There is a taxidermist’s shop near my office. It’s a funny little place near Essex Road station with every animal from a wolf to a guinea pig (really) posed in dusty, glassy-eyed silence in the window. I don’t think I’ve ever told many people this before – it’s not the sort of thing that often comes up in conversation – but I really don’t like stuffed animals. They freak me out. Not in a screaming, panicky, and uncouth sort of way but in a hair-standing-up-on-the-back-of-the-neck, quietly shuddering gross-out sort of way.
When I was at university I read an essay called “The Uncanny” by Sigmund Freud. I didn’t get on with most of the rambling psychoanalytic stuff in the essay, but I liked the core concept (which wasn’t Freud’s) which stated that a key component of what people find scary – the uncanny – is “doubt whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might be, in fact, animate”. It’s a simple idea, but it is true of many scary things: ghosts, zombies, creepy dolls, mannequins, the statues in Blink, and – to get back to what I was saying just now – stuffed animals. They look like they’re alive, but they aren’t – or vice versa. It’s weird. It blurs the line between a living creature and a dead creature.
Today, when I walked past the taxidermist, however, there was no such thing. I stood in front of the window, staring in bafflement for a good few seconds before I started to laugh like a drain. The poor ghoulish soul that runs the place obviously felt that it was a little bit dour given the season, and so he decorated his shop. The thing is; the stuffed animals are pretty much the only thing in the shop, so they were all he had to decorate. Which made the whole thing go from creepy to really surreal.
The deer’s head with gold, sparkly tinsel wound around its antlers is an image that will stay with me for a long time. Nearly as long as the deceased albino guinea pig sitting in the middle of a holly wreath, in fact.
-Ben
Thursday, December 04, 2008
Inside my head
I found this on my computer this evening. I think it's from the summer, I vaguely remember writing it then. I think it was a blog post that got horribly out of control and was subsequently abandoned. As my babblings go it's not bad, although the voice switches about a bit, probably because I hadn't figured out what I was writing while I was writing it.
The incident boards were still up around the pedestrian crossing when I walked home today. ‘Fatal Accident’ written in black on yellow. They wanted information, but I knew that I had none to offer. Like thousands of other people, I passed by the crossing on Monday lunchtime and saw the tire marks leading to the stopped and empty truck; the police cars in planned formations; and the walking stick lying in the middle of the road. There was no blood, no gory details to gape at, it all seemed like a sterile tableau to me, as if arranged by an artist trying to make a social statement.
On the other side of the road I saw a smiling young woman, which lightened my mood. She looked happy, sitting near the big open windows at the front of the pub. I looked at her for perhaps longer than was really polite, but she didn’t notice, so I felt safe in my indiscretion. She was pretty, but in a slightly strange way. There was a quality to her face -- the slightly angular lines, the large dark irises of her eyes -- that seemed to me like an amateurish drawing of some great beauty. It was not that she wasn’t beautiful, just that there was a simplicity to her features that made me think that she’d come from the imagination of an enthusiastic draughtsman, rather than an artist. As I walked down Upper Street I composed this little descriptive phrase in my head, rearranged it, and smiled, momentarily pleased with my idea.
I turned my attention back to the street in front of me, and was preoccupied dodging the wayward metal spines of women’s umbrellas after that. protecting them against the rain which had now passed. The rain had been heavy while it lasted, and the street steamed; the damp cotton of my sweater was mingling with the sweat patches that I could feel on forming on my t-shirt already, making me shift my bag around uncomfortably. For once, my headphones weren’t in and I was listening intently to the sounds of the city, hoping to feel some poetic pleasure in the sensory experience. I didn’t. I was just struck by how quiet commuters are, they are all focused and tired, not interested in talk. I clutched the reassuring weight of my tatty backpack and weaved my way through the gradually thickening crowds as I approached the station.
Inside the floor was slick with water from the downpour, and neat brown swirls of liquefied dirt were covering the tiles. I dodged past the leaflets and free papers, not making eye contact, not even bothering to look aside far enough to connect the proffering hand with a person. The barriers passed me by in brief clatter of machinery, and my hands returned my travelcard to my wallet without me having to look down at what I was doing.
After walking cautiously down the escalator -- conscious of the long descent, and the hard edged steps glistening with water -- I found myself standing on the platform watching the train leaving without me. The train shot out of sight, and the suction flicked at my hair and clothes for a moment. My hands moved, unseen and unconscious into my backpack for my book, which was curved and warped by mistreatment and damp. As I brought it to my face I realised something: All the way from my office I had been moving, with ears unblocked and eyes raised, and I had felt no more a part of my environment as I did when I walked through the crowds with music loud and eyes on my feet.
I remembered when I was younger; reading about the King’s cross fire, about all those men who died because a fire wasn’t part of their routine. When faced with a station worker blocking the escalators they just ducked past, without breaking their stride, and walked purposefully into the suffocating smoke. When I started working in the city I deliberately took different routes, different lines through each space; I was determined to not get automated like that. It clearly hadn’t worked; familiarity had made me move more swiftly and unthinkingly through stations with each month, entirely detached from the whole process. One day, I thought, I’ll probably squeeze onto a train with a twitchy man with a big bag, smelling of cordite, because I don’t want to miss my train. But for now I seem to be getting away with it, I decide. I’m willing to trust in whatever part of my subconscious is controlling me on my way home. I step onto the train and start reading my book.
-Ben
The incident boards were still up around the pedestrian crossing when I walked home today. ‘Fatal Accident’ written in black on yellow. They wanted information, but I knew that I had none to offer. Like thousands of other people, I passed by the crossing on Monday lunchtime and saw the tire marks leading to the stopped and empty truck; the police cars in planned formations; and the walking stick lying in the middle of the road. There was no blood, no gory details to gape at, it all seemed like a sterile tableau to me, as if arranged by an artist trying to make a social statement.
On the other side of the road I saw a smiling young woman, which lightened my mood. She looked happy, sitting near the big open windows at the front of the pub. I looked at her for perhaps longer than was really polite, but she didn’t notice, so I felt safe in my indiscretion. She was pretty, but in a slightly strange way. There was a quality to her face -- the slightly angular lines, the large dark irises of her eyes -- that seemed to me like an amateurish drawing of some great beauty. It was not that she wasn’t beautiful, just that there was a simplicity to her features that made me think that she’d come from the imagination of an enthusiastic draughtsman, rather than an artist. As I walked down Upper Street I composed this little descriptive phrase in my head, rearranged it, and smiled, momentarily pleased with my idea.
