Operating System

On matters regarding puter and related phones and tablets I admit to conservatism. I don't like change - if the 1s and 0s work I don't see the need to update. From experience early adoption means heartache and frustration.

I had been happy with the old operating system for both phone and computer. They were out of date but they were stable and I knew their idiosycrancies. I read in today's papers the sorry news that a security flaw meant I had no longer had a choice - I would have to update. I would be saying goodbye to a familiar electronic face.I had seen the face of the new operating system and found it garish - it's day glo icons reminded me of the children's TV programme the Tellytubbies. With regret I hit install and downloaded a new world. It didn't look brave.

The new operating system has some benefits but nothing remarkable. I am learning a few tricks.There is one constant however - I have no use in the old or new version for the dulcet tones of the voice recognition software. In a film called Her a man falls in love with a new operating system voiced by the siren song of Scarlett Johansson. It's a neat conceit but I can't help feeling its one only a man could dream off. I haven't seen the film so I cannot comment on how the ideas are explored. I can however imagine many women rolling their eyes as they are widowed by a tablet computer or smart(ish) phone.

 

 

Byzantium

We watched Neil Jordan's little seen vampire flick on DVD. It is the tale of a mother and daughter revanant and their attempts to survive a hostile modern world. The story is set in a dilapidated seaside town and was filmed in Hastings in East Sussex. I have visited the aforesaid and it is an atmospheric locale.

The vampire pony has been flogged to its knees by the Twilight saga and various post modern iterations. Bram Stoker's Dracula has been largely forgotten along with the primal fears triggered by the original tale. Byzantium itself is beautiful looking, well performed but ultimately hollow. The fault may not lie with the creators . Mr. Jordan is a talented filmmaker and writer with a sophisticated sensibility . He has made modern fairy tales like The Company of Wolves and Mona Lisa . The problem may lie with the audience and changing viewing habits. The practice of going to the cinema for adult entertainment may be in terminal decline. Home cinema and the Internet could leave the multiplex the provenance of the 3D spectacle or the teenager with various men in tights flicks.

In the past Hollywood did accommodate diverse sensibilities. The American Paul Schrader wrote or directed award winning films like Raging Bull . He was not drawn to cinema by nostalgia - his parents were religious and forbade his going to the movies. He saw his first movie at 18.His latest film The Canyons may be a portent for the future. He had to finance the film by crowd sourcing though the Kick Starter web site. He ended with a budget that was a small percentage of his studio features, a limited cinema release and viewed mostly over the Internet. I have not seen the movie so I cannot comment on its qualities. I have read about it and seen the trailer. It begins with a montage of abandoned film theatres and a lament for the demise of the seventh art form.

Mr. Jordan's film never explains why it is called Byzantium but I forgive the conceit. Byzantium is a beautiful word.

 

Stormy Weather

We lost a day to the storms in Southern England. We drove to Ashford to look in a shop and never reached our destination. Flood waters blocked the road between Canterbury and Ashford.The route back was then closed off to deal with twigs on the motorway. The detour through Sittingbourne shaved three hours from our existence.

The extremes in weather we have experienced do not seem that inclement to this Irishman. We regularly encounter high winds and rain in N Ireland. The province does not come to a standstill and we seem to manage without fuss.To hear the lowing cattle of the media community you would be under the misapprehension England had been devastated by a tsunami . To this observer it has not.

Ice and snow has been forecast . The preparedness for same will be the usual standard . I anticipate hours spent in stationary traffic.

 

Philadelphia Here I Come!

I am re-reading some of Brian Friel's plays . Mr. Friel lays claim to being Ireland's greatest living dramatist . Apropo nothing he also hails from my home town . The mise en scene and characters in his plays are very familiar.

In his play Translations he deals with a well worn theme - the death of the Irish language. Friel has described it as "a play about language and only about language" . It is set in the fictional town of Ballybeg in County Donegal in 1833. The plot is straightforward. A local man returns home after six years away in Dublin. With him are English cartographers working on the Ordinance survey map of Ireland . Both Irish and English characters speak their respective languages and they cannot understand each other. This failure has ruinous consequences. Drama is as much about what is not said as what is expressed and understood.

