Disgressed

I’ve been doing a refurbishment of Conscious Entities recently; a nice new widgetised theme that is fully up-to-date and looks good; a new dynamic blogroll which is far better than a dull set of title links, and the addition of a front-page display of recent comments, all good stuff. In addition, I will now gradually bring over all the old content into the blog, in effect sweeping up some of the mess left over from when I actually moved to WordPress. Some old posts that have been absent ever since then will eventually reappear and then I may be in the position where I can use redirects so that the old hand-coded html stuff is no longer seen. I can’t get rid of those pages altogether because some of them remain among the most popular pages on the site.

Sorry about that geeky outburst; what I meant to explain was how I’ve gradually become fond of WordPress.  When I first contemplated blogifying the site I knew very little about the different options and I could easily have gone for one of the other options; but I’m glad I didn’t.

One of the things I like about the internet is the way you can get into the technical aspects gradually. It was a revelation to me when I first discovered that you could see the code for any page on the internet, copy it, muck about with it, slap it back in your browser and see what happened. This kind of idle tinkering was how I picked up enough html to start cobbling a site together by hand (and how I completely failed to pick up any knowledge or concern for prescribed standards).

WordPress sort of facilitates a similar gradual approach. You can use a hosted blog and never look under the bonnet; but if you want to host your own and choose a theme, you can do that too.  You really have to add your own masthead graphic. Then the temptation to fire up the editor and change a few variables, colours, fonts, spacing, and so on, is irresistible.  You can do a surprising amount without great difficulty; you randomly lob in a php file from a different template and lo: it works!  Let’s just snip some of that code there that looks as if it does this and see if it will do that…

Sorry. What really amused me yesterday that there was a particular feature I wanted and I couldn’t see how to do it. I started googling and visiting likely places for advice, and it turned out some woman had been on the forums and asked for advice on exactly the same point a year ago. She didn’t get a proper answer: I looked at the next possible place to find advice and she’d been there, too. I ended up following what must have been almost exactly the same path she had followed a year before. She got unhelpful advice, advice that was correct but not really what she wanted, and incomprehensible advice (I’m no css expert, but I’m pretty sure that some of this was actually just wrong).  At last I came across a post from her where she happily explained that now she’d found the answer – and luckily she said where.

The thing is, you can avoid techie details altogether if you like, or you can spend days writing up your own hand-crafted plugins. Or, if you’re like me, you can occasionally indulge in a little bit of fiddly customisation and then stop while it still works…

“Have you been reading the Bible?” asked Katharine suspiciously.

“Well, not reading it exactly. I was just checking a couple of things.”

“Looking for loopholes?”

“Yeah, yeah. Did  you see that they’ve found a tablet which suggests that the Ark was actually circular?”

“But that’s not in the Bible.”

“No, well I was also checking what the KJV says compared to that Crumb Genesis – you know? The comic book thing? Anyway, how did you know I was looking at the Bible?”

“I noticed it had moved.”

I got a copy of Robert Crumb’s comic-book interpretation of the Book of Genesis over Christmas; incidentally I also re-read Joseph Heller’s “God Knows” which is sort of the story of King David in the style of Catch-22.

There’s been a lot of fuss about Crumb’s version of Genesis – he’s always been popular and over the last decade or so has been taken increasingly seriously as an artist, a trend epitomised in Robert Hughes’ notorious comparison with Breughel (something Crumb himself disavowed). There’s always been an undercurrent of dissent from those who object to his nastier images, so maybe a Biblical subject is calculated to add respectability, though this being Genesis there was bound to be plenty of sex and violence.

I do think Crumb outclasses most of his peers in talent, style, and hard work, and it shows again here, with some striking images. He points out his own strict adherence to the material; not for him the interpolated passages and omissions of other cartoon Bibles. Even the ‘begats’ are dealt with in little groups of portraits.  But reviews sounded a bit disappointed, and I can see why: overall, I’m afraid Genesis exposes Crumb’s limitations more clearly than they have perhaps been exposed before:  in two main ways.

