A short, funny read - As They Slept

This is really not a novel, more of a diary. I love diaries because I am very nosy and I love that feeling of being the intimate confidant of a person with whom I need not reciprocate.

Andy Leeks is the diarist concerned. He wrote his book on the commuter train whilst his fellow commuters seemed to be sleeping or downing cans of Stella. Andy is a nice 30-something, he lives far out of London and has plenty of time to write on his iPad on the train, even standing up and with one hand. He doesn't mind standing up for people who want to sit down, because he sits down all day doing something in finance. He outlines a scheme for giving priority train seats to those who have to stand up at work all day. This is the kind of thing he is good at. He outlines other ideas for interesting changes, e.g. moving New Year away from Christmas.

The trouble is he says he is going to write for a year on his commute, and he only does about 4 months. He started last September. Sept 2012. I believe he is still writing, but now he is on Volume II and this is not fair. Volume I is far too short. Still, it only cost 75p or something ridiculous for the Kindle version, so if you've got a Kindle, and you're interested in commuter trains, and taking stuff back to the shops, and cooking with Jamie Oliver's recipes, and how strange it is that people actually use the toilets on trains, and going bald, and when to start wearing a coat, I recommend this book.

Professor Steve Jones - the Single Helix

As I explained in my post about Clive James, I am very fond of journalism when the writer is, like Boris Johnson or Clive James, particularly talented.

Prof Steve Jones is also gifted and witty, and he loves puns and word-play which makes him perfect to be a popular science communicator. This book is a collection of writing from his column called 'View from the Lab'. His word limit is short enough to keep him pretty disciplined, and he writes very well, sometimes sharing the camaraderie and sniping of the academic world. He tells the reader, for example, about the conferences he goes to, and how the British delegates look more down at heel than those from other nations, like "someone who has come to look at the drains". Sir Paul Nurse, apparently, looks like a window cleaner.

He gives an example of rudeness from an academic from John Hopkins University who took exception to something Steve Jones wrote in a book review, and after a short discourse emailed him: "Have you thought of taking psychiatric advice for your delusional, paranoid disorder?" Wow. This is a preface to explaining that current research shows that a gene for paranoia is connected to a mechanism for speeding up the activity of the brain which allowed man to evolve from the ape. I have simplified Prof Jones's explanation, which is more detailed.

Prof Jones is interested in many kinds of science, including maths and politics, the art world, anthropology and travel and ah! almost everything. This means he has a great deal to draw on to enliven and illustrate his science writing.

I am particularly fond of Prof Jones because I have done some linguistics research on his science writing. My work was too superficial and too short to be of much use because I was an undergraduate with only a short word limit to play with. But here it is in summary:

The interesting thing is that grammatically, the more specialist and academic the style, the simpler the sentence construction. This is because processes are cast as long nominalisations often linked with is, or are, or may be - variations on the verb to be or to have. The writer is also less likely to allow himself a personality, as he keeps to impersonal constructions which allow him/her to assume a distant and authoritative persona. He uses a great deal of specialised lexis which allows him to assume the authority of an expert.

Prof Jones moved forward in time and his writing became much more certain in tone and he allowed himself to ask direct questions - initiating a relationship with his readership - which made his writing more personal, more witty, and easier to connect with. He abandoned some of his relational verbs in favour of verbs which relate to reporting and the material world. He used more clauses per sentence.

When he writes for the newspaper his writing uses very few specialist terms and he explains those which are not in general use. He writes often in the first person and, by writing about personal experience, assumes a friendly personality. His verbs are very varied and illuminating as they carry the idea of processes. They explain and illustrate rather than merely state. Meanwhile, the number of clauses per sentence averages nearly three, (although some sentences have only one clause), which illustrates a shift towards the patterns of speech.

The naughty thing about Steve Jones, as far as I can tell from the limited research that I have carried out,  is that he is less likely to cite his colleagues "in text" using the word "by", e.g. Research by Plinker and Plonker (2011) shows blahblahblah, than his peer group, which uses it fairly often. Prof Jones almost never does, unless he refers to Darwin or some other eminence. In this way he links himself to the legendary rather than the run of the mill.