When I was at University I was asked to contribute to the Irish language society . Though I donated I flippantly said there was no point as it was on its uppers. Language is a reflection of politics and power . We are exhorted to learn Mandarin Chinese and Spanish as these are the languages of the new economies. It's unthinkable now but in a couple of centuries someone may be asking for donations to keep the English language alive.

 

Herne Bay

I spent yesterday morning as a flaneur in Herne Bay. Herne Bay is a seaside town 7 miles or so from Canterbury. It was popular as a holiday destination until the 1960s but cheap foreign travel has taken its toll and it has declined in the intervening years.

I am fond of Herne Bay and its forlorn amigo Margate. They have a dilapidated grandeur. If I was an investor I would speculate in the Bay. It's near neighbour Whitstable has become prohibitively expensive with DFLs ( an acronym for down from London) driving property prices skyward. I never take my own advice so braver and richer souls may benefit from a Herne Bay resurgence.

My reason for my trip was a gaping hole on the M2 on my wife's route to work. The lengthy detour left her exhausted so I offered to drive to and from Canterbury. It has taken two days to fix a few hours work with a JCB. A mountain and a molehill.

In the afternoon I arranged to meet a former work colleague for coffee. He is now a legal consultant for a property developer .We had a good time catching up in a blustery Canterbury . He is a practising Christian and still retains hope that I will make the leap to one flock or other. I assured him again I will remain steadfast in my convictions . God needs a loyal opposition.

 

Julio Cortazer

In a break from The Brothers Karamasov I read a book of Cortazer's short stories.

Julio Cortazer was an Argentinian writer who died in exile in Paris. He was a fabulist like his countryman Jorge Luis Borges but more humane.

In his collection All Fires the Fire there is a story called The Island at Noon. An air steward becomes obsessed with a Greek island he sees every day at noon on his scheduled flight from Italy to Beirut. His obsession affects his job - the passengers are left to their own devices as he stares rapt at the beautiful beaches of the island below.

He saves money and makes the journey to the island. He meets locals and swims on the cove he saw from above. He has found his paradise and resolves not to go back to his previous life.The next day at noon he hears the sound of his plane. He hesitates then looks up to see...

In the New York Times Book Review Cortazer is described as "the apostle of the lives we have chosen not to live".

 

Aide Memoire

I gave the hard drive a spring clean.

It was a tedious process involving sifting my photo files . My finger hovered over the mouse for a moment before committing approx 4500 photo files to the ether. I noted 26 gigabytes of information disappeared from the trash can on both hard drive and its doppelgänger the back up drive.The cull erased one in four photo files.

Most of the deletions were straightforward - duplicates of other files or duds. Bad composition, exposure errors or out of focus; they served no purpose. Others photos were ok but were not good enough to merit retention. These moments in time were cast into oblivion.

It's a forlorn procedure deleting representations of a moment . When younger there is the thrill of the purge and the tabula rasa. There is time to fill up the hard drive (real or metaphorical). As you get older it can be a melancholy experience .

When we lived in Twickenham we used to walk past a gallery called the Orleans. I went one day and saw an exhibition of photos from the 19th century explorer Sir Richard Burton. Burton is famous as an explorer of the Great Lakes of Africa and translating One Thousand and One Nights. Burton and his wife are buried in a remarkable tomb in the shape of a Bedouin tent in St Mary Magdalen's Church in Mortlake southwest London. If you get the opportunity I recommend a visit - it is a striking (and macabre) monument of empire.

One photo in the exhibition at the Orleans gallery stopped this viewer in his tracks. It was a momento mori of Burton on his deathbed. These post mortem photos were popular in the Victorian era. The dead would be posed in a photo for the benefit of the bereaved .Thankfully the practice largely ceased in the early 20th century. The modern sensibility can do without post mortem photos as aide memoire.

