News from Nowhere

Happy Chazday, desperance!

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 10:00:11 GMT

Chaz is LI: may his life be full of light, his limbs lively and his literature limpid! Let us celebrate with livarot and liqueurs...

(Though not today, because today we'll be doing well if we get as far as the supermarket).

The more it goes on snowing

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 21:52:17 GMT

So much for optimism: our intention, yesterday, was to go out to the coast, walk on the beach and then go to an afternoon party. I was looking forward to both elements of this, and it seemed reasonable - surely the weather would be milder at the coast, and we could leave home late enough (and return early enough) to benefit from any day-time thaw. And the sun was shining. What could possibly go wrong?

Which was of course the cue for a phone call from our hosts: It's blowing a blizzard here, it'll probably reach you soon... And it did. So the furthest I have gone this weekend is the compost bin.

According to the stats on my userinfo page, this is the thousdandth post in this journal. I'd hate such a landmark to be so negative, so, turning my thoughts to travel, and summer, and a sea-coast, let's have a photograph from Iceland:

This is the post at Seyðisfjörður in the Eastern Fjords, which is where the Norröna, the Faroese ferry, docks once a week - and clearly today was the day, because as we drove up the winding corniche, all breathtaking scenery and sheer drops to the sea, we met more oncoming traffic than we had yet seen anywhere on Route 1.

The Eastern Fjords are the Land of the Long White Cloud. We woke to sunshine and drove down to the coast and into the mist, and at first thought we were just unlucky. But as we followed the road along the side of each inlet, then up over the shoulder into sunlight and back down, we could actually see how each long narrow valley contained its own even narrower, perfectly fitted cloud.

Tiddly-pom!

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 16:08:02 GMT

We were invited by the chatelaine of Brancepeth Castle to her annual New Year's Day coffee and bread and cheese and make a contribution to charity if you feel like it. And first thing this morning we weren't sure, but the sun was shining and we thought we'd risk it. We arrived without mishap. The guests were gathered in the great hall, clustered around the fires burning one at each end of the room (with a Christmas tree reaching up to towards the ceiling in the middle), and we admired each other's boots and travels and courage. After a couple of hours, durham_rambler pointed out more snow was falling, and we beat a hasty retreat (with a little help to get the car moving, but once we had a grip on fresh snow we were fine).

Having been out of the house, however briefly, leaves me feeling much more positive about the year!

Happy New Year

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 11:36:37 GMT

New Year's Day saw better weather: sunny, breezy, and, with a high of -24 degrees Fahrenheit, almost balmy. After an excellent breakfast of fat venison steaks, the men spent some hours at yet another spirited game of football. The snow was hard and slippery, and again the players fell often, roaring and laughing and threatening each other with revenge. After dinner - hare, venison, and reindeer tongue, with a currant pudding for dessert - the non-drinker Rae served brandy. On the whole, he wrote, "I do not believe that a more happy company could have been found in America, large as it is. 'Tis true that an agreeable companion to join me in a glass of punch, to drink a health to absent friends, to speak of by-gone times and speculate on the future, might have made the evening pass more pleasantly, yet 1 was far from unhappy. To hear the merry joke, the hearty laugh and lively song among my men, was itself a course of much pleasure."

Fatal Passage, Ken McGoogan

Meanwhile, here in Durham, another couple of inches of snow have fallen, but the council has replenished the salt box, and we feel quite intrepid about risking the seven-mile journey to Brancepeth Castle.

Noted and Queried

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 11:52:52 GMT

Another one from the Guardian: Notes and Queries is part of their ongoing campaign to persuade the readers to write the newspaper for them. Readers submit questions, other readers (or, for all I know, the same readers - I'm not keeping track) submit answers, and the Guardian publishes them, apparently unmediated, in the sense that some of the questions are plain silly, and some of the answers are plain wrong.

Snark aside, it's usually entertaining and occasionally thought-provoking. Some of the questions act (intentionally or otherwise) as the set up line for jokes ("Is a dead badger still a badger?", "Can vegetarians eat jellyfish?"), some make me snarl "Oh, go and look it up yourself!", others (though I can't off-hand think of an example) are the sort of sidewise approach to an issue which wouldn't be easy to research, and can draw interesting answers from people who know what they are talking about.

Into which category, though, should I place yesterday's query: "Before AD, what did people of the BC era call their years?" I'm hoping it's a joke...

ETA: It occurs to me belatedly, having seen the comments on this post, that of course they started counting from the creation of the world, and that they called their years 'years' (just as we call our world 'the world', on the basis that it's the only sort there is).

Seen academicals

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 11:32:12 GMT

Terry Pratchett at the Guardian book club: a half hour video in which John Mullan ever so kindly patronises Sir Terry, and Sir Terry patronises right back.

Christmas cake - but not as we know it.

