There are one or two things I didn’t write there that occurred to me afterwards, so I’m going to put them here.
The first is that, for the most part, I have gone out of my way to avoid processed food and so avoided hidden salt and sugars. Where I’ve had tinned food it has usually been chopped tomatoes or various varieties of beans. Whenever possible, I’ve made everything fresh. A bonus is that most of what I’ve made has been popular in the household too. The one thing I bought recently that was processed was something that I didn’t enjoy – vegetarian sausages. I researched what was available, but they were bland. I have eaten no shop-bought bread, though I have eaten homemade bread, usually made with low-GI spelt flour. Unlike shop-bought bread it contains no added ingredients beyond flour, water, yeast, a little olive oil, a little salt, and a little honey.
That’s all very worthy, but, as is often said, good food is more expensive than cheap processed food. I can enjoy freshly made food, and look for associated health benefits because I can afford to. I moan about prices in the supermarkets, but I don’t have to make sacrifices to buy cheap basics. It’s well known that living in an affluent area can add eight years or so to your life expectancy compared to more deprived areas. Lots of the co-morbidities associated with Covid deaths, especially in the early months of the pandemic, tend to be more prevalent in deprived areas. Health inequality follows financial and other social inequalities.
Secondly, today ought to be my final day of dry January, but I’m going to keep it going through February. I like red wine, I like beer and I like whisky and rum, but I haven’t found their absence a particular hardship. I might allow myself a couple of beers later in the month when I see Wilko Johnson in Glasgow with a couple of pals, but that’ll be it.
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The death was announced this morning of Norma Waterson. She had been ill for quite sometime, and her family’s fortunes have been savaged by Covid since they depend on live work for their income. She died yesterday afternoon.
This blog isn’t the only journal I keep, though it is the most comprehensive and long-lasting and the one that is public. I also keep a hand-written writing journal, a hand-written diabetes journal and a hand-written self-publishing journal. If this seems odd or anachronistic, it goes back to something I observed in the late 1980s when I worked at the Lands Tribunal for Scotland: it was far easier to access and read hand-written eighteenth century documents and records than more recent computerised ones. For the paper records, carefully written in registrar’s ink, you needed your eyes and a familiarity with the handwriting of the time; for computerised records you needed access to a system capable of retrieving and displaying the files.
Soon after that I went back to university for a second degree, and some of the things I wrote then, typically in MS Word for Works, are now inaccessible without conversion software. Likewise things that anyone wrote on the emergent popular word processors of the day, such as the Amstrad, were produced in a format and on a medium that are, to all intents and purposes, inaccessible without carefuly preserved technology. My typewritten essays from my first degree (and prints of my essays and notes from my second degree), by contrast, all sit in boxfiles and are perfectly readable, albeit embarassing.
I came across the same phenomenon again and again, often in tangential contexts, but the underlying operator is the persistence of technologies and ideas long after they might have been thought to be long-gone. I was fond at one time of talking about how the structure of modern computerised accounting and finance systems demonstrate the persistence of the banking practices of renaissance Italy, but more physical examples can be found in the persistence of such things as corrugated metals as building material and the continued manufacture and sale of rickshaws. In the context of typewriters, the English-language QWERTY keyboard, developed to avoid the typebars of letters frequently used together from jamming when typing at speed, survives to the keyboard of the laptop on which I’m writing this. And paper and ink is a phenomenally succesful and persistent technology that will survive any collapse of the IT infrastructure on which so much of modern daily life depends.
The fancy name for this is the Lindy Effect. Lindy’s is a deli. in New York, famous at one time for its cheesecake. Actors used to meet there, and somewhere along the line someone posited that the best predictor of how long a Broadway show would run was how long it had already run. A hit was likely to stay a hit. It appeared in print in 1964 as the future career expectation of a television comedian is proportional to the total amount of his past exposure on the medium. This observation was given mathematical shape by Benoit Mandelbrot in his The Fractal Geometry of Nature, and it was he who called it “the Lindy Effect.”
The idea has gained a lot of currency in recent years, in part through the tireless advocacy of Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I’m not in any way qualified to follow Mandelbrot or Taleb’s mathematics and, for my purposes, there is no need to try. The key point is that the future life of something scalable and non-perishable, such as technology or an idea, is proportionate to how long it has already been around.
