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*4

September 1st; We set off in bright sunshine. Martin detects a lobster pot dragging under the boat, turns off the engine {no wind today either} and goes under with scuba gear and a fearsome-looking knife to cut the rudder free. I stagger from side to side of the stationary boat as it rocks around. I vomit over the side into exquisite green-blue water, feeling worse than I have all week. Martin emerges from under the boat, lobster pot successfully detached, and we set off again, pulling in five hours later at another port, the one where we are to meet Wendy. The corner bar facing a row of palm trees and the sea, right under the blue-painted stucco archway into the marina, buzzes with energy and good-looking Spanish girls. As the sky goes dark I slowly recover from the day's nausea over some lemonade beers and local snacks such as dates wrapped in bacon.

August 31st; Medium day of motoring, since there's no wind today. We dock in a marina in a small town and we try an Indian restaurant patronised by the local British-in-Spain, 'Pride of India'. Although the restaurant is empty, excellent food. Martin does impressive Spanish, chatting to coastguards and harbour masters on his walkie-talkie as we chug into ports each day.
August 30th; Long day of sailing, quite sea-sick, despite pills. Big rolling waves pitch the boat. Bright sunshine. In between me lying down up on deck, or adopting the foetal position for hours on end down below deck, Martin & I continue our ongoing chat in snatches about life: what it's for and how to live it well.

August 29th; More sailing. We anchor off somewhere, and take the dinghy into a beach by a town. Launching a dinghy against surf turns out quite hard even with a friendly Spaniard helping us. His children come up and say hello with appealing straightforwardness and lack of self-consciousness while Daddy and Martin and I stumble around in the pebbles fighting to push the dinghy out against breaking waves while starting the outboard motor. Feel quite sea-sick much of day. Beautiful colours in the water, greenish light turquoise near land, and a clear, pale-blue-ink colour out at sea. In the quiet of the night when we are anchored at last I read Martin's copy of 'Hegel: A very Short Introduction' by Peter Singer of 'Animal Liberation' fame. A very clear introduction indeed. Singer sketches out Hegel's theory of history and social will in beautifully crisp, careful sentences. I must read more by Singer. Perhaps even more by Hegel.
August 28th; We set sail. Despite taking sea-sickness pills, am very ill & weak. Once anchored, Martin and I watch a video documentary about Derrida, with the sly old fox being shrewd with his interviewers and sections of his writing voiced over. Intriguing glimpse.

August 27th; Wake up late, get to Sailing Club bar to find Martin chatting by Skype with video with Szilvi in Budapest on his laptop. Tomorrow's World has finally arrived then. In bright sun, a large military ship is parked alongside the restaurant for a couple of days, bristling with radar dishes, and today, coloured pennants, visible through the wall of glass just past our breakfast tables. He orders me a curious mixture of coffee and brandy - a sort of Iberian Irish coffee with more kick.
August 26th; Day of getting used to Martin's boat, and the heat. Pop into Cartagena trying to find a shop with one or two items. Martin tells me Cartagena was founded by Carthaginians, hence the name.

August 25th; Flight to Alicante goes smoothly. Arrive at the airport slightly dazed, queue up for bus to Murcia. Hot, relentless sun bakes every surface. Spaniards stand around being relaxed with who they are. At the busstop, a pretty girl in sunglasses stands motionless for about half an hour, an old man comes up, they speak and kiss briefly, he goes, and then I see she is quietly sobbing behind her shades. I ask if she is all right, she says yes thanks, so I leave her to her grief. Get bus to Murcia. I wander round their bus station swimming through the heat, then, twenty minutes before my 2nd bus, the one from there to Cartagena, I realise my mobile phone must have slipped out of my pocket. This contains the only record I have of how to get to where Martin is in Cartagena. The bus ladies are very kind. We search the bus - no luck. Then one bus lady phones my phone, and it turns out to have been handed into the ticket office. Smiles & hugs all round. I get on the bus to Cartagena, with still ten minutes to spare. Wander around Cartagena a bit, then Martin meets me beside a submarine. There is a big sailing race happening, and we walk along the jetty lined with parked yachts. He points out various expensive, stripped-down vessels built purely for strength, lightness, and speed.
August 24th; Fruitful meeting with Roger out in Saffron Walden, followed by a visit to Notting Hill Gate with Exotic Girl 1. She visits one telecom office, I visit another. Am told that no, having deactivated my year-old wireless modem, Vodafone feel no obligation to give my back the fifteen pounds I gave them. They get to keep that. Strangely, ten pounds in phone calls to their useless help desk last night will go unrefunded too. The help desk were unable to tell me that my modem SIM card was no longer in service. Finish Mystery Friend 2's copy of 'Strange Days Indeed', a curious account of the 1970s by Francis Wheen. Wheen gives Nixon several chapters as opposed to one chapter on Mao. He also seems to have learned a very significant lesson from the 70s: paranoia is usually silly. I know he also wrote a book about 'mumbo jumbo' so an overall view he has of the 70s jumps into focus: a time of intrigue, chaos, paranoia, conspiracy theories, terrorism, gullibility about the supernatural, UFOs and so on. The quote he includes of the rambling Harold Wilson telling a couple of journalists that he saw himself as the "big fat spider in the corner of the room" is priceless, and the hold that his secretary Marcia had over Wilson seems completely unexplained by Wheen's breezy account. Punk rockers get no mention, Callaghan and the IMF are briefly touched on, and what this is really is an account of the early 70s. The chapter-ending last word on page 141 is "divorcee", meaning Ronald Reagan. There are very few typos like that, but perhaps a basic superficiality in how Wheen brings the decade together. I turn the light out, and as I wait to fall asleep visions of similar triangles pirouette before my inner eye. Really very well behaved triangles, all things considered.

