Holiday

As I mentioned last night, I’m now back from my trip to Wales and I suppose I better write something about it. I went, with my family and some extras, to a place called the Gower peninsula, in south Wales, staying in a campsite near the village of Rhossili. The Gower is a strange place, all rolling hills and sheep, lots and lots of sheep. As far as I can tell, the Gower was a horrific backwater that remained rustic and rural when the rest of Wales launched themselves into the industrial revolution with great enthusiasm. The only innovation that they seemed interested in taking from the world around them at this time was Methodism, which they took to with the same vigour as every other part of Wales.

The religious denomination favoured in an area wouldn’t seem to be that important at first glance, but it seems to have had a substantial effect on the landscape of the land, long after most of the chapels have been boarded up and forgotten. The most important legacy is, of course, the chapel.


They are small, squat buildings, architecturally unadorned; they vary from being pretty in their simplicity, to being plain boxes grotesquely spattered with neoclassical decorations, like stone pillars on the side of a warehouse. They manage to be beautiful, however, by always being put in amazing places. I don’t know whether this was motivated by a desire to make people really work for their church, or something, but they are almost always in elevated positions, high on hills and mountains above the towns they serve. It means that their plain austerity acts as a counterpoint to vistas and landscapes more beautiful than anything that would be allowed in a protestant church. It made me think of this poem by Wallace Stevens -- which I’ve never really understood, and still don’t think I do, but it seems apt.

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion every where.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

Wallace Stevens Anecdote of the Jar

I think it’s because I’m from a big city, one where the buildings are often pretty, but the landscape as a whole generally isn’t, but this opposition always makes me happy, like a kind of deference on the part of the locals to the world around them. Sadly I don’t have a picture of the most striking example of this; a utterly dull grey box of a chapel that sat on the top of a hill next to a shimmering, cascading waterfall. I do have a picture of the waterfall though.


The thing that makes the Gower remarkable is that in 1956 it was designated to be an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (mostly because it was such a pristine backwater) which means that planning regulations are extremely tight there, and very little new building goes on. Between the Methodism and the planning department, the Gower is left, tragically, with a dearth of decent pubs, or any pubs at all.

It has no shortage of nice beaches, however, beloved by English surfers (we’re not talking Hawaii-grade surf here, but it’s enough to work with apparently, and closer to home). I didn’t surf, obviously, because I have no sense of balance and wouldn’t look good in a wetsuit, but I did swim in the sea quite a lot. It has to be said, however, that quite often my swims were cut short by the feeling of hypothermia setting in (there’s nothing like swimming away and then being struck by the thought ‘my kidneys are cold… that’s not good’).


I like swimming, I’m like a seal in that I’m slow and ungainly on land, but can more with a little more grace when gravity is no longer an issue. I’m unlike a seal in that I can’t breathe through my ears, which is another one of the ways in which I feel that evolution has short-changed humanity -- along with our absence of tails, and independently movable ears.

There’s loads more to say, but this is all I’ve managed to say before I got distracted by shiny things (well, shiny thing – my new bass is still awesome) I might write some more on the subject when I remember - I feel I should write something about the peculiar delights of camping - but it won’t be for a few days as I’m heading up to my brother’s this weekend for a weekend of computer games, loud music, and drinking – to recover from all that nature and rustic living.

-Ben

Jim Radford

I'm back from Wales, it was fun, I'll write about it later. I came across this when I was doing my 'back in the 21st century' celebratory internet surfing. He's someone I've seen and heard many times in various folk clubs around south east london. Have a listen, he's got an amazing voice and a seemingly infinite repertoire of shanties, songs of the sea, and folk ballads.

This is a good example of the sort of song he performs - songs that describe recent history with the timelessness of really old folk songs. This particular one is about the Battle of Gallipoli, one of the bigger bloodbaths of the first world war. It isn't very well known in the UK because the losses were mostly Australians, Kiwis, Canadians, and Indians* -- soldiers from the colonies always seem to get left out of popular conceptions of 20th century warfare.

-Ben

*As well as the Turks, of course, whose losses were no less horrific for the fact that they were the nominal victors

vanity

I took this picture with the intention of shaming the people who keep persuading me not to cut my hair (kristen and sarah, I'm looking at you) by demonstrating just how stupid they'd made me look. When I actually put the picture up on the computer, however, I thought it looked rather good. So I'll let you off for now.

I'm going on holiday to wales on wednesday with my family and some friends. We're camping, which of course means that the word document known as the 'camping list' is once again printed out. This thing was written in the late 1980s, but hasn't ever been changed because it's generally a pretty good reminder of the sort of thing you need, even if my parents tent weighs about a tenth of the old family one, despite being much bigger.

It is a rather odd document, that has been transferred from one format to another and opened with every program between Wordstar and Openoffice. It does contain certain anachronisms though, like the section headed "I wanna doa Weeeeee", which dates to a time when me and ed still don't have absolute control over our bladders.

I shall leave you with the section headed "Toys"

Toys

A few Cars

Limited Teddies

Buckets, Spades, Diggers.

Books

I just love the idea of 'limited teddies' (our car was quite small)

-Ben

The BPA

Very good song, combining three different flavours of awesome (Norman Cook, David Byrne, and Dizzee Rascal) with a very good video. The funniest part about this video is what you see when you look at the comments on youtube, which are full of people complaining about the censorship. Put a funny and creative use of censorship in front of a teenage boy and he can think only of the graphic nudity he's missing.

Also, the new Hold Steady album, Stay Positive, is brilliant. As expected.

Jeebus

I'm generally a pretty liberal 'believe whatever you want' sort of geezer, but there are times when I am left rather baffled. My work involves quite a lot of reading up on the religious attitudes and perspectives to various aspects of human sexuality and reproduction and some of them are really quite disturbing.

Take, for example, the old testament view on menstruation - Dig Leviticus 20:18, which says sex with a woman who's menstruating is all evil and nasty, which is valid enough, I suppose (although I'm not sure why you'd want to punish people for it) but then there's the rather more unpleasant sentiments in Leviticus 15:19-24 which essentially says that any man who goes near a woman who is menstruating has whatever the religious equivalent of cooties/lurgi is, and has to go and sit in the corner of the playground until his friends think he's clean again. Now I know that Leviticus is sort of like the dusty attic of Judeo-Christian religions, where a strange elderly relative sits and denounces everything, but seeing as people take some parts of it very seriously indeed, it worries me what else they're going to take as, if you'll excuse the pun, gospel.

The stuff I read, that is completely in earnest, means that when I come across something like this on one of my searches I'm honestly not sure whether it's a joke or not (it is). Which of course wrongfooted me, so that when I read this I thought that I was reading The Onion, but no. Sadly not.

-Ben

Don't look back

I have absolutely no idea why I started doing this, but earlier on I started to read through the archives of my old email account (which I stopped using as my main account in winter 2005). Because my brother didn’t have a computer of his own, and my family didn’t use any sort of instant messenger thingy, there was a near constant stream of quite lengthy emails flying backwards and forwards between me, Eddie, Dad, and various friends at other universities. Looking back at them I’m not hugely interested in the emails that I received, as they tell me things that I either remember anyway, or don’t really feel particularly enlightened for knowing. The thing that fascinates me is reading my old emails to others, daisychained along in a big string of correspondence under my friend's responses. Hotmail didn’t record any sent mail then, and I don't think it does now, unfortunately, so I have only the emails that I got replies to, but it’s still an interesting little study.

What I’ve learned is that I was really embarrassing. Even in emails written when I was just a few weeks shy of my 19^th birthday, settled into uni life and in a relationship with someone much more mature than me, I was still writing like an overexcited child about everything. In any email where I mention something to do with women you can actually hear me puffing my chest out and talking in an artificially low voice. I didn’t think it was possible, but I seemed to have a writing style that sounded as ridiculous as my early experiments with facial hair looked. Amongst other things, I come across as a complete prick, arrogant and insensitive to the point that it seems like some kind of absurd parody of a teenage boy. Looking back, I like to think that that tone is the result of some sort of misguided bravado, as I don’t think I was ever that much of a wanker; I did have some friends, after all. Then again, looking at the emails I wrote to J* and the steaming moron fumes that rise from them, I can only assume that I really was as much of a jerk as I seemed.