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 18:40:40 GMT

It starts with the chestnut and chocolate cake I made for the wine tasting lunch; the recipe is torta di castagne from Claudia Roden's Food of Italy, adapted because the recipe instructs you to start by preparing your chestnuts, and I had a couple of tins of crème de marrons, French sweetened chestnut puree, and I melted the chocolate instead of grating it, because it was easier. So the revised recipe goes:

One and a half tins crème de marrons
4 oz ground almonds
5 eggs
4 oz butter
zest of one lemon
generous 4 oz dark chocolate
chestnut liqueur
chestnut flour to dust tin (it doesn't have to be chestnut flour, but I had some, and it has the virtue of being gluten free)

Melt chocolate, stir in - in order - butter, chestnuts, lemon zest, egg yolks, almonds, liqueur. Fold in stiffly beaten egg whites. Pour into buttered and floured cake tin. (10" cake tin, it says here. Next time I will line a tin with a removable base, so that I can get the cake out of the tin). Bake at mark 4 (350°) for 50 - 60 minutes.

The resultant cake is surprisingly light and delicate - which I had not expected, hence the miscalculatio about the tin. There were no leftovers - except the other half of a tin of crème de marrons. I also had the remains of a packet of chestnut biscuits gradually going soggy in a tin. With the aid of Google, I found a recipe for chocolate chestnut cake and a recipe for chocolate tiffin cake mix. There was a substantial overlap of ingredients and method, so I combined them

The remaining half tin crème de marrons
4 oz dark chocolate
2 oz butter
3 oz biscuits
chopped mixed peel (about 2 oz? as much as was left in the tub I'd bought last year because it was an emergency and I couldn't find any whole candied peel)
chestnut liqueur

Melt chocolate, mix in butter. Add about two thirds of this mixture to the crème de marrons; then add the broken biscuits, peel and liqueur to the other third.

Butter and line a shallow dish, and spread in the two mixtures in separate layers - you could try multiple layers if you were ambitious, but I'm not. I put the chestnut mix on top, and that worked fine. Let it set, and serve as thinly sliced as you can manage.

I'd thought of soaking the biscuits in the liquer, but I'm glad I didn't, because if anything it could do with more crunch. Another time I might put some walnuts in the biscuit layer.

And something completely different: at a birthday party last night we were served Trinidadian Christmas cake, which tasted (completely wonderful and) like a bar of compressed dried fruit, only moister and more alcoholic. A search turns up a variety of recipes for Trinidad Black Christmas Cake, of which this one looks particularly promising. But they all look more like the familiar Christmas cake than I expected...

More white Christmas days

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 16:39:18 GMT

On the Sunday of our weekend in London, we visited durham_rambler's family in Essex; all the expected pleasant family things, plus a surprise bomus walk in the snowy afternoon, at Warley Place - a local nature reserve which is not exactly 'natural', but one of the many sites where a country house has fallen into ruin and been abandoned. In the case of Warley Place, the last resident owner neglected the house in favour of the garden, planting trees and constructing an 'Alpine ravine' which survive alongside the walled garden and the ground plan of the house (the conservatory at one end, the ceramic tiled stairs leading down to - or was it from? - the kitchen at the other).

Although the literature (and the information boards) tells you that the best time to visit is in the spring, it was a magical place in the snow, particularly in the golden evening light (between three and four o' clock; this was the day before the solstice) and I took lots of photos. It's also, in Essex terms, quite high up, and we could see CAnary Wharf floating in the apricot glow of the sunset.

The next day, durham_rambler and I were at Canary Wharf itself, on our way to the National Maritime Museum, whose exhibition about the North West Passage I had read about in the summer and resolved to visit at the next opportunity. It's a long time since I've been to Greenwich, and it was tempting to wander off and explore the park and the Observatory and the river - but the exhibition was in its last days, while Greenwich itself endures. But first, a distraction: we had barely arrived at the museum (I was in the ladies', in fact) when I heard an announcement that there was about to be a short talk about Jack Cornwell somewhere upstairs, so we dashed off to hear that. Then we tried out both of the museum's cafés (recommended: soup downstairs, coffee and viennoiseries upstairs) - and then we were ready for the exhibition.

How to describe the exhibition? It was small, but dense: information about, and objects associated with, each of a sequence of exploratory voyages. And yet something about it struck me as slightly off-kilter. I suspect this was no more than that it didn't quite engage with the aspect of the story which fascinates me, which is... Well, look, here's how the Museum's web site answers the question: What is the North-West passage?:

The North-West Passage is a sea route through the Arctic Ocean, around Canada and North America, which links the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Throughout history many explorers tried and failed to find the passage hoping to increase trade between Asia and Europe.

Excuse me, "is a sea route"? Could the reason why so "many explorers tried and failed to find" it be that it does not exist? Well, didn't exist, because with the retreat of the polar ice cap, a route navigable by trading vessels of the sort they had in mind is now open; but at the time (from Captain Cook in the eighteenth century through the nineteenth century) it existed only in their desire for it. Eventually, in 1906, Roald Amundsen (about whom the exhibition has little to say) sailed his converted herring boat through the Rae Strait, and honour was satisfied, although the channel was in parts too shallow to provide a practicable trading route.

The exhibition is structured around the successive British expeditions, illustrated with maps, portraits (including a very dashing James Clark Ross, to whom this reproduction does not do justice; and here is Qalassirsuaq, who acted as interpreter to one of the expeditions in search of Franklin)), sound clips (readings from the accounts of various participants) and a variety of miscellaneous objects: harpoons, blankets, scrimshaws, Parry's violin with which he entertained the crew while his expedition passed the Arctic winter stuck in the ice. I was very taken with a blue and white transfer printed plate with an 'Arctic scenery' design (similar to this one, from the Bulletin of the Transferware Collectors club - note the slightly random selection of wild animals in the border.