I turned my attention back to the street in front of me, and was preoccupied dodging the wayward metal spines of women’s umbrellas after that. protecting them against the rain which had now passed. The rain had been heavy while it lasted, and the street steamed; the damp cotton of my sweater was mingling with the sweat patches that I could feel on forming on my t-shirt already, making me shift my bag around uncomfortably. For once, my headphones weren’t in and I was listening intently to the sounds of the city, hoping to feel some poetic pleasure in the sensory experience. I didn’t. I was just struck by how quiet commuters are, they are all focused and tired, not interested in talk. I clutched the reassuring weight of my tatty backpack and weaved my way through the gradually thickening crowds as I approached the station.
Inside the floor was slick with water from the downpour, and neat brown swirls of liquefied dirt were covering the tiles. I dodged past the leaflets and free papers, not making eye contact, not even bothering to look aside far enough to connect the proffering hand with a person. The barriers passed me by in brief clatter of machinery, and my hands returned my travelcard to my wallet without me having to look down at what I was doing.
After walking cautiously down the escalator -- conscious of the long descent, and the hard edged steps glistening with water -- I found myself standing on the platform watching the train leaving without me. The train shot out of sight, and the suction flicked at my hair and clothes for a moment. My hands moved, unseen and unconscious into my backpack for my book, which was curved and warped by mistreatment and damp. As I brought it to my face I realised something: All the way from my office I had been moving, with ears unblocked and eyes raised, and I had felt no more a part of my environment as I did when I walked through the crowds with music loud and eyes on my feet.
I remembered when I was younger; reading about the King’s cross fire, about all those men who died because a fire wasn’t part of their routine. When faced with a station worker blocking the escalators they just ducked past, without breaking their stride, and walked purposefully into the suffocating smoke. When I started working in the city I deliberately took different routes, different lines through each space; I was determined to not get automated like that. It clearly hadn’t worked; familiarity had made me move more swiftly and unthinkingly through stations with each month, entirely detached from the whole process. One day, I thought, I’ll probably squeeze onto a train with a twitchy man with a big bag, smelling of cordite, because I don’t want to miss my train. But for now I seem to be getting away with it, I decide. I’m willing to trust in whatever part of my subconscious is controlling me on my way home. I step onto the train and start reading my book.
-Ben
Wednesday, December 03, 2008
I'm currently doing commissioning work for a textbook at work, contacting academics and asking them if they'd be willing to write for us. This means that I spend a considerable amount of time, well, googling people essentially. I have no idea how on earth this sort of work was conducted in the days before the internet and faculty profile pages.
The thing with googling people is that you often turn up relevant results other then faculty pages or personal websites. Things like mentions of the person in question on blogs, news websites, bookstores, etc. You often find yourself getting odd glimpses of people's personal lives through these little details, funny little personal pursuits or interests, relationships and collaborations with other names you know. It can be very interesting, and sometimes a little odd.
Today, for example, I was looking for the email address of an academic who has become estranged from a project without handing over the text. I found their faculty page fairly quickly, which contained all the information I needed. I also turned up a news story, which was mostly about their other half, but mentioned the writer's name in passing as well. It's not significant what the story was about, but it contained a link to the personal website of his wife, whom they mentioned in an earlier email (they work in the same industry). I saw that she attended the same university BA program as him, at the same time, that they shared a lot of academic interests, and, oddly, that they apparently live on opposite sides of the country. One of them in Buffalo, NY, the other in Irvine, CA.
A curious situation, but alas, one doomed to remain so. There is no further information to be had, and I'm not going to ask a writer intrusive questions about their personal life. This got me thinking about how the information acquired from google searches seems to be generally inadmissible in social situations. Despite the fact that this information is all stuff that people have voluntarily placed in the public domain, admitting to a person that you have looked for it makes you instantly weird.
I think one of the aspects of the internet that people don't think of is that with google, all information is interconnected. Someone can volunteer information about their career to a person they are working with, a brief mention of their personal life can come up in a blog post, and their other half can have a profile page which gives his contact details. That all of these pieces of information are online would not be considered creepy by the person I'm working with. If I were to connect all the information I've gathered from ten minutes of reading, however, and use it -- by, say, emailing his wife asking her to tell him to check his damn email once in a while -- it would be a considered a creepy invasion of privacy.
I think I should make that a personal rule to not use internet searches to create the impression that you are omniscient, or that you can read minds.
-Ben
The thing with googling people is that you often turn up relevant results other then faculty pages or personal websites. Things like mentions of the person in question on blogs, news websites, bookstores, etc. You often find yourself getting odd glimpses of people's personal lives through these little details, funny little personal pursuits or interests, relationships and collaborations with other names you know. It can be very interesting, and sometimes a little odd.
Today, for example, I was looking for the email address of an academic who has become estranged from a project without handing over the text. I found their faculty page fairly quickly, which contained all the information I needed. I also turned up a news story, which was mostly about their other half, but mentioned the writer's name in passing as well. It's not significant what the story was about, but it contained a link to the personal website of his wife, whom they mentioned in an earlier email (they work in the same industry). I saw that she attended the same university BA program as him, at the same time, that they shared a lot of academic interests, and, oddly, that they apparently live on opposite sides of the country. One of them in Buffalo, NY, the other in Irvine, CA.
A curious situation, but alas, one doomed to remain so. There is no further information to be had, and I'm not going to ask a writer intrusive questions about their personal life. This got me thinking about how the information acquired from google searches seems to be generally inadmissible in social situations. Despite the fact that this information is all stuff that people have voluntarily placed in the public domain, admitting to a person that you have looked for it makes you instantly weird.
I think one of the aspects of the internet that people don't think of is that with google, all information is interconnected. Someone can volunteer information about their career to a person they are working with, a brief mention of their personal life can come up in a blog post, and their other half can have a profile page which gives his contact details. That all of these pieces of information are online would not be considered creepy by the person I'm working with. If I were to connect all the information I've gathered from ten minutes of reading, however, and use it -- by, say, emailing his wife asking her to tell him to check his damn email once in a while -- it would be a considered a creepy invasion of privacy.
