At Wolf Hall

Having recently finished Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, one of this last weekend’s small excitements was a visit to Wolf Hall, Wiltshire.

My images are two composites: aspects of the monument to Jane Seymour’s father John in the church at Great Bedwyn (moved there in 1590 by his grandson, the memorial states, from Eston Priory Church, which had by then fallen into ruins), along with a window there containing some armorial stained glass derived from the former Wolf Hall. Sir John lived to see his daughter Queen of England, but not to be a grandfather to a future King, dying a couple of months before his daughter’s pregnancy was announced. Of his sons, one became Lord Protector, and had to allow the execution of his brother Thomas, who had plotted to capture the young prince, and marry the young Elizabeth Tudor.

The other image comprises two views of the present day Wolf Hall itself, which seems perhaps to be an 18^th century house with large Victorian accretions. The rear view is framed by a catalpa tree – and there is what seems to be an abandoned walled garden, as there should be in a lost domain like this. The original house of the Seymour family has vanished, though there are apparently brick lined tunnels running from the present buildings to where the old house stood. A 16^th century house down the gently sloping valley side to what is now the Kennet and Avon Canal survives, and Henry VIII is supposed to have stayed there while on his first visit to Wolf Hall with Mantel’s hero, Thomas Cromwell, in 1535. Back then, the (Hampshire) River Avon rose close by the house, and flowed west into the Vale of Pewsey.

I talked with a couple of the tenants occupying parts of the Manor (and they are currently, should you want to take up what would seem likely to prove an interesting stay in a house full of associations of one kind or other, looking for a new sharer). I was told that the landlady was currently reading Wolf Hall itself, which ends precisely when Cromwell (imagined by Mantel to have his own eyes on Jane) works out that he can escape Henry’s demands on his time for a visit of some days to Jane Seymour’s family home.

Mantel’s remarkable book prompted all this literary and historical tourism, of course. There’s so much to admire in it: the intelligently hostile portrait of Sir Thomas More, Henry VIII seen through the eyes of his brilliant counsellor, and I liked the way the narrative is paced, making us all wait, as they did, for the product of Anne Boleyn’s pregnancy. Then there’s the gracefully lucid writing. Mantel admits scarcely any archaisms: her point is partly that Thomas Cromwell was a modern man, interested in information and its storage, acutely aware of how money works and makes all things possible: so he cannot be distanced by what he says every time he speaks. She has, in line with this policy of making Cromwell our contemporary, partly secularized a man who was probably far more in league with the reformers than the sympathetic fellow-traveller depicted here.

In the second volume, Mantel has to repeat what she did so well in A Place of Greater Safety, show idealism and remarkable personal capacities turning to bloody oppression, to unleash the murderer latent in her measured and highly intelligent Cromwell (the inner murderer glimpsed in the novel by Cromwell in Hans Holbein’s portrait). Her hero has, in the second part, to set about destroying Anne Boleyn and her circle to save his own position. The axe and the block will feature like the guillotine did for the French revolutionaries in the earlier novel: Mantel’s characters cannot be unaware of their likely fate, how close it always is, how they can appease the terrible wraith with other people’s blood for only a limited time.

As it is, in this volume about his rise to power, Wolf Hall deploys Cromwell as a very gifted novelist’s ideal protagonist: a master of language, either in persuasion, threat, or charm, and a witty appreciator of costumes, food and style. Cromwell here is also a man preoccupied with memory - both haunted by his own memories of having been the child of a brutal father, and the adult administrator determined to possess, so as to augment his own prodigious powers of recall, a mechanical memory theatre. So always he allows Mantel to demonstrate her own prodigious gifts of imagination and language.

http://www.burbage-wiltshire.co.uk/historic/wolfhall.html

Ere the spider make a thin curtain for your epitaphs

The stillborn daughter of Walter and Deborah Dunch, from the monument described in my prior post.

The research assistant

(Ah well, it makes a change from writing crap on my computer.)
It is suggested that he looks like a webcam, connected (of course) by a USBeak cable.

Music for the unaccompanied parrot

I’ve been reading David Rothenberg’s Why Birds Sing (Allen Lane, 2005), and was charmed to learn of The Bird Fancyer’s Delight (1717): “Choice Observations and Directions Concerning ye Teaching of all Sorts of Singing-birds, after ye Flagelet and Flute, if rightly made as to Size & tome, with a Method of fixing ye wett Air, in a Spung or Cotton, with Lessons properly Composed, within ye Compass & faculty of each Bird, Viz. for ye Woodlark, Blackbird, Throustill, House-sparrow, Canary-bird, Black-thorn-linnet, Garden-Bull-Finch, and Starling”.

