Paedophilia and Lit Crit

Posted on April 18, 2005 by acb

I don’t know whether Rowan Williams got into any trouble for praising the works of William Mayne, a children’s author convicted last year of sexual offences against young female fans. I hope not. Since it was the Sunday Times that got the story, a lot of other papers are going to discount the possibility that it might be true. What struck me, however, was the comment from “Michelle Elliott, director of Kidscape, a child safety group who is herself a children’s author” [sic, including the absent comma].

“I wouldn’t touch his (Mayne’s) books with a barge pole. Books are the sum of you as a person. To divorce the writings of an author from the author himself is impossible.” But the whole point of books is that that they allow us to subtract from ourselves as people. They let us leave out all the vain dull and inadequate bits. They let us backspace till we have got it right.

Posted in Literature | 4 Comments

An unusual software plug

Posted on April 16, 2005 by acb

I’ve said this before, but Abby FineReader is the best 70 Euros I have ever spent on software and proof that the stuff built in Russia is much better than its American rivals. I am using it this afternoon to scan in some 30 year old xeroxes of typewritten Swedish court documents, about as grim a test of OCR as I can imagine. It went off and got a Swedish dictionary for me and then read, with very little fuss, a page that looks like this:

The Swedish-speaking readers may proceed to sprain their brains by clicking on that to read it at full size. It is part of the story of a real changeling.

Posted in Software | 2 Comments

What’s wrong with this country?

Posted on April 15, 2005 by acb

How did I find myself here? I think of myself, if I have any political home, as a sort of realistic leftish conservative. All my serious arguments for voting agaist T Blair are conservative ones, about the preservation and maintenance of standards — you should not subvert democracy by drawing us into war on a lie; nor should you introduce a corrupt system of postal votes. These don’t seem to me particularly socialist positions. But, if this survey is accurate, I am wildly to the left of even most Liberal Democrats.

This is chiefly because of my views on prison and foreigners, which are almost the last things that I would give up as I grow older and my brain softens. So perhaps the great divide in British society has to do with views of outsiders.

Posted in British politics | 4 Comments

What’s wrong with Kansas? (lobster edition)

Posted on April 14, 2005 by acb

PZ Myers has the most astonishing film sequence up at Pharyngula, showing a lobster being bamboozled by a sea hare, a creature that might be regarded as God’s first shot at an image consultant: a spineless, brainless, bottom-feeder that looks nothing like its name. The one talent that the sea hare has is to squirt obfuscating clouds of ink, which turn out, to be beautifully chemically tuned to predators’ nervous systems. Hit a lobster with this goo and it finds all its buttons pressed at once. It doesn’t know whether to groom, dance, or pick its teeth. Meanwhile, the sea hare slithers off about its own business. I know — let’s call the sea hare Karl.

Posted in Science without worms | Comments Off on What’s wrong with Kansas? (lobster edition)

The Conclave vs the Grand National

Posted on April 12, 2005 by acb

My expertise on the papacy is great enough that I won’t bet at all here. It’s just too much lke the Grand National: long and gruelling course, women riders discouraged, form very hard to read — but the real difference is that you can’t, in a conclave, put on an each-way bet.

Posted in God | 1 Comment

heroic defeat

Posted on April 11, 2005 by acb

If I’m unusually stupid tomorrow, it’s because I finally cracked this afternoon and drove up to Grafham to try and catch some trout. No one knew where they were, since there had been winds of 50mph over the weekend (it snowed here at the end of last week for half an hour, without anything lying).

The wind had died down a bit, but not enough to be comfortable to cast in down the deep end, where the trout probably were. Even in the shallow end the wind was high, and the water cold. Extremely cold. After the first hour I couldn’t feel anything much south of the thigh and waded in to land, thinking of the advice in Scrope’s book on Salmon fishing, published in 1843, to roll down your stockings (knee socks) and study whether your legs have actually turned black. If they have, you may honourably climb out of the river. He, of course, was wading the Tweed in February, without waders. American readers should at this point suppose themselves wading naked in the Gallatin — I have fallen into that river and the Tweed, and there is nothing to choose between them in point of coldness.

At around seven, the sun came out and photshopped the whole NE bank. I don’t think I have ever seen such saturated colour in my life. My camera was in the car, but I waved the phone at the vew, and may have captured some of these colours. It’s certain I captured no trout. I missed one: they seemed to be feeding on tiny black midges. But I don’t care, much. The sunset was well worth the journey. Now I am sunstruck, windburnt, and exhausted and I think I will have to take the little camera around in my vest in future.

Posted in Trouty things | Comments Off on heroic defeat

Monday morning tasteless blogging

Posted on April 11, 2005 by acb

Andrea Dworkin has died. Roz Kaveney has taken the occasion to republish a wonderfully cruel and perceptive review, topped and tailed with expressions of decent regret. I can only offer a clerihew, which was written either by me, or Francis Wheen, or both of us, when we shared a desk on the Independent in the spring of 1987.

Don’t stick your pork in
Andrea Dworkin
And as for Marge Piercy
Lord have miercy.

Posted in Journalism | Comments Off on Monday morning tasteless blogging

happened to be

Posted on April 8, 2005 by acb

“Happen to be” is the Anglican for “is”, just as “I happen to believe” means “I would go to the stake for”. It’s a tactful way of glossing over really important things. There was a gorgeous specimen of this in Roy Hattersley’s Guardian piece today about the rising power of Muslim voters in Birmingham, and their tendency not to vote automatically for labour any more:

Nobody to whom I spoke during my visit to Birmingham chose to talk about the postal vote rigging which had been exposed and condemned the previous day. Reaction to my own inquiries confirmed the reason for their reticence. The six corrupt councillors happened to be Muslim.

Well, stone me!

Then there’s “Respect”, the unlikely alliance of the the Trotskyite SWP and the disgruntled Muslim vote, which is left-wing in the sense that the Texas Republican party is right-wing. Hattersley bumped into them, too:

Dr Naseem – a retired general practitioner, chairman of Birmingham Central Mosque and Respect candidate for Perry Barr – believes the attack on the New York trade centre was orchestrated by the CIA. Dawn, the mosque’s newsletter (distributed to the 4,000 worshippers who attend prayers each weekend) publishes what he regards as evidence to support that fantasy.

Posted in British politics | Comments Off on happened to be

How the establishment works

Posted on April 8, 2005 by acb

A story from Private Eye: some weeks ago,. Christopher Booker was in town to write jokes. Not the Sunday Telegraph column: the deliberately funny ones — in this case a Sylvie Krin story about the Royal Nuptials. At lunchtime, he snuck off, being very cagy about where he was to have lunch. Since this was Private Eye, they found out anyway, by bribing the cab driver or something — and Booker had, of course, gone off to lunch with the Prince and his friend, Mrs Parker Bowles, at their palace. Hello!

Posted in Journalism | Comments Off on How the establishment works

too clever by half

Posted on April 8, 2005 by acb

I wasted five minutes this morning trying to get the RSS feed from the Guardian’s election blog working in Opera. The icon was there, but nothing I tried seemed to subscribe me. I dragged, I dropped, I clicked and control-keyed. Nothing. In despair, I turned to the help system. It turned out to be too simple to believe. On any page with an RSS feed, Opera will show a little icon in the address bar, next to the address. Click on that and you are automagically subscribed to the feed of your choice. Wonderful when you know how. But who would ever have looked there in the first place?

Posted in Software | Comments Off on too clever by half