I think I should make that a personal rule to not use internet searches to create the impression that you are omniscient, or that you can read minds.
-Ben
Monday, November 24, 2008
Hijack
I was aimlessly internet-loafing earlier and I came across the wiki page for D. B. Cooper. I've read about this geezer before, but it's still got to be one of the coolest, weirdest events that has never been made into a decent film.
-Ben
-Ben
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Fraternities
I came across this when doing some research the other day. It's hardly a shocking finding, but interesting for its thoroughness. I give you this interesting little paper --
Fraternity membership, the display of degrading sexual images of women, and rape myth acceptance
I think the same is probably true of a lot of university sports teams over here. Well, judging from how they act in public, and the songs they sing when they're drunk -- I've never been in their rooms.
-Ben
Fraternity membership, the display of degrading sexual images of women, and rape myth acceptance
I think the same is probably true of a lot of university sports teams over here. Well, judging from how they act in public, and the songs they sing when they're drunk -- I've never been in their rooms.
-Ben
Flying Boat
I have a great affection for examples of people bravely continuing to bark up the wrong tree, long after the correct tree has become apparent. It's most interesting in the world of technology, where you get people plugging away, pushing the boundaries, and engineering to perfection something that looks, with the benefit of hindsight, to have been obsolete from the start. The products of this misguided enthusiasm are often masterpieces in their way though, just not particularly practical ones.
Today I found a fine example of this whilst cruising the internets. It was this bulbous beast, the Saunders-Roe Princess.
It was a giant propeller driven flying boat, completed a few months after the de Havilland Comet entered service and Boeing announced the design that would become the Boeing 707. It flew well enough, and was by all accounts a quite nice plane, but many saw the writing was on the wall for flying boats long before it was completed. No-one ever bought one. The company continued to take their flying prototype to airshows around the world though, seemingly in the hope that people would come round to the idea of a giant flying boat, and warm to its snub nosed charm.
Interestingly there are still plenty of people out there who see this plane as having been unfairly snubbed by the British Government and tragically ignored by an aviation industry to lazy to give it a fair hearing. I don't really see the point in such discussions though. Whilst they are pretty, and pleasing in a nautical sort of way, being able to land in almost all weathers - and not having your plane corrode like a boat - are good things too.
Mind you, If I was an evil genius, I'd definitely fly around in one of those.
oh, and this is an amazing bit of technical drawing, showing all its inside gubbins.
-Ben
Today I found a fine example of this whilst cruising the internets. It was this bulbous beast, the Saunders-Roe Princess.
It was a giant propeller driven flying boat, completed a few months after the de Havilland Comet entered service and Boeing announced the design that would become the Boeing 707. It flew well enough, and was by all accounts a quite nice plane, but many saw the writing was on the wall for flying boats long before it was completed. No-one ever bought one. The company continued to take their flying prototype to airshows around the world though, seemingly in the hope that people would come round to the idea of a giant flying boat, and warm to its snub nosed charm.
Interestingly there are still plenty of people out there who see this plane as having been unfairly snubbed by the British Government and tragically ignored by an aviation industry to lazy to give it a fair hearing. I don't really see the point in such discussions though. Whilst they are pretty, and pleasing in a nautical sort of way, being able to land in almost all weathers - and not having your plane corrode like a boat - are good things too.
Mind you, If I was an evil genius, I'd definitely fly around in one of those.
oh, and this is an amazing bit of technical drawing, showing all its inside gubbins.
-Ben
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Here's another 'what I do all day' post. The writer's proofs vs the editor's red biro. I wouldn't take any satisfaction from dealing such an editorial mauling if it wasn't for the fact that I wrote the article in question, and there's always a certain contentment that comes from picking up your mistakes before anyone else does.
The headings are covered up because I'm paranoid and I don't want angry writers poking me with sticks.
-Ben
Monday, November 10, 2008
eek
Dreams are funny things. I think it was Freud who said that, or words to that effect anyway. For various reasons I've been getting very little sleep of late - mostly just running on coffee and tea. I don't know whether this is in anyway related, but I've also not been dreaming much recently either. At least, not that I remember.
Don't worry, this post isn't going to be a tedious account of my dreams. Most of the time dreams are really not worth mentioning to anyone, and nine times out of ten if they can't be explained in a single sentence then they're just going to bore people. The other week, for example -- after working on a project about westerns for for a few weeks -- I had a dream that John Wayne came up to me in the pub and called me a 'dirty commie'. See - one sentence. It's not interesting, but at least it's over quickly. It's a subtle difference but it's definitely better than someone sitting there saying "well. I was in this house, right, and there was a butler following me around with a tray of those funny biscuits. You know, the ones with the cow imprinted on them that tasted sort of, er, malty. Anyway, this butler looked like that Russian guy who was in The Man from Uncle, but it was actually my granddad in disguise...etc."
Every now and then though your subconscious throws you such a horrific unexpected curveball that you have to tell someone. This evening, as a result of one of these dreams, it took me about three minutes to pluck up the courage to go out to the shed and get my washing out of the dryer. It wasn't because of something I dreamed, or even something dreamed by someone I know, but the dream of a person I've never met.
This person -- a colleague of my mother's -- is moving into a new flat soon. She's bought the place, and has most of her furniture in the place, but she's not actually living there yet. It sounds like a nice place, on the ground floor of a new housing block built on the site of the old swimming pool in Bexleyheath (not a place I have fond memories of. It always smelled bad, even for a swimming pool, and it had a really deep diving area at the far end of the pool that I was a bit scared of.) Anyway. Last night she dreamt that she was sitting around in her new flat one evening, curtains drawn, when she heard a knock on the window-glass. In the dream she drew back the curtains and came face to face with a pallid boy of about ten, standing outside the window in swimming trunks, his hair dripping wet. He looked at her and said "Can I come in? I'm all wet and cold." He wouldn't go away -- even when she closed the curtains she could still hear him knocking and calling to her. In the dream she ran out of the house hid in her neighbour's flat.
Needless to say, she is now terrified of her new place.
That sort of thing makes me less bothered about the fact that I haven't dreamt much recently.