I cannot find this agreeable sounding and doubtless diverting book on the ECCO database, but I did ask a colleague if, as an 18^th century specialist, she had heard of it. Not only had she heard of it, but down in her cellar, had an LP of performances by Richard and Theodora Schulze (recorders, sopranino), accompanied by a harpsichordist. Academics! – when you think you are being absurdly recondite, but there they are, way ahead of you, head full of knowledge, cellarage a latter day wonder cabinet.

I duly begged the loan of this venerable LP. It isn’t dated, but may be from the 60’s: Stereovox of New York:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LP_album

for anyone unfamiliar with the technology. Apparently the 1717 collection of tunes for pet birds became important to the recorder player’s repertoire. Richard Schulze has added a second part and the harpsichord, but the original idea was that you played the music on your bird flageolet (they use a sopranino on the recording) until your bird had the tune off perfectly. You then might enter your bird in singing contests, etc.

As a parrot owner, I was especially pleased to find two tunes ‘for the parrot’. Now Barney, my African Grey (see him marking Renaissance Literature exam scripts for me here http://roy25booth.blogspot.com/2008/05/mere-parrotting-52.html ) had a poor early upbringing. He can whistle ‘Half a pound of tuppenny rice’, but he then skips the boring bit, and seques straight into ‘Pop goes the weasel’.

Here, however, is a bird doing a very creditable Queen of the Night:

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=sWh_2Iit3Ek

and here’s a rather less highbrow compilation of Leonard the parrot amid cries of ‘Exterminate!’ intermittently doing the ‘Mission Impossible’ theme and singing ‘Red Red What’ instead of UB40’s hit song, ‘Red Red Wine’:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bristol/content/articles/2008/09/02/parrott_video_feature.shtml

Anyway, my MP3 is of the two tunes for parrot in The Bird Fancyer’s Delight, 1717. The first I recognize as ‘The Happy Clown’, which is such an appropriate choice. Like most birds, Barney has a syrinx rather than a larynx, and can make two sounds at once, but it will take a long time to get him up to this (and I think he’s out of his best learning age-range, which is closed in birds). I didn’t try to edit off all the pops and crackles, as they as so many, and they rather add to the parrotty ambience:

http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhle/001/soloparrot.mp3

http://www.traditionalmusic.co.uk/national-songbook/national-songbook%20-%200122.htm

My image is ‘The Serinette’, the little hand-cranked barrel-organ people used to train their birds, with depicted in use by Jean-Siméon Chardin in 1751. I will have to get one of those, maybe.

To round off, here’s William Cowper’s ‘On the death of Mrs Throckmorton’s bullfinch’. A sad tale of the death of one of those trained birds – with a very apt moment of mock heroic in the final stanza:

‘On the death of Mrs Throckmorton’s bullfinch’

Ye Nymphs, if e’er your eyes were red
With tears o’er hapless favourites shed,
O, share Maria’s grief!
Her favourite, even in his cage,
(What will not hunger's cruel rage?)
Assassin'd by a thief.

Where Rhenus strays his vines among,
The egg was laid from which he sprung,
And though by nature mute,
Or only with a whistle bless’d,
Well-taught he all the sounds express’d
Of flageolet or flute.

The honours of his ebon poll
Were brighter than the sleekest mole,
His bosom of the hue
With which Aurora decks the skies,
When piping winds shall soon arise
To sweep away the dew.

Above, below, in all the house,
Dire foe alike of bird and mouse,
No cat had leave to dwell;
And Bully's cage supported stood

On props of smoothest-shaven wood,
Large built and latticed well.

Well latticed, - but the grate, alas!
Not rough with wire of steel or brass,
For Bully’s plumage sake,
But smooth with wands from Ouse’s side,
With which, when neatly peel’d and dried,
The swains their baskets make.

Night veil’d the pole: all seem’d secure:
When, led by instinct sharp and sure,
Subsistence to provide,
A beast forth sallied on the scout,
Long back’d, long tail’d, with whisker’d snout,
And badger-colour’d hide.

He, entering at the study door,
Its ample area 'gan explore;
And something in the wind
Conjectured, sniffing round and round,
Better than all the books he found,
Food chiefly for the mind.

Just then, by adverse fate impress'’d,
A dream disturb’d poor Bully's rest;
In sleep he seem’d to view
A rat fast clinging to the cage,
And, screaming at the sad presage,
Awoke and found it true.

For, aided both by ear and scent,
Right to his mark the monster went, -
Ah, Muse! forbear to speak
Minute the horrors that ensued;
His teeth were strong, the cage was wood, -
He left poor Bully’s beak.