It makes me worry now about this, about all the writing that gets collected. I write this blog, I use google talk (which keeps everything archived) all the time, and I write emails to people all the time. I think that the end result of this is that people like me are never going to be able to escape the stupidity of their past selves. Even this post, for example, will probably make me cringe in a few years time – if you look back through the archives to the old posts on here you’ll find plenty that make me cringe now (I don’t know why I’ve not bothered to delete them, I suppose it would feel like cheating, editing myself somehow).

In the past I expect that this was an affliction only suffered by writers who had to look back at their juvenilia in their collected editions, which had to flick past all those clumsy and imitative works that they’d long since surpassed and forgotten. Most people were lucky enough to never be confronted with artefacts of how they used to think, and could just pretend that they'd always thought in the way they did in the present.

That is, of course, assuming that I have changed. Perhaps I’ve not, and in a few years the changes that seem mountainous to me will seem insignificant and barely noticeable. I mean, I’ve just written this whole thing, in exactly the form you see it before you, in about five minutes. I’m pretty sure that come the morning it will look just as excitable and childish as the stuff that lurks, like a cupboard full of slanderous skeletons, in the depths of my hotmail account.

I should tighten up the security on that thing. Just in case.

-Ben

*not her real name, in case you hadn't guessed - her name had more syllables and vowels and suchlike.

Two Poems

The similarity pleased me, it teaches us two things: firstly, casual sex isn't a new invention, and secondly, the ladies love poets.

Woman's Constancy
John Donne (1572-1633)

Now thou hast loved me one whole day,
Tomorrow when thou leav'st, what wilt thou say?
Wilt thou then antedate some new made vow?
Or say that now
We are not just those persons, which we were?
Or, that oaths made in reverential fear
Of love, and his wrath, any may forswear?
Or, as true deaths true marriages untie,
So lovers' contracts, images of those,
Bind but till sleep, death's image, them unloose?
Or, your own end to justify,
For having purposed change, and falsehood, you
Can have no way but falsehood to be true?
Vain lunatic, against these 'scapes I could
Dispute, and conquer, if I would,
Which I abstain to do,
For by tomorrow, I may think so too.

Comeclose and Sleepnow
Roger McGough (1937-)

it is afterwards
and you talk on tiptoe
happy to be part
of the darkness
lips becoming limp
a prelude to tiredness.
Comeclose and Sleepnow
for in the morning
when a policeman
disguised as the sun
creeps into the room
and your mother
disguised as birds
calls from the trees
you will put on a dress of guilt
and shoes with broken high ideals
and refusing coffee
run
alltheway
home.

It's got to the point now where I actually cover up the covers of the books I read on the train for fear that people think I'm a poser.

-Ben

Mr Ben's Guide to Publishing

I don't like to post shop, but sometimes I feel obliged to.

My work, as I've mentioned before, requires me to write about sex, and all manner of sexual topics, whilst maintaining a sensible, even handed and rational perspective. I resist the temptation to write rude words in the captions under pictures of antifeminist activists, and I refrain from giggling when I'm in the office.

There are times though, when my noble intentions are undone. These times generally involve the picture research department who I'm sure, sometimes, are deliberately trying to make me laugh. It's generally at its funniest when they're trying to find pictures for things that they can't illustrate directly (because our publisher don't want no filth)

Take for example the article on premature ejaculation. Obviously they couldn't have a picture of a happy looking bloke lying on top of a woman who looked distinctly peeved. So they decided to try and represent the pain and frustration these men feel. The result made me want to write the caption 'd'ooh, I did it again... and I've not even left the office yet.'

The next one, impotence, can't be illustrated directly either (a picture of a big floppy cock wouldn't go down well with most American publishers) so again, picture research went for expressive - The result: 'my inability to get an erection makes me a saaaad paaaanda'

This one is a rejected possible image for an article on father's rights. I wanted an image that illustrated some aspect for visitation rights for estranged fathers. Instead I got an image which illustrates visitation rights from beyond the grave! I especially like the way that the double breasted suit gives a strange sort of 'twilight zone' feel to the image.

This last thing isn't a stock image, but it made me laugh nonetheless. It's a graph detailing the time elapsed between vaginal intromission and intravaginal ejaculation, referred to as the intravaginal ejaculatory latency time (IELT)*
Ref. Bandolier

I was interested and not smirking at all until I saw the far right of the graph. which made me smile.

Other than that I can only recommend that you check out a study into the relationship between bumper stickers and road rage and further evidence that the founding fathers were cool, and that Bush is a bit of a nob really. Oh. and on a slightly less serious note, a man playing a giant flying V.

Hmm. I seem to have forgotten what I was writing about and just started posting random links. Oh well.

-Ben

*I love it when scientists talk dirty, oh yeah.

Tube

When some people have just got off the tube, I have to think fast. I stand there, book in hand, taking in the situation. First, I count the number of seats that have become free, assess how far they are from where I'm standing, and if anyone is nearer. Then I look at the people who standing, and the people getting on - I scan for the tired, the pregnant, the old - to if there are any who deserve a seat more than me*. Lastly, if the second test didn't turn up any bellyswell or drooping lids, I make a decision on which seat to stick myself in. This is an involved decision, you look at the stance of those on either side, how sweaty they are, how much they're encroaching, etc. And all of this is done in about 3 seconds. It's a stressful business, commuting.

Today the girl I sat down next to made a funny little muffled noise, turned and snuggled up to me. She continued to sleep, now resting her head on my shoulder, for the rest of the journey. I wasn't quite sure what to say, waking her up would have been more than a little embarrassing for both of us and she was my age, and pretty, so I didn't really mind.

I realised as we were coming into London Bridge (my stop) that she might have missed her stop, so I did the gentlemanly thing. I stood up, stepped back, and trod on her toes. She woke up suddenly, and stared around for a moment. I said 'whoops, sorry' and got off the train. I saw her on the platform a few minutes later, so she didn't miss her stop, and was excused the embarrassment of realising that she'd curled up and gone to sleep on a creepy stranger's shoulder. It seemed like the most humane way of doing things; I didn't tread on her toes very hard.

-Ben

*I'm aware that now that my knees are OK most people deserve a seat more than me, but what I mean is, 'that deserve a seat sufficiently more than me to make me give it to them'

Kamchatka

It’s a place in the very far east of the Russian Federation, little more than an ice-bound peninsula, covered with volcanoes, snow, natives, and miserable dock workers. It sits on the other side of the Bering Strait from Alaska, and is about as desirable a residence. You can always tell which parts of a country are of no value, because the government generally turns them into reserves for the nomads and natives who survived long enough to see their persecutors grow some kind of conscience.

The only real claim to notability that the place has in my life is that it’s a region on a Risk board. Which, looking at it now, seems like an attempt to make Civilisation with crude technology – but was quite fun at the time. It wasn’t a game I played often, because games took hours; my parents had jobs and, attentive though they were, they didn’t really have the patience to indulge me and my brother in such nerdy pursuits for so long.

The only time, in fact, that I can ever really recall playing the game was when I was staying with my grandparents*. My grandpa used to have a vast collection of fascinating old board games – ones that were actually fun, that required thought and cunning. When my parents were taking some time out from me and my brother running madly around the house, or if we had a teacher training day off that my mum had to attend, then me and Ed were driven up the road and stayed with granny and grandpa for a while.

