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2005
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December 31st;
Read a book by Rupert Sheldrake.
'The
sense of being stared at' is
straightforwardly sensible
and daringly bizarre by turns. Once-orthodox biologist
Sheldrake
has, in the years since
'Nature'
called his first weird book about morphic resonance "a
book for burning",
been doing experiments with animal telepathy. He has
the innocent
idea of, when people claim their dog "knows" when
their owner is
coming home, or even has formed the intention of
coming home, methodically testing
their claims. This book contains much of his material
on this, but rather more.
He makes the
startling proposal that when children, primitives, and
the ancients, think that vision
is something coming out of the eyes, not just
in, that they might be right and
modern biology [for whom the eye is only a receiver of
light] wrong. Next to that one,
another suggestion - that waking a couple of minutes
before your alarm clock goes off
or your alarm call comes through [as I always do] is
not a form of internal clock but
an everyday form of seeing into the future - sounds
positively tame. Clearly I
underestimated Sheldrake when Andrew took me to see
him in Kensington in the 80s.
No shortage of boldness, whatever else.
December 30th;
Visit very helpful
e-cafe in Halifax. Grey, rainy
day.
December 29th;
John finds me in a Chinatown
Internet
cafe. Chilly night.
December 28th;
Read the book I gave mother for Christmas.
'Penguin
by Design' by Phil Baines,
though a handsome picture book
of 70 years of smart and clever Penguin covers, was
oddly reminiscent of 'Stet'. Much the same period,
1935 to 2005, is covered, and there is the same story
of decline. Idealistic young
designers, editors and publishers slowly slide over
the postwar decades towards ever more confused-looking
books. Both accounts show modernism failing, as what
looked sharp & new in one decade becomes old-fashioned
in the next. For the first 15 or 20 years
Allen
Lane and his young designers were brightly
confident that modernism and good taste were
compatible - or even synonymous. It slowly
emerges that they are neither: the same wistful
history as modernism in architecture.
What worked for both was a kind of classicism that
insisted on undercutting itself.
A gorgeous book visually, packed with sharp,
attractive cover designs. Refreshing to
read accounts of people who really cared about
typefaces: the early use of
Gills Sans
shows Penguin's real roots in
Bodley Head and the
Arts
&
Crafts
passion of the 1890s.
But by the 1990s,
when Penguin dropped the Pelican imprint under
pressure from American partners for
clashing with a US book series and for being "too
highbrow", a similar failure to that
in Athill's narrative becomes clear. A quick sum based
on shop assistants'
wages and cigarette prices in 1935 and 2005 suggests
Penguin paperbacks have
tripled in real price. Lose the founding mission to
print
smart, affordable, accessible paperbacks on serious
subjects,
and what's left of Penguin?
December 27th;
In small hours finish mother's copy of Diana Athill's
book about her life as an editor.
'Stet',
despite being written in an upbeat, brisk tone, is
rather a sad story.
From the 1940s to the 1990s, Athill worked for Andre
Deutsch, as a partner and book
editor. Apart from enjoying offices at quite
attractive London addresses, it seems
neither Athill nor Deutsch felt they had much to show
for five decades helping
novelists like
Mailer,
Roth,
Naipaul,
Updike,
Rhys
get their first books published.
She was charmed and inspired by him, but depicts
Deutsch as nastily critical of
colleagues he liked to their faces,
slyly nasty about employees he didn't like behind
their backs [until they left of
their own accord], and deeply forgiving of himself.
Andre Deutsch was a Hungarian.
As being an independent book publisher in the 1980s
grew ever bleaker,
his phrase "It's not fun any more" sums up the firm's
failure to outgrow its energetic but flawed founder.
As authors join them and then
leave them for bigger publishers, until Deutsch sells
off the backlist to no avail,
Athill's crisp, cheerful prose has an ever more
depressing effect. A poignant moment
at the end when she revisits an editorial office after
her retirement and marvels
happily that "It's still there" ["It" standing for
"being young", she explains]
makes me wonder if she was in love with Deutsch for
decades as she
toiled for him like a junior rather than a partner.
Two tiny photographs
on the book's cover show Athill, in one at
what looks like an elegant yet lively fancy-dress
party in the late 1940s. Beautifully
written, not least because of her fair-mindedness.
