The twenty-eighth of February, 2011: a fleeting beating of hearts

Just a song.

Would’ve worked better if I’d posted it in January, wouldn’t it? Ah, well. Here’s a February poem, to make up for it.

Edward Thomas, ‘February Afternoon’ (1916). Thanks to the First World War Poetry Digital Archive.

The twenty-fifth of February, 2011: “Books. I read Heidi.”

I was pointed in the direction of this article, but I’m not allowed to read it for free. Happily, Frank Cottrell Boyce has read it for me. Key point:

Unesco, the United Nations educational and cultural arm, has produced a report which shows that reading for pleasure is the single best indicator of social mobility. People who can lose themselves in a book do better than those who can’t. Simple as that.

Apologies, incidentally, for plugging a Murdoch publication. By way of redress, watch this, consider this, rest a nice cup of tea upon this, read this, or browse this.

EDIT: also, read this – the Guardian’s Michael White managing, as so often, to preserve an air of cool detachment even while dishing out a good kicking.

The twenty-fourth of February, 2011: all the huskies are eaten, and the pathology of boredom

From Albert Camus’s 1956 novella La Chute (‘The Fall’, Penguin, 2006, Robin Buss trans.):

Let us pause on these lofty peaks. You understand now what I meant when I spoke about aiming higher. I was referring to these high summits, the only place where I can live… I had no difficulty in appreciating why sermons, thunderous homilies and miracles of fire took place on inaccessible heights.

From another book I read today, John Geiger’s The Third Man Factor (Canongate, 2009), which is very interesting in spite of a rather American penchant for coining buzzwords (‘the principle of multiple triggers’; ‘the widow effect’; ‘the muse factor’):

The ‘mountain metaphor in religion’ is widely recognized, but in the journal Medical Hypotheses, Shahar Arzy and three co-authors, all neurologists from Swiss or Israeli universities, suggested  that mountains are more than simply a metaphor. They categorized “feeling of a presence, hearing of a presence” among “reports of revelation-like experiences in high altitude mountaineers” as experiences that might help explain the link between mountains and religion… In particular, Arzy and his colleagues wrote: “the revelations to the founders of the three western monotheistic religions – Moses, Jesus and Mohammad – occurred on mountains”… The neurologists suggested “prolonged stay at high altitudes, especially in social deprivation… might affect functional and neural mechanisms, thus facilitating the experience of a revelation”.

All of this is apropos of the so-called Third Man Factor: the sensation of being accompanied by a comforting ‘presence’ during times of danger or hardship. It’s been experienced most famously by the legendary climber Reinhold Messner (“The body is inventing ways to let the person survive”) and the polar explorer Ernest Shackleton (“During that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia it seemed to me often that we were four, not three”).

I think I’ll blog a little more on The Third Man Factor (particularly, perhaps, on Jaynesian bicameralism) at some later time.

Literary footnote: Shackleton’s recollections recall Daniel 3:24-5, and the casting of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego into the burning fiery furnace (“Did not we cast three men bound into the midst of the fire?… Lo, I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire, and they have no hurt; and the form of the fourth is like the son of God”). (I am not, I might add, obsessed, unhealthily or otherwise, with reading the Bible).

Shackleton’s experience, in its turn, inspired a passage in TS Eliot’s The Waste Land (“The following lines were stimulated by the account of one of the Antarctic expeditions (I forget which, but I think one of Shackleton’s)” – Eliot’s note):

Who is the third who always walks beside you?

When I count, there are only you and I together

But when I look ahead up the white road

There is always another one walking beside you

Just to bring this  Clutterbuck full circle, I’ll conclude with the observation that Eliot died on the fourth of January, 1965 (“he died at start of year, in January”, as Joseph Brodsky noted in his elegy (another cross-reference: Brodsky also wrote the impossibly bleak and brilliant A Polar Explorer)) – and, the fourth of January, 1965 being a grey day for world literature, so did Albert Camus, author of The Fall.

The twenty-third of February, 2011: Lonely and Chalk

A nice coincidence, this. I knew (I think) what Fibonacci numbers were – they’re numbers in a sequence that begins with two positive integers and in which subsequent numbers are the sum of the proceeding two (like 2, 3, 5, 8, 13…). On reading The Man Who Loved Only Numbers this morning, I learned that Fibonacci numbers were first investigated by Francois Édouard Anatole Lucas (1842-1891) around 600 years after the death of Leonardo Fibonacci (about 1170 – 1240, or thereabouts)  – and that the origin of the sequence is to be found in the following silly puzzle (set by Fibonacci).

A certain man put a pair of rabbits in a place surrounded by a wall. How many pairs of rabbits can be produced from that pair in a year if it is supposed that every month each pair begets a new pair which from the second month on becomes productive?