Whenever we played that game I generally lost, because I’ve not got a great strategic mind and I’m unlucky with dice. I always enjoyed, however, hearing my grandpa say the names of the places on the map, he would enunciate ‘Venezuela’, or ‘Madagascar’, or, my personal favourite, ‘Kamchatka’. He was a man who seemed to take great joy in words, in speaking them; he used to deliver sermons at the local Methodist church from time to time, and used to read old Winnie the Pooh stories to me and my brother at bedtime – adopting a high falsetto for piglet, a deep sonorous voice for owl, and a dull monotone for Eeyore. I’ve never seen the Disney version of those stories, and I really don’t want to.

The thing that makes these memories so delicate and important to me is that they aren’t even memories anymore. They are memories of memories, fossils. I can’t remember what his voice sounded like, but I can remember the shape, the impression they left on me. If asked, I could say ‘Kamchatka’ as he used to pronounce it, but the sounds that once filled that shape have long since faded away.

I like to think that my personal obsession with pretty words and beautiful voices is in some way a direct descendant of his own, that my personality has some imprint of his left in it, but I don’t think I’ll ever really know. My memory is exceptionally malleable, and such ghosts of memories aren’t a solid foundation for any theories. I hope I’m not being fanciful though, it’s a comforting idea.

The reason I’ve been calling him grandpa, incidentally, is because he didn’t live long enough for me to become self conscious about it, so grandpa he will always be. He died in August 2001, when we were on holiday in France, after spending some months (it doesn’t seem like a long time to me, but I’m sure it was to everyone else) struggling with the after effects of a stroke. I remember becoming slightly nervous about going to see him in that time. I didn’t like to see him struggling to remember words, stuttering and struggling to talk to me. I suppose I’d not really grasped the idea that people sometimes got worse and didn’t get better, and my never articulated unease was borne out of a hope that I could just wait until he was back to normal again.

I don’t think I ever shed a tear for him when he died. I cried, but it was because my dad was crying, which was somehow more distressing to me then. I often wonder what he’d make of me now, what he’d have made of the world if he’d lived to see the events that took place just a month later, but I suppose the closest I’m ever going to get to that is listening to my dad, or myself.

-Ben

*This might seem strange to Americans, but my grandparents lived about 10 minute’s car drive from my family.

Song Titles

Valerie by Jerry Garcia

Valleri by The Monkees

Valerie by Reel Big Fish

Valerie by Richard Thompson

Valerie by The Zutons/Mark Ronson

Valerie by Steve Winwood

And those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. The question is, is Valerie a very common name that I've never noticed, or is there one woman (who must be quite old by now) called Valerie who goes around variously making songwriters "feel so good", "remember just where she touched me", and "make me wish I was dead".

-Ben

Judge Books by their covers

My work has given me a new found appreciation of good book covers. I've always liked nice design, in whatever form it took, but it wasn't until I was writing a bibliography for a reference book that I began to really dig a book cover. You see, the reference book in question was american; so I had to check to see whether the books I was listing were easily available in the US. This involved looking on Amazon.com (as opposed to the usual .co.uk) for the books I was listing.

Quite a lot of the books I was mentioning (literature and suchlike) are books that I own myself, so I'm familiar with their British edition covers. What I realised, when looking at the books on the American website was that American book covers are really horrendously bad, as a rule.

The overall impression you get is that the design team sat down, picked about 10 different typefaces out of a hat, and then used them all on the cover. Preferably over the top of a really complex and ugly picture. A good example of this difference in approach can be seen in the American and British covers for William Faulkner's dense, gory, and occasionally incomprehensible (but very good, nonetheless) novel Light in August.

US edition on the left, UK on the right.

I don't know why this is, perhaps all the decent graphic designers have come here.

For a lesson on damn fine cover design I think you can't do much better than the cover for the 2001 Flamingo 60's Classics edition of Flann O'Brien's raving masterpiece The Third Policeman.



The front cover was once white, but I'm not very nice to my books, so it's rather dirty and scuffed now. The full size versions of these pictures are absolutely mahoosive, because my scanner doesn't seem to do small, and neither do I.

Just dig the way that it's all fairly simple, and the way that the back cover doesn't give anything away about the story, but gives you a very good idea of the sort of book it is, by simply letting the book do the talking. Which more publishers should do, seeing as often the blurb on the back annoyingly distorts the story told.



The thing that makes this all the more impressive is the fact that the US edition of this book has a cover so horrifically ugly and amateurish that it makes you want to vomit out of your ears like a fire hydrant.

-Ben

Erk

Another vaguely work related post this. In my defence, I am writing about sex all day, so work related doesn't necessarily mean dull. Although it often does, I have to admit - even sex becomes a dull subject after a while.

Today's macabre but interesting little factoid:

The most common cause of death among pregnant women in the United States is murder*.

I'm not sure whether that means that America has really excellent prenatal care programs - that make the rates of illness comparatively insignificant, or that it has serious problems with violence against women.

-Ben

*well, it is in Maryland, and a few other states, where in depth studies have been done over the last few years. In the majority of cases the killer was the significant other.

incoherent rantings

It’s a strange thing, looking at a nation from the outside. When I look at my country I see the people, I hear the strange rambling conversations, the arguments and the whispered affection, I see the people I share trains with everyday, essentially. This means that when I hear someone shouting about how the country is going down the shitter, or see reports that say everyone is unhappy I pay no heed. I see hundreds of people everyday, and they seem fine to me. There are shits and saints, but it was ever thus. When I consider another country, however, I see only statistics and cultural output; I get the dispassionate numbers in rows and the emotional Technicolor of words and images. It creates a very different impression. I honestly don’t know whether this means that only outsiders can truly grasp the state of a nation, or that outsiders are always prevented from seeing the picture fully.

There are times when I feel like a vicarious American. I talk to my American friends; I work on American school textbooks in American English; I read the news which mostly seems to talk about American politics. I think that we are, as a country, probably all vicarious Americans to some extent. Whether we consider it to be ‘The Great Satan’ or ‘Magic America’ we are all dancing to their music and caught up in their politics. Through my work I see a lot of information about the United States, census reports, economic forecasts, sexual surveys. I can tell you the proportion of American women who don’t often achieve orgasm during penetrative sex (36%) and I can tell you the tallest point in the state of Montana (Granite Peak). My head fills up with information and I can’t help but start passing judgement, good and bad, on the virtual nation outlined by this stuff.

In practice this generally means that the country in my head, and the imaginary people that live in it, change from day to day, depending on what I’m working on, or what I’ve seen or read. Today I was doing some research into school psychologists, and how they are involved with sex education and counselling. I ended up on the website of the National Association of School Psychologists reading a policy paper on dealing with ‘sexual minorities’ in schools.

The more I read of it, the more horrified I was. It gave the general impression (to me at least) that the poor ed-psych is often left trying to stop the effeminate boys and masculine girls* from getting suicidal or dropping out because of bullying, in the face of indifference from parents and, sometimes, teachers. Schools are afraid to defend the gay kids from the violent nutters, and the evangelicals who want to ‘cure’ them, because they’re quite rightly scared of being demonised by Christians, on the one hand, and printed on t-shirts by every activist in the city of Berkeley on the other.

When I think about the shitty time that anyone who so much as seemed a bit gay got at my school -- a school with rules written in big writing and stuck at the front of every classroom telling the students that queer bashing or racism or sexism would earn them serious trouble, with a significant number of openly gay teachers, and mostly ultra liberal staff otherwise -- It makes me worry about the childhood that the kids in the US get. Which of course, brings me back to the point I made at the beginning. I don’t know. The persecuted kids are in my head, and so are the schools, and the measures made to help them. I’m achieving nothing by writing this, about something I’ve never experienced and won’t ever really understand. All I can say is that based on all the statistics and reports I’ve read over the last few days, I wouldn’t want the situation, as I understand it, to be inflicted on me, or anyone for that matter, and it baffles me that anyone would. They’re just kids, can’t people just leave off demonising them until they’re big enough to fight back?