Anyway, the point I wanted to get to is that my blogging, now dating back nearly 20 years and forming something of a diary of my adult life, albeit a partial and self-selecting diary, exists only in digital form – a form that will change and, in all probability, become redundant and inaccessible if I’m not around to keep updating it. This might not matter if you consider it to be ephemeral and its preservation an act of vanity, but from the perspective of my family tree and family history, I would be overjoyed to find an ancestor had kept a journal that I could read (the one whom I know to have done so destroyed it all before she died.)
So from the perspective of any future family historian who has some degree of relationship to me, it would be worth my producing something from my 20 years of blogging in a physical format that they could read without cursing technological change – and paper and ink is the way to do that. I talked about this last year in relation to my Covid Diary, but really I ought to think about something grander as an ongoing project.
Meat Loaf died the other day. There was a lot of reaction, as you might expect, particularly from my generation who were in their late teens when Bat Out of Hell was released, seemingly coming out of nowhere.
Some of the reaction was based on aspects of his personality, and he had recently made public comments about mask mandates and Covid restrictions, making his reported death from Covid unfortunately ironic. To be clear, I do not gainsay those sentiments or criticise those who express them but nor do I take pleasure in the karmic aspects of his death. In fact, since Friday I’ve dug out my cd of Bat Out of Hell and played it several times at high volume in the shed – I’ve probably played it more in the last three days than in the last 40 years. And I’ve enjoyed it.
Part of the enjoyment is the exuberant performance of the songs by him and Ellen Foley, but at least as much of it is the quality of the songs themselves as produced by Todd Rundgren. The material is mostly killer, and Meat Loaf had the perfect voice for it, although – and bear with me here – I have found myself wondering what Roy Orbison would have made of it.
I mean, everyone who was ever an adolescent can relate to we were barely 17 and we were barely dressed. What adult can’t relate to the pains and regrets in our teenage past, all the things we keenly remember and hope everyone else has forgotten? All set to over-the-top orchestrations and guitars sounding like a motorcycle?
The criticism of Meat Loaf the man -v- Meat Loaf the performer brings us back to the thorny question of what to do about disagreeable people who produce good work – the world, and history, are full of such. I’m not going to get into the modern debate about ‘cancel culture’ here – I haven’t really thought about it in sufficient depth, but, when it comes down to it, Bat Out of Hell was a collaborative effort between Jim Steinman, Todd Rundgren, Ellen Foley and Meat Loaf, and however much one might find one of them problematic, the whole is greater than the sum: three out of four ain’t bad, as the song almost said.
Like many in the UK, my first encounter with Bat Out of Hell and Meat Loaf was on The Old Grey Whistle Test and the performance linked below. Paradise by the Dashboard Light, is a sleazy song, but it’s neither more nor less sleazy (and considerably less saccharin-coated) than John Travolta in Grease, and Karla DeVito, who is absolutely not Olivia Newton-John, gives as good as she gets.
Today featured two triumphs – or at least they seemed that way to me. The first was that, after several years of wearing XL sized shirts, I picked a shirt out of the wardrobe this morning sized L and it fitted me with room to spare. That pleased me a lot. Since my last diabetes update two days ago, I’ve lost a further half kilo (1.3 lb to North Americans.)
The second triumph was fixing a problem with a typewriter that’s been bugging me for a week – an AEG Olympia Traveller Deluxe S, made sometime in the 1980s I think. Everything worked fine except the letter ‘a’ which wasn’t striking cleanly. It is now. That means that I now have three working typewriters and one more that needs some work. Of course, with four typewriters in the shed, I absolutely am not keeping my eyes open in charity shops and online for more. Nor would I like it to be generally known that I am interested in typewriters so that people might find them and give them to me (especially ultra-portables in reasonable condition*.) Oh no. That would be silly.
We value “naturalness” so highly that in some places we are even willing to hurt and kill animals to protect it. When non-native animals are killed simply because they “don’t belong” and not because they are clearly causing some measurable harm, we have decided that erasing the taint of the human is more important than the lives of animals – who, lest we forget, have no conception that they are in the “wrong” place.
To make good environmental decisions, we must stop focusing on trying to remove or undo human influence, on turning back time or freezing the non-human world in amber. We must instead acknowledge the extent to which we have influenced our current world and take some responsibility for its future trajectory. Given that we actively use at least half of Earth’s land for our own ends and actively manage many of our protected areas, a gardening metaphor seems right. But our global garden is, and should be, rambunctious because we must always leave room for the autonomy of non-humans. We shouldn’t seek to carefully control every plant and animal on the planet. We couldn’t even if we wanted to.
