I'm getting into swinging

NO, you perverts.

I refer to this wonderful hack (which you can download): it turns ordinary songs into swing numbers by stretching the first half of each beat and contracting the second.

I really, really love this swing version of 'Enter Sandman' - other examples are available on the site:

Enter Sandman- the Swing Version by plamere

Don't Stop Believin'  (Swing Version) by plamere

Top Tips for Thieves

No, not plagiarists, but advice on how to steal rare maps from books.

There was a man who always came in chewing. He spent an age with books containing maps or prints. Always left buying nothing. We thought he was doing research, completing his MA here in store. He turned out to be chewing string. When this was suitably wet he’d lay it along the inside spine next to a desirable map. The dampness would seep into the paper and after ten minutes or so he was able to slide out the print without making any sort of tearing sound. Up his sleeve it went. Sold on to the antique market the same day.

It's from Peter Finch's blog: he's a fine poet, critic and journalist from Wales who is consistently interesting.

"Maybe nobody minds about things as much as me."

Update, August 2010: Hello to my repeat visitor from Grosse Pointe, Michigan (great film, by the way). Glad you can't stay away. Do they have Peep Show in the US? Leave a comment, tell us why you keep coming back!

Friends, colleagues and drunken strangers on trains and in the street have repeatedly remarked upon my resemblance to Mr. David Mitchell, the ubiquitous comedian with whom I share a birthday, a tailor, and every single opinion.

My friends will also be familiar with my antipathy towards hairstyling. Haircuts = fine. Hairstyles = needless complication (though I am being educated in this matter).

In this fine video, Mitchell lays off the cultural implication of hairstyles, but summarises my feelings about going to the barber with considerable wit.

I've never accepted the offer of a wash in the salon. I wash my hair before going. It seems polite.

Selected Peep Show quotations which remind me of me:


Peep Show is a comedy about an uptight loser and a lazy selfish loser. It's photographed from 'behind the eyes' of the characters, and the dialogue in brackets is their internal monologue.

Jez: You're a posh spaz.

Mark: Oh really? Well I'd love to know in what way I am a posh spaz.

Jez: In the way that you do posh, spazzy things like... tidying up and... ironing your socks.

Mark: I do not iron my socks!

Jez: Socks, shirts, whatever!

TV: I'm basically looking to meet someone like myself.

Mark: (Pfftt. That's exactly the opposite of what I'm looking for.)

Mark: [Before having toast for breakfast] (Brown for first course, white for pudding. Brown is savoury, white's the treat. Of course I'm the one who's laughing because I actually love brown toast.

Mark: (Well that was a fucking disaster. I want compensation. I want reparations. I want the Rhineland. It's going to be 1919 all over again, fuck the inevitable backlash.)

Mark: This is the sort of thing people do when they're having a good time.

Mark: Dancing? Y-yes... dancing... I love... dancing... (It makes me look like a coma victim being stood up and zapped with a cattle prod.)

Mark: (Sure, an orgy sounds great, but you're basically just multiplying the number of people you're not going to be able to look in the eye afterwards.)

Mark: I'm dangerously close to getting what I want. Feels a bit weird.

Jez: You're still living in your Hitchhiker's Guide world where you'll go around in your bathrobe and have a nice cup of tea.

Mark: (Look at me; I've got a girlfriend. A proper girlfriend reading a best-seller about child-abuse. I go out and have croissant. I'm just a normal functioning member of the human race and there's no way anyone can prove otherwise.)

Mark: Nothing means anything to you, does it? Friendship, loyalty - they're just fusty old words like sixpence and codpiece to you, aren't they?

Mark: She’s good for me, Jez, She’s dragging me into the twenty-first century with its meaningless logos and ironic veneration of tyrants. It’s all good, my friend.

[about Jez and Sophie being nice to Mark after he walked in on them almost having sex]

Mark: (Why are they being so nice? Maybe they've had a big chat about me and they're suddenly realised I was right about North Korea, I was right about the European Constitution, and by God I think I'm right about the congestion charge!)

Mark: (Look at them all - the Christians. It's not fair. I could be that happy if I believed in a lot of rubbish.)

Mark: Why does everything have to be fun to be worthwhile? Crick and Watson have discovered the double helix. Did they do it on a skateboard? No? Well fuck off then, I'm not interested.

Mark: The absolute worst thing anyone could say about you is that you were a selfish, moral blank, whose lazy cynicism and sneering, ironic take on the world encapsulates everything wrong with a generation. But you my friend are not evil.

