The Monkey King

I haven't been able to find out much about the Chinese artist Xu Peichen, except that there's currently a show of his work at New York's Asian Cultural Center (which, oddly, seems to lack a website of its own), and that Xinhua assures us he's known (they don't say by whom) as the "Oriental Monkey King". But this impressionistic, almost abstract picture of monkeys in a snowy pine tree makes me want to know more.

Whiny drivers

Over the past few weeks political flyers, such as this rain-smeared example, have appeared thumbtacked to almost every tree in our usually quiet street. What could trigger such an unwonted burst of civic activism? The murder of human-rights campaigners in Chechnya? The brazen stealing of elections in Iran and Kyrgyzstan? The increasing use of English libel law to silence authors around the world, even those whose work has never been published in Britain?

Don't be silly. It's far more important than that. Someone is trying to stop the car owners of Harrow from parking wherever they want, whenever they want. How fitting that they show their attachment to their planet-poisoning vehicles by assaulting a tree.

I don't know the full details of the proposed "controlled parking zone", because I don't own a car. I have lived in this area nearly 10 years without owning a car, and thanks to the public transport network this has caused no inconvenience whatsoever in my everyday life. But I'm assured that for many people around here, a car is an indispensable necessity. Then again, I don't seem to share the hobbies that enhance these people's lives, such as:

• Ferrying their roly-poly offspring half a mile to school, lest amassed armies of paedophiles and swine-flu germs ambush the little darlings during the 15-minutes it would take to walk.
  
• Careening through red lights, mobile phone clamped to one ear, on a quest to keep the streets free of cats, children whose negligent parents still let them play outside, and grown-ups inconsiderate enough to live within walking distance of their work.
  
• Ensuring that no one need endure a blustery autumn night without hearing the haunting and wistful cry of half a dozen car alarms being set off by the wind.
  

Weren't Chávez and Ahmadinejad supposed to have choked off the civilised world's oil supply by now? You can't depend on insane dictators for anything.

Anthropology

"How long has your colleague lived down here?"

"A few years, I think. Do you know her?"

"Never heard of her."

"Then how did you know she was from up North? I didn't mention it."

"You said she offered you some of her chips at lunchtime."

"Londoners eat chips, too, you know."

"Sure. By themselves."

Watercress flowers

I hardly know whether I dare risk triggering a public outburst with these sensational details from my life, but earlier today I was making a sandwich when I found a cluster of tiny white flowers in the watercress. This must be because I'd bought an organic brand, since (so says The Independent) mainstream producers reject any batch that has flowered.

Although there should be nothing surprising about a plant producing flowers (it is how most of them reproduce, after all), it's always a bit odd to see them on something we eat as a vegetable. I remember being quite impressed when delicate trumpetlike white blossoms appeared on our basil plant, and again when our chilli plant came into bloom. The flowers themselves are often edible, but as the example of the watercress shows, many people seem to be alarmed at finding them in their salad. When people complain that we're no longer aware of where our food comes from, they're usually talking about meat, but maybe we've become estranged from the plants that feed us as well.

Window tax

A little curiosity from British history is the Window Tax, which was in force between 1696 and 1851. Householders were divided into tax brackets according to the number of windows in their house, and were then taxed a certain sum for each window.

Although this can be seen as an early attempt at a progressive tax -- the more windows a house had, the larger it was likely to be, and the larger the house, the richer its owner -- it nonetheless triggered widespread resentment, and some people bricked or boarded up windows to reduce their tax bill. Here's an example that can still be seen in Harrow-on-the-Hill, a few minutes' walk from our house.

The Sign of Peace

At Mass this evening we had one of our regular substitute priests, who likes to race through the service in just over half the time it takes the others (this can be good or bad). He took advantage of our temporary suspension of the Sign of Peace to reminisce about how he had to introduce the ritual to his little country parish in the early 1970s. His parishioners, who were used to the passive role they had played in the Tridentine Mass, were horrified at the thought of having to touch and speak to their neighbours. On the day the new rite began, one retired colonel took his seat next to a demure old lady and said, "When the dreaded moment comes, would you mind if I simply bowed to you?"

The priest then said that since we aren't having the usual Sign of Peace these days, he thought we should make up for it by standing up -- yes, right then! -- and introducing ourselves to the people next to us. I dread that sort of thing in any context, and I had a strong suspicion that the priest had come up with it to avoid having to preach a full homily. Having said that, the woman next to me turned out to have only recently come to this country from India, and to be very relieved to finally have someone speak to her, so who knows?

