Bear With, Bear With... Back.

And Bonjour again!

With less than a week until Dr Who graces our screens once more, summer must really be in its autumn years.  Needless to say, then, that my holidaying is over.  Having spent a week in Brittany, and about 2 days at sea, I'm back with fresh photos and exciting stories.   So, sit back, relax, and enjoy a yarn or two about my time away with three of the most cerebral people you're ever likely to meet.

 

A comment I take back instantly.

No matter how wonderful a holiday turns out to be, it doesn't necessarily have a perfect beginning.  We took an overnight ferry from Plymouth to Brittany, and drifted off to sea in our cabin somewhere in the English Chanel - something new for everyone.  At 6 o'clock the next morning, we were woken by gentle, but curiously intrusive, guitar music, and an announcement that we were only an hour away from land.  The instruction to leave our cabins was cued to perfection, being given midway through my shower, so we packed quickly and disembarked, all tired and still slightly shampooed.  Oh, and in true holiday spirit, it was raining.  

Arriving at our chalet in Saint Laurent, typical excitement was replaced with exhaustion and relief as we slumped down to the sound of raindrops on the roof.  Needless to say, we went to bed pretty sharpish.  By the morning (when we up this had almost gone), things had taken quite a different turn. The clouds had parted, the sun was shining, and we got to appreciate for the first time the incredible view of the bay we had.

Now there's a view you can chew a croissant to.

From there on in, things seemed much nicer for all.  With a new-found confidence in our prospects, we did what any self-respecting Britons would do on holiday, and pottered about.  After exploring the local beaches for a few days, and wondering what to do, we decided to walk to Concarneau, the next town over.  We could see it from the beach near us, and had been told it was only a short walk away.  Our hearts set on crepes for lunch, we headed off.

Now, it's true that it isn't all that far of a walk from Saint Laurent to Concarneau... provided you're walking on the road.  Instead, we were taking the more winding, yet infinitely more senic footpaths around two or three peninsulas.  Whilst this made for some excellent photo opportunities, it didn't exactly agree with the footwear of certain members of the party.

 

"See?  It's only around the corner!"

We made it, though, and got a two course crepe dinner and a taxi ride for our efforts.  It also made us aware of the Blue Nets Festival that would be starting just before we left - but more on that in another post I have planned.  For the moment, we were enjoying the two sides of Concarneau - the quiet, local side (where we had our crepes), and the tourist based centre, focused around the old Norman walls.  As you'd expect, it was absolutely heaving with people, but not without good reason.  The area was full of period buildings, converted into streets of shops.  While it's true that many of them were gimmicky and naff, a few treats were dotted about.  For example, we stumbled upon a chocolate shop with an impressive range of sculptures - goodness knows how they stopped them from melting in that heat.

Because some things are just inherently more awesome than others

We visited other little towns like this over the week - Vannes, Quimper, but Concarneau stands out the most.  Probably because of the walk and the festival, but also because it has, to my mind, contained the tourist infestation to only a region of itself, leaving a working port and livelihood for the residents, unlike so many similar regions of the world.

Of course, walks weren't all we did out there.  For starters, there was the consumption of a near-impossible quantity of cheese, bread and wine, of which my tastebuds and I have no regrets.  The noticable lack of a television, however, meant that everyone, even my darling sister, was reading in the evening.  A pleasant experience, to be sure, and one I tried to make the most of.  So, without further ado, I present a one sentence summary of the things what I read:

           - The Very Short Introduction to Literary Theory:  Dense but insightful, with usefully clear structure.

           - Moab is my Washpot: Hilarious and heartbreakingly honest - you couldn't ask more of it.

           - The Symposium:  Modern philosophers should write in Plato's fictive structure - it makes it so much more enjoyable

           - The Atrocity Exhibition: Comic yet tragic, structured yet insane.

           - Never Let Me Go: One of the saddest and most enjoyable books I've read in a long time.

As I say, a week is a long time.

In order to get the ferry home, we had to travel to Saint Malo and stay overnight there, once again finding ourselves in the midst of a port town that benefits from a tourist industry, much like Concarneau.  Though we weren't there long, we had dinner in a shop run entirely by the loveliest old lady ever, and had a fantastic walk on the beach.  Particularly interesting were the thousands of tree trunks lined up on the shore as a tidal defence.  Having seen footage like this, however, you can see why they're there.

