Protestants, radicals and readers rejoice…

Bunyan (1628) and Blake (1757) born today… The rather wonderful Walsall New Art Gallery has a collection of Blake's illustrations, and is hosting a Blake exhibition for the next few months.

Introducing the Map Twats

Two of them, anyway.

To my American and Canadian chums

Happy Thanksgiving… but why do Yankees and Canucks celebrate on different days?

Plodding towards Christmas

It's been a long and hard week, though all my teaching has been fun: Twelfth Night again, discourse analysis with the Research Methods students, semiotics with Comms. students and some shockingly offensive poetry - Rochester, Swift, Spenser and Ol' Dirty Bastard. The class, blessed with resilience and a sense of humour, took it very well!

As a respite, I've been fencing a couple of times (sorted out my habit of constantly renewing rather than parrying and riposting), and advanced yet further in the Anne of Green Gables series. I'm up to book 5, Anne's House of Dreams. In places, the books drag - too many mildly amusing local characters, but the joy and tragedy has returned. Anne's finally married Gilbert (notable mostly for his colourlessness) and there's an interesting tension appearing between Anne's independence and book-learnin', and the propriety which required her not to work. Presumably this, like the constant stream of parental separations and deaths, is autobiographical - L. M. Montgomery was a minister's wife. The solution is a bit weaselly - they both write occasional pieces for magazines which is genteel enough not to count as suffragist nonsense…

Other things are fascinating too - readers are expected to be knowledgeable about the tensions between Presbyterianism and Methodism, though we should be able to rise above such sectarianism - Cornelia's horror at Methodist heresy is clearly meant to be amusingly overplayed. French Canadians are slow, Forrest Gump-like amiable imbeciles, and Americans are loud and showy. England (and perhaps Scotland) is still 'the Old Country'. Most of all though, the series is astonishingly intertextual. Every character in the book, including the narrator, quotes or alludes all the time, usually to Shakespeare, the Bible and nineteenth-century respectable poetry. Longfellow and Tennyson are all over the place, as well as 18th-century bores like Moore. 

Then there's the treatment of love and death. Love is purely Romantic in this novel, and not without its harshnesses. It is certainly coy - the narrative skips two months from the day of Anne's wedding to the couple's new settled life, but she does openly yearn for a child - who lives, like one of Montgomery's children, for only a few hours (don't whinge about spoiling the plot: it's book 5 and none of you are going to read it). Deaths are frequent, especially of children, and the misery is quietly but poignantly expressed. Finally, the books abound with unmarried, independent and resilient women. Some, like Marilla, had their chances at marriage and regret not taking them, but many others find fulfilment in strong female-female relationships, often modelled on homosocial lines. Finally, there are clearly-masculine characters like Cornelia, an open man-hater and devotee of abstract arguments - perhaps there are glimpses of other ways of life in this largely conservative text. 

And now… the climax of the week

Yes, the results of the Literary Review's Bad Sex Awards are in and the winners are: Rachel Johnson, for "a mounting, Wagnerian crescendo" which has room for the woman in question to think of slugs and moths… she's the sister of Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, Mayor of London, so presumably he's helped with the research. Updike was also given a Lifetime Achievement award, which will please Howard Jacobson and all the other pseudo-American wannabes. (No link to the Literary Review because their site's useless).

Slow blogging

Jon Henley in today's Guardian covers the rise and (gentle) fall of slow blogging. It's a nice idea - post something infrequently and let people mull them over. Unfortunately, the originator of this idea, Todd Sieling, has ceased blogging due to lack of readers. It's little wonder Sieling likes the idea of plodding blogging: he's Canadian!

Seriously though, I like the idea of moving blogging from instant reaction to contemplative haiku - but it's not going to happen because you can't control how the reader uses or consumes your material. They won't read an entry in a slow blog, go away and think about it for a week, then return for the next entry. They'll consume the post, then fill the intervening time reading other material, then never go back to the slow blog because they're bored…

Happy Birthday

… Ferdinand de Saussure, 1857-1913, father of structural linguistics and thus of all the good bits of literary theory. Without hell, there could be no heaven, as I'm sure he'd agree.

Trouble with lichen

While I'm in the mood for pictures, here are a couple from my walk up the Cheshire Matterhorn. There are plenty of landscapes over at my flickr site, but I'm particularly pleased with these images of lichen and icicles (click on them for a bigger image)

Fractal veg

My photos of Chou Romanesco aren't perhaps quite as good as that posted earlier, but I'm glad I took them. Here are a couple - the rest of on my Flickr page (under 'Chou Romanesco').

Feldman

Alex Ross over at Therestisnoise has posted a few moments of Morton Feldman's Rothko Chapel. If this doesn't convince you of the joy of modern music, nothing ever will. The first instrument is a viola, that underestimated but noble plank. 

I can't help thinking that in this snippet, it sounds very like the opening theme of Vaughan Williams's Flos Campi, a far more beautiful piece than The Lark Ascending, although perhaps that's because the former hasn't been done to death by Classic FM (soporifically stealing your soul with music from bourgeois commercials: all your M+S favourites). I hate that station. It's the Daily Mail of classical music. 

