Laptop help needed

I apologise in advance for the dullness of what follows, but this post doesn't really count: I'm just seeing how long the computer can hold out before switching itself off again.

For the past five years, our only computer has been a laptop we bought in America. It's satisfactory except for two flaws: an over-finicky DVD drive, and a tendency to overheat very easily. For the past couple of years, we've had to have a desk fan blowing right over it whenever we use it. This generally keeps it going, although it does make things uncomfortable in winter.

When the weather heats up, though, it's a different story. As the British media will tell you, we are currently going through a blistering heatwave, with temperatures shooting up to 28° Celsius. (That sound you hear is my readers in Australia and Colombia laughing at me -- as would the Americans if they knew that 28° Celsius is about 82° Fahrenheit). This morning after breakfast, even with the fan on its highest setting, the computer lasted just 40 minutes. It's almost ridiculous how stressful I find this: without a working computer and Internet connection, I feel lost and forlorn, as if I'd been abandoned in the wilderness.

Today I went out and bought two things I had seen recommended: a can of compressed air for blowing dust out of the laptop's vents, and a cooling stand with fans in it. Blasting the computer with air was fun, and the stand looks nice and is pleasingly quiet ... and this time, the laptop lasted all of 45 minutes.

So now I've got the cooling stand and the desk fan running (it was a bit eerie going online without the fan's racket, anyway), and I keep anxiously touching the computer like a mother feeling a sick child's forehead. I don't count the stand as a total loss: it does give us several extra USB slots, and since the computer lasted about as long with it alone as with the fan alone, I'm hoping that in cooler weather we can rely on the stand and reduce the amount of cold air blowing around.

The best solution may be to buy a proper desktop computer, which we've been intending to do -- the only problem is getting one home without a car. We have some time off from work in August (mainly so we can attend a series of Proms without worrying about getting up early the next morning), so we're hoping to have one delivered then. In the meantime, if anyone has any further suggestions on stopping the laptop from overheating, I'd be very grateful to hear them.

Who would do a crazy thing like that?

Every Monday, our electronic newsletter at work contains a brief interview with a different employee at one of our five sites. This is about what you'd expect -- questions about work responsibilities, hobbies, interests and so forth. (With my well-documented aversion to such things, I have so far managed to avoid being selected.)

This week's interviewee listed her interests as: "drinking, going out with mates, going on holiday etc. No hobbies -- except my book club!! (Joke!!!)"

To be fair, the woman interviewed last week said her hobbies included organising poetry nights at the local library and growing prize-winning spring onions, so this week's subject didn't speak for all her colleagues. Still, it's hard to imagine anyone telling a group of strangers their hobby was "watching football (joke!!)" or "going to the movies (just kidding!!)".

What has the world done for us?

Today was the feast of Peter and Paul. Like all feast days in our parish, this had certain drawbacks. First of all, our priest likes to break out the Latin on special occasions, which leaves me feeling somewhat lost: I knew no Latin before I became a Catholic, and when Chris tried to teach me some, the Classical pronunciation he'd learned at school turned out to be completely unsuitable for church. You do get odd looks from Catholics if you start talking about the "Reghina Kylie". Then there's the reading from Acts 12, with its accusatory references to "the Jews", which were neither qualified nor contextualised in the homily.

But the thing I like least is that, as a martyrs' feast, this day provides priests with a cue to talk about how we can take inspiration from the martyrs in our present age, when "our faith is constantly under attack". This phrase pops up so often in church that it might as well be part of the liturgy. No one ever seems to stop and ask if it's true, which is probably just as well for the people who say it.

Nobody in mainland Britain in 2009 is trying to stop Catholics from practicing their faith, or threatening their safety or livelihoods because of their religion (though such things have certainly happened to British Catholics in the past, and still happen to Christians of all types in some parts of the world). When people say that Christianity is "under attack" in this country, they generally mean that British laws are (as they see it) no longer based on Christian principles. And they're usually referring to laws having to do with sex; I've never heard a priest declare the UK's cooperation in extraordinary rendition to be un-Christian, or condemn politicians' baiting of refugees.

All this is hard for me to understand. As one raised in a country with separation of church and state, I don't find myself particularly troubled by a lack of religious influence in government. Besides, it seems to me that if laws concerning personal morality don't reflect the consciences of a country's people, they will be at best ineffectual and at worst repressive. (And the church might do well to ask itself why it has had so little influence on the public's conscience.)

A few weeks ago we had a guest celebrant at Mass: a professor from Allen Hall seminary who had come to raise money for the training of new priests. He told us that seminaries like his represented the last bastion of hope in a Godless nation. "What good", he asked us, hissing with righteous anger, "has this secular age of ours produced?"

Um. Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony? Antibiotics? The Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Mystery Science Theater 3000? The fact that people who share this priest's faith are no longer driven from high-ranking positions by paranoid Anglicans? I looked around to see if my fellow churchgoers could possibly be taking this seriously, but most of them didn't seem to be paying much attention. The priest, however, was quite sincere as he assured us of the wickedness of the entire world outside the church walls, and of the wickedness of our age above all past ones. (All right then, Father; set your time machine for 1938.) I had already decided that I would not give money for the training of priests as long as women were excluded, but after having heard the kind of views they're being taught in our seminaries, I would have taken money out of the collection if I could.

