false azure: weblog

Sunday, December 30, 2001

posted 9:55 PM by alastair horne
[falseazure will be back in the new year. well, probably...]

Saturday, December 15, 2001

posted 7:50 AM by alastair horne
The novelist W G Sebald, author of Austerlitz and Vertigo is dead.

The New York Times obituary is here.

Friday, December 14, 2001

posted 11:55 PM by alastair horne
Just in time....

The wonderful actress and singer Jane Birkin is 55 today.

[Oh, and the equally wonderful Michael Owen is 22...]

posted 10:47 PM by alastair horne
The recent spate of virus-infected e-mails I've been receiving from Japan is causing me to develop an alarming sense of paranoia, particularly since the latest batch don't even seem to register as possessing attachments [though they certainly do have them].

So although I'm running what appears to be highly-respected [but free] antivirus software, have my e-mail program set not to open anything that might possibly be a virus, and have set up my system to monitor and [if necessary] reverse any changes that follow the opening of any suspicious mails; even though I've checked my system for all the signs of infection and found none, I'm still not convinced that someone out there isn't receiving a copy of everything I type, passwords etcetera included. In which case, s/he will be reading this as well.

well, at least that would mean that somebody is...

posted 6:16 PM by alastair horne
"There's a fascinating area of language between active competence and full ignorance, a body of vocabulary one understands and doesn't use. [...] The fascination of this shadowy volume of words is partly a linguistic one, but partly, also, a social one. Of course, the lifelong development of linguistic competence in an individual mainly proceeds through speech, as a child hears a word and repeats it. But, in an educated person, there is the shakier route of reading a word and attempting to introduce it into his conversation; at which point the vagaries of English spelling start to present a problem. Two common slips, both of which I committed when younger, were pronouncing "misled" to rhyme with "twizzled", and "banal" with "anal"."

[from today's column in the Independent by Philip Hensher.]

This has always been a problem for me. My earliest experience of it came as a child when I read the word 'hyperbole' in Doctor Who Monthly and then tried to drop it casually into teatime conversation. Never having heard the word spoken, though, I pronounced it as rhyming with 'superbowl'. Hilarity, of course, ensued [sigh].

I had equal problems with Tony Hancock's middle name, Aloysius. And even now I can still embarrass myself immensely: comparatively recently I positively humiliated myself in front of my Ph.D supervisor by insisting that David Leavitt had written a book called "Arkansas"; which would have been true enough but for the fact that I envisaged its title being pronounced as if one had simply stuck an 'Ar' in front of Kansas. Considering that this was at the time of the Whitewater investigation, when every news report seemed to mention 'Arkansaw', this was a particularly poor mistake to make...

Wednesday, December 12, 2001

posted 9:14 PM by alastair horne
"It's difficult sometimes to reconcile what I do, this, my niche in academia of English literature [...]; it's difficult to look at the people working in labs for hours on end or working out math problems so complex they might as well be Ellie Arroway's three-dimensional blueprints for all I understand. And then there is me, who sits and reads and thinks and discusses and writes, and really, what is that?"

In this entry from Monday, bluelikethat articulates convincingly the curious mixture of doubts and affirmations involved in studying literature.

For me it's the time spent with a book in one hand and in a pen in the other that really seems to justify choosing this option [and there has to be the pen there as well as the book; to me it seems to be important not merely to be absorbed within the book but simultaneously to stand outside it and admire the way that it's made].

The rest of the time, of course, it can seem like the expense of energy that might be better spent on something with a more tangible reward [in many senses]. And it often does...

Sunday, December 09, 2001

posted 9:42 PM by alastair horne
In the run-up to what is surely the car-crash-tv event of the week, Tuesday's Louis Theroux film about the shameless Hamiltons, the Independent's website has a profile of the former and an article about the latter's GQ photoshoot.

An intelligent woman I once shared a house with used to have a thing for Louis Theroux. I can't imagine that anyone could ever have a thing for Neil and Christine Hamilton, but I know little of such things...

posted 3:32 PM by alastair horne
One of the more tediously predictable events of the last week has been the media attention given to the Collins English Dictionary's inclusion the word 'Delia' in its latest edition. This has 'publicity-stunt' written all over it, and I can't decide which is more depressing: the lengths to which supposedly serious academics are prepared to go to publicise their books, or the credulous eagerness with which the papers seize upon this non-story.

More interesting, but obviously far less newsworthy is the fact that the dictionary also features eight new words from Japanese:

"bento" (boxed lunch), "gaijin" (foreigner), "pachinko" (a type of pinball game), "ramen" (Chinese noodles), "reiki" (a form of spiritual therapy), "soba" (buckwheat noodles), "udon" (thick wheat flour noodles), and "wasabi" (Japanese horseradish)

According to this report in the Japan Times,

"The fact that many British people are now familiar with Japanese words such as bento, pachinko, reiki, ramen and wasabi shows our increasing fascination with Japanese culture, especially its cuisine, systems of belief, therapies and meditation techniques and pop culture".

That may be true, but I certainly don't remember hearing anyone use these words, outside of those who've visited Japan. That said, however, I've not mixed in polite society that much since my return...

Meanwhile, Japan Today looks at the other side of linguistic globalism, asking people off the street "What do you think about all the foreign words being absorbed into Japanese?" Encouragingly[?], all eight of the people questioned [most of whom are in their early twenties] seem quite positive about the trend.

Thursday, December 06, 2001

posted 8:51 PM by alastair horne
A mildly disconcerting coincidence by way of postscript to yesterday's entry concerning the highly entertaining implosion of the Tories. I was listening to Hefner's "The Day that Thatcher Dies" [bizarrely released a good decade after she was removed from power] when I turned on the TV to see some footage of the Evil One herself. For a moment I wondered if this was going to be a moment of real synchronicity, but it turned out that her companion Marike de Klerk, wife of the former South African President, had been murdered. To find out more, click here.

Wednesday, December 05, 2001

posted 6:59 PM by alastair horne
"The party I joined was full of nice old people: today it is full of nasty old people. Their hatred of gays, blacks, successful women and the European Union is as extraordinary as it is offensive. But they cannot be reasoned with."

Nick Kent, co-ordinator of Ken Clarke's unsuccessful bid to become Tory leader, wakes up and smells the coffee. The obvious bitterness and sour grapes throughout the article just adds to the deeply enjoyable sense of schadenfreude that will be felt by anyone who endured eighteen years of Tory rule. Quite how Kent ever got the impression that his party was ever full of "nice old people", though, is beyond me.

Other highlights from the article include the claim that

"no group of 300,000 adults, other than the membership of the Conservative party, would have chosen Iain Duncan Smith over Ken Clarke.".

Don't take my word for it, though. Treat yourself, and read the whole article here. You deserve it.

posted 6:11 PM by alastair horne
Well, it's been more than a fortnight since I last posted, but at least this time I have a legitimate excuse: for the last two-and-a-half weeks my sister's been in hospital. Though there was an alarmingly long period when things didn't look too great, she's coming on well now, and we hope to have her home soon. Thanks to everyone who sent messages [people who evidently don't rely on this sorry journal for information on my life]. Normal service will, of course, be resumed etcetera...