First, while doing things straight is a virtue, lack of imagination is not; but some of the most noteworthy challenges offered by Genesis are sadly muffed. “And there was light” – what could an artist do with that? Crumb gives us a white blob on a black background. The Tower of Babel? A realistic spiral minaret in a low-lying Middle-eastern town. Yes, realism is good, but if you weren’t going to do anything more than this with it, why bother?

Second, it becomes disappointingly clear that at the end of the day Crumb is a cartoonist; albeit a cartoonist who can rise to painstaking bits of graphic art at times. The mark of a cartoonist is that instead of drawing things, he represents them; this particular squiggle represents a nose, that one an ear. One result is that cartoonists sometimes struggle to make their characters look different. Here I’m afraid a lot of the beardy old men are at times hard to distinguish, and the same goes for many of the stout, big-breasted women. Fair’s fair; Crumb conscientiously tries to throw in a thin woman (Hagar) or one with unusual cheekbones once or twice, but for the most part we are dealing with small variations on the well-known Crumb Ideal Woman with huge legs, buttocks and breasts, (and a mouth not quite big enough for the inordinate number of teeth she seems to have). In the begats, it’s a different matter; we have a series of portraits of distinct individuals; but it seems these are copied from Hollywood stills taken from old Biblical epics. Even the range of facial expressions seems to lack something – there’s an awful lot of wide-eyed staring going on.

All in all, it seems that Crumb is not only not the Breughel de nos jours; he isn’t even the Gillray. Gillray’s Genesis – now that would have been an altogether livelier, funnier, and dare I say, probably ruder piece of work.

I remain a bit perplexed, because I’m sure Crumb could have done better. Is it, could it be, reverence that holds him back – or is it actually boredom, old age? The comparison with God Knows is instructive: Heller adopts a breezily anachronistic manner and language which, in my view anyway, work much better. Heller has King David refer in passing to Sarah, ‘who laughed and lied to God. I got a big kick out of that’. Crumb, naturally, portrays the episode in detail; we see the laughing and the lying, but it’s never half as vivid as in Heller’s David’s throwaway remark.

Maybe I’m dwelling unfairly on the negatives, and maybe it’s the high expectations that mainly cause the disappointment, but I’d still say don’t do Exodus.

Just to mention that I’m intending to attempt Nanowrimo again. Follow my maunderings here if you’re so inclined.

We’d had a slightly overcast week in Brittany, but when we arrived in Paris, with lots of queueing in store, it turned hot. The high thirties in centigrade – when you came out of the air-conditioned hotel, the sun just hit you.

Still, we did alright: Eiffel Tower (now with sparkly lights every hour at night), Arc de Triomphe, Louvre (We did a pretty good day-long stab at it, walking about five miles through all the galleries. Did you know that at one stage the Louvre was only half of a gigantic palace, with a mirror image western wing? The mind boggles.) and all the rest.

We were treated to a performance of the Parisian Gold ring trick: as we were walking along the banks of the Seine, an urchin picked up a “gold” ring ( I actually saw them drop it, too, which was a bit of a flaw in the pitch). “C’est vraiment de l’or? Vous pensez?”.

The idea is that this lucky urchin has stumbled on a real gold ring lost by someone: there’s a complicated proposition they work through but the gist ultimately is that you should give them about 20 euros for a ring which is actually some crummy thing worth 20 cents at most. The depressing thing is that they can rely on your not wanting to hand it in to the police and also on your being keen to rip off the apparently naive urchin by giving them a fraction of the ring’s supposed real value. I imagine this helps them to think you deserve all you get: but in my case I literally saw them coming.

There seems to be an unlovely trend towards tourists having their pictures taken in front of famous pictures or works of art (it seems to be mainly oriental tourists for some reason). It’s annoying enough to have people in the way when you’re trying to look at something, but now it seemed matey often wanted to stand in front of the exhibit too, and took it for granted that everyone would clear a space for five minutes or so while his mate was fiddling with the process of immortalising him.