Eugh. But I suppose society never works that way, anywhere, so my crude rhetorical question will just float around with all the others. ‘“This is perfectly horrible” he exclaims, “You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!”’ I think only James Baldwin properly understood the futility of this kind of activism, of pretending to berate your enemies whilst affirming only the righteousness of yourself and your friends, which is an art no more refined or humanising than it was when Ms Beecher Stowe’s caricatures capered around an imaginary south.

----

I apologise for the rather florid prose, I spend all day writing in cold, detached, textbook English, and it’s nice to use long sentences, metaphors and pretty adjectives every now and then, even if I don't use them very well. (and look, no serial comma! Oh the decadence)

-Ben

*I’m fully aware that those are largely unfounded stereotypes, but generally those who beat those kids up aren’t, so it makes little difference.

tube

Today I was standing on the tube, minding my own business. I was holding on to one of the rails above my head with my right hand, and holding my book in the other. As the train accelerated out of Moorgate station I swayed backwards a little, as one arm isn't quite enough to hold me completely steady - I wasn't going to fall over, nor did I move very far, but I did drift backwards a little. I felt the newspaper of the person behind me touch my back and then I felt four pointy fingers and one pointy thumb press into the small of my back and shove me forwards quite hard.

I stagger away from the person, thinking I must have been squishing them unintentionally, but look round questioningly as it was a really irritating and uncouth way of pointing this out (I didn't have my headphones in, they could have just said something) .

When I look round, what do I see but the hard scowling eyes of the angry woman from yesterday.

If this keeps up I'm going to have a nemesis soon.

-Ben

Lipsync

I remembered this the other day when me and Izzy were comparing stupid youtube videos, it brought back flashbacks to the cave, and made me laugh like an idiot. Izzy's suggestion was equally brilliant though, although much shorter.

The downside of that video is that, of course, you end up with a cheesy pop song stuck in your head.

oh well.

-Ben

Something Happened

I had a small epiphany today. These are very rare for me, despite the fact that I read shitloads of epiphany-heavy short stories, and read enough 'inspiring' literature to start a movement on its own (Although I have no idea what it would be a movement about).

I was standing on the train, listening to Stevie Wonder (which isn't the usual soundtrack to great revelations) and dwelling, amongst other things, on each droplet of sweat as it gathered pace and trickled down my spine, before absorbing into the waistband of my pants. It wasn't one of the most pleasant journeys I've had, the only respite from the heat was the occasional gusts of dusty, noisy air that blew in when another train passed ours. These would cool me down for a moment, then stick my shirt damply to the sweat on my back, which would make things worse.

I was reading a book that I bought years ago, called Something Happened by Joseph Heller. I bought it after I had my last notable revelation, about the way that I was happily sabotaging my own life, after reading his first book, Catch-22. When I got it I couldn't get on with it, I struggled for a few hundred pages before giving up, in the face of the relentless unlikeability of the main character, and the monotony of his domestic life.

Coming to it now, a few years older and possibly a little wiser (better read, certainly) I find it a much more readable and interesting book. For the last few days I've been reading it, I've been thinking that the main character reminds me of someone, not that strongly, but enough to ring little bells in my head. Today, whilst some part of me was counting the sweat droplets and another was concentrating on keeping me upright, the part that was paying attention to the book had a moment of realisation. The part of the book I'd got to, you see, is titled "My Daughter is unhappy" and details, amongst other things, the protagonist's arguments with his teenage daughter, and his own feelings about the way he conducts them. At this point, somewhere past Lewisham Station, I realised that the person I was being dimly reminded of was me. I don't have a daughter, thankfully, but the pedantic superior tone that the protagonist takes with his daughter was almost an exact mirror of the way that I bicker with my kid sister.

As I've said before, I'm really not very articulate, this is why I need literature, and friends, and the words of those smarter than me. These words can give shape to various half articulated ideas that are sitting in my head, to all the little suspicions that I've not been able to find the words to voice. Reading the main character's analysis of his own conduct, I was able to see the stupid reasons behind my own, and just how much of a jerk I must appear to everyone else.

I went home and when Izzy came up to borrow my metronome, took the opportunity to apologise and to give some idea of why I'm always such a jerk.

After I'd finished my slightly embarrassed explanation my little sister pointed out that she'd always known perfectly well all the things that I'd only just realised myself. I remembered that unlike the kid in Something Happened, my little sister usually wins those clashes, she's got a quicker tongue and a better insight into what makes people tick than I'll ever be able to grasp. She's also kinda thick sometimes, but she is ten years younger than me, so slack must be cut.

The funny thing is that a realisation like that makes me happy, becoming aware of the fact that I'm a jerk in some respect feels a bit like getting some written music, I have the answer written right there, I just need to practice it. Which is something I'm getting quite good at these days.

----

I think I managed to ruin someone's day today, although I really don't know how. I was standing on the tube and after bank, where loads of people get off, i sat down next to a quite pretty young woman. I felt something touch my foot lightly as I sat down, and saw that I'd knocked over her Thermos coffeecup thingy, she reached down and put it back upright again (it was closed) and I apologised. A few minutes later, as I was sitting there listening to my music, I noticed that she was glaring at me. I could see that she was looking at me, and I could see that it wasn't a happy face. I wasn't listening to my music loudly, or dancing about like I do sometimes. Whenever I looked round, she stared down at her feet, though, so I wasn't sure if it was all in my head. Just as we were coming towards Angel station (where I get off) I noticed that she was quite unambiguously eyeballing me. I turned round at looked straight at her, pulled my headphones out and said
"Yes?"
She continued to glower at me with a look of absolute contempt for another few seconds, then got up and walked to the door. I saw her a bit later, stomping angrily up the stairs as if she was working up a serious Huff. I'm guessing she must have said something that I didn't catch, but still, it was a little unsettling to be regarded like that so soon after breakfast.

Anyway, I really should get to sleep now. Please excuse the countless errors I'm sure there are in this, I'll go through it tomorrow.

-Ben

Future of the Left

I love this video. It's a fantastic example of how sometimes low sound and image quality can contrive to give a far better impression of what a band are actually like live than even the pickiest of high fidelity recordings. Watching and listening to that video gives you an impression of the sheer weight of sound and hair raising intensity of a Future of the Left show. It feels like being kicked in the brains, but in a really good way.

-Ben

Diamond Joe Quimby

I feel like a heap of crap today. I've for some reason spent the entire day feeling like I'm about to blow chunks - I don't mean I've been feeling nauseous, not in the slightest, just that I've had that weird tickly feeling in the back of your throat you get when you're about to barf. It's not been fun.

Today, I was researching JFK for an article. Which was a bit of an eye opener. It's impressive, i mean, Clinton was a womaniser, but JFK was something else, a womaniser to the point where it looked like some kind of mental illness. He'd shag absolutely anything with boobs, really. I'm not whether that makes him a bad president, after all, if being a complete jerk disqualified you from office then America would have, er, theodore roosevelt? perhaps Jimmy Carter? and neither of them are exactly loveliness incarnate.

The most interesting part of these researches though, was a strange tangent which brought me to the story of Vaughn Meader. Born in Maine, Abbott Vaughn Meader trained as a soldier and musician. When he was 27, he rose to fame for his uncanny impressions of the then President, John F Kennedy. He made an album of satirical sketches of life in the Kennedy white house that sold millions, nearly 8 million copies in fact. He made appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show, and just about every national TV station and newspaper wanted a piece of him. Kennedy himself used to tell jokes about him, and gave out copies of the album to friends as christmas gifts. His star was in the ascendant right up until bits of Kennedy's brain got splattered all over the seats of a Lincoln Continental.

After that, unsurprisingly, nobody wanted to hear him. All possible follow ups dropped away - people weren't even interested in hearing him exhibit any of his other comedic talents (which, by all accounts, weren't many). He spiralled into depression and drug addiction, wandered the south, getting more and more out of control, with heroin and homelessness. After a while, it seems, he managed to get himself back together and ended up returning to what he was doing before his brush with stardom - living with his wives (there were a few of them), and playing bluegrass in pubs around New England. He refused to ever imitate Kennedy again.

