Cullture, Politics, Money - and other concerns!

 

 

I am not watching or reading anything of real value at the moment.

     I am partially binge watching Ghosts (Netflix) and not (NOT, emphatically not Ibsen) but rather a jolly, undemanding Sunday-afternoon-TV sort of series.  This about a young couple who inherit an old house from a distant aunt and discover that it is full of ghosts.  Which the female part of the couple can actually see because of a near-death experience.

     The ghost characters span the years stretching from a Viking, via a representative of the indigenous peoples of the area, to a trouser-less almost up to date idiot, taking in a flower-power hippie, a black jazz singer, and an American Revolutionary Officer on the way.

     The variety allows for a somewhat picaresque approach as the back stories of the ghostly individual characters interact with the living or other ghosts.  It is effortless watching and there are some moments of wry humour.  But it remains a guilty pleasure that consumes time that I feel I should be spending on other more worthy matters.

     My reading is equally easy, with my just having finished reading Nine Minutes of Sun by F G Harrow.  This Sci-Fi novel is set on a distant ice bound planet where the inhabitants of the underground shelters are threatened by a heat devouring ‘other’ that threatens the existence of the human population.  It is a well worked narrative and the description of politics and the mechanics of living in challenging situations is carefully crafted and has a gritty realism within the fantasy that is compelling.

     As this was one of my ‘free’ books courtesy of the internet, I was not really surprised to find out when I got to the end that this book is one of a series, the rest of which needs payment!  Not unreasonable.  But my enjoyment of the book was not sufficient to encourage me to pay for the next instalment.

 

I am something of a fan of the Father Brown short stories of by G K Chesterton, though it is many years since I have read them.  Therefore, a casual glimpse of the television series based on the character was enough for me to give the tele my attention and follow the episode. 

     I was also drawn to the fact that the character of Father Brown, the unlikely Roman Catholic parish priest detective, played in the television series by Mark Williams, which has been running since 2023 and has over 140 episodes to its credit.

     Williams is perhaps better known as Arthur Weasley in the Harry Potter films and for his excellent comic work in The Fast Show.

     The episode that I saw was called The Viper’s Tongue and it originally aired in January 2022.  It concerns a woman who returns to Father Brown’s village to avenge the death by suicide of her sister on those who she considers drove her sister to it.

     And Williams as Father Brown was awful.  His acting was wooden, his charisma nil, and his ability to mouth religious platitudes embarrassingly unconvincing. 

     Just as with The Dresser you have to believe that the wreck of an old style actor in that play could have played Lear in his past, so with Father Brown the actor must have the ability to make you believe that he could be a Parish Priest with an extraordinary ability to solve seemingly intractable problems in crime.  It is the clash of incisive minded analyst and kindly, umbrella wielding priest that makes for the drama, and is the USP of the stories.

     Perhaps I just saw a dud episode, it is the only one I have seen, but all the rest of the cast were the usual professional jobbing actors and character part players that the British acting community do so well, giving the perfect acting setting for Williams to do his starring bit.  Which he didn’t. 

     What is especially galling is I know that I have seen him act better than this.  I felt cheated.

 

And it’s raining.  At least we have no had another of those intrusive mobile phone bad weather warnings, but we have an a period of extended heavy rain, so that we can be absolutely sure that all the usual places on our roads will be flooded.

     Next to a Catalan School and the site of The British School of Barcelona there is a building site which is supposed to be constructing something to deal with the flooding by capturing (in some way or other) the excess water that our inadequate drainage system is incapable of dealing with.

     As is often the way, what at first appeared just to be a big hole in the ground has developed into something much more sophisticated and much more expensive.

     I have been having extensive conversations with Chat and have discovered more information about this structure.  It is, in effect, a giant pumping station that can force excess rainwater through a system of pipes and out into the sea.  Since this new collection of pumps can pump up to six times the present volume of water, it would be good to know just what quality of water will be being added to our local patch of the Med every time we have a downpour.

