Classical selfie

All that’s missing is a smartphone.

Seen in the gardens of Dartington Hall.

Quote of the Day

”The land of my fathers. My fathers can have it.”

• Dylan Thomas, speaking of his native Wales.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Keith Jarrett – Over the Rainbow (Tokyo 1984)

Link

Long Read of the Day

Heresy

Thoughtful essay by Paul Graham.

April 2022

One of the most surprising things I’ve witnessed in my lifetime is the rebirth of the concept of heresy.

In his excellent biography of Newton, Richard Westfall writes about the moment when he was elected a fellow of Trinity College:

Supported comfortably, Newton was free to devote himself wholly to whatever he chose. To remain on, he had only to avoid the three unforgivable sins: crime, heresy, and marriage.

The first time I read that, in the 1990s, it sounded amusingly medieval. How strange, to have to avoid committing heresy. But when I reread it 20 years later it sounded like a description of contemporary employment.

There are an ever-increasing number of opinions you can be fired for. Those doing the firing don’t use the word “heresy” to describe them, but structurally they’re equivalent. Structurally there are two distinctive things about heresy: (1) that it takes priority over the question of truth or falsity, and (2) that it outweighs everything else the speaker has done…

One of the few interesting pieces I’ve read on a contemporary malaise.

Longtermism: how good intentions and the rich created a dangerous creed

Yesterday’s Observer column:

In the past few weeks a photograph of Tony Blair and his buddy Bill Clinton sharing a panel with a scruffy kid wearing a T-shirt, baggy shorts and trainers has been doing the rounds. The April event was in the Bahamas and funded by an outfit called FTX – a supposedly “user-friendly crypto exchange” – owned by the scruffy kid, Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF from now on). Blair and Clinton are looking very pleased to be there, providing confirmation of the aphrodisiac effect of great wealth, because the lad who was playing host was apparently as rich as Croesus, or at any rate worth $32bn.

And this was real wealth, it seemed. After all, the venture capitalists at Sequoia – who had backed Silicon Valley success stories such as Google and PayPal – had given him the green light (as well as some of their investors’ money). A few months after Blair and Clinton made their pilgrimage to the sun-soaked and regulation-lite Bahamas, one of Sequoia’s partners offered a breathless endorsement of SBF and his crypto exchange. “Of the exchanges that we had met and looked at”, she wrote, “some of them had regulatory issues, some of them were already public. And then there was Sam.” And FTX, which, Sequoia felt, was “Goldilocks-perfect”.

And then, suddenly, it wasn’t. In fact it was effectively bankrupt. And it had been managed, said the administrator brought in to sort out the mess, using fraternity-house accounting principles – which kind-of squared with SBF’s sartorial style…

Do read the whole thing.

Books, etc.

Apropos my Observer column (see previous item), this review of the MacAskill book by Scott Alexander makes for interesting reading.

Mastodon and Twitter

From Dave Winer (Whom God Preserve):

Mastodon is like email and twitter got married and had a baby. Last night I posted a message to both Mastodon and Twitter saying how great M’s support for RSS is. Apparently a lot of people on Masto didn’t know about it and the response has been resounding. And the numbers are very lopsided. The piece has been “boosted” (the Masto equiv of RT) 1.1K times, yet I only have 3.7K followers there. Meanwhile on Twitter, where I have 69K followers, it has been RTd just 17 times. My feeling was previously that Mastodon was more alive, it’s good to have a number to put behind that.

Interesting, ne c’est pas?

Correction

The link in Friday’s edition to Kieran Healey’s blog post on the January 6 ‘insurrection’ was faulty. It should have been this.

Apologies. And thanks to the readers who pointed it out.

My commonplace booklet

MARMALADE

Ingredients: Sugar Oranges Conservatives

Jar Label, Hong Kong

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The Hall, in technicolour

Like me, William Davies (Whom God Preserve) loves Dartington Hall. And when I opened my laptop yesterday evening, this is what I found in an email from him. With this note attached:

So we are here again and after entering the arch we’re greeted by the quad in Christmas multicolour! The South Devon railway, with audio enhancement, sounding like the Polar Express in the background, and Jupiter above.

Good way to start December, eh?

Quote of the Day

”He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.”