-Ben
Don't worry, this post isn't going to be a tedious account of my dreams. Most of the time dreams are really not worth mentioning to anyone, and nine times out of ten if they can't be explained in a single sentence then they're just going to bore people. The other week, for example -- after working on a project about westerns for for a few weeks -- I had a dream that John Wayne came up to me in the pub and called me a 'dirty commie'. See - one sentence. It's not interesting, but at least it's over quickly. It's a subtle difference but it's definitely better than someone sitting there saying "well. I was in this house, right, and there was a butler following me around with a tray of those funny biscuits. You know, the ones with the cow imprinted on them that tasted sort of, er, malty. Anyway, this butler looked like that Russian guy who was in The Man from Uncle, but it was actually my granddad in disguise...etc."
Every now and then though your subconscious throws you such a horrific unexpected curveball that you have to tell someone. This evening, as a result of one of these dreams, it took me about three minutes to pluck up the courage to go out to the shed and get my washing out of the dryer. It wasn't because of something I dreamed, or even something dreamed by someone I know, but the dream of a person I've never met.
This person -- a colleague of my mother's -- is moving into a new flat soon. She's bought the place, and has most of her furniture in the place, but she's not actually living there yet. It sounds like a nice place, on the ground floor of a new housing block built on the site of the old swimming pool in Bexleyheath (not a place I have fond memories of. It always smelled bad, even for a swimming pool, and it had a really deep diving area at the far end of the pool that I was a bit scared of.) Anyway. Last night she dreamt that she was sitting around in her new flat one evening, curtains drawn, when she heard a knock on the window-glass. In the dream she drew back the curtains and came face to face with a pallid boy of about ten, standing outside the window in swimming trunks, his hair dripping wet. He looked at her and said "Can I come in? I'm all wet and cold." He wouldn't go away -- even when she closed the curtains she could still hear him knocking and calling to her. In the dream she ran out of the house hid in her neighbour's flat.
Needless to say, she is now terrified of her new place.
That sort of thing makes me less bothered about the fact that I haven't dreamt much recently.
-Ben
Friday, November 07, 2008
They Call Me Mister President
I'm still happy about the US election result, I'm not sure whether it will translate into any sort of improvement in the world -- but a lot of people are certain it will, and I think that confidence probably has considerable power on its own. Sorry about the rather inappropriate In the Heat of the Night reference, although the contrast between then and now is fascinating. I was surprised that none of the english papers used it as a headline. It was nice to see the headlines in the paper on wednesday, things like "One Giant Leap for Mankind", "GOBAMA!" and so on -- a nice change from four years ago when one major national paper in the UK ran with "How can 58 million people be so dumb?". The Obama campaign flickr page has some interesting shots from election night.
In other news, Field Music are awesome. I'm sure this is old news to a lot of people, but I'm a bit slow on the uptake and not very hip.
-Ben
In other news, Field Music are awesome. I'm sure this is old news to a lot of people, but I'm a bit slow on the uptake and not very hip.
-Ben
Thursday, November 06, 2008
I’ve been writing an article about sex in literature for the last few days, which is a rather big subject to condense down to a single 2800 word article. I’ve managed to get the sections on ancient literature, medieval literature, renaissance and early modern literature, and modern literature done but I just can’t get the 19th century bit down right.
The reason for this is that unlike the other historical periods, I’ve not read a great deal of the great canon novels out there. Ultimately, what it comes down to is that--despite my years of reading everything I could get my hands on, earning a first in English Literature, and somehow ending up in a job that requires me to read and write all day--I really don’t like 19th century realist novels. The glowing esteem that those brick-thick books are held in by literary types meant that I’ve had to suffer a lot in the course of my studies.
In the first year I had to read Hard Times by Charles Dickens. I can honestly say that it was the single most tedious book I’ve ever read. It led me to devise a method of rating literature which, whilst highly subjective, nonetheless proved invaluable in my assessment of different books.
The system is this—how many pages can you read before you fall asleep? Bearing in mind your bedroom is generally the only place in a student house that you can get any peace, and the bed is usually the only piece of furniture in your bedroom, it’s pretty easy to doze off.
I started thinking about this system when I was sitting in a very dull seminar (it was in the middle of winter, in a very cold room and it started at 4pm-- which meant it was dark the whole time) thumbing through the copy of Hard Times that I had only managed to get a bit more than halfway through. The rest of the class were silent and sheepish – none of them had managed to finish it either (I asked before the tutor came in) and this was leading to long and uncomfortable silences. Not one to let a room full of people suffer under the claws of the awkward turtle like that, I bravely stepped in and started responding to the tutor’s questions with my finest freestyle academic bullshit, backed up by quotes taken pretty much at random from whatever page happened to fall open while I was speaking.
You’d be surprised how often that method worked. Once, in my final year, I did a presentation which got 73 (that’s a very high mark at an English uni) on a book I hadn’t even read using exactly that technique. It’s all about pretending to be forgetful rather than unprepared--doing a Boris, essentially.
On this particular occasion though, my method was encountering a snag. You see, it had taken me so much effort to read the two-thirds that I’d managed to plough through that my book was half stuck together with drool. (yes, I drool in my sleep. I’m like an unusually articulate spaniel). When someone else finally started talking--and I was able to relax for a while--I sat there, slouched in my corner of the room, and counted how many pages there were between each group of stuck ones. I wasn’t being hugely scientific, but I found that in the case of hard times I managed to read around 15 pages on average in each sitting, before falling asleep.
Now 15 pages isn’t too bad, it’s only 288 pages long so you’d get there eventually. The big problem--and probably why I’ve never been able to see the genius in these books that everyone else sees—is that whilst 15 pages passed before I actually conked out, my brain generally shut down after about 10 pages. I was reading, but the words weren’t reaching my mind.
My impressions of most of the most of the big 19th century novels that sit on the top of all the ‘best books ever’ lists that people publish from time to time (I suspect with the intention of making people feel intellectually inferior) are pretty much the same. For some reason, realist fiction has an amazing soporific effect on me. I managed to read Middlemarch and some Henry James once, although I wouldn’t say I enjoyed them much. But yes, to meander drunkenly back to my original point (if I ever had one) it’s hard to write about sex in 19th century literature when you’ve never read Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, or Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Perhaps one day I’ll become addicted to amphetamines or something and finally be able to understand what all the fuss is about.
