IT book reviews

That should ensure I get some more hits!

As you know I've been retraining, so I've assembled quite a few of those big scary IT books that, for some reason, are always a different squarer shape from normal books (i.e. the kind of leisure book that the workplace symbolically kills by making that joke about "bedtime reading").

Scott Lowe, Mastering VMware vSphere 4. Let's start with this, because it's the benchmark, unreservedly the best IT book I've ever read. It absolutely is possible to read this extremely wide-ranging and uncompromisingly technical book for the sheer pleasure of understanding what you never understood before. The massive chapter on storage is I think by Chad Sakacs, and is in a denser style, not quite so limpidly aware of its audience's needs but nevertheless hugely informative. This is Scott's first book. Dare I suggest, a very good example of how the discipline of blogging will actually produce better writers and readers?

Brian Casselman, Tim Reeser, Steve Kaplan, Citrix XenApp Platinum Edition for Windows: The Official Guide. The excellence of Scott Lowe's book also reflects the missionary zeal for VMware that is irresistibly blowing through the IT industry. XenApp's (i.e. Metaframe, Presentation Server - hey, no wonder everyone just calls it Citrix...) glory days belong to a different era - I mean don't get me wrong, it's still a crucial and expanding technology but it's lost that sexiness, somehow. Even Citrix seem to want to merge it into XenDesktop... And perhaps it's unfair, but XenApp really suffers because no-one has written a decent book about it. OK, this one's not bad. But for a techie reader it's deeply frustrating because so much of it is aimed at CIOs (would they really read it? it's hard to believe) and it keeps selling application delivery to you, which you don't need to be sold. It's a ragbag that looks like it was pasted together from other, older books. You SHOULD be suspicious of why there is no version number in the title... Even when it gets a bit more technical, in Part III, it doesn't really give you solid enough specifics. You can't learn XenApp from this. It focuses very selectively on the Platinum Edition add-ons (which is useful), but where's the comprehensive general guide on XenApp? The answer to that, I suppose, is in the product Administration and Installation Guides (all available online) - Citrix do have a great website - , but you can't really read the product documentation as books. Plus, "Official" guides are a downer. It means you're going to hear a lot about XenServer (Citrix's virtualization product) and nothing about VMware or HyperV. This isn't the real world.

Jared Hoover and Shawn Tooley, et al, The Real Citrix CCA Exam Preparation Kit: Prepare for XenApp 5.0. I wrote about this before. It IS possible to prepare for your CCA from this: I did it, but I knew XenApp pretty well. It's hastily thrown together, doesn't take the trouble to explain things comprehensively, and is pretty dull reading, if I'm honest. Yet I got sort of fond of it by the end.

Elias N. Khnaser, VCP VMware Certified Professional (Exam Cram VCP-310). The Exam Cram series books are cheap and cheerful, and I've used them before and liked them. We all want to certify on the cheap. But as technology certifications become increasingly complex, the paradigm format is less and less able to encompass the content. I seriously doubt you could pass VCP-310 with just this. Incidentally this qualification will shortly pass into history. However, so far as I know there are as yet no exam preparation guides for vSphere's VCP-410. No doubt there are a bunch of furiously scribbling authors working on that right now.

Tom Negrino and Dori Smith, Javascript & Ajax Visual Quickstart Guide. I haven't really studied this yet, - I mean I haven't got as far as writing any scripts - but it's very well written and looks like a very useful book. When you start to see gimmicky rollovers on this blog, you'll know I've got started...

Rui Maximo et al, Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Resource Kit. This is seriously hard going. It has a pretty formidable subject to discuss, but surely there has got to be a better way. Somewhere in this book is the information you need, but you have to already be an OCS Master to extract it (I'm exaggerating a bit). OK, so OCS isn't mainstream yet. For the moment, your best bet is the blogs. One day someone will write a great book on OCS. Like, maybe one that starts with - what is OCS? What is unified communications? What is SIP? This book kind of assumes you have a background in telecommunications AND IT, and several years of running Live Communications Server - which is one hell of a big ask.

Fed up with IT yet? Then why not read my Intercapillary Space piece on Robert Browning's Strafford. It has pictures!

pestle and mortar

This exceptional October, the fallen leaves have not been swept by gales nor water-sodden. Instead they are slowly pulverized by tyres or the steady tramp of shoes.


(manna ash)


(common lime)


(London plane, under streetlights)

blog without integrity

Silence from Järvenpää, I know. I've been in Spain for a while, and now I'm in the thick of job applications. [While I was away our town (pop. 30,000) gained its first F1 world champion. It must be admitted Jenson doesn't really ever come to Frome. But still...]

Funny how books I read early and didn't especially value have had sometimes a big influence, too big to shake off critically. E.g. in this case, some biography of Sibelius from way back - I've never forgotten that chapter-title, and I was surprised to look it up and find I actually remembered the name "Järvenpää" right after all these years. I've always seen Sibelian silence as a possibility, an oddly attractive possibility - and since readers are helpless and misguided victims of their betters, I've absorbed this as if I want to get straight on to the silence without going to the trouble of actually making any significant noise first.

Yesterday I was reading Simon Seagrave's http://www.techhead.co.uk/ about installing a home VMware ESX server on an ML110 and realized I'll just never be a real tecchie. I got there from Chad Sakac's http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/, which is also a great resource. But I don't feel their bliss about the thought of tinkering with hardware. And I can't remember tech stuff for more than the few days it takes to prepare for an exam. My head's too full of words from the past that are inherently non-productive.

Prunus domestica fruit

Seen today in Upper Langford, on a path leading up to the north-facing gloom of Dolebury woods - still in perfect condition and a fine pot of jam waiting if someone wishes to make it. These might actually be Prunus cerasifera - I haven't got my head round that one yet, and I didn't measure the fruit (should be only 2-3cm in P. cerasifera, which sounds about right) or check if the stone was hardly flattened. The only thing I do know is that green doesn't necessarily mean greengage. The one I ate was quite sharp. That last shot is meant to suggest tonight's moon.

specimens of the literature of Sweden...cont'd

     Autumn concert

     Silent and grey
     like a cathedral of the Middle Ages
     Tramsberget rears up
     out of Lossen's autumnal crescendo
     while Anåfjällen's gleaming furioso
     grazes the skies

     Over Galtjärn's black mirror
     blazing leaves dancing
     like butterflies
     awakened once more
     by the autumn organ's mighty fugue

     In the wildwoods
     the glow of lingon cresting
     like love-chords
     ripe and ready to fall
     into grateful hands
     when the wind turns over
     the first dazzling page
     of winter's score

(from Bo Lundmark, Den Sjunde Dagen - dikter från glesbygden, 1992. The author lives in Härjedalen.)

*


     The surge

     The wave's surge against
     rock-hearth
     reflects the fire
     within me


     Catch

     Take out your feelings
     Hunt them
     Overtake them
     Catch them
     Hold them still!
     A long time!

(from Nära Och Kära, Dikter av Gunhild Larsson, booklet from c.1998. The author lives in Ångermanland.)

more specimens of the literature of Sweden

77 ENGLISH RYEGRASS, LOLIUM PERENNE L.

This grass, which was formerly named "renrepe", is fairly low, around 1/3 of a meter in height, with an erect stem and the flowerhead, which is a compact spike, is confusingly similar to couch grass (no. 110). But there is a crucial difference between them: the spikelet of Agropyron, Elytrigia, Roegneria etc. has its flat side, of Lolium on the other hand one of its edges, adjacent to the common spike-axis. Because of this arrangement the Lolium spikelet is missing the glume that would otherwise be closest to the spike-axis.

In central Europe this grass has greater significance than it does with us. There it has been cultivated for several centuries, especially in pasturage, as it tolerates close grazing. It is also makes an attractive and smooth turf for lawns. In Sweden it is of fairly common occurrence, either self-seeded or as an escape from cultivation, in the southern and middle part of the country, but normally in cultivated ground or close to human habitation, on building-lots, rubbish-tips and so on; in the north it is not hardy and grows as an annual.

PLATE 77. Fig. 1 The plant's lower part and the stem's upper part with spike in flower, 2 spikelets (x4).

(from C.A.M. Lindman's Nordens Flora, text revised by Magnus Fries 1964)

*

APPRENTICES AND JOURNEYMAN-WANDERERS

As with all other professions during the era of the guilds, the copperbeating workforce comprised masters, journeymen and apprentices.
The ancient statutes, which regulated the exercise of the profession, remained in force until 1846. The general guild system (under royal warrant) appeared in 1669, with a revision in 1720.