Do look at the mantelpiece while you're stoking the fire, OR, how to be a top quality scamster

I overslept very badly indeed today, which meant I didn't go swimming.

However, it meant I could listen to Woman's Hour on Radio 4, which alternately encapsulates the best of British culture, and the worst.

After this morning's show, I'm not sure whether to be depressed or elated. It featured a long and involved discussion of mantelpiece culture . Yes, your eyes do not deceive you (even the show's producers must be ashamed: they don't mention this piece in the synopsis). A woman named Clare Jenkins explained that her eyes were drawn to her mantelpiece during the adverts on TV, and she began to wonder about the various ways in which mantelpieces are used. Then she discovered a whole academic groups of mantelpiece researchers.

From this programme (and I'm sorry to sound like a Daily Mail columnist here) I discovered absolutely nothing that two minutes' thought would have unearthed. Mantelpieces developed as fireplaces grew from holes in the wall to something neater. Some people use their mantelpieces to show off expensive things, other people display sentimental items, and some people just put any old stuff on there (a vet's appointment card was cited as evidence).

Jesus. Put Jenkins down for a Nobel.

So I'm in two minds. Do I welcome the Tory education cuts because there's clearly fat there, or should I celebrate. After all, if there's room (and interest from Radio 4) for Mantelpiece Studies, then my own research interest (1930s Welsh Writing in English) is safe and healthy.

Now, the little bit of liberal in me that I haven't managed to kill off is saying 'everything humans do is intrinsically interesting and important, and you shouldn't attack fellow toilers in the paper mines', but most of my brain is shouting 'she gets paid for this? And gets national media interest? This is the worst kind of mimsy upper-middle-class bourgeois, pointless, inconsequential, reactionary nonsense', and a tiny voice is saying 'nice work Clare. Good scam. No heavy lifting, regular pay cheque. Sweet'.

Your thoughts, ladies and gentlemen. Shall we all enrol in Mantelpiece Studies 101?

Colleagues: an apology

I get the feeling I'm stretching the bounds of consideration towards my colleagues, particularly those involved in carrying and sorting the post. Today's haul included three very big, heavy boxes from a certain none-too-principled online book behemoth, and a parcel from an independent bookshop. I shall moderate my purchases before hernias develop.

What came in today?
Finally, Nicola Barker's Burley Cross Postbox Theft because she wrote Darkmans and can therefore do no wrong - ask Cynical Ben if you don't believe me;
Adam Roberts' New Model Army, set in a war-torn near future UK: he's a writer bursting with great ideas and he has a lovely turn of narrative, as he should, being a professor of Eng Lit and Creative Writing. The premise reminds me of J. G. Ballard's Vietnam-in-the-UK short story, 'The Killing Ground', discussed here and Moorcock's A Cure for Cancer;
Alan Warner's The Stars in the Bright Sky, sequel to his warm, funny, lovely The Sopranos (not the gangsters but a bunch of Scottish schoolgirls);
China Miéville's The Kraken - I enjoy his work but I'm never entirely convinced that there's much more going on in The New Weird than entertainment and a gothic imagination;
Scarlett Thomas's The End of Mr Y, because I heard her read at All Tomorrow's Parties a year ago and was impressed;
Mike Berners-Lee's How Bad Are Bananas: the carbon footprint of everything, because I'm wracked (that's how you spell it, kids) with guilt. If there's a chapter on books, I'm ignoring it;
a signed copy Jonathan Coe's The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim, because I've read his other books and they're acute, funny and wise;
Robert Wilson's Julian Comstock: a Story of 22nd-Century America because I'm a sucker for dystopian future novels (even though the present is dystopian enough for anyone: Gwyneth Jones Bold as Love series is the best of all and - huzzah -  she's back online, but Wilson's book looks fascinating. There's definitely a post-nationalist or new nationalist wave breaking)
and finally,
Dan Rhodes's Gold because I heard that it's funny and Welsh-related.

Obviously, I've got looming multiple research deadlines, so these books will merely be extra bricks in the wall I'm going to build in the office to shield me from colleagues' scorn.

Oilcam

Watch the bastards wreck the planet in real time.





By the way, for the benefit of my Conservative readers, this is what happens in advanced capitalist states, especially ones which suffer constant lobbying by big business for 'small government' and 'deregulation':

3.43pm (9.43am CDT): 

The head of the troubled US Minerals Management Service, Elizabeth Birnbaum, has been sacked.