To say that the world has profound problems is true (has there ever been a time when it wasn't?), but I'd prefer to hear priests talk about what we as Christians can do in the world, rather than what the world might do to us.

My life with the ghost of Bush

The other day at work a newish member of staff introduced himself to me in the break room. This was refreshing, because usually nobody bothers to tell us who new starters are; we have to eavesdrop and wait till a supervisor addresses them by name.

"Sorry if you can't understand my accent", he said, "I'm from Ireland".

I said it was all right, I was a foreigner myself. On learning I was American, he (as I have come to expect) began listing every place he had been in the U.S.: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Orlando. This didn't provide much basis for conversation as I've only been to the last. Then, just as inevitably, he moved on to another topic:

"I bet you're glad about the change in government there. At least you got rid of that Bush at last. He must be the worst one ever, for sure. And you know, when he left nobody even cared. He just sneaked off in that helicopter and nobody shed a tear ...."

And so on. I'm starting to think I will never be out of that man's shadow. At least my colleague's conversation was friendly: he obviously assumed I would agree with him. As it happens, I did, but being a Republican abroad must be extremely uncomfortable.

Good day to bury bad news?

Every tragic news story has an annoying coda: a wave of smug critics tutting over the amount of attention it's received. So I really hope I'm not falling into that role myself today. I'm not going to pretend for a minute that Michael Jackson's death isn't a huge deal, or mock lovers of his music for being devastated -- I wasn't a fan myself, but if it had been Bob Dylan instead, there wouldn't be any tissues left in the house by now.

But the saturation coverage worries me, not because I think we should all be spending our time on something more improving, but because of what the world's nastier regimes might decide to do while the free world's attention is elsewhere. I'm thinking particularly of the situation in Iran (I haven't written about it before because I don't have anything particularly original to say, but High Windows has had some interesting posts about it here, here and here). Perhaps one reason the violence at demonstrations hasn't turned into an all-out bloodbath is that the Iranian government knows the world has been watching. What will they do now that the Western media are distracted? And what about those countries that were receiving less attention even before Jackson's death -- Burma, Zimbabwe, Uzbekistan?

Am I being too pessimistic? I hope so.

Mountaintop removal

It isn't often that my home state gets mentioned in the British media -- I think the last time was the Sago mine disaster, an experience I'm not keen to relive -- so I was startled to find a story from Raleigh County in several papers yesterday. Needless to say, it took the involvement of a celebrity to get the press interested. Well, the involvement of Daryl Hannah, anyway. She's been arrested in a protest against mountaintop removal. (I apologise for linking to a story in The Daily Mail, which is a vile right-wing tabloid, but they were one of the few British media outlets to recognise that West Virginia isn't simply the western part of Virginia. Also, they managed to sneak some actual coverage of the issue in among the snickering over Hannah's bad plastic surgery.)

Showbiz egos aside, anything that draws attention to the scandal of mountaintop removal has to be good. For too long it's been ignored by most of the world, occurring as it does in remote areas of the U.S. and affecting mainly the poor and unphotogenic. I remember a few years ago when a British acquaintance somehow heard a radio report about mining in Kentucky. Wide-eyed, she asked me: "Did you know what the coal companies do down there in the mountains?"

Of course I knew; it's been happening ever since I can remember. I recall the pain in a dear friend's voice when he told me how the mountain where his family had lived for nearly 200 years -- where generations had hunted and fished and grown crops and lived side by side with nature -- was gone, replaced (after the coal company's much-trumpeted "reclaiming") by a blank grassy plateau like nothing that has ever existed naturally in Appalachia. And that's not to mention the floods of toxic slurry, the ruined soil, the poisoned streams.

If mountaintop removal is the latest trendy Hollywood cause, then that can only help to counteract the millions of dollars that Big Coal has poured into propaganda (I wonder just how spontaneous those counter-demonstrations were), to say nothing of buying off the state legislature, to persuade people to turn a blind eye to this destruction of landscape and livelihoods.

Another surprise in the article is that Ken Hechler, the former West Virginia secretary of state, is apparently still alive. He must be 100 now at least.

City pigeons

The strangest thing about going into any of the little wooded areas in London is seeing feral pigeons pretending to be real birds. They look like comical intruders among the robins, blue tits and jays, and they seem clumsy and heavy in the trees, crashing about where other birds move noiselessly. Still, they keep trying, as if they knew that at some point in their distant past this was where they belonged.

Walking through a sunlit park today, I saw some graceful silhouettes passing over the grass; when I looked up, I was surprised to see they belonged to the same birds I usually find scrounging for crumbs on Tube platforms.

I remember hearing how in areas of Europe with declining populations (such as the former East Germany), wildlife is slowly reclaiming the cities. I wonder how long it takes their pigeons to revert completely to the state of their wild ancestors.

Hopkins and joy

I don't know whether this says more about him or about me, but Gerard Manley Hopkins tends to be associated in my mind with sorrow. The so-called Terrible Sonnets, "Carrion Comfort" and the opening stanzas of "The Wreck of the Deutschland" are among the most vivid and harrowing descriptions of depression and anxiety I know.