By the time we had had enough of the museum, the snow was falling again, gently, wetly, out of a dark sky among the floodlit buildings of old Greenwhich and the silver balls strung across the street for Christmas. We headed for the pub, and by the time it had stopped, it was time to go and meet helenraven for dinner.

At this point, please imagine a key change. Hereafter it's all spending time with friends, sociable chat and sociable meals (hey, it's Chritmas: as Thea Gilmore says, "Faith, hope and gluttony") and snow gradually thawing, with the occasional cold night turning all the meltwater into a sheet of ice, just to stop us growing complacent. Happy to do, but not interesting to read about.

Not a day of Christmas at all...

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 14:57:08 GMT

...but a birthday, and I hope it's a happy one, helenraven!

Ten days of White Christmas: the first three days

Sun, 27 Dec 2009 16:04:38 GMT

The snow began to fall, and to settle, ten days ago, and we went bravely out to see THea Gilmore and her band on their Wintertide tour: promoting her Strange Communion album. I can't find anything on the net that gives a flavour of the evening, but here's the official video for the single, That'll be Christmas, one of the more mainstream songs. Picture instead the band in semi-Dickensian, semi-Cloudish garb, high hats and frock coats, Thea herself in a skirt festooned up to the knee; no orchestration but drums, fiddle (wonderful fiddle), guitar and above all that voice, rich and haunting. A concert staged like a mummers' play, and a fine start to the season.

On Friday we even more bravely drove down to London for the Bears' Carol Evening - though in fact the jorney wasn't too bad, since the main roads were quite clear and we were on main roads all the way. The carol evening was good, as ever: a chance to catch up with friends I haven't seen since last year, a chance to start the Christmas season with mulled wine and mince pies, but above all a chance to sing carols. We sing the same carols every year, though we are now up to three versions of While Shepherds Watched - this year we sang the version most of us had learned in school, as well as Cranbrook (Durham University discovers what we already knew; the Durham Times report has a scap of video) and Sweet Bells. I was distracted this year by the realisation of how very odd Down in Yon Forest is.

On Saturday we had agreed to drive the Bears - weather permitting - to GirlBear's brother's wedding in Bury Saint Edmunds; and weather did permit, although once we were clear of London it was surprising how thickly the snow was lying on the fields to either side of the road. But the sun shone, and it was a pleasure to sit back and enjoy the scenery (durham_rambler, as driver, may feel differently about it, and certainly the return trip was heavier going). While the Bears were at the wedding we looked round Bury. It's an attractive old market town, and I'd probably have got more out of exploring it if I hadn't had hopes of finding some last minute Christmas gifts - and been almost entirely disappointed in those hopes. There was a splending market, and if I'd been looking for vegetables and cheese and bread I'd have been very happy, but there were very few of the quirky individual shops which are invaluable at this time of year. Never mind; have a picture:

That's enough for one helping; there will be more...

If you liked Firedrake in Concatenations, you'll love this

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 17:04:41 GMT

moshui's forthcoming Jade Man's Skin gets its oddest 'review' yet on something calling itself 'Ursula's Space' (http://peacescbqj.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!DFA921FDF0C3B16B!160.entry).

The 'review' is the publisher's blurb (as it appears on Amazon, for example), but run through BabelFish or equivalent in both directions. I can think of various reasons why you might do this: to pad out a link-blog with fake content, to make money through Amazon links, say. But it doesn't seem to be doing any of these - the only link is back to Daniel Fox's own web site.

The processed text is quite wonderful, though:

Therein surging epos, Daniel Fox interweaves the ancient myths and fables of feudalistic PRC into a fairyland of roughshod warfare and brickle passionateness, immortal God and mystic brutes.

With the long-chained firedrake now free and the Reb ' invasion boomed by her triumphal rage, the balance of powerfulness holds modified. Offspring emperor Chien HUM is no more fighting for endurance; now he is ambitious to retaliate. As unreliable General Ping Steatocystoma voicelessnesses in the emperor 's ear, not even Chien Harkat-ul-Mujahidin 's darling courtesan or his most sworn escort can conclude with him. Worse, prolonged exposure to wizardly jadestone is modifying him radically: His increasingly divine powers are doing him dangerously rash.

But with the firedrake policing the skies above and the strait beneath, the emperor 's forces hold no hope of founding a counterattackuntil a goddess locomotes to interfere. Yet neither the clangoring of armies nor the opposing volitions of goddess and firedrake can determine ultimate triumph or licking. The destiny of the warfare lies in the blood-deep bonds between the firedrake and the boy Han, her screw and her liberatorand in the costs both will invite their freedom.

Sol invictus

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 22:39:45 GMT

We have been away for pre-Christmas family visits and other traditional activities; and now we are home. If I have time to write more about it, I will. But for the time being, this pretty well sums it up.

Wishing everyone sunlight in the winter, and grace even when the branches are stripped bare.

Coffee pots and wine bottles

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 22:48:22 GMT

I thought I'd been posting about the coffee pots - and maybe I have, but if so I haven't tagged the posts in a way that enables me to find them now. So if I'm repeating myself, please skim this bit.