It's fascinating, the way that someone can rise to such high fame, and then plummet down to nothing in such a short time - it seems that it was possible even before the days of pop idol and big brother.

-Ben

Today's musical links. Ian Dury and the Blockheads, the best jazz/funk comedy band ever to come out of Essex. Dig Hit me With Your Rhythm Stick or Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll. Also, on a wildly different note, this performance of Close Your Eyes by James Taylor and Carly Simon, which is probably one of the most mesmerising things on youtube. Oh, and David Bowie and Mick Ronson doing Queen Bitch live.

Games and Sex

An interesting little lecture, makes some interesting points. It's a topic I've never been quite sure about myself. Personally I think it's one that wont be overcome until more and more decent writers become attracted to games as a valid narrative format. As it currently stands games (when they aren't just written by members of the coding team) are generally written by people who have more experience of computer games than they do of narrative or, well, life*.

Until Matt made me play System Shock 2 I'd never really considered games to be a format particularly compatible with good stories. After playing that game though, I was converted - the story isn't particularly great, but the way that it is told, the experience of being a part of the story whilst the context is gradually explored and understood, that made me interested in what else could be done.

I do take issue with the lecture on one significant point, however, and that is the identification of film as the narrative form that games should seek to emulate. This is stupid, games can occupy the audience for anything up to about 60 hours. That places the narrative possibilities way beyond that of the 3 hour film. Games writers would be better off looking to the depth and complexity of novels for their cues on characterisation and plotting.

Ugh. I've just realised that I'm writing about sex outside of work - and it's not even something covered by the book.

-Ben

*I know it's mean, but there's definitely some merit to the suggestion that those who play computer games enough to want to become part of the industry generally don't have the most mature or developed attitudes to sexuality.

Lord Ben of Plumstead, protector of the peas

I love the anonymity of the internet. Today I one of the writers I've been corresponding with gave me the title 'Dr.' when he was writing to me. Obviously it was just an academic habit, developed to avoid offending the tenured and tetchy, but still, it made me smile. Although I think if I'm going to affect a spurious honorific I'd go for 'Colonel' (which seems to be the military rank of choice for such purposes*).

Also today I learned that all British legislation starts with the following phrase:

BE IT ENACTED by the Queen’s most Excellent Majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, in this present Parliament assembled, and by the authority of the same, as follows:—

I'm not generally much for tradition, but I love that shit, especially the way that 'the lords spiritual and temporal' come before the commons, despite the fact that neither the lords (spiritual or otherwise) nor the queen have had anything to do with the drafting of laws in a long time.

-Ben

* See Here and Here

EDIT: In an strange little postscript to this, when I politely explained to the writer that I didn't have a Ph.D they told me that they didn't either. I completely forgot that I too, was just giving them the title Dr. at a guess.

feerta

If we shadows have offended,

Think but this, and all is mended,

That you have but slumber'd here

While these visions did appear.

And this weak and idle theme,

No more yielding but a dream,

Gentles, do not reprehend;

If you pardon, we will mend.

And, as I am an honest Puck,

If we have unearned luck

Now to 'scape the serpent's tongue,

We will make amends ere long;

Else the Puck a liar call:

So, good night unto you all.

Give me your hands, if we be friends,

And Robin shall restore amends.

Today I finished work at about 5:30, as usual, and wandered off to the tube station. Everything went pretty much as normal, I read my book and listened to my loud shouty music. The difference from every other Thursday came when I walked out of London Bridge station and walked down to the southbank to meet my family at the Globe. I'd completely forgotten about this until I was reminded this morning, but yes, tonight I went to see the Globe theatre company's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

I was a little apprehensive about this play because, whilst it's hard to go wrong with it, the last play I saw at the globe was really appallingly bad* and I was worried that they would mess this one up too. There was no need to worry, there was the correct number of actors to do the play correctly, with the actors playing Theseus/Oberon, Hippolyta/Titania, Puck/Philostrate, doubling up, as they should.

It was, most importantly, really fucking funny. I laughed so hard that my face still hurts whilst I'm writing this. I could go on for hours about why it was so good but, and this is I'll never be a critic of anything, I can't really evoke it in a way that would make any sense to someone who hadn't also seen it. Suffice to say that it was very good; fantastically acted, staged, and accompanied by beautiful music.

The setting in the globe really does add something to those plays I think. I love the way that you can clearly see the rest of the audience, seeing them creased up with laughter makes the jokes even funnier. I love the way that the actors wander in and out of the audience, directing lines and asides to certain figures in the crowd. I think, if nothing else, there's just something energetic and lively about it all that isn't there in normal theatres. When they want to get the audience's attention for the beginning of the play, for example, a man and a woman come out with massive drums and do a very impressive, and extremely loud, percussion set whilst the stragglers settle in. The whole thing just feels like fun somehow, you watch in attentive silence (when you aren't laughing) not because you're afraid of being tutted and frowned at, but because you are completely engrossed in the sound of unamplified voices declaiming centuries-old poetry over the sound of the modern city.

-Ben

*Imagine, if you will, a production of The Tempest played in its entirety by three actors. Who never changed costumes, and often played more than one part in each scene. Sometimes carrying on conversations with themselves. It was annoying, they were fantastic performances, but essentially just a bit of acting virtuosity for the benefit of those who know the play off by heart already.

Brainfarts

I've been waiting on some unifying train of thought to group some of the ideas that have been floating around in my head this week, but such a thing does not seem to be forthcoming, so I'm just going to have to write a strange page of babble. Such is life.

Something unusual happened to me today. This will be familiar to anyone who has visited London, or any other city, probably. You know when pigeons get scared by something and, after running away for a few seconds, remember that they have wings and launch themselves into the air in a panicky tangle, with their wings slapping together and breadcrumbs flying everywhere? Well, this is a pretty common occurrence, and I've often wondered, when dodging out of the way of some beady-eyed vector of disease, whether or not they'd actually hit you if you didn't duck. I mean, think about it, they're birds, they can see you're there and, stupid as they may seem, surely they have a reasonable about of skill at flying. right? Wrong. I decided to test this, and took a pigeon to the face today. Dry feathers and hard little bones, scraping across your cheek. It's not a nice experience, let me tell you.

Neither is the lingering smell.

Musicwise, this week I've mostly been listening to the unclassifiable strangeness that Matt sent me, and various folky people. Although I've been taking time out from this gruelling schedule to dance around like a wazzock to Metronomy (Their Kate Nash remix is especially fine) and singing along like a crazy person to Weezer on the tube.

I discovered a very funny website recently, which made me laugh until I made unhealthy gurgling sounds. It's called ship of fools and it reminds me of various family friends I remember from when I was younger. People like my grandfather who made me laugh, think, and didn't carry their faith around like a big stick. It's run by a couple of english christians who derive much of their humor from, er, the slightly stranger fringes of christianity (which are many and populous). As I'm obviously doing my strange slightly jesus flavoured thing (raised in liberal christian stylee, but don't really buy into the big beardy bloke argument) I thought I'd link The Drum Major Instinct which I read a month or two ago. It's a pretty long bit of writing to read online, and suffers a little from the fact that it wasn't written with the intention of being read but heard, but it's powerful stuff. It made me go and buy the complete non-fiction of James Baldwin, which I promised myself I'd get when I had the money, back when I was at uni.

For some reason I've started to feel the need to grow my Jazz mane back again. I don't think I will though, I don't think I can take spending 6 months looking like a complete moron. I'm also considering learning to play the upright bass for some reason. I think my money must be going to my head, seeing as I can barely play a fretless bass with cheater lines.

-Ben

Folksounds

I've been in a bit of a folk music mood recently, when the sun comes out I feel the need to put my bass down, grab an acoustic and go and play in the sunshine. This is someone I came across through his work with Roddy Woomble (yes, amazingly that is his real name) the singer from Idlewild who came over all folk a while back. Anyway, have a listen, and dig that double capo playing.

