Atomic Razor

Famously Relaxed and Liberal

Radio 4's Book of the Week this week is Dr John Rae's The Old Boy's Network, extracts from the diaries of his time as headmaster of Westminster School. The continuity announcer described Westminster as being renowned for its "famously relaxed and liberal" atmosphere. Well, it was definitely "something" and liberal, and it seems likely that the phrase was one cribbed from the Wikipedia article, which, in turn, is quoting The Good Schools Guide. I was not exactly sure what that is supposed to mean, although the notion that sprang immediately to my mind was that it is some kind of euphemistic reference to an attitude, unusually relaxed even for one of our great public schools, towards pederasty. Westminster apparently has a reputation for tolerating "eccentricity", which would seem to confirm my original notion, although perhaps it is an allusion to Dr Rae's support for girls at Westminster, not restricting scholarships solely to British Christians, STOPP and the SDP.

Tim Pigot-Smith unctuous tone - apparently Dr Rae did have something of a plummy voice in real life - did little to stop my class hackles from being raised. Surely after the revolution one of the first tasks of the Council of the People's Commissars will be the abolition of the public schools.

Rae was rather catty about Keble, but smugly obsequious about Christ Church, the traditional sister of Westminster in Oxford. We weren't treated to this particular passage, but perhaps tomorrow:

Saturday, December 15

The dean of Christ Church telephones to say that X has not done well enough in his history papers to be offered a place but the college like him and are anxious to do well by him, especially in a year when we have sent them such a good crop of candidates. Would X be willing to read geography instead? On X's behalf I say yes, and the dean promises to consult his geographers. Just as well Roy Hattersley does not overhear this conversation.

(After reading the Daily Telegraph extracts of which the above is just one entry, the Weasel was moved to exclaim of Rae: "What an odious sh*t he is".)  We were however this morning treated to a discussion of the various issues surrounding open and closed entrance scholarships, held at Christ Church for Oxford in Westminster's case. But this was the early 1970s, a very different world from today, and thus, one would have thought of, a matter merely of historical interest (the early 1970s probably represented the zenith in terms of both the academic standard and the Byzantine opacity of the procedures to be negotiated required for Oxbridge entrance). And yet immediately after the programme had ended, the continuity announcer stated that the Oxford entry procedures described in it had ended in the mid-1980s. This is absolutely extraordinary and quite without precedent in my long experience of Radio 4. Why was it felt necessary to issue such an editorial clarification? At whose behest was it inserted? Fair enough if it had been the editor of the diaries placing the entry in its historical context within the programme itself. I can only assume that some producer or editor heard the programme and decided that it was likely to have the tendency to bring  Dr John Rae, Westminster School in particular and the public school system in general or Oxbridge entrance into disrepute and decided to head off any potential criticism at the pass with a preemptive strike. But it attempting to do, it seems to me that the BBC have merely succeeded in summoning ancient grievances from the grave. They will not quickly be laid to rest again.

Exciting New Career Challenge

Luckily my current employer isn't giving me the opportunity to seek exciting new career challenges, but nevertheless  I have, despite the Credit Crunch, managed to obtain one, so in a few weeks I will be exchanging my daily commute to South Oxfordshire for one to South Kensington. Which will at least give me an opportunity to do more reading, although I will certainly miss the post-prandial strolls around the estate with the Weasel. But the new job should be very interesting (and indded challenging) and will, I hope, give me the chance to do slightly more in helping to bringing about a safe Singularity.

Two Come Along at Once

Good sitcoms that is. And one of them is ITV1(!). I am talking, of course, of ITV1's Moving Wallpaper and Channel 4's Free Agents, which ended last Friday after six episodes, although it felt like only five, perhaps the series was so good that I didn't want it to end. Sharon Horgan and Stephen Mangan did what they had to, but it was Matthew Holness as the wonderfully deadpan agent and Tony Head as the boss who is rarely more than a sentence of rude, lewd, inventive invective from a harassment suit who stole the show for me. Consider that

When the series was first broadcast, the Sunday Express attacked the show because of bad language, claiming that the word "Cunt" was used three times and "Fuck" 22 times. John Beyer from Mediawatch said: "The obscene language in this programme is appalling by any standard. It shows a disregard of public concern that is completely unacceptable from a public service broadcaster."