Every Swedish youth who wished to follow a craft profession had to demonstrate from his birth certificate that he was of legitimate birth. To be sure, it was later asserted that illegitimate birth ought not to hinder a lad from enrolling in some form of training, but this represented merely the authorities' idle hope, in the form of a decree that officials paid little attention to.

Drinking mug from the beginning of the 19th Century. Height 15 cm.

Miniature coffee-pot made out of an emergency coin from 1721. The coin is 2.5 cm in diameter. Probably a journeyman-piece.

In general it seems that apprentices in the copperbeating trade were bound to a master from the age of 12. From the master they could expect board and lodging, and such training as would prepare an apprentice, some four or five years in the future, to be employable as journeyman. A certain cash salary was also payable to the apprentice. In the 1880s an apprentice could earn 35 kr in the first year, 45 kr in the next, 55 kr in the third and 75 kr in the fourth. The master reserved the right to set the boy to work at miscellaneous duties, which did not necessarily relate to the craft he was learning. In the Guild statute of 1720 it was asserted that the apprentice, since from his master he "enjoyed meals, clothing and house-room, was fully bound to run the master's errands, provided they were imposed in moderation and were in the main connected with the training and craft to which he was apprenticed". An apprentice boy's first year at the works was certainly no picnic. Hard masters and bullying from the journeymen meant that a boy who survived this introduction was pretty toughened.

Beaker, stamped AB, perhaps from Avesta works. 19th Century. Height 20 cm.

If a son chose his father's profession it was of course quite common for his apprenticeship to begin considerably earlier. The coppersmith Bergström in Falun reported that he was already assisting his father in the workshop at the age of 9. His father would wake him at three in the morning to help with the hammering. By the time he set off to school, which started at 0900, he had already had a long working day.

When the apprentice came to the end of his final year at the master's he had to be formally discharged from his training. The alderman entered in the record the day of discharge, a fixed sum of money was paid into the officials' coffers, and then the young man received his letters of training and the title of journeyman. He had moreover to produce a journeyman-piece for the approval of certain impartial examiners. The ex-apprentice would then be adopted into the union of journeymen, which was a junior counterpart to the society of master coppersmiths. Often this initiation was a particularly painful procedure.

The society of journeymen decreed, among other things, that a journeyman who was out on his travels looking for work must wear a hat and carry a wanderer's stick. He had to have three buttons done up on his coat, set his hat upon his stick when he crossed the threshold of a strange workshop and pronounce the words "lass åff fon tell", a corruption of the German "Landsauftenhalt". The senior journeyman at the workshop would then answer "hjelt", a corruption of "gilt" i.e. "Approved". The newcomer was presented to the master and might receive a contract for 14 days' work. If there wasn't any work for him then each of the other journeymen was obliged to give him at least 25 öre as travel-help. And it wasn't unusual for some consumption of brännvin to take place. If the journeyman who was looking for work managed to find it with another master in the same town, he was obliged to repay the travel-help he had received.

The copperbeating journeymen were predominantly a wandering workforce. Many journeymen had their reference diary fully filled out with 14-day contracts for different masters. It was often impractical for them to acquire a home or family since it was exceptional for the many small concerns to to be able to make room for married workers in their workshops. The wage for a journeyman in the 1880s varied between 6 and 9 kr for a working week consisting of 12-13 hour days. It is said of the journeymen "that they were often tramps who would stay a few weeks in one place and then move on. It could become habitual to work only until they had built up a little store of wages and then hit the road again. Few journeymen put by any savings so they could eventually set up their own workshop.

When the new journeyman set forth from the workshop where he had learned his trade an apprentice was assigned to ceremonially bear his rucksack through the town. In the 1880s the boy earned 25 öre for this service. The journeyman must never buy his own wanderer's stick. Anyone who broke with this rule had no hope of making good in the world. Either the master and his old comrades would present the stick to him, or (if he truly wanted to ensure success on his journeyings) it should happen that the stick was a gift from a young lady.

(from Per Henrik Rosenström, Gammal Koppar 1965)

Leevi Lehto review

... is finally delivered on Intercapillary Space.

life without work

I'm making green tomato chutney and doing last minute revision for a Citrix exam tomorrow. Back to regular running. On the Brief Hist I've written about A.S. Byatt's Possession. I've Nearly finished my next piece for IS... next 2-3 days. Still holding off on the heating.

you may be entitled to a free will

About 80% of the plums I picked in August looked like this. When you cut the fruit open you can see that the stone is rather neatly broken close to its top, and there's a horizontal scar passing across the inside of the plum, but not reaching the edges. I didn't see any creatures, but I suppose the damage is done by some larva a bit like the plum-fruit sawfly, whose eggs are laid in the plum ovary at a very early stage. Unlike the plum-fruit sawfly, however: 1. this one appears to feed only on the kernel and is not interested in the flesh, 2. the fruit do not fall prematurely but remain on the tree and mature normally, 3. There is no visible exit channel. All rather puzzling. Anyway, it didn't stop me using the fruit, so I guess that's a good pest to have. Plum pie, anyone?

That was a month ago, but I never got round to photographing it, so today I went to see if there were any left, and as you see I did get one, but it wasn't easy. The area is shortly to be made into homes, so has been fenced off, but that wasn't my main problem. (I regret the many small ecosystems I have watched on this waste land over the last eight years, - most will now disappear.) The plums were nearly all gone and rotted, but eventually I found a few that were still just about OK, very high up. Eventually I managed to beat this one down with a stick - you can see the bruise where it hit the ground.

Since I can't be bothered to start a new entry, I'm also posting a couple of photos of rosebay willowherb (Chamerion angustifolium), one from July and one from November.

michaelpeverett.com

This is the name of my new website - or rather, the old old website, migrated. This is the site that contains the Brief History and other writings as shown on the right.

The new site is functional now, but it probably contains some broken links. If this happens, you see a nice photo of poppies instead of what you were expecting. Please tell me!

Some existing links (e.g. within older posts on this blog) will probably never be updated and probably won't work, (though according to Yahoo! these links were meant to be automatically redirected). If you have ever linked to one of my pages, then the link should be changed from, e.g.

http://www.geocities.com/mpeverett/selhist1.htm

to

http://michaelpeverett.com/selhist1.htm

I took the easy way out and went with Yahoo's small business service ("poetry is ultimate small business" - Charles Bernstein). I checked out the free hosting sites but they really seemed to be outlaw country these days - a pity, and I feel like I've given way to a loss of principle as well as money. The good side of finally paying a subscription is that the site will be a lot faster, won't hit download limits, carries no ads, and I can load lots of images and sound files if I want. However, I've decided against a total makeover. I've often dreamt of a Brief History that was searchable, had proper frames, and all that stuff, but as always I'd rather put the time into writing a bit more of it. Therefore it will continue to have the retro text-based appearance that it had in 1999. Enjoy!

blackberries on Brean Down

Some photos we took at the same time as the last lot from Brean, back in August. Like most average citizens I am content to know that there are 276 microspecies of Rubus fruticosus agg. in the UK, without being able to distinguish a single one. But sometimes I'm in a different place and the blackberries look a bit different from usual, and then I think, this lot have got to be one of the microspecies I don't usually see. And I feel obscurely pleased, as by the first stirrings of a sense I didn't know I possessed and will almost certainly never develop.

Development might begin, for instance, by analyzing WHY they struck me as a bit different. But I never got as far as that. The only answer I could give would be: well, I noticed them. Blackberries, as a rule, are not something I notice. Pink flowers though, not white ones. Neat-looking fruit borne on the top of the thicket, many segments, many stamens.... Naturally, the windswept coastal conditions would also affect the overall look of the plant and this might not imply any microspecific significance.

lit ephem

What I didn't warn you about, is that apart from the lack of hyperlinks and italics, some of my facts might be pretty dodgy, too. I said that Mina Loy or whatever it's called, that youthful story by Charlotte Bronte, was written as an unserious game with her sisters. Gross untruth, it was Branwell with whom she wrote the Angria booklets, and anyway this was a comparatively late one, when Charlotte's head must have been already bursting with the big new forms that were swimming around restlessly in there. Anyway...

Well, I'm writing elsewhere about Leevi Lehto, so I leave his book on one side for the moment.