Heshel's Kingdom

My friend Nick very kindly sent me a copy of Heshel's Kingdom by Dan Jacobson, a book I learned about when W.G. Sebald mentioned it in the closing pages of Austerlitz. I thought from Sebald's description that it would be fascinating, and so it was.

Jacobson's grandfather, Heshel Melamed, was an Orthodox rabbi in the Lithuanian town of Varniai, where he tried (not always successfully) to keep his wife and nine children under strict control. Shortly before World War I he contemplated moving the family to Cleveland, Ohio, but was shocked by the secular way of life he observed in America. So the family stayed in Lithuania until 1919, when the rabbi, still only 53, died of heart disease. Soon afterward, his widow and children were forced by economic necessity to emigrate to South Africa -- a move that, though they could not have known it, was to save their lives.

Jacobson, who never met his grandfather, grew up thoroughly Westernised and secularised, unable to fathom the rabbi's motives for his actions and beliefs. At the same time, Heshel himself was always a quasi-mythical figure:

Death, closure, "existlessness" (Thomas Hardy's word) was always his lot. When I was a child this rendered him peculiarly distant and mysterious. Now that I am so much older, he has become far closer to me than he was then. The corridors of thought which lead to him are shorter than they used to be. He, who stood behind my coming-into-being, now waits for my ceasing-to-be. He is the expert on both conditions. He is the absence into which my absence will eventually be absorbed.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, when it became possible for foreigners to travel to Lithuania, Jacobson decided to visit the country and try to trace Heshel's story.

In one sense, he failed. At the end of his trip, he knew no more about Heshel Melamed than he had when he started. He could not find his grandfather's grave in the old Jewish cemetery at Varniai (the sign at the entrance says that it "used to be" the cemetery, reflecting the fact that the community it served no longer exists), or the house -- if it was still standing -- where his mother and her siblings grew up. The only family records he succeeded in tracking down were in his great-grandfather's hometown of Kelme, where he found a listing for his great-uncle's household in the 1941 census. Then his guide led him to the field where they, along with the rest of the town's 2,000 Jews, had been marched by the Nazis and shot.

His journey, however, was not fruitless:

On the other hand, I did learn something about my grandfather I had not expected beforehand: it had not even occurred to me that it might be possible to do so. Looking about me in Lithuania, searching for him in the midst of a devastating absence and emptiness, I was surprised to find myself grasping for the first time the full reality to itself of the obliterated community he had belonged to. Seeing him in the context of his vanished people, of the nation that now is not, I began to understand for the first time how it could once have seemed to him sufficient; as much as he needed; as much as a man like himself could expect to find on God's unredeemed earth.

Jacobson writes vividly about other people, both those in his family's past and those he met during his travels. He also has the ability -- shared by too few memoirists and travel writers -- to insert his own feelings into the narrative without hijacking the story.

Before reading this book I knew very little about the destruction of Lithuania's Jews, and I was surprised to learn how swiftly and how early in the war it had occurred. Around 85% of the country's Jewish population was murdered in just ten weeks leading up to December 1941 -- three months, as Jacobson reminds us, before the gas chambers were first used at Auschwitz. In village after village, Jewish men, women and children were simply herded outside the town limits and shot.

In doing this, the Nazis were helped by many willing Lithuanians, something that the country's present-day residents would prefer to forget. Jacobson tells of the wrangling between Jewish groups and the Lithuanian authorities over the wording of a memorial, which ended up saying that the murders were carried out by the "Nazis and their assistants" because the locals could not stomach the phrase "Lithuanian assistants". Lithuanian Gentiles prefer to think of themselves as also having been victims of the Nazis, with no culpability of their own. (More recently, of course, they see themselves as double victims -- first of the Nazis, then of the Soviets. Nick recently linked to an interesting piece on Harry's Place about this national myth.)

I'm disappointed that Jacobson's book seems to be so little known -- mine is one of only 10 copies on LibraryThing. It's so good that I even forgave him for referring to "Kiev and other Russian cities".

Kyrgyz elections

Few in the West are likely to notice, but Kyrgyzstan has a presidential election today. I clearly remember the hope and exhilaration that accompanied the country's "Tulip Revolution" in 2005, when it seemed that the whole region was moving unstoppably toward liberal democracy.

Now, of course, things are very different. The Kyrgyz president, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, has been conducting a campaign of harassment and violence against political opponents, journalists and human rights activists. In its 2009 report (in PDF format) on Kyrgyzstan, Freedom House stated, "President Bakiyev has become infamous for even greater levels of corruption, authoritarianism, and ineffective economic policies than his predecessor." He is almost certain to win re-election today, but whether he will do so fairly is another question.