The coffee pot we've been using is the one J. gave me for my birthday, back in the spring. I'd broken the previous pot a few weeks before, and had scoured the town for a replacement (glass, the sort you sit a filter on top of, not too expensive). Meanwhile, I was filtering coffee into the measuring jug (tricky, because the filter is precariously balanced, and you have to hold it steady). "Great!" said J. "Stop your search now, and I will find you one for your birthday." It wasn't as easy as she thought, and she ended up opting for a solution which I'd already declined (but which, as it turned out, has worked very well): use the kind of coffee pot which is a glass cylinder with a plunger, but discard the plunger.

It was at this point I promised myself that next time I was in a charity shop and saw a coffee pot even vaguely of the desired kind, I would buy it. This was tempting fate, which presented me (in Berwick, at midsummer) with a pot of exactly the shape and size I was looking for, but in heavy pottery, not glass, royal blue with a bright red handle and lid. I took the plunge and bought it - and just as well I did, because I haven't seen another since, and on Sunday morning we broke the glass coffee pot. So I'm now learning to judge how much water to pour through the filter into a pot which is opaque and too heavy to judge by weight.

For once it wasn't me who broke the coffee pot, it was D. Since practically all our breakages occur during the washing up, this simply means that he was helping with that, and I'm grateful. Anyway, since D. was here, we'd decided that this would be a good opportunity to hold a wine-tasting lunch: invite a group of guests, each of whom brings a bottle with its label obscured, and drink our way through them. It was a good party - at least, I enjoyed it, and (despite some sparks at the end) the company seemed to get on well together, and to enjoy the game: a good balance of falling naturally into conversation, and having to be dragged back to talking about the wine, but on the whole being willing to be so dragged.

Things I learned:

We were twelve, and we were at capacity. I could seat and feed more people, but it would mean two separate tables, whereas twelve will just fit round the dining table and the kitchen table pushed together.

If a couple are invited to bring a bottle each to a wine tasting, they will tend to bring a bottle of white and a bottle of red. I proceed, on principle, on the assumption that people will bring what they most want to drink, but on this occasion I'm not entirely sure this was the case - one white, in particular, felt a little - shall we say 'dutiful'? fjm identified it as pinot grigio on the basis that it tasted like the wine served at departmental parties (I paraphrase, but I think that's close).

It's harder to get the white in the right order than the reds. The reds are more forgiving, but desperance's sauvignon from the south of France did not show well after fjm's Pouilly Fuissé. I wonder how it would have worked later still, and with the goat's cheeses? But then, to know that was worth trying I'd have had to know it was sauvignon.

Speaking of Pouilly Fuissé, I should remember that there's a flavour I tend to identify as oak which is actually chardonnay. I'd be much more efficient at grape identification if I didn't keep forgetting this.

fjm can identify Margaux blind, and is therefore declared the winner in the tasting stakes; I, on the other hand, mistook Burgundy for claret, thus demonstrating that French and classic are stronger indicators for me that details like grape variety. (The bottle was sufficiently swaddled in tissue paper that I couldn't see the shape of its shoulders, but I am still embarrassed; chilperic flinched visibly).

People can eat more bread than you would think possible, especially considering that on this occasion we were a baker's dozen of eleven, since one of our number is gluten intolerant. Admittedly, one loaf was desperance's sourdough (less sour than advertised, but still excellent), and I found a loaf which had been overlooked in the oven this morning, but even so...

That chocolate chestnut cake does not turn out of the tin, whatever the recipe says. Next time, use a tin which doesn't rely on its co-operation. But certainly do it again.

durham_rambler and I are the exception to point 2: invited to bring a bottle each, we are liable to aim for one red and one dessert wine. Our red was a Hardy's Oomoo Grenache Shiraz Mourvèdre - bought on the strength of its silly name, its pretty label and a favourite blend of grapes. I placed it last of the straight reds, a little nervously, since I knew this would mean I was serving it after better, but less robust wines, and I think this was the right decision. It may also have had something to do with why no-one came close to identifying it. Knowing what it was, and also knowing (and assuming that at least some of those present also know) my tastes, I thought it was fairly obvious: a Rhône blend, and if not Rhône itself, then Australia. (And not hard to identify as not Rhône itself, I thought. It was nice, but the real thing is nicer). We ended with a Maury from the Wine Society, which did, as it is reputed to, stand up very well to the chocolate cake.

Best 404 ever

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 22:17:10 GMT

lamentables has the best 404 notice ever: all she needs now is a web site to put it on:

if I ever have a website of my own
Originally uploaded by lamentables

Fortunately, I have an 'under construction' graphic:

(photo taken by desperance on the Taipei underground).

Not eating pizza

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 22:17:22 GMT

I know there is a recurring theme in my holiday posts of the pizzas we have eaten in incongruous places (ie not Italy nor England*), but I don't seem to have tagged the relevant posts. Anyway, we didn't eat any pizza in Brittany this autumn; perhaps because in Brittany when you fancy a light meal consisting of dough with a tasty topping, you can eat crêpes, and that's what we did.