So it's easy to forget that he could also write sublimely about beauty and joy. I suppose "Pied Beauty" and "God's Grandeur" are the most frequently cited examples, but I think I like even better the fifth stanza of "The Wreck of the Deutschland", which comes immediately after his description of an emotional and spiritual crisis:

I kiss my hand
To the stars, lovely-asunder
Starlight, wafting him out of it; and
Glow, glory in thunder;
Kiss my hand to the dappled-with-damson west:
Since, tho' he is under the world's splendour and wonder,
His mystery must be instressed, stressed;
For I greet him the days I meet him, and bless when I understand.

Haven't had a pointless post about Shostakovich in a while

A fellow Shostakovich fan recently told me that what first attracted him to the composer was his name. I can see what he means: it's a name that feels good in the mouth, and that makes one wonder what sort of sounds its owner might have produced. I can remember being drawn for similar reasons to Mstislav Rostropovich, before I actually heard him play: I saw a couple of his albums while looking through my parents' record collection and was enchanted by the fact that his name began with "Mst". I decided on that basis that his records must be worth hearing, and fortunately I was right. Zoltán Kodály is another whose name made me want to hear his music -- though there was also the fact that he came from Hungary, a country which has always intrigued me for reasons I can't fully explain.

I've written before about this phenomenon of feeling drawn to an artist before actually experiencing his or her art, often for apparently superficial reasons. I'm always pleased when I hear of it happening to someone else. I remember being amused when I read how Brian Eno and David Byrne had become obsessed with the title of Amos Tutuola's novel My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, so much so that they decided to use it as the name of the first album they made together. At some point after releasing the album, they actually read the book. Fittingly enough, I was fascinated by the title of their record long before I listened to it.

Literary grief

I have been feeling bereft because W.G. Sebald is dead. This didn't happen recently, you understand. He died in a car accident back in December 2001, at which time I was barely aware that he'd been alive. (Though oddly enough, at around the same time I was taking the train to work every day with a man who was reading Austerlitz; I remember sneaking looks over his shoulder and trying to work out if the book was a novel or non-fiction -- a more pertinent question than I realised.)

I've now read his most famous works -- The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz. Since I did so, I've found he has become a sort of mental companion to me. When travelling through London recently, I felt an odd satisfaction in realising that I was seeing some of the same places he had described less than a decade ago in Austerlitz. As usual with an author I love, the works I had read made me long to spend more time with him, to go on reading him forever.

But the other day at Foyles I bought the last two books of his that I haven't yet read: the early novel Vertigo, and Campo Santo, a posthumous collection of essays. In a way, I feel reluctant to start on either, since I know they will be the last new words of his that I ever read. It feels better to have something to look forward to.

Sebald seems to break a rule I have noticed in the lives of writers and artists. There are so many geniuses -- Keats or Mozart, for example -- who start producing great work very young, and then die very young. It's as if someone, somewhere, knew that they wouldn't have much time on this earth, and thus started them early so that they could give the world everything they had to give in the brief time that they did have. But Sebald started writing relatively late in life, and then he died far too early. Had he said everything he needed to say?

Further linguistic discovery

"What are you doing?"

"I'm looking at the pinwheels on the neighbours' fence."

"At the what?"

"Pinwheels."

"What are those?"

"You know -- the little toys the kids put there to blow around in the wind."

(Looking out window) "Oh ... windmills!"

(For those keeping track: Time taken for pinwheels to come up in conversation = nine years, five months.)

Dylan in black and white

On Monday I went to an exhibition of photographs of Bob Dylan by Barry Feinstein, and also bought the book that came with it. Feinstein took the picture of Dylan on the cover of The Times They Are A-Changin', which I find myself staring at every time I listen to the album. I don't do that with his other album covers.

There's something about black and white portraits that makes me stop and study them, in a way that I don't with colour. Maybe it's because colour pictures are all around us, on every poster and in every magazine, so that they start to seem like visual static. Or maybe it's because without the distraction of colour, I can focus on the contours of someone's face, or on the thoughts that might lie behind their expression.

The photos in the exhibition are all in black and white, and all come from Dylan's troubled tour of Europe in 1966, when he was heckled by crowds for going electric (including the infamous "Judas!" taunt at the Manchester Free Trade Hall). While Feinstein doesn't often mention the chaos in his commentary, in some of the pictures the strain is obvious. One photo from a press conference in Paris shows Dylan clutching a wooden mannequin he had bought at a flea market that morning. "Every time one of the journalists asked him a question," Feinstein explains, "he put his ear to the puppet's mouth and pretended to listen to the answer. Then he would tell the press."

Other pictures, though, show Dylan looking more relaxed and happy, particularly those where he's interacting with ordinary people he met in the course of the tour: the kitchen staff of a restaurant where he ate in Scotland, an old flower-seller in Birmingham, street children in Liverpool. Perhaps significantly, Feinstein tells us that none of these people had any idea who he was.