 

They're not just pretty photo opportunities, you know.

I realise this isn't the most fluent summary of my time in Brittany, but there are good reasons for that.  1) You'd probably be really bored by the time I was through, and 2) I'm saving some stuff for a more thoughtout post, arriving soon.  In the meantime, I'll be putting some more pictures up under "Things of the Now".  I hope you enjoy them, and check back for more soon!

TTFN!

Au Revoir!

What ho, chums!

I know I haven't posted anything for a week or so, and I'm sorry.  That's on top of the fact that tomorrow, I head off from Portsmouth for a week or so in "sunny" Brittany!  Pictures to follow, I assure you.  So, there'll be nothing new here for the next 10 days or so, but never fear, for plenty is lined up for the moment I return.

See you all soon!

"Rioting in the streets?  Pft.  That's so 1789 - 1799..." - Charles de Gaulle on the London Riots

Happy Birthday: Why I Should Have Been Born a Day Later

Yesterday was my birthday.  I'm 19 now, which is all well and good, and I got lots of lovely clothes and things.  Some time ago, I looked up who I share the Special Day with, to see if I had some kind of tenuous connection to any celebrities.  It might not surprise you to find out that the reasonable odds of someone famous being born on that one of three hundred and sixty five days paid off.  So, happy birthday Terry Wogan and John C. McGinley.

That, friends, is my future.

Don't get me wrong, Wogan and Cox are pretty good people to share a birthday with, and I have nothing against them.  The thing is, I happened to find out who was born the day after me, and who I could so nearly claim to be birthday buddies with.  The list is so good, I'm actually going to do a countdown.

4.  Knut Hamsun: 1859 - 1952

He's a Norwegian Author, famous for the novel Hunger.  He'd be 142 today.  I have to confess that I've never read anything by him, but he's a Nobel Prize winner, so he's automatically on my 'to read' list.  You might not understand why I'm riled about not quite sharing a birthday with a novelist whose books I haven't read.  Then again, you probably haven't seen a picture of him, have you?

Above: The embodiment of badassery

Look at him.  Just look at him!  That's a photo from 1890, the year he published Hunger.  That's a look not many people can pull off, but by God he's doing a magnificent job right there.  Mind you, I wonder what he did when he wanted to look at something by his feet...

3.  Louis Armstrong: 1901 - 1971

Pops himself was almost a birthday buddy.  That's a big'un, that is.  There's an interesting story behind Satchmo's birthday, actually.  Never having a copy of his own birth certificate, Louis always believed his mother's account (I would, too.  Of all the people, you'd think she'd be the one to know when Baby Armstrong was born...).  According to her, Louis was born on American Independence Day, July 4th, at the turn of the century 1900.

It's strange that Ms. Armstrong could be so far out in remembering the date of her own son's birth, but there you go.  I suppose it's quite a bit more poetic, and Louis bought into it his whole life.  It wasn't until a few years after his death that a baptism certificate was found, revealing the truth for the first time.  So although Louis'd be 110 today, he'd think he was 111. 

But is that the face of a man who cares?  No.  No it is not.

2.  Barack Obama: 1961 - Present

Happy 50th, Obama!  This particular birthday should be a bit better known than the others, and all the more reason to find its tantalising proximity to my own so infuriating.  I don't think I haveto go into much detail on how cool this would be, so instead I'll leave a little video to make myself feel better.  It's done by Adam Buxton, a very brilliant man:

1.  Percy Bysshe Shelley: 1792 - 1822

I've already listed the President of America, arguably the most influential musician ever, and a man with impeccable sartorial tastes.  Who could possibly be better to share a birthday with?  Percy Shelley, that's who.

And he's got that sartorial thing going, too

This is a pretty personal gripe here, because not only would I share Shelley's birthday if I'd been born but one day later, but I'd also be exactly 200 years younger.  That basically means there's a chance his poetic soul would have leap into my body, and I would have taken credit for the next Ozymandias, or something.  Gah!  Not only that, but he came from Horsham, which is where I'm from.  I would have been first choice for the soul-hijacking scam!  But can I make any claim to birthday buddyism?  Nope, I'm just another sucker who's got a 199 year and 364 day birth difference between themselves and a dead poet.  Such is life.

