Eclectic Trains

The Sunday Times have a poetry competition called 'Off by Heart'. It's rationale is based on an attempt to inspire children with the joy of poetry by encouraging the rote learning of poems. The competition goes against the grain of many contemporary educational trends and should be applauded for that reason alone. Here is journalist Daisy Goodwin's pitch:

Off by Heart is an attempt to revive the tradition of parlour poetry - to make poetry a public delight rather than a purely private pleasure. If you learn poetry as a child, it stays with you for life - having great poetry stored in your head adds lustre to the good times and consolation to the bad times in life.

Great pitch. I look forward to watching the competition.

I find the aversion to rote learning in the UK education system both irrational and counter-productive. More on this potential rant another time.

AA Gill has thrown his hat into the Sunday Times poetry ring and penned one of the most refreshing articles I think you'll ever read on the subject of poetry. I hope, like me, you will be inspired to dig out some old favourites and perhaps discover some new ones. Please pass on this article to your friends. Gill, by reflecting on his own prose and his 1,500 words a day habit, battles to define the difference between the journalist's wordcraft and that of the poet's:

I reckon I can make a craftsmanlike job of most wordy things, from a shopping list to a eulogy. But I have no idea, not the faintest inkling, of how a poem is made... I have yet to hear a convincing explanation of where poetry comes from and how it arrives, but I do know it is the highest calling of a cerebral, emotional, aesthetic existence.

Wow! Gill describes poetry as the "cornerstone of our civilisation" and I would have say that his article goes a long way in explaining why he might just have a point.

The backlash against dumbing down (DD) seems to be taking shape. University academics have presented a 500 page dossier to an MPs' inquiry complaining about DD and Manchester Grammar is pulling out of GCSEs because of DD. Where this will end up nobody knows but action needs to happen.

Imagine how in 2048 - when a lot of today's graduates will be hitting retirement age - this generation will reflect back on what we did to our education system in the 90s and noughties...

...and they'll be stymied because they won't have the analytical tools to work out where it all went wrong.

It's WUC time. WAKE UP CALL!

I did my daily scan of fellow tube travellers the other day. What are you wearing? Who's got a seat? Who's looking at me? (Well, you do don't you?) What are you reading? And there in the middle of the left hand row of seats (I was standing) was a young bloke reading from his eBook. Clearly an early adopter, this Gucci glasses scruff-head was flaunting his technology for all to see. His styled, dress-down, geek look may not have been a great advert for those other passengers entertaining the idea of getting an eBook, or eReader, but this was a first. A humanoid prepared to do the daily jostle with a sleek piece of 21st century reading kit. It is only a matter of time until the tubes will be full of them. The next breakthrough will be when I see 3 or more in a carriage.

I'll keep you posted.

There's silly talk about returning to the womb.
That's not for me.
But as we learn more about our pre-birth existence,
The imagination expands;
Empathy engorges.

The low hum of the swimming pool heating system,
The smell of chlorine and clammy heat,
Mixes with watery echoes and excited pupil voices,
Sending this spectator into his swimming pool reverie.

I said in a previous post that I was witnessing a personal shift in reading habits away from print. But my love of books and newsprint is going to be difficult to shake. A morning read on the tube (with a seat to boot) can induce private moments of pure insight and offer up flights of fancy before the working day begins proper. These simple reading experiences seem locked into our love of paper-based information. But the very fact that I am thumbing out this thought on my BP (BlackBerry Pearl) with its fudged QWERTY keyboard layout (two letters per key) probably betrays a greater sea-change in my literary habits; I'm just writing more. I'm texting, blogging and even occasionally 'google chatting' and all the rest, and all this has a repeat effect on my reading - I'm even more hungry for ideas in the written down form than I have been in my life time. It's probably my age combined with the easy accessibility of cheap technology for sharing thoughts (eg blogging on the web) plus the impact of the recession (shall we ditch 'credit crunch' altogether now?) all mixed up to make one big stew of curiosity.