August 23rd; Meet Ray for a late breakfast at his studio, find Melanie in time to eat cakes and discuss plasma, and experience nagging problems with Vodafone, who don't seem to want to turn the fifteen pounds I gave them into an internet connection. I read Mystery Friend 2's copy of 'Das Kapital: a biography' by Francis Wheen, a short and readable tale both of how long it took Marx to write the book, and what the book says in Wheen's view. Wheen portrays Marx's pomposity and obsessive procrastination comically, but also makes a case for Marx as a visionary, literary thinker with a unique grasp of the power of capital, a sort of all-entangling organism of almost unstoppable power. Wheen seems unaware that the English socialist Thomas Hodgskin had the idea that profit was theft from labour two decades before Marx. It slowly becomes clear that Wheen, like Marx, doesn't really understand economics. As he cobbles together his pseudo-science, the fact that people with power cruelly use people without power is greeted by Marx as a symptom of a new and unique force, when it is really just a sad old fact about human nature. His ideas about profit are wholly confused. Marx and Wheen both seem unable to grasp that their belief that labour is compressed into production and somehow stolen by the mark-up {the only thing that makes any trade possible} is at least as occult and mystical as belief in spoon-bending. Marx proposes, though fails to realise he proposes, a kind of alternative pricing system to measure real value which would somehow replace the two-party price-haggling we have now. Perhaps I'm being unfair, but my memory of reading a large chunk of Das Kapital was of encountering a rambling polemic by someone struggling to grasp and analyse a topic substantially beyond him. This might explain why Marx was so appalling with money in his own life - Wheen reveals that at one point he is being paid four pounds a week in the mid-19th century by a New York newspaper, a huge amount of money at the time. Marx's inability to manage his personal finances despite high income like this and the loyal largesse of Engels casts very strong doubts on the profundity of the insights into money & economics he credits himself with. No wonder he wasted a year feuding with a German academic sharp enough to call Marx a charlatan - that accusation must have been unnervingly close to the bone. Marx emerges as a kind of crank social theorist. His theory posits a self-sustaining conspiracy without conscious conspirators so as to make it sound more serious, like a force of nature or history, a sort of social geology. This is an intellectually upmarket version of the widespread belief in 1840s and 1850s Europe that secret societies like the freemasons steered politics: literally antisemitism for pseuds. Wheen dismisses Samuelson's point that Marx was wrong on the absolute immiseration of the proletariat by digging out a line from Kapital justifying that Marx actually meant relative immiseration of the proletariat. Like the notion of relative poverty: a much more comfortable position for embattled left-wingers to defend. Yet he fails to notice that this is false too, and that the proletariat has vastly improved its relative as well as absolute position since Marx designated himself a prophet of imminent disaster a century and a half ago. Recent revivals in inequality relate less to now well-paid proletarians than to increases in earnings gaps between big capitalists and small capitalists, alongside the gap between well-paid proletarians and less well-paid proletarians. It's hard to claim they show working-class immiseration, even in the reduced version modern socialists retreat to. The fact that people work much longer hours now than in the 1970s is taken by Wheen as confirmation that Marx was right all along, not as confirmation that proletarian earning power is now sufficiently high that many people believe they can enrich themselves by voluntarily doing extra paid employment {or that the arrival of personal computers in the 1980s was the early beginnings of wage-earners purchasing productive machinery with their enlarged wages}. Worrying to see that Marx's failure to understand what savings and profits generated by machinery are lingers on. It even strikes a moderately bright person like Wheen as rational and completely unlike the paranoid, conspiratorial mood of the 1970s {Wheen's other book I'm reading}. The paranoia of the 1970s and since that Wheen mocks is the clearest sign I can think of that Marxist mumbo jumbo has infected all of us.
August 22nd; Fly to London, arrive at Mystery Friend 2's flat. We dine on Turkish food and watch 'High Plains Drifter'. Lots of symbolic, epic moments as the mythic archetypes stand tall in the harsh light of the American West.

August 21st; Last day of packing before travel. I print a packing list, sensible boy that I am. Then pizzafication with Marguerite & Kati.
August 20th; The usual annoying king/god/saint holiday I forget each year when shops are all shut just when I need them to be open. Changing printers will massively inconvenience me, but I switch to these people. Amazingly, a woman from their firm actually phones me from Britain, on my mobile, without me even asking her to. Why was I so patient with the other wankers? I ring the old firm to ask for my 400 quid back, get the man himself on the phone for the first time ever. He asks why I'm breaking the contract - I say he makes me feel like a nuisance, not a customer. He protests I'm not a nuisance, but he doesn't offer any last-minute deal or apology. He must think it normal to keep someone waiting a week who's deposited money with him and sent him book files and clearly wants to get the printing process started. Feeling of futile rage all day at other people's inability to just do their job properly. How can I cheer up? Try to think good thoughts.

August 19th; I've finally had it with this printer. It was so obvious from his secretary's voice that he was never going to phone me back, even though I've been waiting 7 days to talk to him, and he's been sitting on my 400 pound deposit for weeks. Unwind a little with Franc after dark after a second class with Annamari - amusingly shrunk from 12 students on Tuesday to 5 students tonight. Not just me who thought she was tough then.
August 18th; Last night, an unexpected switch of aerobics dominatrix, and the supple, lissome Annamari takes us through a truly excruciating set of exercises. A bit intense after what was nonetheless a gentle morning swim. I try reading up on the alleged 'endorphin deficient' condition. Sounds a lot like me.

August 17th; Extended lunch with Marion, after my first morning swim in ages.
August 16th; Ilan comes over and we have some soup at the Chinese restaurant.

August 15th; British Gas still stubbornly pretend I owe them money. In fact they owe me money. Total lack of shame, these sly utilities. Even when I catch them out lying they then concoct a new story claiming I owe them money. They insisted their 2009 estimate was a real reading while claiming the real inspection one of their meter readers did on June 19th this year was an estimate. Surprise, surprise, this was because the June reading showed that their bills are 1300 kW hours too high.
August 14th; Apparently many New York women's ex-boyfriends look like this. Humour aside, girls, if he was that gross, why didn't you choose someone good-looking to start with? By night meet Edith for dinner at the Mexican restaurant.