I read Allen Fisher's Birds again - I need more of this. I read a strange poetry book in Bath, 300 pages of walking round London, remarkably like Goldsmith's Fidget - I didn't take in the poet's name, but it must have been in the 90s. I wish I'd bought this now. There was also a big Thomas Merton, that Trappist west-coaster who died in 1968 - who can bear any book of poetry that big? I read about XenApp 5.0, (Syngress), written by a host of bods. Sometimes lucid (like, a real human being is talking) and sometimes shoddy - whole paragraphs that don't make any sense - obviously thrown together against the clock (like, we WILL be the first on our block to write a CCA guide for Xenapp 5) one grows to almost like this after a time. I'm reading A.S Byatt's Possession - see remarks on XenApp 5 - no, I'm kidding. "Hugely enjoyable." But you know what I mean - one page you're lost in admiration and the next page you're gasping in a different way, you know, at "broad" characterization (on the analogy with broad comedy). - But I'd better finish it.

A new Proust first vol, seen in Waterstones. They've managed to mangle the title into "The Way by Swann's". Written by a tag-team of translators. The second one apparently thought that "A rose-garden of young girls" was a good idea, but was over-ridden by the series editor, who nevertheless published this embarrassment . Not reassuring. All this is me showing my age. I was never going to feel anything other than a kneejerk spasm of contempt at any new translation (like - you REALLY think you could do it better than Moncrieff/Kilmartin?). But when I opened it up and read some, it just seemed like good old Anglo-Proust again. I fancy that Anglo-Proust seems a bit different from Franco-Proust, because class prejudice runs along slightly different fault-lines. But whichever language you read it in, Proust vies with Jane Austen as the apex of classist literature. Upper-middle-class, naturally. So why is there a stack of "The Way by Swann's" in a thoroughly working town like Trowbridge? (Not that it will sell very well, though doubtless ten times better than any of the later volumes.) Why is Radio 4 so invested in preserving the genteel classes? And hey, Radio 1 listeners, don't you get all morally superior: Why do people who listen to Chris Moyles only ever have names like Kev and Mark and Karen and Lindsay and why is so much of the comedy on this show about foreign words and accents? And actually, why am I writing about Proust? Literature is a paltry thing, isn't it?

I read about kopparslageriet (Gammal Koppar), but I haven't had time to translate it for you.

I ordered Johan Jönson's Restakitivitet. The title means something like surplus-activity or leftover-aktivity. I have no idea if this is in any way representative of Jönson's other writings. It is 274 pages long and consists of three bits: "O", which looks like a sequence of lyric poems, "RESTAKTVTT", which consists of 1031 numbered paragraphs of which about 200 appear twice - I mean the numbering, but the paragraphs are completely different. And "MOLOK ORALIAAPPENDIX", which is all in capital letters and uses "|" as its only punctuation. That's it really, until I get the dictionary out and start to read. The point of the purchase was really to try out Bokus.se, which will deliver to the UK (and lots of other countries too, including Australia and NZ, though not Canada or the US). This will get very expensive if I start collecting the x-hundred volumes of "Nationalnyckeln till Sveriges flora och fauna" as they come out, an extraordinary enterprise - unique, I suppose - I guess they owe it to Linnaeus. Well anyway it won't get expensive, because unless I am unexpectedly made a millionaire this just isn't going to happen. But I can dream.

But wouldn't it be better still to have an INTERnational key to the flora and fauna of planet Earth? An impossible book, but you might do it electronically. The text could be automatically translateable into any other language - after all, the vocabulary of botany/zoology is extremely translateable. I suppose someone's grand plan is that the Swedish work should be the start-off point (since there's no point in redescribing the species). Cultural world domination has always appealed to some Swedes - velvet colonialism. I'm not immune to that compulsion. Oh, I was reading the Wikipedia entry on Swedish literature - which is a rubbish article, btw, but what an idiot you'd have to be to read Wikipedia on a wide general topic like that! -
anyway, I was that idiot, and there you can read Sweden's catalogue of shame, literature-wise - not Henning Mankell, but those absurd Nobel Prizewinners, Karlfeldt, Eyvind Johnson, Heidenstam, - decent-ish local writers disfigured by gross over-decoration. But then, the Nobel Prize for Literature is absurd whatever. Yet it still has to be conducted, there's a bequest.

What else? Cobbett's Rural Rides. Sometimes these are great, but sometimes they aren't. Cobbett bangs on for ever about the black locust (tree), which he thinks is a massively superior timber tree. He thought for himself, with all that that implies, i.e. originality, force, freedom, quackery and crankery. And as UK readers may have noticed, our woods are conspicuously not full of Robinia pseudoacacia, though Cobbett made plenty of money selling the seeds. His seeds were unselected, and the trees didn't grow straight. Besides, it's not that great with wet soil. The timber does have fantastic properties, as Cobbett claims, but especially if it's grown on poor soil (and therefore, slowly). Grown on good soil, timber-production is superfast but the wood is nothing like so close-grained. Finally plantations are difficult to thin because any sapling that is cut down immediately springs a thicket of vigorous root suckers which the thin canopy of the selected trees does not suppress (this is from Alan Mitchell's Trees of Britain). In the US, its own native land, it's been even less successful as a forestry tree because of the depredations of a locust borer that ruins the timber. But Cobbett wasn't all wrong. The locust is widely grown for timber in E. Europe, e.g. Hungary. And it is a recommended species for agroforestry, i.e. the intercultivation of crops or pasture with lines of trees, said to be a highly productive use of land in the long term.

silence

Cornus. Mahonia. Audi. Saab. Cypress. South Elevation. Mark Prindle.

Smoke - swayed... grew in the eaves, developed. It was only a puff of cloud, nevertheless. and taking our ease in the greenlight under boughs.

The dry chattering of a typewriter, on and on in the corner of the stable block, with that commercial certainty that only comes with possession of a definite audience: it is more than commercial, it is assurance.

When the cousins came their mother hissed at them to stop meddling with their phones on the sofa. They did not pay any attention to our talk. There was nothing for them here except a rotten swing under an apple-tree.

I couldn't concentrate with their fidgeting. Go, I waved them away liberally.

You come back here if you want anything, mother said.

Well, we all chipped in, I continued with the story of Tania's bike ride.

more thistles

These pictures were taken on Brean Down yesterday. It was mainly overcast but thistles always produce nice photos. (When it was sunny, I was getting my hair cut down by the fort at the end. This is the second time I've had my hair cut on Brean Down, and I assure you there's no pleasanter spot for what Laura, however, described as a "stupid chore". Then she shot off up the gradients leaving me trailing, an infected tooth - or, more likely, de-toxing the painkillers - seeming to have cut my lung capacity in half.)

Above and below, marsh thistle (Cirsium palustre), very common in woods and wet places, also here on the north face of the down among bracken. This face gets comparatively little sun and attracts woodland plants though there are no trees - none taller than the marsh thistles themselves, anyhow. More often than not, quite a lot of the plants have white flowers, but not here.




A few hundred yards away you can find diminutive specialists of thin dry soil and full sun, such as this:

(Above and below) Carline thistle (Carlina vulgaris), attracting plenty of insect interest despite its uncolourful appearance.

guide-vocal

Pre-season is quite hard. The coach is also a PTI for the Marines (for £104.33 Ballantynes of Walkerburn ship him in bronze, but I am sick of hyperlinks!). First we had sprints round the pitch. Jogging is one kind of exercise, sprints are a different kind. Then tackle-bags, continuous - 2m sprint, tackle, go to ground, jump up, sprint - . Then fireman's-lift runs the length of the pitch, flip 3 tractor tyres and then fireman's-lift run back to the start.

My mate is going for Ironman. That is a 3.5km swim, then 180km bike ride finally run a full marathon, you have got to finish in 17hrs.

I know an old guy called Frank, he's retired, and he is an artist, he has exhibitions and he paints the whole time. It is mostly or all abstract paintings.
Well as the years go by old Frank builds up a stock of old paintings and unsold promotional postcards of these old paintings, and this undistributed stock depresses him and he wants some more space in the studio. Well if Frank had died it would all be perfectly simple, it would all just go to the charity shop and join the public community of objects at the appropriate level. However since Frank is alive and he is an artist who values art, especially his own, he has different ideas. He thinks it would be ungenerous to just box up things that members of his family might well appreciate. They might not appreciate the painting so very much for itself, though they say they do, but Frank knows if only from this polite over-enthusiasm that they love him and therefore an object that he has worked on would quite likely prove an acceptable and graceful gift. The relatives do not know how to refuse. An artist's art is a religious person's religion, you do not insult it. Therefore the paintings find their way into homes and (being abstracts) usually a suitable place on the wall can be found. "Blue Engagement" usurps a space that might otherwise have been taken by a 2009 calendar.

