attitudes can be moulded and ideas changed simply by controlling the words used to describe something: you don’t change the thing, but Newspeak makes you regard it quite differently.
I wrote about this phenomenon in the context of prostitution a couple of years ago in a post called Opinion poll; this was a feeble and jokey piece mainly concerned with Sainsbury’s check-out girls, but somehow it evoked some lively comments from women writers, one of whom provided a fascinating magisterial survey of terms for prostitutes in their social context through the ages (whores, courtesans and so on). I contributed enthusiastically for a while but we got side-tracked into talking about death, putrefaction, the Dewey Decimal system and other irrelevancies, and then a soi-disant dyke from Prescott, AZ, joined in and I felt that the discussion had wandered off the point and it was time to end it.
See here for a fair comment (from another female journalist) on what the trade is really like and why the idea of de-stigmatising it is daft.
Selling sex for money is not, of course, illegal in the UK (there is a useful summary here of laws throughout the EU), so it is presumably the ancillary activities such as advertising it, joining together in a co-operative, soliciting and perhaps pimping and brothel-keeping which they think should be legalised. To make her own version of the proposal absolutely clear, the journalist went on to say “we should stop regarding sex work as having any sort of stigma… It should be a job choice like any other…”
In other words, there’s nothing wrong with prostitution, we just have to tidy it up a bit, amend our attitude and regard it as something perfectly acceptable, and all will be O.K.
Exactly how this will work is not spelt out, and perhaps the Green policy-makers cannot see that a legal, properly regulated trade in prostitution, with every kind of protection afforded both to free-lance workers and employees—Health and Safety and employment rules properly enforced (minimum wages, contracts, pensions and so on), and the Inland Revenue keeping a watchful eye on tax evasion—would be a multi-billion pound industry. It would from the start attract the attention of our top entrepreneurs, not only as employers but in providing all the services needed, such as training, careers advice in schools, selection (head-hunting at universities) and the establishment of professional standards and qualifications. And, of course, marketing: Richard Branson would have a head start here with his already widely-known brand name.
Male prostitution, I suppose, might still remain a cottage industry.
All this, of course, is lunacy. The article prompted a sensible reply from someone who has seen what happens in places where there is legalised prostitution, and knows that it singularly fails to achieve what its proponents imagine. But it would not be fair to think of them as merely simple-minded: if you have a naive idea of what the trade is like, then the daffy notion that prostitution could become “a job choice like any other” arises naturally from adopting the term “sex worker”. It was George Orwell who first showed the extent to which attitudes can be moulded and ideas changed simply by controlling the words used to describe something: you don’t change the thing, but Newspeak makes you regard it quite differently.
I wrote about this phenomenon in the context of prostitution a couple of years ago in a post called Opinion poll; this was a feeble and jokey piece mainly concerned with Sainsbury’s check-out girls, but somehow it evoked some lively comments from women writers, one of whom provided a fascinating magisterial survey of terms for prostitutes in their social context through the ages (whores, courtesans and so on). I contributed enthusiastically for a while but we got side-tracked into talking about death, putrefaction, the Dewey Decimal system and other irrelevancies, and then a soi-disant dyke from Prescott, AZ, joined in and I felt that the discussion had wandered off the point and it was time to end it.
See here for a fair comment (from another female journalist) on what the trade is really like and why the idea of de-stigmatising it is daft.
Wednesday, 13 December 2006
Intelligent design at Georgia Tech
Coupling the possibilities offered by genetic engineering with the discipline of microelectromechanical systems, scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology have recently turned their attentions to the prospect of controlling the growth of diatoms to provide useful 3-D microstructures.
Really Magazine reports here on the astounding possibilities this offers, but those whose pulses are not set racing by such news can still derive much pleasure from the article, for it provides a link to the on-line version of Ernst Haeckel: Die Radiolarien (1862). Dr Haeckel’s work involved the engraving of copper plates with pictures of some of the more than 100,000 varieties of marine diatom.
But never mind about all that; even if marine biology means as much to you as it does to Dolly Parton, you cannot fail to find these engravings things of wonder. Here is Plate Number 34:
Click on it to enlarge it, and marvel at the beauty and complexity of the structures.
Really Magazine reports here on the astounding possibilities this offers, but those whose pulses are not set racing by such news can still derive much pleasure from the article, for it provides a link to the on-line version of Ernst Haeckel: Die Radiolarien (1862). Dr Haeckel’s work involved the engraving of copper plates with pictures of some of the more than 100,000 varieties of marine diatom.
But never mind about all that; even if marine biology means as much to you as it does to Dolly Parton, you cannot fail to find these engravings things of wonder. Here is Plate Number 34:
Click on it to enlarge it, and marvel at the beauty and complexity of the structures.
Monday, 11 December 2006
Up the chimney with you, sonny
The shadow Attorney General’s pronouncements about the success of our Victorian forbears in changing public attitudes to moral codes, together with a lot of stuff (in a report on social justice prepared by Iain Duncan Smith and published today) about fathers—particularly Afro-Caribbean ones—shirking their responsibilities and unmarried parents damaging society may not mean that his party actually wants to put the clock back a hundred and fifty years. But the suggestion first voiced in 1983 by Margaret Thatcher that we could learn much from Victorian mores remains alive in the Tory mind, and some of them will not regret that a front-page headline in one of yesterday’s papers was:
Bring back Victorian values, says key Tory.
There cannot be many, even among aged Yahoos of the right, who believe that our modern ills stem from the abandonment of the values of 1850, and that—for example—giving women the vote, letting them into universities and allowing them to own property even when married were the first steps along the slippery downward slope which has led in modern times to a widespread lack of moral fibre and a general decline in such matters as the ability to wage a decent war against lesser breeds.
I suppose there must be some, though, in the higher echelons of the party, who sincerely believe this.
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