August 13th; At last, send in text and cover to printer in England. Suddenly feel free. Lula sends me links to some wonderfully raucous sixties songs by The Pretty Things and The Spencer Davis Group. I weakly reply with Larry & The Blue Notes and The Misunderstood. In the early evening I finish a short book by Paul Krugman, titled 'Development, Geography, and Economic Theory' adapted from a 1992 lecture series. Krugman argues in favour of mathematical models in economics, saying that people who think they do better economics by avoiding models usually overlook the mistakes in their own thinking that a rigorous model would have forced them to confront. Better some kind of simplified, imperfect model than no model at all. At the same time, he appears to regret the false starts in postwar development economics and economic geography that were caused by (a) those economists' inability to create a proper mathematical model for their insights, and (b) other economists' unwillingness to look at any new theory without a quantitative model underlying it. He uses two interesting metaphors. Maps of Africa went from being messily, vaguely, partly right when the interior was filled with hearsay about reported rivers, but as cartography got more rigorous & sceptical over evidence, the effect was to actually empty the interior of Africa, and through the 18th century the maps got blanker before filling up again with better-researched data. Likewise, as meteorology went from folk science to proper science, there was a hiatus of a century or so as folk wisdom about clouds was neglected in favour of exact measurements, only for later meteorologists to re-examine the old folk myths and find that in fact shapes of clouds predict the coming weather very well. Obviously the maps better favour his argument that the development of economics unfortunately led to neglect of folksier ideas until the mathematical substructure was ready to refound them systematically, since maps represent things that stay the same and can wait to be rediscovered. With weather he is already treading on thinner ice, and the extension to economics, where people's beliefs about economic clouds and winds actually form part of the substance of those clouds and winds, looks more tenuous still. Though the main thrust of this early-90s book seems innocently sensible and rational, in retrospect this might be seen as a pre-Black-&-Scholes-failure book. The Black & Scholes options-pricing model was admired by financiers and academics, but proved extraordinarily wrong by events a couple of years after they won the Nobel Prize for it. Theirs looks very much like a case where having some kind of numerically testable and theory-supported quantitative model most certainly was worse than having no model at all. However even if these lectures and this book come from before derivatives pricing fell apart, Krugman's text might have warned a few acute readers. Across the sunlit uplands of clearcut model-design, one or two hints of academic hauteur glint in his authorial voice. Krugman shifts from showing emotional attachment to sheer tidiness {"And yet what a difference a clean model makes." on page 86, or "The von Thunen model ...is a beautiful thing." on page 53, repeated almost word for word twelve pages later}, to patronising {"No - the moral of my tale is nowhere near that easy." page 65}, and on to sneering sarcasm {"Are you sure you really have such deep insights that you are better off turning your back on the cumulative discourse among generally intelligent people that is modern economics? But of course you are."} In being transformed from lectures into book, about thirty footnotes in the course of the text would have been a very good idea, giving short summaries and definitions of ideas and terms he refers to, instead of the 5 or 6 paragraphs of non-helpful notes on pages 109-110.
August 12th; It's been agonising days/weeks of checking & rechecking the book. I keep finding new errors now.

August 11th; Rather alarming statistics website, ticking away...
August 10th; Too cute to be true, but cute. Resign your job in 33 photos.

August 9th; Finish Yates book {with its strange cover art showing two cardboard boxes} on 'Giordano Bruno & the Hermetic Tradition'. This is a careful excavation of all the peculiar ideas in the mix at the start of the 17th century and the dawn of modern quantitative science. Yates convincingly shows that Bruno, a Dominican from Naples, was burned alive at the stake in 1600 not for supporting Copernican astronomy and not for suggesting an infinite universe of other planets {though he did both}. Rather he was executed for advocating a return to Egyptian magic, and enthusiastically promoting Cabalism, Hermeticism, and a kind of sun-centred astrological cult in Italy, France, England, and Germany. Yates reveals Bruno's hostility to maths, and shows he mainly supported Copernicus's heliocentric system because he identified the sun as The One of neo-Platonic mysticism. She argues that the wrong turn of Renaissance reverence for the writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus {wrongly thought until textual analysis by the scholar Casaubon in 1614 to be of greater antiquity than Plato or Jesus} helped turn scholars' attention to the direct study of nature. That is to say, a craze for nature magic among Renaissance magi paved the way for the rise of mechanical experimentation. The era closes with Marin Mersenne's struggles in the 1620s to remove magic from serious discussion. This was a far cry from the strange intellectual ferment among southern Italy's Dominicans in the 1550s and 60s that Yates detects. Younger than Bruno by twenty years {sometimes they were even in the same prisons for a few overlapping weeks, unknown to each other} came another Dominican, Tomasso Campanella. He actually led a popular revolution in 1599 in southern Italy to try {and fail} to throw out the Spanish rulers of the south and set up a 'City of the Sun' in Calabria, a Utopian pantheistic/semi-Christian city state along Hermetic lines. The mood shifts and Europe becomes cooler, more rational. Descartes himself shifts from a vaguely occultist, Rosicrucian outlook in a couple of years to becoming more interested in strictly mathematical modelling of nature. Yet even in this increasingly uncongenial new age, Campanella somehow stays alive, surviving prison and torture. He keeps reshaping his peculiar Sun-City mysticism, very similar to Bruno's in many details. He lives long enough to die a natural death at the French court where he has managed to talk his way into Cardinal Richelieu's team. In his last days, Campanella is recommending Richelieu and anyone who will listen that when he grows up the boy who will be Louis XIV should be hailed as the "Sun King".
August 8th; The Silver Key, by H.P. Lovecraft. Fascinating, the New World obsession with their lost Old World past.

August 7th; Pasta with Marguerite and her adorable dog Emma. She tells me of one US trial judge who reprimanded a woman in court for wearing red shoes, and when she wore them again the next day sent her down for contempt. Meanwhile, this must be why the Met shot Menezes 7 times in the head. It's hard to be sure these days.
August 6th; Yet more proof-reading. I might be about to turn into a semicolon.

August 5th; Intriguing language-learning method.
August 4th; More last-minute changes to book. Someone who sculpts the soft graphite of pencil leads and pencil tips. A little bit more low-key than the paper shaping. Weathered look of the pencils definitely part of the appeal.