Yet imagining her polishing the prose of
self-important
novelists for fifty years seems a dreadful waste for
all her protestations of
having found it a lot of fun.
December 26th;
Ryan phones from Michigan. Mentions
Mises.
Finish
Mr
Carlson's copy of the
Robert Greene book,
'The
Art of Seduction'. This
ever-so-slightly-sinister tome is a
typographically lush guide to seducing people, using
lots of examples from both
literature and history. By "lush" I mean playful use
of shaped paragraphs at each
chapter start and finish (text in ovals, triangles,
shapes reflecting the personality
type of that chapter), plus use of lilac italic margin
notes quoting sources like
Homer's Odyssey, Casanova's diaries, Stendhal on love
and so forth. This part - the
handsome design of the book - is presumably down to
Joost
Elffers, designer/editor/'producer'. (Elffers'
book
on birthdays is probably the one used at the party
of
Jaap's
that Robin
mentioned.) The design of Greene's book very
successful - just a smidgeon of
disappointment at finding typos on both page 107 and
108 in such an otherwise
sumptuous, carefully-presented text. Am fairly sure it
was Greene's other book (on
laws
of power) that I found on Andrei's bookshelves a
couple of years back. Another
set of lessons drawn from history and literature. In
'Art of Seduction'
Greene distinguishes 18 types of victim for seduction,
and ten types of seducer.
The basic idea is: choose a compatible person whose
weaknesses and illusions
you understand, and use the seduction method that best
suits your own personality.
Though he claims that everyone wants to be seduced (he
quotes one wit who claims that
virtue is just an appeal to be more stylishly
seduced), chapter headings like
'Mix pain and pleasure' or 'Master the art of
insinuation' are vaguely alarming,
nonetheless. Very readable and interesting. A queasy
hint of the
overdoing-the-box-of-chocolates feeling afterwards.
December 25th;
Christmas Day. Chicken,
cheese,
mandarins.
December 24th;
Christmas Eve. Find mother's old copy of
Seidensticker's English translation of Murasaki
Shikibu's
'The
Tale of Genji' on a top shelf. Bit bulky for
paperback format.
December 23rd;
I finish the Peter
of Spain logic book borrowed on Mariann's ticket,
drop it off at the
library
on the way to the airport, and fly to Manchester. Two
separate men, one at the airport,
one at Victoria railway station, are so drunk that
they cannot get off the floor. This
book,
'Petrus Hispanus Mester
Logikajabol' by Gennadiosz
Szkholariosz, was a translation into Greek of the main
mediaeval logic textbook by Peter
of Spain from the 1200s. Western students used this
text to study Aristotle and logic even
up to Thomas More's time. The odd journey Aristotelian
logic went on was translation from
Greek to Arabic, Arabic to Latin in Spain, and - in
this case - translation back into
Greek just in time for Byzantium to fall to the Turks.
The translator into Greek,
Gennadios, actually saw the fall of Constantinople in
1453 and served as Orthodox
Patriarch after the Turkish conquest. This
dual-translation edition by the
Joszoveg
/ Hianypotlo [Good text / Filling a gap] publisher
had his Greek on the left [by the 1400s the
Greek-speaking East was an intellectual backwater, and
even a 200-year-old Latin text was cutting edge] and
the Hungarian version of Maria Szabo on the right.
Nice and short. Peter elaborates his own taxonomy of
types around the Aristotelian syllogism, and lays out
differences between categories of Aristotelian
inference clearly. Extraordinary to read something by
the mysterious Peter of Spain at last. Budapest's
central lending library has no fewer than four copies
of this apparently vital text on its shelves.
December 22nd;
More merriment with
Mr
Carlson,
this time with his friends the mellow Jack and the
mesmerising Nora.
I duck out of the party later.
December 21st;
Cheery dinner with
Mr
Carlson.
December 20th;
Hangover. Another
Heesch
tiling page.
December 19th;
Mr
Carlson joins us at the
VoIP firm.
Evening office party at
a
restaurant,
accompanied by
Politics
Judit's
utterly charming friend Isabel. I find I like Pina
Caladas a lot, and the way Isabel pronounces it
suggests there is a little squiggly
tilde on top of the n.