• Jonathan Swift, 1738

Agreed. Can’t stand the things.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Keith Jarrett Solo

Link

One of my great regrets is that I could have gone to his Köln concert in 1975 and didn’t. (I was in Germany at the time within driving distance.) Sigh.

Long Read of the Day

What happened?

By Kieran Healy. A sociologist’s view of what happened in the January 2021 ‘insurrection’ in the run-up to Biden’s Inauguration. Written two day’s afterwards.

I don’t know what happened. But here’s my current theory of what the White House thought was going to happen. I don’t have any more information than you do, and here I’m not concerned with the broader question of how the country came to this end. I am just trying to make sense of what happened on Wednesday.

From the moment he knew he’d lost the presidential election, Trump absolutely wanted to get the result overturned. Some large proportion of his own staff and Congressional Republicans thought there was no harm in humoring him. Many surely knew him well enough to realize he was quite serious about it. But most, falling into a way of thinking that Trump has repeatedly benefited from over his entire career, and especially during his Presidency, figured that he could not possibly overcome the weight of institutional and conventional pressure behind the transition of power. Still, by the first week of January he had not relented in his efforts to find some way to do it, whether through bullying local election officials, chasing wild geese through the courts, or directly intimidating state officials. That all failed, or looked like failing. The next thing on the horizon was Electoral College certification.

So, Team Trump organized a big day of protest to coincide with the certification…

Read on. It’s perceptive, given that it was written just after the events in question.

Books, etc.

As you may remember, I was very impressed by Brad DeLong’s book, Slouching Towards Utopia and have been tracking the reviews via his blog. When I enthuse about the book to people they often ask for a thumbnail description (something like an elevator pitch, I suppose) and I struggle to come up with something compact and succinct. So I was pleased to discover yesterday that Brad now has one, courtesy of Robert Reich (who, if memory serves me right, was Secretary for Labor in Bill Clinton’s administration.

Anyway, here it is:

My thumbnail description—which Bob Reich suggested to me—is that, while we have made extraordinary progress at figuring out how to bake a sufficiently large economic pie so that, potentially, everyone can have enough, the problems of slicing and tasting that economic pie have completely flummoxed us. Thus while we are rich and powerful beyond the wildest dreams of avarice of previous centuries, that is all. We can neither equitably distribute our wealth nor properly utilize it to live wisely and well, so that people feel safe and secure, and live lives in which they are healthy and happy. To say “have not been distributed particularly evenly” and “our desires have grown” catches only half of it. Distribution has not been inept, but has been positively poisonous. And utilization has fallen vastly short not just because of our rising expectations: people 200 years ago would also have hoped along with us for a world in which they were not stalked by flying killer robots, and in which sinister people in steel and glass towers did not attempt to hypnotize them via dopamine loops to glue their eyes to screens in terror so they could be sold fake diabetes cures and crypto grifts.

That’ll do nicely.

My commonplace booklet

UNESCO lists the French baguette as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity

From Euronews…

Imagine the cliché of a French person, and you’ll probably picture someone carrying a baguette.

And rightly so – it’s a national treasure and nothing beats it, or that warm nostril-tingling waft of freshly baked bread as you enter a boulangerie.

Make no mistake: it’s less a baked good and more a way of life, a symbol of the French art of living.

Well, now the baguette has (finally) been inducted into the UNESCO World Heritage List. To be precise, the “Artisanal know-how and culture of baguette bread” has officially inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

I’m delighted by this elevation of the baguette. But it’s in no way “intangible”. That’ indeed’, is the whole point of it.

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Predictive Signology

You’ve heard of predictive policing, but how about this from Bath? And it was done long before the Queen died!

Thanks to Christopher Smart for the pic.

Quote of the Day

”War is capitalism with the gloves off.”

• Tom Stoppard

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Ruhe Sanft (Sleep Safely) | Mojca Erdmann

Link

This was new to me. It’s from Zaide. an unfinished opera by Mozart.

Long Read of the Day

If you’re puzzled about ‘blockchain’ then read this piece by Tim Bray — and relax. (The Andy Jassy to whom he refers in the first para is Amazon’s current CEO.)

