Life Less Literary |
|
|
A small selection of the many things that have happened to Dan Sumption, his family, friends and colleagues
my homepage my life Old Ramblings: This page is powered by Blogger |
Saturday, February 16, 2002
Sometimes my dreams are like cathedrals. I don't mean they're tall and old, I mean that they have so many details, you couldn't possibly comprehend them in one lifetime - angels and devils at play on every surface. And somehow, in my lucidity, I can take all of this in not only in one lifetime, but in a few moments of sleep. So why is it that as soon as I wake up they crumble and fall, and all I'm left with are millenia-old foundations torn by ivy, lashed by wind and vandalised by passers-by. Take, for example, the other night - I was reading a magazine profile of... I can't remember who. I can remember the exact sleeping moment that the lucidity hit me, when I realised how funny it was that some part of my brain had conjured up this entire article, which I was reading word-for-word, my mind had created the environment in which I was reading it, where every fleck of paint on the wall was visible and slight changes in air pressure, temperature, humidity, breeze... I noticed them all, which of course I never do in real-life. And then last night... meeting up with.... someone, I think based upon Jan... climbing out of the house and through the woods and ferns to his tent, the dead turkey-bird-eagle-things under the trees, every feather picked out, the cloying bird-shit limewash mess dumped over them, the blades of grass bent beneath them. The points I wanted to add to the conversation about Kettering and Bristol, but couldn't get a word in edgeways. All of these things are shadows now, but at the time they were made so much more real, realer than real, by the accompanying details. And then the guinea pigs and the bleach.... nyeeurgh... no, that one's still far too clear in my mind. Add comment | this item Friday, February 15, 2002
I really enjoyed reading this valentine tale of woe - especially the supermarket bit. The Adam and Eve bit got a bit convoluted for me, but started making sense again towards the end. Add comment | this item Been fiddling with our new Unix server homes. Thought I'd try to convert some ASP over, starting with this blog. Well, the server has a thing called Apache ASP on it, so I thought I'd give that a try - spent far too long (though not as long as I might have done) fiddling, banging my head against the screen, converting upper-case and mixed-case to lower-case, before I realised that Apache ASP only supports PerlScript, not VBScript. So then I found a thing called ASP2PHP, and at long last dipped my toe into PHP. Unfortunately, the conversion process isn't very good - took me a couple of hours fixing errors that it put into the scripts, though to be fair I would have probably spent at least as long working out what mapped onto what. ASP2PHP seems particularly weak on file-system stuff: it barfed on a call to FileExists and screwed up the rest of the script after that. It also converted a lot of functions to variables, retained VBScript Object.Function naming conventions when PHP does things differently, and converted function calls to $function[parameter] when they should have been function(parameter). Ah well. Learning lessons all the time... Add comment | this item Wednesday, February 13, 2002
Finally found somewhere that can supply me with a new bowl for my Magimix (apparently I have the "original model" from Robot Coupe, as there is no model number on the thing. Looks like it's about 40 years old but works like a dream - when the bowl is in one piece). Looks like that website could be handy for a few more things I have lying around the house half-useless too. Add comment | this item Tuesday, February 12, 2002
Got another book review, The Murdoch Mission, published on Brand Republic today. Will post the full text here as soon as I get around to it, for those without a subscription to that esteemed media publication. Add comment | this item Ed just introduced me to Fischerspooner - wonderful sounds. Fast forward to the 80s. And unlike most music, it sounds perfect coming out of the tinny speakers on my Vaio. Add comment | this item Sunday, February 10, 2002
Another weekend in the countryside, rambling around Grindleford with Terry. Another opportunity to put some damn fine photos online. 1 comment Add comment | this item Friday, February 08, 2002
Hey hey! Got the initial caricatures of the FAD team through from Gaz. Niiice. Add comment | this item Thursday, February 07, 2002