O, had he made that too his prey!
That beak, whence issued many a lay
Of such mellifluous tone,
Might have repaid him well, I wote,
For silencing so sweet a throat,
Fast stuck within his own.

Maria weeps, - the Muses mourn; -
So, when by Bacchanalians torn,
On Thracian Hebrus’ side
The tree-enchanter Orpheus fell,
His head alone remain’d to tell
The cruel death he died.

2,800 miles of America

The holiday in America was rewarding and demanding. We (this means me and my son Timothy) drove 2,856 miles, in a Pontiac Grand Prix – a great lump of a car, but amazingly less spacious inside than my own Ford Focus. On ‘drive’, this would grind up the passes at 1,500 rpm, you had to select 3 or 2 to get any response from it – a basic incompatibility with my soft-footed driving style. On the freeways, it came into its own if you overtook past the speed limit, with a great throaty roar.

We 'did' the Rockies (over the highest paved road in America) – lots of marmots and pikas, and a breathless attempt at a walk. Then Mount Rushmore, the Black Hills, Devil’s Tower, Yellowstone, Grand Tetons, Dinosaur National Park, Canyonlands National Park, Arches National Park, and the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings.

Yellowstone is so big – you couldn’t fit it twice into the whole of Yorkshire. We had a day and a half. We saw Old Faithful and lots more of the geothermal stuff, and swam in the Firehole River. A wildfire prevented us from doing the full central loop, which was almost a relief.

I think that I enjoyed the Arches National Park the best. The hike up to Delicate Arch was phenomenal, but on the way to Landscape Arch subsequently, you just had to acknowledge that after this one, the heat and the altitude meant that this was your limit for the day. Instead of mountain bikes on the Slick Rock Trail, it was back to the motel for air-con and a pool.

The Mesa Verde made a thrilling visit, going up the ladders to Balcony House. I’d no idea that the people there were living so high up anyway – it’s at about 7,500 feet; or that their lasting legacy was for them a desperate expedient which they only lived in for 80-odd years before they had to abandon the Mesa completely.

On the final morning, we both loved a visit down the Mollie Kathleen gold mine at Cripple Creek (round the back of Pike's Peak). Geology is quite a theme in this holiday route. Dinosaur bones have been found all over the region, and sometimes the road will have signs naming the formations you are driving by: the drive up the Big Horn Mountains at the start of day 7 takes you through six major geological periods.

We saw humming birds, marmots, ground squirrels, a moose, prairie dogs, and a buffalo; but no bears.

My image is of Lewis Lake, going south out of Yellowstone towards the Grand Tetons. I shall now suffer from a lack of a daily overload of big scenery.

Vacation time

I am fluttering away from my keyboard for a holiday in and around the Rockies (thus squandering more than another year of carbon credit from frantic pedaling).

I hope in the meantime ‘Blogger’ might put itself back to aesthetic rights, as it is looking sub-basic at the moment, and I can’t be bothered for now fishing about in the HTML tags to try to put things right.

My image is a composite from Thomas Marent’s Butterfly: A Photographic Portrait, which has been delighting me recently. These are Colombian eighty-eights and eighty nines (Diaethria clymena) – ‘this our life, exempt from public haunt / Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, / Sermons in stones, and good in everything’.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Butterfly-Photographic-Portrait-Dk-Reference/dp/1405325402/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1216719908&sr=1-1

As I gad off enjoying myself, I will not forget my late companion Anthony Maynard, whose funeral was yesterday:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/7518329.stm

Mere parroting! 52%!

Thanks to the assistance of our highly trained auxiliary staff, marking on this year's Renaissance Literature paper is moving rapidly towards its completion.

How could a parrot NOT love the Baroness of Grosbeke?

My parrot, Barney, alongside the parrot from Jan Steen’s ‘The Effects of Intemperance’ (who is being given a sip of wine: a beaker full of the warm south, as Keats would say). Barney turned up at the local pet-shop, an exile from his first home, and in need of a new owner. He is reportedly six or seven, and, yes, he talks: a bird-brained tape of his first household ‘Get out the way!’ ‘Come on!’ and the like, and in his repertoire of noises, their telephone and the growling of their dog, his old enemy.

In early modern terms he appears to be:

“VII. Aldrovandus his ash-coloured or bluish Parrot.