August 3rd; Proofread book more. Some striking photos of flowers seen by X-ray. Eerie, delicate.
August 2nd; Proofread book. In the middle of the sofa, a piece of metal wire seems about to poke through the green fabric covering. It feels, when I sit on it, like it is the thickness of a broken spring. This is obviously not a good development. Mind you, entropy in this building isn't too bad. Ten days ago, one of the front steps had a big six-inch shard of tile detached, lying next to it. It was like that for three days, then mended as good as new. So well repaired I now cannot recall which of the steps had the damage before. Patient man who works in curved paper, {nice dog} though a lot of the images are a bit cluttered for my taste. Been meaning to try this form myself for years, but am still too lazy.

August 1st; Proofread book.


Recent weblog entries continued:

Who can translate the next 300 words into Korean or Hindi? Contact me and there will be revelry.

Languages dying out each week - who cares?

We do - otherlanguages.org is gradually building a reference resource for over five thousand linguistic minorities and stateless languages worldwide.

Thousands of unique language communities are becoming extinct. Out of the world's five to six thousand languages, we hardly know what we're losing, what literatures, philosophies, ways of thinking, are disappearing right now.

So?

We may soon regret the extinction of thousands of entire linguistic cultures even more than we regret the needless extinction of many animals and plants.

The planet is increasingly dominated by a handful of major-language monocultures like Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Arabic, Indonesian, Urdu, Spanish, Portuguese, English, Swahili, Russian, Cantonese Chinese, Japanese, Bengali - all beautiful and fascinating languages.

But so are the 5,000 others.

These are groups of people?

Linguistic minorities are communities of ordinary people whose native tongue is not their country's main official language. Swedish speakers in Finland, French speakers in Canada, Hungarian speakers in Slovakia - and hundreds more - are linguistic minorities.

And totally stateless languages are the native languages of some of the world's most intriguing, little-known, cultures. Like the Lapps inside the Arctic Circle, the Sards in Sardinia, Ainus in Japan. Cherokee in the US, Scots Gaelic in Britain, Friesian in the Netherlands, Zulu in South Africa. There are only a couple of hundred recognised sovereign states and territories, so more than 5,000 languages are the native tongues of linguistically stateless people.

How could I help?

You don't need to learn an endangered language - any more than go to live in the rainforest to help slow its destruction.

A good start is to just tell friends about websites like this.

Broader public interest makes it easier for linguists to raise funds and organise people to learn these languages while there's time.

That's right. There are people who love languages and are happy to learn them on behalf of the rest of us, but they need support, just like zoologists, botanists, or historians.

Fewer languages still sounds good to me

Depends what you think languages are for. They're not just a tool for business. We never said you should learn three or four thousand rare languages - or even one. And which ones we make children learn in school, or whether we should force children to learn languages at all, is another question.


Typical scene in a European city; Chances are, folk here speak some sort of foreign language *5

A century ago - before we understood ecology, and when we cared less about wilderness, most educated people would have laughed at the idea of worrying about plants or animals going extinct. Now we understand how important species diversity is for our own futures, we are more humble, and more worried.

In the same way, linguistic triumphalism by English-speakers who hated studying foreign grammar at school is dangerously ignorant as well as arrogant. Few of us know what we are losing, week by week. How many people realise these languages have scientific value?

Scientific value?

You can think of these languages across the planet as beautiful cathedrals or precious archeological sites we are watching being destroyed. That should be motive enough.

But these five thousand languages may also hold clues to the structure of the human mind. Subtle differences and similarities

Wireless radio can be a great comfort to those unable to leave the textbooks in which they live *6
between languages are helping archeologists and anthropologists to understand what happened in the hundreds of centuries of human history before written history. And that is one of our best chances of understanding how human brains developed over the thousands of centuries leading up to that.

Study of the mind and study of language go hand in hand these days. The world's most marginal languages are actually precious jigsaw pieces from an overall picture of who we are and how our species thinks and evolves. Every tiny language adds another brightly-coloured clue to this academic detective story.

Yet researchers have hardly started sifting through this tantalising evidence, and language extinction is washing it away right in front of us.

And worst of all, most people have no idea that there is this fantastic profusion of cultures across our world, let alone that they are in danger of extinction. Even just more people learning that there are still five thousand living languages in the world today (most of us would answer five hundred or fifty) is already a huge help.

We English-speakers hardly notice English - it's like air for us. But every other language is also an atmosphere for an entire cultural world, and each of these worlds has people whose home it is. Each language encapsulates a unique way of talking and thinking about life. Just try some time in a foreign prison, being forced to cope in another language, and you'll realise how much your own language is your identity. That's true for everyone.

Minority languages are a human-rights issue?

One of the most basic.

Dozens of millions of people worldwide suffer persecution from national governments for speaking their mother tongue - in their own motherland.

Many 'ethnic' feuds puzzling to outsiders had as their basis an attempt to destroy a linguistic community. Would the Northern Ireland dispute be quite so bitter if we English had not so nearly stamped out the Irish Gaelic language, for example? Almost nowhere in the world does a language community as small as the few thousand Rheto-Romanic speakers - the fourth official language of Switzerland - get the protection of a national government. Next time you see some Swiss Francs, check both sides of the banknote.

But outside exceptional countries like Switzerland or the Netherlands, speakers of non-official languages have a much less protected experience.

Speakers of minority languages are often seen as a threat by both the governments and the other residents of the countries where they were born, grew up, and try to live ordinary lives.

They experience discrimination in the job and education markets of their homelands, often having no choice but to pursue education in the major language of the host state - a deliberate government policy usually aimed at gradually absorbing them into the majority culture of that country.

Mighty oaks from tiny acorns grow, of course *7

Most governments are privately gleeful each time another small separate culture within their borders is snuffed out by a dwindling population or a deliberately centralising education system.

The United Nations is no help. It is an association of a couple of hundred sovereign states based on exclusive control of territory, almost all of them anxious to smother any distinct group or tradition that in any way might blur or smudge the hard-won borders around those pieces of territory.

The usual approach by sovereign states is to deny their linguistic minorities even exist.