Been swotting up on IRC all day - need to create some chatbot scripts for Liv4now - been aiming to try and recreate something like the Eliza perl scripts I had such success with on GSpot, The Network, Jolly Rancher and GSpot again. But... phew... that mIRC script! It's nothing like anything I've ever programmed with before. Obviously designed very much with a job in mind, it just defies everything that I have ever learnt. And... working out rules of associativity, execution order, variable scope... just about everything really, it's all pretty impossible. Still, I managed it... I have a very basic but working (and improving all the time) little script, "the vicar", which seems to work rather nicely. Now... I just need to add multi-word prompts, action responses, and a few more bells and whistles. Add comment | this item Drove behind a Bentley today (yeah, a Bentley. In Sheffield. Not only that, in Pitsmoor of all places) - its number-plate was FIL 1969 (actually I think FIL I969, but that's obviously not what it was meant to look like). For some reason my mind started thinking in Latin - Filis-Filial-Filius, something along those lines. A son is born. In 1969. That's me, that is! Add comment | this item Something very strange has happened to my computer over the last couple of days - it's lost the ability to notice double-clicks. Well, not quite lost: if I go into the mouse control panel and slow down the double-click speed to the very slowest setting, it can just about pick up very speedy double-clicks, but even this is a bit erratic. Normally I would put this down to experience and a side-effect picked up somewhere down the line of installing dozens of snippets of software from various sources. However, I was just chatting to Guy and he mentioned that exactly the same thing had happened to him, also during the last couple of days. I hesitate to cry "virus", because I know I'm fairly well protected and, mass software insallations aside, relatively careful, but it does seem like pretty obscure behaviour for both our machines to pick up at the same time. Anyone else ever hear of anything like this? Add comment | this item Wednesday, February 06, 2002
Lola's 1st birthday yesterday. Nothing much special doing - nursery in the morning, moaning for most of the afternoon. We're having a bit of a party for her on Saturday (jelly and ice-cream for the kids, curry for the grown-ups), but in the meantime I made her a birthday cake - chocolate, at Gill's request, though I don't think she realised quite how chocolatey chocolate meant. Nigella, of course, for the recipe - here's a very similar one (the picture looks almost identical to what I made). The recipe was called "Sour-cream chocolate cake with sour-cream icing". It may just as well have been called death in the afternoon. Equal amounts of sugar, flour and butter went into the cake, chocolatized with cocoa and moistened with eggs and sour cream (except I didn't have any - made do with a mixture of creme fraiche and double cream, which no doubt made it even deadlier). And then for the icing.... ahh, the icing. So rich, and Soooooo much of it. 80g dark chocolate, 80g milk chocolate, melted down with a wodge of butter, creamed up with some more cream-mix, pasted-up with a whopping 300g of icing sugar and a dollop of golden syrup for good luck. Oooh. It was heaven. And, did I mention, there was Soooooo much of it. Splattered it all over the cake - in between the 2 sandwich halves, over the top, and plenty left over to goo around the sides, and dollop some more on top, and spread it and flick it around, and lick spoons and bowls, and.... They say the proof of the pudding's in the eating. Wow! I was a bit worried that I'd left it in the over slightly too long (why is life never simple - the crappy old gas ovens we used to have in rented accomodations always used to need twice as long as listed in a recipe. Then when we moved in with the Aga it was bliss, but of course, no recipe caters for Agas so lots of trial and error. Now we have this electric fan-oven jobby, and everything needs to be sped-up and cooled down). Actually, burning the edges slightly just added to the perfection - a lovely touch of crispy caramel just inside the gooey chocolate icing. And the icing was heaven - a hint of hazelnuts, even though no nuts went into the recipe. And the whole thing was so rich - well, we had to give a third of it away today, because I keep inadvertantly eating slices and then finding myself unable to move for 2 hours (hence death in the afternoon. And morning. Evening too). Add comment | this item Monday, February 04, 2002
I'm kick-starting my proper journalism career with a feature for FAD-MAG on Intelligent textiles. Was about to get started when... I realised I had nothing to tape my interviewees with. Well, OK, I have an old dictation machine somewhere, but no tapes. And I have a computer, of course. So I tried hooking Cool Edit 2000 up to my phone... bummer, the phone doesn't do hands-free (it only does "monitor" which lets me listen but not talk). So... a bit of ingenuity and experimentation with various freebie microphones I have picked up over the years - finally I came up with this contraption. Thank goodness I hung on to this old Apple Mac microphone (perfect shape for taping to things - not quite a PMZ, but it will serve) when we cleared out the G-Spot offices. Tape it to the phone receiver and... voila! Your conversations tapped and taped with perfect clarity!