This according to Aldrovandus is ten inches long: Of the bigness of a tame Pigeon, or the common green Parrot. The Bill is black: The Nosthrils near to one another, in the upper part of the Bill next to the Head; which part is covered with a naked white skin [we afterwards observed the same figure and situation of the Nosthrils in all other Parrots.] The whole body is of an uniform colour, viz. a dark cinereous: Yet the lower part of the Back and Belly and the Rump are paler than the rest of the body, and almost white. The Tail is red of a Vermilion colour, very short, and scarce reaching further than the ends of the Wings. The region of the Eyes [sides of the head round the Eyes] is white and bare of feathers. The feathers of the Head and Neck are shorter than the others. They say that all of this kind are brought from Mina, an Indian City of St. Georges. We have seen many of them at London.”

In my photograph he is eating his chief gustatory delight, a piece of a digestive biscuit. Here is John Ray’s edition of The ornithology of Francis Willughby of Middleton in the county of Warwick Esq, fellow of the Royal Society in three books (1678) discussing those clever parrot feet:

“The Feet are of a singular fashion, for they have not three Toes standing forward and one backward, but two each way, like Woodpeckers. Jo. Faber, in his Expositions of Nardi Antonio Recchi his Animals found in New Spain, hath noted and observed concerning the Toes of Parrots something not mentioned by any Author, viz. That when they walk, climb up, or descend down the sides of their Cages, they stretch two of their Toes forward, and two backward; but when they take their meat, and bring it to their mouths, they make use of three Toes to hold it till they have eaten it up. Yea, (which may seem wonderful) they do so dexterously and nimbly turn the greater hind-toe forward and backward, that on sight of it you would confess your self not to know, whether it were given them by Nature to be used as a fore-toe in feeding, or a back-toe in walking.”

It is the happiness of the parrot to be, like small children or drunks, the regular source of a fund of anecdote:

“They do not only imitate mans voice, but in wit excell all other birds, as Aldrovandus proves by many Histories and examples. I shall not think much to set down one very pleasant story, which Gesner saith was told him by a certain friend, of a Parrot, which fell out of King Henry VIII. his Palace at Westminster into the River of Thames that runs by, and then very seasonably remembring the words it had often heard some whether in danger or in jest use, cried out amain, A Boat, a Boat, for twenty pound. A certain experienced Boatman made thither presently, took up the Bird, and restored it to the King, to whom he knew it belonged, hoping for as great a reward as the Bird had promised. The King agreed with the Boatman that he should have as the Bird being asked anew should say: And the Bird answers, Give the Knave a Groat.

CHAP. V. * Clusius his Discourse and Account of Parrots.

The Noble Philip Marnixius of St. Aldegond had a Parrot, whom I have oft heard laugh like a man, when he was by the by-standers bidden so to do in the French Tongue, in these words: Riez, Perroquet, riez; that is, Laugh, Parrot, laugh. Yea, which was more wonderful, it would presently add in the French Tongue, as if it had been endued with reason, but doubtless so taught, O le grand sot, qui me faict rire; that is, O great fool, who makes me laugh: And was wont to repeat those words twice or thrice. But among others I saw one of those great ones in the house of the illustrious Lady, Mary of Bremeu, Dutchess of Croy and Areschot, of happy memory, before she went out of Holland, the like whereto for variety and elegancy of colours, I do not remember to have ever seen. For though almost all the feathers covering the body were red, yet the feathers of the Tail (which were very long) were partly red, and partly blue; but those on the Back and Wings particoloured of yellow, red, and green, with a mixture also of blue. Its Head about the Eyes was white and varied with waved black lines, like the Head of the Canida. I do not remember the like Parrot described in any Author. Moreover, this Bird was so in love with Anna the Dutchesses Neece, now Countess of Meghen, and Baroness of Grosbeke, that where ever she walked about the Room it would follow her, and if it saw any one touch her cloaths, would strike at him with its Bill; so that it seemed to be possessed with a spirit of jealousie.”

As we all like to tell a story (at least, we will do until the ubiquity of the video camera and YouTube makes the anecdote an obsolete form), parrots have always been prized and transacted across continents. Dutch painters loved them: Jan Breughel paints the garden of Eden with an orthnithological slant, as he loves those bright colours. Or parrots riot through still-lives, the exotic bird about to attack the exotic fruits the painter has piled up.