At some point in mid-2016 I got hauled into a conversation with Andy Jassy. I can’t remember if it was video or f2f, can’t remember how many of his staff were there. There were four of us present who were senior techs, not Jassy staff. ¶

Andy is an outstanding communicator and was eloquent on this occasion. You have to understand that one of the most important parts of his job was listening to the CIOs and CTOs of huge enterprises explain their problems and concerns.

He said something like this: “All these leaders are asking me what our blockchain strategy is. They tell me that everyone’s saying it’s the future, the platform that’s going to obsolete everything else. I need to have a good answer for them. I’ll be honest, when they explain why it’s wonderful I just don’t get it. You guys got to go figure it out for us.”

Well, OK then. I can’t remember whether it was right there in the room or by email after a short caucus, we got back to Andy along the lines of “We mostly think it’s mostly bullshit and probably not strategic for AWS, but we’ll look harder.”

Before I move along, Dear Reader: There was a dead give-away in Andy’s presentation of the problem. I’ll get back to it later but do you see it?

Do read it. It’s great.

H/T to Charles Arthur, who spotted it first.

Building a PDP-11/70 Kit

If you’re a geek of a certain age, this is truly lovely. The DEC PDP11 was an iconic minicomputer on which many of my contemporaries cut their programming teeth. The one in my department was the size of a refrigerator and had the most compelling control panel with switches and blinkenlights! And it was so popular with students that it was hard to get any time on it.

Kieran Healey is Professor of Sociology at Duke University. His research is on the social organisation of exchange in human blood and human organs, cultural goods, software, and ideas. But in the pandemic he found that he had an interest in reviving old computers. And then he discovered that Oscar Vermeulen makes a fabulous little kit called the PiDP-11. It is a 6:10 scale replica of the PDP-11/70’s front panel. You assemble the board connect it to a Raspberry Pi via the Pi’s GPIO port. It runs some software that emulates the PDP’s operating system. The switches and LEDs and so on all function just as they would on the real machine. So he got one of the kits and set to work.

The blog post is an account of how he did it. And it includes a nice video of the device in action, sitting on a bookcase in his office. And he signs off with a nice message: “If anyone needs me, I’ll be running the inventory and payroll of a medium-sized business in 1974.”

Which indeed is what you could do with a PDP11 in the mid-1970s!

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Into the Light

Quote of the Day

”I believe in the Church, the one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church; and nowhere does it exist.”

• William Temple, who became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1942 (and was an outspoken advocate of social reform).

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Eric Clapton | San Francisco Bay Blues

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Why Meta’s latest large language model survived only three days online

Lovely piece by Will Douglas Heaven on the incurable tech hubris that surrounds all big machine-learning ‘language’ models.

On November 15 Meta unveiled a new large language model called Galactica, designed to assist scientists. But instead of landing with the big bang Meta hoped for, Galactica has died with a whimper after three days of intense criticism. On November 18 the company took down the public demo that it had encouraged everyone to try out. Like all language models, Galactica turned out to be “a mindless bot that cannot tell fact from fiction”.

It’s an interesting read, if only because it highlights the ability of smart and highly-paid software engineers to believe nonsense.

A mathematical puzzle

Why were these Chinese students protesting with a set of equations? What could it mean?

Answer: they’re the Friedmann equations which, as Wikipedia explains, are

“a set of equations in physical cosmology that govern the expansion of space in homogeneous and isotropic models of the universe within the context of general relativity. They were first derived by Alexander Friedmann in 1922 from Einstein’s field equations of gravitation for the Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker metric and a perfect fluid with a given mass density ρ and pressure p.

Or might these clever students be saying “I am a freed man”?

Thanks to Alex Tabarrok for the link.

My commonplace booklet

 How gaslighting came to encapsulate the spirit of 2022

If you’re puzzled by the popularity of this word, then join the club. But Quartz has an explanation.

Gaslighting is not a new word—but it’s one that people have taken newfound interest in this year.

In 2022, searches for “gaslighting” increased 1740% year-on-year, according to Merriam-Webster. “In this age of misinformation—of ‘fake news,’ conspiracy theories, Twitter trolls, and deepfakes—gaslighting has emerged as a word for our time,” the American publisher, well known for its dictionary, noted while announcing it as the word of the year.