Add comment | this item Heh-heh! Finally finished The Big Nowhere - incredible, so many plots, sub-plots, streams-of-consciousness. Layer after layer, and they all tumble and re-assemble and... well, for something I expected to be a quick throw-away trash-but-enjoyable read it opened my eyes quite a bit. For the rest, I'll leave it to the reviews on Amazon (all of which I concur with). Just read a biography of James Ellroy - explains a lot. Only problem now is... I'd meant to get some work done (have a book on Rupert Murdoch that I'm supposed to be reviewing for Brand Republic) but now all I want to do is read the other two novels in the trilogy (sorry, Trio). Add comment | this item Sunday, February 03, 2002
Saturday 2nd February 2002, 02/02/02, 2s day, was my 33rd Birthday. I hadn't expected a huge response to the invite I emailed rather belatedly to all my online friends, but in the end we had a perfect group of people, just right for sitting around chatting and chilling. John, Sue and Annabel brought their tandem and bike up on the train from London, and braved the last mile uphill to reach us. They came bearing a 150cl bottle of Sebor Absinth. David had hired a people-carrier and driven up with Pippa, Beth, Rob and Simon, and their gift was a bottle of Jamesons. Emma and Jessie popped over too. We sat around, ate, talked, chatted... first the wine (about 10+ bottles, judging by the clutter this morning), then some sips of Jamesons (amazing - I didn't realise what a distinctive taste Irish Whisky has, but drinking this stuff tasted just like snogging Bridget 10 years ago after a Paddy's hot toddy). By the time we moved onto the Absinth (with caramelized sugar) things were getting pretty fuzzy. I seem to have found an excuse to start knocking back chilli pepper vodka at some point as well. Spent far too much of the evening running around the house trying to remember where I'd left my last drink, but had a great time anyway. Woke up slowly but comfortably - not too much of a hangover at any rate - and we made vague plans for the day - head somewhere into the Peak District. In the end, John, Sue and Annabel cycled back towards the station and the rest of us drove to Castleton, where we parked up and climbed the (steep, steep) hill to Peveril Castle. Back down again and into the Castle for lunch (Red Pepper Wellington with lots of various potatoes and veg, and a pint of ale) before we went our various ways. Drove back through the beautiful beautiful peaks - couldn't remember what season it was - the fields looked autumnal, in shades from green to brown, and everywhere were trees with their shrivelled bronze leaves still tightly attatched. I even managed to take a few pictures throughout the weekend, which I made into another life page. Add comment | this item Haha - I think I mentioned internationalifying food names the other day - well, no need - found this website of food name translations - very handy for the scorzonera I bought yesterday. Add comment | this item Friday, February 01, 2002
Hey! Looks like somebody else is celebrating my 02 day tomorrow! (please send me any similar examples you find!) Jesus! It's worse than that! Somebody has combined my ideas for this year and next year. Add comment | this item So, a very belated RIP then to George Harrison. Been on my mind lately - he was one of the background ingredients of childhood that you can't quite taste in the finished mix, but the recipe wouldn't be the same without him. Some of my earliest memories are of shopping with my Mum in Twickenham. I must have been 3 or 4 - below school age, at any rate. I imagine that my visualisation of the time has been tainted by the peculiar colour palette of early 70s TV and photography, but I recall flows of shoppers towering above me in shiny calf-boots and knee-length dresses, gaudy with turqouise blobs of paisley and violet patterning, colours expoloding everywhere, black post-Mary-Quant bobs brushing over Nana Mouskouri glasses, eternal sunshine haloing those high-up heads. It was a little like being Mr Benn, walking down Festive Road among playing children and smiling adults. A few of the places we visited stand out in my mind as small worlds of their own - of course there was the toy shop on Church Street, run by an ever-so-nice man who reminded me of Brian Cant, who was himself the nicest man on TV. In fact, I suspect that I thought the shopkeeper truly was Brian, and that is why I used to watch Play Away so eagerly, looking for a clue, a secret sign for my eyes only. Although it was a rare treat to be able to buy a toy from the toy shop, we did visit it religiously every week to make use of the jigsaw library. One of the high-points of my then simple existence was walking home with a new jigsaw to try out. Also in Church Street was the pet shop. I guess we must have been there to stock up on food for our dog, Disraeli, but for me the reason for visiting was to talk to the ever-chatty mynah bird. And to gaze at tropical fish - a little window on a distant world normally only visited by Jacques Couseau (another TV favourite). More fish at the fish-mongers on York St. Even more alien. A lot more dead. Scary - the closest a child ever comes to death, corpses staring, eyeballs fixed, nothing moving. But if you turned your back on just one of the creatures, you know that it would be up and dancing and plotting against you. And of course the fish-mongers smelt like no other shop, no other place in the world. It was hard enough to bear for the 2 or 3 minutes taken to select a nice