As for the postcards, well here I must admit that it isn't exactly Frank's fault. He really would bin them, the postcards have gone a bit curved and the backs are a bit yellowed. But just as he has stacked them up someone happens to stroll in and says (to Frank's surprise and mournful pleasure) that they would be quite keen to take away a block of 150 x "Rainstorm - Pwllheli", if Frank is just slinging them. Frank's pleasure is muted because by now he is not particularly keen on this or any of the other paintings from that era, he is aware of how he used to paint and who he used to be and the provincial enthusiasms that then had such an undue influence on his work. But still, he reflects that it's by no means unusual for artists to be harder on themselves than posterity is. It might well be that the period represented by "Rainstorm - Pwllheli" will come to impress others by a certain freshness and lyricism...

What Frank does not appreciate is that, from the relative's point of view, a stack of unused postcards is quite useful. It has nothing to do with what's on the front; they would be just as acceptable if they portrayed a white kitten looking winsomely out of a sewing-basket rather than "Encircling Light, III", Acrylic on canvas 75cm x 50cm. And if you take the stack of postcards now, it might make it easier later to express your reasons for regretfully NOT taking a trilogy of the dusty splay-legged clay sculptures that Frank experimented with back in the nineties.

Zero, however, is an insidious price. The recipient, attracted by the thought of getting a free stack of stationery and of cheering up old Frank at the same time, is subtly condemned by their own action to years of visual deprivation. Every note or scribble or phone number, every hasty communication or impromptu congratulation is accompanied by the same small account of an olive wash with its white arc. And these were people, were it not for Frank, who might have enjoyed the White Rock gardens, Mullion Cove, Rosa 'Ena Harkness', glass-blowing, Ciampino Airport - Rome, Exmoor ponies....

I am glad there is no undistributed stock on the internet, nothing left over, nothing that takes up space and becomes an encumbrance. We walk up from the changing-room with our sports bags and slicked hair, completely unburdened by the weightless mass of all the billion websites we never visit. Creative people can now proudly join the rest of us who have nothing, literally nothing, to PASS ON to their families.

XXX

I've never really noticed this before, but Messagelabs has a very capricious tendency to block images. For example, in the entry below Messagelabs took exception to the first, fifth and sixth. I suppose it must have been the undertone of sensual abandon.

August is also a good time to check out Hairy Brome (Bromopsis ramosa), another woodland grass, or perhaps rather semi-woodland, as it seems to especially like marginal areas with a bit of direct sun. A casual glance at the flowerhead always used to remind me of drips moulded in plastic - e.g. a model waterfall. An almost equally casual glance might recall Barren Brome but each spikelet of BB has a dedicated pedicel, there's no sub-branches. And besides, BB was at its peak in June.

I am reading Leevi Lehto, sort of (more about that in IS, eventually...). I WAS reading Dickens Uncommercial Traveller (not for the first time, or the second), when I realized that my remaindered copy of the Slater and Drew Collected Journalism Vol 4 is missing pages 61-92 (they've accidentally duplicated the next gathering instead), so I was left high and dry in the theatre at Hoxton and then I felt so disappointed that I gave up.

meadow and wood

An outbreak of Woolly Thistle (Cirsium eriophorum), a common plant in the bit of England I live in and one of the highlights of every August.



Homing in. The flowers were as usual attended by numerous besotted insects who were very patient subjects.



Fairy flax (Linum catharticum), now in a diminutively dessicated phase of its existence, buried among taller growth. Blurry ultra-closeup below.




Broad-leaved dock (Rumex obtusifolius), an unfairly neglected contributor to August colour.

Then I walked into the wood and tried to photograph the grasses, but I was mainly defeated by the chequered backgrounds, so I haven't troubled you e.g with any of my worthless studies of Poa nemoralis, a plant that disappears when photographed. I begin to understand why there are not many good photos of grasses on the internet...


Giant Fescue (Festuca gigantea) with close-up showing blade, auricles and node.



False Brome (Brachypodium sylvaticum) with closeups of blade/ligule and node. After taking these I went back into the meadow and got on with studying XenApp 5.0.

my links

I've just done the annual troll around my links (the ones over there on the right). Not the ones featuring me, the ones further down. I'm quite precious about these links. There aren't very many, but each of them has meant a lot to me at one time or another, it's delighted me and also irritated, informed, amused, infuriated, beguiled, challenged, struck dumb or whatever, and I've spent plenty of time there. I'm surprised and happy to report that none of the links were broken; an increasing number, sadly, are now dormant, and I was very sorry to read that William Harris died this February - he will make you in love with classical poetry. I've added a few new ones. Ken Edwards' blog (poet, musician, publisher) began in March and every word of it is worth reading. Nordic-Voices-in-translation is also a new (but very prolific) blog by a group of translators of nordic literatures - (it ticks most of the boxes mentioned above, but especially to inform and infuriate). After a long time I've decided I really have to put Catherine Daly's blog on there, though it is quite delibrately not crafted, often messy and mundane, but then it will suddenly fling out something dazzling and completely strange. As I've been writing this I've remembered some others that ought to be here, and maybe I'll add them soon. Anyway, go and click on one of these links and your head will expand, I promise.

Brief hist

A double-header for the home counties:

Jane Austen's Emma

Harold P. Clunn's The Face of the Home Counties

Plus, on Intercapillary Space:

Samples from The Many Press

herons and rooks

"It has been statistically proven that there are more common birds than there are rare birds", lamented Bill Oddie during a dull week-end's birding. He also noted that some particularly rare and spectacular species seem to only ever show themselves to non-birdwatchers. To a certain extent I can now vouch for this.

e.g. I'm getting really bored with great white egrets. On Tuesday I was at Climping Beach in W Sussex and I looked up and there was a big white heron flying above me. But I've already seen another one this year; it was fishing in a pool near the mouth of the River Brue at Highbridge. I don't really know much about birds. I can't tell a missel thrush from a song thrush, (I can't even spell mistle), and for anything I know to the contrary warblers are a purely fictional kind of bird. So why am I dogged by birds that aren't even in the birdbook?

This must be a good confident time for herons. Was the time, not so long ago neither, when the grey heron was so timid that it flapped wearily out of a stream the moment you even had a passing memory of that stream, even though you lay at the time in foreign custody and had not been near the stream for twenty years,... anyhow, these same herons are now so insensible that they snooze hunched up while we trudge past them, though barely 6 feet away on the far side of a ditch.

On the way home we still had an end of stale loaf that had been intended for ducks, but we hadn't met any ducks. I thought I would try feeding it to some rooks who were pecking at a strip of turf beside the motorway services. Only one or two were in range. They were surprised and extremely suspicious, but couldn't resist snatching the bits I had managed to chuck furthest. There was a fairly clear message of "No-one's ever done this before, are you sure you wouldn't rather shoot us and hang us upside-down from a gibbet?" Rooks close to have a very disneyish appearance with a sort of Mersey cut and a cartoon conk. When I had finished casting stale bread and I walked away, about forty rooks descended in a joyous squabbling mass, in which I could still distinguish a faint note of incredulity.

more literary ephemera

I've got a new mini-book. This one is Charlotte Bronte's Mina Laury, written as an unserious game with her younger sisters when she was 22, and it's great. What I like best about it is the unrepressed mixture of fantasyland, real places, local names, settings remembered from other people's novels, domestic dreams. It begins: "The Cross of Rivaulx! ... It is a green, delightful, and quiet place half way between Angria and the foot of the Sydenham Hills; under the frown of Hawkscliffe, on the edge of its royal forest. You see a fair house, whose sash windows are set in ivy grown thick and kept in trim order..."

I'm not bothering with the niceties on these literary ephemera - there isn't time. So you'll have to put up with the missing diaeresis on Charlotte's surname, no italics, no hyperlinks, etc.

Richard Makin's St Leonards (Google it yourself)is going to be a bigger book, though you don't really have to read it all, and I haven't, but yesterday I came up to speed with the latest chapter (XXXI). SL is both very unlike a novel and very studiously fictive. Apart from its title, it contains so far as I know not a single proper name, i.e. of a person, place or artefact. Like a sea. Remarkable how in this unnerving vacuuum one clings to such momentary definition as a "Martello tower" or an implied family relationship ("Get your kids and leave"). But of course I exaggerate: the latest installment also mentions St Francis, a certain Old Poker, and a city called H.