Bakiyev, is however, an ally of the U.S. in the Afghan war. A story in yesterday's New York Times raises disturbing questions about whether President Obama's approach to such matters is so different from his own predecessor's:

The United States has remained largely silent in response to this wave of violence, apparently wary of jeopardizing the status of its sprawling air base, on the outskirts of this capital, which supports the mission in Afghanistan. Indeed, the Obama administration has sought to woo the Kyrgyz president since he said in February that he would close the Manas base.

In June, President Obama sent a letter to Mr. Bakiyev praising his role in Afghanistan and the campaign against terrorism. Mr. Bakiyev allowed the base to stay, after the United States agreed to pay higher rent and other minor changes.

The lack of criticism of Mr. Bakiyev underscores how the Obama administration has emphasized pragmatic concerns over human rights in dealings with autocratic leaders in Central Asia. Under pressure in Afghanistan, the administration has feared alienating nearby countries whose support is increasingly important.

Practical experience

All week my classmates and I have been acting out emergencies, with one person lying on the floor pretending to be ill and others gathered round to "help". As I came back to the centre after lunch today, I thought I saw a few people from the class doing the same thing on the pavement. As I got nearer I realised that they were standing around a stranger who was curled in the fetal position, breathing raspily and giving a low but agonised wail with every exhalation.

It turned out that the woman's car had been sideswiped by a van a few minutes before. Although no one (so far as we could tell) had been physically hurt, she had got out of the car and promptly collapsed in a panic attack.

Since the first couple of first-aiders-in-training had already done the necessary work (basically, speaking soothingly to the victim and trying to encourage her to breathe regularly), there wasn't much for the rest of us to do. But we all felt obliged to hang around until the emergency crews showed up and told us we could leave -- all except one unfortunate woman who had actually seen the accident and had to give a statement to the police.

First aid, day two

It's slightly amusing the number of people who manage to injure themselves on first aid courses. One woman walked in this morning with bruises round her lips from where she had pressed down too hard on the CPR dummy. During the break one of the instructors took her aside and began quietly recommending some herbal remedies, which she isn't allowed to mention in class.

Meanwhile, we all spent the morning having our heads winched into triangular bandages as our partners practiced dressing imaginary scalp wounds. I was wondering how long it would take me to pass out from impaired circulation when the instructor came by and judged my bandage to still not be tight enough, whereupon my partner sighed in exasperation, threw the loosened dressings over my face and started again. I myself always find bandaging to be the most difficult part of these courses, and embarrassed myself by having to dress a palm wound three times before the layers of gauze would hold.

I learned of another development since my last course: the Red Cross, thinking that people don't take the term "stroke" seriously enough, is now encouraging people to call them "brain attacks" instead. I don't know if it will catch on.

Exciting developments in first aid

Today I started the four-day course to renew my First Aid at Work certification. There's quite an assortment of people in our class, including an ex-policeman who's been supplementing our discussions of injuries with graphic examples from his career. At the other end of the spectrum there's the tiny pale girl who ran from the room and was sick when the instructor began comparing arterial and venous bleeding. She apologised to us afterward, but in a tone that suggested she was actually rather proud. I wondered how she could ever hope to perform first aid if the very mention of blood made her ill. Every time the discussion took a turn for the gruesome after that, everyone in the room glanced at her to see if she would repeat the performance.

Resuscitation procedures have changed a bit since I last studied first aid. We don't check circulation any more, we don't bother measuring along the ribcage to find the right spot for chest compressions, and we do 30 compressions followed by two breaths, rather than two breaths followed by 15 compressions. Some things never change, though: The instructor still had to explain that people don't miraculously sit up and start breathing again after CPR, they way they do in the movies. The sole purpose of CPR is to keep a person's vital organs alive until the paramedics get there. The instructor didn't mention a statistic I've read elsewhere, that only about 15% of people who receive CPR survive. Mind you, if your heart stops and you don't get CPR, your chances of survival are roughly 0%, so it's still worth doing.

One mildly interesting claim the instructor made was that because British people have got so used to seeing characters on American television shows dialing 911 for an ambulance, calling 911 will now put them through to emergency services in this country too (the official numbers are 999 and 112). I don't know if that's true or an urban legend, but there doesn't seem to be any good way to test it.