As things go, I don't share a birthday with any of these people.  It's a silly thing to care about, I know, and normally I wouldn't.  It's just the fact that they all happen to have bunched together on one day so close to my own... and I could have joined their special club.  Instead, I'm left to sit at the door with Sir Terry, catching a whiff of Obama's cupcakes as they waft through an open window near by.

It won't last, he'll cut it.  Ah, satire...

TTFN!

By the way, that Obama cupcake picture comes courtesy of Choconancy1.

It's All Greek to Me!

When one is terminally unemployed, it seems wise to find interesting and practical ways to fill one's time.  Develop a new skill, say, or do something to help get that next interview.  I already volunteer at Oxfam, and I have great fun doing it.  However, I felt as though something was missing in my time-usage.  Something important that I couldn't quite put my finger on.  And then it hit me: I wasn't transcribing any Ancient Greek.

Fortuately, the fine fellows and females of Oxford University have been able to fill just such a gap.  Recently, they launched ancientlives.org, a website onto which they uploaded  tons of recently discovered Greek texts.  In terms of thousands of years old text, that's about as hot off the press as you can get.  I'm not sure I'm getting across the giddiness I get at the idea that these texts are previously untranslated.

Pictured:  My idea of a "fun night in"

There is, of course, a rather significant snag - I can't speak a word of Greek, ancient or otherwise.  Any other time, this would make me quite the usless drudge in a project dedicated to translating the stuff, but not here.  See, the researchers have created a special interface wherein all you have to do is identify the symbols, and the pattern you create gets entered into a database somewhere in the ether, which proper Greek-speaking researchers can access later on.

I hope that gives you some scale of the project - there are so many of these texts that the researchers are asking for volunteers who don't even understand the things to help them.  This is an entirely original idea on their part, but I still feel like I might be making some kind of a difference in joining in.

 

I might not understand it, but I can still enjoy it, dammit!

 Ok, so I can see that the appeal of trudging through all this unreadable text might not be instantly apparent to some of you, but here's some news.  Some of the texts found with the ones online have already been translated.  Amongst them are new poems by Sappho, and fragments of unknown Sophocles plays.  Even more amazing, a new story about Jesus has been discovered, written in 300 AD.  Just to clarify, that doesn't happen every other day.  Whilst there'll doubtless be lots of shopping lists and bills in the mix, maybe there's an undiscovered treasure.  If there is, someone's got to find it, and who wants to pass up that chance?

 

Shopping list?  It's clearly a lost Aescylus monologue about groceries!

This project's going to be around for a while, it seems.  If it goes well, the people behind it have promised to release another 200,000 or so texts on to the site.  Two hundred thousand.  That's a lot.  I don't know about you, but even if I can't understand it in its current form, it'd be pretty exciting to be a part of such a monumental undertaking.  This looks set to be the Classics' equivalent of the public submissions to the first OED: a little messy at first, but fundamentally changing the way things are done.  Who knows?  Maybe we'll see more projects like this in the future.  I, for one, look forward to the prospect!

TTFN!

Blues Reviews - Hugh Laurie's Debut Album

It's been some weeks since I've done anything to the blog.  It's unacceptable, and I apologise wholeheatredly.  Things have a habit of getting in the way, but that doesn't mean ideas don't stop coming.  As such, there's a nice backlog of stuff to write about.  Huzzah!

Let's start with an irrefutable fact: Hugh Laurie is awesome - the very definition of awesome.  He's been a national rowing champion, a comic genius, a novelist and a medical-telly miracle, now the highest paid drama actor in the US.  For us mere mortals, to achieve any one of those things would be more than satisfactory.  Laurie's done them all.  Even better, that's not the end of it.  In May this year, he released his debut blues album, Let Them Talk.  For most people, that's a massive career break.  For Hugh Laurie, it's another tick on the List of Casual Excellence.