Been trying to think of something quick to write for IS (fortunately, Peter Larkin has shown up there, so the pressure relaxes). I always imagine it should be easy to just knock out three paragraphs about anything. I opened G.M Hopkins and read about Heraclitean fire. Yes, I like this poem, though it's a bit Victorian. But perhaps I should really know a bit more about how it all fits.... and I start to read around it, and suddenly I know it won't be a quick job. Well, what about something from an anthology? I try D. J. Enright's grotesque Verse 1945-1980 - James K. Baxter, a weird selection of Ted Hughes, then to cheer myself up Children of Albion - Pickard, Turnbull, now this is more like it... But everything I think to say bristles with issues of theory or history that I don't know enough about. It's amazing how many things I don't know enough about, once I think I might publish something.

Anyway, I learnt that a youthful Hopkins once stayed off liquids for a week. I suppose he cheated by eating lots of apples and other watery foods. Hopkins supposed that we all drank far too much liquid and would be healthier if we cut down on it. It strikes me he generally wasn't very happy in his convictions.

on a forest path

4. At the sea shore.

Can you hear the waves lapping? When the ice melted, the long valley of the Indal river became an inlet of the sea. You are standing now at the highest coastline (HK), i.e. the highest level attained by the waters of the Eastern Sea* at this location. During the Ice Age the land was pressed downwards by the tremendous weight of the inland ice-sheet. When the ice disappeared the land began to lift again. Here the HK is 250 meters above the current sea-level. Even today the land continues to rise at a rate of around 7mm per year.

Look back at the path above the signpost. Where the waves never reached, finer rock-particles still remain. The ground is moister and richer in nutrients. That makes it easier for plants to get established. In the woods we've been passing through, mosses dominate the ground-layer. Bilberry together with lingonberry** are the commonest low shrubs***. But at the highest coastline the ground becomes dryer. On the path leading down from the signpost the rock-particles are coarser and conditions are more arid. Bilberry becomes less frequent and there is more heather, lingon and crowberry. Reindeer-lichen replaces some of the mosses at ground-level.

Juniper flourishes in the open forest. As a result of timber-thinning many junipers are released from a meagre existence in dense woodland. Look at the ones along the footpath. Near the power-lines in particular there are some that are more tree-like than bush-like. That is not so very common in the north of Sweden.

5. Peat extraction

The farmers in the village came together to cut peat. Peat-cutting continued sporadically into the 20th century. Water is needed for peat-formation. Sphagnum peat is the most common sort but sedges can also form peat. Here in Långmyran both sphagnum moss and various kinds of sedge grow today.

[From a leaflet found at Bispfors in SE Jämtland.]

* Östersjön: Swedish name for the Gulf of Bothnia.
** Vaccinium vitis-idaea , in Britain restricted to the NW and named cowberry in British floras, but probably the Swedish name lingonberry is now more familiar, because of the national obsession with going to IKEA and scoffing meatballs while scribbling wish-lists of flatpack furniture.
*** The untranslateable Swedish word is "risen", meaning thin twiggy growth, e.g. from which you can cut a switch to flick away mosquitoes.

literary ephemera of yesterday

The sneaky volume for work consumption: - I've finished a Penguin 60s vol of 4 Gabriel Garcia Marquez short stories - odd mix, the best by a mile was "I only came to use the phone", fantastic short story. In one of my dreams of old age, I will only read short stories. Why read the Trial or 1984 when you can get it all here in this story, and a bit better?

Anyhow, that's over, so now in continuance of the virtual Sweden theme, I'm reading a pamphlet about a local (Jämtland) geologistigen. I learned that the ground is still rising 7mm a year, and all about when Indalsälven was a bay, during the thaw at the end of the last Ice Age, and how you can know where the shore was at its highest point.

Back home, three booklets from Oystercatcher Press had arrived: Carol Watts, Allen Fisher and Lisa Samuels. Hughes is just knocking these out on his home computer and inkjet, I'm guessing, yet they are very desirable objects. I sort of scanned them, the way you do when you buy something that you don't really intend to read yet. This is just about the first time that I've read anything by AF. There was a crackle of electricity, vaguely portentous, and then I put it aside. Watts I already knew faintly from poems on the Internet - it's so exciting to know that a British poet writes like this - and LS I'm just a massive fan of, as you already know.

Last night, first I read more of Lindman's classic Nordens Flora, the grass section. I'll probably translate some extracts, and of the geology leaflet too. Fascinating the transformation of nature in a different language. Of course the species are themselves transformed, they look, grow, and behave different, but that's another matter.

I must have read something on the Internet, too, but I already can't remember what. http://nordicvoices.blogspot.com is currently talking about Greenlandic literature. I went on the Bokus.se site and it looks like they would deliver to the UK, though I haven't tried this out yet. I also ran across a sort of site within Amazon that specializes in Swedish books/books about Sweden, primarily in English, -http://astore.amazon.co.uk/swedenbooks-21 - the selection of books seemed rudimentary and random, but perhaps this will evolve.

Winding down for bed, picked up Selected Poems of Robinson Jeffers (bought for 10p at fete), which I was half way through, and finished it. Jeffers, with his private income and irritating way of taking the highest of moral high ground and of informing the rest of us that whatever disgusting things we did we'd soon be dead anyway, was clearly a total git (he would have been amazing in Big Brother), but the performance is compulsive reading, sort of car-crash poetry. (See the evasive way in which, by treating his stark truth-telling as "performance", I refuse to notice it.) He has some great, knee-saggingly brutal lines about the world wars, and some unforgettable (also brutal) ideas like the one about the lights of LA compared to sardines rounded up in a seine-net.

Finally, subsiding into sleep, read some of Eva Ström in Robin Fulton's trans of Five Swedish Poets, a book that always bores me to death and so it proved once more, but I keep nibbling at it.

specimens of the literature of Sweden

1.

"It's just about seven o'clock, let's go down and meet Fredrik!"

We went to the jetty. The usual people were there. The young artist with a red cap and cautious way of walking. Also the French lady who believed anything that you told her. She offered up her soul to me through big light-blue eyes and I said:

"This morning a revolution broke out in Paris. The whole town is in a state of siege. They're shooting in the streets so you can't hear what anyone says and you have to go indoors if you want to talk to someone."

"My mother! My mother!" said the French lady, because her mother lived in Paris.

"All the women and children have gone to a meadow out of town," I said soothingly.

Just then the boat arrived. It emerged from behind the promontory, and I whispered to my wife:

"Do be nice to Fredrik!"

(Hasse Z (1877-1946), "Fredrik")

2.

"Ah, dear sir," said the princess, "your poor heart lies buried down there in the earth under the threshold, so to put you in a happier state of mind I've scattered the threshold with all the finest and loveliest rose-petals that grow in your garden."

"My heart won't be happy," said the giant, "until you promise to be my wife, but if what this is about is your needing to know where my heart is, then you may as well know that it isn't buried under the threshold, but is in a particular hiding-place where neither you nor anyone else can get at it. And anyway, I'm not going to tell you where the hiding-place is, not unless you promise to step forth at once as my bride."

Naturally the princess didn't want to do that, she just wanted to find out where the giant's heart was, because she knew that once she got her hands on it she could force the giant to do anything she asked.

So she went on at the giant the whole time, to see if she could discover where his heart's real hiding-place was, and in the end the giant said, if only to get away from her incessant questions:

"You'll never find my heart. But if you made a journey one mil east of the sun and one mil west of the moon, you would come to a great lake. And in the middle of the lake there lies an island, and if you could get across to the island, there you would see a mighty castle. And within the castle wall is a big pool. And in the pool a duck swims, and the duck holds an egg in its beak. Inside the egg is my heart."

When the prince (who was lying underneath the giant's bed) heard this, he was so happy that he gave a delighted start.

"What's that under my bed?" exclaimed the giant.

"Oh, that's just a little rat," said the princess.

"Oh, OK," said the giant, and then he fell asleep.

As soon as the giant began to snore, the prince crept out of his hiding-place, said farewell to the princess and called for his wolf-horse.

At once the wolf stepped out of the wood, and the prince leapt on his back.

"Where are we going?" asked the wolf.

"One mil east of the sun and one mil west of the moon," said the prince.


[1 mil = 10 kilometers, or 6 English miles.]

(Svenska Folksagor, i urval av Jan-Öjvind Swahn, 1959)

3.

Now he lay and thought about the first time he'd had a dream of the ground opening up and swallowing him. It had happened the night after the Discovery.

How old would he have been? Four, five?

He was having a kitten from some cousins who lived in the country. They were already acquainted, the cat and him. She was fine and rather uncommon, white with blue eyes the cousins said, when he was meeting her in the garden.

That Saturday morning an aunt who worked at the check-out in Konsum was unwell. Mamma had to go instead. Pappa was away from home so Anders also had to go. He sat on a stool next to Mamma. It was nice there, among the voices talking of butter and coffee, how dear it all was, the clink of money and the till that hummed and jingled.