cod, god knows how the mucky-aproned men in wellingtons put up with it. They weren't like us. Couldn't be. Although Mum never ate fish, she would cook it once a week for Dad, Hannah and me. We would sit around a table and tuck in off one plate. I don't think the fish was really the important part - I'd probably have turned my nose up at fish on its own - but the parsley sauce... mmmmm. I have never tasted anything so perfect in my life since. Another time we bought prawns for dad. If dead fish were scary, these things were positively terrifying. Aliens from another planet waiting to take control of my body as soon as I let them pass my mouth. I was given one to peel and eat myself. It sat there on its plate for an inordinate length of time - my memory has it pegged at 4 hours, though in the slowed-down spangle-coloured time of childhood it was probably closer to 5 minutes. I was too scared even to cross the room towards it, keeping instead a healthy distance of at least 4 feet between us. Finally, in the battle between cowardice and boredom, boredom won out - I couldn't face staring at this monster forever, and if Dad had already eaten a load then surely I could come to no harm. Quick as a flash I crossed the room, grabbed it and, paying as little attention as possible, stripped off the skin, legs, beady eyeballs, and popped the pink maggot down my gullet. There was also a dance school in York Street - a black door alongside the Nat West bank, leading up some stairs to a large dark-floored space. I clearly remember hoping, every time we passed the entrance, hoping that we would be going inside. But it was not until recently that I recalled why - I asked Mum whether she used to take dancing lessons, but no. Why did we used to go there then? Apparently it was from time-to-time the preferred venue of local market researchers, who would corner my Mum, eager to put her feet up, outside, and lead her in to answer questions or try out some new product. Once inside she would be rewarded with a cup of tea, and I would have biscuits to keep me quiet. Biscuits! So that was my holy grail, the reason why the dance school was so special to me. When I think of the regularity with which Rowan demands her several daily fixes of sweet stuff I look back misty-eyed at such an age of innocence. And finally, back to George (almost). There was a record shop in Church Street. I can't have ever visited it more than once or twice. I remember it vaguely as dark and musty, the kind of place I would love to spend hours browsing in today (perhaps that was just a trait of early '70s record shops?) I remember visiting it with Mum to buy Dad's birthday present - the Concert for Bangladesh album by George Harrison. An incredible artefact in itself - the oatmealy-box in orange and black with starving child, nothing like a normal record. I don't actually remember Dad listening to it very much, and when I "rediscovered" it during my obligatory Ravi-Shankar phase (when I was about 17) it was strangely unfamiliar despite being the packaging being so well known to me. The other two George Harrisons, Dark Horse and Living in the Material World, I do remember hearing. In fact, I was so familiar with them that if I were to hear them now they would feel quite empty, detatched from their natural habitat. Dad had a massive taping spree before a trip to Switzerland, and these were two of the albums committed to cassette. Dad allowed Hannah and me to choose one tape each to "own" - Hannah went for the George Harrisons, while I chose the rather more naff Paul McCartney/Wings, although I later changed my choice to 10cc (or was it the other way around?) Whatever, all of those tapes have become associated with continual play and re-play throughout countless car journeys through South-East England, France, Belgium, Luxemboug, Germany, Switzerland, Switzerland, Switzerland. They became part of our mental makeup, although the words never meant quite what they were intended to. For me, George Harrison's Material World was, quite literally, a world of materials - a 2-D patchwork of fabric, any and every colour and pattern permitted, visually confusing, contradictory, from which escape was nigh-impossible. McCarney's Jet (which for years Hannah and I though of as "Check") was another part of this same world, a nightmare landscape of gingham and tartan, so soul-destroying that "if I ever get out of this place, gonna give it all away, to a registered charity"... "if I ever get out of here, if we ever get out of here" sung with such despondency that it was quite obvious all attempts at escape were useless. Ah... the literal out of the metaphysical... "I'm a dark horse, running on a dark race-course" meaning exactly what it said, a song about horse-racing. Somehow, songs were always much more visual that way. Switzerland is another "thing" that's been much on my mind lately - from my recent mention of Paul's Basel-madness, through an email from Nik in Berne pinned to Dad's noticeboard, to meeting up with Mich from Geneva last night. There is no place in the world as beautiful as the Bernese Oberland in the summer/autumn. Of course, I mean that in exactly the same way as there is no taste more delicious than parsley sauce and no song touches the nerves like one about being stuck in a quilt. But still, it's been 17 years now, and I long to see the mountains and forests, pick wild strawberries, blueberries (mmmm... heitisturm!), mushrooms, walk on paths where the signposts give distances in minutes not miles or kilometres, build dams in streams