Frank Kermode’s funeral took place yesterday in King’s chapel. It was a small affair (there will be a memorial service later) which was elegant, moving, celebratory and only slightly elegaic. I think he would have approved. Afterwards, there was a splendid tea in the Senior Combination Room. His friends Anthony Holden, Ursula Owen, Karl Miller and John Sutherland spoke, and Tony and Ursula read a couple of poems which seemed spot on for the occasion.

I felt for both of them, for they had known and loved Frank more intimately and for longer than most of us, and these things are always, in the end, an ordeal. Tony chose to read the sonnet he’d written for Frank’s 80th birthday:

Where once you were a name on spines of books
Read, marked and learned in duly franker mode,
Of late you are a friend with knowing looks,
Warm heart, wise counsel, welcoming abode.
Together we have stalked the Stratford bard,
Hip-flasked at Highbury, chalked the Savile baize,
Wept at the opera, watched Lara taking guard,
Set towns from Yale to Barga all ablaze.
Your students know the learned, measured sage,
Your readers the insightful polyglot,
I the chimes-at-midnight chum, sans age
And for all time — whose winged chariot,
refusing to believe you’re just four score,
Is posting flight-plans for a good few more.

Nobody could have known when those words were written that Frank had another fruitful decade ahead. And what a decade! There was a small ripple of astonishment when Tony reminded his audience that Frank published ten books in that last decade. Imagine it: a book a year — and the funny thing was that he always swore that the one he was working on at the moment would definitely be his last. When he knew his time was coming to an end, he briefly contemplated writing a book about dying but decided against because he wouldn’t be able to finish it! This was, after all, the man who wrote that memorable book, The Sense of an Ending.

At the tea afterwards, I ran into an old friend who told me that she had just been re-reading that particular book. She had first read it as a young woman many years ago and it had whistled over her head then. But now, she said, it made perfect sense. It’s strange how we often realise the significance of things — and of people — too late.

Ursula told a lovely story about a trip she and Frank had gone on together — to the Yeats Summer School in Sligo, where he had been invited to lecture. When they settled into their seats on the plane, Frank opened his folder and realised that he’d brought the wrong text. So they checked into their hotel and he then calmly reconstructed the missing lecture, walked out and delivered it.

Afterwards they drove down to Gort, to visit Coole Park — the home of Lady Gregory, Yeats’s great friend — and Thoor Ballylee, the tower that Yeats restored (and which, IMHO, is still one of the most magical spots in Ireland). Then they returned to Coole (where the demesne remains even though the house has long been demolished) and stood by the lake, counting the swans. She then read Yeats’s The Wild Swans at Coole, which is one of his loveliest and most accessible poems.

It begins:

The Trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine and fifty swans.

On that magical day when they visited, Ursula said, there were only nine swans. But in an odd, poetic way, I thought, that seemed to fit.

At the end of his eulogy, Tony said something that rang true for all of us. “What I did to earn Frank’s regard”, he said, “I’ll never know”. Me neither. To be granted the friendship of such a great man was a wonderful privilege. So I’ll just count it as one of my blessings and leave it at that.

One of the things I like most about the Web is the quality of the writing and thinking one finds there. (If this runs counter to mainstream media’s “the-Net-is-full-of-crap” meme, then so much the worse for the meme.) Of course there’s great stuff in print too, but much of what I enjoy and value most is exclusively online.

Another Web-essayist I always read is Paul Graham. His “Hacker’s Guide to Investors”, for example, is a gem of insight derived from experience. His Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age: Essays on the Art of Programming is also lovely.

This picture of 86 notebooks sums up a life’s work — and, more importantly, a life’s learning. Designer (and design critic) Michael Bierut gave a terrific, thoughful talk about what he’d learned in his career as a designer. It’s quite a long presentation, so make some coffee, sit back, and enjoy.

I’m sitting in my study, tidying up a draft, with Exile on Main Street by the Stones blasting out from the Tannoys and thinking this must be the best rock album ever recorded. Just thought you’d like to know

This is a terrific interview conducted by Robert Scoble with Jean-Marie Hullot, who was once CTO of NeXT and later played significant roles in Apple. The peg for the talk was the launch of Jean-Marie’s remarkable iPhone/iPad App, called Fotopedia Heritage, which is an endless stream of CreativeCommons images of UNESCO World Heritage sites wrapped up in an information stream.

