Writing to his Commanding Officer, Admiral Sir Francis Bridgeman…

My Dear Sir Francis

I fear we have shipped up – a close shave. I am writing a few letters which I hope will be delivered some day. I want to thank you for the friendship you gave me of late years, and to tell you how extraordinarily pleasant I found it to serve under you. I want to tell you that I was not too old for this job.  It was the younger men that went under first. Finally I want you to secure a competence for my widow and boy. I leave them very ill provided for, but feel that the country ought not to neglect them. After all we are setting a good example to our countrymen, if not by getting into a tight place, by facing it like men when we were there. We could have come through had we neglected the sick.

Good-bye and good-bye to dear Lady Bridgeman

Yours ever

R. Scott

Excuse writing – it is -40, and has been for nigh a month

[Source]

The letter has been acquired by Cambridge’s Scott Polar Research Institute and released 101 years since Scott’s final diary entry (for March 29, 1912).

It’s Good Friday and when driving one of my kids to the station I was surprised by how much traffic there was. When I was a kid, Good Friday was the most boring and longest day of the year. In Catholic rural Ireland in the 1950s, you see, nothing, but nothing, moved on Good Friday. All the shops and offices were closed. No pubs, no buses. And almost no traffic. Then at 3pm everyone trooped to the church for three hours of interminable ceremony supposedly commemorating the passion and crucifixion of Christ. And all this decades before Mel Gibson got in on the act.

One Good Friday, though, sticks in my memory. We were staying with my grandparents in the tiny Mayo village where they lived. It was a beautiful, hot, sunny day. Nothing moved. Even the stray dogs in the street seemed to stop scratching. I know because I was out all day on the street watching them, waiting for my father to arrive.

He had gone to Dublin the previous day on the train to buy our family’s first car — a Morris Minor — and was driving it back to Mayo. This was a big deal in the 1950s. And an even bigger deal for us, because it was the biggest purchase my parents had ever made up to that point. (They weren’t able to afford to buy a house until much later.) The weeks preceding this particular Good Friday had been taken up with intense discussions of what vehicle to buy. I seem to remember that it came down in the end to a choice between a boxy-looking Fiat and the Morris. Brochures were solemnly consulted, and opinions sought. But in the end it came down to the solid British product. And that is what I was excitedly awaiting on that hot, airless afternoon.

What I was desperate for, of course, was that Da should arrive before I was dragged off to church by my ultra-devout mother. I didn’t hold out much hope: Dublin was a long way away, and in those days people were supposed to drive new cars gently. They used to have notices on the back saying “Running in, please pass.”

But miraculously he made it in time! To this day I can recall the shiny black metalwork of the tiny car, the shiny chromework, its red upholstery, the clean functional dashboard dominated by a single dial. And the smell! That new-car smell that, even today, people remark upon when they enter a new vehicle. And then I was dragged off to church. Needless to say, I remember nothing of the ensuing service. But I still remember the aroma of our new car.

Well, it’s a start anyway.

Wonderful little memoir by Edward Jay Epstein in the New York Review of Books about his first paid employment — working for Vladimir Nabokov, who what then teaching his Eng Lit course at Cornell.

So began the course. Unfortunately, distracted by the gorges, lakes, movie houses, corridor dates, and other more local enchantments of Ithaca, I did not get around to reading any of Anna Karenina before Nabokov sprang a pop quiz. It consisted of an essay question: “Describe the train station in which Anna first met Vronsky.”

Initially, I was stymied by this question because, having not yet read the book, I did not know how Tolstoy had portrayed the station. But I did recall the station shown in the 1948 movie starring Vivien Leigh. Having something of an eidetic memory, I was able to visualize a vulnerable-looking Leigh in her black dress wandering through the station, and, to fill the exam book, I described in great detail everything shown in the movie, from a bearded vendor hawking tea in a potbellied copper samovar to two white doves practically nesting overhead. Only after the exam did I learn that many of the details I described from the movie were not in the book. Evidently, the director Julien Duvivier had had ideas of his own. Consequently, when Nabokov asked “seat 121” to report to his office after class, I fully expected to be failed, or even thrown out of Dirty Lit.