You wouldn’t mind someone standing in front of, say, Castiglione if they appeared to be scholars who had worked on The Courtier for years and saw this as the nearest thing they could get to visiting the Master himself; but it was painfully obvious that the sub-text was always more along the lines of:

“Hey! Check out me with some really weird beardy guy in this kind of a gallery place or some sort of shit full of like all sort of junk that the French were really crazy about. LOL!!!1!1!!”

My expectations of hostile or condescending Parisians proved baseless (to be fair most Parisians were absent, it being August). At one point some friendly French people stopped and asked if they could offer us directions or any other sort of help?  Even the waiters were fine. Watching my fellow tourists in a place north of the Rue St Germain, I even felt some sympathy. OK, so you don’t speak any French at all and you’re not even going to try.  OK, so in fact you don’t even speak English particularly well, but that’s your language of choice for communicating in Paris. You want all the tables rearranged, but some of you want them rearranged differently to others. You don’t want anything on the menu or anything you could reasonably expect in a French restaurant: some of you want a kind of German food I’ve never heard of; others want American hamburgers; and some of you want to be offered vegetarian food.  You haven’t sat down yet, but you’ve already asked me three times whether service is included. Can I be forgiven if the edge of one nostril just trembles ever so slightly?

For someone like me, who spends a lot of time in London, it was impossible not to make comparisons between the two cities, but also impossible to get  the conclusions quite right. Paris seems more compact and coherent, and sort of older (with modern insertions), though London’s ancient roots are much more evident. In some ways Paris seems much more tourist-friendly, though the sense London gives of a vast, almost indefinite labyrinth of varied districts might be more appealing to the adventurous visitor.

It was so hot and we did so much standing in line at Versailles and elsewhere that the girls spontaneously suggested that we need not go to EuroDisney after all.

Recently this blog has been absolutely plagued with comment spam. This stuff is more sophisticated than it used to be; it often has only one link in it and it reads like a real (if somewhat lame) comment, so it can’t be warded off just by blocking anything with the word ‘viagra’ in it. I wasn’t sure why it was so bad – Conscious Entities was getting very little spam, in spite of its massively larger traffic.

So eventually I looked for a captcha plug-in. You may know that captcha is that thing where typically you have to type in a word shown in a distorted picture to prove you’re a human being rather than a spambot before your comment or whatever will be accepted. I’m told that really good spambots are now getting better at reading from distorted pictures than human beings, but in most cases it still seems to work well.

Anyway, browsing through the WordPress plugins which offer some kind of comment captcha, I found one that, by dint of doing something far too clever for me to understand, was apparently able to detect robotic submissions without requiring human users to do anything. Couldn’t be bad. I downloaded the files, installed and activated.

It was 100% successful in warding off spam; unfortunately it was also pretty good at warding me off, too. I found I was no longer able to log into my own blog. But now I’m back! In the end I had to go in and mess with the database manually (or by means of PHP something or other), which although it was actually perfectly straightforward, I find a bit scary.

As I was about to install a different anti-spam measure, I noticed that Akismet was deactivated. Am I an idiot or what? (Akismet is the basic anti-spam plugin which is normally the first line of defence for WordPress). In essence, I’d been running with nothing but a blacklist to protect me.

Anyway – enough of that.

The general plan was that we would spend several days getting out to visit places and two or three days on the beach at one of various places along the coast (Dinan itself being inland a bit, not to be confused with Dinard). In the event the weather failed us a bit, being overcast on several days, so that we only ended up doing one beach day.