On the road again…

Walking on Saturday was stunning - from Macclesfield's finest delicatessen where I bought hare and venison pie, up Shutlingsloe, across the moors to the Cat and Fiddle for a pint in front of a fire. I'll post some photos (of lichen and icicles) when I work out why my camera isn't showing up on my computer - I'm hoping it's just a low battery. 

The views were amazing - all the way to the Clees, the Breiddons, Cannock Chase, the Wirral and Caer Caradoc. 

I'll also post some photos of mathematical veg - I got this amazing fractal thing in my veg box the other day. Neal informs me it's a Chou Romanesco. Here's a photo of it by someone else:

Uh huh her

It's time for the Literary Review's Bad Sex Award (for bad sex in fiction, so you can't nominate your exes). I always enjoy the sight of aged soi-disant heavyweight authors and powerful men getting their mojos working in public. They're too powerful to be edited boldly, so they spill their literary seed onto the page and expose only their own tedious, and usually tediously mechanical, imaginations to the mockery of the crowd. There's a simple rule - get your friends to read it. If they laugh, cut it out (or off). 

Thomas Pynchon's entry (sorry) is particularly egregious (last one on the page), though Updike has won it before. This year, I'm rooting (sorry again - it's catching after a quick browse) for Alastair Campbell's All In The Mind. But perhaps he can't help it, as the former 'Riviera Gigolo' of Forum magazine fame, to which I'm not linking. 

These boots are made for walking…

Unless it's actually snowing tomorrow, I'm going up the Cheshire Matterhorn: it's said to be bleak and steep. So far it's Dan, Neal and myself, but others may be foolhardy enough to join the Map Twats. 

Then in keeping with Orwell's description of middle-class liberals

'that dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking to the smell of progress like bluebottles to a dead cat … fuzzy-haired intellectuals in pullover sweaters'

(The Road to Wigan Pier, Part 2, Chapter 11)

I'm off to see Dick Gaughan (Scottish lefty folk singer) in the evening! He sounds better than he looks…

I'm not exactly an Orwell fan, but you have to admit that he had a talent for winding people up (also from The Road to Wigan Pier): 

'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.

Anyone know why this thing is ignoring my formatting? 

Poor Adolf

He's discovered that he's on the BNP membership list…

Joy

Still no books in the post today, but I did get a rather lovely pair of Doctor Marten shoes.

Lookalikes

Peter Mandelson?

New Media - making the lynch mob so much easier

Some colleagues have just received anonymous text messages naming the alleged killers of Baby P. It's little more than a lynch mob (and in contempt of court) - the dark side of viral marketing, and the kind of thing that news media can't do legally and (mostly) wouldn't want to do. 

The phone companies keep copies of every text message sent - it shouldn't be too hard to find the senders of these texts. What do they want, other than to circumvent the process of justice for, presumably, violent intent?

The excessively soft hands of the provincial novelists

I'm on the third Anne of Green Gables book, Anne of the Island. It suffers in comparison with the first two slightly because the plot's moved away from the enclosure of Prince Edward Island, but there are compensations - Anne's emotional maturity is convincingly tested. On the down side, an authorially-approved character speaks disparagingly of the Byrnes - tribal fury stirs in my blood. 

Actually, I'm really enjoying this vision of a simpler but fulfilling lifestyle. Maybe it's because I live in Wolverhampton, but I'm regularly checking the vacancies list at the U of Prince Edward Island. 

By way of contrast, I'm teaching Petrarch, Spenser, Wyatt and Shakespeare this afternoon for the second time this week. Wonderful.

A nation yearns to care about mundane shit again

The other excitement of the day, at least for me, was receiving two Northern Picture Library CDs in the post - post-Field Mice jangly guitar thrills from a band liberated from the demands of chasing chart success and living up to the legend that was Sarah Records. No books in the post today though - very worrying. For you completists, the other Field Mice splinter group was the rather special Trembling Blue Stars. Mmmmm, twee.

BNP - the party that keeps on giving

This BNP membership list just gets more and more fun by the minute. I've checked my area, my friends' hometowns and old schoolchums I've long suspected. Now the Guardian (or should that be theguardian?) has posted an interactive map of where these scum live. 

Which brings up an interesting question - about the role of newspapers and blogging. The papers have to be very careful about this stuff. And those impeccable liberal souls at the Guardian have declared that 'The BNP has rights too' which is all very well but they certainly don't want to extend rights to Guardian readers. Bloggers presumably have the same legal duties and responsibilities as newspapers, but we're very unlikely to be sued - I've only got 1 reader. Those blogs which are prominent enough to be closed down are treading very carefully: Slugger O'Toole has listed the numbers in various places in Northern Ireland, but moderators and posters are being very careful to keep names out of it. 

So the major blogs are behaving like the newspapers - both groups are using the BNP material in interesting ways, but are desperate to keep on the right side of the law (or of our lords and masters at blogger.com - hence the only place I've found the full list after the initial burst of joy yesterday is still wikileaks. This may be the making of that site - I've dropped in occasionally but only today have I seen the site made unavailable due to heavy traffic. 

The whole thing suggests that there's a place for 'citizen journalists' outside the legal system - we can chance our arms because we have very little to lose (a 5-yr old laptop, in my case). We can move faster and we probably won't get caught. On the other hand, nobody's going to see this, so it's little more than self-satisfied, consequence free, electronic masturbation.