Euthanasia, 19th-century style

Since the deaths of Sir Edward and Lady Downes, the media have, unsurprisingly, been full of debate over euthanasia and assisted suicide. This was in the back of my mind last night as I was leafing through E. & M.A. Radford's fascinating Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, which is why I stopped short at an entry called "Death, Easing":

The idea that death is difficult, and that the dying need help to enable them to go easily, was once very common .... The way was cleared for the departing soul by opening all the locks in the house, withdrawing bolts, and loosening knots .... Since death, like birth, comes easier in contact with the earth, the dying man was sometimes lifted out of bed and laid upon the floor. This practice began at a time when most cottages had earthen floors, but it was quite often followed in houses with wooden floors also. In either case, the shock of being transferred, while in a state of extreme weakness, from a warm bed to the cold floor would probably be enough to hasten death and secure the desired quick passing ....

In her Shropshire Folk-lore, Charlotte Burne ... says that about the middle of last century [the 19th], one Ruyton doctor found it necessary to warn relations in attendance on the sick that he expected to find his patient alive when he next called. At Baschurch in the same period, a curate visited an old man who was very ill, but not apparently in any immediate danger of death. On his next visit, he was astonished to find him dead. The widow explained that her husband had tried hard to die, but he could not, so to help him, she had taken a piece of tape and "put it round his neck and drawed it tight, and he went off like a lamb".

... Enid Porter records a curious custom observed until 1902 in an Isle of Ely village. When a sick person's recovery was despaired of, but death was unduly delayed, the village nurse might be asked to bring a certain pillow, covered with black lace, which was said to have been made originally by a nun at Ely and handed down through the years from one nurse to the next. This was placed behind the dying man's head, after he had been made unconscious by a dose of crushed opium pills mixed with gin. It was then quickly pulled away, so that the patient fell backwards with a jerk, which was usually his last movement in this world. This custom came to an unlamented end in 1902, when the last woman to own the pillow died, and her son burnt it.

War memorials

Today Chris and I went out to Hyde Park Corner, a place where we hadn't spent much time before (though we did pass through it last month on our way to Apsley House). This area is largely filled with memorials from World War I, which reminded me that just before we went out I'd heard of the death of one of Britain's last Great War veterans, Henry Allingham.

The Machine Gun Corps memorial, erected in 1925, looked odd to me with its combination of classical imagery and bronze-encased modern guns. I wonder what it looked like to people at the time.



Under this section of the Royal Artillery Memorial is buried a list of those who fell in the war:



Shortly after I took this picture, some tourists arrived and began climbing on the steps of the memorial and encouraging their kids to pose for comical photos with the statues. That always seems a bit wrong to me.

On either side of Hyde Park Corner are two much newer memorials, devoted to the dead (of both world wars) from Australia and New Zealand, respectively. The Australian memorial was unveiled in 2003, but had to be closed earlier this year for repairs, which doesn't say a lot for the quality of construction. It's mainly reopened now, but one section remains under wraps.



I think the design must have been partly inspired by the Vietnam memorial in Washington. All along the wall are the names of the battlefields where the dead fell, which on closer inspection turn out to be made up of the tiny names of Australian towns.


Click for the larger version to get the full effect.

I'm sorry to say the New Zealand memorial was so unimpressive that at first I didn't realise what it was, taking it for some annoying modern art installation. It consists of a group of three-dimensional black-and-white metal crosses. The inscriptions on their sides are in both English and Maori, though, which was a nice touch.

Slender lorises

Since we have season tickets to London Zoo, we get ZSL's quarterly magazine. I keep hoping they'll do a feature on the zoo's pottos one day. No luck so far, but the latest issue does have the first of a two-part series on their Asian cousins, the slender lorises. This is another species I always stop and watch when I visit the nocturnal section. They look so shy and delicate in the dim light that I can hardly believe they live outside dreams.

The article in this issue is about the lorises at the zoo (the next one will be about ZSL's attempts to conserve them in the wild). I was interested in the keeper's description of how he used environmental enrichment to help the lorises feel at home in their new surroundings:

At this stage the lorises were still moving nervously around the enclosure and for the most part staying in their favoured spots, only coming towards the floor if absolutely necessary. My plan at this point was to get them to start using more of the depth of their enclosure, so that they could gain in confidence, and so that I could more easily check basic body and coat condition.

My first step then was to offer enrichment, such as stuffed pine cones, in the lower levels of the enclosure, devices that I now knew they recognised with foodstuffs on them and which they found very palatable. This way I knew the only obstacle for Menika and Nehru to overcome was not the device, but its location. The response was much the same as it had been with the more challenging enrichment provided in their favoured spots, with lots of backwards and forwards between the security of their favourite spots and the enrichment device near the enclosure floor. Each time, though, the lorises would edge that little bit closer to the device, snatch some food and then eat it in the seclusion of the "canopy" area. As time passed they would come down to the lower levels of the enclosures with more confidence, and as they did this, so I increased the complexity of the device so that the balance of hesitation was always counteracted by the desire for a reward.