What I had not taken into account was Nabokov’s theory that great novelists create pictures in the minds of their readers that go far beyond what they describe in the words in their books. In any case, since I was presumably the only one taking the exam to confirm his theory by describing what was not in the book, and since he apparently had no idea of Duvivier’s film, he not only gave me the numerical equivalent of an A, but offered me a one-day-a-week job as an “auxiliary course assistant.” I was to be paid $10 a week.

I guess that this was the course which eventually led tp one of my favourite books — Lectures on Literature. It contains some of the best dissections of novels that I have ever read.

It is also highly idiosyncratic (which is probably why, as a non-literary type, I love it). There’s a neat review of it on Amazon which says:

Vladimir Nabokov’s approach to European literary masterpieces is both funny and enlightening. Of special interest for the uninitiated into the Nabokovian world view are the essays “Good Readers and Good Writers” and “The Art of Literature and Commonsense”. But beware: if you want to read a straight academic approach to the writers treated in this book you have chosen the wrong book. Some of Nabokov’s comments are fantastic, especially his reading of Flaubert and Proust are exceptionally good, but they are not wissenschaft in the traditional manner. These lectures say more about Nabokov the writer than they say about other writers.

Quite so.

Er, some of us have very strong work ethics, and use iPads and Android tablets. In fact, sometimes my iPad does almost as much work as my laptop and desktop machines combined.

Andrew Sullivan asks a question I’ve been asked a lot since my column came out on Sunday. The right answer IMHO is that they’re complementary. I’ve always regarded Twitter as my human-mediated RSS feed. But I still need the un-mediated firehose.

Great blog post by Paul Bernal.

I don’t believe the ‘anti-Leveson’ argument for a number of reasons. First of all, because as I’ve argued before I don’t think the mainstream press that we have now bears much resemblance to a ‘free press’ – it’s just a question of who or what controls it, rather than whether it’s free. Secondly, I don’t think that what’s being proposed by either side will actually do much to fetter the press. It may control one or two excesses, but it won’t do anything that’s not already being done. We already have defamation and privacy law that impacts upon free speech, we already have huge editorial control that prevents some of the really important debates ever reaching the public eye – what’s proposed by Leveson won’t make as much difference as his opponents might think.

Similarly, I don’t believe the ‘pro-Leveson’ group either. Firstly, as noted above I suspect they’re deeply naïve if they believe that even the full implementation of Leveson would really do that much to curb the practices of the press – regulation rarely has the effects that people might desire, either way. What’s more, if they imagine that implementation of Leveson would turn the likes of the Sun, Mail and Express into responsible papers, they’re really living in cloud cuckoo-land. Regardless of Leveson, the Sun will still be full of rampant misogyny, the Mail full of anti-immigrant and anti-European rants and the Express will still billow out homophobia and Islamophobia. They’ll continue to demonise the disabled and those on benefits, twist the debate on Europe and shift the blame for all our problems onto the vulnerable and the innocent. They may not hack our phones, but they’ll still find a way to dig out secrets and private information – and ways that are technically legal, too. The data is out there – and they’ll find a way to dig it out and to use it in all kinds of horrible ways. If we think statutory press regulation will stop this, we’re deluding ourselves.

Yep. The reason that sections of the UK mass media are so awful is simply that there’s a market for intrusive crap. People continue to buy disgraceful newspapers, so bad behaviour is always rewarded, not punished The only thing that would change that would be for consumers to make ethical decisions when buying papers. And they don’t. The elephant in Leveson’s court-room was the Great British Public. But nobody talked about that during the proceedings.

I especially like the one about “befriending VCs”.