Archive for March, 2009
WESWEE – “We’re Sorry We Even Exist”
March 29th, 2009 Uncategorized
Formerly the BBC complaints department, this was outsourced and is now a thriving independent company. They’re proud of what they’ve achieved: “The whole complaints procedure needed streamlining. The rigmarole of getting feedback, reading it, evaluating its content and then responding was ridiculous in this day and age. Clearly we needed to get from tabloid-induced complaint frenzy to abject backtracking apology in a matter of minutes, if not seconds. That’s what the licence-fee payer has a right to expect.
We’re building great relationships with our media partners whereby newspaper editors can let us know in advance what they’re going to tell people to be appalled by, with an estimate of the number of complaints that will generate, and then we just email the appropriate WESWEE [media slang for a 'We're Sorry We Even Exist' statement] to the DG’s Blackberry.”
Hot dogs made from cats? That’s tasty by David Mitchell
More art: Hammershoi
March 28th, 2009 Treats, atschool
Hammershoi, Interior / Young Woman from Behind
Hammershoi, Sunbeams / Dust Motes dancing in Sunbeam
Film Fest this year
March 27th, 2009 screen
I am looking forward to the first and second. The third seems too serious. I want a laugh.
DEAN SPANLEY – Must go!
HOW TO BE – says comedy so I’ll go
FLAME & CITRON Maybe?
His Illegal Self – Peter Carey
March 25th, 2009 books
Something changed.
I’m not very sharp about the books I read. I am, more often than not, oblivious to the plottings of man, the twists of fate, the hand of God, the foreshadowing, the symbols, the kind of thing one looks out for in Literature. I follow the author’s entire oeuvre and I follow the shifts in his mind. Not big ideas – I’m not interested in Big Ideas. Even comedy – although I love a laugh. They obscure the person that is wrapped up in layers and layers of words. I like stories because in very good stories, the author puts himself in the centre of action.
Like when John Irving wrote Until I Find You, he was talking about his missing parent, how much it mattered to him. (I didn’t have to read the nytimes to find that out. I was surprised about the sexual abuse bit however – I thought it was just his quirks.) Like Greene in The End Of The Affair, he was referring, of course, to Catherine Watson. Atwood, who is all about the writing, does it only in Cat Eye but not in other books. Thomas Mann (Death in Venice). Peter Carey, never has he put himself in his books. He managed to hide himself so well I was incredibly impressed by his imagination.In His Illegal Self, this was the most confusing book in his entire body of works so far. Yet it is in this book I found the author wrapped in lines and lines of words.
The shifting perspectives is not the worst: the confused perception of the young boy is. Lost, I re-read but it does not make it any better. Carey, obssessed with staying in perceptive of the young boy (eg names like The Rabbitoh, the confused impressions and misunderstandings) and the rashomanic repeats of the same event. He persists throughout the book with lush (excessively fanciful?) descriptions of the outback, of not showering and the petty quarrels in communes (just like HDB flats!).
The love, the affection, the warmth between the small boy Che and the mother figure Dial is touching. Carey is a master – he carefully paints, in a few brush strokes, the initial affection, the surprising deep love they have and the carefulness after a quarrell. What made this little family feel real is Trevor, whom the pair grows to trust. The strange unwashed man who tries to relate to the small boy but fails. Instead, he falls in love (or is it the other way round?) with Dial.
Trevor is Carey wrapped in lines and lines of words. The man who does stuff at home. The man who observes the bond between the mother and child but does not participate in it. The book is about a boy – not Che but Carey’s son.
Economic Incentive Tricks III
March 24th, 2009 Treats, atschool
Following on the success of Part I and Part II I’m launching Part III. Part I was a penalty: in which money would have been parted if I had not lost weight
Part II was a gift: pearls I got for myself would have been gifted away
Part III is going to be art reproductions. It should be a series of reproductions that will cost me a goodish sum and this will be gifted away to brother C., for his house as a penalty. I don’t want my usual Hopper and Vermeer. Possibilities:
An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump
An Egyptian Mirror
Celadon flask with lotus flower motif (Taipei Palace Museum)
Business men’s Bath (shown below)
And this: WOW!
Stag at Sharkey’s
Exteriors
March 22nd, 2009 Uncategorized
I love the full lushness and showy flowers of cyms. My favourite memory of Shanghai (awful city full of aggressive spitters who go after one’s shoes with vim enough to clean a mansion) is looking up into a banking hall across from the bund and seeing, on a tall stand, a blue and white ceremic pot of yellow cyms.
Anxiety
March 22nd, 2009 atschool
I have been experiencing some* anxiety about my FRM because I am so excited about it and I am working too slowly towards it. I can’t go through the materials any quicker – I have timed myself. Any quicker, I am not getting the stuff and it is a lot of stuff. Serious anxiety – not mild : actually had a bodily reaction towards the internalised stress. I am still anxious – it hasn’t stopped. It is the same anxiety I feel about a blank page: the smell of failure, of inadequacy. I look at the notebooks I keep when writing my thesis, hoping for hints. It does not comfort me. There was a lot of pain, yes, a lot of moaning,yes, but specifically how did I get through it?
Today, procrastination finally kicked in. Instead of working on the FRM, I toyed with the site. And tomorrow, instead of working on the FRM, I would be going through the CSAs.
Perhaps, this is the five emotions all over again.
*understatement
Various interviews
March 18th, 2009 screen
A Basket of Fruit – Ben Miller
Occasionally I’ll sit in my trailer and get wistful for a life in physics research. I’d like to have been involved in modelling neural networks, which was a hot topic when I was at Cambridge. But then I’ll look at my complimentary basket of fruit and I’m OK.
All right on my own – David Mitchell (from his wiki page)
As of 2006, Mitchell was living in a small flat in Kilburn, and cannot drive as he never took any lessons. In a 2005 interview, Mitchell admitted that he had “been in so many situations when I’ve just said nothing to someone I’ve fancied,” and he has not dated anyone “for six or seven years”, and is occasionally propositioned by fans. He notes that “I’m sort of all right on my own. I don’t want it to be forever, but the fundamental thing is I’m all right alone.” In 2007, he was best man at Robert Webb’s wedding to Abigail Burdess. He remains interested in history and said in an interview with The Observer that “I can see myself in a few years’ time joining the National Trust and going round the odd castle. I think I might find that restful as the anger of middle age sets in.” In his interview on Parkinson he stated that if he could go back in time to do one thing, it would be to go the building of Stonehenge, to ask them “why they were bothering”. He also plays the occasional game of squash and tennis, and enjoys watching snooker. Mitchell has expressed an interest in writing a novel but admitted that he currently has no ideas.
What I failed to do is
March 17th, 2009 Uncategorized
this -> http://twitter.com/head_space
Bugger.
As the Americans say, if it ain’t broke…