The lorises eventually became comfortable enough in their new home (they arrived in London from another zoo, I'm not sure where) to mate there. They're one of three breeding pairs in Europe.

Museum dream

One of the best reasons to go to London's Natural History Museum is the architecture. The dinosaur collection is scanty compared to Pittsburgh's, and dumbed down with animatronic models. A large portion of the building is filled with stuffed exhibits from an earlier age, which now seem creepy and depressing. (I'm forced to conclude that there was once a time when people were pleased, even charmed, to see a shot, stuffed mother bird surrounded by her shot, stuffed brood in a tender and lifelike pose. This might as well have happened on another planet.) But I never get tired of studying the terracotta ornaments and identifying the different species of monkeys, birds, reptiles, fish and plants climbing up the doorways and columns.

I'm pretty sure it was a window in the Natural History Museum that I was looking through in my dream last night, because I could feel the cool stone pane under my hands as I stared out at a tree in the gardens. I didn't look around the building because I was busy watching a little family of blue tits as the parents (both mother and father look after the brood) encouraged some of the more advanced chicks to fly.

Another reason I think I was in the Natural History Museum is that in the midst of this, Sir David Attenborough walked in and handed me a book. He told me he'd often seen me there and always liked watching me because I looked so happy. I was going to tell him I was happy because of my love of nature, and that he was partly responsible for inspiring that love, but for some reason I was unable to speak at all.

The gulls return

The black-headed gulls, in breeding plumage, are back on the Open Space* near work. They were sitting around very placidly this afternoon. I was carrying my camera, as I always seem to do lately, but I couldn't quite get close enough to take a good picture without disturbing them. This was the best I could do.



I went up into the woods for a little while, and when I came back the gulls were flapping from place to place, trying to avoid a remote-controlled toy truck that a man was driving around on the grass. I wasn't bold enough to photograph this; it's not really a good idea to take pictures of strangers in the UK.

I'm not sure if the concentric rings all over the open space were made by the truck, or by the council's mower, or by some aliens too lazy to make proper crop circles.



* I called it a Green Space before, but I was mistaken.

Sir Edward Downes

The news bulletins on Radio 3 often report the deaths of old musicians and conductors, but before this morning I'd never heard a report quite like this.

This sort of thing normally provokes a flood of political and ethical commentary, but I seem not to have been born with the ability to respond in that way. All I can do is think how terribly sad the whole thing is.

Migraine with aura

This morning I returned to my desk after a pointless presentation and was finally about to begin the day's work when I noticed that half my computer keyboard was slowly fading out of vision. I get about three migraines a year and this was one of them. The backlog would simply have to wait. I went up to the sickroom and stayed with my eyes shut until I could read the signs in the street below again, and the swimming sensation in my eyes had been replaced by a penetrating ache above one of them. That I could deal with.

The visual disturbance that precedes a migraine headache is among the most disorienting experiences I know. In one sense, I can still see perfectly well -- I recognise the people around me and know that the object in front of me is a computer or book. But if I try to read some text or focus on the details in a face, the different parts break up and slide away from me. For relief I'll try to look at some plain expanse such as an undecorated wall, but I'm distracted by jagged arcs of light or odd swirling motions on the very edge of my field of vision. In some ways it would be less disturbing to temporarily lose sight altogether.

I've sometimes wondered if Picasso suffered from migraines: the way he depicted objects one detail, one plane at a time seems oddly familiar. Turns out I'm not the only one to have wondered.

India's vultures

In the 1990s, the vultures of the Indian subcontinent began to die off at an extraordinary rate, their numbers plummeting by 95% in just three years. By 2004, when it was discovered that they were being poisoned by cow carcasses containing the veterinary drug diclofenac, three species of these once-ubiquitous birds were nearly extinct. An international conservation effort is working to save the vultures by trying to stamp out the use of diclofenac (it's now been banned as a veterinary drug by all governments in the region, but illegal use continues) and breeding the birds in captivity. In the meantime, however, the skies of South Asia remain empty of vultures, and the carcasses they would once have eaten are devoured by feral dogs (many of them rabid) or simply left to rot away.