-

Mark Griffith, site administrator / contact at otherlanguages.org

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*1 image from , with thanks
*2 "Al-Araby" in written Arabic (read more)
*3 "What?" in American Sign Language; image from , with thanks
*4 "Big" in written Chinese (read more); image from , with thanks
*5 image from , with thanks
*6 image from , with thanks
*7 image from 'B?ume', with thanks to Bruno P. Kramer, and Franckh-Kosmos Verlag

useful:

.languages of the world
.Internet free speech
.weights & measures
.5000 English words
.2000+ Chinese char.s
.persian/english dictionary
.currency rates 1 2 3 4 5

other web diaries:

.enigmatic mermaid
.languagehat
.billy
.francis
.samizdata
.patrick
.rainy day
.varangy
.diaries abroad
.hereinside
.samuel pepys
.hasanpix
.ehsan
.cora
.mychronicles
.openbrackets
.whump
.sargasso

also useful:

.country domain names
.language-learning 1 2
.find old websites
.fine HTML tutorial
.webhost
.minimalist websites

reviews: .................

books {...or films here}

1 metrologie historique
2 postmodernism & the other
3 disaster (news on sunday)
4 money unmade (russian barter in the 1990s)
5 the sleepwalkers
6 e
7 the kruschev era
8 the end of science
9 don't you want me?
10 the carpet wars
11 zelator
12 life of thomas more
13 faber book of science
14 gilgamesh
15 out of it
16 guns, germs & steel
17 words & rules
18 figure in the landscape
19 life without genes
20 bede's history of the english
21 the nothing that is
22 zoology
23 journey by moonlight
24 heavenly serbia
25 ratkay endre
26 the handmaid's tale
27 the selective eye
28 a megismerese epitokovei
29 intention
30 thirty nine steps
31 princess
32 the pyramids
33 the etruscans
34 moonchild
35 paradise news
36 culture of time & space 1880 to 1918
37 szimmetria
38 babel orokeben
39 astro-archeology
40 a history of islamic spain
41 high gothic
42 among the believers
43 the renaissance
44 augustine
45 mcvicar
46 atomised
47 tangled wing
48 da vinci code
49 nature via nurture
50 termeszet szamai
51 decline & fall of roman empire
52 practical cheesemaking
53 the sufis
54 fra angelico at san marco
55 the cryptographer
56 they have a word for it
57 szamok valosan innen & tul
58 artistic theory in italy 1450 to 1600
59 darwin's black box
60 indiai ejszaka
61 cleopatra: histories, dreams & distortions
63 what mad pursuit
64 language, the learner & the school
65 writing the romantic comedy
66 the blank slate
67 dougal & the blue cat
68 diego velasquez
69 horse nonsense
70 a certain chemistry
71 deterring democracy
72 textiles
73 thief of time
74 bloodsucking fiends
75 right ho, jeeves
76 generativ grammatika
77 1st time i got paid for it
78 galapagos
79 othello
80 understanding media
81 mysticism
82 short history of french literature
83 best on the market
84 art of seeing
85 culture & imperialism
86 food of the gods
87 arabic-islamic cities
88 the alchemist
89 verbal learning & memory
90 building a successful software business
91 don't make me think!
92 memory
93 the u.s. & the arab world
94 hard times
95 spells for teenage witches
97 the pig that wants to be eaten
98 encyclopaedia of stupidity
99 seventy eight degrees of wisdom: part i
100 beach watching
101 the ancient greeks
102 brainstorms
103 seventy eight degrees of wisdom: part ii
104 utopia
105 technical writing for engineers & scientists
106 alphabet versus goddess
107 writing on drugs
108 news from somewhere
109 isp survival guide
110 petrus hispanus mester logikajabol
111 art of seduction
112 stet
113 penguin by design
114 the sense of being stared at
115 the golden ratio
116 dinamikus emlekezet
117 margins of reality
118 hopjoy was here
119 bump in the night
120 box of delights
121 color atlas of immunology
122 fashionistas
123 pi in the sky
124 a new kind of fool
125 one man's meat
126 greek fire
127 the buddha in daily life
128 beginner's dutch
129 private life of the brain
130 solar ethics
131 pedant in the kitchen
132 knots
133 the planets within
134 encyclopaedia of ancient & mediaeval history
135 consilience
136 the age of scandal
137 fashion: the 20th century
138 the tipping point
139 design literacy
140 the silent partner
141 hamlet
142 1421
143 the 1890s
144 godel's proof
145 rosencrantz & guildenstern are dead
146 beyond reason
147 little book of music theory
148 q-basic
149 alone of all her sex
150 social studies
151 eternal darkness
152 drawn from memory
154 a guide to elegance
155 medea & other plays
156 the future of money
157 cheese
158 grammars of creation
159 aquarian conspiracy
160 the climate crisis
161 true fiction
162 the making of memory
163 why most things fail
164 genetikai abece
165 finding fulfilment
166 genome
167 the broken estate
168 inigo jones
169 flashman & the dragon
170 from bauhaus to our house
171 100 great paintings
172 kis spanyol nyelvtan
173 the historian
174 tomorrow's gold
175 charting made easy
176 life after life
177 spanyol igei vonzatok
178 the eclipse of art
179 fire in the mind
180 the human body
181 out of control
182 possession
183 simplified chinese characters
184 the generation of 1914
185 intellectuals
186 world of late antiquity
187 riddle & knight
188 informacio kultusza
189 napoleon of notting hill
190 secrets: palm-reading
191 meet yourself as you really are
192 cat's abc
193 intro to spanish poetry
194 rise of christian europe
195 philip's guide to electric living
196 sins for father knox
197 celtic twilight
198 myths of love
199 snobbery with violence
200 just like tomorrow
201 7 basic plots
202 experiment with time
203 vile bodies
204 icons & images: 60s
205 fisher king
206 new jerusalem
207 born on a blue day
208 surveillir & punir
209 trial of socrates
210 how to catch fairies
211 conversations on consciousness
212 mind performance hacks
213 conscience of the eye
214 beau brummell
215 evolution
216 the outsider
217 raja yoga
218 rise of political lying
219 occidentalism
220 colossus
221 secret teachings of jesus
222 blue murder
223 nostrodamus the next 50 years
224 homage to catalonia
225 charity ends at home
226 palace of dreams
227 discovering book collecting
228 beyond the outsider
229 the last barrier
230 that hideous strength
231 indian sculpture
232 small world
233 evolution & healing
234 in search of memory
235 campo santo
236 llewellyn's 2007 tarot reader
237 dream of rome
238 why buildings fall down
239 the empty space
240 england made me
241 greek science in antiquity
242 science, a l'usage des non-scientifiques
243 utmutato tarot
243 hunt for zero point
244 william wilberforce
245 viktor schauberger
246 untouchable
247 the vitamin murders
248 straw dogs
249 elizabeth's spymaster
250 the hard life
251 the god delusion
252 the intellectual
253 undercover economist
254 quirkology
255 chasing mammon
256 early mesopotamia & iran
257 the strange death of david kelly
258 the pilgrimage
259 origin of wealth
260 maxims
261 the finishing school
262 the shepherd's calendar
263 islamic patterns
264 lost world of the kalahari
265 german short stories 1
266 electricity
267 liber null & psychonaut
268 born to rebel
269 wittgenstein's poker
270 will the boat sink the water?
271 romeo & juliet
272 why beautiful people have more daughters
273 the crossing place
274 the turkish diplomat's daughter
275 missionary position
276 lust in translation
277 teaching as a subversive activity
278 how german is it
279 empires of the word
280 warped passages
281 the power of now
282 ponder on this
283 sword of no-sword
284 narcissism
285 blink
286 shock of the old
287 basque history of the world
288 truth: a guide
289 who shot jfk?
290 newtonian casino
291 power & greed
292 the world without us
293 5-minute nlp
294 concise guide to alchemy
295 evidence in camera
296 4-hour work week
297 the rosicrucian enlightenment
298 de-architecture
299 how to lie with maps
300 a book of english essays
301 a time of gifts
302 the occult philosophy in the elizabethan age
303 le pelerinage des bateleurs
304 alchemy & alchemists
305 greenmantle
306 the hero with 1000 faces
307 goethe's parable
308 rhedeyek es fraterek