One trip out, inevitably, was to Mont St Michel, where the girls had been before – I’d only seen it in the distance.  It’s a bit like the Eiffel tower in that the crowds are terrible, but you sort of have to do it. Apparently the sea is gradually silting up, so that left to itself the island, or peninsula, would be fully incorporated into the mainland in about twenty years, but there are plans to dig out the sea bed at either side and build a tram (wtf, as they say). I understand the Benedictine monks who originally created the place were induced to return some time late in the last century, but bitter experience having shown them that the place was no longer suitable for any serious monking, they left again early in this century.

Brittany is full of neolithic monuments to an absurd degree – alleged covered walks (ie six collapsed boulders), menhirs and dolmens: you should assume in imagining this part of the trip that every so often we stop and follow erratic signs into a distant field where a few ancient stones, usually overgrown with weeds, are lying around. One farmer had surrounded his allée couverte with a field of maize, leaving one row out to make a narrow path so that visitors still had access.

Another hidden item was the charming little castle of Hunaudaye, which somehow remains invisible until you’re quite close. The rest of the party, I think, believed I had led them astray, and was preparing to pretend to be interested in another low pile of stones, but although it’s not in mint condition, it’s definitely a proper castle.  Apart from climbing the towers, etc in traditional style, you could visit the rather odd exhibition on medieval humour which had been created in several of the rooms. I think it may have lost something in non-translation.

We also got the ferry (the vedette, which I now learned means ‘launch’ as well as ‘film star’) over to the Ile de Brehat one day, sort of a small French Channel Island, and not altogether like a smaller Guernsey in being rather over-full of both houses and tourists.

With a kindly goodbye from Mme Dabare, who made a last-minute bid to have us eat and drink in her place, we set off for the second stage. Here we came across the only snag in our flawless planning. Having returned the hire car to the ferry port, we assumed it would be easy to pick up a taxi to get us to the station. Not a bit of it. There were about six taxis there, but they were all pre-booked and would have nothing to do with us.  Katharine asked the person at the Britanny Ferries to ring, which she grudgingly did, but nothing much happened. After fifteen or twenty minutes a lone taxi appeared which someone else got because we were standing at the wrong end of the rank. We rang ourselves, one of the companies whose drivers were still hanging about waiting for their ‘pre-booked’ customer.  Ah no, they said, not worth us sending someone – you just wait, there’ll be one along in a minute. Another twenty minutes or more, and at last a single taxi did arrive. We hurried forward. No, sorry, this one is pre-booked. Eventually, at long last, we got one. As we left, the pre-booked taxis-drivers, still waiting patiently,  looked up from their cigarettes and jovial conversation for a moment.

Luckily, our plan had included a drastically over-long margin for error, which proved just long enough for us to still catch the TGV. At Gare du Nord, no taxis.

It all seems so long ago. We took a taxi down to Portsmouth: it sounds mad, but for for us the train fare would have been significantly more – and the train wouldn’t have come to our door when we wanted it.  Mustafa, our friendly driver, was unable to work out where the hell he was supposed to go to drop off passengers at the ferry terminal, and I have to say it was completely obscure to me, too. When we finally stopped, outside the ‘departure lounge’ but evidently behind the wrong fence, we were approached by one of those people who should never be given a peaked hat.  A normal human being would have said something like “You’re supposed to go over there”, but this lady’s opening sally was “Right, I must have this moved – now. It’s security.” Have a nice day, there.

The crossing, overnight, was not too bad. We went in the most upmarket of the ferry’s restaurants, which was OK though the food didn’t quite come up to the promise held out by the decor and the waiters.  We had been too late to book a cabin, and had to sleep in reclining chairs, which wasn’t great, but wasn’t as bad as it might have been. Wandering round the boat early in the morning I was suprised at the places some people had picked out to kip down in instead of their allotted seat – under the main stairs?