According to Miriam-Webster, a well-known American dictionary compiler, it means:

1. psychological manipulation of a person usually over an extended period of time that causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories and typically leads to confusion, loss of confidence and self-esteem, uncertainty of one’s emotional or mental stability, and a dependency on the perpetrator.
2. the act or practice of grossly misleading someone especially for one’s own advantage.

In other words, common practice on social media.

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The Way In…

… to the Danish Architecture Centre in Copenhagen.

Quote of the Day

”I went to Vietnam to take the train. People have done stranger things to that country.”

• Paul Theroux, 1975

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Lauridsen | O Magnum Mysterium | Nordic Chamber Choir

Link

Eerily beautiful. I’ve often heard it in the background of radio broadcasts and wondered what it was. Now I know.

Long Read of the Day

 Gone Bad, Come to Life

Extraordinary (and revelatory) reflections by Justin E.H. Smith on fermentation, distillation, sobriety — and ‘bucket lists’. Sample:

Is any product of bourgeois consumer ideology more noxious than the “bucket list”? At just the moment a person should be adjusting their orientation, in conformity with their true nature, to focus exclusively on the horizon of mortality, they are rudely solicited one last time, before it’s really too late, for a final blow-out tour of the amusement parks and spectacles that still held out some plausible hope of providing satisfaction back in ignorant youth, when life could still be imagined to be made up of such things. “Travel is a meat thing”, William Gibson wrote, to which we might add that the quest for new experiences in general is really only fitting for those whose meat is still fresh.

But our economic order cannot accept this. Capitalism obscures from view first the meaning of life, which properly understood is a preparation for death, and then it obscures the meaning of death, which properly understood is the all-surrounding horizon of a mortal life. Instead it portrays life as an opportunity to go to amusement parks and accumulate novelty foam hats and so on, which is silly enough, but then, at the end of it all, it has the audacity to portray death itself as an event of life, at which you would do best to arrive with all the right “souvenirs” (what a word: memory congealed into artifact!), all the right photos of the Grand Canyon or your Kenyan safari or whatever stored for you in your personal space in the “cloud”… stored for whom, now? For what? I will not venture any dogmatic claims here about the existence or non-existence of an afterlife, whether conceived as infinite duration or as a state outside of time.

What I will say, with as much certainty as I have about anything, is that death is not an event of life, it is not something you pass through and then keep going, and it certainly is not going to matter to you, when you’re dead, if you ever rode a camel or not. It might matter whether you loved another person with all your heart, whether you attained any lucidity about your mortal condition or only lived like a puffed-up fool (you will certainly not be riding your camel through the eye of any needle); it will not matter whether you fed a watermelon to a hippopotamus.

Amazing philosopher, who always comes up with something unexpected.

Mastodon’s Moment

An interesting conversation about comparing Twitter and Mastodon between two experienced journalists — Julia Angwin and Adam Davidson, who has set up a Mastodon server for hacks.

Sample:

Angwin: Can you talk more about how the platforms differ?

Davidson: I think the interface on Mastodon makes me behave differently. If I have a funny joke or a really powerful statement and I want lots of people to hear it, then Twitter’s way better for that right now. However, if something really provokes a big conversation, it’s actually fairly challenging to keep up with the conversation on Twitter. I find that when something gets hundreds of thousands of replies, it’s functionally impossible to even read all of them, let alone respond to all of them. My Twitter personality, like a lot of people’s, is more shouting.

Whereas on Mastodon, it’s actually much harder to go viral. There’s no algorithm promoting tweets. It’s just the people you follow. This is the order in which they come. It’s not really set up for that kind of, “Oh my god, everybody’s talking about this one post.” It is set up to foster conversation. I have something like 150,000 followers on Twitter, and I have something like 2,500 on Mastodon, but I have way more substantive conversations on Mastodon even though it’s a smaller audience. I think there’s both design choices that lead to this and also just the vibe of the place where even pointed disagreements are somehow more thoughtful and more respectful on Mastodon.

Interesting throughout. And squares with my impression of Mastodon.

My commonplace booklet

From Quentin’s blog:

Someone on Mastodon pointed out a useful thing today:

One mile per gallon is exactly the same thing as one furlong per pint.

So if anyone quotes their fuel consumption in furlongs-per-pint, you’ll now know what it means. Pleasingly, this works even in America.