A blogger I enjoy reading, and was introduced to through his weekly column in Monday's Media Guardian section (the print version as it happens), is Jeff Jarvis and his Buzz Machine. His recent blog on the decline of The San Francisco Chronicle is a fascinating take on a newspaper in trouble situated in the wider context of a generalised decline in the business of making and selling printed newspapers. Jarvis has one clear message for papers like the Chronicle: reinvent yourselves and engage with the new technology of news distribution (the web) or die. As a former newspaper man himself this a tough message from someone who has made berating the world of print journalism a cause célèbre. Jarvis's blog offers up an angle on the technology and humanity of communication that is a joy to read even on my little BlackBerry Pearl screen on a cold and dank February morning.
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Also read Goodbye to all this? about the future of subeditors. (Interesting that The Grandad choses to write 'subeditor' as one word when the rest of the world is quite happy with 'sub-editor'. Ahhh the power of house style over common sense and popular usage. There will be a reason for sure).

1. I started growing it in early December 2008 after a week of not shaving.

2. The early stages of beard growth are the hardest because your face is not use to it and it's prickly.

3. Old friends pretend not to recognise you when they haven't seen you for a while...

4. ...but end up being polite and saying "Go for it!" and "Why not" whilst muttering under their breaths: "It must be something to do with his wife being pregnant..."

5. For a short while you feel more intelligent.

6. Glasses help with the academic image and also accentuate your eyes to the onlooker, stopping them being lost in two hairy craters that were your eye sockets.

7. Shopkeepers think you could be a homeless person, until you open your mouth and ask for a mineral water to go with your copy of The Guardian.

8. Even unkempt bushy beards (like mine) require some pruning if you are to avoid blocking the food access orifice (the mouth).

9. Sometimes you catch yourself in the mirror and you get a shock. Who is that man?

10. As a consequence of point 9 you spend more time in front of the mirror.

11. My kids are convinced that I store food inside my beard for unscheduled secret snacks. (I blame Roald Dahl's 'The Twits' for that. But they are not wrong).

12. My beard is particularly coarse just after being washed and I long for its greasy foodiness to return. OMG, this proves I am in a bad, beardy space.

13. As a personal rebranding exercise it has had limited success.

14. Intimacy with loved ones is severely compromised.

15. The temptation to stroke one's beard whilst thinking is overwhelming. This can lead, when in face to face conversation with someone, to people thinking that you are not really listening to them. (Useful in some situations; a problem in most).

16. Inspite of being a big supporter of the folk music revival movement - Fleet Foxes, Mumford & Sons etc... - I don't need to be a beardy to do that.

17. As Che Guevara once said to the American student wanting to help the Bolivian revolution: "Go back to your own country, have a good shave and fight your own ruling class. That's the best way you can help, beardy kid".

18. Witty references to Grizzly Adams, Chewbacca and ZZ Top become tiresome.

19. On the one occasion that I was mugged (in 1989) my street fighting capabilities were seriously compromised by my long hair. (My assailant grapped me by my moptop and spun me round and was about to kick me in the face when my, croptopped friend jumped on his back giving me a chance to run free. Thanks again, Graham). I fear my beard might be an easy grip point for potential muggers.

20. Surely man's inevitable evolutionary direction is towards less hirsutedness (including in the facial region).

21. My favourite aunt, my only grandma and my wife all disapproved of the beard on the same day (yesterday). This cannot be an historical accident, it's fate. The beard must go.

22. My newly born daughter (4 weeks old) might get to used to having a bearded dad and be traumatised when I shave it off.

23. My newly born daughter is not getting proper kisses (the type with varied cheek contact) because I am a prickly monster. This will not do (see point 14).