I wrote this in one huge blaze of typing, so it probably doesn’t make much sense. I’ll come back and check it later. Oh, and the irritating mixture of double-hyphens and Em dashes are the fault of Microsoft word, and are really making me wish I had a mac.
-Ben
The reason for this is that unlike the other historical periods, I’ve not read a great deal of the great canon novels out there. Ultimately, what it comes down to is that--despite my years of reading everything I could get my hands on, earning a first in English Literature, and somehow ending up in a job that requires me to read and write all day--I really don’t like 19th century realist novels. The glowing esteem that those brick-thick books are held in by literary types meant that I’ve had to suffer a lot in the course of my studies.
In the first year I had to read Hard Times by Charles Dickens. I can honestly say that it was the single most tedious book I’ve ever read. It led me to devise a method of rating literature which, whilst highly subjective, nonetheless proved invaluable in my assessment of different books.
The system is this—how many pages can you read before you fall asleep? Bearing in mind your bedroom is generally the only place in a student house that you can get any peace, and the bed is usually the only piece of furniture in your bedroom, it’s pretty easy to doze off.
I started thinking about this system when I was sitting in a very dull seminar (it was in the middle of winter, in a very cold room and it started at 4pm-- which meant it was dark the whole time) thumbing through the copy of Hard Times that I had only managed to get a bit more than halfway through. The rest of the class were silent and sheepish – none of them had managed to finish it either (I asked before the tutor came in) and this was leading to long and uncomfortable silences. Not one to let a room full of people suffer under the claws of the awkward turtle like that, I bravely stepped in and started responding to the tutor’s questions with my finest freestyle academic bullshit, backed up by quotes taken pretty much at random from whatever page happened to fall open while I was speaking.
You’d be surprised how often that method worked. Once, in my final year, I did a presentation which got 73 (that’s a very high mark at an English uni) on a book I hadn’t even read using exactly that technique. It’s all about pretending to be forgetful rather than unprepared--doing a Boris, essentially.
On this particular occasion though, my method was encountering a snag. You see, it had taken me so much effort to read the two-thirds that I’d managed to plough through that my book was half stuck together with drool. (yes, I drool in my sleep. I’m like an unusually articulate spaniel). When someone else finally started talking--and I was able to relax for a while--I sat there, slouched in my corner of the room, and counted how many pages there were between each group of stuck ones. I wasn’t being hugely scientific, but I found that in the case of hard times I managed to read around 15 pages on average in each sitting, before falling asleep.
Now 15 pages isn’t too bad, it’s only 288 pages long so you’d get there eventually. The big problem--and probably why I’ve never been able to see the genius in these books that everyone else sees—is that whilst 15 pages passed before I actually conked out, my brain generally shut down after about 10 pages. I was reading, but the words weren’t reaching my mind.
My impressions of most of the most of the big 19th century novels that sit on the top of all the ‘best books ever’ lists that people publish from time to time (I suspect with the intention of making people feel intellectually inferior) are pretty much the same. For some reason, realist fiction has an amazing soporific effect on me. I managed to read Middlemarch and some Henry James once, although I wouldn’t say I enjoyed them much. But yes, to meander drunkenly back to my original point (if I ever had one) it’s hard to write about sex in 19th century literature when you’ve never read Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, or Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Perhaps one day I’ll become addicted to amphetamines or something and finally be able to understand what all the fuss is about.
I wrote this in one huge blaze of typing, so it probably doesn’t make much sense. I’ll come back and check it later. Oh, and the irritating mixture of double-hyphens and Em dashes are the fault of Microsoft word, and are really making me wish I had a mac.
-Ben
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
neato
The Unfinished Swan - Tech Demo 9/2008 from Ian Dallas on Vimeo.
I saw this on 'Why, That's Delightful' a few days ago and was rather impressed. I'm really happy whenever I see games like this (the only other example I can think of is Portal, but there are plenty of others). When I saw how close games were getting to photorealism I really hoped that we'd get some sort of gaming equivalent of impressionism and abstraction. Because, as any 19th century artist will tell you, photorealism is boring. I am pretty sure that in about five years Twilight Princess will look really badly dated, whilst The Wind Waker will still look stylistically amazing. The fact that developers are doing things like this provides a satisfying counterbalance to the ongoing efforts to render team sports, cars, and brutal violence in ever more colorful detail.
Not that I have anything against violent games, or games where I crash cars, it's just that sometimes I like to feel like games should at least try and punch their weight in a cultural or aesthetic sense.
-Ben
I was going to link a load of other things I've read and seen recently, but most of them are in some way political and really, I think that anyone reading this doesn't need to be told that Sarah Palin is a moron again.
Oh, but I should link this fine example of what must, surely, be genius trolling. That, or an idiot of truly magnificent proportions.
Monday, October 27, 2008
"That's just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the universe has that"
I’m watching a BBC documentary about the collapse (and alleged demolition) of World Trade Center tower 7. Conspiracy theories like these are always fascinating examples of the many different biases which people bring to the analysis of evidence.
[I was going to write more on this stuff, and I might at some point, but I’m tired now.]
Firstly there is always the way that most people are far more willing to take didactic statements of truth from figures of authority than they are willing to assess evidence on their own. This creates big problems for people trying to debunk conspiracy theories, because they are often started, or prominently backed up, by people with seemingly solid credentials. What is most effective is when a person with an apparently informed background (in the case of the WTC7 conspiracies he’s an architect*) states—without giving any evidence to support his claim—that the scenario he suggests is ‘obvious’ and that ‘anyone can see it’. I’m sure there’s a name for this effect in the study of rhetoric, but I don’t know what it is, either way it is very effective -- it makes people who go along with his arguments feel superior; everyone else, the subconscious logic goes, are idiotic and easily led. The statement that I thought was particularly interesting in this documentary is when the 911 truthman says ‘even a child can see that that isn’t a natural collapse’
Which is just dumb. It’s like saying ‘any child can tell that lightning is caused by fighting sky monsters’ because you think that meteorologists are a sinister cabal who don’t want anyone to learn how they ‘really’ predict the weather. Hypotheses are not given credibility on a first-come-first-serve basis, they have to make sense, and be possible. Generally underpinning all of these things is the anti-intellectualism that seems to be becoming increasingly common in American society in particular. The fact that those who support the official line are world leading authorities on the subject of demolition and structural collapse is seen as irrelevant. Just as the fact that Sarah Palin doesn't seem to know the first thing about the job she's running for, or the sort of issues she'd be expected to deal with, is seen as irrelevant by many.