Now an article by Sherally Munshi in the July issue of Harper's reports on the effect of the die-off on Bombay's Parsis, who traditionally bring their dead to cylindrical towers called dokhmas to be consumed by vultures:

As the birds disappeared, residents of the apartment buildings overlooking Doongerwadi began to complain about what most Parsis already suspected: dead bodies were lying unconsumed, left to rot in the dokhmas. The Panchayat responded by closing two of the more exposed dokhmas. In the others, it began conducting strange experiments. Ozone pumps were installed to deodorize the air, but they were expensive and ineffective. Khandias [pallbearers] were told to scatter chemicals and microorganism-rich substances over corpses to speed their decomposition, but during the monsoon, the rain washed the powders away. Khandias tried pumping chemicals into the bodies’ open orifices, but the process was unbearable. Corpses turned to sludge, and the khandias slipped on the human residue.

Incidentally, I was surprised the other day to realise that diclofenac is the main ingredient in some analgesic gel I'd bought for a pulled muscle. Of course, it doesn't cause problems when used properly in human medicine. But it was a reminder of how seemingly innocuous substances, when introduced into the environment at the wrong place or the wrong time, can trigger catastrophe.

Ungodly ignorance

The archive photo in yesterday's Times showed a group of Muslim soldiers from the Indian Army worshiping in the Woking Mosque in 1941. The caption explained that they were "celebrating the festival of Eid al-Adha, 'Festival of Sacrifice', celebrated by Muslims worldwide to commemorate the willingness of Ibrahim (Abraham) to sacrifice his son Ishmael (Isaac) in obedience to God".

Not so! Yes, "Ibrahim" is the Arabic version of "Abraham". But as anyone who's read the Old Testament should know, Isaac and Ishmael were two very different people. Isaac was the son miraculously born to Abraham and his wife Sarah in their old age, after many years of barrenness; in the Bible he appears as the ancestor of the Jewish people. Ishmael was Abraham's son by his servant, Hagar; he and his mother were rescued by an angel after Sarah drove them out into the wilderness in a jealous rage. To the Muslims, and to some Jews, he is the ancestor of the Arabs. A crucial difference between the Jewish and Muslim traditions is that in the Old Testament, it is Isaac whom Abraham nearly sacrifices at God's request. In the Quran, it's Ishmael.

This isn't the first time I've seen this kind of religious ignorance in the media. Recently a mystified member of the public wrote in to another publication to ask about the meaning of the emblem on the Lyle's Golden Syrup tin: a dead lion with bees flying out of its body, surrounded by the motto "Out of the strong came forth sweetness". The reply said it referred to an "old folk tradition" that honey could be produced from the corpses of animals. Rubbish. It's a reference to Judges 14, in which Samson kills a lion and later sees a swarm of bees infesting it; later, at the Philistines' table, he tells them a riddle based on the incident. The "folk belief" the journalist refers to may indeed be at the heart of the biblical story, but the Lyle's motto is a direct quotation from Judges 14:14. There's no question that's what Abram Lyle was referring to, and when the trademark was registered in 1904, most consumers would have recognised the reference immediately.

Similarly, on a recent visit to the National Gallery, I wandered around grumbling to Chris about errors in the museum's captions for paintings depicting Biblical subjects. Admittedly, most of the paintings referred to the so-called deuterocanonical books (or Apocrypha), which don't appear in Protestant Bibles. But it's not like there's no easy way to look these things up.

I suppose these days, any call for schoolchildren to be taught more about the Bible or other scriptures would be seen as a step on the road to theocracy. But it's startling to me to realise just how much we are losing of what was once our shared cultural language, how allusions that would have been instantly familiar to people just a couple of generations ago now might as well come from some distant and long-extinct civilisation.

Shameless commercialism (but hey, it's for the monkeys)

Last year I blogged about our experience volunteering as keepers for the day at the Monkey Sanctuary in Cornwall. I've kept up with their inspiring work and just thought I would mention that they've started selling two shirts to promote their campaign to end the primate pet trade in the UK:


Chris's shirt is especially cute.



You can buy them here. All proceeds go to support the sanctuary's work (and the shop's service is excellent too -- we got a handwritten thank-you card with our order!).

Campo Santo

I've started on one of the two W.G. Sebald books I picked up last month.* Campo Santo is a collection of essays and prose compiled after the author's death. The first four pieces are accounts of a visit to Corsica, fragments of a book on the island that Sebald never completed (the introduction tells us he set it aside to write Austerlitz). I found these to be nearly as absorbing as The Rings of Saturn, although they suffered a bit from lacking the pictures that are a characteristic of Sebald's other work. Had he lived to complete the project, he would probably have included a reproduction of the Pietro Paolini portrait that so moved him in the Musée Fesch, and photographs of the "silent fragments of a town abandoned years ago" in a Corsican graveyard.