and most of those came out of Tony Head's mouth, this is definitely one for Dave to download in Seattle. Note also that there was nothing in Free Agents that couldn't be heard every night on the West End stage, so I don't really know why television is quite so squeamish in 2009. In fact, Free Agents felt like a play. There was a story arc, as there is Moving Wallpaper as well as Plus One, the show that preceded Free Agents in the ten o'clock Friday evening slot and which was also a product of the 2007 Channel 4 Comedy Showcase. Plus One did only run five episodes, although it seemed more like six. It certainly had its moments, but it was much more in the mode of farce than Free Agents. It also had a great deal of swearing, which in this case I did rather tiresome, partly because it wasn't delivered with the brio, panache and vim with which Tony Head delivered his filth-sodden expostulations and partly because it made me think of my own work and particularly 11SSAL, in which the characters do swear less and somewhat to their advantage in my opinion, but perhaps this is a generational thing and it was easier for me to relate to the thirty- and fifty-somethings in Free Agents than the twenty-somethings of Plus One. Whichever way, it would be easy to imagine a version of Free Agents on the stage or as film, perhaps under the working title of Bitter and Twisted, which would at least distance us from The 10%ers, especially as at times  it verges on dramedy (I don't think black comedy or dark comedy is quite the right description), which lends itself to the stage (see the works of Alan Ayckbourn). The fact that there must be have been a pilot is interesting as it might well be an extra on the recently released  DVD of Free Agents.

With Moving Wallpaper, we are firmly back in the mode of farce, but at least it is, for the most part, funny farce (not that Plus One wasn't funny at times), although there were sailing not exactly close to the edge, but somewhere way, way over it in last Friday's episode. This is 2009. Have the production (and, for God's sake, the actors!) never heard of transphobia? Or is that the respectable prejudice? I am surprised that there wasn't some comment on this on LJ. Whereas theatrical agencies might well be not that much unlike the one in Free Agents (but would the agents have their own offices?), I don't imagine that TV production companies are much like the one in Moving Wallpaper or that senior ITV executives are much like Raquel Cassidy('s character) - interestingly both she and Ben Miller started PhDs in science subjects at Cambridge).

Consider the Veolia vanity TV advert. Is the actress Lucy Liemann, Moving Wallpaper's Samantha Phillips, script editor? It sure as heck looks like her. Now, the ubiquitous Veolia (formerly Vivendi, formerly Compagnie Générale des Eaux - Stop! Stop! I can't get started on fascinating, but hardly relevant peregrinations into the history of companies right now) is a French company. Now, in the globalised world in which we live, it is common for companies to have global marketing campaigns (and anyway British adverts are often filmed abroad, although I do recall French adverts from the TV in Grenoble in 1995 that were clearly made by UK companies) and this is strongly suggested by their tagline: "The environment is an industrial challenge", which probably sounds a lot better in French ("L'environnement est un défi industriel" - indeed!) as well as the Euro-English voiceover. Well, we don't have to speculate. Or, if you prefer. Of course, this doesn't tell us whether it is Ms L or which city the ad was filmed in. Somewhere "Latin", I'd say. Madrid? Lisbon? Montevideo? Buenos Aires? One of you must recognise the parliament-type building shown. Often models turn out to be Czech or Brazilian, so if it is Ms L , it is good to see a British actress getting a global gig.

Liquid Architecture

If architecture is frozen music is poetry liquid architecture?

To Marlow on Monday evening for a writing workshop. I hadn't realised until the day itself that it was in fact a poetry workshop (my bad for not bothering to look at the preparatory materials until pretty much the last minute). Not that there was a problem with that. I've long felt that no matter what kind of writer one wants to be it, one should study poetry - and at least try to write it. Poetry is language at its most concentrated, condensed, distilled, reduced. It is about the sound, rhythm, meaning and feel of words. And these are things we should - must -care about as writers. Reading poet and writing it stretches literary muscles that don't otherwise get stretched and stretching those muscles will make us better writers regardless of whether we are writing litfic, paranormal erotica or monkpunk.

The tutor was Kate Foley. She hadn't been expecting a chap among her tutees, but this didn't seem to affect the flow and we were soon to business. I managed two poems or, rather, attempts at poems. For me, it is difficult to get over the feeling that there is a particular language, subject matter and tone that is proper to poetry - the elegiac (in fact, I could go further and say that it is elegiac nature poetry that is real poetry), but I did manage in one of my pieces to at least address this issue. I think it will take a while to get over it completely, but it is a start.

It would be a good to go a course at the City Lit or Arvon or somewhere, but not going on one is no excuse for not starting to do something more on the poetry side now. I have the Penguin English Verse audiobook on tape. At some point I will have to convert to a form that is more maintainable over the long term (I also have the cassette of James Joyce reading from Ulysses and Finnegans Wake). And, of course, I have innumerable volumes of poetry at home. I could read some of them.

Poetry reminds me of science fiction in that most poetry, like most science fiction, is about itself, but also in that the poetry world reminds of the science fiction world. Although science fiction does not have an equivalent of The Poetry Place (and such a place would be unbearable if it did, I fear), if one goes there and browses through the various little magazines one finds lying around the cafe tables one is reminded of nothing so much as fanzines as well as the hermetically sealed world of science fiction: poetry, like science fiction, talks (largely) to itself (it just has easier access to the book pages of the broadsheets, school and university literature syllabuses and Arts Council grants). The Wikipedia page on the British Poetry Revival reads like an account of the history of the fandom - only the names have been changed. Of course, there is a poetic sensibility that some people possess just as there is a science fictional one, so one might only be able to go far, but surely there is potential for interesting things to happen at the interface.