Even if you disregard the fact that rigging a building for demolition involves tearing out internal walls, drilling holes in columns, and laying miles and miles of cables everywhere (which is hard to do in a busy office building without anyone noticing), this conspiracy theory is no more possible than any of the other unorthodox theories that have surfaced over the years. The reason for this is fairly simple: with each successive counter to their arguments conspiracy theorists add more people to the list of people who would have to be in on the conspiracy. What this amounts to, in effect, is that these people are accusing thousands of people of being accessories to mass murder. A list that includes all of the structural engineers that testified at the enquiry, the FDNY and NYPD witnesses who testified that they heard no demolition explosions, as well as thousands of ordinary men and women in the area at the time.
When people come up with these theories they generally envisage them as being masterminded by some devilish incarnation of ‘the man’ and don’t seem to realise what it is that they are, in reality, suggesting. Even if you accept the idea that thousands of people who pledged to help their fellow citizens, who have risked their lives in the course of that vocation, lied and conspired to kill thousands of innocent people, there is an insoluble problem with all this: people are shit at keeping secrets.
Just think, Nixon couldn’t keep a break-in at an office in the Watergate building secret – and that only involved a handful of people. Do they really think that of the thousands who would have to be involved in a scheme like this, none of them would sell their stories, or have a crisis of conscience?
I've always felt that Hanlon's Razor is one of the best principles to live by, or, in the words of Sir Bernard Ingham, "cock-up before conspiracy".
-Ben
*This is a irrelevant anecdotal slur, but I’ve heard my share of ‘dumb architect’ stories: structural engineers like to tell stories of the many architects they have dealt with who displayed ignorance of construction methods, structural tolerances, and even really basic physics.
[I was going to write more on this stuff, and I might at some point, but I’m tired now.]
Firstly there is always the way that most people are far more willing to take didactic statements of truth from figures of authority than they are willing to assess evidence on their own. This creates big problems for people trying to debunk conspiracy theories, because they are often started, or prominently backed up, by people with seemingly solid credentials. What is most effective is when a person with an apparently informed background (in the case of the WTC7 conspiracies he’s an architect*) states—without giving any evidence to support his claim—that the scenario he suggests is ‘obvious’ and that ‘anyone can see it’. I’m sure there’s a name for this effect in the study of rhetoric, but I don’t know what it is, either way it is very effective -- it makes people who go along with his arguments feel superior; everyone else, the subconscious logic goes, are idiotic and easily led. The statement that I thought was particularly interesting in this documentary is when the 911 truthman says ‘even a child can see that that isn’t a natural collapse’
Which is just dumb. It’s like saying ‘any child can tell that lightning is caused by fighting sky monsters’ because you think that meteorologists are a sinister cabal who don’t want anyone to learn how they ‘really’ predict the weather. Hypotheses are not given credibility on a first-come-first-serve basis, they have to make sense, and be possible. Generally underpinning all of these things is the anti-intellectualism that seems to be becoming increasingly common in American society in particular. The fact that those who support the official line are world leading authorities on the subject of demolition and structural collapse is seen as irrelevant. Just as the fact that Sarah Palin doesn't seem to know the first thing about the job she's running for, or the sort of issues she'd be expected to deal with, is seen as irrelevant by many.
Even if you disregard the fact that rigging a building for demolition involves tearing out internal walls, drilling holes in columns, and laying miles and miles of cables everywhere (which is hard to do in a busy office building without anyone noticing), this conspiracy theory is no more possible than any of the other unorthodox theories that have surfaced over the years. The reason for this is fairly simple: with each successive counter to their arguments conspiracy theorists add more people to the list of people who would have to be in on the conspiracy. What this amounts to, in effect, is that these people are accusing thousands of people of being accessories to mass murder. A list that includes all of the structural engineers that testified at the enquiry, the FDNY and NYPD witnesses who testified that they heard no demolition explosions, as well as thousands of ordinary men and women in the area at the time.
When people come up with these theories they generally envisage them as being masterminded by some devilish incarnation of ‘the man’ and don’t seem to realise what it is that they are, in reality, suggesting. Even if you accept the idea that thousands of people who pledged to help their fellow citizens, who have risked their lives in the course of that vocation, lied and conspired to kill thousands of innocent people, there is an insoluble problem with all this: people are shit at keeping secrets.
Just think, Nixon couldn’t keep a break-in at an office in the Watergate building secret – and that only involved a handful of people. Do they really think that of the thousands who would have to be involved in a scheme like this, none of them would sell their stories, or have a crisis of conscience?
I've always felt that Hanlon's Razor is one of the best principles to live by, or, in the words of Sir Bernard Ingham, "cock-up before conspiracy".
-Ben
*This is a irrelevant anecdotal slur, but I’ve heard my share of ‘dumb architect’ stories: structural engineers like to tell stories of the many architects they have dealt with who displayed ignorance of construction methods, structural tolerances, and even really basic physics.
Thursday, October 23, 2008
It’s been said many times, by people much more intelligent and articulate than myself, but the internet has really changed the way that people access and interact with information. My job requires me to do a fair amount of research and calls on me to have at least a passing knowledge of pretty much everything, ever.
Now, if you want a fairly shallow understanding of pretty much everything, ever, then the internet is your man – or, more specifically, Wikipedia. When I need to know something for a specific reason then I get my information from somewhere authoritative, but for just a quick orientation on a subject wiki is king.
The problem with it, and its great strength, is the amazing way that information is endlessly interlinked and cross-referenced. It brings out a little known principle of information gathering, sort of like thermodynamics of thought – when reading about something important, your mind will always tend to drift towards information that is less important, but more interesting. This is best demonstrated by this XKCD comic:
Today, for example, I started by reading about a John Wayne film called ‘The Cowboys’ – this was for work, I needed to get a vague idea of the story before I wrote something. Through various strange diversions -- which included articles on Bruce Dern, Yakima Canutt, and Non-Fiction Novels -- I ended up on a website devoted to a little known sideshow freak/magician called Johnny Eck.
