The music of the warming spheres

So, when I was coaxed out of the house last night, little did I know I’d end up discussing Borat with climate change guru Mark Lynas in a village pub.

It was after a talk he gave in the same village hall (Ramsden) where I went to a previous talk on climate change (which I wrote about here and here). Lynas is an excellent speaker and very accomplished at effortlessly marshalling bucketloads of data, as well as fielding complex questions without pause. He provides an admirably sane view of the whole issue, very much from the perspective of a scientist rather than a campaigner. My only worry is that he is over-optimistic about human psychology, ie a reliance on co-operation between nations (though I don’t really doubt that his solutions are at least possible). To me the issue smacks heavily of the prisoner’s dilemma, and the evidence from studies of that doesn’t suggest co-operation is a likely strategy for people in a world where fighting habitually takes precedence over common sense.

He’s also an entertainingly sarcastic sod, and it was fun talking with him. (I’ve only just discovered he was two years below me at Edinburgh, too). My lingering memory of the evening – other than the talk itself – is of the crazy, beer-filled notion of turning his book Six Degrees (a documentary version is being broadcast by National Geographic next week) into a musical. I can’t help thinking about it. It’s horrible, but it could almost work. Mark, get your people to talk to my people. Or, better, get them to sing.

Epi phenomena – do doo de do do

So, I’ve finally finished Hofstadter’s I am a Strange Loop. I is a strange loop. I am a strange loop.

This is something of an achievement for me as it’s the first time I’ve actually read all of one of his books – I’ve read most of Gödel Escher Bach, Metamagical Themas and Le Ton Beau de Marot, but never quite all of ’em. Anyway, that’s enough italics for now.

It’s a funny sort of book – essentially it rehashes the core argument of GEB, and forms a defence of epiphenomenalism, which is not exactly a new position nowadays (and GEB itself was written in the late 70s). It’s as much an ‘intellectual autobiography’ as anything, bringing in many personal tales, particularly the death of his wife, albeit with a big and slightly confusing chunk in the middle about Gödel’s revolutionary overturning of Bertrand Russell’s endeavours to bolster the foundations of mathematics. DRH makes the same points over and over again, sometimes superfluously: that we work at the abstract level of patterns and defining physical phenomena in terms of tiny little particles is no hope in our quest to understand ourselves – but that ‘we’ emerge from those nonetheless; and that consciousness is a ‘strange loop’ of self-reference inevitable when a pattern-obsessed organism has a sufficiently broad range of categories identifiable by it.

Although this is far from as dazzling a book as GEB, and is really an oldish man now saying ‘yes, but you weren’t listening the first time’, the way he tells things – anecdotes, analogies, allegories – is what makes him so much more interesting than most ‘philosophers’. (Though next time the publishers really ought to stop him thinking he can design the book as well – the pictures in here are pretty bad.)

Let’s hope he doesn’t get interviewed by Jim Naughtie, though, who was bumbling his way through whether a restored Cutty Sark is still the real one this morning…

Stripped of charm

Genealogy is always a double-edged sword. Within minutes of being entertained to find that one set of my great-great-great-grandparents ran a canalside pub in Middlesex… I discovered that it’s now a strip joint next to an industrial estate.

Clare as mud

Last year I observed that I don’t often read the same author one book after another – the exception was Iain Sinclair (see here and here). He’s the exception again. Hot on the heels of Edge of the Orison I’ve felt compelled to read Rodinsky’s Room (co-written with Rachel Lichtenstein).

The first follows John Clare’s ‘journey out of Essex’ – ie his fugue from an asylum at High Beach in 1841, walking penniless, driven by lost (and unregainable) love, the 80 miles to his village north of Peterborough. I can’t remember feeling so inspired and gripped by a book in recent times, such that I’ve fixed anyone who’ll listen (or won’t) with an ancient mariner’s stare and proceeded to prate about it. Sinclair’s form, for me at least, gets ever better with each new non-fiction book he writes – while his fiction (though I probably will tackle Dining on Stones when I have the stomach) gets more unwieldy and unfathomable.

The Clare book is self-indulgent at times, especially with a fruitless quest revolving around his wife’s genealogy, but I loved it throughout nonetheless – the usual blend of coruscating sideswipes at modern blandness, fused with elegiac tones and swathed in his psychogeographic obsession with making connections: Sinclair is the real Dirk Gently.

I’m still in media res with the Rodinsky book – more on that some time soon.

I was there

A trip to the Design Museum, for the splendid You Are Here exhibition. A festival for geekish poring. Along with the inevitable Tube map delights, highlights for me included:
– Adrian Frutiger’s Symbols and Signs – Explorations foldout chart
– The works of Richard Saul Wurman, Otto Neurath (hurrah! my old chum Basic English) and Annegrete Moelhave
– John Adams’ 1679 map of road distances between UK towns and villages
– Joseph Priestley’s invention of “charts of biography”
– the unlabelled maps comparing metro networks across the world

Much Googling to be done, frankly, and much else of interest besides, but:
(a) no catalogue!!
(b) as J pointed out, er, didn’t the design of the exhibition (not to mention the dreadful Design Museum website as H has already observed) somewhat let down the premise. A major missed opportunity, given that the structure of the exhibition itself was so blurred.