At St Malo we picked up a hire car without particular difficulty (I’d found it almost impossible to find out in advance which of the hire companies in the town actually had cars at the ferry terminal – only two out of the six or so do – Avis and EuropCar if  you’re interested).  One potential problem with our plan was that the ferry dropped us off in St Malo, a little the worse for wear, quite early in the morning, while we couldn’t get into our apartment in Dinan until late afternoon. In the event, it wasn’t really a problem: we spent a pleasant day visiting (revisiting in some cases) St Malo, or St Smello as the recorded commentary on the tourist train would have it.

At Dinan we luckily drove to exactly the right car park and found the place in the Rue de l’Horloge easily: finding Mme Dabare our landlady to collect the key was not so easy. The directions we had took us to a little tunnel and told us to ring at the last door just before we emerged. There was no door at the end of the tunnel, and trying the door at the near end yielded no results. What the directions should have said was: come out the tunnel at the other end, cross the small shopping centre, but don’t go out the obvious way, instead taking the steps to the left and the path that follows, where the door to Mme Dabare’s apartment is behind you, concealed by a wall and a flower bed.

It was a remarkable apartment, though: sixteenth century, including a big panelled room hanging out over the cobbled street, right by the old clock tower (thoughtfully organised not to strike between the hours of 11 at night and seven in the morning).  We could give tourists a surprise by suddenly opening the window and leaning out when they were trying to take a picture of the house: if we left the windows open we could get the full benefit of the hurdy gurdy man, traditional Breton musicians, and, er, Andean flute players who entertained the streams of tourists.

Mme Dabare herself was a most friendly and helpful lady, though she spoke no word of English.  I was gratified by the amount of operable French I seemed to have retained:  I even spontaneously came up with vitraille when remarking on the decorated windows in our bedroom (the girls said they were glad they hadn’t got our four-postered room because the stone knight’s head on the wall and the mysterious hole containing, if you peered in, a crucifix, would have affected their sleep).

Mme Dabare’s own apartment was directly connected to ours by a door which she urged us to knock on if we needed anything. Indeed, she invited us to come round for dinner one evening, in that non-specific way which leaves things in the air.

Dinan is a great place to wander round – there’s always some new little park or fragment of the walls, or quaint old street.  Down the steep Rue Jerzual, lined with nice shops and restaurants, you get to the Port of Dinan – a small river port on the river Rance, full of even more restaurants and amazingly picturesque; the city walls are behind with the Jardin Anglais just showing at the top, while the river is crossed by a high viaduct. It’s possible to do day trips up here from St Malo, but not alas the other way round. We did go on a boat in the other direction: above Dinan the river was canalised by Napoleon so that boats could get to any of three ports on the Atlantic coast, where they had a better chance of evading the British blockade. The two gentlemen operating the boat gave us a commentary on the way out and then got out the music box and sang traditional songs on the way back.

More later.

We’re off on our hols. Over the Channel on a ferry to St Malo tonight, a week in Brittany, TGV to Paris, a week there and then back on the Eurostar.

See you in two weeks.

I staggered into the bathroom as usual this morning at about ten past six and clumsily stabbed at the button on the radio. These days someone has usually retuned it to some music station (Radio Jackie? I never listen for long enough to find out) but today it had been left on good old Radio Four, where, on the Today programme, they were talking about reform of the banking system.

“now hmhm nurhh hmm nmhhhur Finney nnumrm murmmm”

Oh, they were interviewing someone called Finney – that’s Katharine’s madien name.

“mmmnhm nmmrh (By the way – this stuff is meant to represent my inattention rather than the quality of the reception or the actual sounds being made.) mmnnr mmnr Denton Wilde Sapte”

Denton Wilde Sapte? The firm of solicitors where Katharine’s brother works?

And then,  sure enough, my brother-in-law’s Edinburgh accent came through loud and clear. Well, not loud; more calm and measured, really. By now I had shaving foam over a substantial part of my chin, but I seized the radio and took it in to Katharine, who must initially have assumed that my sudden appearance meant they’d just announced the destruction of London by an opportunistic nuclear suitcase bomb, or something.