Rejecting the human/nature dichotomy doesn’t mean condoning all human actions because, as animals, everything we do is “natural”. Using “natural” as a substitute for “good” is the problem here, not the solution. Many human actions have been bad for us, bad for other species, bad all around. As a collective, we humans have clearly taken more than our fair share of space, water and other resources. But we don’t fix that by exiling ourselves from the rest of Earth’s species and building a wall between us. We fix that through repairing the systems by which we make our living, by learning – or re-learning – better, positive relationships with the species with which we share Earth.
I agree with that. She also argues that:
Our concepts of nature and wilderness sadly limit the solutions that we can imagine. Perhaps because of the bluntly extractive tendencies of their ancestors, it remains very difficult for many people with primarily European ancestry to wrap their minds around even the idea of a positive, mutually beneficial relationship with other species. Thus they can see only two conceptual options: destruction of nature by humans or separation of humans from nature. To save nature, we must exile ourselves from it – like latter-day Adams and Eves leaving Eden in shame after despoiling it.
I think there’s a straw man lurking there, but agree with her basic point.
I watched Marvel’s The Eternals which I wanted to enjoy, but instead stuck with to the end in a state of appalled fascination. The talented cast were wasted on a wooden script – a script as wooden as a log cabin in a redwood forest: so wooden that I had to check I wasn’t watching a DC film.
I also watched the final episode of The Expanse, which wrapped the programme up nicely and left me wanting more. I continue to enjoy Blade Runner : Black Lotus.
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*Ultra-portable models include:
Hermes Baby/ Hermes Baby Rocket
Empire Aristocrat
Adler Tippa/Gossen Tippa
Remington Travel Riter
Groma Kalibri
Princess 300
Smith-Corona Skyriter
Smith-Corona Zephyr
Antares Parva
Olympia SF
If anyone in the UK spots one of these going cheap … (the clue is in the name, they are usually surprisingly small and specifically designed for travelling rather than sitting on desks.) Generally speaking, these are all overpriced online, priced up for a collectors market that doesn’t really exist in the UK. Asking a premium price for a fully-refurbished machine is one thing, but for an eBay/charity shop special is something else.
I wrote back on 5 December 2021 that I enjoyed Ken MacLeod’s most recent novel, Beyond the Hallowed Sky, and I was interested to read Adam Roberts’s generally positive review of it on his blog Sibilant Fricative. What caught my attention, though, was Roberts’s discussion on structure, and how to treat different points of view. Macleod, as Roberts notes, pleats three strands together, and GRR Martin, in the Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones) sequence, weaves together multiple points of view. Roberts refers to his own most recent novel Purgatory Mount, though not by name, in which he opens with pov ‘A’, has a long middle section based on pov ‘B’, then returns to pov A to close the novel. Roberts calls this approach Amphibrach which is a term in poetry for a long syllable bookended by two short, unstressed, syllables. It’s an interesting way of doing it, but it faltered, in my view, in Purgatory Mount, because the middle sequence was more engaging for me than the two end sequences.
A novel I’m revising, working title The Magpie Rhyme, adopts the interweaving approach. A much delayed work in progress is causing me porblems with two distinct points of view, and I’m toying with options. My draft of this work in progress started with some interweaving but I found it clumsy and have archived off one of the strands to come back to. What I’m wondering is what to do when I come to seriously revise what I’ve written. If interweaving doesn’t work in this case, then I could simply put the two povs as two stories in one book, perhaps with another short story in the same ‘universe.’ Alternatively, I could adopt the Purgatory Mount approach, but if I wasn’t entirely convinced by it in that book, then I’m not sure as I want to experiment with it in my own.
An interesting remark in the comments section of the Roberts blog post refers to the writing of John Dos Passos. I last read Dos Passos 40 years ago and remember being a bit bamboozled by him at the time – I certainly read the USA trilogy (1930-36), in the combined Penguin edition, and also, I think, Manhattan Transfer (1925). I remember nothing about the latter, but do remember that the USA trilogy uses multiple short sections in a non-linear form. Cool, but more experimental than I have in mind for the work in progress (and probably beyond my capabilities to pull off convincingly.)
A conundrum.
Meantime, the short story muse has stirred and I’ve written two in the last week and a half – Immortalis, which is a 1400 word love story set largely in a graveyard, and The Devil and Barnaby Smew (ca 2000 words) which is not a love story and needs more work before I’ll be happy with it.
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