There was a pizzeria in Josselin, where we spent our first night. It was called - presumably in an appeal to Breton patriotism - 'Breizh Pizzas', and it was closed. We would still have gone to the crêperie next door, even if it had been open, and we enjoyed our meal there, though I admit I don't remember much about the crêpes. What I do remember is the floor show, which was provided by the young woman whose job it was to write the menu of the day on a blackboard. She was taking great care over it, with plenty of flourishes and curly capital letters: velouté de potiron aux châtaignes, échine de porc aux deux purées (poireaux, carottes) - when an elderly gentleman dining alone began to heckle her: No, that's wrong, it should be 'au' not 'aux'... There was a reason, which I don't now remember - possibly it was that the word following didn't begin with a vowel? - but she found it convincing, and began rubbing out the 'x's**. At which point the debate became more general.

We didn't eat pizza in Roscoff, either, despite the appeal of the Pizzeria Marie Stuart - why would you call a pizzeria after Mary Queen of Scots? durham_rambler suggested it was the Rizzio connection.

A year earlier, we had failed to eat pizza in Bogny, on the Meuse. We found ourselves in a small town which was closed on Sunday evening, and our hosts at the B & B recommended an Italian restaurant in the next village. It was an odd-looking place (some sort of post-industrial, or post agro-industrial, conversion?) - we had a fine view of it on our walk the following day:

but inside it was a classic Italian restaurant of a certain era. One wall was decorated with a mural of an Italian scene, with the inevitable fucking gondolas, and the wall facing it with a mural showing the Ardennes: the forest, the boar, the river...

Instead of pizza I ate escalope milanese as they used to serve it at the self-service restaurantat the Porte Saint Denis in Paris forty years ago: well, I could have had pasta as an accompaniment, but I admit I chose chips instead (the chips were excellent). There were rum babas for desert, the kind shaped like an outsized cork which you buy in a jar of syrup; they were served with ice cream and spray-on whipped cream and that red sauce the local kids call "monkey blood". The wine was Sicilian, and very good.

*I accept that it wouldn't be particularly incongruous to eat pizza in the US, but I'm sure I haven't posted on the subject.

**He was wrong, of course. She had been right in the first place.

Two valleys

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 20:56:33 GMT

Yesterday's walk was determined by durham_rambler's desire to investigate an application to 'divert' a footpath. Permission had been granted for a farm building in the conservation area not far from the city, on the basis that no footpath would be affected; now there was an application to divert a footpath, which would be clipped by a corner of the building [this is a little approximate, as it relies on my memory of the legal details, and because I am trying to be discreet about the precise location].

We wouldn't normally choose to walk through farmland in December, still less in a December as wet as this one has so far been - considering which, it really wasn't too muddy. The footpath we were trying to check was, in fact, obstructed before we reached the crucial point: to get into the field where the building was to be sited, we would have had to cross a barbed wire fence on a stile consisting of a single cross-plank, sloping steeply downwards towards a stream which had evidently been bridged at some point in the past, but is no longer. We didn't even try.

Instead we turned right and picked up another path, following a field edge and then emerging surprisingly high above the thin silver thread of the stream. We found a way down, and along a rising valley (this was the muddy bit, but it was charming in its small scale, and I was happy to have discobvered it) which ended in a padlocked gate, a huddle of cows and a broken stile waymarked 'Crowtrees Heritage Trails' (with a logo of a butterfly, probably the Durham Argus). Back home, I've been seaching for information about the trails, but it's all about the funding and launch in 2006, not about the actual route, or where you can find information about it. Ah, well.

A stretch along the road, and a pleasanter stretch along a disused railway brought us into Cassop, from where we headed down into Cassop Vale. What was once a quarry is now a nature reserve, with all the interesting flora of Durham's Magnesian limestone (which, in December, means hips and haws and some spectacular bullrushes around the pool at the bottom). We emerged to one of those views which are forever taking me by surprise around the City:

the cathedral glimmering in the misty sunlight above the bowl in which it sits, apparently on a level with the sheep grazing unconcerned.

After which it was down the hill and up again, and back down to our starting point. As promised, the overnight rain had cleared, and although the forecast hadn't mentioned the mist, that too came and went. It wasn't a long walk - the original estimate was about five miles, but of course that's not the route we took - just a morning's worth, and enough over that we were well ready for our lunch break. I wouldn't repeat that route as a whole, but there are bits of it I would try to stich into a more satisfactory circuit.

Pierre Bayard: Comment parler des livres que l'on n'a pas lus?

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 22:18:09 GMT

I read enthusiastic reviews of How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read when it was published in English, and promised myself that I would find a copy of the French language original - I don't read as much French as I'd like to, and - outside the comics section - never know where to start looking in a French bookshop. Towards the end of our holiday in Brittany, I tracked down a copy in a religious bookshop in Dinan. (Small digression: I was struck by how many independent bookshops we saw, selling both new and second-hand books - Quimper alone, with a population of around 62,000, seems to have nine).

So, even before I'd read this book, I had certain ideas of what it would be like: I knew it was a philosophical discussion rather than a bluffer's guide, and I expected it to be clever, witty, abstract.