“But that the price of those birds there was very great; so that they were not rated at less than eight or ten German Dollars. Linscotius writes, that the Portugues had often made trial to bring over of them to Lisbon, but could never effect it, because they were too tender and delicate. But the Hollanders with a great deal of care and industry brought one alive as far as Amsterdam, which though it were not of the choicest, yet might have been sold for one hundred and seventy Florens or Gilders of that Province, that is somewhat more than seventy Dollars, as I find recorded in the Diary of that Voyage. That bird by the way had learned to pronounce many Holland words, which it had heard of the Mariners, and its Master had made it so tame, that it would put its Bill into his Mouth and Ears without doing him any harm, and would put in order the hairs of his beard if discomposed: And if any one else offered to touch him, it would presently snap or peck at him, as if it had been some Dog. "

Friendly, communicative and bright, the parrot was a kind of middle-class hawk. As Ray/Willoughby notes, it shares the same shape of beak as the ‘rapacious birds’, but it is domestic and funny. In portrait paintings of the period, young men often have their hawk (difficult, expensive both in itself and for your bets on its performance), but the parrot is the subversive companion of women. Here’s an early modern version of the celebrated Einstein the parrot:

“He (Clusius) adds further, that a certain Brasilian woman, living in a Village two miles distant from the Island, in which he with other Frenchmen dwelt, had a Parrot of this kind, which she made much of; which seemed to be endued with that understanding and reason, that it could discern and comprehend whatever she said who brought it up. For, saith he, walking forth sometimes to refresh our selves as far as that Village, when we passed by that womans house, she was wont to call upon us in these words, Will you give me a Comb, or a Looking-glass, and I will presently make my Parrot sing and dance before you? If we agreed to her request, as soon as she had pronounced some words to the Bird, it began not only to leap upon the Perch on which it stood, but also to talk and whistle, and imitate the shoutings and exclamations of the Brasilians, when they prepare themselves for the battel. In brief when it came into its Dames mind to bid it sing, it sang, to bid it leap, it leapt: But if taking it ill, that she had not obtained what she asked, she said to the bird Auge, that is, be still or silent: It stood still, and held its peace; neither could we by any means provoke it to move either foot or tongue.”

Here’s Einstein (Barney has some way to go):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSDFzg8_Wfg

and here’s Ruby, the swearing parrot (a likelier outcome):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xSn6vL2rLs

A talk with Mr Mazda

Off to another 'Rock, Gem and Mineral Fair', and here's my prime acquisition, from my favourite dealer, Mr R D Mazda.

These are little turrets of pale green chalcedony, mingled with pale pink quartz and a single bright green chrystal of apophyllite. The source (Mr Mazda is punctiliously correct about provenance) is a place called Jalgaon, which is in Mahavashtva state, a day's drive north east of Bombay.

My photograph has lost much of the beauty of the piece: the chalcedony is in the subtlest of grey-greens. It reminded me of the 'Rain Flower Pebbles' and other landscape stones the Chinese avidly collected (and I am sorry that so aesthetically and intellectually enriching a blog as 'misteraitch' has run is now brought to an end):
http://www.spamula.net/blog/2007/04/hard_stones_and_rain_flower_pe.html

I bought other smaller things, including a dangerous lump of native cinnabar - sealed in a plastic box. I acquired this late acquisitiveness around 2002. As these objects pile up in the house, I tell myself that having an enjoyment of ownership is one thing that distinguishes us from animals...

But, speaking of enriching people, I had a long talk with Mr Mazda, who collects books by the poets of the 1890's. We talked about Swinburne, and Dowson, back to Tennyson, and on to Masefield. And he recited for me a poem by Masefield which I did not know, 'A Creed', and politely indicated that its forthright account of reincarnation was more or less what he himself believed. He also said that Masefield's first line was toned down, under pressure, to the faintly absurd 'I held that' (which would undermine the very title - if you have renounced the idea, it hardly qualifies as much of a creed, does it?). The version on LION does indeed have that diluted past tense. I read David Gervais's life of Masefield on ODNB, which has no indication about Masefield's leaning to Buddhism. Here, Masefield seems so happy with Samsara, that it comes across as a kind of Buddhist Browning, all heartiness and vigour. But here it is, as a thanks to my educator and purveyor of fine rocks:

'A creed'

I hold that when a person dies

His soul returns again to earth;

Arrayed in some new flesh-disguise

Another mother gives him birth.

With sturdier limbs and brighter brain

The old soul takes the road again.

Such is my own belief and trust;

This hand, this hand that holds the pen,

Has many a hundred times been dust

And turned, as dust, to dust again;

These eyes of mine have blinked and shown

In Thebes, in Troy, in Babylon.

All that I rightly think or do,

Or make, or spoil, or bless, or blast,

Is curse or blessing justly due

For sloth or effort in the past.

My life's a statement of the sum

Of vice indulged, or overcome.

I know that in my lives to be

My sorry heart will ache and burn,

And worship, unavailingly,

The woman whom I used to spurn,

And shake to see another have

The love I spurned, the love she gave.