It smelt good in Konsum too, money and sweat and sweeties and buns.

Afterwards they came home and they were standing in the hall, at the entrance to the long, long living-room, which had a sofa at the far end. And Mamma said:

"Oh look, they've been here with the cat."

"Where?" said the boy, breathless with excitement.

"It's lying there on the sofa and sleeping," said Mamma.

Then she fetched the cat and laid it on Anders' knee, he stroked its back but he was so perplexed that he couldn't feel happy. He never really became attached to that cat, and this was all down to the Discovery.

How did Mamma know that the cat lay on the sofa?

And at long last, an insight: The others knew something at a distance.

He tested the Discovery and got proof. He could put his coat on back to front, and position himself in the kitchen doorway while Mamma was at the sink. And each time, unfailingly:

"But Anders sweetheart, what a funny way to wear your coat."

She knew. At long range!

It was after the Discovery that he started to poke himself in the eyes, to squeeze them tight and to roll them around, all the time wondering how the others could know something with them.

He couldn't find the answer. That was when the nightmares began.

(Marianne Fredriksson, Blindgång (1992))

on the by-pass

I kind of went through my orchid phase soon after getting into wild flowers. Like a lot of people, I suppose, I bought into the glamour and the fabulous rarities and, in the fervour of those early days, I went rather overboard about it; orchids are to wild plants as Dostoyevsky is to literature. Consequently (and rather unfairly) there's no group of plants about which I now feel less excited - well, that's an exaggeration of course, because there's plenty of groups of plants I've never given any thought to at all. Anyway, I couldn't overlook these wonderful banks of orchids which over the last few years have gradually spread along the verges of the local by-pass. These verges are now around twenty years old. Although orchids are long-lived perennials, they are also opportunistic colonizers, but it is a slowish business. It takes quite a few years for the ground to develop its mycorrhizal richness, for the minute orchid seeds to show up, and for the plants to grow from such tiny beginnings (the seeds themselves carry hardly any on-board food, and are dependent on the fungal partner to supply it) up to the point when they are mature enough to put up a flower-spike.

These orchids are basically two species, the common spotted orchid (Dactylorhiza fuchsii) and the pyramidal orchid (Anacamptis pyramidalis). Both are common plants, the former the commonest orchid of the whole lot, though it always attracts a lot of earnest scrutiny from inexperienced orchidophiles because the individual plants vary so widely, so it sets you to thinking about possible great rarities and about even rarer hybrids. When it comes to orchids, these fantasies are not so ludicrous as they might be. The seeds, being so light and so numerous, disperse so widely that even rare species do have a habit of turning up in totally unpredictable places. And orchids tend to favour the same spots as other orchids, so when you find one species you have a hunt around and you often find others. As a distribution pattern this resembles mushrooms more than it does other flowering plants. What's also like mushrooms is the way that plants who are standing right next to each other can be completely identical in every way except that one is twenty times bigger than the other. The weird glamour of orchids has a lot to do with their mysterious transactions with the other kingdom. (A bit like when pet-owners, jockeys or ethologists start to look like their animal companions.)

One difference from twenty-five years ago is that now anyone can take good close-ups of the flowers. The technology of macro and supermacro photography has effectively been given away for free to High Street shoppers, so it's hard to remember that there was a time when unless you were a serious photographer you could never get closer to any plant than four feet away. Unfortunately, it remains as difficult as ever to capture a more panoramic impression of the jaw-dropping profusion of spikes in a flush such as this: the photo above was the best I could do, and it looks nearly as uninspiring as it did in the days when I was using 35 mil.



Common spotted orchid (Dactylorhiza fuchsii)



Pyramidal orchid (Anacamptis pyramidalis)



A solitary bee orchid (Ophrys apifera) showed up too, here blurrily seen along with the two other species. [NB Isn't it rather pointed of Stace, on the final page of his great flora, not to even mention the well-known "wasp orchid" variety of this species?]

midsummer

It was 19:00 and raining gently. We went out looking for patio slabs. Rain is the best weather for robbery. We remembered a place to try, a dumping ground in a spinney. I had got stuck in here once in the van so this time I parked a bit further away with two wheels still on the main road. Some young bullocks feeding, hides all streaked with rain, shied away from us at first but then they got used to us. The paving slabs were thick and too big and heavy to easily work with, so we dropped them on each other and smashed them up. We loaded up the boot of the car until it sagged.

Then we went and climbed Cley Hill. Our trainers got soaked and then all of our jeans up to knee height, but far in the west you could at last see the long straight edge of the raincloud and as it got nearer the sky lightened and then the long grasses began to twinkle and finally at 2040 a little sun raced on the empty hilltop. There were some rosy groups of orchids but I'd forgotten to charge the camera, and lots of bedraggled but glowing rockrose and trefoil and horseshoe. Flying up the hill had been just invigorating and lung-filling, but getting off it wasn't so straightforward. Cley is steep on all sides (and of course Laura went and chose the steepest descent of the whole lot). Bare chalk is very slippy and the wet turf was just about as bad. Anyhow we bumped down somehow and went to Little Chef for tea and chips and a KitKat, then we dropped by mine to get a bottle of milk, then we went to a garage and got some more chocolate, then we went to Laura's and unloaded the paving slabs, now with fine-combed cirrostratus overhead. Then I went home and wrote a couple of things and then I went to bed and read Bill Bryson about Einstein and Max Planck until it was quite late. That was a midsummer evening, I thought.

Centranthus ruber (Red Valerian)

Introduced from the Mediterranean, but common in the UK, especially in the SW, on cliffs, old walls and rough stony ground. Part of the interest lies in the neighbourly coexistence of three common colourways:



1. A deep pink, a very common colour in insect-attracting flowers, more or less the same as red campion. (Whether you call this magenta is pretty much a matter of taste. For me the plant that defines "botanical magenta" is common vetch. In other words I think of magenta as an intense red-purple, rather than pink.) About 50% of the population are this colour, I'd say, based on many miles of Mendip streets.



2. Crimson, looking somewhat reddish in comparison to the previous. This is nearly as common as the previous, maybe about 40% of the total.




3. And white. Perhaps a comparatively sparse 10%, but still completely commonplace. (I don't understand the genetics behind this.)




Very much less frequently, (like, .00001%) you might come across this pale pink form.

The vivid colours make Centranthus ruber welcome in all but the most snobbish of town gardens, until it gets too invasive. But the classic location is on the outside of garden walls. Throughout the summer the plants narrow the streets on both sides, leaning inwards like arsenals of soft weaponry drawn up for a massacre of love. Then masses of fluffy seeds get blown into stony crevices and develop into even more of these tough, vigorous plants.

brief hist

New additions....

Double Shakespeare this week, with Love's Labour's Lost and Romeo and Juliet. (Shakespeare is the most futile of topics, if what you are interested in is getting people to read you. No-one will ever find their way to your words via Google, because of the swamping effect surrounding major canonical authors.)

Also: Borden Chase's Red River

And on Intercapillary Space:
William Canton
Lisa Samuels: The Invention of Culture

I've just seen the announcement that Yahoo are ceasing their free Geocities service later this year; the gloomy prediction in my advertisement has thus proved true, though what I had really believed was that the web would evolve in such a way that no layer however venerable would ever be lost; I had supposed that storage space would become so cheap that the tiny part of it occupied by an ancient hosting service (personal disk-space limit: 15MB) would cost more to delete than to maintain. But perhaps I am now the only tenant.... I've been with Geocities for around ten years. At the time I signed up, you had to decide which bustling virtual city you were going to live in - my choice was Paris, which I was told was inhabited by artists and intellectuals. (Cities such as Mumbai and São Paulo were not on offer; the Mid-West hadn't heard of them; nothing good, anyway.) The virtual city idea was an imaginative one, in the sense both of beauty and of indifference to reality. Its creator supposed that site owners might like to form virtual communities within their "local" neighbourhood, and would spend many a cold spring evening strolling the boulevards of "Paris" and browsing the ateliers of their neighbour "citizens" - none of whom were French, by the way. There were local contests and neighbourhood forums. This was a prophetic dream of Facebook. But as a virtual community Geocities was over-optimistic. The sites of that era were non-interactive, comment streams were in their infancy. Web surfers have a targeted agenda and do not drop in on new sites randomly. Nothing was less likely to satisfy than the site next-door. And besides, what meaning did next-door have, when every site in hyperspace was a single click away?