Appropriately enough, the book itself was not entirely unlike the book I had anticipated, but it had an entirely different flavour: it was more structured, more concrete (that is, constructed around actual examples), more - well, more French. The book is in three sections: different ways of not reading, different situations in which you might find yourself talking about a book you haven't read, advice about how to behave in these circumstances. Each section has four chapters: the different ways of not having read a book, for example, are knowing absolutely nothing about it, having skimmed through it, having heard other people talking about it, and having forgotten it - and each of these chapters is illustrated with an example taken from a book (one per chapter, from Montaigne's Essais to Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose).

It's hard to know how seriously to take this. At one level, not at all: the book is published in a series called 'Paradoxe', and there's a large element of jeu d'esprit in relying on examples from books to demonstrate that you never read books - and another twist in this argument is revealed towards the end of the book. Illustrations from Groundhog Day or an anthropological study of reading Hamlet with the Tiv of West Africa are not realistic models of everyday conversations about books. I'd been struck, in the reviews I'd read beforehand, by the example of whether you can truly claim to have read a book about which you have forgotten every last detail; I have, for example, read the whole of Proust's A la Recherche du temps perdu - but it was a long time ago, and I don't suppose I know any more about the book than if I had simply read about it in a Guide to Great Literature. But Bayard doesn't cast any extra light on this issue by taking at face value Montaigne's declarations that he doesnn't read, only skims, remembers nothing - yes, and the quotations with which the Essais are larded, they just crawled in there of their own volition, did they?

There is a neat device whereby each book mentioned in the text is, on its first appearance, labelled with the particular way in which Bayard has read it, and either one or two plus or minus signs to express his opinion of it: Hamlet, for example, is a book he has skimmed through, and heard others talk about, and he thinks it is very good; the book that he himself published about Hamlet, though, is a book he has forgotten, and of which he has a moderately low opinion. This is entertaining, but makes it absolutely clear than every book is an unread book. The four categories cover every book, no book falls outside them as a book he has read. In real terms, I don't accept that I didn't read Comment parler des livres que l'on n'a pas lus? - it was a couple of months ago, and it is fading now, turning into a book I have forgotten, but at the time I read it intensely, arguing every step of the way. Even within the terms of the argument, if it is impossible to read - or to have read - a book, then the category of books that you haven't read becomes meaningless: they are just books, like all the rest.

Bayard is going somewhere with this: all the individual paradoxes are leading towards a paradoxical conclusion. I'm not sure how seriously he's proposing it, whether he suggests it just for the pleasure of the paradox or whether he really is so misguided as to believe what he says. (We all know that I'm not good with humour, right?) But because he is pursuing his own line, about how it is both perfectly all right and, indeed, inevitable to talk about books you haven't read, because he claims not really to enjoy reading, he doesn't explore the areas I wanted to discuss.

For example, there's a whole other category of unread books which are the books we have read in translation. You don't have to look any further than the title of this book, which in the original French asks a question, and in the English translation promises an answer. Can you claim to have read a book if you haven't actually read a single word of what the author wrote? I'm currently reading Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; only I'm not, I'm reading Reg Keeland's translation of Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. If I find the style clunky (and I did, at first, though by now I'm getting used to it), whose style am I reacting to?

This is not the sort of question that Pierre Bayard deals with. Normally I would think it completely improper to compare the book I'm reviewing to the one I wish the author had written, but on this occasion it seems entirely appropriate: if an author urges me to talk about books I haven't read, it's a natural next step to talk about the book he hasn't written. Which is, of course, the book I haven't written - but that brings me closer than I like to being reconciled with Bayard's conclusion.

It may not be obvious from this that I found Comment parler des livres que l'on n'a pas lus? enormously entertaining, and quite thought-provoking. I was frustrated that my convesration with it was so one-sided.

Google SideWiki

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 11:18:50 GMT

How long has this been going on? When I logged on last night, Firefox was open at a tab about wonderful Google SideWiki, which would allow me to add comments to any web page... Hang on, isn't that what we call graffiti?

I like comments. I'm always pleased when people comment here, and when I set up a site for someone else, I encourage them to keep comments as open as they can. But when I design a static page, I design it to be read as it is: sometimes you don't want people scribbling in the margins. I'm spluttering with fury at the idea that a third party - even Google, who despite everything are a pretty useful third-party - should feel rntitled to encourage visitors to comment behind my back and outside my control.

SideWiki appears to be a feature controlled from the Google Toolbar. Once you know it exists, it was easy enough to find information about it on Google's 'Toolbar Help' page. But I had to go looking for it - there's nothing on Google's home page to alert me to it. If I didn't use a Google toolbar I'd be none the wiser.

And the 'help' doesn't include anything about how to block SideWiki comments from your pages. You can enable or disable it on your own toolbar, but what's the point of that? Well, I suppose if I disabled it, I could get rid of the irritating icons, and its habit of flasing across the page when my cursor passes its ticklish spot, but then I wouldn't know if my pages were spawning graffiti. Better not. (Of course, it isn't actually enabled on my toolbar until I create a Google account, and right now I don't feel inclined to sign Google's terms and conditiond to do that...)

A quick search - well, no, of course, a quick google - reveals that there is no opt out clause (also that when people google 'google sidewiki', the phrase they are most likely to be looking for is 'google sidewiki opt out'). You can block Google Toolbar users from visiting your site - which seems extreme - but once you let them in, you do so on their terms.