 

If he put his mind to it, he could solve climate change before breakfast

 This is all very well and good, you might say, but isn't Laurie a former Eton student, and a Cambridge graduate?  What kind of blues can you write with that background?  You've made a valid point, astute reader - Laurie just doesn't seem the sort of person who could sing from the soul about the harder knocks of life.  Indeed, it's hard to think of anyone less suitable outside of the Royals, am I right?

Perhaps.  But this isn't exactly a project from out of the blue (pun intended).  Laurie is a self-declared, lifelong blues fan, and he's always been keen to have a go at an album himself.  If that makes it sound like enthusiasm alone fueled the project (aside from a fat load of cash), allow me to correct you in bullet point form:

     - Laurie's played the piano since he was six

     - He also plays the drums, guitar, harmonica and saxophone

     - He sings and plays keyboard for "Band from TV"

     - He guested on Meat Loaf's 2010 album "If I Can't Have You"

 

Obligatory image contradiction

So there's a musical history there.  A pretty good one for someone who generally qualifies as a "rather busy chap".  But does it pay off in the album?  Why yes, yes it does.  The whole opens with a cover of St. James Infirmary, most famously performed by Louis Armstrong, which is itself introduced by a virtuoso piano solo from Laurie.  From the outset, he's out to prove that he can connect with the blues, in spite of what you might think at first.

With a consistent mixture of classic covers and original songs, I think Laurie does a pretty convincing job, too.  Of course he was never going to have the soul and drive of the blues legends, but it's important to remember that 1) The album's more a tribute to the blues tradition than anything else and 2) This isn't even his day job.  Anyone who's seen 5 seconds of House knew the accent wouldn't be a barrier, and after that the passion for the genre just flows throughout.

The contrast!  It's just too weird!

Let Them Talk succeeds, then, in overcoming some rather drastic cultural boundaries, leaving in its wake raw talent and a passion for blues.  I can't confess to be an expert myself, but I know what I like, and I like what I hear.  For me, it's one of those albums that gets better with every listen, and it was pretty good the first time round.  For those of you still unconvinced, here's a little cover number.

TTFN!

He's Pynchon My Admiration!

I finished reading Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 about a week ago, truth be told.  Since then, I've been working my head around what happened.  It's not the longest book in the world - at 45,000 words it hardly qualifies as a novel - but it's certainly one of the most gripping and mysterious I've ever read.

For those of you who don't know much about Thomas Pynchon... join the club.  Nobody does.  He's books are published quietly, without much advertising or warning, and nobody's even got a photograph of him since the 60s.  In other words, he's done a pretty good job of making sure everyone pays attention to the books, not the author.  Ironically, it did earn him a cameo on The Simpsons - one of the two times he's made any kind of public vocal appearance.

With that paper bag, I'm amazed nobody's spotted him in the street.

Anyway, on with the novel(la).  It begins when Oedipa Maas, the female protagonist, is asked to execute the will of a recently deceased ex-lover, Pierce Inverarity (read what you will into these names, by the way).  Naturally, there are certain things that stand out as odd in Inverarity's will, and Oedipa is lead down a dark path of conspiracies and treachery, spanning centuries, mapping the intricacies of San Narcisso in eerie detail.

Does that sound creepy?  It isn't - it's hilarious.  In fact, Dr. Hilarius is a character in it.  What does this lurking conspiracy conspire to do?  Assassinate world leaders?  Act as a front for our reptile overlords?  Nah, they're an underground postal system, obviously.  As you might have guessed by now, the plot isn't the only surreal element to the book - the characters are pretty quirky too.  Be prepared for mad directors, ex-Nazi doctors, and moping, mop-haired, teenage imitations of the Beatles, called The Paranoids.

 Say, they sound familiar (minus the Naziness)...

Don't be fooled, mind.  This doesn't take away from the impact of the book at all.  Pynchon's satire is refreshing and welcome, like a drinks stop on a marathon.  Besides, if Catch-22 taught me anything, it's that the best stories about madness drive the characters, not to mention the reader, insane with it.  Everyone and everything in the book has a frantic uncertainty about it, as if they're desperate to put themselves forward as "most important clue", or "best tangential scene", and while that might sound like it spells everything out for you, it really doesn't.