 

The Brothers Karamasov

There are a few books on the unfortunately named bucket list. Dostoyevsky 's tome is one . Others include Anna Karenina and Captain Ahab and his whale. I tried Finnegans Wake years ago but gave up after 30 pages or so. Shem and Shaun and the book of dreams was hard work . Any book with a explanatory text as complicated as Anthony Burgess's guide has disappeared to the nether regions of the never read. I have read most of Jimmy Joyce's work and it is wonderful. The Wake is a bridge too far.

I am now reading Fyodor's opus. I read a few of his books years ago including Notes from the Underground and Crime and Punishment. Reading Karamasov years later I am struck how prolix the prose style . Granted it is in translation but I suspect the original Russian was little better. I remember reading Nabokov s dissection of Fyodor's prose years ago and feeling affronted. Crime and Punishment had made a striking impression on a young student and I was defensive of his work.

In retrospect Nabokov was correct. Dostoyevsky was a visionary but not a literary stylist. Reading from the perspective of today 19th century novels can seem discursive and long winded. We forget photography was in its infancy, cinema and TV had not been invented and travel was for privileged few . Novelists had to describe a scene in detail because many of the readership had no mental picture to draw upon .

Dostoyevsky themes have not aged and are universal. Revolution, anarchism and trying to lead a moral life in a world without religious belief.

No jokes though.

 

Zabriskie Point

I was fascinated by the area known as Zabriskie Point near Death Valley in California.I was attracted there by a similarly named film by the Italian film maker Michelangelo Antonioni. It was set in the hippie movement of the late 60's. Though beautiful it has dated badly and it's politics are fag packet Marxism.

Zabriskie point was named after a mining company owner - Borax was extracted in the area. Zabriskie point has a eerie erosional landscape . It used to be a lake bed long since dried up. The sediments from the lake bed gave the area the strange lunar landscape.

Death Valley and its surrounds have the reputation as a harsh inhospitable place . The Valley was given its current grim moniker by gold rush prospectors. Prior to the gold rush it was known as Tumpisa by the Timbisha Shoshine tribe. Tumpisa means rock paint and derives from the red clay found in the valley.

The Native American tribe have lived in the area over a millennia . Unlike the gold rush prospectors they have found the area manageable. They have flourished and hold the place sacred.My wife and I found similar. Despite the heat we found the place magical and oddly life affirming.

 

Running Man

There doesn't seem to be a connection tying these missives together. Jimmy Joyce would approve.

I have returned to running in earnest. My body revolted at first and the treadmill was penance for the sin of inactivity. My torso is gradually remembering the rhythm and my stamina and speed are improving . Very gradually. I would like to run a half marathon at some juncture but that is months away.

I am hesitant to return to road running in London and prefer the treadmill and the gym. I do not have the natural build of a distance runner and I don't want to risk joints and arthritic tweaks .The treadmill is kinder to limbs. I do miss running on the underpopulated roads of N Ireland though. The slow unfurling of an empty road was a pleasure.

I read that this years Badwater Ultramarathon has been relocated from its usual route through Death Valley in California. For the past 27 years participants have run 135 miles of asphalt, a 13,000-foot elevation gain and through late July temperatures of 120 degrees and above. This years race has been relocated due to a safety assessment. This is understandable given human nature - extreme sports are becoming more extreme . Some participants had wanted to run dressed as Darth Vader and other characters from the space opera.

I have driven through Death Valley in autumn. It is a wonderful place but intolerant of fools. You are advised to gas up ( American slang for a full tank of petrol ) and take a gallon of water for each person.I cannot imagine what is must be like to run an ultra marathon in summer. It seems an act of lunacy.

And yet I look at the photos of the roads that stretch to infinity and I half understand it.

 

 

 

Regicide

I read of a John Dixwell in a novel.

Mr. Dixwell was born in 1609 near Canterbury . He was MP for Dover and fought in the English Civil War on the side of the parliamentarians . He was one of the judges who condemned Charles I to death.

During the restoration the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion granting pardon to those who supported the Commonwealth and Protectorate. It excluded those who had played a role in the trial and execution of King Charles I . Dixwell was condemned to death.