The best thing about this particular book is there is an index. The articles are all stuffed with facts, but have titles which are witty rather than descriptive. The best way to find particular items is through the index.

As usual, there is very little in the way of citing other people's research, unless they are household names.

You can hear an interview (17 minutes) with Prof Jones talking engagingly about snails and genes and many other things.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00nf603

The ending of The Restraint of Beasts by Magnus Mills

The ending of this tale of mundane daily labour and time-wasting comes as a surprise, but it seems to mean that eventually you find you have built your own prison - by restricting all your possibilities and  making terrible mistakes in your life, perhaps quite casually.

But my friend Susie thinks the ending shows that the protagonists had become beasts themselves.

Although the narrator started off as an outsider, he became one of the gang simply by behaving as they behaved, doing what they did. He was tolerant - perhaps weak, and so he shared the same fate. Scary!!

It didn't make me laugh but I enjoyed the journey.

Employed at last!

I went back to the College of FE I had visited before Christmas. See previous post: I am a teacher. ESOL = English for Speakers of Other Languages.

The guys who were my students for the micro-teach pretty much offered me a job straight away. I was so relieved. I go from apprehension to delight, but generally, I am glad to be employed at a proper College again, and if I am bombarded by work-related emails I am happy with that too! I am looking forward to meeting my colleagues.

Also, we were broke before, and I shall be glad to make a contribution towards the expenses that keep cropping up.

The Watts Gallery

Today I took Mum to the Watts Gallery for a change. We were both tired and didn't hit it off too well, but I was interested to see the Gallery, which is in a village off the A3 south of Guildford. It has recently been completely renovated.

There are some huge sculptures as well as paintings. I was particularly impressed by these. this one is called Physical Energy. Watts crafted it out of gesso and then cast it in bronze. The gallery has the gesso model - very rough and ready.

The gallery is quite small and visitors should go and see the cemetery chapel as well. If you don't go and see this you have missed a major treat. See photos here.

GF Watts's sublimely beautiful paintings exposed brutal truths about Victorian society, says Richard Dorment

In 2002, I wrote in the Telegraph Magazine about an institution close to my heart: the Watts Gallery, just outside Guildford in Surrey. Founded in 1904 to display more than 200 paintings, drawings and sculptures by the Victorian artist GF Watts, the collection had dozed for most of the 20th century to become a perfectly preserved time capsule only 30 minutes by train from Waterloo station.

But after so many years of benign neglect, the listed Arts and Crafts building was facing ruin. Rain was coming in through the roof, and the pictures were in need of conservation. The patina of age, which had once been part of the gallery's shabby-genteel charm, had gradually become a serious preservation issue.

In 2004, the trustees launched an appeal to raise £10 million to save the building and its contents - and to ensure their survival into the next century. In June of this year the target was reached, thanks to the support of the Heritage Lottery Fund and the incredible generosity of individual donors.

The gallery was closed for renovation, but before it re-opened in 2010 a show of highlights from the permanent collection toured the country.

George Frederic Watts was born in London in 1817. His first surviving picture is dated three years before Queen Victoria came to the throne; he was working on his last painting three years after her death. As well as being one of the leading portraitists of the Victorian age, Watts left behind a body of symbolist work that addresses (among other subjects) the Victorian loss of faith, child prostitution, and cruelty to animals. Like John Ruskin and William Morris, he saw art as a means to social reform.

For most of us, I think, this has made Watts's art harder, not easier, to appreciate. It encourages a tendency to treat each painting not as an end in itself but as a portal onto the age in which he lived.

This approach is not in itself wrong - indeed it is one important way in which his art differs from that of contemporaries such as Burne-Jones, Frith or Leighton. But what gets lost is our sense of Watts as an artist whose pictures we judge as we do those of any other artist: the handling of paint, the strength of the draughtsmanship, the originality of the conception, and the power of the composition.

The first picture in the show is his self-portrait at the age of 17. It shows a preternaturally sensitive youth whose tousled hair and bohemian dress belong to an already-bygone era of romantic poets doomed to die young.