Strange to suddenly hear someone you know on the radio; it’s happened to me a couple of times with old school or university acquaintances,  and once I switched on the radio in a hotel room I’d just dumped my suitcase in, only to hear immediately a news item about a house fire in the street where my parents lived – the item so perfectly timed that in a film they would have taken the incident out or re-shot it as being too implausibly neat.

Then there was one occasion when I saw a family being interviewed on TV: they had the same surname as a colleague of mine, and the male members of the family looked so much like him they could surely only be his brothers. It was an item about Kids Who Never Leave Home; when I asked my colleague later he confirmed that it had been his family (he wasn’t there himself). They had been a little startled by the finished piece, as they had been told the item was about the medical problem suffered by his handicapped brother, which perhaps provides an insight into the general ethics and outlook of television production companies.

Radio 4’s not like that of course, though they’re not always brilliant interviewers. At least they seem to have got over the problem they had a few years ago of constsntly attempting to interview people who couldn’t really speak English. You spent half the interview listening to that nasal noise people make to show they haven’t finished speaking but have no idea what the word they’re after is. The journalists made no allowance for their standard of comprehension, either.

“So, it has been reported that the advent of the new Premier Serge Trouserin heralds a re-examination of contingencies in respect of the bruited liberalisation of the fiscal regime so lately denounced as dissimulation by sources close to the former regime. In that regard, what measures to demonstrate fidelity is the former likely to espouse?”

“Nnnnnuh. Mnnnnuh (OK, this time it represents the actual sound) Trouserein, Trouser…”

“I  mean, the circumstances inherently lend themselves to tergiversation at this point, or would you characterise that as a tendentious generalisation?”

“Nnnng. Nmnurnnn. Trouserin… nngnn Trouserin good…”

Robert’s interview seemed to go pretty well.

Elizabeth and her cronies are going to see that latest instalment of the epic today after school.

“So it’s alright?”
“Yes, so long as you’re back in time for dinner. That’s the only issue.”
“You see it’s nice to see something straight away, when it first comes out, isn’t it? Partly because it’s new, but it also means that people can’t talk to you about it. They can’t come up and keep saying, ‘Oh there’s this really good bit where they, whatever’. ‘Coz that’s really annoying.”
“Whereas now you can go up to other people and keep saying, ‘Oh, there’s this really good bit where they, whatever’?”
“ ’Zactly! Did I tell you we talked about dressing up for it?”
“Yes, you mentioned.”
“Only we haven’t really got the stuff. I can wear my red tie, ‘coz that’s Griffindor, but we haven’t really got enough red ties.”
“No.”
“The worst of it is, we drew lots to see who was going to be who, and I’m Ron.”
“Ron?”
“Yes, and I haven’t even got ginger hair. I mean A at least looks a bit like Hermione, and B is like Harry, but I don’t look like Ron at all. I mean, I’m a girl.”
“In fact, apart from being human beings, more or less, you and Ron Weasley don’t have anything in common at all?”
“ ’Zactly. Mind you, I don’t know what C is going to do. She got Voldemort. A told her she’d have wear a bald wig, but to be honest, she probably isn’t going to do it, is she?”

Katharine is affecting ignorance, although I think it’s really just a form of denial. Last night when Elizabeth was explaining how Slytherin colours were relatively easy, she asked which was the House with the bad people in.
“Come on,” I said, “You’ve seen all the films at least once. You can’t pretend you don’t know these things. I mean, even if you’d never heard of Harry Potter you could tell. Is the evil House going to be Hufflepuff  do you think? Or could it perhaps, just possibly,  be Slytherin?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t watch them properly.”
“Yeah, but come on – next you’ll be telling us you don’t know that Voldemort (what’s that – Flight of Death?) is the villain.”
“Is that Alan Rickman?”
 

“Well, hope it goes well,” I said to Elizabeth as we parted at the bus-stop.
“Yeah. It’d better be good, this film. ‘Coz we’ve kind of built it up a bit, haven’t we?”