Author Archives: oook

The Common Toad

My friend Ron sent this wonderful bit of George Orwell, in celebration of the Spring:

…I have always suspected that if our economic and political problems are ever really solved, life will become simpler instead of more complex, and that the sort of pleasure one gets from finding the first primrose will loom larger than the sort of pleasure one gets from eating an ice to the tune of a Wurlitzer. I think that by retaining one’s childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies and-to return to my first instance-toads, one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable, and that by preaching the doctrine that nothing is to be admired except steel and concrete, one merely makes it a little surer that human beings will have no outlet for their surplus energy except in hatred and leader worship.

At any rate, spring is here, even in London N.1, and they can’t stop you enjoying it. This is a satisfying reflection. How many a time have I stood watching the toads mating, or a pair of hares having a boxing match in the young corn, and thought of all the important persons who would stop me enjoying this if they could. But luckily they can’t. So long as you are not actually ill, hungry, frightened or immured in a prison or a holiday camp, spring is still spring. The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.

— “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad,” 1946

Mandocello improv

I’ve been messing with the means to record from various sources, working out efficent ways to move stuff from vinyl and cassette tapes to digital form. It occurred to me that I could run pretty much anything from my Mackie mixer into the iRiver iFP-700, so I recorded about 4 minutes of a nameless something played on my Dell’Arte mandocello. It might have something to do with the crocus shoots that are beginning to peek through the dirt.

a few minutes later: there’s a problem with the integral player (that blue triangle), such that it plays back at double speed… not what I intended. Click on the hyperlink instead, to play the clip at the right speed. I’ll try to figure out what’s going on…

still later: I think I see what went wrong. The default rate for the iRiver mode I was using is 32 kHz, but the playback thinks it should be 44 kHz. Elementary mistake by ignorant user…

Bruce Sterling in 13 gulps

Every year Bruce Sterling gives a talk (well, a rant) at SXSW, and this year’s is a real barn-burner. The whole thing is available for download (along with quite a few other recordings of panels), and it’s really worth listening and then listening again to the whole 48 minutes. That’s a pretty tall order for people who don’t have mp3 players grafted into their lives, and long commutes or walks or whatever in which to multitask.

To give you reasons to download the whole thing, I’ve made a bunch of extracts of especially powerful bits, most of them pretty short:

American industrial policy 0:12
broadband in Serbia 0:21
technical backwardness 0:55
the last reels of Gone With the Wind 1:10
on Creationism 0:50
the ports scandal 0:25
where are Mladic and Karadzic? 0:48
quoting Warren Ellis 1:00
on spimes 6:00
the Semantic Web 2:20
the people tire… 0:20
Evil has a face 1:20
reading part of Sandberg’s The People Yes 2:40

This is heady stuff, and his reading of Sandberg (which ended the talk –I mean, how could you follow that?) makes the point pretty persuasively that hearing a poem is an essential complement to reading a poem silently. See also Jon Lebkowsky’s take at WorldChanging.

reading Clive Bell

One of the pleasures of midcoast Maine is odd finds in used bookstores. One recent example: Clive Bell’s Old Friends, a collection of sketches published when he was about 75, looking back over a life of having known remarkable people. Three excerpts, chosen for their vivid language:

of Dugardier‘s model, Irma:

Besides being a beauty, Irma was a wit, and a très brave fille to boot. A passionate cyclist, she was the first woman wearing bloomers with whom I ever sat down to dine; also, she was the first I ever saw pick up her plate and lick it clean. I learned much from Irma. (pg 151)

on Walter Sickert:

‘The opinions of Walter Sickert’, what were they? They boxed the compass between a first and a third glass of wine. Sickert was a chameleon, and the most I hope to suggest is some plausible explanation of the fact.

Sickert was a poseur: he belonged to an age of poseurs, the age of Wilde and Huysmans and Whistler. If, to be an artist, it was not absolutely necessary to épater les bourgeois, it was necessary to do so in order to be reckoned one in the best circles. And it was in the best artistic and intellectual circles that Sickert was admired. In London, at the beginning of the century, his position was remarkable and, I think, enviable. He was not a popular artist but he was esteemed. English people of intelligence and culture, whose culture was mildly cosmopolitan and more or less up to date, had to have an English painter to admire, and whom could they have but Sickert? (pp 13-14)

In an effort to describe Virginia Woolf’s conversation (“the fun and spirit of Virginia’s talk”) he quotes this passage from The Mark on the Wall:

…To show how very little control of our possessions we have—what an accidental affair this living is after all our civilization—let me just count over a few of the things lost in one lifetime, beginning, for that seems always the most mysterious of losses—what cat would gnaw, what rat would nibble—three pale blue canisters of book-binding tools? Then there were the bird cages, the iron hoops, the steel skates, the Queen Anne coal-scuttle, the bagatelle board, the hand organ—all gone, and jewels, too. Opals and emeralds, they lie about the roots of turnips. What a scraping paring affair it is to be sure! The wonder is that I’ve any clothes on my back, that I sit surrounded by solid furniture at this moment. Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour—landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one’s hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! (pp 108-109)