The one that got away

The trolley behind the wire mentioned at reference 1. As I say there, easy enough to recover with the pioneering tools & skills still there from my scouting days - the scout troop to which I belonged - the 5th Cambridge - being rather well equipped in that department.

The telphone struggles to get the trolley into focus, masked as it is by the substantial fence (although not so substantial that I would want to put much weight on it). I suppose one needs content intelligence of a sort which has not even made it to PhotoShop yet to bring the trolley out from behind the fence: perhaps it would have been simpler to simply make a sketch.

Which reminds of a whole, hitherto hidden, world out there that I discovered yesterday called non photorealistic rendering (NPR), à propos of the fake Rembrandt which Microsoft have produced with their computer. A whole world which is pulsing with the life of thousands of geeks beavering away. From whom, for some reason, I associate to the dwarfs beavering away under their mountain to knock out presentable armour & accountrements for their lord and master.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/trolley-42.html.

Cock fighting

Using google to look for the cockpit in the English market town yesterday (see reference 2), the best I could do was a cockpit in Wales, relocated in the 1960's to a museum. So clearly an opportunity to take another look at the Digital Public Library of America (see reference 1), not looked at for a little while now.

Without fuss, it turns up 47 images, 10 texts and 1 film. I include one of the images left. I have no idea why this particular chair is called a cock fighting chair, although it does come from a time before cock fighting had been made illegal here. It is however a fairly grand chair, so if it did come from a cockpit, clearly the sport of gentry, if not of kings.

Next up is 'Courage, the story of modern cock-fighting' by Tim Pridgen, published by Little Brown in Boston in 1938. Running to 250 or so pages and 25 or so illustrations. The property of Cornell University Library and scanned by Google. Available to read but not to download (at least not in entirety) online. A book which appears to have been written at a time when cock fighting was flourishing in the US and when it was OK to call a fighting cock 'Nigger Blue' - as in: 'the Nigger Blue's hackles went up, a great fluffy collar around his neck. And the Mug's. Their necks went out like snakes striking, bills open, eyes gleaming. There was a click when their bills met. Then the pitters swung back to their lines, searching their cocks' dubbed combs and eyes...'.

There is also talk which reminds me of the stuff that lovers of bull fights put out, about how it is not really a cruel or vicious sport, more an art form. An art form for which cocks were designed and intended. It is their destiny. The author goes so far as to include a picture with the title 'a cock asks for no better death than with his steels on ...'. A steel being, I think, a sort of spur extension, intended to give greater reach and penetration.

I do not find it particularly easy to read online, although the search feature is helpful, but if I had been a member of a participating organisation, maybe the download pdf button would have been enabled.

Then we have a picture of a cockpit in England, sadly not the one I am looking for, rather the Royal Cockpit, once to be found in Birdcage Walk, alongside St James's Park in London.

And while I think cock fighting has been illegal in the US for years, we have a picture from the late lamented Los Angeles Herald-Examiner from 1980, with title: 'Deputies display one of the more than 70 fighting cocks seized yesterday'.

I read about the Bellyse family of Cheshire, a family which has included several famous cockers (as followers of the sport were then known). But nothing about any cockpit which I might have come across.

All in all an entertaining excursion into the world of cockers. A splendid resource for all kinds of people, not least for school teachers trying to stir up a bit of interest in the world outside of Grand Theft Auto.

Reference 1: http://dp.la/. They must have pull to wangle an address as short as that!

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/road-notes.html.

Ducks

A short while ago, a pair of ducks arrived on our back lawn and were eyeing up our three small ponds, two of which have just about enough free water for them to float in. And given the numbers of cats and foxes hereabouts, not really a suitable place to raise a family, if that was what they had in mind. Perhaps they had been ejected from the rather larger pond at Stamford Green by the there resident swans and geese.

They did not appear to be bothered by the full sized model duck standing erect by the side of one of the ponds, but they were seen off a few minutes later by our here resident magpies.

Caretaker

Last Saturday to a matinée performance of 'The Caretaker' at the Old Vic.

Kicked off with a picnic in the little park across the road from the theatre. Quite busy with winos on one side and metros on the other. Plus a scaled down version of the Diana memorial in Hyde Park - all the better for being less complicated. Possibly helped by not being designed by a committee in the full glare of the then Diana obsessed media.

Old Vic fairly full with a good mixed crowd, young and old. Maybe the odd off-duty luvvie, but no confirmed sightings.

Very good set, starting off roof in the winter rain and moving on into fetid attic. I am reminded now of the penchant of Victorian audiences for elaborate stagings, with these stagings being as, if not more important than the play. But BH was a tad unhappy with the mattresses on view which she thought should have been horse-hair rather than interior sprung. The BBC of old would have more careful about such details.

Very good music and I suspected whoever wrote it of having been familiar with the Shostakovitch preludes. For my copy see reference 1.

Very good cast, with all three characters doing well. One splendid bit, for example, when Spall was sprawled in the middle of the set, holding forth from an easy chair while wearing a fancy smoking jacket over his rags.

