Lovely piece about Jim Marshall by William Weir in The Atlantic.

When Jim Marshall designed his first amplifier in 1962, he used the 12AX7 vacuum tube, a seemingly slight deviation from the 12AY7 tubes of the popular Fender amps—because Marshall couldn’t find any in Britain at the time. This accident of geography meant that customers of his music store suddenly had a little more crunch in their guitar sound. In rock and roll—a genre forever entwined with technology—a mere vacuum tube begat a major shift in the music’s history.

Marshall, who died last week at 88, also had the fortune of having a 20-year-old Pete Townshend for a customer. Townshend told Marshall he wanted to hear himself over The Who’s audience and rhythm section. Thus was born the first 100-watt amp. Add to that two cabinets, each bearing four speakers—together, the components came to be known as the Marshall stack—and Marshall secured himself a permanent spot on any history-of-loudness timeline.

Loudness is strictly a psychological phenomenon referring to how the brain perceives the strength of a sound. But exactly why loudness appeals to so many of us is still a mystery. In his book, Your Brain on Music, neuroscientist Daniel Levitin suggests that very loud music saturates the auditory system, causing neurons to fire at maximum rates. Studies have shown that louder music causes us to shop more and work out more enthusiastically.

Adam Gopnik has a lovely piece about Albert Camus in the April 9 issue of the New Yorker (sadly, behind a pay wall) in the course of which he neatly evicerates the hypocrisy of a certain celebrated caste of French intellectuals:

For all their self-advertised agonies, the lives Sartre and Camus led after the war mostly sound like a lot of fun. Their biographies are popular because they dramatise the agonising preoccupations of modern man and also because they present an appealing circle of Left Bank cafes and late-night boîtes and long vacations. A life like that implicitly assumes that the society it inhabits will go on functioning no matter what you say about it, that the cafes and libraries and secondhand bookstores will continue to function despite the criticism. A professor at the College de France who maintains that there should be no professors at the College de France does not really believe this, or else he would not be one. This isn’t a luxury that thinkers in Moscow, still less Phnom Penh, ever had. Sartre’s great sin was not his ideology, which did indeed change all the time. It was his insularity. The apostle of ideas in action didn’t think that ideas would actually alter life; he expected that life would go on more or less as it had in spite of them, while always giving him another chance to make them better. Nice work, if you can get it.

Here’s an acronym that, I am reliably assured, is common parlance among IT Support staff:

PICNIC

It stands for “Problem in chair, not in computer”.

You have been warned.

Thanks to Andrew Ingram for enlightening me.

Lovely blog post by Sean French.

It seemed such a good idea at the time. We were going to visit Nicci’s parents in Worcestershire. I looked at a map and saw that we could cycle almost the whole way on the canal. We could cycle the last bit through lovely country lanes. It would take two days. I went online and booked a hotel on the banks of the canal about halfway along. It would be like those pre-First World War trips through England made by people like Edward Thomas and Hilaire Belloc.

I forgot that there were other pre-First World War trips, like those made by Captain Scott and the good ship Titanic.

But there had been a month of dought and hot sunshine, so at least the weather would be good, right?

So two days ago we set off early in the morning, joining the Regents Canal at Kings Cross. The journey out of London is strange and interesting and really, really long. It was three and a half hours before we hit real countryside. Interesting fact: from Camden Lock it’s twenty-seven miles until you reach the next lock, which means that it’s completely flat.We cycled relentlessly past familiar names: Harefield (isn’t there a heart hospital there?), Berkhamsted (where Graham Green went to the school where his father was the headmaster), Milton Keynes (in the seventies there used to be a TV commercial with the slogan: ‘Someday, all cities will be like Milton Keynes.’ I really hope not.). But it was all taking a bit too long, and then we got a puncture. And then there are towpaths and there are towpaths. Some are smooth and some are rough and some are rutted and some are like cycling through an unkempt lawn.

Darkness started to fall and you don’t want to be on a canal towpath in the middle of nowhere in pitch darkness…

You can tell he’s one half of a very successful thriller-writing duo, can’t you. I mean to say, luring the innocent reader into the horror like that.

Headline in the Irish Times that caught my eye.

The breakfast table this morning.

From the Guardian.

On Saturday I wake at six and relishing the day ahead. I teach on Mondays and Tuesdays; I have to reread a novel for each class and take notes on it. Nothing makes me happier than the thought of this. I often lie there until the seven o’clock news comes on, grinning at the thought of the day ahead.

All day I will read and take notes. The worst-case scenario is that I might need another book, and this involves lot of decision-making and self-consultation. It might end in a five-minute walk to the university library. But normally I go nowhere except to the fridge if I am hungry to see what’s there, or to the sofa to lie down if my back is tired, or to the rocking chair if I feel a need to rock.

Normally there’s not much in the fridge. In the kitchen there is an oven I have never opened. And there are pots and pans whose purpose may be decorative for all I know. But I know where all my notebooks are. They are all over the apartment. That is the best part. I can leave them where I like and no one touches them or wants to put them away anywhere. No one sighs about books and notebooks piled up. All of the notebooks have stories half-written in them, or stray sentences in search of a home, or musings that are none of anyone’s business. If I like, I can go to one of them and add some paragraphs. I don’t have to excuse myself, explain myself, or put on a distracted writer’s look in order to get down to work. Or worry that someone has, in my absence, opened one of my notebooks and found that they don’t like the tone of what is written there.

There are only two golf competitions that persuade yours truly to book the family TV for the evening. One of them starts tonight. But I’ve never seen it like this before.