I also discovered the works of Edward Tufte, which I shall be tracking down, especially his essay about PowerPoint being the death of reason, a long-cherished philosophy of mine.

Yes yes, I kneau that

On Friday, I finally got to see The Life and Death of Peter Sellers.

If you don’t know, I’m a Peter Sellers nut, and probably have about 15 of his films on video or DVD (plenty more to go…), plus lots of audio. I openly acknowledge that (a) a huge percentage of his output, or his directors’ output perhaps, was dreck (b) he was a complete shit of a person. But.

In many ways it’s a good film, though by no means a great one. Good things, of course, include a very plucky performance by Geoffrey Rush, and a great supporting cast, and some game quirks such as the bits where various people in Sellers’ life transmute into Rush (an attempt to capture the spirit of all those films where Sellers, and Alec Guinness (his hero) before him, played numerous roles) and talk to camera. But.

Rush frequently captures the mannerisms of Sellers well, and if you squint, you can see the man. He also has a good pop at some silly voices, but at heart I think he’s the wrong man for this job (who the right man is, I don’t know, or modesty forbids ho ho). His normal voice, for one thing, is far too deep and growly – Sellers had a very hard voice to capture, and distinctive largely for its nondescript quality (with an affected twang of the d?racin?), in the same way that the ‘ordinary’ voice of someone like Rory Bremner is, well, ordinary. I could never quite let go of it being Rush, alas (plus no amount of prosthesis can disguise Rush’s glaciated face).

And the mugging to camera – why? If you’re going to have an element like that in your film, surely the point is to ‘stylise’ the subject’s life in some way, with some ‘theory’ to interpret their behaviour. No such theory was ever offered, really, even in the relationship with his mother Peg, which was only sketched with the broadest brush. Sellers’ family music hall background was ignored.

It seems the whole aim of this film (it must have been secretly backed by bitter Blake Edwards) was simply to say ‘Peter Sellers was a complete shit’. It’s absolutely true that he treated everyone in his life badly in one way or another, but the film never attempts to engage in any depth with why this might be, and the idea of him as a ‘child-man’ is nodded at without any sense of making it a real way to think of him. As ever, the real Peter Sellers remains elusive.

What saddens me most, really, is that for all its accuracy in biography and the extreme and appalling moments of selfishness in his life, the film fails to capture the positive side of him at all. It showed audiences smiling happily at his performances, but failed to make its own audience smile as they could have done. There is no sense in which this film is a celebration of Sellers’ remarkable talent.

So, er, anyway. I think it *is* a good film, but clearly created in a spirit of loathing for its subject. Contrast Man in the Moon, another biopic of an intensely irritating, selfish and demanding comedian, which nevertheless makes you go away with sympathy and a smile.

But for general readers, the entertainment lay in the fact that the sound went two-thirds of the way through watching it, in Oxford’s remarkable Ultimate Picture Palace, closely followed by the picture, leaving 12 people (count ’em) looking around the auditorium, at each other, and at glimpses of a white haired old gent in the projection room, somewhat baffled. The owner of the cinema has completely disappeared. I took the opportunity to annoy H with a couple of public Clouseau gags, and shone my bike light up at the projection room. Eventually the owner appeared and the film was rewound to the wrong place, then back to the right place for us to watch loads of it again, and eventually we got to see all of it, if not quite in the order intended. Marvellous.

Ghosts

I’m three-quarters of the way through John Crowley’s Aegypt, kindly lent by DM after literally years of trying to find a copy. I was lukewarm to start with but now am more and more enthralled by its quiet subtlety. I particularly approve of the way so far it has reconciled a magical realist viewpoint with a secular materialism (not to mention all the stuff about my old chums John Dee and Giordano Bruno). As do many things, it reminds me of my favourite quote from Coleridge who, when asked if he believed in ghosts, replied ‘No madam, I have seen far too many myself.”

Manifesto

The Old Man’s Road

Across the Great Schism, through our whole landscape
Ignoring God’s vicar and God’s ape

Under their noses, unsuspected
The Old Man’s road runs where it did.

When a light subsoil, a simple ore
Where still in vogue true to his wherefore

By stiles, gates, hedgegaps it goes
Over ploughlands, woodlands, cow meadows

Past shrines to a cosmological myth
No heretic today would be caught dead with

Near hilltop rings that were so safe then
Now easily scaled by small children

Shepherds use bits in the high mountains
Hamlets use stretches for lovers’ lanes

then through cities threads its odd way
Now with gutters, a thieves’ ally

Now with green lamp-posts and white curb
The smart crescent of a high toned suburb

Giving wide berth to a new cathedral
Running smack through a new town hall

Unlookable for by logic or by guess
Yet some strike it and are struck fearless

No like can know it, but no life
that sticks to this course can be made captive

And those that know it are not stopped
at borders by some theocrat.

