Lewis Hyde (Trickster Makes the World, Canongate, 1993) says of the Trickster (such as Coyote or the raven) that ‘the boundary is where he will be found–sometimes drawing the line, sometimes crossing it, sometimes erasing or moving it, but always there, the god of the threshold in all its forms.’
I was reminded of this reading an article by Tom McTeague in The Atlantic, and came away with a notion of our prime minister as a trickster, inhabiting boundaries, creating and destroying in equal measure.
The Minister of Chaos: Boris Johnson knows exactly what he’s doing.
In the prime minister’s view, those who wanted to remain in the EU during the Brexit referendum didn’t have the courage to tell the real story at the heart of their vision: a story of the beauty of European unity and collective identity. Instead, they offered claims of impending disaster were Britain to leave, most of which haven’t come to pass, at least not yet. The story voters believed in was fundamentally different—in Johnson’s words, “that this is a great and remarkable and interesting country in its own right.”
“People live by narrative,” he told me. “Human beings are creatures of the imagination.”
I think that is correct. The profile is interesting: it’s unusual to read a journalistic profile of the prime minister that isn’t polemical (from either pro- or anti- standpoint).
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Another interesting read was a thread on Twitter this morning by Dr Emma Hodcroft, of whom Wikipedia says: Emma Hodcroft is a British-American molecular epidemiologist at the Institute for Social and Preventive Medicine at the University of Bern. Her research focuses on the phylogenetics of viruses and other pathogens, mapping the spread and evolution of different genetic variants.
She, with colleagues, has just published a paper in Nature looking at the spread of a virus mutation (‘EU1’) around Europe last year at holiday time. The thread has been rolled up at this link.
See the paper for full discussion, but what our model’s underestimation suggests is that travel related activities are associated with more cases than expected: Demographics, behaviour, & variation in incidence (city vs province-level) likely play a role.
But this was last summer… & EU1 isn’t even more transmissible. So why should we care about it now? As we head once again into summer & the balance of travel & transmission, while hearing about new variants –
I think EU1 can still tell us some very important things.
EU1 underscores the potential impact of travel. Last summer in Europe travel persisted as cases rose in Spain. There was essentially no testing, & quarantine may not have worked as well as we wished. Test&Trace didn’t stop transmission chains.
You might think that there’s an element of ‘no shit, Sherlock,’ in that, but the important thing is that it is underpinned by data analysis.
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The neighbours I mentioned yesterday were still chuntering on at 01.00 last night. In fairness, they kept their voices down, but they still carried in the still air.
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I watched Tale of Tales last night. The blurb for the film is
Once upon a time there were three neighbouring kingdoms each with a magnificent castle, from which ruled kings and queens, princes and princesses. One king was a fornicating libertine, another captivated by a strange animal, while one of the queens was obsessed by her wish for a child. Sorcerers and fairies, fearsome monsters, ogres and old washerwomen, acrobats and courtesans are the protagonists of this loose interpretation of the celebrated tales of Giambattista Basile.
Basile died in 1632, and recorded what we now know as fairy tales long before the Brothers Grimm–the brothers credited Basile as a source. However, these weren’t stories for children in the way we’ve come to know them. Partly because of the way the Brothers Grimm and others rewrote later editions of their work, but mostly because of Disney, we see much-changed versions, written with tender sensibilities to the fore. Basile, and the first editions of the Grimm collections, were much more robust, weird, grotesque, bloodthirsty and potent. In the earliest versions of Cinderella, for example, one of the sisters is encouraged to cut off pieces of her feet until the glass slipper fits (the prince notices the blood).
Tale of Tales, while focusing on only three of the stories, retains the spirit of the original. If you get a chance (and I think Channel 4 might be showing it in the UK), you should give it a go.
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Music: I’ve had an obsession with this record for fifty years, and wore out my original 45. Meaning is hard to come by–Alan Hull, who wrote it, was at one time a trainee psychiatric nurse at St. Nicholas’ Hospital in Newcastle, in the days when alcoholics were prescribed 25 milligrammes of LSD per day. Hull decided to try some, but didn’t realise it had a delayed effect and kept popping pills until something happened. 1000 milligrammes later, Hull tripped for a month and still had flashbacks in 1978 (‘pretty frightening, really’). He came out at the end with songs that were in Lindisfarne’s repertoire for years, notably this one: Lady Eleanor.
Endless minutes of fun can be had looking at website where people try to transcribe lyrics rather than just look up the sheet music. The title of todays post is a line that gets horribly mangled.
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