One of the photos of Dylan with the children is apparently quite famous, though I'd never seen it before. Liverpool was still a bleak place back then: except for the clothing styles, the kids could just as easily have come from 1866 as 1966. I'm intrigued by Dylan's pursed expression -- is he clowning for the camera?

A couple of years ago Chris Hockenhull made a documentary for the BBC in which he tracked down the now-grown children in this photo and had them recreate the picture -- though without Bob.

Pepe, the night janitor

About six years ago, Pearls Before Swine featured this amusing little sequence (there are three strips altogether; sorry about the ads you have to scroll through to see them all), which I assumed was a fairly standard dig at modern art and its fans.

Last week, however, while wandering through Tate Modern (probably my least favourite museum in London), I came across an installation by Pepe Espaliú called To an Unknown God; Tate's lawyers seem to have kept any images of it offline, but the museum describes it thus:

Four whirling bronze mops are lifted out of the ordinary by elongated handles which reach to the sky, so that they appear both transcendent and precarious. Accompanied by three pastel drawings of flowing water, Espaliú's work hints at the possibility of cleansing and healing, tempered by a sense of ambiguity and religious uncertainty.

Maybe Stephan Pastis* is more erudite than I thought ....

Update: I've now heard from Stephan on Facebook, and he says it's just a coincidence, though he did seem to find it quite amusing.

* Or, as Chris now insists on calling him, "your friend Stephan Pastis".

It is not a significant sandwich

Here's a well-known figure in the film industry, responding to a journalist's question about their eating habits. I wonder if you can guess who it is?

Please do not think I am miserable. I am not unhappy. I have the most wonderful life, the most exciting life. But life is life. It is as it is. It is out there and all around us. It is not dependent on where I am or what I have to eat. You want to know what I have for lunch? I do not know! If I am in a hurry, I will have a sandwich. If I am not, I will have something else. But not soup. Soup and I do not go together.

Apsley House

Apsley House, near Hyde Park Corner, was a place I had never visited until last week. I have to admit that historical houses usually bore me unless I have a particular interest in their former inhabitants. In this case, although I didn't have any great personal fascination with the Duke of Wellington, the historical period to which he belongs did appeal to me. I could imagine a slightly awestruck Jack Aubrey attending a ball in these huge light rooms with their gilded ceilings, or admiring the grandiose centrepiece that was presented to Wellington after the battle of Waterloo.

The collection of paintings is displayed in a way that suggests it was meant to show off the owner's ability to buy art rather than any particular appreciation of it. The pictures covered the walls like tiles, with many too high up for them to be seen properly. Originals were mixed with skilled copies (mainly of Raphael), and great names -- Velazquez, Brueghel, Jan Steen -- with lesser-known artists. A lot of the Jan Steen paintings were at my eye level. I've never been quite sure whether I like his scenes of drunken peasants or not: there seems to be an element of cruelty under the humour.

The main thing that struck me was the number of portraits of Napoleon in the house -- to say nothing of Canova's colossal nude statue of the emperor, which stood in the stairwell. We were told that Wellington bought many such pieces after his victory at Waterloo. Was he just gloating, or did he have a grudging admiration for his old enemy? It's hard to imagine Churchill filling his house with pictures of Hitler.

Fluffy baby duckies

Someone recently suggested to me that I might have enough photographs of wildfowl in my collection. I don't know what they can possibly have meant.



The highlight of the day was when a group of bold little mallard ducklings paddled over to swim among the captive eiders. After a few minutes, their mother crashed into the water in a panic and began attacking every eider within reach (although the eiders could justly have objected that it wasn't their fault). Eventually things settled down and the two groups managed to exist side by side.





Elsewhere at the Wetland Centre, the Eurasian cranes came out into the open for just a few minutes before going back into the reeds. The centre only recently started breeding these birds and it was the first time I'd got a good look at them.



We also saw -- and heard -- a very vocal frog calling to an unseen partner. It was the first time I'd seen a frog at the centre, and only the second or third time I'd seen one in England.

Baroque at the V & A

At times the Victoria & Albert Museum's exhibition about Baroque style felt like a bit of a hodgepodge. The curators seemed determined to cram in as many different aspects of the era as possible -- art, theatre, architecture, religion, public celebrations, and the various ways that royalty aggrandised themselves. (The items from Louis XIV's court were all you needed to see to understand why the French eventually had a revolution.)

I suppose in a way, the overloaded and slightly random collection that resulted was appropriate for the era. At best, the rich detail of Baroque objects offers seemingly endless possibilities for discovery; at worst, it seems overwhelming and confusing. I thought one cabinet in the museum was supported by disembodied human legs, which disturbed me until I saw that the legs actually belonged to crouched figures that I had missed underneath all the other ornament. By contrast, an obsidian box from the court of Frederick IV -- which had a silver statuette of a lamb on its lid and dragons for handles, and was studded with gems, cameos of the Danish royal family and of battle scenes, and mottoes celebrating Denmark's victory over Sweden in the Great Northern War -- seemed charming in its wealth of detail.

