Just finished reading a detective novel, so-called, that I picked up at the
secondhand shop round from the Tip Top recently. It's called Cosi Fan
Tutti and each chapter heading is a quote from the libretto of that opera;
the connection being that the piece partly concerns whether two young men
will stay faithful to two young women - the women's mother doesn't want them
to, however. It's complicated, written by an English writer with a thorough
knowledge of Italian life and its vagaries, and is set in Naples. But it's
plain silly. The author is
Michael
Dibdin and he's
proclaimed
on the cover as 'among British crime writers, very much the man to beat."
Certainly he's imaginative, but the piece is so complicated and full of nonsense
characters - a female taxi-driver who translates into a form of Cockney rather
than straight English, and only seems to be there to provide a supposedly
hilarious scene where translation is required, or a magician who really can
do some interesting pieces of foretelling, or Aurelio Zen himself who seems
to be the most lackadaisical policeman you've ever met, slack, and apparently
lazy. He doesn't in fact solve the case at all; in fact the case and he hardly
coincide - his case is do with chasing a petty thief, while the real case
involves the gradual disappearances of various prominent corrupt powerful
men. All this is mixed in with a load of nonsense based on the
Cosi fan Tutti
idea, lots of strange sexual relationships (which we're not party
to in detail thank goodness), and scene painting in a theatrical sense,
interchange between ordinary storytelling tense and present tense, and lots
of runnings-around that don't seem to achieve very much. The last scene is
hugely theatrical, with nearly all the 'cast' included - and is played almost
like farce. Stylish, and intelligent, and imaginative and witty, but difficult
to see the point of, or actually understand where everything is going!
This particular book is the fifth Aurelio Zen title - don't think I'll
bother with the others.
13th Feb, 2002
While trolling the Net tonight looking for items on decorative ropework,
which my wife has taken up, and wants to find some projects to work on, we
came across
Kaylee's String
Art Page - Kaylee is a parrot who apparently has some skill in tying
and untying knots. Or maybe 'had' - the page is dated 1999. This led on to
a page for Quaker parrots - with
a book section offering a great selection of Quaker and Parrot-related books.
My first thought was why the Quakers, a
sect not known for their association with the avian species, should have
a page devoted to such a topic. Of course, light dawned eventually.
8th Feb, 2002
You have to wonder whether scientists are really as dim as they quoted, or whether the people quoting them get it wrong. In an article called, "Is human evolution finally over?" Robin McKie quotes several scientists, who not only contradict each other, but speculate and make no sense. It doesn't help that natural selection one of the strangest theories ever to have taken hold on the minds of scientists, so I guess it's not surprising that they can come out with such different conclusions. But why are their conclusions so odd?
Here's McKie himself trying to explain Darwinism: "According to Darwin's theory, individual animals best suited to their environments live longer and have more children, [sic] and so spread their genes through populations. This produces evolutionary changes. For example, hoofed animals with longer necks could reach the juiciest leaves on tall trees and therefore tended to eat well, live longer, and have more offspring. Eventually, they evolved into giraffes. Those with shorter necks died out."
So what about all the other shorter-than-giraffes 'hoofed animals' that exist on the planet at present? Should they be extinct? They plainly aren't.
McKie again: 'Similar processes led to the evolution of mankind, but this has now stopped because virtually everybody's genes are making it to the next generation, not only those who are best adapted to their environments." Pardon?
"In addition, human populations are now being constantly mixed, again producing a blending that blocks evolutionary change. This increased mixing can be gauged by calculating the number of miles between a person's birthplace and his or her partner's, then between their parents' birthplaces, and finally, between their grandparents'."
But surely that intermixing of genes and racial characteristics is a form of evolution, and is why we have the varieties of peoples that exist in the world now?
"However, other scientists believe evolutionary pressures are still taking their toll on humanity, despite the protection afforded by Western life. For example, the biologist Christopher Wills, of the University of California, San Diego, argues that ideas are now driving our evolution. 'There is a premium on sharpness of mind and the ability to accumulate money. Such people tend to have more children and have a better chance of survival,' he says. In other words, intellect - the defining characteristic of our species - is still driving our evolution."
In my experience, the rich and intellectual are the very ones who have driven the process of having less children, not more.
"If people start to live to 150, and are capable of producing children for more than 100 of those years, the effects could be dramatic, he says. 'People will start to produce dozens of children in their lifetimes, and that will certainly start to skew our evolution. These people will also have more chance to accumulate wealth as well. So we will have created a new race of fecund, productive individuals and that could have dramatic consequences."
Surely the number of years we live has nothing to do with fecundity any more. With contraception in all its forms being the norm, people are already living longer and having fewer children. We are all capable of producing plenty of children now, but we're not.
"Stringer disagrees, however. 'Evolution goes on all the time. You don't have to intervene. It is just that it is highly unpredictable. For example, brain size has decreased over the past 10,000 years. A similar reduction has also affected our physiques. We are punier and smaller-brained compared with our ancestors only a few millennia ago. So even though we might be influenced by evolution, that does not automatically mean an improvement in our lot.'"
How curious - we have a smaller brain than our ancestors, yet we're so much more intelligent than they were! And according to my understanding, we've actually gained height and weight over the last millennia, rather than got smaller. Do these guys read different books to me?
7th Feb, 2002
Have
just played one of the Bach fugues (a two-part one) while waiting for the
computer to load up. It's one of the ones I've been learning as part of my
goal of having the whole book under my fingertips by the end of the year
(Book One,
that is). Felt quite exuberant getting through it with ease and at a
decent speed - not just because my formerly-infected finger is much better
(still twinging slightly, and my hands seem to be aching a tiny bit) but
because I feel confident with the thing. And the same goes for the others
I've learnt: feeling good about them, confident, makes all the difference.