Soon after I joined, the virtual city idea was in effect bulldozed when inhabitants were given a new site-name based on their username. I suppose siteowners instantly embraced the novelty of having a site with their own name in the URL. For a while, I don't know how long, the old virtual Paris name was retained concurently. But if you try to navigate to virtual Paris today, all you'll see is a "Page could not be found" and an ad for the world's largest matrimonial agency, decorated with photos of lovely and gifted unbetrotheds (one is from Mumbai).

So my website will have to up sticks, and I'll be doing a lot of tedious relinking at some point. As a matter of principle (as well as wallet) I would like to continue to use a free hosting service, so if you've got any suggestions push them my way...

Oh, of course, what you really want to know is what is my grand total of web hits after ten years? The answer is about 35,000 (some stats were lost, so I'm not really sure). Of these, my long-standing Shakespeare page contributes a pitiful 347. The most popular is a relatively recent page on Rubens' Judgment of Paris - about 4,000. Memo to self: include plenty of images, and don't bother with self-indulgent creative stuff, remember about the targeted agenda... Of course I don't really mean this, but it's a sobering thought that the flock of Rubens students have probably given this page a lot of relatively engaged readings. Whereas the vast majority of other visitors will have suffered only brief disappointment - they realized their mistake and they instantly clicked away.

(One of my own naiveties was to suppose that occasionally my site would be visited by some casual specialist, who would take up one of my numerous invitations to email me with a factual correction. I knew I must have made a lot of errors. This pleasing fantasy has, of course, not once occurred. But when I wrote about Bob Cobbing on Intercapillary Space, Lawrence Upton jumped in straight away. That - actually uncomfortable - exposure of my ignorance has not yet recurred; this is because I no longer make mistakes.)

flowers on Brean Down

Some plants seen on Brean Down, 10th May 2009.

(above and below) Milk Thistle (Silybum marianum). Occasional in the UK near coasts, probably an introduction from the Mediterranean region. The seeds provide the herbal extract silymarin, commonly taken by people like Dave to prepare themselves for an office night out. (It's one of the new breed of nutritional supplements that appeal to a heteronormal male audience, like Bayer's multivitamin supplement Berocca.) Milk Thistle is thought to aid the liver in dealing with toxins, and is quite commonly used in severe cases of liver damage e.g. from Death Cap, toluene/xylene, cirrhosis of the liver, hepatitis.






(above) Bugloss (Anchusa arvensis)




(above and below) White Rock-rose (Helianthemum apenninum) - in the UK found only here and in three sites near Torbay. Crowns the southern slope of the down (yang). The flora on the northern slope (yin) is completely different. Brean Down, the isolated western end of the Mendips, contains a number of other rare plants that I haven't seen, but Somerset Hair Grass (Koeleria vallesiana) is the only one whose name I remember right now.

22° halo

22° halo round the sun, seen at Whitchurch, May 9th 2009, caused by poorly-oriented ice crystals in cirrostratus clouds. This is a reasonably common celestial phenomenon (he says snobbily, still dining out on that moonbow story), but I'd never noticed one before and I was excited when I did. Besides, it has the advantage of sticking around a long time and of being easy to photograph. The trickiest part was training the blackbird.

up to a slate pebble

Suddenly Dor turned round

and a dragon face and a furnace mouth came up at me large and hot and I shrieked.

That's scary, Dor. Don't do that to me.

Depends, said Dor, and she ran down the clotted hill singing "For he is a Plymouth man". Moss ran ribbons around her and squatted in the grass with her tongue out panting, her eyes on Mistress.

berrr-Um-per-dum dum! I joined in. My legs were like white brawn sausages (and an infant in Dickens), I sang God Save the King lustily, wearing Clarks' walking shoes and a navy Aertex Ladybird shirt.

It's the missile base. You can see 'em taking off down the loch most days. One hit into the quarry once. A Westland helicopter crash-landed in the glory hole.

Dor's toe-nails were soft and she could "cut" them just by picking at one side until a split appeared. She threw them into the stream and they milled in the whirlpool like sideways boats. I scraped at the powdery lichen on the bench and collected green dust in my sock. Mossy got her coat wet and vibrated in the air atomising doggy eau-de-cologne. Clouds slipped past each other; occasionally the sun came through and coloured the chink of a distant glen.

oh the ferny brae, Dor sang.

What song is that, I wondered. Look it up on Google when I get back.

All we do is try different drinks.

The clarity of the jug. The Claret Jug. This is Ravel, this is Morisot. International clarity at last. Soon we will begin to write true novels about everything. Even Algérie.

But if it's real, what else is there? Is it real or isn't it?

Yeah but Dor, what you're talking about is just something that takes pictures. What I'm talking about is a Camera.

Suddenly Dor looked terribly tired and tears of frustration came brimming out of her eyes and tracked down her cheeks because she couldn't find the words.

It's too hot in the sun. Dor, why don't you go in and have a lie down? I'll wake you up in time for Deal.

What will you be doing, writing your blog?

No. I'll probably have a snooze myself. It's so awfully close, isn't it?

Sagarethia theezans

Underside (above) and upperside (below). Opposite or alternate? These descriptions don't work for the peculiar leaf-arrangement of Sagarethia. Though the leaves are in roughly opposite pairs, each pair reverses the positions of the preceding pair, in other words it goes left-right - right-left - left-right etc.....






Sagarethia is known in the west only to bonsai fans. Whether its curious leaf arrangement once conferred a benefit to some ancestor in the battle for survival, I don't know. In today's plant it seems to be a mildly embarrassing genetic legacy whose impact has been ingeniously minimized, leaving only a beauty of character. But this may be a misconception.

ripple (not many things get written down)

it is an extremely uneven horizon," Niall remarked.

At five o'clock the tissues stuck together at the tip, forming one untypical hull. Opposite, young red babies sprawled between the green knees: watercolour shimmered, things were entire, they were dabs, but was this them?, and the impressions did not segregate from the atmosphere.

picnic among the spreadberries.

The planet city and body was bunged up. Every one of your hopeful exhalations seemed to begin: "Despite..."

avelshingst

The dabs drew close, merging me in them. Was I a leaf?


Is my grandmother, patinaed leaf of her own autumn, palm court and Ashkenazy concertino ......entire?

Prunus 'Shimidsu'

Prunus 'Shimidsu', aka 'Shimidsu Sakura', aka 'Shôgetsu'

Solen

Their home was close to the south mountain. It was not a high mountain though it had a ski-jump. But it blocked out every ray of sun from September to April.

Even so, they had a lovely, open garden. Redcurrant bushes stood near the house, then there was grass and at the back was a scruffy tangle of birch saplings and prickly resinous spruce where the magpies clattered until mamma went outside to shout at them.

Many years ago mamma had found an empty bottle in a paper bag in this tangle. After that, when anyone saw neighbour Oskar's black beard in the distance, they stayed indoors so they wouldn't have to pass him in the street or say hello to him. No-one now remembered whether his wife had run away or died.

With Inga-Britt she found in the skräp the thrown-out sprays of birch that mamma had cut from these very saplings. (She brought them indoors at Easter-time and put them in a vase, then hung them with the fox, the witch, and other ornaments of spring, and soon they put forth tiny green leaves.) At that time the tapestries of groom and season still lay face-down in the snow. In a few weeks it became bright. Now it was summer. Now mamma took Anna's shoes and tied them in a bag in the cupboard near the stove, to keep until the autumn. Anna made sure that the knot was really tight, so no animal could decide to make its home in them.

A waft of cellulose blew in from the bay. It was dinner time. Anna, aren't you going to eat your potato? asked mamma. Pappa puffed over the evening paper. Don't mind it, wife. She'll eat when she's hungry. Anna felt a longing to go and see Inga-Britt's cat. It had just had kittens, but they might be drowned. If Anna could have had a kitten she could have fed it potatoes under the table.

30 in 30 mins (ish)

1. Grieving win a caribbean wedd

2. e.g. scooters, holidays, autumn

3.
I am trembling, I want thoroughly drifting life may last
- can't remember -

4.
portugalis heitor
thought your prussic

5. weld flowers in glossgreen

6. strim extra fingers; water; no-one up.

