Just Say Gnome!

In 1990, during his Sound + Vision tour, David Bowie invited fans to vote for what he should play. Inevitably, someone ran a campaign to get one of his 'embarrassing' early works, The Laughing Gnome, on the list. Voting was then scrapped in what I think was a regrettable lack of a sense of humour (an unusual one, look at this) and of proportion.

A similar lack of proportion, though in reverse, seems to have attended the publicity-explosion of the last few 

weeks about the surprise release of where are we now. I mean, it's fine, isn't it? I just don't think it merits the reception it's gotten. And nor is this the first time this has happened: in fact everything that Bowie has put out since at least 1999, when everyone said Hours sounded like Hunky Dory, which it doesn't, has had the same treatment. Perhaps everyone's just so relieved it's not Tin Machine again. That's a shame, because it diminishes the original achievements in his golden period running from 1970 to 1983 (you can dispute both ends). It's not that the recent albums aren't bad, many tracks are good, they just lack the sense of risk, innovation and plain madness that characterised him at his pomp (and indeed afterwards, I'm no fan of Earthlings, but it shows the same restlessness). It's certainly true that since 1999 he's eliminated the tendency to put out something awful, but it comes at a price - he's lost that sense of adventure. Not surprising for a man in his sixties. 

But in his pomp, he was extraordinary. He released more than an album a year in the 1970s (useful list here). And all of them (Pin Ups aside) are great, and different. To have followed it at the time must have been amazing, even in retrospect, it's jarring, but exciting. Above I noted that Hours doesn't sound like Hunky Dory, that's because nothing sounds like Hunky Dory - it's a odd, affected record, but it's brilliant, packed full of gems as well as the classics. I remember getting it, it was one of my CDs and it unlocked Pop for me. I then bought most of the rest. You can take your pick, but I'd single out Ziggy Stardust, Station to Station and Diamond Dogs as the best. At one point over 40% of my CD collection was Bowie. 

Anyway, there's a nice retrospective here (hat tip to Elliot), though it misses out The Laughing Gnome.

An elegy for lost data

Notoriously, I have a database of my friends. Specifically, I have a small spreadsheet on which I record my core friends - about 50 of them - and various facts, including how often I see them. I also have spreadsheets that record in detail a variety of other things, including my books and reading. No-one really remembers them though. Now, they are all gone - or at least 2012 is - as I put them memory stick on which they reside in the washing machine. The data for 2012 is lost. I was, and am, very upset about this. A doesn't really understand why.

Now I've had these for about ten years, maybe a bit more. I started them for quite prosaic reasons. I built a list of books because at the time most of my books were still at my parents' house and I didn't want to buy duplicates. I started recording presents when I bought the same thing for the same person two years in a row. I built the Friends database to win an argument over how many of my friends were Tories - less than half as it happens. But I've kept them because they're useful, and interesting. They've expanded in function of course. It was the Books DB that told me I'd not read about 15% of the books in the house, and so I read them. It's the Friends DB that means I don't forget to catch up with people who aren't front of mind. A record of what I cook, and where, from means I could throw out half my cookbooks last year, and forced me to discover more in those I kept. There's more, minor (I also recorded when people first met JR on the Friends DB) and major (the Books DB also records reading levels, allowing me to note the catastrophic baby-induced collapse in volume). I'll now never have that information for 2012.

But the loss I feel is bigger than that - I feel like I have lost part of my past. Without the data, I'm forced to rely on my perception of what happened, and perception is irredeemably faulty, unsystematic and unreliable, and just plain wrong. We know this - that's why we write things down, it's why we take photographs. For me, the information in those spreadsheets was part of my narrative of my past. The information contained allowed me, quickly, to access accurately the past. I'm not making any great claim for the information they held as a record of my life, but they captured part of it, and with ten years of data, they were compelling. And now they are gone. I can replicate some of the information, but not much, and though I've only lost one year, the sequence is broken and the data will always be incomplete. So will the narrative they supported.