Although one of the exhibition's themes was that Baroque was a worldwide style, I felt the show would have benefited from making more distinctions between the specific ways the style had been applied in different countries. The whimsical ostrich-egg cup from Dresden -- the eggshell covered in ornament and topped with the ceramic head of a decidedly miffed-looking ostrich -- was clearly the product of a very different set of ideas and expectations than the miniature Italian waxwork depicting "Time and Death", which included skulls covered in cobwebs and a corpse whose intestines were being gnawed by rats. Likewise, José de Mora's exquisite painted wooden bust of the Virgin of Sorrows could not possibly have come from the same culture as the Chinese ivory carving of the Madonna and child. It would have been interesting to explore these differences in more detail.

Despite its flaws, I greatly enjoyed the exhibition; the José de Mora sculpture alone was worth the price of admission.

Paintings from Jodhpur

The British Museum's current exhibition Garden and Cosmos contains paintings from the courts of three different maharajahs of Jodhpur. Of these, the least interesting comes first: Bakhat Singh, who ruled from 1725 to 1752. Painting after painting shows him surrounded by courtesans in the grounds of his palace, celebrating festivals, "savouring the moonlit evening", or boating in his private reservoir (the museum's caption pointed out that this last picture was painted while most of the land was suffering from a terrible drought). Bakhat Singh was obviously painted from a stereotyped image: he's always seen in profile and usually pinches a flower before him in two fingers. Even in the painting where he's allegedly watching two rampaging elephants, he stares blandly off into the space to his left.

Bakhat Singh came to power by murdering his father and was in turn poisoned by his niece. His son, Vijai Singh, perhaps through guilt at his father's misdeeds, turned to religion and encouraged his court artists to paint scenes from the Hindu scriptures. This was a relief to me, as it meant fewer pictures of dull garden parties and more illustrations from the Ramayana (including delightful paintings of monkey families socialising in the forest and elephants trumpeting the beginning of the monsoon) and the stories of Krishna.

The final ruler covered by the exhibition is Man Singh (there was a gap of 10 years between the end of Vijai Singh's reign and the beginning of his, which the curators don't explain), who caused rebellion and division in Jodhpur through his devotion to the mystical Nath tradition and its gurus. During Man Singh's reign, court painting was devoted to illustrating Nath metaphysics. A popular type of painting consisted of two or three panels, like a modern comic strip. The first panel was always a solid gold colour, representing brahman (the infinite); in the subsequent panels, deities representing consciousness and matter appeared against this same gold background. Other works from this period included diagrams of the yogic chakras and so forth. Finally, we saw a set of paintings whose source the placards told us was a great mystery, showing godlike figures isolated against backgrounds of solid colour. Personally, I didn't think these seemed different enough from the brahman paintings to be worth getting excited about, but Indian art is hardly my field.

I must be a shallow person, because even when looking at paintings of great religious significance, I found myself studying the trees in the background for blossoms and birds. I was especially taken with the way water was depicted in the Jodhpur paintings: lakes and rivers of pure silver, dotted with ducks, fish and lilies. Or the thin swirls of white on black depicting an ocean of milk covering the universe, on which the god Vishnu floated, reclining on a raft that seemed to be made from friendly eels.

Currently the museum also has a free temporary exhibition of shields from the islands of the Western Pacific. Most of the cultures in this region now use shields only in ceremonial dances, but in the western highlands of Papua New Guinea they are still used in tribal warfare. The exhibition included several modern shields from this region, and we saw that while Australian administration had not succeeded in stopping the fighting, it had encouraged the warriors to paint their shields with beer adverts and the names of their favourite rugby teams. Another difference between traditional shields and modern ones is that the latter are now made of metal to withstand gunshots. Meanwhile, the ever-reliable Room 3 contains a 19th-century Javanese gamelan.

We also stopped into the new Chinese ceramics gallery, which is set up in an interesting way. Instead of explanatory labels, each object in the gallery has a numerical code, and you can enter the code into one of the computers set up around the room to get more information. I thought this was a good idea, because it's often tempting to spend as much time reading the label for an exhibit as actually looking at it. This way you had to get to know an object first before deciding to find out more.

I've created a monster

During my first decade in the UK, I picked up British habits in most respects except one. For a long time, I resisted writing dates in the British manner. Even at work, when I could get away with it, I wrote "June 11, 2009" rather than "11 June 2009". (I didn't write dates as pure digits because it would just have been too confusing.) As I went back and forth between wanting to stay in the UK and to repatriate America, and while I still had a recurrent suspicion in the back of my mind that the U.S. was where I belonged really, I suppose it was psychologically important to me to have one portion of my mind that had not been conquered.

Then one day -- and I still can't say how it happened -- I woke up and felt that London was my home. It was the first time in nine years that I had felt at peace about where I lived. On a large scale, this epiphany caused me to finally apply for UK citizenship. On a small scale, it meant that I made one last capitulation and started writing my dates in the British style.

Now there's a problem. At work, a fussy (British) colleague has not reacted well to the switch. I don't know if I brought her around to the American way of doing things or if she just doesn't like change, but every time I open a spreadsheet or other document we share, I find that she's prissily "corrected" all of my British dates to American ones. It's not a big deal, but it's an amusing reminder each working day of the internal conflict I once went through.