24. Vanity, although difficult to admit, is an issue. What I might gain with elevated academic gravitas in some circles, I lose in others by looking like an old git with a grey beard. The grey is in a strong 30% minority, flecked on top of the dark, brown 70% undergrowth. I am not about to start zapping the whiteness (as I prefer to call the greyness) on my head with Grecian 2000 but why let the whiteness spread like tangle weed to the lower reaches of your face.

25. Hairballs. No one ever tells you about hairballs but they are a permanent feature. Why? It's obvious isn't it? After eating you lick your lips to clean your chops (surely an evolutionary instinct?) resulting in beard hair collecting in the back of your throat. Unavoidable and quite disgusting.

The beard has just left the room.

I've always taken a strange pleasure in a private fantasy that CCTV cameras might reach a finite numerical saturation point because the state would simply be unable to employ enough people to watch the footage. And a private fantasy this must stay because "hundreds of PhD students around the world" are trying to make CCTV smarter. The aim is to fully automate the tracking process by developing sophisticated computer software that can model human behaviour patterns. Smart dumbness for any fellow fantasists who still crave freedom, I reckon.

Well I hope you caught the show, Limmy's Show that is. I'm not going to bore you with a long, windbaggy review, suffice to say I was smiling and laughing from ear to ear throughout the show. It felt like an old virtual friend had jumped from the small small screen to the small screen and was talking to me right in my front room (are you talking to me?). Quite a shock for someone (me), who like Brian Limond (aka Limmy) has probably has spent far too many hours over the last 10 years staring at cyberspace. And what have we got to show for it? Well, Brian's got Limmy's Show and good luck to him.

Fellow Blogger, Antonine Plato, caught one of Limmy's rare gigs in London back in 2007 and wrote a nice little prophetic piece about how we might see this fella on the box. Blogtastic crystal ball usage Antonine! It must be getting late...

It is with great pleasure that I can announce the arrival of Limmy's Show to a telly (or Sky box) near you. Ever since I was sent a link by my brother to his Swearing Xylophone back in 2003, I have been a member of his fan club. Limmy, a Glasgow-based internet comedian, has a keen eye and ear for the absurd and plays with his audience's preconceptions of Glaswegian caricatures to hilarious effect. He had a brief outing on BBC's The Culture Show in 2007 and has performed at a few festivals, but now he is getting a long-awaited television series. Like all early-adopters of fringe artists, I hope he doesn't water down his material too much but I think in the current climate it might be unrealistic to expect a defensive BBC to let Limmy have full creative freedom. His website videos - www.limmy.com/blog/videos - are truly out there and certainly not to everyone's tastes. I have favourites and here are two of them and if you don't like these, don't watch the show.

Yes or No - Ever wanted to get violent with a contributor from the floor? Watch this.

What would you do? - Under extreme pressure from work, your family or the bank? Have a taste of this.

Limmy's Show
Wednesday 18th February, 10pm
BBC2 Scotland (Sky 990 / Freesat 970)

And repeated...
Monday 23rd February, 11:15pm
BBC1 Scotland (Sky 971 / Freesat 960)

And, of course, BBC iPlayer.

My review of Hitchcock's Notorious, which is re-released this week to coincide with the BFI's Ingrid Bergman season, can be read here: Wrapped around Ingrid Bergman.

Are you a Mechanical Turk? I am. This picture of a keyboard has come from a web service called acobox.com - a copyright free image hosting service. Acobox were offering any takers via Mechanical Turk $1 if they were prepared to host one of their images on their blog*. Well, here it is and I've done what was asked. I wasn't obliged to write anything nice about Acobox or anything about them at all in fact. I just had to use a photo. But, as it happens, it seems like a really simple and useful service for a blogger like me. A copyright free hosting source for photos of all varieties? I'm signing up.

Actually, this was part of an investigation I'm conducting into digital piece work (which sounds exploitative), or crowdsourcing (which sounds like an amazing social experiment) on Uncrunched.com, my anti-credit crunch blog. Amazon's crowdsourcing site, Mechanical Turk, has literally thousands of micro-jobs that can be completed by anyone with a broadband connection and a desire to "earn" micro-money.