Mr Dixwell decamped to the New World and ended up in New Haven Connecticut . Along with fellow regicides Edward Whalley and a William Goffe he ended his days hiding in a cave near New Haven.He died in 1689 dreaming of a new revolution in England.

In 1783 the New World obliged with the American War of Independence. The revolution in England was not forthcoming.

A parable of sorts.

 

Borderlands

I watched the last episode of the excellent Danish drama The Bridge on BBC. If you have not succumbed to its peculiar charm imagine a police procedural written by Ibsen. It's not Starsky and Hutch. Instead of Starsky you have an autistic female Swedish detective who wears leather trousers, drives an old bilious coloured Porsche and picks up men in bars. Her partner is a Danish policeman adept at impersonating a shambles.

The odd couple investigate crimes that takes place on the Oresund Bridge that links Sweden and Denmark.This second series involves eco terrorism and big business. The end was touching, unexpected and left room for a third series. It didn't outstay its welcome.

By chance I had also finished a crime novel called Borderlands. It was the first novel in a series of crime fiction set on the North West border between the six counties of N Ireland and Southern Ireland. The protagonist was a policeman in the Garda ( the Southern Irish police) called Inspector Devlin. He faced a similar problem to the detectives in The Bridge - bodies found on a jurisdictional border . He has to deal with suspects who flit North and South of the border.

I am not an aficionado but the appeal of crime fiction is the resolution. There is a crime, an investigation, a suspect apprehended and the mystery resolved. Courtesy of Hitchcock there is also a MacGuffin for suspense ( and padding).In the practice of criminal law matters may not be as clear. You may obtain an acquittal for an accused and still harbour doubts.

A dead body near a border need not be a crime. I cannot attribute the quote but I read that all borders are drawn in blood. Instead of a murder on the border between Denmark and Sweden or the North and South of ireland it may be an act of war between states.

The photo is of a memorial of the killing of three IRA volunteers by the SAS in N Ireland during the 1980s. To some it was an act of war. To others it was a crime and an act of murder.

Unlike fiction there is no resolution. The memorial is near Borderlands.

 

Windmills of your mind

I am a fan of wind farms. I like the whooping noise they make and I like their aesthetics. I came across a wind farm outside Palm Springs in California which seemed to stretch to the horizon. To the writer they are a renewable source of energy and sensible.

Many do not share my appreciation. When I was home in Ireland in 2012 we stayed in Glenties town in Donegal . We tried to stay at one of the town's hotels but it was fully booked - there was a public enquiry taking place on a proposed wind farm in the area. Local landowners claimed it would blight their farmland. Everyone employed lawyers and the hotel provided the locus for the debate.

My Aunt felt similarly about the locating of a wind farm on a hill called Bessie Bell overlooking my home town. She was aghast at the eyesores on a much loved old friend.The Daily Telegraph wheels out conservative nimbys who feel the same about these subsidised bird blenders besmirching the views of the Home Counties.They much prefer nuclear ( also subsidised) or fracking in areas well away from Chipping Norton et al.

I suspect if the alternatives were a nuclear reactor in your back garden, a wind turbine or no electricity at all (with attendant Mad Max style social dispensation) the bird blenders might be more popular.

I quote Dusty Springfield on the matter:

"Like a wheel within a wheel

Never ending or beginning

On an ever spinning reel

As the images unwind

Like the circles

That you find

In the windmills of your mind "

 

 

Winter

January and Febuary always surprise and always disappoint.

After the festive consumer hi jinks of Christmas and New Year they drag on interminably. Every year this is a surprise. I know a GP who cheerfully announced his elderly patients seemed to hang on for Christmas and New Year and succumb shortly after. Winter finds and claims them.

Thankfully this winter has been unusually mild with early flowering of snowdrops and hazel. We have a ladybird encamped in our bedroom .Despite the mild winter I will be glad when February ends . Billy Shakespeare always gives good copy. This is from his fifth sonnet:

" For never-resting time leads summer on,

To hideous winter and confounds him there;

Sap cheque'd with frost and lusty leaves quite gone,

Beauty o'ersnow'd and bareness every where"

Roll on the vernal equinox.