Once you’ve impressed your friends at the pub with that one, you can point out that one mile per gallon is about 3 leagues per firkin.

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Morning has broken

Early morning at Dartington Hall, where we spent the weekend (as we generally try to do whenever we’re in Devon). It’s a wonderful place, with a fascinating history which is well recounted by Michael Young in his book, The Elmhirsts of Dartington.

Quote of the Day

”The stoical scheme of supplying our wants by lopping off our desires, is like cutting off our feet when we want shoes.”

• Jonathan Swift, 1711

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bob Dylan and Joan Baez | Chimes of Freedom

Link

Long Read of the Day

Building Fast and Slow: The Empire State Building and the World Trade Center

The astonishing story, told by Brian Potter, of how one of the modern world’s iconic buildings was constructed — on time and within budget.

The Empire State Building and the World Trade Center make for an interesting comparison. In many ways, they’re similar. They’re both iconic Manhattan skyscrapers (they were built just 3 miles apart) that sit right next to each other in the sequence of “world’s tallest building”. Both started out as projects aimed at creating (among other things) a large amount of commercial office space, and were later nudged by their owners into becoming the world’s tallest building. Both were completed in the midst of a severe economic downturn (the Great Depression and the 1973 Oil Shock, respectively), and took many years to be fully occupied. The Empire State Building would be only partially occupied through the 1930s (making money largely from visitors to the observation deck), and the owners were only saved from bankruptcy because the lender (MetLife) didn’t want the building. It wouldn’t start to turn a profit until after WWII. Similarly, the World Trade Center didn’t reach full occupancy in 1980. In both cases the building owners had to coerce government agencies to use much of the available space.

They also share an architectural genealogy – the architect of the World Trade Center, Minoru Yamasaki, had worked for several years at Shreve, Lamb, and Harmon, the architectural firm that designed the Empire State Building.

But in many ways they’re different. The Empire State Building is often the first example reached for by those nostalgic for an America that builds. Not only was it built impossibly fast by modern standards (less than a year from setting the first column to being completed), but it came in under budget, with its design becoming a widely praised example of Art Deco architecture.

The World Trade Center, on the other hand, was continuously mired in controversy and difficulty. It was slowed by lawsuits from displaced residents, political opposition from both New York and New Jersey, difficult site conditions, union strikes, and novel building systems and construction methods. From its conception in 1961 (and arguably even earlier) the project took more than 10 years to complete, going far over its planned schedule and budget.

Probably because I have an engineering background I’m a sucker for these kinds of stories. (One of my favourite books is David McCullough’s  Great Bridge, a riveting account of how the Brooklyn Bridge was built.)

Alexa, how did Amazon’s voice assistant rack up a $10bn loss?

Sometimes, invasions don’t work out as well as you hoped.

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Intrigued by an Ars Technica post about Amazon’s Alexa that suggested all was not well in the tech company’s division that looks after its smart home devices, I went rooting in a drawer where the Echo Dot I bought years ago had been gathering dust. Having found it, and set it up to join the upgraded wifi network that hadn’t existed when I first got it, I asked it a question: “Alexa, why are you such a loss-maker?” To which she calmly replied: “This might answer your question: mustard gas, also known as Lost, is manufactured by the United States.” At which point, I solemnly thanked her, pulled the power cable and returned her to the drawer, where she will continue to gather dust until I can think of an ecologically responsible way of recycling her…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

What is it with so-called ‘luxury’ wristwatches? Every weekend the Financial Times’s ‘How to Spend It’ supplement is full of advertisements for analogue timepieces costing half the GNP of smallish countries. Even more puzzling: some of these watches are billed as diver’s watches, waterproof down to formidable depths and pressures. But none of their wearers known to me has ever dived deeper than the average swimming pool.

A similar thing applies to fancy ‘aviator’ timepieces. A friend wears one made by Breitling which costs over five grand, and I know for sure that he doesn’t have a pilot’s licence. He may have logged a lot of hours in the air, but all of it has been in First or Business class.

So there’s no utilitarian rationale for these watches, which basically means that they’re just male jewellery.

Errata

There were two missing links last week.

1. The NYT report by Cade Metz and Ian Clontz on Tesla and the future of autonomous vehicles was here.
2. The link for Nancy Sinatra’s boots was here.