I mourn.

Bibliography, 2012

End of the year time. Here were my books of the month:

January - A. Burgess, Earthly Powers* 
February - J. Le Carre, The honourable schoolboy
March - D.L. Sayers, Gaudy night 
April - M. Lewis, Moneyball 
May - Duflo & Bannerjee, Poor economics 
June - T.Penn, Winter King 
July - P.G. Wodehouse, Uncle Fred in the Springtime
August - P. Krugman, End this depression Now
September - C. McCullers, The Heart is a lonely hunter
October - L. Strachey, Eminent Victorians 
November - P.G. Wodehouse, Service with a smile
December - A. Spiegelman, Maus

It almost doesn't need saying that this has been a terrible year for reading. In the previous seven years, I've chalked up an average of 127 books; this year it was 85, and while I don't have a lightweight percentage to hand, it would be higher than ever before. There's certainly more fiction - 64/85 or 75% - though this hasn't really shown up in the BOTMs, which fell 50:50. One minor upside, it did make Books of the Year easier to pick. Too many months had only good rather than great books as their best.

In fact, if you'd shown me the list in advance I could probably have guessed fiction this time last year. I loved Earthy Powers eight years ago, and I loved it again this time. Like other monumental works, it repays rereading as while the shape remains constant, one's engagement with the characters and the issues changes over time - Carlo seems much more fragile, and more flawed than he did in 2004. Regardless, it's a magnificent book, and I'm already looking forward to rereading it in about 2020.

Non-fiction was a surprise, though it shouldn't have been. Non-fiction was better as a whole than fiction despite its low numbers. But, excellent though Penn was, nothing could touch Eminent Victorians. I suspect if I'd read it at 18, I'd have taken more modern papers at university. And, by implication, fewer Byzantine ones. I can think of no greater praise than that.

Bibliography, December 2012

BOTM: A. Spiegelman, Maus

A. Christie, Crooked House*
A. Christie, Hallowe'en Party
A. Christie, Sad Cypress
P. O'Donnell, Modesty Blaize
S. Maconie, Pies and prejudice
S. Richardson, Clarissa (vol 1)

Some years ago, someone told me that Clarissa revolutionised their view of English Literature (they either went on to do or were doing a English Literature degree at the time, which may have been a warning sign). Given it's free on the Kindle I thought I'd try it. I have failed - it is turgid in the extreme and I only got to end of volume one (of four) and that took serious effort. Perhaps as a result, everything else has been a bit lightweight. I almost gave BOTM to Modesty Blaize, which I read on the strength of listening to it serialised on Woman's Hour when I was ill the week before Christmas. but it was flimsy, if great fun. Maus however was a cut above. In some ways it's a bit flimsy too. There are certainly better Holocaust books (and there the obvious ones), but there's an immediacy that the comic form brings that works well. 

How to use averages

We've had a baby; he's coming up for eight months now & I'm very fond of him. So far he seems to be be doing the things he should. He's nailed rolling over, is pretty good at sitting up and picking things up and while he hasn't quite got round to crawling, he's pretty close. I was apparently pretty retarded at those things, so he's up on me. He's a bit below average weight, and he's well below average for sleeping.

At least, I think he's below average for sleeping - neither standard baby books nor doctors tell you what the average is. I'm a big fan of averages, properly used of course - for example you really need standard deviation to understand cricket averages properly. In other areas, the baby profession is also keen on averages. They have very detailed tables of weight, height, and even head circumference and how it will change over time. It's therefore possible to worry, in detail, about the trajectory of your baby's weight gain, yet it's impossible to worry about his ability to sleep through the night (or rather, to worry about it with data). At the moment, I know which one I am more concerned about.