-Ben

Scanner

I was looking through an old notepad I found the other day and discovered these two things which I found interesting. The first is this - it's a sort of rosetta stone, you can look at all the words in handwriting that can be understood and decode my bizarre scrawl.

It'd be interesting to do a study, double-blinded, to see if people can guess the gender of a person from handwriting. I rather suspect that you could, there certainly seems to be a certain neatness in Lucy and Sarah's handwriting that isn't in the others.

The other scans are the the manual and warranty for the guitar I rebuilt for Ed.

It really is as complicated as it sounds, I couldn't make head or tail of my own circuits when I was at Ed's house recently. But he asked for a Frankenstein guitar, and I don't do half arsed when I've got my soldering iron out.

This is the Warranty, featuring a strangely incorrect signature.


Anyway. That's enough of that. I'm going to go and shower, because I smell even more than normal

-Ben

Chris TT

I first heard Chris TT years ago when someone played '100,000 turkeys' on the radio. I searched around, but couldn't get hold of any of his music, other than one track that I managed to find on napster. Yes. It was that long ago. He's kept going for the last few years, seemingly maintaining his low-profile cult status, occasionally releasing stuff on wee small independent record labels. Thanks to the advances of the internet, it's now possible to actually find some of his music online, and know when and where he's going to be playing next.

He plays a damn fine Stylophone solo as well.

Mr Ben Digs

Just the one link today, but I expect that it's more likely to actually get listened to if it's on its own.

Karine Polwart
Scottish folk singer songwriter, she writes good songs and sings them with a lovely voice. Sort of like an improved Kate Rusby, but from a bit further north. It occurs to me that now I've put that link to Kate Rusby's site in, I've got two links. It's more for reference than recommendation, though, so I don't think it counts.

I was rather dreading listening to those songs on Kate Rusby's page, because her song 'underneath the stars' was inextricably linked to the last time I saw my sixth-form girlfriend before I went off to uni. I just listened to it though, and it didn't have any effect on me whatsoever, which is encouraging, I think. It either proves that I'm capable of forgetting that which is long dead and buried, or that after sleeping in an empty bed for so long, I'm officially dead on the inside.

-Ben

Bad Medicine 2

I don't really have anything to add, other than this link.

which is interesting

eh?

I've not really got anything to say other than to drop a few links. The first one, which is a Youtube video, really needs to be watched. You should sit yourself down with some headphones and marvel at what I will confidently say is the worst performance you're likely to find on the internet. Really. It's that bad.

I've had the dubious honour of seeing these two perform live at various folkclubs around south east london, and believe it or not, she's actually worse on her own. Since seeing them the first time I now always carry a crosshead screwdriver, just in case I see them again and have to perforate my own eardrums. You wouldn't believe how far from the correct pitch someone can go. It really is an education, afterwards everything, even the shittiest of pop, seems like joyous musical beauty.

That said, they are quite funny, and seem to be nice people, fully aware of how bad they are, which makes me feel a little bad about finding them so completely unlistenable. I think they may have the makings of an internet meme.

The other two links are profiles of two interesting figures from american history. People who weren't great, or that bad, when compared to the gallery of famous historical figures*. Nonetheless people who achieved a certain notoriety in either their own time or ours for being, well, a bit nuts.

The first of these is an old favourite of mine, Mr John Harvey Kellogg, inventor of corn flakes and a man whose faults and neuroses woudln't fit on the back of a cereal packet, even if you wrote them really fucking small. His recommendation that girls should have their clitorises burned with carbolic acid to stop them from masturbating is a pretty representative example of his thinking.

The second is Reverend Rufus Wilmot Griswold who is notable for making a career out of being exceptionally unpleasant about other people's books, notably describing Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass as being filled with "a degrading, beastly sensuality, that is fast rotting the healthy core of all the social virtues." He also inexplicably devoted the last ten years of his life to posthumously slandering the reputation of Edgar Allan Poe in anonymous obituaries, snide articles, and largely fabricated memoirs.

*Which, it has to be said, includes mass murderers, warmongerers, slave traders and more rapists than you can count

Bad Medicine

I've been writing about sex a lot recently, which isn't nearly as exciting as you might think, in fact, my job often involves removing anything that's too interesting, if you get my drift. It's mostly been articles about every sexually transmitted infection under the sun, and how they can be caught from doing so little as thinking dirty thoughts about people. Which makes you think that you might have some of them... until you look at the pictures, scream and realise that no, you don't. The closest to interesting I've read was probably the really rather detailed article about the physiological phases of the female orgasm, which did nearly make me gnaw my own arm off (it has been a while).

Anyway, I'm aware that I'm probably talking shop, but what I actually wanted to write here was a rant about the pharmaceutical industry. I need to write it here, otherwise I'm going to end up putting it into the Female Sexual Dysfunction article. Which brings me round to my point.

After the roaring financial success of treatments for erectile dysfunction, like viagra, cialis, and levitra, drug companies across the world realised what quacks and everyone else realised long ago - sex sells. After tapping the male market (selling sexual enhancements to men is like shooting fish in a barrel) they decided to try and get a foothold in the other half of the population.

One problem, women don't have penises to go floppy or to be self conscious about.

But aha! They find a market - some surveys indicate that a large proportion of women, especially older women, really don't enjoy sex. They then tack on the same Freud derived bullshit that's been kicking around for years - about the clitoral orgasm being a juvenile stage and the vaginal orgasm being the sign of a grown woman, and shazam! You have an illness that you can peddle the cure to. Never mind the fact that a woman not enjoying penetrative sex is a symptom of nothing more than the fact that she doesn't enjoy penetrative sex, or that a lack of sexual desire is more easily explained by, er, I don't know an ugly and inconsiderate partner?

The worst part is that they don't even develop new drugs for it, the two that they are pushing hardest are Bupropion (an antidepressant that they're also marketing as a treatment for obesity and ADHD) and Viagra - which is supposed to make the clitoris bigger, which it does, but this is in turn supposed to make sex better, which it might, er, they think...

Mind you, there is a funny side. One of the drugs being researched as a possible cure was Bremelanotide, which did actually appear to be very effective (it isn't going to be marketed though, because it also raises your blood pressure dangerously high). The funny part is that bremelanotide was first developed as a tanning agent.

Which it did very well, but it also gave men spontaneous erections, and made both genders really fucking horny. Which possibly isn't the best thing for a day on the beach. Not ones to admit defeat, they just tried to develop it as a drug that made you horny (and also gave you a sexy tan, I guess).

-Ben

Iron and Wine

I was first shown the meaty goodness of Mr Sam Beam by Matt, to whom I am eternally grateful. With his new album he's gone electric, but oh man, it's so tasty. Like his backing band is made up of Four Tet ultra and Zombie Jeff Buckley.

Mhmm.

-Ben

We're a Winner

I decided to go to Oxford Street after work today, to see if there were any clothes there that I liked. I’ve been thinking I should get some new clothes for a while now, as only about half my clothes were bought in the last year or two – which means that half of my clothes are too big for me, and the other half look tatty because they’re the ones that I wear regularly. So anyway, I got to oxford circus station and had the usual couple of minutes of complete disorientation (oxford circus station has four exits, one on each corner of a junction, and no signs telling you what’s what – which means that you have no idea which way you’re going once you come out). I looked in a few shops, in a bored and unenthusiastic sort of way (shopping for clothes makes me depressed and cranky) and then came across a large police roadblock.

Some inconsiderate person, who, lets face it, had a much worse day than me, seemed to have ended up under a bus. So it goes. The police had about 100 metres of the road cordoned off and I didn’t much feel like rubbernecking, so I turned down the street on my right and decided to take a diversion through Soho.