films ..................................

1 k-pax
2 very annie mary
3 wasabi
4 gosford park
5 arany varos
6 minority report
7 amelie
8 bridget jones' diary
9 arccal a fo:ldnek
10 monsters' ball
11 cube
12 man with no past
13 talk to her
14 szerelemtol sujtva
15 bowling for columbine
16 matrix3
17 zoolander
18 anything else
19 farenheit 9/11
20 8 & 1/2 women
21 madagascar
22 kill bill 1
23 dude, where's my car?
24 the woman in green
25 the hunger
24 nightwatch
25 de battre son coeur s'est arrete
26 wicker man
27 v for vendetta
28 courage the cowardly dog
29 casino royale
30 power of nightmares
31 charlie's angels
32 full throttle
33 foxy brown
34 paths of glory
35 airplane
36 between iraq & a hard place
37 mutiny on the bounty
38 flashmob the opera
39 octopussy
40 bakkerman
41 kiterunner

....................................................................................................................................


July 31st; British newspaper article about poo.

July 30th; Keen reader Josh inspired by my sunburnt-slots-in-envelopes post to send me pinhole photos of months & months of the sun crossing the sky. Two Economist articles on rich & poor. Seems rich folk really are meaner than poor folk and giving your possessions away to the destitute makes your life difficult.
July 29th; "Real bear rescues stuffed bear from humans."

July 28th; Small hours of the morning, listen to Melvyn Bragg's radio show, this time about Abelard & Heloise. Hadn't realised that Abelard was such a major logician, or that Heloise knew Greek & Hebrew much better than him. This morning I woke out of a dream where I am chatting in a library with a charming grey-haired woman who is a historian of 14th and 15th century Paris. Yesterday I woke out of a dream where I was at a congress of cartoonists somewhere. A few days ago, I woke out of a wonderfully detailed dream about clans, gangs, heraldry, and families through history. Curious.
July 27th; Much cooler, damper weather. Not like last week when I sat in on a meeting about this digital artist's website, got home, then collapsed. Today, in the sauna, chat with two women about suntans. One woman compliments the other on her beautiful tan {the younger blonde's smooth skin is a soft creamy coffee colour} and they agree on the obvious point that solarium tans differ visibly from natural tans, but the blonde then suggests an interesting extra distinction: freshwater and saltwater tans. She says her tone comes from tanning at Lake Balaton. I ask her if it might also be the quality of the light reflected off fresh versus salt water, not just the salt or lack of salt on the skin, but she has no theory of why the tans differ. She just sees they do.

July 26th; A friend in a reading group contributes to this legal weblog.
July 25th; Anonymous Slav meets me on way to airport to hand over keys. Fascinating article about "caring professions" and {says the author} the end of friendship & love, at least in American culture.