The young Watts painted hopeless loves, dark deeds, noble knights and glamorous villains in pictures and sketches of remarkable technical confidence. In his self-portrait he uses paint with a freedom and fluidity that in one so young might almost be called arrogance.

After five years in Italy, Watts returned to London in 1847. Shocked by the extremes of wealth and poverty that he saw all around him, his pictures changed dramatically. Found Drowned shows the corpse of a young servant girl washed up under Waterloo Bridge; Under the Dry Arch depicts the slumped figure of an exhausted female vagrant sheltering beneath Blackfriars Bridge. In both pictures, nocturnal London itself becomes part of the story, the indifferent maw that swallows up these two anonymous lives.

The realism here is confrontational. Bravura brushwork is suppressed and the colours restricted to midnight blues, blacks and ochre, the better to focus the viewer's attention on single monumental figures isolated against the brooding skyline. Such images have no counterpart anywhere in art at this date.

Watts didn't show his realist paintings publicly for another 30 years and never attempted to sell them. He understood that the Victorian public would not tolerate - and certainly would not hang on their walls - works that told such brutal truths about the society they lived in.

But what the public would look at, and even buy, were pictures that told the same truths through myth and symbol. And so, in responding to the topical issue of child prostitution, Watts didn't show a little girl soliciting in the street. Instead, he painted the minotaur, the monstrous hybrid of man and bull, a symbol of rapacious male lust looking down from his fortress to find his next victim.

Such works reflect the anxieties and aspirations of the age. And yet I sometimes think that their symbolic content deflects our attention from the real issue, which is that at his best Watts is a sublimely beautiful painter who had his own original take on even the most time-worn subjects.

One of the most beautiful - and ghastly - pictures in this show, for example, is his Paolo and Francesca. In Dante's story, the adulterous lovers, murdered by Francesca's husband before they can repent their sin, are condemned to the circle of hell where souls are blown forever in a whirlwind. Watts goes out of his way to show the pair as beautiful corpses still wrapped in their shrouds, clinging together as they are swept through a black abyss.

And what could be more poetic than Watts's Endymion, where the blurred softness of silver-blue paint conjures up the vague idea of the goddess Diana in the form of diaphanous moonlight enfolding the sleeping youth?

Once you see how beautiful a painter Watts can be, you look at even the most rhetorical symbolist and allegorical pictures in a different way. For me, the horseman seen in an aureole of orange light in Watts's allegory Progress looks like the logo of a power company. But look at the freely-painted robes of the miser who counts his gold in the lower foreground, and you will see a passage so sensuously painted it reminds you of Titian.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/3563601/GF-Watts-confronting-the-demons-of-his-age.html
At present there is a minor exhibition on by Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale, and her pretty painting and book illustrations were the Pre-Raphaelites' last hoorah - she used delicious colours like early Millais. I have enlarged this but it is painted in with careful detail and is much longer than this.

Orienteering

Orienteering is  a strange sport that appeals mainly to teachers and computer scientists. It's very tecky in that you have a dibber (computer chip) attached to your finger which you enter into various posts on the running course, plus on the start and on the finish, and these times are recorded. At the end you go into the finish tent, give in your dibber and the times are instantly downloaded and printed out, complete with your position in the field and any points won for your club.

It's great to run around in the open air following a map, though horrible if you get lost. But people are often kind enough to stop and tell you, if you look miserable enough, where you are on the map.

the bit I hate is that we do this in winter when it's slippery because (mainly) of the mud, and the posts that you have to find are hidden in the brambles or thin trees. This is the most annoying part because you can spend ages looking for one post.

So I didn't get to run much because of all the mud - I am the very reverse of reckless - and I also got quite torn on the shins by the brambles. Really, I conclude that I am very lucky to have suburban pavements to run on and I would do this more often were it not for my weak knees, which get terribly stiff after I run.

Southwark and Quartermaine's Terms

Yesterday we saw Southwark Cathedral, which is small but lovely. It has an excellent refectory for tea and cakes.  We also saw the Shard, which is the new building in that area. In fact, the Shard is not quite finished. It costs £30 to go in the lift to see the view. Steep in both senses of the word. You need to book in advance.