Depressingly, I think they do it deliberately. Weight is a lead indicator for health, so they have to track it, and they might as well get parents to do it. However, everything else may well be held back to avoid parental panic about how their baby is below average (we're guilty of this too; worrying the doctor about his changing weight position). Of course, just under half of babies are below average so, to put it another way, I have a horrible feeling we limit information to parents because we assume for they will fail to understand statistics properly.

On one level, I suppose this doesn't really matter, but what it means is that those of us who can understand stats don't get some useful information. For example, my boss has a baby about five months younger than JR, who already sleeps better. Good for him, but he needs to know that's better than average to calibrate his expectations of me (and others) who may not have such obliging offspring. On the other hand, A is of the opinion that being able to work out that you're in receipt of a baby that's in the lower deciles for sleeping is mostly depressing - there's not much you can do about it after all.

For me though, if there are numbers to be had, I'd like them. This of course isn't limited to babies, but with babies I think I'm right. It would certainly make conversations with parents on this subject less frustrating.

The eighteenth century

Were you listening to Today on Monday (which you should be every day save the Sabbath) and you'd kept listening to the end, you'd have heard an extraordinary debate about British history between Chris Skidmore MP and Trevor Fisher. Actually, it was a fairly mediocre debate about a suggestion in a report from an all party parliamentary group that we should teach history in a more narrative fashion (written up here, not easy to actually find the report).

I don't know Mr Skidmore, though I should, we were at the same college at the same time doing the same subject, though I was rescuing my degree when he came up not meeting first years - my mistake perhaps. He seems like a good egg, and although I don't agree entirely with his proposals, the opposition was extraordinarily weak. Specifically, his opponent proceeded to argue that narrative history would be 'boring' as if that's something an effective curriculum and effective teaching couldn't stop, and then - amazingly - that he didn't know anything about the eighteenth century despite having taught for thirty-odd years.* And somehow he didn't see any problem with this. 

I'm not surprised he's never needed to know about it; but I'm surprised he thought it was acceptable not to. Personally, I'm not a massive fan of the eighteenth century, but it's pretty important period. Immediately, and in rough order of importance at the time, I'd go for:

• The French Revolution (1789)
• The American revolution (1775)
• Walpole and the formation of the Prime Ministerial office (1721-42)
• The Act of Settlement (1701) & The Hanoverian Succession (1714) 
• Union between England and Scotland (1707)
• Union between England and Ireland (1800)
• Plassey and the entry of Britain into India (1757)
• The '45 (1745)

It's noteworthy that most of these fall outside the 'short' eighteenth century, 1715-1789, usually dated with reference to France and dominated by the dreary ineffective years of Louis XV, but that wasn't being discussed and if I were doing the continent, I'd mention - amongst others - the War of Spanish Succession, Peter the Great's modernisation of Russia and Frederick the Great of Prussia. Nonetheless, this is pretty strong list, and I've probably missed a few off. I rather think this therefore gives weight to the view that we should teach more eighteenth century history and history teachers (and others) should certainly be ashamed of not knowing much about it.

*Oddly enough, this was lie. Mr Fisher does know about the Eighteenth century, or at least enough to write about it. Curious.

Bibliography, November 2012

BOTM: P.G. Wodehouse, Service with a Smile

A. Christie, Sparkling Cyanide
P. Kimmage, Rough Ride
D. Lynskey, 33 Revolutions per minute
A. Trollope, The Three Clerks

I wasn't expecting this. At various stages, I was expecting Lynskey, Trollope and Kimmage to be BOTM. But they tailed off, leaving it open for another Wodehouse, with another starring role for  Uncle Fred. It's really by default though because I've read so little this month and the others were flawed. I've because I am stuck on Clarissa, which goes on for ever (and so far) is pretty tedious. The others were flawed, respectively  because Sparkling Cyanide is silly, Kimmage only really comes to life in the final sections and then meanders, Lynskey can't tell the difference between a protest song and people just being angry, and Trollope, well, it's not one of his better plots, given it hinges on the setting of competitive exams for entry to the civil service. A shame.