But the play itself, despite the humour & slapstick, I found rather depressing. Perhaps being the product of the dreary & depressed years after the second world war, which I only just missed, the play was too realistic. I remember all about squalid bedsits, boarding houses and the odd people that often wound up in them - and don't need to be reminded. Perhaps rather as FIL, having had the mending of plenty of smashed minds and bodies during that war, was not keen on blood & gore on television. I was much happier with the more fantastic 'Waiting for Godot' - with, incidentally, the costs of the production noticed at reference 2 probably being a very small fraction of those of this one.

Raining on exit, so we decided on home cooking rather than casting about for a bit of metro cooking. And no refreshments in the 'Duke of Sussex' (the Truman, Hanbury and Buxton people), a pub that I used to like, as it was being refurbished. Will it still be a pub when the builders and interior designers have finished with it?

A serious theatre goer with whom we chatted on the way home told us that she had been to several productions of 'The Caretaker', other than this one, perhaps as many as four or five over the years, some of which she recalled as being a lot darker than this one, with all its slapstick. I wonder if I would have liked them any better?

Not inclined to go to this production again, but maybe I would go to another, should one come around.

Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=preludes+guildford.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/godot-waiting-for-1.html.

Road notes

Briefly warm enough to sit outside this afternoon.

One goldfinch, two sparrows (uncommon in our garden), sundry great tits, starlings, parakeets and magpies. A pair of pigeons going through some elaborate performance involving a lot of prancing, jumping and flapping.

In the road a skylark, that is to say what looks like a cross between a minibus and a camper van, and which brings in the Poles who are turning the bungalow opposite into a house disguised as a bungalow. Lots of steel getting into the new roof, and into quite a lot of other extensions going up round about - presumably the upside of the Chinese dumping lots of cheap steel on us.

In the next road a drive contractor who has moved into fencing. For a chap who sounds more like a gangmaster than a builder - this crew are Poles, which he certainly is not - he turns in a pretty good job, having done quite a lot of drives around here over the past year or so. Fence looks pretty good too.

PS: although the van has 'skylark' clearly & professionally written on the side, google seems to know nothing about such a thing. Most odd. I must take a closer look when it comes back in the morning.

Closer look now taken. Plenty of mattresses, sleeping bags, spare clothes and such like in the back. Perhaps they share camping grounds with one of the various travelling groups who have set up around Epsom. And while I am on the subject, the chickens attached to those at reference 1, now look to me as if they are fighting cocks, not for the production of the matinal boiled eggs at all. I suppose it is all a bit rough and ready, out in a field, with no proper cockpit - like the handsome brick one we once came across in a market town, somewhere in the heart of England. Perhaps the name of the town will come back to me at some point. Google seems to be much more interested in Jamaica.

But the van itself is now tracked down in google. Still no skylarks, but according to wikipedia: 'the LDV Convoy is a panel van that was manufactured by LDV Limited between 1996 and 2006. The Convoy was a development of the Leyland DAF 400 Series, which in turn was based on the Freight Rover 300 Series. The Convoy and its predecessors were the larger versions of the LDV Pilot (and its predecessors), all of which were based on the Leyland Sherpa series of vans that was first developed in 1974, sharing some components with even earlier models...'. Not in bad condition for its age.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/visitor.html.

Thoughts of and prompted by a McEwan

Arising from one of the Royal Institute’s evening discourses (see reference 1), a discourse called ‘Examining the self’ given by Ian McEwan. I was there in part because I had been prompted to read his novel ‘Saturday’ by its coverage in a book by one Jens Brockmeier, a noted narratologist. See references 2, 3 and 7.

I imagine that the Institute’s auditorium could be rather intimidating for a lecturer, all rather intimate with its old brown wood and steeply tiered circles of stalls. With its ghosts of eminences past. The lecturer marches in at 1950 on the dot, to the sound of a small bell, and is supposed to finish exactly an hour later when the small bell is rung again. McEwan managed that bit rather well, getting through what he told us was 8,000 words spot on time – an average of a bit more than two words to the second. Perhaps there were some options he could tweak as he wound up. I associate to the lecture scene near the beginning of Chekov’s ‘A Dreary Story’, a lecture which was given in a similar auditorium.

It was the first such discourse which I have been to where the lecturer read his talk, something which is difficult to do without sounding very dull, and where he managed without any kind of visual aid. He did take a while to get into the swing of it, but get into the swing he did, giving us what I thought was a very good lecture, even if I did not agree with some of the points he was making. But it was quite a dense lecture and one did need to pay attention or stuff just passed one by.

It was built around the thesis that western literary coverage of the inner workings of human minds – what McEwan called subjectivity – has been steadily increasing since the onset of the Reformation, with only very sporadic coverage before that time and with virtually none at all before the appearance of Homer’s Odyssey. Ancient Sumerians, at least in their surviving writings, were a lot more interested in tribute & taxation than in psychology.