See, uncertainty really is at the heart of this book.  Oedipa discovers about this secret postal organisation, the more she doubts its existance.  Moreover, as a character, Oedipa develops in such away that I couldn't help but find her doubts justifiable - there's a very good chance she's making up the whole thing to piece together her life, which is slowly falling to bits around her, or it's all a laugh-from-beyond-the-grave from Inverarity, or a multitude of other things.

 In other words, imagine rubbing salt into the part of your brain that deals with satisfying conclusions.

 So Pynchon leaves us to draw our own conclusions, and it doesn't feel like a cop-out.  Actually, the opposite's true for me, and I found myself thinking long and hard about the reliability of Oedipa as an investigative mind, because I'm unemployed and desperately lonely.  I even came to the interesting conclusion that all the critical conclusions I've read are wrong.  See, Pynchon offers a series of potential explanations at the end of the book, but I reckon they're to mislead you.  The real solution?  Yes, Oedipa's paranoid and quite probably mad, but she's not the only one.  In fact, the whole secret organisation is sustained by people on the edge, people like Oedipa who half hope it exists and, in doing so, create it.  It's the unspoken yet crucial character in Wainwright's play (invented by Pynchon, watched by Oedipa), a tentative escape from social convention.

Either that, or I've fallen into Pynchon's trap.  After all, that's essentially a recreation of Oedipa's journey - hesitantly stringing together clues to make sense of something nonsensical.  Maybe the silly character names are there just to taunt us, and remind us of that?  In any case, it speaks volumes of the nature of our need for a cohesive plot, well and truly keeping the book in your mind long after you've finished reading it.  So get out there: solve Pynchon's little puzzle if you can, but keep in mind that there might not even be a puzzle in the first place...

TTFN!

P.S.  "Things of the Now!" will be updated shortly after this goes live!

Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed...

Looking to find things to blog about, I've come up with a bit of an idea.  There's some technical wizardry I've been poking around with that allows me to create multiple pages, and I think I know how to do it.  Eventually, I'll get round to adding links to the blogs of all the lovely people I know, but there's something else I'd like to do first.

Starting today, I'll be updating a page called "Things of the Now".  Ambiguous?  Yes.  It'll just be something that's on my mind at the moment - a film clip, a song, a quote, maybe several things at once.  Anyhow, I see it as a good way of adding new things regularly (note how I haven't said "daily"!), and gives a little insight into my present mindset which, in a very hedonistic way, is what this blog is all about.  So let's get this thing kicked off.  There should be a shiny (note: it's not actually shiny) link appearing at the top of the page very shortly, if it's not there already.

TTFN!

Man Seeks Job: Has Experience With Cobras

As a student, it's pretty much a given that I'm strapped for cash.  As an English student, it's also likely to stay that way indefinitely, so it's pretty darn important I'm earning cash, and now.  The thing is, I'm finding that easier said than done. Employment being hard to come by around these parts, I've been thinking outside the box to try and make me some money.  Once you leave the box, though, you find yourself in some pretty scary company if you don't keep your wits about you.  I nearly didn't.  Take heed, fellow vagabonds and jobseekers - this information might save you a lot of time.

Trying to avoide another unemployed summer, I started looking online for the sorts of work you won't find on signs in shop windows.  Turns out, there're vacancies for telesales people spread around the Brighton area - some of them within my reach!  Regardless of their time or experience requirements, I fired up the ol' C.V. and set to work praying.  It was a shot in the dark, but within 24 hours, I had an interview with Blackcode Advertising!  Huzzah!

 I love you, Alexander Graham Bell!

Once that initial excitment had died down, practicalities came to mind.  Having sent of so many C.V.'s off at once, I had no idea what the company did, or how they did it.  Was it even a telesales company?  I was pretty sure it was a telesales company.  I've watched enough Dragon's Den and Apprentice to know that "not doing your homework" costs you dearly, so I got stuck in, and by that I mean I typed the company name into Google.

Naturally, I came across the company website, which is this one.  Not too bad to look at initially, I thought, but a little generic.  Still, they seemed professional looking.  Now, I couldn't find out how exactly I'd be fitting into such a smooth-looking corporate enterprise, but it looked like it paid well!