Not satisfied with tea and cakes, we also went to a well known pub, the building of which dates from 1640s, the George Inn Yard. I had heard a radio programme about it and was very keen to see the pub where Dickens sent one or two of his characters. Many historical Londoners must have known the George Inn, not far from London Bridge. It is all National Trusty and well-restored, but the food was surprisingly reasonably priced.  Had a very enjoyable time there. 

In the old coaching days.

This is the pub in modern times.

We also went to see a play, Quartermaine's Terms, which was very well acted with Rowan Atkinson in the title role. I wasn't expecting it to be funny, but I was terribly disappointed with it altogether - it's a play which seems to be depressing without having much point to it. Quartermaine himself is a very tragic character who  says himself  he has nothing much to offer. He is a language teacher (I thought it was sure to ring some bells for us, but it was set too far in the past when language teaching was by bumbling amateurs.) He doesn't try to teach at all! His life revolves around the staff room. Everyone else's life does move on in various ways, but his doesn't. It's a lesson for everybody that they mustn't lose their mojo, their dynamism.

Brave New World Revisited - Aldous Huxley - Soma the wonderdrug

The Soma of Brave New World had none of the drawbacks of its Indian original.  In small doses it brought a sense of bliss, in larger doses it made you see visions and, if you took three tablets, you would sink in a few minutes into refreshing sleep. And all at no physiological or mental cost. The Brave New Worlders could take holidays from their black moods, or from the familiar annoyances of everyday life, without sacrificing their health or permanently reducing their efficiency.

However, it was one of the main instruments of the dictatorship's armoury.

The systematic drugging of individuals for the benefit of the State (and incidentally, of course, for their own delights) was a main plank in the policy of the World Controllers. .. Marx said that religion was 'the opium of the people'. In Brave New World, opium (soma) was the religion of the people.

Huxley runs through the drugs currently available in the late 1950s, both legal and illegal. Opium makes addicts and ruins health. Alcohol not only 'maketh glad the heart of man; it also, in excessive doses, causes illness and addiction, and has been a main source, for the last eight or ten thousand years, of crime, domestic unhappiness, moral degradation and avoidable accidents. Cocaine is a very powerful and very dangerous drug, leading to 'agonising depressions' and 'paranoid delusions that may lead to crimes of violence.' Amphetamines work at the expense of physical and mental health.  Huxley considered cannabis 'merely a nuisance'.

He also runs through the kinds of drugs used to treat psychotic patients and finds great strides being made in the manufacture of tranquillizers and in hallucinogenics - he was quite enthusiastic about LSD for the spiritual insight it gave, which he felt to be of great value.

But to Huxley the danger is that drugs may be used to limit the freedom of a population. Writing at the time of the Cold War, he could compare the populations of the Soviet Union 'constantly stimulated by threats and promises and directed by one-pointed propaganda' and that of the United States 'no less constantly being distracted by television and tranquillized by Miltown'.

I think antidepressants are rather like Soma in that people may be genuinely unhappy with their society and find that it gives them no emotional fulfillment, but antidepressants lift their spirits enough to enable them to carry on. But I did a quick check for all drug use, to find how widespread it is.

Here are the results.

How many people take Antidepressants?

The number of antidepressants prescribed by the NHS has almost doubled in the last decade, and rose sharply last year as the recession bit, figures reveal.

The health service issued 39.1m prescriptions for drugs to tackle depression in England in 2009, compared with 20.1m in 1999 – a 95% jump. Doctors handed out 3.18m more prescriptions last year than in 2008, almost twice the annual rise seen in preceding years, according to previously unpublished statistics released by the NHS's Business Services Authority.

One in three women have taken anti-depressants at some point in their lives, researchers say.

The study by women's campaign group Platform 51 found that 48 per cent of women currently using the drugs have taken them for at least five years, while 24 per cent have taken them for 10 years or more.

Meanwhile, 24 per cent of women on anti-depressants have waited a year or more for a review, the research found.

How many people take tranquilizers?