The answer – of course! – is 377. The tirelessly multiplying rabbits number first 1 pair, then 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, and 377 pairs. This was the prototype Fibonacci sequence.

I was delighted, later today, to come across a gallery of work by the children’s writer and illustrator Emily Gravett. This led me to Gravett’s book The Rabbit Problem:

How does 1+1 = 288? A family of rabbits soon provides the answer! Hop along to Fibonacci Field and follow Lonely and Chalk Rabbit through a calendar year as they tackle a variety of seasonal challenges and cope with their fast expanding brood.

This is a book that I think ought to be issued to all children at birth, or at least on the occasion of their first pair of glasses (I don’t wear glasses, and never have, which I suspect explains why I’m not all that good at maths). Here are Ms Gravett’s mathematically correct rabbits.

And here’s a link to the lovely books blog Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast, from which I filched this picture.

The twenty-second of February, 2011: he adored New York City

Yet another viewing of Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979). All right, it’s not as funny (or as sweet) as Annie Hall (1977) and as a drama it’s not in the same league as Hannah And Her Sisters (1986). But I love it, mainly because of how it looks.

It’s been pointed out by someone more insightful than me that, at around the same time as Martin Scorsese was painting New York City as hell, Allen was painting it as paradise. I’d really like to know how much of Manhattan‘s mesmerising look – not only the Gershwin-backed cityscapes but also the inventively framed interiors shots, where walls and staircases in cramped apartments intrude on intimate scenes, and the disorienting off-centre long shots (as when Yale is looking over the car) – was down to Allen, and how much was down to the brilliant cinematographer Gordon Willis (who, with The Godfather (the greatest-looking as well as the greatest film ever made) also on his CV, has a good claim to be the most under-appreciated genius in American cinema).

I have a feeling that Allen was responsible for one of Manhattan‘s visual keynotes: the silent-film look of a number of scenes. Apart from the dumbshow sight-gag comedy of Allen and his kid looking in the toyshop window, or Allen overseeing the crew of clumsy removal men, there’s a real pre-talkie melodrama to, say, Allen kissing Mariel Hemingway in the horse-drawn carriage, or brooding over the harmonica, or (particularly) gazing at her through a glass door as she brushes her hair in the climactic scene.  I know that Sleeper (1973) was Allen’s homage to the era of silent comedy, and that he made this, but I’d be interested to know how influential silent melodrama was for him.

Maybe I’m just being misled by the orchestral score: Rhapsody In Blue (1924), after all, places the soul of Manhattan squarely in the golden age of silent film.

The twenty-first of February, 2011: you have to say it in Scottish

Q: What’s the difference between Mickey Mouse and the man who created him?

A: Mickey Mouse got big ears and Walt Disney.

Anthony Burgess was indebted to Professor Roger Lass for that joke. I am indebted to Anthony Burgess for it (A Mouthful of Air, again (Vintage, 1993)). Laugh, or don’t laugh, as you please.

The eighteenth of February, 2011: lie back, close your eyes, and work

I’ve begun reading The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, Paul Hoffman’s book about the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdös (4th Estate, 1998). Erdös wrote or co-authored 1,475 academic papers. That’s just unreasonable.

Erdös was known for his willingness to share his genius with the intellectually limited (relatively speaking: mere MIT maths postdocs, and so on). Nevertheless, he lived in a mental world inaccessible to practically anybody else – and, to the vast majority, not only inaccessible but incomprehensible.

This sort of anecdote fills me with wonder and envy:

“There was a time at Trinity College, in the 1930s I believe, when Erdös and my husband, Harold, sat thinking in a public place for more than an hour without uttering a single word,” recalled Anne Davenport, the widow of one of Erdös’s English collaborators. “Then Harold broke the long silence, by saying, ‘It is not nought. It is one.’ Then all was relief and joy. Everyone around them thought they were mad. Of course, they were.”

A chemist or physicist needs experimental data, an historian needs evidence, a literary scholar needs texts to study – even most branches of philosophy require, if not dialogue, then at least linguistic expression. I’m hugely envious of the mathematician’s limitless capacity for work. “That’s the beauty of it,” mathematician Ron Graham comments in The Man Who Loved Only Numbers. “You can lie back, close your eyes, and work.”

The seventeenth of February, 2011: Mrs Lowell and the little lame balloonman

Here’s a poem that I met lately, and liked.

As you might have guessed, it’s by e. e. cummings (1926). I quite like cummings, somewhat in spite of myself: I find his stuff fun, the feeling true enough and the wit likeable (although at the same time I want to give him a slap, or at least a gift-set of capital letters). And I like his little lame balloonman who whistles far and wee.