That's 171 words and with these final words included - that's 228 in total - my assignment is complete. (Acobox wanted me to write a minimum of 150 words). Visit Uncrunched.com in a few days for an assessment of the whole experience of me becoming one of the growing millions of VPWs (Virtual PieceWorkers).

*Sponsored Post

The BFI have an Ingrid Bergman season on at the BFI Southbank this January. I have just seen a newish print of Notorious (which is part of the season) and I think Bergman's performance is worth the ticket price alone. Colm Tóibín's article, For old times' sake, captures some of the magic of Bergman's early and later work.

Yesterday was a nightmare waiting to happen and happen it did. I left the office early and on time at 1.15pm to travel back to East Ham to see my eldest daughter in her Xmas performance of Hansel and Gretel. I had my work bag (a Dell computer bag without a computer in it) and my video camera. (I intended to video the show, or at least key moments with my daughter in, so that my wife, at home with a sickly youngest daughter, could see the recording). I took the Central Line from Bethnal Green to Mile End and changed at Mile End to pick up the District Line to Upton Park. The District Line was, however, not happening. Someone had "fallen under a train" at Whitechapel and trains weren't moving. Sad, but how was I going to get to the Xmas show on time? I waited for 5 minutes and realised that the announcements advising passengers to take alternative routes applied to me. I hopped on the next Central Line train to Stratford and caught the only black cab in the rank to the school in E13. As I pulled up outside the school with 2 minutes to spare (and £10 lighter), I saw my daughters' former childminder (P) with one of her charges (C) strolling along and on her way to see the show. I said thanks to the driver and said hello to P and C as we walked into the school playground. I got through the reception door and then my small, fragile world fell apart...

...I had committed a Mr Magoo like atrocity on myself - the video camera was still in the back of the cab...

...to cut a very long and tiresome shaggy dog story short; the video camera has not been retrieved. I saw my daughter's show and very good it was too. (Although strangely I never saw my daughter, as she had decided, I think partly in protest of not being given a major role, to hide her face behind the back row of the choir. I could hear her recorder playing but not see her. A video camera would not have altered this odd situation. Ironic, you might say as I had no camera anyway). I managed to track down my taxi driver by some deft detective work. All right, I went back to the Stratford taxi rank and chatted to some drivers who recognised my description of the driver and said I must have been a customer of "Big John". I got Big John's mobile; texted him; he called me back and he said he would try and help but he had picked up 2 customers after me and the camera wasn't on the back seat any more.

THE PAIN, THE PAIN. Sure insurance may cover it (I haven't checked the policy yet). But the camera was pristine - a 3 year old, low tech memory machine. The tape inside it had my youngest daughter's Xmas show, as recorded by my wife which I still hadn't seen. Now do you understand? How could someone pick up that camera and not make an effort to return it? If they played the tape they would see immediately that someone's sentimental, personal family stuff was going to be sorely missed. The new "owners" of my camera could even work out which school my daughter went to, because, as my wife informed me, the headteacher's traditional welcoming speech to parents before "Whoops-a-Daisy Angel" kicked off the nursery kids' Xmas show, mentioned the school's name a number of times.

RETURN THE CAMERA TO THE SCHOOL, WHY DON'T CHA? Are you on the same page? Acute pain. I am a very careful chap. I guard my gear. A suicide, a delay, a freak diversion, a taxi ride and some recognisable faces could all be added into the mix of distractions but at the end of the day I just magooed. Plain Mr Magooed it. Magooed it big time!

Rectifying a situation like this isn't easy. You fight with yourself, you retrace steps and you make strange phone calls to lost and found warehouse operators. The line is a bit echoey...

...but then COMEDY COMES TO THE RESCUE. I didn't feel like drinking. COMEDY, that's what I needed. I believe great comedy can be truly cathartic.