The App itself is amazing (and freely downloadable from the Apps store), but the really significant thing about it is its hint at how our concept of ‘book’ will have to shift to adjust to the possibilities of this new technology. At one stage in the interview, Jean-Marie makes the point that what will determine whether a publisher succeeds in this new medium is whether he/she can master the software. He uses the analogy of Nokia in this context — great maker of hardware, but always an outsourcer of software. Then one day Apple — a master of software — appears on the scene, quickly picks up the easy stuff (the hardware design) and — Bingo! The moral is clear: publishers who think that their only role is to get passive content out the door in readable form aren’t going to cut it in the eBook world.

And while we’re on the subject of eBooks, I see that Apple has released an update to iWork that enables it to output in ePub format.

Actually, this is part of a big and interesting story. Up to now, print publishers have been able to stand by and watch the Net play disruptive havoc with the music and movie industries. Now, it’s their turn to feel the network’s disruptive blast. In that context, author’s agent Andrew ‘the Jackal’ Wylie’s audacious move to strike a deal directly with Amazon for his authors, bypassing their print publishers entirely, has really concentrated minds. As the Guardian observed:

Once upon a time publishers were the only ones who could find authors, edit manuscripts, print books and distribute them, but new technology from desktop computers to the internet has thrown the doors wide open. As marketing departments have gained the ascendancy over editorial, agents have moved centre stage, filtering submissions and polishing manuscripts. With the messy business of ink and trees and Transit vans receding, Wylie’s latest move is simply the logical next step. None of this will worry those publishers who have made a business out of finding the voices others haven’t spotted, but in the week when Amazon claimed that ebook sales passed those of hardbacks the questions are unavoidable: who needs big publishers? Are the interests of writers and readers best served by big publishers, or the Jackal?

And while we’re on the subject, my friend and colleague Michael Dales has a fascinating blog post about his experiments with Kindle and iBooks versions of Scott Pilgrim books.

Lovely Economist obit of Bill Millin, the man who invaded Normandy with bagpipes.

His playing had been planned as part of the operation. On commando training near Fort William he had struck up a friendship with Lord Lovat, the officer in charge of the 1st Special Service Brigade. Not that they had much in common. Mr Millin was short, with a broad cheeky face, the son of a Glasgow policeman; his sharpest childhood memory was of being one of the “poor”, sleeping on deck, on the family’s return in 1925 from Canada to Scotland. Lovat was tall, lanky, outrageously handsome and romantic, with a castle towering above the river at Beauly, near Inverness. He had asked Mr Millin to be his personal piper: not a feudal but a military arrangement. The War Office in London now forbade pipers to play in battle, but Mr Millin and Lord Lovat, as Scots, plotted rebellion. In this “greatest invasion in history”, Lovat wanted pipes to lead the way.

He was ordering now, as they waded up Sword Beach, in that drawly voice of his: “Give us a tune, piper.” Mr Millin thought him a mad bastard. The man beside him, on the point of jumping off, had taken a bullet in the face and gone under. But there was Lovat, strolling through fire quite calmly in his aristocratic way, allegedly wearing a monogrammed white pullover under his jacket and carrying an ancient Winchester rifle, so if he was mad Mr Millin thought he might as well be ridiculous too, and struck up “Hielan’ Laddie”. Lovat approved it with a thumbs-up, and asked for “The Road to the Isles”. Mr Millin inquired, half-joking, whether he should walk up and down in the traditional way of pipers. “Oh, yes. That would be lovely.”

Three times therefore he walked up and down at the edge of the sea. He remembered the sand shaking under his feet from mortar fire and the dead bodies rolling in the surf, against his legs. For the rest of the day, whenever required, he played. He piped the advancing troops along the raised road by the Caen canal, seeing the flashes from the rifle of a sniper about 100 yards ahead, noticing only after a minute or so that everyone behind him had hit the deck in the dust. When Lovat had dispatched the sniper, he struck up again. He led the company down the main street of Bénouville playing “Blue Bonnets over the Border”, refusing to run when the commander of 6 Commando urged him to; pipers walked as they played.

Millin also played at Lovat’s funeral in 1995.