of freshly-melted snow, stand inside glaciers and atop proper mountains... this is something I would like my children to experience too. So, good old George, he found his path to Krisna at last. Ah well. The best obituary I can think of is this cover version by Mark Ribot (from the album Rootless Cosmopolitans - how very apt!). Weep gently no more. Add comment | this item Books. Been immersing myself in Noir recently. Since finishing The Lord of the Rings, I fancied something easy but rewarding to read. Settled on some Chandler - last year I read through the trilogy printed in Penguin Classics (The Big Sleep, Farewell My Lovely and The Long Goodbye), and I recently picked up The High Window from a second-hand bookshop. Breezed through it in a few days - I was down in London fast approaching the end of the book when I realised I may need something to take its place, or risk a dull train-journey back to Sheffield. I was with Jan at the time, mentioned the Chandler to him, and he became animated - turns out Chandler is one of his favourites, but for hard-boiled hard-men he prefers James Ellroy. We trudged around to the Hoxton Book Depository and started grazing - far too many books that I wanted to read; filter, focus, cut them down to a shortlist of one. The winner was, on a platform of novelty, cheapness and length-of-read, another trilogy, Ellroy's Dudley Smith Trio, consisting of The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential and White Jazz. £7 for a reduced-price new copy. At first I was thrown by the differences from Chandler - harder-boiled, harder-men, set some 10 years later but written generations apart, and it showed. The language was also dense, overwrought for the most part, taking far too much glee in using 1950s Californisms and jive-talk. But I stuck with it long enough to get into the groove, and get myself hooked. So I was really pissed off when today I set off for London again and realised just when it was too late to return home that I'd forgotten to put the book in my bag. I'd just reached Wolverine, the third part of The Big Nowhere, things were hotting up, plots were twisting, and I was dying to get things resolved, or at least as resolved as they were ever going to get. Kicking myself doubly for not spotting my error when I was in the vicinity of the Oxfam bookshop, I headed into Waterstones to try and find a full-price alternative to last me for my journey there and back. (I hate reading two books at once, although its something I do far too often - I very rarely manage to keep the momentum to read both books with the enthusiasm that they deserve). Browsing through the Chandlers I noticed that Penguin Classics had released another trilogy - I was very tempted despite noticing that the book I had just finished, The High Window, was in there sandwiched between another two. But then my eye shifted up a shelf to a couple of Truman Capote books. I'd read some Capote a long time ago - In Cold Blood and another book of short stories whose name escapes me. On the shelf were In Cold Blood and Music for Chameleons - I skimmed the back of the second and noticed that "at the centre... is Hancarved Coffins, a 'nonfiction novel' based on the brutal crimes of a real-life murderer". More in the vein of In Cold Blood. More noir, but in the wonderfully minimalist prose of Capote. That clinched it - I bought the book. So my second disappointment of the day came when, on the train, I started reading the book and gradually it dawned on me that this was the book of short stories I had read before, and no doubt have at home somewhere. I seem to be making something of a habit of double-purchases lately (when filing away my Chandlers I noticed another copy of Farewell My Lovely). Not the end of the world, and I guess it's a book which could certainly stand up to a re-read, but it wasn't exactly what I'd intended, and I put off delving into it and got on with other things. Now I've started re-reading it, I'm kind of glad I did. Hancarved Coffins is wonderful. Capote's writing is of such incredible quality that it's worth reading whatever the subject matter - the choice of words, the clarity of meaning is enough. In fact, going through Captote's preface, I remember that this piece of writing-about-writing is the one thing which springs unbidden to my mind whenever I start trying to put finger to keyboard: To begin with, I think most writers, even the best, overwrite. I prefer to underwrite. Simple, clear as a country creek. But I felt my writing was becoming too dense, that I was taking three pages to arrive at effects I ought to be able to achieve in a single paragraph.Of course, I never manage to adhere to Truman's maxim - in fact, I too delight in overwriting - but I do at least keep it in my mind constantly as an admonishment. And then - oh joy - Capote on Chandler: TC: ...A thriller.Wow! This is becoming such a familiar feeling - the "I thought it was just me." I love Chandler's work particularly for the one-liners. The plots... they keep my interest, but they do always seem a bit sloppy, far too many unbelieveable or unlinked elements. But I had assumed that was my stupidity - I was missing something crucial - if I really knew how to read then it would all fall into place, one glorious masterplan revealed. Nice to have somebody as respect-worthy as Capote back me up on this one. Now I am so looking forward to getting home so that I can find out who the Wolverine is or, more to the point, why? Add comment | this item |
Yaaay! Another Dan cartoon courtesy of Gaz!