All you can see in that picture is all there was to him – he was developmentally normal, except for the fact that his body stopped just below his ribcage, giving him the appearance of a half person. He nonetheless lived a long and varied life, managing to use his bizarre deformity to his advantage. I especially like the anecdote I read about the time when he performed in a travelling magic show with a magician and a dwarf: The dwarf would wear a specially designed pair of giant trousers that came up over his head, and would hold Johnny Eck over the waist so that – in a dark theatre at least – they looked like one person. The magician would pick them out of the audience for the obligatory sawing-in-half trick, and when the boxes were separated the ‘legs’ would get up and run around the stage, with Johnny Eck chasing them around on his hands, angrily demanding that they come back. The cast and crew always found the show hilarious, and once the people who had fainted, or thrown up, had recovered they were pretty impressed too.
-Ben
Now, if you want a fairly shallow understanding of pretty much everything, ever, then the internet is your man – or, more specifically, Wikipedia. When I need to know something for a specific reason then I get my information from somewhere authoritative, but for just a quick orientation on a subject wiki is king.
The problem with it, and its great strength, is the amazing way that information is endlessly interlinked and cross-referenced. It brings out a little known principle of information gathering, sort of like thermodynamics of thought – when reading about something important, your mind will always tend to drift towards information that is less important, but more interesting. This is best demonstrated by this XKCD comic:
Today, for example, I started by reading about a John Wayne film called ‘The Cowboys’ – this was for work, I needed to get a vague idea of the story before I wrote something. Through various strange diversions -- which included articles on Bruce Dern, Yakima Canutt, and Non-Fiction Novels -- I ended up on a website devoted to a little known sideshow freak/magician called Johnny Eck.
All you can see in that picture is all there was to him – he was developmentally normal, except for the fact that his body stopped just below his ribcage, giving him the appearance of a half person. He nonetheless lived a long and varied life, managing to use his bizarre deformity to his advantage. I especially like the anecdote I read about the time when he performed in a travelling magic show with a magician and a dwarf: The dwarf would wear a specially designed pair of giant trousers that came up over his head, and would hold Johnny Eck over the waist so that – in a dark theatre at least – they looked like one person. The magician would pick them out of the audience for the obligatory sawing-in-half trick, and when the boxes were separated the ‘legs’ would get up and run around the stage, with Johnny Eck chasing them around on his hands, angrily demanding that they come back. The cast and crew always found the show hilarious, and once the people who had fainted, or thrown up, had recovered they were pretty impressed too.
-Ben
Monday, October 20, 2008
At 2am last night I was lying in bed, staring at the ceiling. I'd managed to put down the book I was reading about 20 minutes previously, having grown too distracted by my own thoughts to for it to hold my attention. After a few minutes spent watching a confused moth (the only kind, as far as I can tell) I found myself, once again, considering the worth of my weekend's activities on the basis of how much laundry I'd managed to get done. At this point it became apparent that something had gone badly wrong. I don't want to be misunderstood here, I'm not saying that I was once some great centre-of-attention party animal -- a quick look through the archives of this blog would quickly rubbish that thought -- but you know, I used to have a slightly more interesting life than I do now. I sat around thinking on this subject, and many others, for a few hours before I finally conked out at about half past four in the morning.
The result of this night's intense self-evaluation wasn't any sense of purpose, mental clarity, or some hardened resolve. No. Instead the result was me waking up late, having to run for a late train, and spending the day in a state somewhere south of sensible. I managed to get a reasonable amount of work done -- with the help of rancid-goat's-arse instant coffee -- but towards the end of the day my head was getting a little swimmy.
In the afternoon I was reading through a book on Ancient Mesopotamia, noting down material that could be reused and checking maps and suchlike. At about five in the afternoon the caffeine, sleeplessness and boredom all conspired to turn me into a uncontrollably giggling wreck. I was staring at a map of the Kingdom of Hammurabi which had the ancient cities marked on it, and which ritual and cultural landmarks they contained. The names and labels were starting to drift in and out of focus as I tried to keep my eyes open, and I found myself reading them out loud (very quietly) to myself. After a few minutes the following sequence of words came out of my mouth:
Akshak...Ziggurat...Babylon...Kish!
I said it again, with a funny sort of metric rhythm to it. It made me smile. I liked the way it sounded. I ended up sitting at my desk sort of reciting 'Akshak...Ziggurat...Babylon...Kish' every few minutes and giggling to myself like a man possessed. Even now it makes me smile.
I think I've either come across an extremely pleasing set of words, or I'm starting to go completely bonkers.
-Ben
The result of this night's intense self-evaluation wasn't any sense of purpose, mental clarity, or some hardened resolve. No. Instead the result was me waking up late, having to run for a late train, and spending the day in a state somewhere south of sensible. I managed to get a reasonable amount of work done -- with the help of rancid-goat's-arse instant coffee -- but towards the end of the day my head was getting a little swimmy.
In the afternoon I was reading through a book on Ancient Mesopotamia, noting down material that could be reused and checking maps and suchlike. At about five in the afternoon the caffeine, sleeplessness and boredom all conspired to turn me into a uncontrollably giggling wreck. I was staring at a map of the Kingdom of Hammurabi which had the ancient cities marked on it, and which ritual and cultural landmarks they contained. The names and labels were starting to drift in and out of focus as I tried to keep my eyes open, and I found myself reading them out loud (very quietly) to myself. After a few minutes the following sequence of words came out of my mouth:
Akshak...Ziggurat...Babylon...Kish!
I said it again, with a funny sort of metric rhythm to it. It made me smile. I liked the way it sounded. I ended up sitting at my desk sort of reciting 'Akshak...Ziggurat...Babylon...Kish' every few minutes and giggling to myself like a man possessed. Even now it makes me smile.
I think I've either come across an extremely pleasing set of words, or I'm starting to go completely bonkers.
-Ben
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Mr Ben Digs
Like many middle class white boys, I have a furtive love for old school hip hop (Oh yes, I don't even spell it with a K, that's how uncool I am). Take a peek through a gap in the curtains on an average evening and you'll quite likely see me dancing around my house to Brand Nubian, Jurassic 5, A tribe Called Quest, or Del tha Funky Homosapien like Henry Kissinger on cocaine. Bearing that in mind imagine my glee when I heard DJ Format+Abdominal on the Adam and Joe show.