 It doesn't matter how, just so long as Her Majesty visits my bank account...

Then, though, I saw their "trademark personal advertising approach".  It's something called the "Human Commercial".  Was that what I'd signed up to?  Was I about to have a Nike tick tattooed into the back of my head?  Why couldn't I get any more information from them?  Things were looking dodgy, so I went to the library to do some serious research.

Just kidding, I used Google again.

This turned up a bunch of blogs like this one, which point to a general experience of 100% commission-based, door-to-door misery (there was one very detailed blog I can't find anymore - the poor girl went to an interview, and it sounded awful).  This basically boils down to one simple rule: you don't sell, you don't get paid.

Worse still, it seemed to highlight a parent company, running similar operations all over the country.  It'd explain why Blackcode's website only gave the profiles of two rather young looking executives - they're the only ones there.  No, this rabbit hole goes much deeper than Blackcode.  Everything leads back to the equally ominous-sounding Cobra Group.

 Which, y'know, can only end well...

If the fact that this whole thing now sounds like a cartel of James Bond-esque villains, just Google them.  The first page is filled with stories of scams and underpayment.  They're out to build up small fronts for the business, hire as many door-to-door people as possible, apparently regardless of the viability of continuing the individual company they create.  In short, it's a scam.  I'd be working for peanuts if I was lucky, and, needless to say, I wasn't too enthused.

The next day, I phoned Blackcode back.  I was planning on casually building up the conversation to asking about their involvement with Cobra Group, and how they felt about their recruitment technique (netting everyone who so much as mentions a contact number to them).  It was going to be the next Frost/Nixon.  Unfortunately, British politeness and petrification got in the way, and I simply ended up asking if the job was entirely commission based.  When I was told it was, I declined my interview, and haven't heard from them since.

 Pictured: My intimidation potential

So that's that.  A lot to read, I know, but it needs to be out there.  The Cobra Group are running this all over the UK, and it's not exactly illegal, but not exactly nice.  I wouldn't wish unpaid door-to-door sales on my worst enemy, and anyone who reads this blog has got to count as a friend.  So watch out when jobs seeking, but don't let this disillusion you entirely!  I'm sure there are still plenty of honest jobs out there*!

TTFN!

*N.B.  If you actually find an honest job, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD TELL ME WHERE I CAN DO THE SAME!

Photos courtesy of jumpinjimminyjava, Jenny Thompson (coincidence!), Laertes, and wallyg, all rights reserved, etc. etc.

Good News... Reviews!

Now that I'm comfortably back in ol' Partridge Green (providing you consider a room stuffed with cardboard boxes comfortable), I thought it was time to start putting content up on this here blog.  The past few days, I've been reading Tennyson's Gift, by Lynne Truss, and I've just finished.  But this won't just be any review, oh no.  This, dear friends, will be a review with pictures.

 

For example, I can only assume this was your reaction to the above.

I'll acknowledge from the beginning that Tennyson's Gift is hardly a classic.  Heck, I didn't even know it existed until it popped up in front of me one day.  Lynne Truss, of fame Eats, Shoots & Leaves, has written what can only be described as a historical farce.  Set on the Isle of Wight in 1863, Tennyson has set up home in Farringford, and just down the way lives Julia Margaret Cameron, pioneering photographer, desperate to have the Great Laurete sit for her.  At the same time, G.F. Watts, the painter, and his young wife, thespian Ellen Terry, come to stay with Cameron, and Charles Dodgson (known to you and I as Lewis Carroll), seeks Tennyson's blessing for a dedication at the opening of his debut childrens book.  Oh, and Lorenzo Fowler, along with his beastly daughter Jessie, are bringing their world-famous phrenology show to the island, throwing up plenty of discord on the way.

 

I must admit, he doesn't scream "comedy", does he?

Granted, it seems a strange plot, but it's truly made by its characters.  Tennyson's perfectionist persona makes for a bizarre and wonderful scene in which the choice between "peaches" and "pears" in Mariana is hotly contended, because life's hard for poets, Cameron has an astounding ability to give away wallpaper, and Dodgson's unique mind lands him in all sorts of hot water - not to mention the various unmissable allusions (and delusions) involving Alice in Wonderland.

