Forty years have passed, I think, since I last looked at a duck with any degree of care or interest.
Roger Lewis, What Am I Still Doing Here? (2011)
Archive for the 'Things I Have Learned' Category
If instead of one apple falling on the head of Sir Isaac Newton a heavenly orchard had let tumble a rain of fruit, one of the greatest of men would have been overwhelmed and then buried. Anyone examining the situation afterwards in a properly scientific spirit, clearing the apples layer by layer, would be able to deduce certain facts. He would be able to prove that the man was there before the apples. Furthermore, that the blushing Beauty of Bath found immediately over and round Sir Isaac fell longer ago than the small swarthy russets that lay above them. If, on top of all this, snow had fallen, then the observer, even if he came from Mars where they are not familiar with these things, would know that apple time came before snow time.
Relative ages are not enough, the observer would want an absolute date, and that is where Sir Isaac comes in again. An examination of his clothes, the long-skirted coat, the loose breeches and the negligent cut of his linen, the long, square-toed shoes pointing so forlornly up to the sky, would date the man to the seventeenth century. Here would be a clue to the age of the apples and the snow.
Jacquetta Hawkes, A Land (1951). There is an interesting piece about the book here.
A letter arrives in the post:
Dear Mr Key
I was interested to read your comments about The Readers’ Digest, which was a formative influence when I was growing up also. An ancient companion of my late grandmother lived with us, and was a subscriber: she would leave copies outside her door when she’d finished with them and we all pounced on them with glee. As well as the magazines, she received a 78 rpm record every month from some sort of listening-club associated with the publisher, and my brother and I were intrigued by these, as she never allowed us to hear them (though we endured endless Caruso, Bing Crosby and The Spooncat 5 on her wind-up gramophone). She explained that the Readers’ Digest records always got broken in the post, and we never wondered why she didn’t simply cancel the subscription.
She’s been gone for decades; but her wind-up gramophone remained, and when we were cleaning it up recently to send it to auction we found just one of those white-label Readers’ Digest 78s, still extant in a thin drawer in the base of the machine. It’s lo-fi stuff – and pretty tame these days – but I’ve recorded the ‘with vocal refrain’ section in hopes that it will be of interest to your readers. I used ‘declicking’ software to remove most of the surface hiss but there’s no curing the damage at the end. Doubtless we have the Royal Mail to thank for that.
Best wishes
Roland Clare
♫♫♫ aunt-maud-78rpm ♫♫♫
I am sending you a bird’s head in a steel box filled with alcohol.
Pierre Bardey to Alfred Bardey, 30 November 1882, quoted in Somebody Else : Arthur Rimbaud In Africa 1880-91 by Charles Nicholl (1997)
Here you are, not a shadow above or below or around you, even though surrounded by enormous objects; there is no more trail, no more precipices and gorges, no more sky; there is nothing but whiteness to think of, to touch, to see or not to see, it being impossible to raise your eyes from the white pointlessness [l'embêtement blanc] which you take to be the middle of the trail; impossible to raise your nose into the raging of the north wind; your eyelashes and moustache forming stalactites, your ears nearly torn off, your neck swollen. Without your own shadow, and the telegraph poles which follow the supposed trail, you’d be as hopeless as a sparrow in the oven.
Arthur Rimbaud, in his account of crossing the Alps in 1878, quoted in Somebody Else : Arthur Rimbaud In Africa 1880-91 by Charles Nicholl (1997)
I’m surprised to hear that you communists overseas are using your own individual sharpeners in classrooms. It’s a very Ayn-Randian position to take. “I’ve got my pencil sharpener, fuck you if you can’t afford a pencil sharpener! Sharpen your pencil with your bootstrap!”
Pencil-sharpening enlightenment here.
With my ornithologist’s hat on, I keep telling you that swans are savage, murderous, semi-aquatic monsters. Now, with thanks to reader Dan Fuchs, unassailable evidence that I have been right all along…
A man whose job was to maintain and care for the swans at a suburban condominium complex in Des Plaines, Illinois was killed yesterday in what appears to have been a freak attack by one or more of the birds.
Nothing freakish about it, when, like me, you know what you’re dealing with… feathered fiends!
Just back from seeing a splendid set of Delft tiles on display in a house in Spitalfields. You can see more here.
I am grateful to Glyn Webster for alerting me to the latest fiendish schemes of the US Navy:
the lamprey’s body contains a single wavelength of oscillation at any given time, and thus always maintains an S-shape during swimming. Speed is proportional to the frequency of this wave, and can vary by an order of magnitude. Lampreys can even swim backward. Ayers is building an autonomous robotic lamprey that can do the same thing.