For me, wanting to study poetry is complementary to wanting to learn another language. Being able to read another language fluently gives you the literature of that language - including the poetry of that language. And poetry in another language, the densest, deepest form of that language, helps you get at language itself from the inside out, which is to be at the very core of what it is that makes us human. And that something towards which all writers, whether we are writing in Cornish, English, French, Japanese, Volapük or Warlpiri should aspire. Everything is Connected.

Going Underground

Dublin Metro - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Good Lord! Dublin to get a tube - or at least part of a tube a 7 km double tunnel deep bore through the city centre with some cut and cover further out and then another 1.5 km of deep bore under the airport (total line length of Metro North is 17 km; there is also a Metro West, but that is entirely above ground). I wonder if the credit crunch will kibosh this (or whether it is in actually really much more than fauxprosal as it is currently described). I am strangely reminded of childhood days of fantasising about a Preston Monopoly board - and a Preston TV station. I realised quickly enough that such things were indeed fantasy. Of course, it is probably harder to get a traditional Monopoly board now than some special edition (we've had Wigan, Ipswich, Bournemouth and Poole as well as Lancashire, but not Preston itself yet). Local local TV though remains a dream. Local newspapers, such as the Lancashire Evening Post, have their issues (so to speak) and probably more so now than in the 1970s, but they don't suggest that the notion of good local local TV is a contradiction in terms (Look North (West)/Northwest Tonight was a formative influence on me and showed that it was possible to produce worthwhile regional programming, in the 1970s anyway, although it probably helped that the North West is a reasonably coherent and cogent geographical region, at least compared to some TV regions, although, of course, the news was heavily biased towards Manchester, which, given that I didn't go there until November 1983 when I was 15 (with my brother to visit Games Workshop in the Arndale Centre - I bought a copy of the James Bond 007 RPG and SORAG, a Paranoia Press Traveller booklet on a Zhodani intelligence service - I still regret that I did not buy the Tarsus:World Beyond the Frontier boxed module - just looking at this stuff now is making me weak with desire (and nostalgia); I think I am going to faint), meant that much of it had a slightly unreal quality to it - the world was a big place to me in those days.

"The programme previously covered the Isle of Man, but that is now covered by BBC Wales Today." I remember the Isle of Man being covered on Look North. Presumably the coverage being hived off to BBC Wales is part of some internal land grab: "The Isle of Man is part of the Celtosphere and in these days of devolution news coverage of it should be provided by fellow Celts out of Cardiff." I presume that coverage is actually provided out of a North Wales studio, but whichever way this makes as much sense as Cornish news being provided by BBC Wales.

There was also Granada Reports and Granada had the reputation as the most intellectual of the ITV franchises, but it was still ITV and I ddn't see it as much. I note that they had studios in Blackburn and Chester until 2005 and still have one in Lancaster. One would have thought that with the price of televisual equipment these days, it wouldn't cost much to run a small news studio, but I suppose the costs are in things like the rent on the building space.

Of course, unlike the Australians and New Zealanders (and there is surely a novel or at the very least a short story there), the Irish have long had their own Monopoly board for Dublin. I recall from The Monopoly Book that  one of the railway stations was actually the bus station (there were also two airports, but consider the Atlantic City board). Brady's book was good for the time (written early-mid-1970s), especially for a ten year old - I recall it was bought from Mears' in Garstang - but it hoved to the Official Story of the Origins of Monopoly: the true history is much more interesting and unexpected. The fact that the Dublin board only had one station made me aware of just how small Dublin was compared to London. When I went there in 1998, it reminded me of Liverpool. This was just at the beginning of the Celtic Tiger era and I imagine it has changed a great deal now. At that time, pretty much only the area around had Temple Bar had been redeveloped. But then I imagine Liverpool has changed. Of course, Liverpool does have a metro (of sorts) and recall extensive coverage of the opening of its underground stations such as Moorfields and the deep platforms at Liverpool Central on Look North in 1977. I don't know if at the time I ever dreamt of a Preston Underground. I know that in the 1990s, when tram scheme were popular, there were proposals for what I think was branded the Lancashire Metro, which would have involved building a large number of new stations on the existing lines between Preston and Lancaster, and Preston and Blackpool. My google-fu is weak today, but I think there might be a map in the Preston Bus book I have at home. The tram schemes constantly return, but it will take a new technoeconomic paradigm before anything more ambitious happens in either Preston or London. We should at least get Crossrail 1, but it would be grand to one day see something more exciting in Brentford.

Blogged with the Flock Browser