Don't be - what was it again?

Two puzzles

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 22:17:37 GMT

Question: As my train pulled into Newcastle Central Station this evening, I looked down towards the river. Did I really and see a red neon sign reading 'ICONIC SITE'?

Answer: Yes, apparently I did. It's at the Stephenson Works.

Question: Walking briskly through Fenwicks, I was twice stopped by vendors who wanted me to try their miracle products for skin or hair. The young man with the skin cream was very insistent. Do I look like someone who buys expensive cosmetics in Fenwicks? No, that's not the puzzle, the puzzle is, why did no one try to press free samples on me in the chocolate department?

Answer: Life is not fair.

Signs of winter

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 11:29:29 GMT

This morning, for the first time this winter, we had to scrape the frost off the car before we set off for the pool; the sun was rising, and the castle and cathedral stood out against great veils of rosy cloud.

I have opened the first door of the advent calendar, and there are Christmas puddings boiling downstairs: big Daddy Pudding in the pressure cooker, medium-sized Mummy Pudding in a saucepan and four little Baby Puddings in the oval Le Creuset casserole. Memo to self: buy another one pint pudding basin.

Artists at home

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 23:07:34 GMT

It was Open Studios Weekend in the Ouseburn valley, and we went along to have a look. This is the same thing as we did last year, only completely different. Last year was clear, bright, icy cold, and we drifted from gallery to gallery; today was mild dark and wet, and we visited locations with large numbers of studios concentrated in a single building. We also spent more time than we'd intended over lunch: in theory we know that the Cluny is always ridiculously slow, but they weren't busy, and it was late enough that we sat down and ordered drinks, and only then did durham_rambler ascertain that there was a wait of an hour. I was glad of a rest, but maybe not that long.

We started at the new Biscuit Tin Studios (no website of its own, but here's the Google cache of an article in The Journal): a large building, once a print works, near the Biscuit Factory (I'll come to the later) hence the name. Purely as rooms to be in, these were the nicest studios, with full length windows and plenty of natural light - and we felt that overall, this was where we saw the best work, too. Favourites were:

Daniel Evans Furniture, beautiful individual pieces, small tables and shelf units made from silky polished wood, ingeniously detailed (drawers whose 'handle' was a vertical rod threaded through a circular hole) and very reasonably priced.

Sculptor Allan Scott has some wonderfully mythic dancing figures - also a large plaster horse's head on the windowsill (it reminded me of Valerie Laws' horse's skull, the sheer surprising size of it). He told us cheerfully that a small visitor yesterday had been thrilled with it: "Look! A dragon's head!"

Creative Ginger had made ginger beer for the event, and had interesting things for us to look at while we drank it - I liked best his portrait of Terry Pratchett

Photographer Doug Hall was generous with postcards of his excellent photos, and not only talked about how he gets some of his effects but gave me a quick demonstration (Photoshop can do some very clever stuff, brightening or darkening sections of an image to bring out the detail). I wwas already going to buy a print anyway. It's the one in his Newcastle / Gateshead gallery which shows Grey's Monument through a window (people who are familiar with my photos will not be surpised at this).

Next stop was The Biscuit Factory. This is a selling craft gallery (in a converted biscuit factory), very smart, though most of what they sell doesn't appeal to me (it's all a bit décor for my taste) and - no doubt as a result - seems very overpriced. The last couple of times we've been there, it's been as the venue for wine tastings, where the art on show provides an agreeable backdrop to the serious business of tasting wine (and the wine helps remove the inhibitions when it comes to art appreciation). Anyway, because we can visit the Biscuit Factory at other times, we tend to give it a miss on Open Studios weekends, so I hadn't realised that below the galleries, stairs lead down to two floors of studios. There are not entirely subterranean - the building clings to the side of a hill - but they weren't as light and open as those at the Biscuit Tin, either.

I don't think that's why we were less impressed with what we saw. Highlight was probably Roy Kirton, and although I like his paintings well enough, the real pleasure was in catching up with his wife, Dot (here she is singing The Seaham Harbour Lifeboat Disaster).

After a diversion to the Cluny, and a quick visit to the bookshop at Seven Stories, we moved on to the Lime Street Studios, but whether because we were running out of steam or because the event was, this was a little dispiriting. We were by now into the last couple of hours of a three day event, and I don't blame anyone who had decided to pack up and go home, but the corridors of closed doors were sad. So were the number of people who were showing exactly the same work as we had seen not only last year, but the year before. There was one glowing exception, showing paintings of boats in bright colours, stylised almost, but not quite, to the point of abstraction, but I've mislaid his name, and even Google does not remedy the loss.

Time to call it a day, then -

That wandering Bears may come...

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 21:32:24 GMT

The Bears (my brother and sister-in-law) came to stay last weekend. They didn't come with buns, but with tiny cheese-stuffed peppers, marmalade and a banjo (they took the banjo home with them, afterwards). The home team provided the buns.

In between the eating and the sitting up late talking, and the doing the crossword, there were entertainments. We went to a Shetland evening in Gateshead, with writer Ann Cleeves and fiddler Chris Stout: a lovely event because, as as Ann tells in in her blog, the two of them bounce so creatively off each other, Ann putting a musician loosely based on Chris into her novel White Nights and Chris thinking that this character is rather cool, and composing a piece of music that he might play... Afterwards we went for a drink at the Sage, somewhere the Bears hadn't previously been - it's not quite the same as taking them to a gig there, but it's a start.