7.
Sure I don't want to speak my language in your country,
or fill buckets with dandelions.

8. Don't you know, my swan? RAS-635

9.
They too slid on buttery pine, it is aspirational,
it is escalated. You know that.

10. each veiled in a frothy web

11. buckwheat over malt city: freckled, toothy

12. a b it's not actually a huge amount c you pretty much are already d whether you guys will

13.
my electric survey extend to corners of the universe!
clothespegs hang on me
power over wireless, sex over wireless

14. bright newton

15.
pounding mealsacks in the gym
fought to a standstill
we will fight

16.
chip diddy chip
7/8 World Music
you may gounod

17. not the same sameness

18.
sunglasses, barstools
over the shoulder
you'd soon give up

19.
I have no voice, none may speak for me
Is it nothing to you
all you that party

20. some living noise, one day you will answer

21.
and continue to punish me
by dying of your envy

22.
Put your hand
no I won't even commit
that I hate the sound
hush

23.
Emma, wild wind,
petals that touch

24. but make a lighten

25.
Mellis, Collibo, and the rivers like sausages
blazing guns, Dunson
Wulshire, meaty hills of bath

26.
when I went to bed chanting brooke's poulters
if twice from six you do conceal
the very price
though sang the mottled shore it came in restless andrew's breast
the

27. or minding my Klondyke

28.
they turn red as quickly
almost
as you do
finding yourself in the poem

29.
yellow - funny, but it looks red
the black wingtips
that is the sea, bombers

30.
oh it is an old song
if you keep your seed in view
harvest spring evening


concept borrowed from Rob A. Mackenzie (10th April 2009).

Prunus - early April

(Above) Yoshino Cherry, Prunus yedoensis





(Above and below) Winter cherry, Prunus subhirtella 'Autumnalis' - its final flush of flowers, with the emerging leaves. This is where it began, last October.




(Above) Prunus subhirtella 'Pendula rubra'



(Above) Prunus 'Hokusai'



(Above) Prunus 'Ukon'. You can't really see it in this photo, but when the flowers first open they appear creamy-yellowish, at least from a distance.

relativism

Go Jenson!

My word, Tom. You really are a mine of useless information.

Look, Dad, Kids Eat Free!
Ah-ha! I hope you're not going to make quite such a mess of it as that little girl. (laughter)
No we're not!
Yes, I am Dad, I'm going to make a great big mess!

I am not a huge fan of folk music, but these guys were really good.

...120 bpm which then slows down to 116 bpm, and on the whole I found the album very poor value for step fans. (from a review of Prince's "Sign o the Times" in Aerobics and Jogging magazine)

Never judge a book by your own standards.

In each of these cases the Q1 version crudely damages the tone and mood of the earlier scene by confusing it with the later: so Capulet becomes impolite, the Nurse a tippler, the light poise of Romeo prosaic. .... The middle of the sppech in Q1 is not Shakespeare; for his still impatient and headstrong Mercutio, suddenly caught by spasms of physical agony and anguished thoughts, Q1 substitutes pedestrian hack-writing in regular dull rhythm, concluded with a dismally banal sententious couplet. ... (Brian Gibbons, 2nd Arden edn of Romeo and Juliet, 1980)

Every so often I jot down materials for an essay about - in fact, a defence of - critical relativism, but I'm sure I'll never write it. That's partly because I suppose that everything in my Defence must have been said about a thousand times already, and perhaps refuted a thousand times too, but I can't really be bothered to check because that kind of writing bores me. I like the idea of writing it, though. And whatever may have been said before, it's obvious that an unrelativistic view of art continues to flourish fiercely in some parts of the poetry world where plodding schoolmasterly chastisings and furious line-by-line tu quoques are clearly intended seriously by their authors.

I would have mentioned Fish's "Is there a text in this class?" as the only book on the subject I've ever willingly read (and I think basically I just agreed with it).

I would have quoted that bit in Borges' "Tlön Uqbar Orbis Tertius" about how no argument is considered complete until its refutal has been completely worked out.
(that would amount to fully understanding why each of your favourites might seem like shit to someone else, and why all the things you hate might seem wonderful to someone else...).

I would have written about "hard cases", where the relativist argument might seem counter-intuitive: for example, that there exists a possible understanding of the world, not necessarily yet instantiated, but no more nor less correct than our own, in which

the "Bad Quartos" of Shakespeare's plays are more valued than the good;

or

Mozart's juvenile symphonies are rated above the Six (or how about this one: Beethoven's "Battle Symphony" above the Nine?)

or

the money-spinning gestures of Wilkie Collins' terribly ill later years seem more interesting than Armadale...

(I sometimes get so absorbed in this matter that no sooner have I thought up some unthinkable reversal of our consensus, than I try and work out the kind of way you'd need to see the world in order to believe these things. Surprisingly often, this procedure leads me to a mental place that is both sensible and revelatory. Surprisingly often, a little inspection reveals that the opinion I once considered so outrageous is in fact not just defensible but already widely held, and my supposed consensus depended on a highly selective sample of the earth's inhabitants.)

In fact these are not really such hard cases. The necessary perspective for a simple reversal of canonical judgment is often quite easy to imagine. For example, "All Shakespeare's plays are wonderful" is a common canonical view, but far more common is the inverse judgment, "All Shakespeare's plays are boring". Such judgments never exist in a void. Thus the latter view commonly exists within a larger framework of "All old plays are boring", "All old books are boring", "Books are boring" etc. -all views of the world that there's no disputing. Thus, if we try and imagine a context for the view of Mozart proposed above, the easiest solution is to place it within a larger belief about youth - in effect, a denial of the values encoded in the very word "juvenilia". That wouldn't really be very hard to conceive - views about youth have been through many well-documented changes in the last few centuries. Like when you look at a sheep field and reflect that the skipping, curious lambs seem a whole lot more intelligent than their stodgy parents.

A really hard case might be something like: "All Shakespeare's plays are deadly bores, with the shining exception of the absorbing Two Gentlemen of Verona." This is an opinion that is tough to imagine being held, because its sole exception seems to imply literary values that, you'd think, would be bound to find something to admire in a few other Shakespeare plays as well. What could you value in the Two Gentlemen that you couldn't also find reasonably executed elsewhere? So perhaps it might be possible to construct composite and artificial judgments of this sort that are really impossible to hold, inextricably mired in self-contradiction? (I am far from conceding it.)

I would also have written about the basic differences in character between inner and outer views of some category of artefact - as rather neatly summed up in that "I'm not a huge fan of folk music" remark.

And I would have talked about the secrecy of artefacts, why audiences can never understand them nor authors come out and sit among their own audience.


[One reason I won't ever write this essay is that its cultural moment has passed... There's a faded, period feel to arguments that (even hypothetically) discuss the ranking of Shakespeare's plays. In practice everyone knows that we relativists have already won the argument, even if we've never really had it...]

Prunus - early

(Above) Myrobalan Plum or Cherry Plum (Prunus cerasifera). Much confused - e.g. by me - with Blackthorn (P. spinosa) (below) but its flowers appear three weeks earlier, typically with (not before) the leaves, and it doesn't usually have thorns.





(Above) Prunus cerasifera, variety 'Atropurpurea', usually known as Pissard's Plum. I first wrote that this early moment of beauty must be why its admirers are prepared to put up with the next six months of shabby brown leaves, but the truth is no doubt otherwise: they probably think brown leaves are cool.

Plums generally flower earlier than cherries - at this time of year you can tell the difference because plum-blossom stalks are in ones or twos, whereas the cherry blossoms are usually in larger bunches.


(Above) Almond (Prunus dulcis) - easily identified by the large flowers.


(Above) I don't know what this is. I photographed it (beneath an overhead walkway) on March 19th. [Addendum: Thank you to Nadia Talent for identifying this as an Apricot (Prunus armeniaca), which I never even knew could be grown as a street tree in the UK - the free-standing trees don't ripen fruit, though. This ignorance of mine was due to excessive reverence for the great Alan Mitchell, prone to arbitrary silence about certain tree species.]


(Above) Prunus 'Accolade'. One parent, at any rate, was Prunus sargentii, the other possibly Prunus subhirtella.

but still, I do have an opinion

Natasya calculated the annual project fees. She went to see Ruud. With a benignly tolerant smile he made certain adjustments concerned with aspects of the world that she could not be expected to know and that it delighted him to inform her of.

While this was going on, Ruud took a phone call from Iain back at base. A jokey, expert, cryptic conversation took place, which included some twinkling eyes when he made mischievous allusion to his new colleague. It was a performance for her benefit. He hugely enjoyed it; so far, she was making a good impression.

Later that evening, someone flitted mysteriously through the dusky garden. Her face was obscured by a mantequilla, although this made her feel greasy.

Biron touched the felted edge of his hat-brim. Play up, old chap. The ragged spectacle of the mahonia-winged horse unsettled him. It reminded him of the dream of seeing young Terry chatting with his shirt off after surgery and all his innards gone, just a spine and a sort of ragged knot of red bootlaces where his belly button used to be.

See Amid the Winter Snow