July 24th; Much cooler this morning - which is odd, since my three thermometers say it is still 82 Farenheit. I only needed the electric fan for 15 minutes last night, but I have it in reserve for when serious heat returns. In case Gentle Reader is wondering why it took me this long to buy one, I should say I never found heat difficult to take before. I also got extremely ill in the summer of 2001 from a panning fan in an office repeatedly chilling the sweat on my neck, so have been rather wary of mechanical cooling devices since.
A nice summary of mass extinctions found by Zdravko, though I wish they had kept the first two billion years to scale, squashing all complex life into the rightmost fifth of the graphic, where it belongs. I love the 'Oxygen Apocalypse'.
July 23rd; The heat continues. Last night I was unable to make it to three appointments, and just lay on the sofa under a single sheet, wheezing like a walrus. The calcium pills seem to be slowly taking the heat rash off my arms, but the curtains have been shut for three days now. All air seems to have the texture of warm meat. In the afternoon, I pass out for about an hour before going to see Regina about page design. The curtains are perhaps eight inches short of the floor, so even with them closed, a horizontal band of daylight of such harsh brightness comes into my room that it's as if my entire balcony is being arc-welded. Locals outside have the kind of witless street quarrel they do sometimes round here, grunting voices bouncing off the buildings and coming through my wide-open balcony door draped in closed curtain. One of them is banging a car bonnet for emphasis, and as I slide into sleep {more like being anaesthetised than dozing off} their noises sound increasingly animal-like. Even with the curtains shut, behind my eyelids I can tell when a small cloud slides across the sun, and as the brightness across the floor gets powerfully bright again, I can see with eyes shut a shimmering sheet of beaten gold. I start imagining that a cosmic gourmet has me paralysed but still juicy in my dark little flat while he heats up a pan outdoors to fry me in liquid sunshine; "sealing in the goodness", he might say. I wake exactly on time after one hour of this feverish, delirious sleep and get to Regina's air-conditioned office somehow. We do some work on the book, and she advises me to buy a fan. Later I wander stupidly round Tesco and purchase an electric twirly thing and somehow get it home and assemble it. It's actually quite well-designed, and I don't need to refer to the instructions in Polish, Hungarian, Czech, or Slovak, to put it together and switch it on in about ten minutes.
Mustn't grumble - weather promises to cool a little, the plump pharmacist lady was right to prescribe me calcium pills, and djuice/Pannon apologised some days back by giving me five complimentary gigabytes. I got called over a week ago by the curvy blonde Evi, who tries to switch into Hungarian with me {despite my policy of speaking only English when I am the Righteous Customer}, and is wonderfully giggly & girly. As so often, this stereotype of the cuddly dizzy blonde appears to understand the price packages and the software better than anyone else at the djuice showroom {she used to work at the Mammut mall when Mariannpsy went with me to open an account}. The other staff keep having to call her up for help if she's not there, and I can't be sure, but I get the strong impression that she's the manageress. See her there two days ago to be placated with my customer gift. She is wearing something so far off one shoulder it actually restricts her moving her arms around. Sometimes she sticks her tongue out with concentration as she {correctly} punches keys and shows the others what to do on the computer system.
Seemingly the only version of 'Disk Warrior' by the Raiders I can find not remixed by the Nasty Boyz is this one accompanying a heatstruck-looking beach-themed fashion show in Brazil. One tanned mannequin jumps out - she's unable to keep the cat-got-the-cream grin off her face. It's no surprise when at the end where all the girls are applauding the swimwear designer, she reaches out a long supple arm, yanks the designer over and gives him a rather confident, dominant kiss on his neck. I can't be entirely sure, but I seem to see a quick cascade of reactions flicker across his face as she does this, going through initial shock, an instinct to pull away he represses an instant later, eyebrows twitching in a isn't-this-a-bit-public-sweetie? way, and a decision to stay cool and whisper a quick warning in her ear as if nothing has happened. In case any doubt is left which mannequin is riding the designer, she then blows kisses at the audience afterwards as if she's the hostess of the whole event. Perhaps I'm seeing things which aren't there.

July 22nd; Adorable little metallic hedgehog photo via Nicolas: it's a cheese grater!
July 21st; Finally, an aerobics class led by the notorious Trixi. She's not at all how I expected. Far from being the sadistic elf made of steel cable I imagined, she is a broad-shouldered, cheerful, tanned lass carrying a few extra pounds round the middle. The session was certainly very rigorous, but Trixi's essentially just a big, strong girl who can go for miles. No wonder the taut little dainty ones hate her and fear her. A film actor called Mel Gibson has been taped saying rude things on the telephone, and the United States is strangely shocked. Those of us who thought that aggressive vulgarity was actually required before an American was allowed to become famous might be puzzled, but here is a gently-modified trailer for one of Mr Gibson's old films, overlaid with some of his special thoughts. Serves him right for making an anti-British propaganda film like 'Braveheart', as if there weren't enough lies about our history already.

July 20th; Strange rash up my arms. The heat? No itching, but looks a bit alarming.
July 19th; Virginia at DeepGlamour says that George Hurrell is the photographer who took pictures of film actresses like this, and Julius Shulman is the photographer who took pictures of modern architecture like this.

July 18th; Song found by Jessica: a nice reworking.
July 17th; Alarming little debt map. Yes, Britain is red.

July 16th; Finish off the shortened-length-version Karinthy work. Getting a sense of the aerobics instructors and their styles. Zsuzsa is young & perky, with a steely edge to her routines. Kinga is pretty, supple, fleet of foot, and enjoys us not quite being able to keep up with her. Anita seems older, calmer, and steadier, though still rigorous. Only the dreaded Trixi, tomorrow, remains untried. The girls at the desk told me clearly that Trixi is the most severe & demanding, at least in the step aerobics sessions. I have been warned.
July 15th; I proofread a translation of turn-of-the-century novelist Frigyes Karinthy; so says this page he originated the "six degrees of separation" concept. Not sure I believe that, but some clever readable prose about i) being operated on for a brain tumour, and ii) being a schoolboy again.

July 14th; Rather wearying heat continues. Above 85 Farenheit indoors, day & night.
July 13th; 1st morning lesson with Qazaq teacher goes well. She explains that 'father', 'to bring', 'mother' and 'to take' are ake, akelu, ana, alu and she giggles when I flippantly speculate that this suggests the root of 'father' is 'bringer', and the root of 'mother' is 'taker'. The sounds of the letters are pleasingly soft on the ear. In the afternoon, I position a magnifying glass in a cup of water so that it focuses a spot of sun on a letter from my bank, at the same time as putting a thermometer out there. Am a little alarmed I might melt the thermometer case, made of plastic. In the sun, the red fluid goes straight up to 118 Farenheit in about fifteen seconds, and perhaps only fails to go further because of the pressure of gas inside the last bit of glass tube, so I bring it back in. Meanwhile, between 4pm and 5pm, the magnifying glass burns a grey slot in the bank-letter envelope exactly an inch and a half long and two sheets of paper deep with some pinholes in the third layer. In the early evening, I go to another aerobics class. Our instructor, Zsuzsa, is particularly adept at getting us to do small repetitive movements with one arm or leg until the whole body part is locked into muscle cramp. In the sauna afterwards a slim blonde chats in a soft, quiet voice with a solidly built man with dark hair. I have this absurdly vivid conviction that he is married, but not to her. As I step out of the shower, she is murmuring to him and coaxingly stroking the back of his neck down just between his shoulder blades with one hand. None of my business in any case. In the heat at night, I have unpleasant dreams where I visualise lots of burnt lines in paper, laid out like teeth of a comb, tracking the movement of the sun on different days of the summer as the earth revolves minute by minute and orbits the sun day by day. The core of these slightly delirious dreams is wondering if the burnt strips can be visualised as part of a helix {joining up with the paths they can be imagined to trace out at night} and if so, how big the loops of the spring would be.