We went out for a walk in Houghall Woods, and another along the coastal path near Seaham; we went to Hexham, and visited the abbey, and explored the town in the rain.

And we went to TK Maxx. If you aren't familiar with TK Maxx, it's like a cross between a department store and a remaindered book shop: it looks from the outside like another shop piled high with the sort of cheap fashionable clothing and characterless home decorations that I would never dream of buying - and it does stock those things, piled high and reduced in price, but there is treasure in among the tat. I've bought a lot of pottery bowls there at one time or another, for myself and as presents; I bought my favourite sauté pan there, and most of my socks; durham_rambler once found a copy of PaintShop Pro 8 at a fraction of the going price, among the children's toys. And GirlBear had never been to TK Maxx, so that's what we did.

And spent a happy half hour or so, wandering around. GirlBear went into a state of indecision at the huge choice of fancy soaps, and the many different kinds of biscuits, any of which she could have bought to take in to work, and in the end didn't buy anything. I bought: two cranberry-scented soaps in fancy gift boxes with Mary Engelbreit designs (this probably counts as a shameful lapse in taste, but I love her stuff all the way up to the line, and then something snaps, and it's just so cute it's horrible. So sue me. Anyway, that's two small Christmas presents sorted); some chocolate covered plums; The Bibendum Cookbook which I will either keep or give to the friend whose collection of cookbooks is almost as large as mine, and who is more of a Simon Hopkinson fan (the recipes look good, but familiar; but there are lots of pictures of Bibendum); and Suze Rotolo's memoir A Freewheelin' Time - what was that doing there? Even the BoyBear bought a copy of the Suze Rotolo, for the fellow band member and Dylan fan in his life.

The Bears admitted that everything I had told them about TK Maxx was true.

The Olive Oil Greenway

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 16:11:54 GMT

In Saturday's Guardian Travel section, a description of walking routes in Spain, converted from disused railway lines. The route described is the Via Verde del Aceite, in the province of Jaén: I wouldn't want to walk 50 kilometres in two days myself, even on the easy gradients offered by disused railways - but perhaps that bit is negotiable? For reference, then, the Green Ways network has a web site,

For some reason, searching the Guardian's site for Via Verde del Aceite didn't find this article; but it did turn up an article published in the Observer in 2002, which considers the Green Ways as cycling (rather than walking) routes. The two writers also disagree about whether the viaducts are actually by Eiffel himself - now, that's an incentive!

Happy Birthday!

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 11:09:00 GMT

It seems that today is Fred Pohl's 90th birthday; so that's what all this thanksgiving is about!

Daniel Fox: Jade Man's Skin

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 23:07:56 GMT

Disclaimer 1) Daniel Fox (moshui here on LJ) is a friend, or rather, the pseudonym of a friend. He is also one (or two) of my favourite writers.

Disclaimer 2) Jade Man's Skin is the second book of a trilogy: 'Moshui - the Books of Stone and Water'. I've written before about the first volume, but if that didn't persuade you to read Dragon in Chains, don't let this persuade you to start with book two. This is not the kind of trilogy which is three linked novels, it's the kind of trilogy which is a story too long to be contained within a single volume.

So Jade Man's Skin begins precisely where Dragon in Chains left off, which is already impossible to discuss without giving away that spectacular, unexpected, inevitable ending. The situation and the characters are those that were introduced in the first book, yet everything has been transformed: Old Yen still sails his ramshackle boat across the straits, relying on the protection of his goddess, and yet... Han still struggles to maintain some sort of control over the dragon, but...

It was implicit from the first that although this is a heroic fantasy in which the boy emperor - young, brave, romantic - has been ousted from his throne and pursued to the outer rim of his empire, it is not the kind of fantasy in which the reader cheers on the young hero who regains his throne for no better reason than that he is the Rightful Heir. Daniel Fox shows us too much of the price paid, not just by those who fall nobly in battle but by those who have the misfortune to live along the route taken by the armies, those whose cities are plundered, those whose lives are destroyed. As long as the boy emperor is more boy than emperor, compelled by circumstances and adult advisors, falling in love, feeling his way, he is a sympathetic figure; but sooner or later he must grow up, start to make his own decisions, or forfeit that sympathy. What happens when he decides, in this book which bears his name, to become more emperor than boy, to command his army and to demand obedience?

If one of the pleasures of Jade Man's Skin is that it shakes up all the pieces which were already in play in Dragon in Chains, another is that it continues to introduce new elements. Something which had been said from the very beginning turns out to be true, introducing a major new force into the narrative: but it would be a pity to spoil this skillfully arranged surprise. Since the mysterious jade tiger appears on the cover of the book, it's probably not giving anything away to talk about it: unfortunately - or fortunately - it appears and vanishes so enigmatically that I have nothing to say about it but: ooh! jade tiger! tell me more...

"Tell me more!" is pretty much the sum of what I want to say about Jade Man's Skin. It is a book in which things happen, many of them exciting or touching or terrifying, and by the end of it, I really want to know what happens next.