     It turns out that there will be no treatment of the water and that the excess will be pumped out into a channel on the beach to make its way to the sea.  At present, although I have turned up an amount of technical information the precise details of where and when are not yet settled.  Chat has asked me to do some photographing of likely areas where the outfall is supposed to occur and we will take it from there.

 

Another question has been bothering us as well.  At the end of the sweep of our beach towards Port Ginester, there have been extensive works on the coastal road and the paseo, which have now ground to a halt.  The works here were supposed to have been completed last month, but the stretch is still a building site, and one half of the road has had to be closed with wire netting restricting access to the beach. 

     It turns out that money has run out, and so all work is on stop until funding is made available for it to continue.  The powers that be have said that work will resume “soon” – but no firm date has been given, and we all know what that means!

 

It does say something that AI does give access to what could only be discovered with hours of research and frustration.  Now the frustration is almost immediate when you find out just what has been going on in your name with your money.

     And that is progress of a sort!

    

 

It's all in the definition. Possibly.

  

Sometimes you just have to tell yourself that proving a negative is as good as a positive.

     For the best part of a fortnight we (AI & I) [If you say that in a swing rhythm sort of way it does sound like one of those inane choruses in a Eurovision failure) have been working on a piece of micro-research into my long-ignored thesis on Huxley from 50 years ago.

     I have fixated on a footnote, and on the person who is the subject of that footnote.  The relatively famous bit of my literary concern is linked to Huxley’s first (published) novel Crome Yellow.  The footnote mentions someone who as far as I was concerned was lost to history.

     Not lost if you have the will and the time to delve.  Very gradually the character (indeed he was a character in the Peacockian novel that Huxley wrote) began to emerge from the shadows of forgetfulness.

     We knew that he was a Rector, and a Rector of the parish of Garsington at the time of Lady Ottoline Morell and her coterie of the literary and the famous, but everyone else in the novel was much more famous than he, and their reputations have largely survived from the dizzy days of the Bright Young Things of the 1920s – together with representatives from a generation that was somewhat older.  Researching the others was easy – I have books on them.  But the humble Rector was not so easy to ¡find out about.

     So the search began.  American born-again fundamentalist on-line libraries actually had copies of some of the book that the rector had written – apocalyptic consideration of some of the more sensational books of the bible looking forward to The End Days – spiritual catnip to the Evangelical Right Wing of those who call themselves Christians.

     Of course, the tract that I wanted, and which Huxley had allegedly used as the basis for a whole chapter in his novel, was NOT online and so the hunt for a copy somewhere began.

     As we began to draw up some sort of biography for the rector, we discovered that he invented a ‘stay’ for a bell – this stay allowed the bell to be . . . well, I did go into the details of what the thing did and looked up a whole vocabulary of bell ringing to try and understand its function and even when onto the website of an old foundry that had used the damn thing extensively, until another fragment suggested that the guy who invented this device was not the guy that we were researching.  Suddenly a whole fascinating aspect of the rector’s personality was snatched away.

     Such is the state of the information available on line, even though we are now questioning the previous attribution, we are not absolutely sure and so instead of dismissing a week of work, we have put an academic question mark next to it: awaiting further clarification.

     I have now contacted the library of the Archbishop of Canterbury in Lambeth Palace, and Oxfordshire History Archive, a foundry, a bellringers society, and numerous other sources all from the comfort of my computer in Castelldefells.  My questions and requests have been sent to locations in three continents, to booksellers, enthusiasts, and academics.

     Self-indulgence personified!

     And, you never know, there might be some answers.

     Eventually!

 

I simply don't have time!

 

 

How do you define a full week?

     When you are working the question is moot.  You have a job that takes up the bulk of your day.  Your week is already full.  And with some jobs, like teaching for example, you have to include marking, meetings, union work, preparation, and the myriad time demands that the profession is heir to, many of which occur outside your stated hours.