An international survey at the beginning of the 1980s showed that tranquilizers and sedatives of any type had been used at some time during the previous year by 12.9 percent of U.S. adults, 11.2 percent in the United Kingdom (U.K.), 7.4 percent in the Netherlands, and 15.9 percent in France. Persistent long-term users comprised 1.8 percent of all U.S. adults, 3.1 percent in the U.K., 1.7 percent in the Netherlands and 5.0 percent in France. The proportion of repeat prescriptions for tranquilizers has increased steadily since about 1970 in many countries, the U.K. in particular. This suggests that fewer people are being newly started on tranquilizers but that a large group of long-term users is accumulating. People starting tranquilizers have at least a 10 percent chance of going on to long-term use, that is for more than 6 months. Some of these chronic users have chronic medical or social problems, and the tranquilizer blunts the unpleasant feelings of tension, anxiety, insomnia and, to a lesser extent, depression.

American children are often prescribed psychiatric medication

Like the diagnoses, the drugs administered to children have mushroomed to involve every class of psychiatric medication, including stimulants, antidepressants, tranquilizers, mood stabilizers and anti psychotic agents. The FDA has increasingly given official approval for giving children especially deadly anti-psychotics such as Risperdal, Zyprexa, Geodon and Seroquel. Meanwhile, anything that can sedate the child’s growing brain from anti-hypertension drugs to anti-seizure drugs are routinely dispensed with callous disregard for their harmful impact.

It’s not uncommon to find children subdued and crushed by multiple psychiatric drugs. Probably 10 to 20 percent of our children will at some time be diagnosed or drugged. This number includes nearly every child in special education classes, foster care or on SSI/SSDI. Any child singled out by child services and educational or psychiatric authorities is likely to fall victim to psychiatric drugs.

How many people take recreational drugs in the UK?

"We have very scant evidence about how many people are using drugs," Mr Linnell says.

"We can't even give accurate figures of how many people are in treatment for heroin and rock cocaine, let alone magic mushrooms, cannabis and ecstasy."

Despite these difficulties, the annual British Crime Survey (BCS) is viewed as the primary source for assessing general drug use.

Over 20,000 respondents are asked, anonymously, which drugs they have taken in the past month, year or in their lifetime.

The latest survey, 2003/04, suggests that 35.6% of people aged 16-59 in England and Wales have used drugs at some point.

Twelve per cent have used drugs in the past year and 7.5 per cent in the past month.

That equates to 11 million people having used drugs in their lifetime, and just under four million using them in the last year. Cannabis, the survey suggests, remains by far the most popular drug.

In a similar survey in Scotland, 27% said they had used drugs in their lifetime and 9% reported using them in the last year.

Commentators agree that although figures from both surveys are likely to be underestimates, they provide a useful benchmark.

"It does give us a broad snapshot of the major trends," says Petra Maxwell. "However... some of the most problematic drug use may not be captured.

"Also it is slow to respond to emerging drugs of choice, focusing mainly on the large ones. For example, as it doesn't ask about ketamine... although we know this is increasing in popularity."

If we say that the population is 62 million, more or less at the moment, and we go with the notion that 1 in 3 women is going to take anti-depressants at some time in their lives. This seems like a huge exaggeration, so let's say that no men take anti-depressants. That would be about 10 million people taking antidepressants.

Then we say that those people taking anti-depressants don't take recreational drugs, although I guess there is likely to be some overlap between the 2 groups. Let's say that the number of people taking recreational drugs stays level at around 12%. that gives us another 7,440,000. Add these two figures together and you get about 17.5 m. This is rather more than a quarter of the population and less than a third. Maybe if we included people on anti psychotic drugs it would approach a third.

See also my entry 12/12/12 which refers to the film Silver Linings Playbook.

As the poor island drowns in rain

scientists may need to help those growing crops by effecting improvements to pollinators. Pollinators need to feel waterproof enough to come out in the rain and get on with it. I'm thinking of bees. We need gore-tex bees, with little sou-westers on.

Clive James

I have always loved journalism. Recently I had to go to the bookshop as a cure for constipation. It worked, but only after I had chosen 3 books, and 2 of them are collections of journalism.