December 18th;
Help
Liia
move some boxes to Vera's. Vera gives me the rest of
the almond scent she is burning because I like it so
much.
At evening's end I get to the end of
'ISP
Survival Guide',
a densely written book from the office about Internet
service providers.
How do I start to describe this? One of Geoff Huston's
sentences:
"A sad reflection of the conflict
of short-term
objectives and longer term considerations is that the
evident short-term motivations of ready and equitable
access to the IPv4 address [which were the
motivational factors in determining the current
Internet address allocation policies] run the
consequent risk of monopoly-based restrictive trade
and barrier-based pricing as a longer term outcome of
unallocated address space exhaustion."
"Exhaustion" is right: the book is
long and poorly written. Most sentences could have
been
cut in half or removed. Huston's networks never have
shapes or grids or plans
- they have topologies, architectures, environments
and
scenarios. Nothing less than four syllables will do.
He is fond of words like
'germane' and 'antonym', and likes 'carriage' (the
noun for carrying data) so
much that he uses it eight times in one paragraph. At
least 100 terms
are missing from the glossary, and to make space for
an extra ten pages of glossary this six-hundred-page
block of a book could have
dropped around two hundred pages of the kind of
sentence quoted above. Some
interesting technical topics are discussed - a chapter
on payment models for data
packets finds problems with all the best guesses of
how best ISPs can charge each
other for passing on Internet traffic. Some intriguing
terms are introduced: I
enjoyed
"lollipop
sequence spaces" and
"split
horizon with poison reverse",
but some are introduced without any explanation at
all, while others are only
explained badly. One thing he does a lot of is explain
a term 50 or 100 pages after
he starts using it. Many of the diagrams are
unhelpful, though some are very good.
Things he understands well, such as network protocols,
are
explained too tersely, though embedded in long-winded
sentences anyway. Things he
understands less well, such as economics and business,
are laboured at huge length.
To be fair to Huston, he may not have expected many
people
to read it all the way through, and there were perhaps
not many people qualified to
write this book in 1998. On the other hand, that's
what editors and ghost writers
are for. Problem is, you need modesty to even think of
hiring writing
help, and wading through
the closing hundred pages of his pompous
non-predictions about Internet "futures"
and "policy" should leave no reader in any doubt as to
just how
modest this writer is. One section has him archly
apologising
for using a word as "misused and meaningless" as
'multimedia'. This is after
hundreds of pages of writing 'impacting' instead of
'affecting' or 'influencing' or
'changing' - and repeatedly using 'issues' instead
of 'problems', or 'drawbacks' or 'flaws'... Why use
one word for both 'topic' or 'theme'
('issues') and for things
going wrong
('issues' again), so blurring what you want to
distinguish? No
surprise several sad, exhausted readers on the
Internet are trying to sell this 30-dollar book
for two dollars sixty. As Mark Twain said of the
Book
of Mormon: "chloroform in
print".
December 17th;
To get some better lightbulbs with more
candlepower, I pop over to
shopping
centre. While I have my shoe
off outside
Media Markt
trying to undo a stubborn shoelace knot, I find
Erik standing
over me. I undo knot, we buy electrical goods, we
drink milkshakes, we sight Scott.
On the top floor of the mall, Erik points out to me
that the
Palmers lingerie shop is exactly
between a clothes shop called
Envy and another clothes shop called Amnesia.
December 16th;
After work and after a decade, I give
Pista
his maths books back. We shelter from the sleet in a
small
cafe.
December 15th;
Lunch, catch up with
Tim.
After work, over a beer, I try to help sort out
Reka's
love hexagon.
December 14th;
Meet
Sebestyen.
Start
this.
Meet
Scott.
December 13th;
Thoughtful piece via
a&ld, on
"radical
losers", in journal with silly pun title.
December 12th;
As we leave the house on the Great Plain at 7am,
5-year-old Bela throws a fit about which coat to wear.
Georgina drives Bela to the nursery, and then Letty
and me
to Kecskemet. I reach the railway station just missing
a train I'd like to have caught,
and am told that the timetable has changed. This would
be why the
MAV
muppets took the
timetable website
down yesterday, exactly the day their passengers would
need it most? Presumably they
don't know how to update a website offline. This
mysterious timetable change
makes me wait an hour and a half in Kecskemet to get
on the 9.30am slow
train to Budapest. After a long day, I relax over
milkshakes with
Kerstin.