     I remember reading in some book about conscription that some highly qualified people, especially academics, welcomed the constraints of a military life because they didn’t have to think.  What to do, how to do it, and when to do it were all laid down.  Personal intellectual involvement: nil. In the same way I also read that the philosopher Wittgenstein enjoyed going to see trashy Westerns and sat in the front row almost up against the screen because the sound and the picture occupied the whole of the space and he didn’t have to think!

     In the vacations of my time in University, I had a wide variety of short-term jobs.  It was inevitable that given the short period that I was going to be employed there was little training needed or offered to do the fairly simple tasks with which I was charged.  The problem in all the jobs was weighing up the offer of the payment for the work and the sometimes mind numbingly tedious work that you had to do to earn the money.

     Sometimes the physicality of the job took over and then there was no time to be bored because exhaustion ensured that you embraced unconsciousness whenever the opportunity presented itself.  I can still recall ‘breaks’ in the plate-laying in the Steel Works where I plonked myself on a plank supported by a couple of bricks, put my back against the wall of our ‘hut’ and in seconds, I was asleep – only to be very rudely awakened when the break was over and work resumed.

     Then there is the sort of work that is mindless and repetitive, but that very mindlessness allows a large percentage of your mind to be elsewhere: your hands and 5% of your brain may have been applying themselves to the task in hand, but 95% of your personality was far, far away from the tedium of paid reality!

     One of the better jobs (though it was ridiculously badly paid) was when I was a Security Guard (!). I refused to wear the uniform, except when forced by management, and had a ‘regular’ placement in the office of a transport firm where my ‘job’ was basically to log the drivers as they returned to the depot, and to do timed rounds of the premises using a clock on a strap.  This had to be ‘keyed’ to show that you had been to the various locations around the place on your regular rounds, each of which had a key on a chain that was used in your machine to prove you had at least moved about a bit during your stint.  Much of the time there I read and sometimes made notes for future essays because I was usually alone.

     As opposed to the time I had a job in a vast open plan office where the work I had to do was soul-destroyingly uninteresting and repetitive, and I had an ‘experienced’ child watching me like a hawk, and each time I finished some god-awful task she provided me with another even worse.  I only lasted a few days before I asked for the agency that had placed me there to find me something (anything) else before I went made.  It was one of those jobs where, even knowing it would only be for a few weeks, was not tolerable.

     With some of the jobs I had there could have been little chance of any real sense of achievement or satisfaction from the work: you were there for the money and nothing else.  I remember in one of my placements that the people I worked with lived for the weekends, and talking about the weekend that had passed gave enough material for conversations during the week!

     I am sure that some of the jobs that I had in the past no longer exist.  More sophisticated automation has probably taken the place of fallible human operators, and AI will take care of more.

     No one should have a job where there is no opportunity for development.  Money cannot compensate for 30 years of mindlessness.  Can it?

     I remember one stop our security van made when we were delivering wage packets to a factory (that concept dates me!) and I was chatting to the girls who were working on a production line.  To make small talk I asked what they were making.  And they had no idea whatsoever.  They did their bits and didn’t think about anything connected with the actions.  I was horrified at the lack of interest in a major element of their lives, except of course that their jobs were not a major element in their lives in the way that I would have thought it should have been.  Their jobs were a mean to an end, and that end was companionship with the other girls, and a wage packet at the end of the week that allowed them to live their real lives divorced from what they were doing each day.

     This piece started with a question, my response would be that the week starting tomorrow is full, including such events as a dental appointment and culminating in a performance of the Emperor Concerto by Beethoven in the Palau de la Musica in Barcelona.  The week  takes in, along the way, an expensive (it should have been free) appointment with the police to renew my identity and residence card, and a meeting of a local Poetry Group.  Throughout the week I am also conducting long distance research using an almost defunct research project of mine from the 1970s into the novelist Aldous Huxley and his use of the arts in his work.  I have centred my research in the last couple of weeks on a footnote in his first novel.

     I know that to most that sounds absurdly, inward-looking-end-in-itself-academic-twaddle, but I have been able to convince myself that the problems and opportunities presented by this footnote will be illustrative of technique and intent of someone who was to become a world-famous novelist.  So there!