 "They're just more poetic, damnit!"

These little details all come from a great depth of research into the characters Truss uses.  While it's certianly the case that they all lived on or visited the same part of the Isle in '63 (with the possible exception of the Fowlers), the plot of the book is entirely fictional.  The quirks and traits of the participants, on the other hand, are not.  Dodgson and Tennyson's traits are well recorded, but Truss really has gone the extra mile.  Emily, Tennyson's wife, is a minor character for the majority of the book, but everything she says or does correlates to how she is historically perceived to have been.  By that, I mean both Truss and I have copies of Ann Thwaite's comprehensive biography of Emily Tennyson on our shelves, but my point still stands.  Moreover, what she knows is used to fantastic comic effect in the end.  Emily's obsessive hiding of Alfred's reviews from his sight (she actually did this) leads to an unprecedented, yet entirely unforgettable, chapter involving apple pie.  I'll say no more.

 Ths bad boy'll throw a twist in yo' tale any day...

In the end, though, this is unfortunately both the book's making and breaking (not the apple pie, the depth of research).  On her own website, Truss acknowledges that the book didn't sell fantastically, and even provides a reason: "you should never put the name Tennyson in the title of a book and expect it to sell".  Sadly, she's right.  As a literary figure, Tennyson just hasn't been cool since Modernism happened.  For the past century, he's had a stale image; one of antiquity and misery (the latter of which he kind of deserves).  As such, anything that deals with him, let alone quotes quite extensively from Mariana, Maud, and other well known poems (albeit humerously) simply doesn't have the audience.  It's not a bad book, by any means - it pulls off the task of being both informative and funny at once quite exceptionally - but it's only ever likely to find a home in the hearts of a very special kind of bookworm: a sort that mostly got eaten up by bigger, scarier bookworms at the beginning of the 20th century.

 

"Our literature is tough, our lives are tougher!"

Photos courtesy of CarbonNYC, freeparking, S Baker, angieloves, and phelle.

You Say Goodbye, and I Say Hello

Is it a bird?  Is it a plane?  No, are you blind?  It's quite clearly a new blog.  Born from recommendation and subsequent coersion by several lovely people I count among my friends, I welcome you to the humble beginnings of Whalesong: my little place for rambling.  It's kind of like getting a packet of envelopes for your birthday - relatively unimpressive look at for now, but then you start to realise the potential.  You could use those envelopes to send letters to the Queen or something.  Not that Her Majesty's likely to read this, nor is it necessarily my intention to direct all future posts to her (for now), but you catch my drift.

With the arrival of new things, though, we wave goodbye to the old.  Some people are aware that I've had a blog before, this one, in fact, but look at the last time anything was posted there.  Over a year ago.  You could write and perform a play in that time, or take an entire undergraduate first year.  I should know, I've done both, and they were exceptionally fun.  To put the old blog into the new context my life has become would have been an awful lot of hassle, and that's not something I'm particularly keen on.  Besides, while I'm still interested in words their origins (I'm doing modules in it this year!), I felt there was much more I could/shouldn't write about, so I needed a bigger canvas.  That's what this is!

The old blog isn't the only thing I'm saying goodbye to, mind.  In that vast expanse of a year that's just gone by, I've made a lot of new friends.  We get on so well, as it goes, that two of them have decided to leave not only the country, but the entire continent.  They've made their excuses, "It's what I want", "I applied before we were good friends", or "I'm from America in the first place, I'm here on a study abroad programme", but they just don't fly.  Anway, thanks to technology, we're sure to stay in contact regardless.  Geography isn't a obstacle, it's a distal malfunction, or a proximity glitch.  A technicality, nothing more.  More fool my intercontinental chums, really.

So that's that: lots of exciting new things, and farwells, in some cases temporary, to others.  Still, there are plenty of "starting afresh" proverbs to justify the whole move, so it's all ok.  But enough of the goodbyes, what's there to say hello to?  There's plenty of interesting things that might happen in this blog now - I'm thinking reviews, musings, word origins ala old blog, and much, much more.  So, if you like reading the dense waffle of a reasonably unedited, unreasonably verbose mind... stay tuned!

TTFN!