That video and the one below this little bit of text are good examples, and feature excellent nerdy computer games references, but essentially everything I've found by DJ Format and Abdominal is face meltingly good.
Other sounds that I've been listening to recently include the sadly no longer active Nic Jones, the strange jazz guitar-tuba-tapdancers combo that are the Born Again Floozies, and Chatham County Line who make some good hillbilly music.
-Ben
That video and the one below this little bit of text are good examples, and feature excellent nerdy computer games references, but essentially everything I've found by DJ Format and Abdominal is face meltingly good.
Other sounds that I've been listening to recently include the sadly no longer active Nic Jones, the strange jazz guitar-tuba-tapdancers combo that are the Born Again Floozies, and Chatham County Line who make some good hillbilly music.
-Ben
Thursday, October 16, 2008
treadmilltreadmilltreadmilltreadmill
I went to the gym today, an event which happens rather more often than even I'm sure I believe. When I was there I was thinking about something that my cousin (who is super ultra fit) said about a good bit of exercise. She mentioned how it made her feel better afterwards, and how she found it invigorating - and she said it in a way that suggested that this was a universal reaction to running, cycling, running, etc. This is a line that I've heard many times from various different people, and it's a line which I think may well be the reason why a lot of people like me give up on this particular aspect of a healthy lifestyle.
Allow me to explain. I hate exercise. I don't feel invigorated, I feel pain and misery. I've learned to expect this, but I worry that a lot of people give up when they realise that the promised moment when it stops being torture isn't ever going to arrive for them; I worry that they feel awkward and out-of-place when others talk about how good it makes them feel and start lying to fit in with the others. I know I did for a while. It took me a long while before I realised the actual reason why I feel good when I get home from the gym. It isn't endorphins or whatever, but simply because that point marks the furthest I can get from the time when I'll feel obliged to go to the gym again.
I just want to make this clear. I go to the gym because I eat a lot, I'm quite vain, and I have a vague sense of concern for my long-term health. Not because I enjoy inflicting that stuff on myself. I think if more people said that they exercise because they think it's a good idea, rather than because it makes them love life, then more people would be willing to keep up.
-Ben
Allow me to explain. I hate exercise. I don't feel invigorated, I feel pain and misery. I've learned to expect this, but I worry that a lot of people give up when they realise that the promised moment when it stops being torture isn't ever going to arrive for them; I worry that they feel awkward and out-of-place when others talk about how good it makes them feel and start lying to fit in with the others. I know I did for a while. It took me a long while before I realised the actual reason why I feel good when I get home from the gym. It isn't endorphins or whatever, but simply because that point marks the furthest I can get from the time when I'll feel obliged to go to the gym again.
I just want to make this clear. I go to the gym because I eat a lot, I'm quite vain, and I have a vague sense of concern for my long-term health. Not because I enjoy inflicting that stuff on myself. I think if more people said that they exercise because they think it's a good idea, rather than because it makes them love life, then more people would be willing to keep up.
-Ben
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Buh?
I came across this caption when looking through a book at work. I feel it is necessary to point out that this book isn't one of ours, and I don't think it's in print any more. I was reading the chapter on the chinese economy when I saw this:
Below: An industrial complex at Anshan in Manchuria. Like most industrial installations in this part of china it was begun in the late 1930s by the japanese and symbolises china's continuing debt to the period of occupation.
Now I'm no expert on the Japanese occupation of China, but I've never heard any Chinese officials talking about how grateful they are for what the Japanese did there. Generally historians just focus on the horrifying war crimes and ignore the, er, valuable industrial development I suppose. That or this writer really liked Japan.
-Ben
Below: An industrial complex at Anshan in Manchuria. Like most industrial installations in this part of china it was begun in the late 1930s by the japanese and symbolises china's continuing debt to the period of occupation.
Now I'm no expert on the Japanese occupation of China, but I've never heard any Chinese officials talking about how grateful they are for what the Japanese did there. Generally historians just focus on the horrifying war crimes and ignore the, er, valuable industrial development I suppose. That or this writer really liked Japan.
-Ben
Sunday, October 12, 2008
I came across this poster at work -- it's for a John Wayne B-movie from the mid-thirties. I think it may well be the strangest poster I've ever seen.The IMDB summary gives the plot of the film as this:
Sheriff John Higgins quits his job and goes into prospecting after he thinks he has killed his best friend whilst shooting it out with robbers. He encounters his dead buddy's sister and helps her run her ranch. Then she finds out about his past.
I can't figure out what the poster has to do with the film, nor can I discern what on earth the strange waxlike figures are supposed to be doing. Whether this makes more sense if you've seen the film, I don't know, but none of those people look like John Wayne, and I think they're wearing rather more rouge and lipstick than the average cowboy.
Oh, and I think the guy on the far left has just shit his pants.
-Ben
Tuesday, October 07, 2008
PETA
This is interesting. I have always found it odd the way that some animal rights organisations express their desire for humanitarian treatment of animals through campaigns that show a sickening disregard for the humanity of anyone other than themselves. The campaign linked there is a good example, they disapprove of the well being and feelings of animals being compromised in the name of some grand cause (medical research) but have no compunction with heaping even more stigma and distress on autistic children and their families to further their own cause.
Incidentally, since reading Bad Science, I've not been able to take statements like this on face value. Whilst I don't doubt this is a good thing, it took me ages to read through all the meta analysis abstracts to check the blogger's assertions that PETA's claims were wrong, which is a pain. There has been almost no credible research on this subject, and the results of that were inconclusive at best (the most scientifically rigorous of the studies only had 4 participants, which renders it pretty meaningless).
As a thoroughly uninteresting little side note, it's the association with that sort of crap that stopped me from ever describing myself as a 'liberal' on facebook.
-Ben
Incidentally, since reading Bad Science, I've not been able to take statements like this on face value. Whilst I don't doubt this is a good thing, it took me ages to read through all the meta analysis abstracts to check the blogger's assertions that PETA's claims were wrong, which is a pain. There has been almost no credible research on this subject, and the results of that were inconclusive at best (the most scientifically rigorous of the studies only had 4 participants, which renders it pretty meaningless).
As a thoroughly uninteresting little side note, it's the association with that sort of crap that stopped me from ever describing myself as a 'liberal' on facebook.
-Ben
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