Things I have read in dreams

A friend recently told me he finds it impossible to read more than a few words in his dreams. On investigation, it seems this is pretty common. Chris says that sometimes he looks at a book in a dream, only to find its pages are a blur; so he strains to see until he opens his eyes in real life, and the dream is over.

I was slightly surprised to learn this, because I've always been able to read in my dreams. In fact some of my most interesting reading has been done there. I remember as a child spending a long time by the bookshelves looking for the book I had been reading a few nights before, a beautiful volume with woodcut illustrations whose story began with sailing silently away on a moonlit stream. I finally had to conclude that it was a product of my mind.

Frustratingly, the exact content of what I read usually vanishes from my mind when I wake. But I keep a vague recollection of a few works:

• A long scholarly treatise on "The Meanings of Glass", complete with black and white photographs and footnotes.
  
• A historical/true-crime book, again illustrated with photographs, which seemed to be about some scandal that had engulfed an entire family, although the exact nature was not clear from the bit I read. The significant thing about this book was that I read it in the library of someone else's house and gradually realised that, although the names had been changed, it was about the very family with whom I was staying.
  
• The card catalogue of a bird library. This was a large building filled entirely with books, recordings and other materials devoted to birds -- their natural history, their husbandry, their meanings in folklore, their appearance in poetry and art. It had an old-fashioned card catalogue, with index cards in little drawers, and I spent the dream browsing through the works on offer and trying to decide what to read first. (Later I found out that such ornithological libraries actually exist: Oxford's Alexander Library and Cornell's Adelson Library, for example.)
  
• Most recently, an effusive e-mail from a friend urging me to go see a Turkish folk ensemble at an obscure club in London. In waking life, I'm not aware of this friend having any particular interest in Turkish music, though it wouldn't be a great shock if they did.
  

The right kind of immigrant

The BNP's victories in the European elections, and the subsequent intention of some politicians to pander to voters' "concerns" about immigration, remind me of my least favourite conversation. It's one I've had on a regular basis since moving to the UK, and it usually goes something like this:

"Britain has been a soft touch for all these immigrants, and now look where it's got us."

"Well, speaking as an immigrant myself --"

"Oh, I didn't mean you."

I've never had the guts (or should that be stomach?) to ask, "Then who did you mean?", but exchanges like this make me suspect that most people's "concerns" about immigration are not based on a dispassionate consideration of its economic effects.

The same thing happens when we visit the U.S.; I've lost count of the number of times someone has ranted about "foreigners taking over the country", only to ask my British husband and me in the next breath: "So when are you moving back to America?"* These statements are given an added irony by the fact that the speakers are often only a few generations removed from immigrants themselves.

I'm not brilliant at conversation at the best of times, and tend to attract people who talk all over me, so I have never found a good way to make clear to these people that I'm not happy to play along with their bigotry. I'm reminded of a conversation I had a few years ago shortly after moving to a new Catholic parish (not the one I'm in now). One of the prominent women in the congregation decided the best way to welcome me was to give me a comparison of all the shopping centres in the area. Of one, she said: "It has some nice shops, but I don't like to go there -- it's mainly Jewish people who shop there."

I did actually say something along the lines of, "Well, my husband's half Jewish, so maybe I can get him to pick a few things up for me there when he's not busy." But the woman was one of those conversational steamrollers who can change the subject four times before anyone else speaks, and I doubt she even noticed I'd said anything. What to do in those circumstances?

* Such people always take for granted that anyone who moves away from the U.S. must naturally plan to come back.

BNP victories

So thanks to the voters of Yorkshire & Humberside and the North West, the UK will now have two avowed fascists representing it in Brussels. It would probably be too mean of me to say that this gives me yet another reason to stay out of the North of England.

Actually, the story is a bit more complicated than it seems at first glance. As the BBC explains, the BNP actually polled slightly fewer votes in both regions than they had in the previous European elections in 2004, and only came fifth in the popular vote in both constituencies. They won seats because of the European Parliament's bizarre system of proportional representation, and hopefully this will cause those who have called for a similar system to be adopted in British parliamentary elections to think twice.

Still, it's alarming that the party got enough votes to win seats by any method. Predictably, some wishy-washy Labour politician has already claimed the victories are a sign that mainstream parties need to take the "concerns" of white working-class voters about issues like immigration more seriously. Rubbish. Sometimes people's "concerns" cause them to vote for extremists because their "concerns" are wrong, whether factually or morally or both. Mainstream politicians should take these voters seriously all right -- but they should take them seriously enough to explain to them why they're wrong. Adjusting policies to pander to their ignorance and bigotry just gives the BNP victory by another method.

(On a cheerier note, my man won in this constituency.)

Secret storm

At this time of year I get up very early, finding it hard to sleep once it's light outside. On weekdays I just get on with the day's tasks; at the weekend I have some breakfast, check my e-mail, and then go back to bed to read by the light from the window. More often than not I eventually fall asleep again and wake up when Chris gets up around 10.

This morning I got up shortly after 6. In my half-sleep I'd thought I'd heard rain falling gently outside, but when I opened the living-room curtains I saw that the streets were churning with raindrops and the gutters under our windows were overflowing. After about twenty minutes there was a flash of lightning, and I had to suppress the instincts I'd gained during my childhood in West Virginia. I remember Chris's bemusement soon after we met, when I started going around and unplugging all the appliances at the first rumble of thunder. Electrical storms aren't as common or as devastating here as they were back home, and no one bothers to take such precautions.

