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RECITING HOMER BY HEART

~ Posted by Emma Hogan, February 9th 2012

With a mayoral election in May and the 2012 Olympics in July and August, you might think the Mayor of London would have enough on his mind. But Boris Johnson claims in this week’s New Statesman that he’s set himself a new project. He's learning "The Iliad" off by heart. “I am only on line one hundred,” he says, “and it’s so laborious.” Book One has 600 lines, and there are 24 books, so Johnson has some way to go. 

Last night at the Southbank centre, Alice Oswald, the poet who withdrew from the T.S. Eliot prize because of her unease over its sponsors, recited her latest work by heart. “Memorial” is an adaptation of "The Iliad", which sets out to capture the atmosphere of the original, not the story. Its 84 pages took an hour and a half to recite. Oswald stood in the spotlight, never hesitated, and never took a sip of water. There were dramatic pauses, but her mellifluous voice kept the recital understated. Afterwards Oswald said she had learnt the poem by speaking it aloud when she went for walks along the River Dart (the subject of her second collection “Dart”).  read more »

IN TWO MINDS ABOUT THE FRENCH

~ Posted by Robert Butler, February 8th 2012

This weekend the Wall Street Journal ran an extract from Pamela Druckerman's new book "Bringing Up Bébé" (published this week). The headline read: "Why French Parents Are Superior". The author explained she got the idea for the book from seeing how well behaved French children were in restaurants.

It turns out the reason why French children are well behaved is that French parents agree on what's best for them. From early on, parents introduce children to as many types of food as possible. They insist children say hello and goodbye to adults. They let children play on their own. They expect children to have to wait. And they make sure children understand "no" means "no".

You would think that a country with this sort of robust parenting would appeal to a Republican candidate. But when Newt Gingrich chose to attack Mitt Romney in a campaign ad last month one of his charges against the former governor of Massachusetts was that he speaks French. The BBC said this was an attempt to portray Romney as "an elitist, European-style liberal wimp". A Washington Post columnist took exception to Gingrich's anti-intellectualism: "Have vous completely perdu votre tete?"  read more »

TROOP MOVEMENT, BOWEL MOVEMENT

~ Posted by Rebecca Willis, February 7th 2012

Today's British press carries colourful photo spreads of the horses of the King's Troop parading down St John's Wood High Street in north London. In full regalia, and pulling 13-pounder guns, the Troop was processing to Hyde Park to take part in yesterday's 41-gun salute that marked the opening of the celebrations for the Queen's diamond jubilee.

But the crowd that packed St John's Wood High Street was there to say goodbye. The barracks where the Troop has been quartered for 65 years has been sold to a property developer to be turned into a mixture of luxury and affordable housing. For those of us in the crowd, there were lumps in our throats and tears in our eyes. We residents have been sharing our neighbourhood with over 100 horses. We have long been woken by the percussive sound of metal hooves raining down on roads or the distant blast of a bugle. Driving a car often involved waiting for a stream of of magnificent, glossy-coated animals to pass by in the middle of the road. And the pungent smell of their droppings used to be a sign that we were nearly home.

The horses had a good send off. There were pearly kings and queens. There was the obligatory, inaudible PA system over which a couple of speeches were made. And choirs of local children sang the wartime songs "Goodbye-ee" and "We'll Meet Again", which of course meant nothing to them.   read more »

NETWORKS IN THE DARK

~ Posted by Robert Butler, February 6th 2012

When a cinema in Austin, Texas, threw out a customer last summer for using her phone, she left a defiantly rambling voicemail calling the management "assholes" and reasserting her right to use her phone where and when she liked. The movie chain posted her message on YouTube as a plug for the kind of cinema they like to run. The video has had nearly two and a half million hits.

In the Washington Post the critic Ann Hornaday connects this with two other angry disputes: some moviegoers have complained that they should have been told that Terrence Malick's “The Tree of Life” would be too philosophical for their taste and other moviegoers have complained that they hadn’t been told that “The Artist” is a silent movie (both groups asked for their money back).

But there are separate arguments going on here. The last two examples are about getting hacked off because the movie wasn't the one you would have liked to have seen (and, frankly, that's just tough). The first is about how people behave in venues. And here it’s not so clear-cut.  read more »

BETWEEN THE POSTS: 2

~ Posted by Robert Butler, February 3rd 2012
 
In From Here to New Hampshire we blogged about the view from our office (with the Shard and the London Eye in the distance) and the beneficial effects, generally, of looking out of the window—whether you're a blogger in London or a former poet laureate in New Hampshire. It turns out the view from our window is also a barometer of the city's financial health. From my desk I can count 25 building cranes, which the chancellor of the exchequer may not consider good news. The Financial Times reports that only 300 tower cranes went up in London in the second half of 2011 compared with 371 in the previous six months. And who's patient enough to count 300 tower cranes? The Health and Safety Executive receives notification of each one that goes up. 
 
In Another Top 40 for Dickens, we noted Penguin Classics' online poll of favourite Dickens characters and suggested another Top 40 poll for favourite minor ones. We put forward five. One of our expert readers wrote in to suggest another 14 including one dog (Bullseye from "Oliver Twist"). The Daily Telegraph is running a series in which 29 journalists write about their favourite Dickens character (one for each day of this month). That discussion continues on Twitter, where there's a shout-out for Tommy Traddles, David Copperfield's endearing pal. The tweet is from the great-great-great-great-grandson of Judge Thomas Noon Talfourd, who is said to have inspired the character and who is the dedicatee of "The Pickwick Papers".
   read more »

A ROAD THAT'S AN EXHIBITION

~ Posted by Robert Butler, February 2nd 2012

Visitors to Makkinga, a northern village in the Netherlands, are greeted on the outskirts by a nice joke. After a road sign that announces the 30kph speed limit, and another that says "Welkom", there's a third that says "Verkeersbordvrij". That translates as "free of traffic signs". It’s a sign that tells you something you can work out for yourself.
 