The agency was heavily criticised over the leak. An official report found that it allowed staff at oil and gas firms to fill in inspection reports in pencil, with regulators later going over the answers in ink. 

If you think it's different over here, try asking the Ministry of Defence how many of its officials are on secondment from weapons manufacturers, and how many civil servants and military officials retire to the boards of weapons manufacturers. Ask the Treasury and Business department how many of its staff are on secondment from major corporations, particularly the accountancy firms, or go on to work there.

It's corrupt. These companies hardly need to lobby because the door's wide open for them to write the rules on financial regulation, or defence procurement. They run these departments, threatening ministers with dire warnings about job losses in marginal consituencies, or 'market destabilisation' if the elected government doesn't do exactly what business wants (and that's worked out brilliantly, hasn't it?). 

The mantra used to be 'what's good for business is good for Britain', repeated while their shareholders moved the head office offshore to avoid tax, outsourced workforces elsewhere, fought employee safety and environmental regulation and generally worked for a jungle of exploitation. If you haven't noticed, 'bonuses are back' while public services are cut to the bone. So much for 'good for Britain'. 

Irony round-up

This just in:

Sarah Palin, who coined the term "Drill, Baby, Drill", felt emboldened to accuse Obama this week of being in thrall to the oil industry.

Meanwhile, some Top Tips for students (I know I've said this before, but you're clearly not listening):

1. If you're going to plagiarise and you're functionally illiterate, try to mess up the stuff you're stealing. We can, somehow and with the aid of microscopes and computers, spot the difference between high-level professorial prose and your verbiage.

2. If you take the other route, and plagiarise from any old internet site, consider some quality control. School-level sites just don't cut it. Ask yourself this: if a site is called 'askkids.com', is it likely to contain university level material which will convince a lecturer? If you think the answer is yes, then feel free to use your exhaust pipe as a bong.

3. If you've spent hours stitching stolen material together from a bewildering array of websites, why not consider using those hours for reading books and thinking about what to write? After all, you've proved that you can concentrate and put the work in. Now all you need to do is add a dash of honesty, get out of bed and go to the library. It's the shiny place with all the books and people loudly using their mobile phones.

Vincit Omnia

Vince Cable is the expert economist Liberal Democrat who wasn't made Chancellor when they went into coalition with the Tories. The job went instead to Gideon George Osborne, who hasn't a single qualification in the field and who has never worked outside politics.

Vince is bored by his job in the Business Department, and uncomfortable in alliance with the Tory Scum.

Thankfully, he's lashed out today at overpaid Vice-Chancellors of universities. Yes, the pay gap between company directors and workers is at record levels (85 times average shopfloor earnings now) but he can't do much about that.

Obviously, I wouldn't dream of offering an opinion on whether or not there's an inverse relationship between the competence, intellectual vision and management skills of my dear leader and her wages. I'll just point out that, with inflation taken into account, I've taken a pay cut and she very much hasn't. As to the bonus scheme for upper management… but no, this is a family blog.

I'll just leave you with Vince's words:

The business secretary, Vince Cable, has launched a scathing attack on university vice-chancellors over their generous pay packages, accusing them of being out of step with reality and having little sense of the "self-sacrifice" needed in the current climate.

The Liberal Democat said he had been "taken aback" to discover thatsalaries had risen last year by more than 10% and the government was sending a "very strong signal" that high awards were unacceptable at a time of a funding crisis in the sector. 

"There is some gap between reality and expectations in some of those institutions and although it is not our job to control pay – it is an independent mechanism – we want to signal to them that there has got to be some restraint."

Contrasting the attitude of the university heads with that of managers in the private sector, where some were taking pay cuts to help keep their firms afloat, he said: "I just get absolutely no sense in the university sector that there is the same degree of realism and of self-sacrifice which is going to have to happen if we are going to preserve the quality of university education. There is clearly salary escalation at the top level that bears no relation to the underlying economics of the country."

Fake pink feathery gits

Cynical Ben has posted a short story. It's very, very good. If you like cruelty to flamingos, which I do. I can't get enough of it.

Read it here.

Careful now, moshers!

Afternoon all. Slow start to the day - we went out to celebrate Dan's PhD and birthday yesterday, in the bright lights of Birmingham, before returning to my place for pointless, involved arguments about inconsequential stuff - all in all, the perfect evening. We gave him big canvas-printed photographs - one of a gull I took in Oslo because that's what his PhD was sort-of about, and another of him holding a map and gazing into the distance. I call it 'To the Dole Queue!'.