I went back to bed instead. Chris was half-awake and we murmured something to each other about the rain. I read another chapter of The Rings of Saturn and went back to sleep myself. When I woke up it was warm and sunshine was blazing through the window; the leaves in the neighbours' garden that had been dripping with rain now looked glossy and wet from the strength of the light.

David Attenborough on Radio 4

Last night I heard David Attenborough give a charming 10-minute talk about sloths on Radio 4. (Anyone in the world should be able to listen to it online for the next six days.) This is the first of a 20-part series of programmes about plants and animals that have been especially important to him. I imagine it's being done to tie in with the revised edition of his autobiography. I read the original a few years ago, and it's a very entertaining and well-written* book; I haven't quite decided whether it's worth paying £20 for whatever updates have been made to the new edition, but I will probably succumb eventually.

Natural history isn't a subject that always works well on radio, but Sir David is a good enough storyteller to bring his creatures to life even without images. Radio programmes like this are, sadly, a bit of a lost art now; that's probably inevitable with the progress of technology, but I do think that at its best, radio can connect with an audience in a more intimate way than television or the Internet can.

* Whether by Sir David or a ghost I don't know, but I feel his voice does come through.

Przemyśl

I'm about a third of the way through The Rings of Saturn. While it hasn't absorbed me as thoroughly as Austerlitz did, it's still a fascinating read. It's ostensibly a travelogue of the East Anglia coast, but with frequent detours into history, art, literature and even ichthyology.

Today a chance allusion in the novel* caused me to take an intellectual detour of my own. Sebald (and/or his narrator, it's hard to tell) describes a day in the Sailors' Reading Room in Southwold:

That morning, as I closed the marbled cover of the log book, pondering the mysterious survival of the written word, I noticed lying to one side on the table a thick, tattered tome that I had not seen before on my visits to the Reading Room. It turned out to be a photographic history of the First World War, compiled and published in 1933 by the Daily Express, to mark the past tragedy, and perhaps as a warning of another approaching. Every theatre of war is documented in this compendious collection, from the Vall' Inferno on the Austro-Italian Alpine front to Flanders fields. There are illustrations of all conceivable forms of violent death, from the shooting down of a single aviation pioneer over the Somme estuary to the mass slaughter in the swamps of Galicia, and pictures of French towns reduced to rubble, corpses rotting in the no-man's-land between the trenches, woodlands razed by artillery fire, battleships sinking under black clouds of petroleum smoke, armies on the march, never-ending streams of refugees, shattered zeppelins, scenes from Prszemysl and St Quentin, from Montfaucon and Gallipoli, scenes of destruction, mutilation, desecration, starvation, conflagration, and freezing cold.

In the midst of this powerful passage, I was intrigued to see the mention of Przemyśl**, a place name I knew because it was my great-grandmother's home town. Whether because World War I tends to get short shrift in history class compared with World War II, or simply because of my own mental supineness, I had somehow never heard of the two great sieges of Przemyśl Fortress in 1914 and 1915, in which up to 115,000 people lost their lives. After the Russians captured the fortress in March 1915, Bernard Pares, a British military observer to the Russian army, wrote:

For weeks past the fortress had kept up a terrific fire which was greater than any experienced elsewhere from Austrian artillery. Thousands of shell yielded only tens of wounded, and it would seem that the Austrians could have had no other object than to get rid of their ammunition. The fire was now intensified to stupendous proportions and the sortie took place; but, so far from the whole garrison coming out, it was only a portion of it, and was driven back with the annihilation of almost a whole division.

Now followed extraordinary scenes. Austrian soldiers were seen fighting each other, while the Russians looked on. Amid the chaos a small group of staff officers appeared, casually enough, with a white flag, and announced surrender. Austrians were seen cutting pieces out of slaughtered horses that lay in heaps, and showing an entire indifference to their capture. Explosions of war material continued after the surrender.

My great-grandmother did not witness any of this: she had emigrated to the United States shortly before the outbreak of war, at the age of 14, and never saw her homeland or family again.

Another aspect of Przemyśl's history is suggested by the fact that its Wikipedia entry includes the city's Yiddish name (פּשעמישל). In 1931 about 30% of Przemyśl's population was Jewish. When Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland in 1939, the border between the occupiers' territories ran through the middle of the city, and the Soviet half saw an influx of Jewish refugees from the Nazi occupation. From June 1941 the entire city was occupied by the Germans, who created a ghetto for all Jewish residents, most of whom were eventually sent to Auschwitz or Belzec. David Semmel runs a blog devoted to reclaiming Przemyśl's Jewish history.

*If that's what it is.
** I don't know where the extra s in Sebald's text came from.

I believe my throat hurts

I got up this morning to see if I could drag myself into work, and finally decided that if I did, there was no guarantee I would be well enough to go out to vote later. So in the name of the democratic process, I'm going back to bed.