I've been working through the first series (2000) of Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm. My wife and I love it. Last week we did 2 nights, 2 episodes a night. But last night we did 5 x half hour episodes. We split our sides. We hardly moved from our seats. Larry David just walked from one catastrophe to the next. Most of his scrapes are generated by him speaking his mind combined with an uncouth and unreasonable attitude but he also gets more than his fair share of simple pure bad luck. Genius, absolute genius. I sat there shaking off a bad day just enjoying someone else's misfortune. Larry was having a worse time than me and I was so much happier because of it.

He made Series 6 last year and 2-5 are also out on DVD. Santa now knows what I want for Xmas. How I missed this the first time round is a mystery to me but this is one thing that is being retrieved from my cultural lost and found.

...Deep inside I know that I'm him...

...I need to get myself a HD camera anyway...

Nev got a moving send off on Friday (12/12/08). Bethnal Green was brought to a standstill as hundreds of well-wishers gathered outside Pellicci's cafe to pay their respects. BBC London caught the mood of the day whilst The Times had written a fitting tribute the day before.

A warm tribute to a much loved East Londoner and a video interview about the caff.

I hope everyone has enjoyed Channel 4's 'The Devil's Whore' - I certainly did (with a few qualifications). The last of this big budget 4-parter was broadcast last night (10/12/08) and I'm missing it already. At one stage it could have been a 10 hour series on BBC and if you read about the production's long gestation, it may never have been made at all.

I've written a review for the The Culture Wars website which you can read by clicking on this link: Passionate people at w…w…w…war!

The Devil's Whore has been watched and appreciated (with some caveats). I'm not sure about the devil, or the whore come to think of it, but I won't go into too much detail here as I intend to write a longer piece on the series. If you need to catch up on the first episode from last week, click here.

If you need to quickly swot up on the English Revolution why not read Christopher Hill's seminal 1940 essay, The English Revolution 1640. [All complaints about the poor standard of transcription should be made to the CPGB (do they still exist?) and/or Andy Blunden at www.marxists.org - it's enough to give Marxists who care about accuracy a nad mame!].

The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution was written by Hill in 1972 and is regarded as one of the classic academic texts on the Civil War and a major contribution to twentieth century historical analysis. I'm plodding through it now and am getting to know my Levellers from Diggers. The Devil's Whore would not have been written without Hill's contribution to our understanding of this period and the worm's eye view of history that he took.

See you after episode 2.

My expectations are being ramped up to the max before tomorrow's screening of The Devil's Whore on Channel 4. Co-writer and co-executive producer, Peter Flannery, was on Radio 4's Start the Week and actor John Simm was interviewed in today's Times. I am sure you blogged-out, newshounds have tracked down other stuff.

Anyway, the 4-parter has a time and that'll be 9pm. So, I would advise you to get the kids to bed on time (isn't government advice 7:30pm?), open a bottle of red and hopefully (I'm praying), sit back and enjoy an insightful journey into our revolutionary past.

The Devil's Whore is on tomorrow (that's Wednesday 19th November) night at 09:00. Live in the here and now by enjoying a bit of BIG TV now and then. (Of course I'm going to Skyplus it. All precatuionary steps are being taken).

Afterthought...

OMG, I've just earwigged someone in the pub recruit a new believer to the Socialist - Degenerated Workers' State variety - cause. The English Revolution must be in the air tonight...

We all know what's going down, but what's going up?

1. Fawlty Towers DVD sales soar

2. Egg Sales up by 22 Per Cent

3. Sales of The Communist Manifesto have risen by more than 700%

"I too rooted for Obama and I too was moved by his victory speech. I expect him to be far more liberal and successful than his predecessor. But he was swept to power on a wave of emotion - it was, albeit in happier circumstances, another "Diana moment" - from which almost nobody dared to dissent. As hard times approach, I do not think that augurs well for democracy and newspapers in either country."

Peter Wilby with some sensible words.