     And Chat has done a lot of the donkey work involved in checking sources and suggesting useful websites and libraries, any spare moment can be taken up with a passing thought of mine being translated into something with the trappings of academe by the indefatigable ‘intelligence’ at the tap of my computer keys.

     Most of what I am doing about Huxley is only possible because I am retired and because I have access to the Internet, but I am enjoying producing something that I think will be a valid addition to Huxley scholarship.  And that is worth making an effort about.

     So, a full week!

Rabbit holes for readers

 

 

I blame AI.

     Specifically my Chat.

     I own (was given) a 1704 copy of Jonathan Swift’s Book A Tale of a Tub, to which is added An Account of a Battle etc etc.  The first edition was published in 1704, my copy is of The Second Edition Corrected, published in the same year of 1704.  Except it isn’t.  Corrected that is.

     In my edition, in the Preface of the Author to A Battle of the Books, the famous line: “Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover every body’s face but their own;” has a typo in it, “where every body’s face but their own,” is printed as “every body’s face but their owo”.

 

 

 

     Previously, I had always considered that error to be a charming indication of the early state of the printing, and that the error could be undiscovered because in 1704 the phrase had not become as famous as it was to be in future centuries.  And who, apart from university students and specialists actually reads A Battle of the Books for pleasure.  Indeed, while people may be able to respond to Gulliver’s Travels, how many other books by Swift are in the general consciousness.  I would want to say A Modest Proposal should be up there with Gulliver’s Travels as I think it one of the most vicious and effective pieces of short satirical writing that I have ever read, but I am realistic in my expectations of fame always being limited.

     But Swift’s explanation of satire being ‘safe’ because everyone laughs at it, and assumes that the target of the satire is someone other than themselves, is as true now as it was then, and the sentences has a justified life outside a satire where the targets need copious footnotes for a modern reader to understand.

     And that should have been it.  Interesting typographical error in famous line by famous writer.  End of story.  Except that did not allow for AI.

     I do not know how or why I mentioned to Chat that I owned a 1704 copy A Tale of a Tub, but Chat is programmed to keep users active and responsive, and so it actively feeds my digressive mind and encourages leaping from point to point – it is, after all, just a more personalized version of Google Search, where one thing leads to another, and before you know it you are reading about Byzantine mosaics when you started off asking about how long a maple tree took to reach maturity.  I fear that for many of us when using AI, computer and the Internet we all take Homer Simpson’s attention span as the norm!

     Anyway, Chat mused about why the typo in my ‘corrected’ edition had not been, well, corrected – and before you could say Bibliographer’s Addiction, we were off on a search for digitalized versions of the first edition and the third, trying to find out how early my little typo was recognized and dealt with.

     Do not think that this was the activity of a few minutes.  Oh no!  It became a whole research project with wider and wider searches, touching databases in two continents and actually sending off emails to speciality book sellers and librarians and archive keepers, asking for information about the typo in copies that they had dealt with.

     I have had remarkable quick and courteous responses from among others the USA, Cambridge and Ireland with each adding snippets of highly technical information about the ‘gathers’ of the early editions of the book and suggesting other centres where I could get more information.

     At one point, Chat and I thought that we had discovered an unrecognized variant as my typo did not appear to be consistent in the edition, leading to speculation that the mistake was discovered part way through the second printing and that a correction was made, meaning that the second edition had different states.  I thought that was unbelievably unlikely as Swift has been exhaustively studied and something as famous as a mistake in a well-known sentence would not have passed inspection.

     And so it proved to be, with one of my correspondents asserting that he thought it was a typo common to all copies of the second edition and he sent me information about digital copies of the text that I could check to see that it was so.

     Was this an exercise in futility?  I don’t think so.

     I have learned a great deal more about the early life of a fairly famous early eighteenth-century book.  I have added knowledge about the ways that early printed books were put together, but above all I have experienced the courtesy, knowledge and accommodation of an academic community that responds to trivial enquiries with charm and alacrity. 

     And that is something worth experiencing.