While I’m on American poetry (and have my Norton anthology open on my knee), here’s another one I’ve encountered this week, from the generation prior to cummings’ (though, with its Poe-ish rhymes and archaic setting, it feels older). It’s called ‘Patterns’, by Amy Lowell.

Lowell (1874-1925) became the matriarch of the Imagist movement, largely by being hugely fat and energetic and smoking cigars and not being really much good at writing poems. Good on her.

 

The sixteenth of February, 2011: the monkey’s despair

Tributes here, there and everywhere today to mark the 90th birthday of the Reverend John Graham, better known as the fiendish cryptic cruciverbalist Araucaria.

The Guardian’s tribute was threefold: a panegyric by Simon Hoggart, a nice slot in the leader column, and – best and most appropriate of all – a superb crossword by Araucaria’s co-setters Paul, Enigmatist and Shed (these three sometimes set puzzles as a foursome with Araucaria under the pseudonym Biggles (the four setters all have the forename John; Biggles was created by WE Johns…)).

Solutions and deconstruction – plus more birthday tributes – can be found here.

The Independent’s crossword, meanwhile, featured the clues:

• Cardinal and erotic writer using sex toy regularly (6) – that is, erotic writer (Anais NIN) + the ‘regular’ (alternate) letters of sExToY = NINETY, a cardinal number. And, of course, Auracaria’s age.
• Man removing books from Margaret Thatcher’s home (8) – that is, Margaret Thatcher’s hometown of Grantham with books (the  books of the New Testament, or NT) removed = GRAHAM, a man’s name (and Araucaria’s name, too).
• Song about gold vehicle and tree (9) – that is, song (ARIA) surrounding gold (chemical symbol Au) and a vehicle (CAR) = ARAUCARIA.

There’s also a nice little congratulatory message – congratulating both you and Rev. Graham – that pops up when you finish the online version.

In the FT crossword, Gozo (imitation being the sincerest forms of flattery) has a go at an Araucarian alphabetical crossword – with a rather clever acrostic twist. The initial letters of the clues spell out the message: JOHN GALBRAITH GRAHAM IS CINEPHILE – as indeed he is, Cinephile being Araucaria’s monicker when setting for the FT. When you finish the crossword (if you ever do, as it’s utterly devilish, requiring you to spell saturnine ‘satur9’ and ground zero ‘ground0’), the letters around the perimeter  (the ‘perimetrical’, another Araucaria innovation) spell: CINEPHILE IS 90 YEARS YOUNG TODAY. Bravo, Gozo.

And happy birthday, Araucaria.

The fifteenth of February, 2011: watchful men in suits, and a lovely little book

This is from a fascinating new exhibition of paintings and drawings by James Hart Dyke. As explained here, Hart Dyke (or is it, as per the URL, Hart Davis?) spent a year in the unlikely post of Artist in Residence at MI6. Sir John Scarlett, the ‘M’ (in reality ‘C’) responsible, explained:

We brought people together from across the service and we asked them how they thought we should mark our first 100 years. And there was a feeling that, because of the secrecy of our organisation, we’ve not been able to celebrate its spirit in the way that other organisations can. They said they wanted to do something that would pass the core values of the service from one generation to another – and painting, because it’s such a flexible medium, was the way to capture that.

The Guardian has done a little gallery here (does it seem to anyone else that Hart Dyke ran short of inspiration – or just got tired of drawing watchful men in suits – part-way through his tenure?).

The above picture is of the Crisis Room at SIS. Even if the context weren’t so intriguing, I’d really like these pictures. Except possibly the one of the dog. And the one of the donut. Basically, I like all the ones that feature watchful men in suits, or at least look as though they might.

I like most of Hart Dyke’s stuff, in fact. I like artists who can handle emptiness – that is, light and sky – as Hart Dyke does in his Himalayan and Alpine paintings. And I like the virtuoso hastiness of his Afghan war sketches – as in Afghan soldier, Camp Bastion, Helmand, 2007, viewable here.

The context of these Afghan war drawings reminded me of a couple of other things. One was the war cartoons of Ronald Searle (drawn while Searle was in Singapore not as an official war artist but as a prisoner of the Japanese at Changi gaol – as detailed here). Here’s one:

Some of the cartoons are desperately bleak.

Another thing of which I was put in mind (somewhat obliquely) was a book I picked up last summer (outside a house in the Cornish village of Millbrook, where some good-hearted soul had left out a cardboard box of old books and a ‘please help yourself’ sign). It’s a ragged little book by the cartoonist Low (that is, David Low), entitled Europe Since Versailles: A History in One Hundred Cartoons with a Narrative Text (Penguin, 1940). The cartoons are mostly from the London Star and the London Evening Standard. Here’s one:

It’s a lovely little book by one of the giants of twentieth-century cartooning. I might write more about it and him when I have more time.