They're no longer a chore to play, nor are they a great wad of notes that
don't register with the musical part of the brain. And the strange part is
that I've learnt them backwards - from the last bar to the first. Why would
that make a difference, except in terms of coming at them in a fresh way?
The same applies to the memorizing of poems and Scripture. I've been trying a new approach whereby I read the section I'm going to learn that day over and over, until I begin to feel that some of it is furrowing down in my brain. Then I gradually learn it, and the difference is that it seems to be sticking better. I think the tendency in the past has been to try and rush the job, trying to learn it quickly but not letting the brain have time to absorb it into a 'rut' for want of a better word. This method seems to deepen the rut earlier on by confident repetition, because I'm still reading the words. Once the rut has been set in, as it were, in the brain, the piece has somewhere to go, you might say, and sticks. Anyway, time will tell how long the piece sticks - whether there's an improvement over the method I've been working on otherwise. (Another advantage is that I'm more likely to have an accurate rendition of the words - often in the past I'd have learnt the piece slightly incorrectly, and that inaccurate version would stick.)
The poem I've been learning is the fourth in Les Murray's cycle: Towards the Imminent Days. It's a very warm poem, with lots of feeling, both emotional and sensual, for the familiar domestic scene. And for once, it doesn't have a line in it that can't be understood. There are still odd lines in other poems of his that I just can't get my head around. And I'd typed out one word in the 13th line when I was learning it as 'balls' - then thought, since I didn't have the book to hand while I was memo-rising, that it must be 'bulls' since it fitted the context. Turns out it was 'bails', which is a different idea altogether.
6th Feb, 2002
Waitangi Day, in New Zealand. A day when we do almost no celebrating; instead we allow protest groups to lambast us at every turn. Today even the Greens were in on the act.
Recently we were talking about Annie Proulx's books on the writers' list, and I wrote that I'd really enjoyed The Shipping News. I've just been looking back at it again, because I read it a few years ago, and the writing delights me still.
But the reason I want to mention Proulx again is that I've just seen the movie of The Shipping News, and am very impressed. They've captured the tone of the story very well, and the atmosphere, and Kevin Spacey, although he wasn't my ideal piece of casting before I saw the film, actually does very well with the part. I don't think Spacey can ever quite subsume the acting intelligence that shines in all the parts he plays, but he comes very close to it in this role.
We'd
forgotten, until we opened the book again, that many of the chapters have
an inscription and sketch from The
Ashley
Book of Knots. This is intriguing, because Celia has been knotting for
the last couple of months as a hobby (we started it in Auckland during the
Christmas holidays last year) and had only just come across this book in
the last couple of days.
I watched A Kind of Loving on Prime last night (the one channel were the seriously interesting tv appears), and thoroughly enjoyed it as a movie, in spite of its atmosphere of gloom. Not unrelieved gloom, quite, because it did have a more upbeat ending than you'd have expected, but gloom nevertheless, epitomized by Thora Hird's dreadful mother-in-law. The director is John Schlesinger, and he brings great attention to detail in the performances of both the main actors and the extras throughout. The opening wedding scene is full of cameo moments and the most unforgettable Northern faces. Alan Bates' Vic is fresh and jaunty until he's ground down by a marriage he wishes he hadn't got into, and he is forced to mature rapidly in the last scenes of the movie. He's great as always. June Ritchie, who appears to have made very few films, and is 'introduced' in this one (although it's not listed as her first film on IMDB) is very subtle, playing an unsympathetic role in such a way as still to make you feel for her. The film is full of detail, and has the sort of script you seldom see these days, with intelligently written dialogue and scenes, and excellent use of the advantages moviemaking offers a good director. Though the credits at the end tell us it was filmed at Shepperton Studios in London, much of it was obviously made on location. Some unnamed Northern town is used extensively.
5th Feb, 2002.
I've now spent a good deal of the evening re-sorting the Blog and this main page. This included updating all the links both on the current blog and the archives, which naturally took more than a little while. Me bum's sore, and it's time to quit.
At this stage, I've left the old Blogger style pages behind. From now on, you'll be able to read the date in a way that makes sense, and I'll be able to include pretty pictures, and archive the older material...all things I'd come to a brick wall with on Blogger. Don't get me wrong, I think Blogger is a great set up. It just wasn't working for me. Maybe it's the old individual thing again - I have to do it my way.
3rd Feb, 2002
I've now put a blog on OC Book's home page though I've been doing it the 'hard' way with html and sending it via ftp. I don't want to use Blogger for it because it would mean the whole page would be mucked around - I presume. Not sure if I can do a test run on it, so in the meantime I'll use the old-fashioned method - which doesn't bother me anyway. I see even Time Magazine has got on the bandwagon with an article on blogging - which means, if I want to do some articles in NZ about them I'd better get a move on. Having had a crook finger for the last few days has rather set me back from doing much writing - infected it somehow internally. Now how can you do that? I mean, why would your finger just up and get itself infected from the inside? Struth! Looking up internal infection on Google doesn't give me much clue - I can find something on swimmer's ear (I always thought most swimmers had two ears) or internal infection in aquarium fish or a nasty piece on how bird faeces can get airborne, get into the lungs and infect you internally, leading to disability and sometimes death. Ouch.
Onto something less drastic.
Seeing somewhere that it was easy (oh, yes, in the Time magazine article) to change the way the page was laid out, I've changed the format of the page - really brave - and hopefully it will have gotten rid of that ugly green and yellow, which in spite of being somewhat similar to the Norwich football team's colours, isn't that attractive.
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