When I reached the first junction I realised that I was on Berwick street, and remembered that there was a really good independent record shop about five minutes’ walk down the road. I spent a while looking around the place, trying to find CDs by the various artists I like who are too obscure to be available in the normal places (it occurs to me now that I didn’t think to look for the new Ted Leo album, silly me) I didn’t find any of them – they’re probably there, they just have a rather idiosyncratic filing system – but I did find ‘The shepherd’s Dog’ by Iron and Wine and a Curtis Mayfield best of, that had a few tracks that I know, as well as a load from Superfly (which I have). The Curtis Mayfield was only a fiver, so I figured I may as well.

I wandered around London for a while, not finding anything interesting – I’d pretty much given up on even trying to shop for clothes by this point, the motivation had evaporated – and made my way home; which took much longer than I was expecting, because of some kind of railway-related-knobbery.

When I finally got home, and put the Curtis Mayfield CD on the stereo I realised that the guy in the shop had put the wrong CD in the case when he was getting them from the stockroom. What I had was not the best of Curtis Mayfield, but the Best of The Impressions – the old soul group he used to be in.

I was a little miffed, but actually, this CD seems to be really good – excellent sunshine music, all pop-soul and funk, and the lyrics are imbued with that sort of exuberant optimism you get in soul music between the passing of the civil rights act and the assassination of Martin Luther King. It’s probably better summertime music than the Curtis Mayfield best of, which belongs to the darkness of the 1970s pusherman and ghettochild, despite its funkyness.

So yeah, thank you fate, fatality, and incompetence – I have discovered some more good music that I didn’t know before.

-Ben

EDIT: As ed pointed out, I now know it wasn't someone getting hit by a bus, but in fact someone being stabbed to death in a gang brawl outside McDonalds.

Oh yes. London is precisely that classy.

summer

The sun is shining, and it is really warm. Even though I can only see windows from a distance in my office, I'm still walking around with a big smile on my face. I find that people just get friendlier when the sun shines, strangers chat, and it becomes possible to distinguish women and men by more than just the colour of their coats and the length of their hair. The only downside is this year's strange fashion for sunglasses the size of hubcaps - I saw a girl today with sunglasses whose lenses actually reached down below her nose, and nearly up to her hairline. This is fair enough, Islington women have to have their expensive trinkets, but really, I saw a couple of blokes on the underground this morning who were wearing giant black sunglasses that looked like those ones that elderly blind men wear.

Which is obviously necessary, what with all the dazzling sunshine on the tube.

I have absolutely no idea where I'm going with this, my brain's just kind of surfing now*. I've been listening to Tapes 'n Tapes' new album for the last few days - tis very good, more noisy and loud than their last one. In the newly discovered music there's these people, who have written one good song, at least, and this geezer, who plays a damn fine bluestronica. There's also this lot, who have been around for years and probably aren't new to anyone but me. And, er, a strange rambling song-monologue by Noël Coward.

-Ben


*I've been accidentally quoting the streets a lot today, not sure why

warm breeze

It was the first warm and summery night of the year tonight - or at least the first that I've noticed. Seeing as I can pretty much walk normally now (although I do periodically get stabbing pains in my left Achilles tendon) I decided to go up to the top of the hill and watch the pretty lights flick on as the sky darkened. Sunsets can be pretty anywhere, you see, but a view like the one from the top of shooters hill is something uniquely urban, and I like that for some reason. During the day, the city is all pretty faceless, individual buildings are impossible to pick out unless they're really big, and therefore uninteresting. Once the sun sets, however, you see the city as a swathe of a million pinprick lights, each one a house, a window. The big blobs of yellowlit officeblocks, the glimpsed halogen blinks of cars flicking in and out of sight. It's like you can suddenly see all the life than you're too far out to notice by daylight.

I tried taking some pictures, but my camera can't take high enough resolution pictures, and I can't keep it steady enough to render each little dot of light, so they're no use to illustrate what I'm talking about. The one below, however, does sort of give an impression of night time in London.

tuesday misc.

My favourite joke

Two muffins in an oven. One turns to the other and says
“it’s a bit hot in here isn’t it”
The other shouts
“Holy fuck! A talking muffin!”

My dad’s Favourite Joke

A man is going on a charity skydive – he sits in the plane, nervous and worried to bejesus. Eventually the call comes, and he jumps out of the plane. He falls for a while, the roaring of the wind the only sound in his ears, until the time comes to pull the cord. He pulls. Nothing happens. He pulls again. Nothing happens. He pulls the cord for the reserve parachute, nothing happens.

“oh dear,” he thinks

Then he sees a man flying up through the sky towards him:
“excuse me,” he asks “do you know anything about parachutes?”
“no, sorry,” replies the other man “do you know anything about gas-fired boilers?”

-----

Today, I have been reading Jorge Luis Borges stories on the train. I recommend this to everyone – not necessarily the train part, though, it’s not particularly comfortable. They’re short, readable, and always make you feel brainy, rather than thick, which is my normal reaction to books with big words and small print. Fictions is what I’m reading at the moment, but The Book of Sand, and Labyrinths are just as good.

-Ben

When the tubetrain fills, the people, jammed tessellate, shift into the unfilled air. But some the fullclothed crush repels. They wait. For another train, with other spaces more their size. Fearing the face-in-armpit intimacy of overweight strangers.

The train rumbles off. Those left behind do not move away, because they know where other doors will be. They stand, with their music, or newspapers. Or else stare, bored, at the advert on the other side of the tracks - a picture that they’ve seen every morning for a month. The picture of the girl drinking the coffee. Fancy coffee. Tiny cup. A picture I cannot stand. Hennaswirling facepaint combines with the dust and grime of the underground: The postersize girl looks beaten and bruised, the sexy smirk on her face twisted into something other; bitterness and brittle toughness, the eye contact disquieting. I look at my feet.

Some mornings I’m spared her stare. I reach the platform just before another train. Those left behind by the last are still standing there under her eyes, in scattered little bunches, remnants of the crowd. Burialmounds of halfmelted snowmen in green fields.

-Ben

geetar

There's a little shop down a side-street near Angel station, I pass it on my way home from work everyday, that I bought a new guitar from the other day. It's one of those places, like X-Electrical in Canterbury, that sells pretty much anything that looks cool and falls into the category of 'audio-visual'. Unlike the place in canterbury though, the guy who runs it has a really good eye for bargain guitars. He buys instruments that are really nice, and often quite old, but, either because of where they were made, or their appearance, aren't likely to become expensive collectables anytime soon. He's got an especially fine collection of quite old Japanese made guitars.

I bought one of his old guitars on wednesday - a 1979 Ibanez Studio - for about the same price that a godawful 'beginners guitar' would cost me new. It looks like this.



it sounds like pretty.

-Ben

Facts

I was editing a book about Jamaica today, and in the course of my fact-checking started reading a few pages that discussed Jamaican Patois -- the 'Creole' language spoken to some degree, by a large number of Jamaicans.

Creole languages are fascinating, because at first glance they appear to be fairly simple, just a broken up dialect of standard English (or Spanish, or French.) The more you look at them, however, the more you realise just how little they have to do with English. It's not just the different words, or drastically different pronunciation -- it's the whole syntax, the construction of the language. Creole languages are essentially one language's words with another language's sentence construction. Jamaican Patois, for example, is widely believed to be a mixture of English vocabulary and syntax derived from various west African languages (like Twi, for example, from which it gets the word 'duppy', meaning ghost.)

The best demonstration of how different it is from standard English is by trying to understand the lyrics of Jamaican singers. Not Bob Marley, as generally he sang in slightly rasta-ised English, but someone like Pluto Shervington. 'It's indecipherability is just down to not getting the pronunciation and the recording', you think, but when you read the lyrics you realise that Patois bears about as much of a resemblance to standard English as Dutch, or Chaucer's English.

It's a good song though, about a rasta trying to buy some pork (which is not Ital)

---

Favourite fact of the day:

-- Cleveland was originally called Cleaveland, but the local newspaper couldn't fit the word on the front page masthead, so Cleveland it is.