As Tom Vanderbilt explains in his book "Traffic" (2008), the sign captures the philosophy of Hans Monderman, a Dutch traffic engineer, who overturned years of bossy thinking by arguing that the fewer road signs there were in social settings, the safer those places would be. (Motorways were another matter.) When car drivers use their own intelligence, and interact with others who are sharing the same space, they slow down, and there are fewer accidents. 
 
The latest example of this counter-intuitive thinking was unveiled in London yesterday. Exhibition Road runs half a mile from South Kensington tube station to Hyde Park, and passes entrances to the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Natural History Museum and the Science Museum. It has cost nearly £30m to redesign this stretch of road and the best bit about it is the stuff that's not there.  read more »

AS MONGOLIA TURNS URBAN

~ Posted by Simon Willis, February 1st 2012

The Economist recently published a three-page briefing about Mongolia, which sits on vast reserves of copper and gold. "Mongolia has a chance," the paper wrote, "of becoming a Qatar or a Brunei: a country that has only a small population, but almost all of it, in global terms, loaded." Money is flowing into Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia's capital, and people are following. Part of this huge cultural change is that city dwellers no longer feel the pull of the nomadic herding traditions. Twenty years ago, the paper says, it was hard to meet anyone in Ulaanbaatar "who identified with the city".

There aren't many movies that you can buy on Amazon that give you a flavour of Mongolian life, but one that does was released 20 years ago. The mismatch between the city and the country is its main theme. "Urga", released in Britain and America as "Close to Eden", won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and an Oscar nomination for best foreign-language film. Directed by the Russian filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov, it's the story of Gombo, who lives with his wife, three children and a grandmother in a yurt on the steppe.

Their traditional life of herding and horse-riding on the grasslands is observed with documentary patience and the camera lingers, nostalgically, on the domestic details—the grandmother cuts fatty slices of mutton into her mouth; a daughter plays ditties on a giant accordion; Gombo’s wife Pagma gets her children to sleep, three to a bed.  read more »

ANOTHER TOP 40 FOR DICKENS

~ Posted by Emma Hogan, January 31st 2012
 
As Claire Tomalin's new biography points out, Charles Dickens loved birthdays. Next Tuesday, he has a significant one of his own. To mark his bicentenary, there's a service at Westminster Abbey (where a wreath will be laid). There's also a new £2 coin from the Royal Mint (with his profile made up from his book titles), along with exhibitions in the British Library, the Museum of London and the Morgan Library in New York.
 
Online, Penguin Classics is running a poll to see which of his characters is the most loved. The list of the 40 names you can vote for leans heavily towards the best known ones from the movies, with five from "Great Expectations" and four from "Oliver Twist". There's another four from "David Copperfield" (but not David himself) and two from "A Christmas Carol". The Artful Dodger, Fagin, Miss Havisham, Uriah Heep, Mr Micawber, Madame Defarge and Lady Dedlock—they're all here. But, surprisingly, not the "timid, broken-spirited" Smike from "Nicholas Nickleby" or the dangerously attractive Steerforth from "David Copperfield".   read more »

SAVING MINUTES BY TRAIN

~ Posted by Robert Butler, January 30th 2012

Two weeks ago a political columnist suggested there were two David Camerons, the rural one and the urban one, and the urban one was winning out. The two other most senior figures in the cabinet—Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, and George Osborne, the chancellor—were resolutely urban.

This observation was prompted by the news that the government had come out in favour of HS2 (or High Speed Two), a £33 billion rail link from London to Birmingham, which would divide at Birmingham, and head on to Manchester and Leeds. The new route would save 20 minutes of journey time. It would also  damage beautiful stretches of English countryside.

The economic argument goes that if you cut journey time, you increase productivity. But The Economist pointed out that “a large part of the supposed benefits rest on assumptions that businessmen are unproductive in transit”. If business people are happily productive when in transit, the most effective way of assisting that productivity would be not to disturb them.  read more »

THE VANESSA REDGRAVE THEORY

~ Posted by Robert Butler, January 27th 2012

In a blog post last week we noted how Michelle Obama's mother, Marian Robinson, was giving mothers-in-law a good name. An example of the opposite can be seen at the movies. Listen to the New Yorker on Vanessa Redgrave's performance as Volumnia in "Coriolanus": "Every mother-in-law joke you've ever heard, along with every Oedipal fantasy, is distilled into this formidable figure..."

Critics have called Vanessa Redgrave's performance "magnificent" and "one of the best of her career", yet she hasn't been nominated for either an Oscar or a Bafta. Volumnia's great scene occurs in Act 5 of the play. It's one of those moments (described in our current Notes on a Voice on Shakespeare) when the playwright pulls off a favourite trick: the 180-degree turn. Redgrave manages to persuade Ralph Fiennes' Coriolanus to change his mind and not to sack the city of Rome, even though—if he draws back at this stage—it will probably lead to his own death. Late in the movie, Redgrave plays on Fiennes's mind with great delicacy and force.  read more »