Meanwhile, Boing Boing has chanced upon a paper in the prestigious British Medical Journal on the dangers of headbanging. It struck a chord - as a youthful metal fan in the early nineties, I knew that if your neck wasn't stiff and sore the next morning, you'd had a bad night down at The Rigger (so unreconstructed even now that one of their pub quiz prizes is 'porn'), The Sutherland Arms (now demolished) or whichever scummy rock pub you'd patronised. I really, really miss my mass of very long hair - you just can't mosh without it, but incipient thinning persuaded me that Francis Rossi's is not a look to emulate.

An average head banging song has a tempo of about 146 beats per minute, which is predicted to cause mild head injury when the range of motion is greater than 75°. At higher tempos and greater ranges of motion there is a risk of neck injury.

Conclusion: To minimise the risk of head and neck injury, head bangers should decrease their range of head and neck motion, head bang to slower tempo songs by replacing heavy metal with adult oriented rock, only head bang to every second beat, or use personal protective equipment.

Here's an instructive video on how not to headbang. Careful now.

Why I don't eat fish

Have you seen The Handfish?
Yes, it uses it's fins as hands instead of swimming. It looks pissed off, and it's evolving to come for us. Though as nobody's seen one since 1999, it's either extinct (well done us, again) or waiting to jump out!

Actually, I don't eat fish because it tastes horrible. Being forced to eat it every Friday in my good Catholic family didn't help either. I like prawns, mussels and scallops though.

Helping RS with his 'Afforestation'*

A couple of really interesting books have come in over the last couple of days - the Welsh bildungsromans I hadn't read on Rachel Trezise's list. I've received Catrin Dafydd's Random Deaths and Custard, which looks like fun, Aneurin Gareth Thomas's Luggage from Elsewhere, and Joe Dunthorne's Submarine. They're all set in urban south Wales (or South Wales - there's a heated argument about that): on the edge of Welsh but not fully included or totally excluded. Being Welsh hovers around the edges as a possibility, a mirage, or a position which makes all the ordinary teen horrors ever so slightly different (the narrator of Submarine, for instance, hides his part-Englishness, having been bullied for being Welsh when he lived in England: difference = weakness in the playground).

I read Submarine in one go the other night, even though I was exhausted from 12 hours of marking. The beautiful dustjacket helped, as did the narrator. It's the teenage boy to whom all the events happen, so there's a lovely gap between what he thinks he knows and what we know is actually going on, between his cleverness and how clever he thinks he is. The usual stuff happens: sex, parental marital problems, bullying (he's a guilt-ridden perp, not a victim) and meditation. It's comic, sad and knowing - well worth reading.

*How am I helping? Well, 'Afforestation' is an RS Thomas poem about the commercial forests imposed on historic Welsh locations in the 1950s and 1960s by the British Forestry Commission - historic villages and working farms were wiped out, covered in sterile, alien trees which supported neither animals nor workers, in pursuit of money in a way that wouldn't have happened in England. Every Welsh book is a blow FOR FREEDOM! Etc.

And now for something very different indeed

Yesterday's music was Maslanka's harmonious Woodwind Quintets. Let's go to the other end of the scale with a massive dollop of Luciano Berio. If you asked someone relatively bright what modern classical sounded like, they'd mutter about screaming and no tunes.

They'd be thinking, I suspect, of Berio, Stockhausen (genius, but barking mad) and perhaps early Turnage. I therefore recommend Berio's Sinfonia and Eindrücke, both of which fulfil these criteria, though the latter is slightly easier on the ear.

The point is that this music is like death metal: it's meant to reproduce the experience of a world without rationality, a world in which one lot of people can put 6 million other people in gas chambers without losing a night's sleep. The harmonies, tunes and neat structures of old classical music, like the poetry and art of the time, just don't tell the truth of the human condition. We had the most advanced technology and skills in every sphere of achievement, and we used them to kill each other on a monumental scale: this is what's meant by modernism. So artists, poets, novelists, sculptors and composers (gradually) stopped writing pretty music for summer afternoons.

Sinfonia isn't directly about the horrors, but it is explicitly about the strange new world we found ourselves in: the text sung is fragments of Claude Levi-Strauss's The Raw and the Cooked, a founding text of modern anthropology - and literary criticism - which first proposed structural analysis (of myths, in this case).