Ayers is not new to this. He’s been building robotic lobsters for years, and he’s basing his lamprey’s technology on those
“Now we’re almost to the point where theoretically we could begin building whole platoons of robotic lampreys and putting them on operational maneuvers in the water,” says Dr. Joel Davis, “A robotic lamprey is ideal for stealthy underwater search and identification missions.”
Her own people were mostly miserable. They wrote long glum books and sang glum songs and went on glumly about the extent of winter and the sound of the rivers freezing and the shortage of meat – not just the serfs who had had every reason to feel thoroughly depressed, but the rich and privileged. They worried about their souls and stared deeply and hopelessly into the depths of themselves. Well, that was how they had always carried on in the past anyway. It might be different since the upheavals, but Aunt Irene doubted it – circumstances did little to alter the nature of populations. They were probably worse, if the truth were known.
Alice Thomas Ellis, The 27th Kingdom (1982)
After four nervy months, [Gladstone] came close to proposing at the Coliseum on a moonlit January evening. A few days later he did it instead by letter. It was not a proposal to sweep a young girl off her feet.
“I seek much in a wife in gifts better than those of our human pride, and am also sensible that she can find little in me,” he wrote, in a single long-winded sentence, “sensible that, were you to treat this note as the offspring of utter presumption, I must not be surprised: sensible that the life I invite you to share, even if it be not attended, as I trust it is not, with peculiar disadvantages of an outward kind, is one, I do not say unequal to your deserts, for that were saying little, but liable at best to changes and perplexities and pains which, for myself, I contemplate without apprehension, but to which it is perhaps selfishness in the main, with the sense of inward dependence counteracting an opposite sense of my too real unworthiness, which would make me contribute to expose another – and that other!”
On receiving the letter Catherine pleaded for time, no doubt hoping it would give her the opportunity to work out exactly what Gladstone meant.*
*”He really was a frightful old prig,” wrote Clement Attlee… on reading this letter in a biography of Gladstone, “Fancy writing a letter proposing marriage including a sentence of 140 words all about the Almighty. He was a dreadful person.”
from The Lion And The Unicorn : Gladstone vs Disraeli by Richard Aldous (2006)
Further to yesterday’s postage about the RMS Titanic, here is the title page of a 1912 book about the disaster. I miss the days when books had lengthy and descriptive titles. More sunken gigantic ocean liner material at The Public Domain Review.
Dan Chambers brings to my attention a splendid example of sober and sensible news reportage.
Chaos in Barnstaple as cows escape from broken down trailer
“Chaos,” says Dan, “is a formless maelstrom of whirling matter. In this story, four cows escaped from a trailer and went missing for a short while.”
Another magnificent snippet from Fish, Flesh And Good Red Herring : A Gallimaufry by Alice Thomas Ellis (2004):
[The vicar's wife] has had bad luck with hens: she lived for a time on Tristan da Cunha and says there are few things more dispiriting than seeing your poultry being blown by the wind out over the Atlantic.
A certain Mr Beale, in the nineteenth century, was collecting shells on the shores of the Bonin Islands when he encountered “a most extraordinary animal” creeping on its eight legs towards the water. “It seemed alarmed and made great efforts to escape, but the naturalist had no idea of consenting to the termination of so unexpected an interview with the odd-looking stranger,” so he trod on one of its legs and then grabbed hold of another one and then “gave it a sudden jerk to disengage it” (the poor thing was clinging to the rock). “This seemed to excite it into fury” which by now was hardly to be wondered at and, “it suddenly let go its hold of the rock and sprang on its assailant’s arm, which was bare, and fixing itself by its suckers endeavoured to attack him with its powerful beak. The sensation of horror caused by this unexpected assault may be readily imagined. Mr Beale states that the cold and slimy grasp of the ferocious animal induced a sensation extremely sickening, and he found it requisite to call to the captain, who was occupied in gathering shells at a little distance.”
I don’t know what Mr Beale had expected, but they proceeded to jump on the wretched creature and hack it with the boat knife: “It did not surrender, till the limbs by which it so tenaciously adhered were successively cut off.” The Victorians were notoriously wasteful of wildlife and we may be sure that Mr Beale and the captain did not cook and eat this octopus. We are told that cephalopods are unusually intelligent, which strikes us, prejudiced as we are against things with tiny heads and eight legs, as strange but caused me to feel some sympathy with Mr Beale’s antagonist. It must have experienced its own sensation of horror on being confronted with a heavily bewhiskered Victorian naturalist.
from Fish, Flesh And Good Red Herring : A Gallimaufry by Alice Thomas Ellis (2004)