Apologies for both.

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A souvenir of the dry season…

…when we longed for rain to rescue our parched lawn. (Which is now almost waterlogged.)

Quote of the Day

”Maybe Napoleon was wrong when he said we were a nation of shopkeepers… Today, England looked like a nation of goalkeepers.”

• Tom Stoppard

Somehow appropriate during a World Cup.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Liam O’Flynn, Neil Martin, Seán Keane, Matt Molloy & Arty McGlynn | Gradam Ceoil TG4 1999

Link

The set (recorded in the Town Hall theatre, Galway) consists of: An Buachaill Caol Dubh (Air 0:00), Caisleán an Óir (Hornpipe 1:54), Paddy Fahey’s (Reel 3:47), The Pinch of Snuff (Reel 5:05) & The Fair-Haired Boy (Reel 5:48)

Long Read of the Day

Putting ideas into words

Thoughtful essay by Paul Graham.

Writing about something, even something you know well, usually shows you that you didn’t know it as well as you thought. Putting ideas into words is a severe test. The first words you choose are usually wrong; you have to rewrite sentences over and over to get them exactly right. And your ideas won’t just be imprecise, but incomplete too. Half the ideas that end up in an essay will be ones you thought of while you were writing it. Indeed, that’s why I write them.

Once you publish something, the convention is that whatever you wrote was what you thought before you wrote it. These were your ideas, and now you’ve expressed them. But you know this isn’t true. You know that putting your ideas into words changed them. And not just the ideas you published. Presumably there were others that turned out to be too broken to fix, and those you discarded instead.

E.M. Forster said somewhere that there are two kinds of writer: those who know what they think and write it; and those who find out what they think by trying to write it.

I’m the latter type. Which are you?

Paul Graham says he’s never known anyone in the first category, and if he met someone who claimed to qualify “it would seem evidence of their limitations rather than their ability”.

I’ve known three people who could write their thoughts in complete, coherent sentences. One is a distinguished historian; the second was a literary critic; and the third was a former British cabinet minister. A trio of rare birds.

What Riding in a Self-Driving Tesla Tells Us About the Future of Autonomy

Terrific NYT report by Cade Metz and Ian Clontz, who spent a day in a ‘self-driving’ Tesla in Jacksonville, Florida. What it tells us about “the future of autonomy” is that it’s a long way off. Regular readers will know that that squares with my views. But it’s fascinating to see it in action. Great multimedia reporting. Hope they had good life-insurance.

My commonplace booklet

And, yes, it’s a Dodo.

From Private Eye.

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EV charging, Riga

And the date when this was taken? July 2017. Makes you think about how ‘advanced’ the UK was then.

Quote of the Day

”Russia: a gas station masquerading as a country.”

• John McCain (RIP)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Antonio Forcione | Scrambled Eggs

Link

Good tune for breakfast, though I prefer mine with smoked salmon.

Long Read of the Day

The Shock and Aftershocks of “The Waste Land”

Lovely New Yorker essay by Anthony Lane.

May is the merriest month, and there are few more cheering journeys than a train ride into the green wilds of Sussex, in southern England. And no destination is more peaceable than Charleston, the secluded house, wreathed with gardens, that found fame as a rural HQ of the Bloomsbury Group. Now a place of pilgrimage, it continues to summon writers and artists, with audiences to match. Here it was, for a festival in May, that the culture-hungry came. Drifting in their dozens past fruit trees and congregations of flowers, they entered a large tent, where the trappings of Bloomsbury-scented comfort were on sale: straw hats, cushions, padded Alice bands, and vials of Sussex Rose Aromatic Water for the soothing of high or fevered brows. We took our seats for the arrival, on a raised dais, of Benedict Cumberbatch. He it was whom the pilgrims had travelled to see, and this is what he had to say:

April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain.

There was more, and worse. “White bodies naked on the low damp ground / And bones cast in a little low dry garret.” And this: “Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit.” And again: “In this decayed hole among the mountains / In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing / Over the tumbled graves.” What had we done, in the sun-warmed paradise of Charleston, to deserve all these mountains, bones, and teeth? So much death, on a day that promised such life!

Cumberbatch was, needless to say, reading T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” which will shortly celebrate its hundredth birthday…

Read on. It’s good.