And I shall know, in angry words,

In gibes, and mocks, and many a tear,

A carrion flock of homing-birds,

The gibes and scorns I uttered here.

The brave word that I failed to speak

Will brand me dastard on the cheek.

And as I wander on the roads

I shall be helped and healed and blessed;

Dear words shall cheer and be as goads

To urge to heights before unguessed.

My road shall be the road I made;

All that I gave shall be repaid.

So shall I fight, so shall I tread,

In this long war beneath the stars;

So shall a glory wreathe my head,

So shall I faint and show the scars,

Until this case, this clogging mould,

Be smithied all to kingly gold.

It's a 'What I did on my holidays type of post'

Here I am at the top of Valahnukur, a minor peak in the Thorsmork ('Thor's Forest', no less) area.
Booth Junior is playing a Nintendo DS on a ridge below. He did me a cartoon, in which I am pointing up a crag and saying, 'Not much higher, Tim', while he is prone on the floor behind me with his legs on fire and his little soul departing from his body.

I was stirred by Iceland, a place of sublime scenery and sublime prices. Most of all, I liked the geothermal and volcanic stuff: the sheer randomness of a purely volcanic landscape, in which a cone or a crater will appear anywhere, lava flows will spread or stop with no other principle than chance; or collosal explosions will broadcast boulders. We stayed near Hveragerthi, where a stream warm as bath water flows down the valley north of the town ('Hot spring gardens').

A glacier close-up is a confrontation with one of Nature's great forces, somewhere utterly inimical to life. On August 3rd, two Germans went on to a dangerous part of Vatnajokull, and have never been seen again. The Icelandic daily press (Premier league results, obituaries on apparently every native citizen who has died, and weather forecasts) reported faithfully on the unceasing search for their bodies.

But the swimming pools! A community of delight, each one of them. Scrupulous rules of cleanliness before you enter that water, all that endless free heat going off into the sky.

England seems to have such dirty air and such a muddy colour palette, while Iceland is brilliant clarity, looming black cliffs of Pelagonite, then tumbling white water.

These people did it properly:

http://www.union.edu/PUBLIC/GEODEPT/COURSES/petrology/labs/iceland/iceland.htm

I read this very good entry about geysers - we visited Stokkur, 'the kettle', of course

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geysers

The 1,000 foot geyser Waimangu Geyser, active near Rotura in New Zealand at the start of the 20th century, must have been astonishing.

From Shovell's pocket

So that my family can access it, a couple of images from my trip to the Scilly Isles. The first, way out at sea near the Bishop's Rock lighthouse, is of the Gilstone, with the Gilstone ledge beyond it. This is where Sir Cloudesley Shovell's 'Association' struck in October 1707. He just about fetched up on the first possible rock, but there was no escape. Had his ship missed this, in a few hundred yards, it would have hit the Rosevear Ledges or the Western Rocks. The other image is of a rather battered half crown, a William III of 1696-7, and a ducaton of 1734 from the 'Hollandia' wreck of 1743, both retrieved by divers from the wreck sites. I was surprised to find them available, and reasonably priced (the English coin was £35). I suppose that for the coin collectors, the cleaning process such coins must undergo after such a long immersion detracts from their value as collectable pieces.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_shipwrecks_of_the_Isles_of_Scilly

The Scilly Islands made a good week. St. Mary's, the largest, is unpretentious, the 'off-islands' are varied and engaging both for sea-scapes and up-close island flora. You spend a lot of time in boats going from shore to shore, and the boatmen are all cheerful and good value. In our trip out to the Western Rocks and Bishop's Rock lighthouse, to enable everyone a good view of seals at their haul-out rocks, the boatman, in a heaving sea, was willing to take his boat very close in, almost to the point when you thought, 'OK, we can see them, now get us away from these rocks right now'. A seasonally belated puffin appeared, circled three times, dived for fish, and went off to its island after exhausting its full puffin repertoire.

Coming from multi-racial Reading, it struck me that there might have been an invisible colour bar just off Cornwall. Everyone is Caucasian, locals and visitors (odd that one should notice). The line from literature that kept coming to my mind during the boat trips was that of Dorigen in 'The Franklin's Tale', about the 'grislie rockes blacke'. Even on a good day, the Western Rocks are frightening, lethal boat-rippers. It must have been hard to believe in a benign creation if you were an early mariner. When the Schiller wrecked in 1875, drifting past the Bishop's Rock lighthouse in a fog, with the passengers lined up on the rails on the wrong side of the boat trying to get a glimpse of its light, the Scillonians were so kind to the German bereaved that (it is said), Scilly was out-of-bounds for all military action by German forces in World War I - they also say WW2, though it is hard to imagine that the Nazis would have scrupled if there were military advantage to be had.