Or at least, the good ones did. The second-raters still took commissions for pretty music from cowards. I still listen to plenty of it (Bax, for instance) because there's lots of beauty in the world and I can't spend my entire life contemplating the holocaust (unlike death metal enthusiasts). But there's certainly a need for ugliness and challenge in music. Here's the first movement of Sinfonia and some 'nice' Berio - his Folksong arrangements.

A very expensive student

I had to be out of the office this morning while my colleagues talked to a student. So I went to a well-known discount store to buy undercrackers (boxers, if you're interested). Half an hour later I leave with said undercrackers, a new waterproof and a new hiking rucksack. I was several pounds lighter too.

Feeling Horny?

I hope so, because the next LP on my musical odyssey is David Maslanka's Quintets for Wind 1-3, played by the Bergen Woodwind Quintet.

I don't know much about Maslanka and don't have anything else by him. I bought this CD in Beatties (a now-declining department store) when it got rid of all the books and records, on the grounds that it was a CD by a composer of whom I'd never heard.

He seems to specialise in wind and percussion music, and I'm rather charmed and delighted by this CD. It's neither old-fashioned nor avant-garde, and seems to be playable by non-professionals without too much damage, though the Bergens sound magnificent. Here's Quintet 3.

Hope you don't depend on your student loans…

The Labour government commissioned a report into the Student Loans Company's disastrous failure to, well, provide student loans to students last year. It found that

…only 46% of the applications last autumn were fully processed by the start of the term, compared with 63% in 2008. As the crucial date approached, calls from students soared, with 4m made in September.

Despite having a target of no more than 14% of calls left unanswered, some 87% went unanswered that month. Between February 2009 and this January, only a fifth of calls were answered in 60 seconds, with 56% left unanswered.

On average, it took more than 12 weeks for an application to be processed in 2009/10, compared with more than nine weeks in 2008/09, when local authorities were in charge.

Now, the chair and chief executive have 'resigned', which usually means that they've been sacked without losing benefits and will probably receive compensation.

Still, it's a good result, and not suspicious at all. It would be deeply cynical to think that their departure was delayed to make the new Tory government look good. Meanwhile, start saving up, because

 a damning report by the National Audit Office found that the system was at "substantial" risk of being hit by delays again this year, when it is expected to deal with twice as many applications,

For all you hoopy froods

I am not a hoopy frood. In the HHGTTG galaxy, I am more Dentarthurdent (if you aren't familiar with the world of Douglas Adams, imagine Arthur as the proto-Mark Corrigan) than Ford Prefect. They both own good dressing gowns and exist in a state of befuddlement with the world's degradation. Only Mark has eaten a girl's dog though, and Arthur's essentially kind.

Today is Douglas Adams appreciation day, known as Towel Day. This is because 'a towel is the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have', and if you know where your towel is, friendly types will lend you anything else you may have mislaid.

I will be donning dressing gown and towel today, because I'm a huge fan of The Hitchhiker's Guide radio series, BBC series and books. They're more than a collection of Adams's one-liners about tea, cricket and technology - there's real heart in there, and serious (though sentimental) liberal-left values. Arthur is a man out of time, baffled by the shallowness of the Porsche-driving advertising executives who stand in for friends. A cup of tea, a girlfriend and peace and quiet is all he needs, yet the universe keeps intervening - blowing up Earth, for instance. The series is essentially a howl of pain as Adams observes the gentle liberalness  which he saw as encapsulating Englishness ripped apart by capitalism and the Tories.



Adams' other books are also bursting with emotion, ideas and funny jokes - Bach and Coleridge are key cameos in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency.

Douglas also cared hugely about species loss, what we've done to the planet, and Apple Macs. He died at the age of 51 in 2001. He's also responsible for my PhD-writing motto:

"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by".

Ladies, Pay Attention

I believe this covers all the bases. Disney sums up your options:

Drum roll for Daniel

Another of the Map Twats has acquired a PhD.

Yes, Mr. Daniel 'Deep-Pan' Pedley  is now Dr. Dan, having breezed through his viva, fielding questions on anything from theories of space to the love lives of pigeons. Or something.

I'm teasing a little. His very learned PhD was on the way humans and urban animals relate to each other, on the urban environment as habitat and it sounds fascinating.

Feast your eyes, ladies and gents: here's a man who knows where he's going.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Puppini Sisters

Christine told me about the Sisters. Mmm… camp.

Kate Bush, Smiths and Beyoncé fans should probably leave the room at this point.