So I have been reading Clive James's A Point of View, and re-reading it, because it is so easy to pick up and read it quite at random, although I don't think I have missed anything. I used to read Clive James' collections of TV criticism over and over again and I loved his enjoyment of the small things, such as the way Harry Carpenter used to pronounce Wimbledon 'Wmbldn' with all the vowels missing, and the way all the knocked out British tennis players one by one made their way to the commentary box to give their pearls of wisdom to the BBC and how the commentary box must have become increasingly overcrowded, but I also loved Clive's willingness to be serious about the subjects which need to be treated seriously.

The great thing about Clive is his sense of the ridiculous. He really enjoys ridiculous things, especially if he feels justified in pointing out exactly how ridiculous they are. He feels like this about his own habit of writing about putting the wheelie bins out. He slightly can't get over the fact that such a great person as himself has to put the bin out for his wife, and he knows this is ridiculous, so he writes about it. If he writes with a sad note sometimes it is because, when he is gone, he will miss ridiculousness so much. In himself, and in everything else too.

The other collection of journalism was by Steve Jones. See blog entry here.

Another Interview

Yesterday I had an interview in the afternoon. Unfortunately it was one of those days when I wake up with no personality. I went for a quick swim to wake up properly and then I worried a lot about what to wear, as though I assume the identity of my clothes. I don't like the personality of my clothes at the moment, but wore a smart raincoat and scarf that I still like, blue cords and duck egg blue merino jumper.

 I tried to assume some kind of personality during the interview but I did feel dislocated and false. Also I felt my assumed personality was rubbing off on the young woman interviewing me so that she was trying to assume some kind of approximation to her regular personality too.

I guess the problem was a lack of interest in the job, but when I talked about it to the interviewer, it sounded quite interesting. There were IT workshops to teach and also ESOl classes. I had to point out to the young lady that learning ESOL takes months rather than weeks and she said she knew that. However, I shall still worry that the pressure will be on to achieve quickly.

It is a bit of a journey to Streatham Hill, but generally you can read on the train.

A list of the themes in Moby Dick

I guess there is a lot more to say about Moby Dick than this, but here is a start: -

These mainly are summarised from the introduction to the OUP version.
1.    It is a prose epic on Whaling.
2.    It depicts human labour and ingenuity at work in mastering the navigation and sailing of the sea.
3.    It includes many different nationalities among the crew of the Pequod, and draws tales and examples from many different lands and customs, so it endeavours to be about mankind (excluding women) rather than one nation.
4.    It combines the description of procedures of a complex industry with the archaic/ epic theme of the hunt.
5.    It shows how solitary men combine together to manage a corporate, communal existence.
6.    It explores how chance, free will and necessity all interweavingly work together (the weaving loom is a recurrent metaphor).
7.    It asks about the relationship between man’s system of signs (from different cultures, and including books and writing), and nature’s wonders. Queequeg’s body is covered in tattooings, many of which he cannot read himself, but which are prophetic writings showing a complete theory of the heavens and the earth in ‘hieroglyphic marks’. References to other books and authors abound. We have a huge need to record in texts, what is the relationship between our texts and the world?
8.    It looks at how the erotic instincts run counter to the death instincts (thanatos). Queequeg's erotic instincts fuel his loyalty and friendship – no such instincts seem to fire Ahab.
9.    The mechanical and metal mindset of Ahab – a ruthless and homogenising force – is, for grandiose ends, turned against the force of nature, embodied by Moby Dick. (To what extent is ruthless Ahab a metaphor for America’s industry?)
10. To Ahab, the whale is evil, and his thought patterns are based on the idea of ‘embattled exclusivity’. This thought pattern is all-annihilating and counter to Ishmael’s tolerant inclusiveness : ‘his eroticized and playful porousness to the wholeness of life.’
11. In his eclectic style, Melville found a new way to represent America, founded on the Bible itself and borrowing its style, and pilfering from other modern texts, and ancient myths, but including the speech of sailors old and young, and black and white, mixing demotic humour and grandiose phrasing.

Tah-dah! It was a very long and hard read – I felt overwhelmed -  but in places a great joy, and I do believe that Melville truly meant to write about all the above complexities which had troubled his mind, so it was a very ambitious book which deserved a lot of concentration.