July 12th; It's so warm here in Budapest that I buy three cheapo thermometers at a bargain shop. All three of them claim it is between 82 and 84 degrees Farenheit day and night, so I pop one in the fridge and it goes down to freezing, suggesting they are working after all. I go to the Toastmasters meeting and pay homage in my 7-minute talk to schoolteacher Reverend Berry's knowledge of the Indian subcontinent. In particular the way he told me when I stopped him in a queue for lunch in the late 70s and asked him about Indira Gandhi's arrest for corruption that "India cannot do without her - she'll be back in power within three years" and how when our class challenged him to say in the first week of January 1980 how Afghanistan would go, he confidently stated "the Afghans will defeat the Soviet Union and it will take them ten years to do it, the same length of time it took them to defeat us."
July 11th; In a way which is a bit hard to explain, the rust stripe around my pine tabletop while I was away seems to have blurred in the same heat that killed my herbs. When I got back some days ago, I could see on the table how the sweat from my forearm {mainly the right forearm} over weeks in April & May had bleached a sort of halo into the rust stripe at each end. Though.... I don't know how I didn't notice that before, unless the sweat took time to seep through the sun-baked table and react with the rust, so the sweat-bleaching in that case took effect while I was in England. In other places, rust brown seems to have bled out into the wax-soaked pale areas like ink seeping across a very slow kind of blotting paper. I bought & sliced a lemon yesterday and repaired the sharpness of the rust stripe edge in places.
The obvious painter to go with composer J o h n Tavener {The mid-name r must have been put down to avoid confusion with 'John Taverner', presumably} surely has to be C e c i l Collins? Both rather lonely-sounding, deliberately-naive English Christian mystics, both very elegaic. Lots of angels.

July 10th; I probably ought to print out Primavera on foamboard.
July 9th; I'm relaxing late around 1am, enjoying some talks on pecha-kucha when TV Eszter phones me up, as far as I can make out to reproach me for not being disappointed enough about her cancelling our teahouse meeting at 1 this afternoon.

July 8th; Seems that Snoop Dogg tried to rent Liechtenstein. Ah, what a lad.
July 7th; djuice/Pannon up to its old thieving tricks again.

July 6th; In the morning, Szilvi comes to pick up some boat bits for Martin, so she can take them to him in Sardinia in a few days. In the mid-afternoon, Dorina appears in cool turquoise & crisp white to take me to a restful studenty bar run by barefoot Russians one tramstop away from my flat.
July 5th; Very hot and sunny here in Pest. All my herbs on the balcony fried up while I was away, even in their translucent water bath. At an Indian restaurant I finish '50 Mots Clefs d'Esoterisme' by Michel Mirabail, a book Mateus approved of me buying in Paris two summers ago. Although the book is nominally fifty short essays in alphabetical order, it quietly builds up to a subdued climax with the final three sections {modishly given in lower case in this 1970s edition}, tarot; telesme {the crucial term in Hermetic alchemy}; tradition. Some rather wonderful black-and-white line diagrams, and the usual French academic air of coolness & calm.

July 4th; After the gym I pass, on the other side of the street, a small family group. The man is carrying a seven-foot model tree, its bark painted in red & black stripes for realism, along with blue foliage. Yesterday had an oddly gentle, weightless mood turning into sweet, sharp dreams.
July 3rd; Before leaving for the airport, make it a few streets away for a couple of pints of wonderfully cold stout with Ursula & Phil. This is in a pub which has been open 175 years but is now going to become part of a luxury housing block. Fly to Budapest, meeting delightful, sweet-natured people on the plane and on the late-night bus into town afterwards.

July 2nd; Meet Peter the Pianist, an old acquaintance of Marion & Paul, at Guildhall. He kindly gives me half an hour of his time, and we briefly chat about music, changing fashions, and languages - out beside a sunlit oblong pond full of reeds facing what is apparently the City of London School for Girls. Later in the day go with Mystery Friend 2 & Exotic Girl 1 to see a Romanian film at a cinema on Curzon street as part of a Romanian film festival. This film, 'Police, Adjective', hard to do justice to in print, is about the painstaking investigation by a detective in a small town of a couple of teenage boys who smoke hashish. The deadpan humour slowly builds up until the painfully funny scene near the end. As a man interviewing the director, Corneliu Porumboiu, on stage afterwards observes, he deliberately breaks several golden rules of cinema, such as "show, don't tell". Like a sarcastic Tarkovsky, revelling in the sweet dullness of Eastern Bloc life.
July 1st; Quiet day getting stuff done, including shopping for ingredients with Exotic Girl 1. She makes the birthday cake for Mystery Friend 2, while I put the Hungarian lettering on it. While we check out of the Sainsbury's, Exotic Girl {like Nigel of Darkness yesterday} insists we use the automated till where we swipe our own bar codes. At one point, the woman's voice coming out of the machine suddenly assures us that "Help is on the way" with just the right intonation. I look around, and a man at the next check-out grins at me. He remembers the 70s film 'THX1138' {the film's two catch phrases are "What's wrong?" and "Help is on the way!"} but no-one else in the hypermegasupermarket obviously does. Another programmer's joke? In evening drinks, a lawyer friend claims she has an obsessive-compulsive secretary who is incredibly meticulous, but has a morbid fear of anything granular {apparently it took her 20 minutes to psych herself up to cross a sandy track in Hyde Park, and found a sugar-coated doughnut on her desk a vision of pure horror}, and more intriguing still, has an equally intense phobia about anything to do with the Tudors. A bit hard to believe, really. Must investigate.


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2004
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2003
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