Cast them as cousins

Here's the latest Chinese dinosaur, Gigantoraptor, side by side with Jacques de Gheyn's zoomorphic monster in one of his drawings of witches' sabbaths. I vaguely recall that in A C Clark's SF, Childhood's End, when the advanced civilisation (and benign) aliens arrive on earth, their form is that of Satan - the first steps out of his UFO with a carefully chosen child playing with his leathery wings, as a way of managing the local PR problem. Reveries about the diabolic were just an anticipation of what will happen, but without the terror.

The one tonne, twice man height raptor is all over the web today: this is the best site I found. The Chinese assume it had feathers.

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/06/scientists_disc.html

I looked for the complete de Gheyn drawing, and my cursory Google image search only hit my old academic course site. Basic, but there it is:

http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhle/001/deGheyn.htm

Infamy! Infamy!

My good friend Tupper, man of many and fearless opinions, urges me to ‘lighten the pudding’ (his very words) with one or two less formal posts.

And therefore, from the Blogger’s own collection, this publicity still of Amanda Barrie, goofing around for Carry on Cleo (1968), a cinematic magnum opus rather tendentiously credited to William Shakespeare (book) and Talbot Rothwell (screenplay).

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057918/

I think the delectable Amanda may not at this point even have been cast as Cleopatra, for her costume is exotic dancing girl, and not the full works as Queen of Egypt, but Cleopatra she became. I have very fond memories of Sid James as Mark Antony goggling at her as she reclines in her bath of asses’ milk, a cockney Cleopatra yattering away in tones raucous enough to strip the paint off the set.

Like all of such delights, it cannot possibly be as good as I remember it being.

There, at last I can truly feel I have enriched the internet with the kind of thing it lacked (for an image search didn't show anywhere such a pleasing image of the subject).

Bad Art: Just Say No!

I was acting as a marshal at the Reading Cycling Club spring road race today. For me, this involved standing at the side of the road just up from a lone shop at Goring, and waving a red flag as the great British public dragged itself from TV coverage of the London marathon, drove half a mile to the shop, parked sloppily, extricated themselves from the car with the cautious deliberation of a crab shedding its exoskeleton, limped into the shop, and came back bent under the weight of the Sunday Mail in a plastic bag. Before, on returning, abruptly driving off without signal or care, despite four of us anxiously matadoring away.
After the event, I diverted slightly to the village of Checkendon, where this macabre and unforgivably bad fiberglass sculpture has appeared on a previously innocent skyline. The slumped barn and corrugated outhouse outdo it in being sinister: the two cadavres look like second home owners lamenting the effect of some catastrophe that has hit their property value.
It has all the aesthetic charm of an album cover designed by a thirteen year old death metal fan, a combination of nastiness and sentimentality. Check it out, good burghers of Checkendon: have you no feelings? Have you no hammers?

Dark with Excessive Bright

I took myself off to a 'Rock, Gem and Mineral' Fair today, my jackdaw eye a-glint (when did I become so acquisitive?), rather hoping to buy a Devonian fish or a eurypterid, but ended up instead with various eye-catching minerals. From the dealer R D Mazda, I bought a cluster of apophyllite, and, more decoratively, a small oval bowl shaped from moss agate.

I expressed my incredulity that none of the many women at the fair had scooped up this necklace in faceted rock crystal - something that Mr Mazda had bought on his last trip back to India in February as (he put it) an 'aberration' from his normal serious mineralogy - and affirmed that, had I a particular lady friend I wanted to give a gift to, I would have bought it on sight. A little later, I went back and bought it nevertheless, some might say, for my one true love...

Trying to do justice to it, I photographed it out in the sun, on a suitable page of Milton: I liked the letters multiplied in the facets. Maybe this is a sign that I am about to turn devout, or sense that I need to start saying my prayers.

http://webmineral.com/data/Apophyllite.shtml

One of my friends has started a blog, under a whimsical pseudonym
http://tupperkneetoss.blogspot.com/
Here he is indulging an undeniably pointed philippic about Global Warming. I didn't bother watching the documentary, but must ask 'Tupper' about his assertion that "One of the talking heads (a founder member of Greenpeace, no less) made the excellent if overdramatic point that to deny climate change was a bit like being a Holocaust denier". Was this really said? Surely not with any seriousness?

I must have another go at making 'Blogger' put URL's in my 'Links' section, though most previous attempts have failed (this makes me embarrassed about fellow bloggers).

Let go thy hold when a great wheel runs down a hill...