My commonplace booklet

A Letter to Nancy Sinatra from Her Boots That Were Made for Walking

by John Moe in McSweeney’s

January 23, 1966

Hi Nancy!

First of all, GREAT song. Honestly, Lee Hazlewood’s melody and lyrics, your spunky vocal. No wonder it’s such a hit. You deserve it!

And as your footwear, I am excited to be a part of the collaboration. I have loved performing with/on you in Vegas and meeting big stars like Joey Bishop and Dean Martin. Of course, you were the one that actually met them, but if they had looked down they would have seen me. I tried talking to some of their shoes. Peter Lawford’s loafers, Sammy’s ankle boots. But they never said anything in response because footwear is not sentient. Except me. That’s why you speak to me in that song—Hello! I’m your boots!

I’m writing to explain my existential terror and apologize for my abysmal performance…

Read on!

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Danish pastry croissant

Breakfast in the Royal Library in Copenhagen with Olafur Eliasson’s Cirkelbroen (Circle Bridge) in the background.

Quote of the Day

”It’s as though Musk has taken Facebook’s “Move fast and break things” motto and reduced it to “Break everything fast.” Last night, reports of mass resignations inside Twitter seemed so dire that Twitter itself seemed to be documenting its own demise, like HAL 9000 singing “Daisy”, ever more degenerately slurred, near the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I lost count of how many of the people I follow were seemingly posting what they expected, last night, to be their last-ever tweets.”

• Jon Gruber

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Joseph Haydn | Partita in G major, Hob.XVI:6 (1766) | Igor Petrov

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Shortest Night of the Year

Nice essay by Dorthe Nor. It’s an extract from her book, A Line in the World: A Year on the North Sea Coast.

Midsummer. The pace of growth can’t keep this up. The corn is turning from green to golden, and everything draws energy from the sun. Today is the longest day. The shortest night lies ahead.

I walked in the heat from the rented cabin on the top of Skallerup Dune, around forty miles south of the northernmost tip of the country, down to the water, amid the scent of rosehips, Rosa rugosa, sweetbriar roses, dog roses, roses everywhere. The soil is fat and damp. Yellow water lilies grow in the hollows. Sediment deposited in the Ice Age continues all the way down to the water’s edge; the dunes have verdant skin. On the beach, there are preparations for a Midsummer’s Eve bonfire. Some children, it must have been, have made a witch with stiff broomstick arms and a wild look in her felt-tip eyes.

It’s the time of year when we burn a female doll. It’s a tradition, an annual thing in Denmark, an act that has clicked into place. We Danes are more or less in agreement: all of this is a game we play. Burning the evil has its roots in ancient rituals and seventeenth century witches at the stake—we can agree on that too. But it’s only in the past century that the ritual has come into fashion, and whether it’s a cosy custom or a problem is something to be discussed over strawberries picked for the celebration. She will be burned…

Read on.

My commonplace booklet

From Andrew Curry’s splendid blog:

One of his readers responded to his piece on ‘The Waste Land’ with a story about T.S. Eliot reading the poem to the British Royal Family at Windsor Castle during the Second World War, prompted by the writer and critic A.N. Wilson in an interview with Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother:

Elizabeth: “We had this rather lugubrious man in a suit, and he read a poem. . . . I think it was called ‘The Desert.’ And first the girls got the giggles, and then I did and then even the King.”

Wilson: “ ‘The Desert,’ ma’am? Are you sure it wasn’t called ‘The Waste Land?’ ”

Elizabeth: “That’s it. I’m afraid we all giggled. Such a gloomy man, looked as though he worked in a bank, and we didn’t understand a word.”

Wilson: “I believe he did once work in a bank.”

“I couldn’t help but wonder”, writes Andrew, “if Eliot might have been trolling the Royals a little. Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats had been published in 1939, and he must have known that these poems would have played better than ‘The Waste Land’ with the extremely middlebrow Windsors”.

Having listened a few times to recording of Eliot himself reading the poem, I’m always struck by how lugubrious it is, so I can understand why the royals were first baffled and then amused by the incongruity of it all. For me, it first came alive when I got on my iPad Fiona Shaw’s reading which had been produced by Max Whitby, a brilliant film-maker and TV producer.

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