He illustrated his point with various examples plucked from Western literature. Penelope getting in a state because she did not instantly recognise Odysseus, returned to home and hearth after so many years. Montaigne’s essays generally. (I was reminded at this point of my long-owned and quite unread copy of same, once the property of one K. Joy Timberlake, with my attempts to recover her identity being blocked by that of some pop singer). Hamlet displaying the sort of virtuoso introspection which had not previously seen the light of literary day. Pepys being very honest about himself when recounting a serious quarrel with his wife to his diary (January 9th 1663, an example which McEwan lifted from the diary, via Claire Tomalin, via a review in the Guardian, a newspaper with which he seems to have some sort of relationship). Leopold Bloom going about his daily business. With the examples getting steadily thicker on the ground as time goes on.

He speculated a little on the nature of self. He quoted Polonius talking about being true to one’s self, talk which both asserted the existence of self – something which some other peoples, in other times and places, have not been that bothered about, bothering more about the community than the individual – and the stability of self. Not necessarily something which never changed, but certainly something which changed, if at all, quite slowly. It was something that one could be true to, this in itself being an idea which would not have occurred to a Homeric hero. A notion which, as it happens, looks to be developed in a recent pick-me-up from the Wetherspoon’s library at Tooting: ‘Sincerity and authenticity’, the printing of a series of lectures by one Lionel Trilling, somebody of whom I had not previously heard, but whom wikipedia knows all about and who appears to have been cut from similar cloth to that used for Alfred Kazin, whom I have noticed in the past. See references 5 and 6. I might have more to say about Trilling in due course.

Contrariwise, McEwan made a rather wry remark to the effect that some authors really disliked being asked about novels which they had written some years previously. A book written a long time ago was written by a different person altogether and it was often terribly hard to say what that different person had been thinking of. One might even be embarrassed by what was down on one’s charge sheet, as it were.

And then there are people who decide what sort of person that they want to be, that they are going to be. Maybe the necessary changes can be effected by changing one’s clothes, changing one’s opinions or changing one’s diet & exercise regime. One might take drugs of various sorts – people with certain mental illnesses certainly do take drugs to change aspects of their self which they, or perhaps others, do not like. One might drink. But there are limits: the brain might be very plastic, but there are obvious limits to the plasticity of the body – so if one has smoked for forty years one is not going to be able to put one’s lungs back to their native condition. One is stuck with being born tall. One is stuck with the parents one started with. And there are limits to what can be done with the brain too: plasticity can only go so far towards working around gross damage like, for example, knocking out some region of the cortex or the separation of the two hemispheres.

One also thinks of actors and the way that they can put on someone else’s personality rather as us lay people might put on someone else’s clothes. I associate to the layers of packages like PhotoShop. So I might overlay my own personality with some other personality, and set transparency of this other personality to 33%: I want the other personality to come across loud and clear, but I also want some of me to be left. Or perhaps it is not like that at all, I don’t need to give this other personality house room at all; it is all just an act and my own personality is alive and well throughout the performance. But I think it is like that; part of the attraction of being an actor is being able to play at being someone else, but being someone else in what we IT people call sand-boxes. It is all quite safe. Or at least fairly safe.

McEwan was sound on free will, although he did not put it quite as I have at reference 4.

He was not sound on obscenity, appearing to believe that the curtains of censorship and evasion were steadily being pulled back and that the world was a better place in consequence. He cited James Joyce was one of the pioneers in the crusade to dwell on what had previously been unmentionable in polite society. Whereas I believe that there are many things which are better left off-stage or obsceana – a notion which I had thought that the Greeks were signed up for, it being their word, but I have quite failed to confirm that thought. That said, I am not altogether sure that McEwan quite believes what he said. He writes about plenty of unmentionable things, but manages to sound, to my mind, rather awkward while he is about it; as if he has to force himself to do it. And while I am on the subject, I think there are plenty of things in the public sphere which are best left private. While many of us are, to my mind unhelpfully, forgetting how to forget – in which, computers with their very good memories are a rather mixed blessing.

A nice touch in dry wit.

He attracted two rather tiresome questioners, one picking up on a remark about choice of gender and one picking up on one about choice of race. Well handled by the mistress of ceremonies.

All in all, a very good talk. The best arty talk I have been to for a very long time.

PS: I am now on ‘Atonement’, the film of which I have seen at least twice (on telly that is), but not having read the book before. I was impressed by his extensive account, at the end of Part 1, of how Briony Tallis came to do the dreadful deed, came to perjure herself; how she talked herself into it and then found herself trapped in the lie. But had the intelligence and power to sustain that lie. A subjective account which it would be hard to get into a film, and as far as I can remember, they did not really try. An account which made it entirely plausible that such a thing might actually happen.

Reference 1: http://www.rigb.org/.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/it-is-forbidden-to-blow.html.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/a-spark-from-anvil-of-academe.html.

Reference 4: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/free-will-1.html.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lionel_Trilling.

Reference 6: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=brownsville.

Reference 7: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/a-tale-of-london-life.html.

Snippet 4

The fancy window. Should I tell google that they have not done a very neat job of splicing their film?

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