And other useless cycling advice from Shakespeare!

Taking part in the Reading CC 'Reliability Trial' this last Sunday: 50.9 miles, 3,034 feet of climbing. Two hours and forty four minutes, a reasonable time for the course, but I rode with far less courage and commitment (i.e. to hurting myself) than I have done in previous years.

Photograph by Dennis Sackett, of
http://www.cyclingphotos.org.uk/

Child Art, 1914

The eleventh of the eleventh, and Remembrance Sunday tomorrow, prompts me to post this drawing by my maternal grandfather, Harry Handforth, in 1914.

It was probably done at Apperknowle school (near Sheffield) some time around the outbreak of the war. He would have been 10 at the time, and one surmises that the children were given paper and the chance to express their feelings. This image of defiance was clearly thought to have been a great success, and it got taken home and was pinned up for years in the family cottage in Summmerlee, before finding its way into a book for safe-keeping.

Grandad left school at 12 to work on a farm, and would take cart-loads of turnips over to Sheffield to sell. Later, he worked down a coal mine called the Mackerel Colliery because its workings were so wet. He was a foundryman throughout World War 2, making tanks and repairing 17-pounder guns (some of those brought in still smeared with the blood of their former gun-crews).

My mother does not think that they had enough money at home for the drawing to have been done there (making such a luxury as sheets of drawing paper unlikely). My grandfather's mother had died when he was seven, seven weeks after the birth of her fourth child. All four children were taken in by their grandmother, who was 72, but who lived to see all the children married, and herself a great-grandmother.

There cannot be much surviving child art from World War One. Grandad got it all in - Nelson, jutting chin, a bulldog guarding the flag, sabre, pistol and bandolier. It might be a copy from a newspaper image, but Grandad was a good draughtsman, and used a fine copperplate script when he wrote. He was an awesome - and yet surprisingly tolerant - figure to me in my childhood, immoderately proud of my academic success. He died in 1993, just before the birth of his great-grandchild Tim, but the kind of patriarch that you made sure knew that the family was going to extend again.

My kind of scene.

I’ve been asked to declare myself. As ever, I wrap myself in the cloak of literature (maybe a little less tightly), and offer by way of reply John Berryman’s 4^th Dream Song:

Filling her compact & delicious body

with chicken paprika, she glanced at me

twice.

Fainting with interest, I hungered back

and only the fact of her husband & four other people

kept me from springing on her

or falling at her little feet and crying

“You are the hottest one for years of night

Henry’s dazed eyes

have enjoyed, Brilliance.” I advanced upon

(despairing) my spumoni. – Sir Bones: is stuffed,

de world, wif feeding girls.

- Black hair, complexion Latin, jewelled eyes

downcast … The slob beside her ... feasts … What wonders is

she sitting on, over there?

The restaurant buzzes. She might as well be on Mars.

Where did it all go wrong? There ought to be a law against Henry.

- Mr. Bones: there is.

The Student, apart from men, sitteth alone

A Latin vocabulary for computer terms:
http://www.obta.uw.edu.pl/%7Edraco/docs/voccomp.html

I am spending too much time at the claviatura, and really must exire. The woodcut, before I messed about with it, is another from that Comenius book for children I posted about. As excitements for a Friday evening go, well, what can I say?

Stuck in the mud.

Back in 2002 I did an edition of Donne for Wordsworth Classics, wrapping Introduction and Notes round a slightly modified Grierson text. They paid me a three figure sum as a one off, and it was published with a tasteful cover, the Lothian portrait made into a black oval, against a background of brown laid paper.

Well, it retails at £3.99 still, and I imagine my students like that price, and are mildly interested by having the editor in their midst. So I order it in to the campus bookshop each year. But look at it now! A late 19th century painting of the Thames side at Southwark at the top, and rising from below, the face of William Wordsworth, backed by the suggestion of a Byzantine halo.

What the image says to me first of all is "stuck in the mud". A blurry and tepid watercolour has been selected for a poet who was all about precision and passion. Was it left over from materials gathered for a cover design on a Dickens novel? And since when has Wordsworth become the official face of poetry?

Does it speak an attitude of "It's just poetry, innit? Wishy-washy stuff, all the same, dont'cha know?" or "This is the corporate design we have adopted after due process of consulting ourselves"?

Actually, this botched job makes the edition look ignorant about the who, when and whatness of John Donne, and so will not help sell the book to its primary promoters, teachers with students to instruct. So a futile editorial raspberry to Robert Mathias at the 'Publishing Workshop'.

I took the cheque, I cashed the cheque. Just leave it, Roy.