The rest of the book consists of essays on literature, and I have to admit these have been slightly less interesting to me, if only because I haven't always been familiar with the works Sebald discusses. His description of Wolfgang Hildesheimer's novel Tynset, however, was enough to make me decide to read it. Alas, I was out of luck: it appears that either it's never been translated into English, or the translation has fallen so far out of print that even AbeBooks is unaware of it. I suppose I could try to overcome my inertia and read it in German, but considering how long I've been meaning to read the foreign-language books already on my shelf, I'm not optimistic.

I see that further on in Campo Santo is an essay on Bruce Chatwin, which makes me wonder if I should take a break before that one to read the copy of Utz I bought in a charity shop the other day.

*It turns out I was mistaken about these being the last two I hadn't read. There's also On the Natural History of Destruction and After Nature. So that's something to look forward to, anyway.

In India, not here

Discussion between two co-workers today:

"Did you get that e-mail about that girl in Kingsbury?"

"Yes, but I don't know if it's true, do you?"

"I don't know. I never know whether to believe these things."

"I don't think it's true. It would be in the news if it happened here. In India I know it happens, but not here."

"Oh, in India it definitely happens. The people who live in the house my auntie owns, it happened to their neighbours. One of the daughters, they threw powder over her and then she just followed them everywhere. Finally someone from the same village saw her and brought her back. But, no, I don't think it happens here."

"Scary, though."

"Yep."

Why stay in college, why go to night school?

After spending too long -- far too long -- dithering and making excuses, I finally decided to take a risk and do something to change my life and job. I went over to Birkbeck's website intending to find a course that would put me on the road to a brilliant new career. So naturally I ended up enrolling in ... a class in poetry- and fiction-writing. There may actually be something wrong with me.

Ideally, I wanted to apply for a degree course, but Birkbeck isn't admitting any more students for its creative-writing BA at the moment -- it's developing a revamped degree programme that will begin in autumn 2010. This continuing education class should help me build up a portfolio that I can submit when I apply for the degree next year. My interest is in poetry more than fiction, but you can't take a pure poetry class until you've had the introductory combined course. I assume the professor will still let students focus on one more than another.

I'll try and post some examples of my coursework (or not, depending on how bad it is) from 28 September.

Hey, remember swine flu?

You could be forgiven for thinking that swine flu had gone away. Whether you blame Michael Jackson, the failure of corpses to immediately pile up in the streets or just the media's short attention span, it's become old news. But of course, while our attention has been elsewhere, the disease has only been spreading: the UK has now had over 1,750 confirmed cases and seven deaths, including, last Friday, the first death in London. At Mass yesterday we learned that seven children from the local Catholic primary school have been confirmed to have the flu, though none is dangerously ill.

Churches in the diocese have now made precautionary changes to the Mass until the epidemic is over -- the first time I've ever seen this happen. We now receive Communion only in the form of bread, whereas usually we also take wine from a shared cup. The priest has also asked those diehards who still insist on having the Host placed directly in their mouth to consider receiving it in the hand instead, although he doesn't go so far as to refuse if they still want it the old-fashioned way.

Finally, we've been asked not to shake hands at the Sign of Peace, but merely to smile and nod at each other. (If I remember correctly, the Vatican doesn't actually dictate what form the Peace is supposed to take, but most parishes in English-speaking countries seem to have settled on the handshake as the best expression of goodwill.) I did find this slightly awkward, but having listened to the kid behind me sneeze and snivel through most of the service, I was quite glad to have an excuse not to touch him.

What's slightly worrying is that these are the first precautionary measures I've seen any institution adopt in quite a while.

From Nightmare at Noon

You can be a Finn or a Dane and an American.
You can be German or French and an American,
Jew, Bohunk, Nigger, Mick - all the dirty names
We call each other - and yet American.
We've stuck to that quite a awhile.

Go into Joe's Diner and try to tell the truckers
You belong to a Master race and you'll get a laugh.

What's that, brother? Double-talk?
I'm a stranger here myself but it's a free country.
It's a free country . . .
Oh yes, I know the faults and the other side,
The lyncher's rope, the bought justice, the wasted land,
The scale on the leaf, the borers in the corn,
The finks with their clubs, the gray sky of relief,
All the long shame of our hearts and the long disunion.
I am merely remarking - as a country, we try.
As a country, I think we try.

