NARRATOR: "After a short absence, Andrew Cusack and his dot-com returned, the latter sporting a lively and attractive new header, and there was much rejoicing."
ALL: "Yay! Yay!"
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AS YOU BROWSE the blogs it's hard not to notice that dreary November has become National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo (yes, there's a website). I haven't read any of the productions, but the idea seems to be to turn out large parts of a novel each day of the month. It ain't for me. My writing horizon stays about three sentences away, and I hate to pad with extra clauses (like this one). So who's up for a properly-hyphenated National Essay-Writing Month? Not that I'm an essayist, but I'd like to be. I tell my kids all the time that practice makes perfect—perhaps it really does.
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I SEE THAT Lord Winterton, writing in the Evening Standard, speaks of the ‘remarkable reticence (by no means entirely imposed by rule or regulation) which Parliament and press alike have displayed in this war to avoid endangering national security’ and adds that it has ‘earned the admiration of the civilized world’.
It is not only in war-time that the British press observes this voluntary reticence. One of the most extraordinary things about England is that there is almost no official censorship, and yet nothing that is actually offensive to the governing class gets into print, at least in any place where large numbers of people are likely to read it. If it is ‘not done’ to mention something or other, it just doesn't get mentioned. The position is summed up in the lines by (I think) Hilaire Belloc:
You cannot hope to bribe or twist
Thank God! the British journalist
But seeing what the man will do
Unbribed, there's no occasion to.
No bribes, no threats, no penalties — just a nod and a wink and the thing is done. A well-known example was the business of the Abdication. Weeks before the scandal officially broke, tens or hundreds of thousands of people had heard all about Mrs Simpson, and yet not a word got into the press, not even into the Daily Worker, although the American and European papers were having the time of their lives with the story. Yet I believe there was no definite official ban: just an official ‘request’ and a general agreement that to break the news prematurely ‘would not do’. And I can think of other instances of good news stories failing to see the light although there would have been no penalty for printing them.
Nowadays this kind of veiled censorship even extends to books. The M.O.I, does not, of course, dictate a party line or issue an index expurgatorius. It merely ‘advises’. Publishers take manuscripts to the M.O.I, and the M.O.I, ‘suggests’ that this or that is undesirable, or premature, or ‘would serve no good purpose’. And though there is no definite prohibition, no clear statement that this or that must not be printed, official policy is never flouted. Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip, but the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault when there is no whip. And that is the state we have reached in this country thanks to three hundred years of living together without a civil war.
02:33 | link | | |
I'll try blogging over there at http://summa.blogspot.com for a while and see how it goes. I have 564 posts here, all done with emacs' muse-mode and pyblosxom. The problem is that pyblosxom rebuilds the entire blog every time I publish a post, which takes about 10 minutes and eats up an entire cpu's horsepower for the whole time. blogspot is quirky and often slow to respond, but it's faster than waiting 10 minutes to edit an already-published post. I may try moving my archives over there if I can find a tool to automate it.
23:11 | link | | |
Another enjoyable Dalrymple jeremiad on art. Here's an excerpt:
Let me take the second point first. One often hears of 'cutting-edge' art; indeed, the much older term, avant garde, is of the same ilk. This suggests that there is progress in the arts, as there is in science, and that what comes after must, in some sense, be better than what came before. Art has some kind of destination, with later artists further along the road to it than earlier.
In science, progress is a fact (except for the most extreme of epistemological sceptics, none of whom, nevertheless, would be entirely indifferent as to whether their surgeon used the surgical techniques of, say, the 1830s, rather than those of this century). The most mediocre bacteriologist alive today knows incomparably more that did Louis Pasteur or Robert Koch, for example; the most mediocre physics graduate knows incomparably more than Sir Isaac Newton ever did. This is because scientific knowledge is cumulative. But no one would suggest that the paintings of Rothko were better than those, say, of Chardin because he lived a long time after Chardin, and that Chardin's were better than those of Velasquez for the same reason.
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Here's a very good writeup on St Benedict Biscop, an Anglo-Saxon Benedictine who founded the abbeys of Wearmouth and Jarrow in 674 A. D.
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The local NPR station likes to broadcast the BBC news at noon. Thanks to them, I know that when I hear a journalist with an English accent I'm being lied to.
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Here's an interface, or perhaps a table of contents, for St Gall's collection of ancient and medieval manuscripts. For example, here's the preface to Bede's history: St Gall manuscript on the right and a transcription on the left.
11:26 | link | | |
You never know what you'll find around the corner:
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A remarkable sense of Anglophilia is produced when your current reading consists of Robert Louis Stevenson's Puck of Pook's Hill and James Herriot's books.
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Here's Peter Norvig's good old essay about the time and effort it takes to learn a craft. One of his points is to learn a lot of languages; here's a list of the ones I've dabbled in since 1977:
and I'm probably leaving some out. I'm not an expert in any of them, though I did write some very cool stuff in TeX and PostScript lo! these many years ago. I've found it takes some effort to switch from my current language to one of the older ones - like traveling to France with only your high-school French to get by on for a few days.
11:53 | link | | |
This evening I helped Lisa move her blog to blogspot and found that things are easier there than they used to be, so I'm playing with my ancient archives over here. The only drawback to blogging from emacs via pyblosxom is that pyblosxom rebuilds the whole danged blog every time I publish - it eats an entire cpu for ten minutes or so.
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Here's a list of authors and books recommended by Russell Kirk in his The Politics of Prudence (to be expanded as I read more):
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Current reading:
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This is a close second - The Rabbit of Seville:
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A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.—Lord Peter Wimsey
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And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.—St John of Patmos
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