WH Auden

Kilvert’s diary

The Rev Francis Kilvert’s diary is astonishingly beautiful to read, lyrical, charming, earthy and humane. Here are a few small bits that have struck me so far for one reason or another.

1. 29/03/1870
“Turned aside into the meadow to look at the great stone of Cross Ffordd… I suppose no one will ever know now what the grey silent mysterious witness means, or why it was set there. Perhaps it could tell some strange wild tales and many generations have flowed and ebbed around it. There is something very solemn about these great solitary stones which stand about the country, monuments of some one or something, but the memory has perished and the history is forgotten.”

Not his poetic best by any means, but this passage epitomises the rare pagan sensibility that Kilvert has, given that he is an Anglican priest. Standing stones, stone circles, cromlechs and so on are all an abiding fascination for me, and I will always go well out of my way if I have a chance to find them. I think when reading these lines particularly of one in Northumberland M. and I found last year on our valedictory excursion before his departure to America. I have some very satisfying pictures of it (which, along with others, I am forever intending to submit to the two major megalith websites). In a way, as Kilvert suggests, perhaps this fascination is a very simple, almost trite one – and he certainly encapsulates the sentiment far more successfully in one paragraph than M Scott Peck does in his entire book, In Search of Stones, which I read wanting to like it, and enjoyed the premise, but the reality was constantly marred by his ego, not to mention his dim knowledge of Britain.

2. 05/04/1870
“It does seem very odd at this age of the world in the latter part of the 19th century to see monks gravely wearing such dresses and at work in them in broad day. One could not help thinking how much more sensible and really religious was the dress and occupation of the masons [ie stonemasons working nearby] and of the hearty healthy girl washing at the Chapel House, living naturally in the world and taking their share of its work, cares and pleasures, than the morbid unnatural life of these monks going back into the errors of the dark ages and shutting themselves up from the world to pray for the world.”

Kilvert writes this while visiting the work at Capel-y-Ffin, where the eminence gris ‘Father Ignatius’ attempted to revive monasticism, just a mile away from the ruins of Llanthony Priory. This passage (and the pages around it) mean a lot to more for a whole amalgam of reasons: H. and I visited Capel-y-Ffin itself on a cycling holiday only last year, and I have a picture painted by her father of the chapel in my cottage (I also went to Llanthony as a child with my parents, and have a photograph of them there I am fond of); and I happened to read this very passage to H. at random recently, just when I was reading Iain Sinclair’s novel Landor’s Tower which is partly about the same area – Sinclair quotes this very passage; also, more generally, I have perhaps a slightly unreasonable distaste for the concept of monks and nuns in general – which perhaps I’ll reflect on another time – and Kilvert’s down-to-earth response would echo precisely my own.

3. 07/04/1870
“I had the satisfaction of managing to walk from Hay to Clyro by the fields without meeting a single person, always a great triumph to me and a subject for warm self-congratulation for I have a peculiar dislike to meeting people, and a peculiar liking for a deserted road.”

I wouldn’t go quite as far as that myself, but I do appreciate what he means, and I suspect most walkers would (with the exception of the Goretexed flocks of Ramblers).

Many more things deserve comment, but I’m exhausted from travelling, working and then cycling this evening, so will stop shortly.

Cycling’s so much a part of all this for me. I bought a new bike today, much more comfortable for exploring country lanes, and it thrills me to meander down them, gratuitous sprays of cow parsley in the fecund hedges either side of the roads around Upton Scudamore. I don’t think there’s anything that has ever given me quite the same sense of freedom as cycling does. But now: rest.

Halt – who goes there?

Have just discovered John Betjeman wrote a poem about my area, immortalising the Warminster launderette. Though it has to be said it’s dreadful:

Dilton Marsh Halt

Was it worth keeping the Halt open,
We thought as we looked at the sky
Red through the spread of the cedar-tree,
With the evening train gone by?

Yes, we said, for in summer the anglers use it,
Two and sometimes three
Will bring their catches of rods and poles and perches
To Westbury, home for tea.

There isn’t a porter. The platform is made of sleepers.
The guard of the last train puts out the light
And high over lorries and cattle the Halt unwinking
Waits through the Wiltshire night.

O housewife safe in the comprehensive churning
Of the Warminster launderette!
O husband down at the depot with car in car-park!
The Halt is waiting yet.

And when all the horrible roads are finally done for,
And there’s no more petrol left in the world to burn,
Here to the Halt from Salisbury and from Bristol
Steam trains will return.