-- Stephen Vincent Benet

(Full text of -- very long -- poem in PDF format here.)

London Catholic Worker

Years ago, when I had burned out from my initially chosen career and had no idea how to spend the rest of my life, I briefly contemplated joining a Catholic Worker house. This was an absurd and thoughtless desire, born of my own insecurity and naive romanticism. I realised just how unsuitable a Catholic Worker I would have been about eight years ago, when I had a brief exchange of e-mails with a man involved in setting up the first embryonic CW community in London. On hearing I was from America, he responded that, oh yes, he had been there himself -- including two terms in federal prison for protesting at nuclear weapons facilities.

This I could not do, and not only because of cowardice. First of all -- and I know how ridiculous this sounds, given the threat that nuclear weapons pose -- it's not an issue I feel strongly enough about to risk my freedom. None of us can choose what we're passionate about, and to sacrifice yourself for something you don't truly feel is worth the sacrifice seems wasteful.

Secondly, I can't convince myself that such protest tactics will make any difference. For any country to destroy its weapons, a larger percentage of its population would have to take part in these demonstrations than is ever realistically going to happen. One protester, ten protesters or a hundred -- they get thrown into prison and forgotten about. They would do more good on the outside, working to change people's minds. Such reasoning may, as Dorothy Day put it, be "true according to the candlelight of common sense, but not according to the flaming heat of the Sun of justice". But we each have to follow our own light.

Nonetheless, I'm pleased the Catholic Workers exist. I'm glad someone is passionate enough, glad someone is willing to risk being insignificant, and most of all, glad that there still exists a "peace movement" that isn't just a covert form of support for the other side. And of course there's also the work they do among the poor and marginalised in the inner-city neighbourhoods where they live.

So I was happy to see that the London Catholic Worker community has become established enough to start producing a regular newsletter, copies of which recently appeared in our church porch. I was being pushed out the door by the crowd and didn't have time to grab it, but last night the newsletter became another of the things I have read in dreams. I doubt that what I read has much resemblance to the actual publication (they're not really offering pottery lessons to the lonely and perplexed, are they?), but I'll take it as a sign that I need to pick the real thing up next week.

Shosty: banned in Britain?

An odd little piece on The Wall Street Journal's site lists Shostakovich ("who rose to fame during the rise of the Soviets" ... um, OK) as one of ten people who have at one time or another been banned from entering Britain. Shosty was, the WSJ tells us, forbidden to visit the UK "during the Cold War". Sadly, the paper doesn't give a source for this information, or elucidate in which of the 30 or so years of the Cold War covered by Shostakovich's life the ban was in force.

The ban, if it existed, must have been very short-lived or very weak, because it's well-documented that Shostakovich visited Britain on four occasions: in 1958, when he received an honorary degree from Oxford; in 1960, when he heard Mstislav Rostropovich play the London premiere of the First Cello Concerto; in 1962, when the Edinburgh Festival was devoted entirely to his work; and in 1963 for the UK premiere of Katerina Ismailova, the revamped version of Lady Macbeth of Mstensk. Moreover, most historians describe these visits as the result of the Soviet Union relaxing travel restrictions on its artists, rather than on Britain's increased willingness to accept them.

So where did the WSJ get this claim? Chris suggested they had Shostakovich mixed up with Snoop Dogg, but no, Snoop appears in the same list. I've left a comment to ask for their source and am sure they'll provide it forthwith; after all, one of America's most respected newspapers wouldn't just make up rubbish to fill space, now would they?

(Update: High Windows has an astonishing addendum.)

Harrow in photos

Statue
Originally uploaded by Laura A. Brown

Recently I've been carrying a camera around and taking pictures of Harrow or anywhere else I happen to be. This started because I wanted to show someone who's never been here what the place looks like, but other motives have since come into play. For one thing, it's kind of a fun challenge to try and coax an interesting photo out of our very basic camera. For another, it's caused me to see my surroundings in a different way, looking at sights I'd come to take for granted and trying to pick out what would catch a stranger's eye.

Occasionally I'm surprised at how different my pictures look from what I saw (or thought I saw) in the real world. Take this statue in Central Harrow, which I photographed mainly because of its ridiculousness: far too grand for the mundane insurance building it adorns; out of place among the garish signs for Primark and Kebabland; and with the support placed so that the woman looks (depending on whom you ask) like she's being either pushed out the window or felt up. The photo didn't come out brilliantly, but when Chris saw it he said, "That looks better than it does in real life", and he's right. It almost has a kind of beauty.