Favourite book quote:

-- "As an industrial city, Cleveland had always experienced problems related to pollution. The city hit a low point, however, in the summer of 1969 when the Cuyahoga River, which flows through the city, caught fire."

-Ben

"God's Turban and Tutu! Do I need a dair of the hog!" - Henry Rawlinson

Snow

My friend Howie just posted up these pictures of the 'snow angel' made by Dave, Hannah, Howie and myself a few weeks back when london was gifted with unexpected snow. I'm reproducing without permission, because I'm a bastard like that.


And here's the dog, sculpted by me, Dave and Hannah. Which Hannah aptly named 'snowy'



In other news, the next few weeks are going to be unhealthy ones -- The unfortunate knackering that my Achilles tendons received from walking for miles in the snow mean that I can't walk very far, and the anti-inflammatories I've been given to make them better require me to eat stuff all the time, otherwise they make my stomach hurt (I know this because I've been prescribed them before.)

-Ben

Bleep Bleep Bleepity Bleeping Bleep!

I am a very, very angry person today.

I mentioned in a post last week that, after months of hobbling around I've finally got an explanation of what caused my left knee to completely fuck up (beyond complete repair, it seems). This wasn't a particularly huge cock in my face, as I don't like running much and can get by without doing it.

For the last week (I first noticed it on Monday) I've been suffering from some rather unpleasant feelings in my Achilles tendons - sort of ouchy and uncomfortable. I figured that this was caused by the boots I'd been wearing in the snow rubbing against the back of my ankles, went back to wearing my trainers and waited for it to go away.

It hasn't.

In fact, over the last few days it's got worse. A lot worse. Like 'I've lost most of the movement in my feet and can barely walk because of the searing pain' sort of worse. It took me about twice as long to walk from the station to my house this evening. Wincing and swearing and limping (with both legs, which isn't for beginners, let me tell you) every fucking metre. It feels like someone has replaced my tendons with a frayed bundle of dried out and crispy old elastic bands.

So there you go. I've been trying to get fit, but even walking, it seems, is completely out the question for me now. Perhaps I should just buy a pair of elasticated waistband jeans and be done with it.

Just... aagh... fuck you nature, fuck you right in the eye. I'm still getting thinner, more out of spite than anything else - I normally wouldn't bother putting this much effort into it, but this feels like a fight to me now and I'm not backing down.

-Ben

Antoine Dufour, Andy McKee, Craig D'Andrea

You would have thought that putting that much awesome in one room would cause some sort of fusion reaction, or at least a rift in the space time continuum.

-Ben

New Bass

After two week's wait, I collected my new bass from the workshop on friday afternoon. I'd been getting a little worried in those two weeks, concerned that perhaps it wasn't as wonderful an instrument as I initially thought. But no need for worry, it makes my old fretless feel and sound like a load of rubber bands on a plank of wood. It's amazing the way that a high quality instrument feels and sounds, they're just so much more lively - they respond to changes in attack much more easily and bring out subtleties in your playing that you never realised you had.


Phwoar! nice rack, etc.

-Ben

Bookthink

Today at work I had to compile a further reading list which included a section on American Fiction - by American authors, about America or American people. I had to include some ethnicky literature and was trying to avoid including texts that were commonly taught at school level (which was hampered rather by the fact that I didn't go to an American school).

Alexie, Sherman. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. New York: Grove Press, 2005.
Baldwin, James. Go Tell It on the Mountain. New York: Penguin Classics, 2001.
Carver, Raymond. Where I'm Calling From: The Selected Stories. New York: Vintage, 1989.
Doctorow, E L. The Book of Daniel. New York: Random House, 2007.
Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage, 1995
Faulkner, William. Light in August. New York: Vintage, 1991.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner, 1999.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. Young Goodman Brown and Other Tales. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Heller, Joseph. Catch-22. New York. Simon & Schuster, 1996.
James, Henry. Washington Square. New York: Penguin Classics, 2007.
Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York: Penguin Classics, 2003.
Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2002.
Miller, Arthur. The Crucible. New York: Penguin Classics, 2003.
Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. New York: Penguin Classics, 2002.
Sallinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye. New York: Penguin books, 1994.
Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Penguin, 2002.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five. New York: Dial Press, 1999.

With the exception of The Crucible and The Grapes of Wrath — Which were put in on the suggestion of others — these books are all from my bookshelves. I'm putting it up here because I know you're a fairly literate lot so feel free to add anything glaring I've missed out, or just mock me for my choices if you want.

Oh, and Another thing. I know that this will mean nothing at all to you, but I'm just going to say it anyway. The London Mayoral candidate most likely to get my vote in the next few weeks will be the first one to stand up and say this:

"Contrary to what my speeches have so far suggested, I am actually aware of the existence of London Boroughs south of the River Thames"

Seriously, that's all.

-Ben

Science

Just a little post to share this wondrous piece of scientific research with the world. I'm afraid it's in .Pdf format (which is always annoying if you aren't expecting it), but hey, it's a journal article available to the common people - so you can't be too picky.

Shazam!

Not much has really happened to me that's worth mentioning - well, not that's worth mentioning in any detail without photos to go with it, and I don't have a camera. Suffice to say I spent Sunday making a giant transvestite snowman in the park, and have a new custom Warwick Corvette fretless bass, which is so nice it makes me wish I could play it properly.

-Ben

(The paper was from Badscience)

Classification

In the world of cargo shipbuilding there are two classifications - Suezmax and Panamax - which describe a ship design (of no specific shape or construction) that fits within the maximum dimensions that can still fit through either the Panama or Suez ship canals) . This isn't the sort of information that most people bother to remember, I know, but it's a pair of pleasing words that could be useful in a life or death game of scrabble.

This came to mind today when I was standing on the tube, reading my paper, listening to my music, and observing the quite visible discomfort of many of those in the carriage with me. I propose a new standard, one that will definitely come into force when people can genetically modify their children.

Tubemax

This would be the maximum size a person can be and still travel in a reasonable level of comfort on the tube. I think it would be around my size - that is, around 6' and 180lbs - as any taller and your height would mean you'd be all crumpled up, and any fatter and you'd be all sweaty and uncool all the time.

Another thing - Supergrass rock hard.

-Ben

Knees

Today I had my long awaited appointment with the knee injury specialist at the local hospital. I went along a little worried about the fact that my knee isn’t particularly bothering me at the moment, and that perhaps the specialist would just dismiss it as some minor, passing thing, only to have it recur weeks later.

I got the bus to Queen Mary’s and sat around in the waiting room, lorded over by the ubiquitous NHS crone*. I was impressed by the way that, with the exception of a very pretty woman (who I tactfully refrained from staring at) I was the only one in the room who wasn’t either A: over 200 pounds or B: over 200 years old.

The consultation was relatively quick, I was poked, prodded and generally jiggled about for about ten minutes, punctuated by occasional

‘does it hurt when I do this?’

‘no’

‘does it hurt when I do this?’

‘yeahowfuckstopit’

And asides to the medical intern who was sitting in, like

‘note the abnormal range of movement of the joints’

‘get me some tea’

At the end of these ineffable medical manipulations he explained to me that the cause of my pain wasn’t a strained ligament like the GP had guessed, but something called Hyperlax ligaments – this means that my ligaments are all stretchy - way more than usual - which is why, amongst other things, I can bend my knees both ways. The side effect of this is that if I were to go running a lot (as I did) my ligaments can’t hold my joints in place properly. The clicking and pain in my knee was caused by damage to the cartilage and bone of the joint. Damage which is, apparently, permanent.

I’ve got to see a physiotherapist a few times over the next month or so, and I’m absolutely forbidden to do any running. Ever.

-Ben

*I’m not sure whether these women are unique to the English healthcare system, or if they’re an international thing - but whenever there is a desk in a medical establishment then the person behind that desk will be in their mid to late fifties, grey haired, and seem to be permanently irritated with you