I can't offer anything very entertaining today, but I did want to take a moment to congratulate fellow blogger Joe on being chosen as Blog of the Month by BBC Countryfile magazine. If you haven't read his blog, Joe's Wildlife Garden, check it out; it's an account of the plants and animals in his family's garden in Buckinghamshire, complete with wonderful photographs. Joe also has the distinction of being the happiest 15-year-old whose writing I've ever read (including my own teenage self). But when he's surrounded by all that beauty, it's not surprising.

Hopefully normal service will resume tomorrow.

The Tank Man

Although the Chinese government would prefer you didn't remember it, tomorrow marks the 20th anniversary of the massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square. I remember very well watching those events as an idealistic 14-year-old: first, elation at the protests, which seemed to be part of a new era dawning around the world; then horror as the tanks rolled in; then impatience to find out what my own government would do about the slaughter; and finally, the realisation that they would do nothing meaningful at all.

From time to time since then, I've wondered what happened to the man at the centre of the most iconic image from Tiananmen Square, the one photographed standing in front of a column of tanks. The short answer is that no one knows. Younger readers may not be aware that a few seconds after the picture was taken, four people emerged from the crowd and hurried the man away. But were these fellow protesters escorting him to safety? Or were they secret policemen who led him off to prison or death? No one who knows has ever said.

The story of this man, his possible fate and the Chinese government's attempt to suppress all public memory of the massacre are the subject of Antony Thomas's 2006 documentary Tank Man. If you're in the U.S., you can watch it online via the PBS website. (In Britain it was shown by Channel 4, who have chosen not to make it available on the Web.) Meanwhile, a short video by Amnesty International shows the complete ignorance of modern Chinese students about the famous photograph. Amnesty is also asking people to support its call for a full independent inquiry into the Tiananmen crackdown.

Might as well blog about shoe shopping like a proper girl

I was two-thirds of the way to work this morning when the strap on my right sandal broke. Although drivers can call in late to work with a flat tyre, I didn't think my boss would allow pedestrians the same luxury, so I hobbled at high speed down the road with one foot bare. Once in the office I did a temporary repair with staples and tape (I had to go and beg a manager for the latter; they keep it locked up lest staff wrap gifts on the company's dime) and then had to go out at lunchtime for a new pair. I didn't relish this prospect, because, with the exception of plastic flip-flops, non-leather shoes are hard to find on the high street. I usually buy mine on the Internet, most often from Veganline (which gives good service despite having a site that looks like a Geocities page from 1996).

However, I'm pleased to say that I can now recommend one chain of shoe stores, Barratts. Unlike any other shop I've visited in Harrow, they label all shoes on display with the materials used to make them. Their non-leather selection isn't huge, but I did find some rather nice black ballerina pumps for less than £25, and can now walk home safely.

I thought I'd pass this on in case any fellow vegetarians ever found themselves with a sudden footwear malfunction. Next up: non-leather watch straps ....

Experimental novels

The May issue of Harper's* includes a review by Francine Prose (unfortunately not available online to non-subscribers) of Leanne Shapton's novel Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion and Jewelry. Prose explains the book's premise:

A series of captioned photographs, Leanne Shapton’s ingenious book does a deadpan imitation of the auction catalogues that often accompany the sale of an estate or private collection, catalogues that constitute a peculiar genre in themselves. ...

Shapton presents and describes the artifacts that once belonged to a couple, now broken up. Someone (one or both of the lovers) is jettisoning everything (or almost everything; some lots have been removed from the sale, for unspecified reasons) that the pair possessed or acquired over a relationship that lasted four years, more or less. The page design of Important Artifacts perfectly captures the look of an auction catalogue, paradoxically elegant and cheesy: thin paper covered with functional, low-tech, black-and-white photographs, somewhat haphazardly laid out, numbered and accompanied by dates, estimated prices, and brief explanations of an object’s provenance, vintage, and purpose. Offered in the Doolan–Morris sale is a wide array of garage-sale items and ceramic dogs, as well as Trivial Pursuit cards, sunglasses, bras, oven mitts, magazines, aprons, offered singly and in lots. There are cake stands, blankets, sports equipment, snapshots, T-shirts, clippings, hand-lettered menus from celebratory dinners for two, unopened bottles of wine—and many of these humble items will turn out to signal a plot turn in the history of a romance.

Certain things about this book ought to appeal to me. I'm interested in the use of photographs in novels (particularly since I've been reading a lot of Sebald -- I just started The Rings of Saturn -- whose work famously makes use of this technique), and also in what the everyday objects we accumulate say about us. But as I read Prose's review (which was glowing), I couldn't shake the feeling that Shapton's book would irritate me.

First of all, I'm not sure the idea is as original as all that -- I seem to recall that Fran Lebowitz, in one of her books from the '70s, had a humorous essay in the form of an auction catalogue from her life. Secondly, Shapton's subject matter doesn't seem to justify her experimental technique: the book sounds to me like chick lit taken upmarket. Maybe novels that step outside the conventions of fiction need to offer something more interesting than yet another tale of privileged New Yorkers falling in and out of love.

If anyone actually reads Shapton's book I'd be interested to know your opinion.

* Yeah, I know, I'm behind. It arrives here late.