December 11th;
Cakes in
Kunszentmarton.
Train
website down.
December 10th;
Chilly day with lemon-sharp sun streaming across the
Great
Plain. I take photos of Robin's
Etch-a-Sketch
toy outdoors in the wind.
Later we go for a walk: his over-enthusiastic dogs
Vicky & Lupi run
after the scent of some deer and need restraining &
retrieving.
Indoors I teach Kasper rules for
5x6
mini-chess, like those reduced versions
Laszlo
Polgar is promoting. After
dark
Robin
& I drive to inspect the Tiszakurt Internet cafe, past
a few farm cottages with strings of
flashing Xmas lights draped over them.
Tiskainoka's parish church has a five-foot-high
pentacle made of
fairy lights proudly mounted halfway up the belltower.
In
Tiszakurt's only bar we meet two excited girls
dancing beside a jukebox.
December
9th;
Give talk at office about
Skype.
Discussion afterwards quite good. On
train
to
Robin's,
I sit next to a large, quiet man in a suit & tie. We
wish
each other good appetite as we start eating our
separate meals,
and then wish each other good health as we sip glasses
of identical
beer. One European House!
December
8th;
Waiting for my underground train to meet Politics
Judit, I
pass an
Intimissimi
lingerie poster on the platform. A Hungarian
man & woman are casually examining the clinging
negligee in the poster, talking about whether the
mannequin's nipples have been digitally erased. I join
the
discussion. The man & I wonder if there is also
something
suspiciously
Photoshopped
about the area around her mouth.
Politics Judit is in full flow inside a cafe called
Negro, next
to the cathedral, where she introduces me to Isabel
from
Madrid [Judit keeps calling her "Spain"] and Robert
from
Hamburg. Tarot readings and good cheer.
December
7th;
A lozenge of bright sunshine creeps across my wall as
I wake up. As I get
up and get dressed it crosses the board-mounted
photograph of the
Margit
Kovacs ceramic sculpture [of a mother & two
children] hanging
above my bed. I could place a mirror or two to act as
a silent alarm
clock by directing a sunbeam onto my face at a precise
time each
morning [adjusting the mirrors a bit each week for the
seasons].
Like the silent doorbell in
'Our
Man Flint'.
December
6th;
Wake this morning out of vivid dream about being drawn
into a vegetarian sex cult
made up mainly of petite, dark-haired girls dressed as
giant peanuts. Am still
coughing up chunks of phlegm. On crowded underground
train to work, I blow
my nose badly, so splatter dignified woman in glasses
sitting next to me.
Without comment, she carefully wipes my snot off her
face while staring gloomily into
the middle distance, as is the Hungarian way. At
lunchtime
we get a talk at the
office from a
motivational
speaker who has no arms. After work I meet
Sebestyen
at the
Academy
of Sciences for a fruit tea, before getting to
Buda to find that
Andrej has done not one, but two,
sonnets
as homework. Perhaps eating all his
fruit gums last time effective.
December
5th;
2nd half of interesting
slide
show about how to do presentations for managers.
December
4th;
In the dining car from
Szolnok
back to town, a sad effort to be Xmassy
has draped tinsel over some windows. One cord of
blinking orange lights snakes
the length of two tables at
one
end of the carriage.
December
3rd;
Edina & Geza drop by at
Robin's.
We are all ill. Edina answers my questions about her
thesis on witches, dragons & magic horses. Robin &
Geza get involved in doing things with black ink on
hundreds of old business cards. I discover Robin's
Etch-a-Sketch toy.
December
2nd;
Interesting meeting at work about
ISP
business models. Bump into
Mr
Carlson.
Afterwards I rush to catch the last train to Robin's
on the Great Plain.
December
1st;
Fly
to Budapest. I've found English flight crews always
say "Use of mobile phones during
the flight is forbidden because they can interfere
with navigational equipment."
Hungarian flight crews always say "Use of mobile phones during the flight
is forbidden." Straight from
airport to school to see Rachel,
a charming history applicant. Afterwards, I see
Franc's vast photo task for myself, laid out in rows
and rows across his floor.
Mark Griffith, site administrator /
markgriffith at yahoo.com
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