The Arrogant Emu

Thomas the Rhymer 7/10 emus
This is so highly ranked partly because of my sheer pleasure in reading it. I love ballads. (I was thinking of writing an entry on my musical opinions, but really it wouldn’t have said much more than that. It’s only when I’m playing them for someone else that I can see their flaws: simple, gratingly repetitive tunes without either harmonic or rhythmic variation, recounting long, lurid tales. Maybe that’s how most of the world hears them. I, on the other hand, hear them as bite-sized tragedies, histories, comedies, whose evocative power is increased by the limits of the form, the shortness and simplicity of the stanza. Anyway, the point is that the author is also clearly a lover of ballads. Not only is this a book-length treatment of one of the most famous, but dozens also appear, in whole or in part, throughout the text. One of these (and it was this which cemented my affection) is Famous Flower of Serving Men.

Travels 5/10 emus
I will say this for Michael Crichton: he can write. He won’t make you gasp with wonder at the things that language can do, but he knows how to be succinct and engaging. The travel portions of the narrative were, for the most part, good travel writing. He doesn’t leave me with the impression of being a particularly nice person, but the essays didn’t demand the amount of sympathy or identification that first-person often does. I was less impressed by his voyages into the realm of the paranormal. It’s a good if weary point that science and religion represent different ways of approaching the world, but someone in whom the faculty of curiousity is so dead as not to take a lively interest in a bending spoon belongs to neither science nor religion, but to apathy, the vast adult ranks of the couch potatoes of Reality.

That title has nothing whatever to do with the contents of this entry, I just really really want to say that to someone.

What this entry is about is ways of understanding space. Now, my sense of direction isn’t that bad, that is it’s not bad enough to be my Comic and Endearing Flaw, like clumsiness or not being about to cook well. But it’s not all that great either. Anyway, so I’ve noticed that when giving directions to people, or even when trying to remember where something is, I will give directions like “It’s on the road with the Da Silva round-point, right where the hill starts to curve down” or “It’s off the Malanville road - you go all the way down the hill, but just before it flattens out there’s this road that goes up off to the side, and you go up that hill until you see the “Apiculture” sign and then you take the next road on the left”. Anyway, I realized that, more than left or right, more than long or short, I orient myself by whether things are uphill or downhill.

Really, how else would you expect a bicyclist to think?

African Folktales: 7/10 emus

The surprising thing was just how similar these were. One may have been written for a society that would consider the other more fit subjects of heartrending tracts, and other may not have been written, in the strictest sense, as all. Still, they are both concerned -and very acutely - with the fundamental problems of Getting By In Society. Granted, eating one’s own offspring (or parents), a recurring theme in many of the fables, occurs rather less literally in “Vanity Fair”. But inheritances given or withheld, old rich relatives wooed or cosseted or hastened toward their graves - it’s still about whether or not your relatives pose a threat to you. And how far are you willing to risk overturning the social order for the sake of your affection? It’s a question that both George Osborne and a Son of a Certain Chief have to consider, and both put little real reflection into the question.

But assured the thing that really made me sit up and take notice, reading the book of folktales directly after the book of Victorian satire, was the presence of the trickster. Is there really that much difference between Becky Crawley (nee Sharp) being presented at court and holding grand parties while her social position is secured only by a complicated web of credit and lies, and Rabbit hiding behind the well, banging his drum and proclaiming what a terrible monster he in fact is? Both change their positions at a minutes notice, after being found out in one trick promptly spin a story for another, and never really do get their comeuppance.

Thackeray’s writing leaves a faintly bitter taste in the mouth after a while - though it’s certainly tremendously entertaining - and a disconcerting number of African folktales (the ones that I’ve heard told as well the ones in the book - are regarded as categorically incomplete until a moral has been pointed out.

But then, Thackeray was no stranger to that either.

I would have asked this on this thread, but I think that would have hijacked a stimulating discussion. Reading the comments, I was horrified by the depth of my own ignorance in a field I used to pride myself on - that of church history. That, coupled with the fact that out by the orphanage site is a monastery of Cistercian brothers, has made me resolve that I should actually get some knowledge to back up my generally romanticised impression.

Recommend me some books. (The brothers have a library, chiefly philosophical and theological works, but firstly they’re mostly in French, secondly they’re still a good half hour away by motocycle, and thirdly I haven’t yet worked up the nerve to ask if I can borrow them). I want to learn about the history of Christianity. I want to read more church fathers than there are on the Program. I’m going to be home for Christmas, I’ll have a chance to pick things up. Tell me some good things to read.

For all your latke needs.

Except for your West African latke needs! Expect a post of an igname-based recipe quite soon.

Actual snippet of dialogue from last night’s dream:

“Sir, as you see me now, I am a dying man. It can make no difference to you whether you take her as Miss Brentwood or as Widow Stratton.”

“There is always a more-or-less in these affairs of dying, and I have no intention of quitting the field in favor of a penniless Irishman with one foot in the grave and one hand on a heart murmur.”

Filling up at a gas station….

Except that the gas comes in one-liter glass bottles once used to hold whisky, is filtered through a cloth into your moto engine, includes a dollop of Secret Recipe Motor Oil Mix, and there’s a monkey sitting under the gas-table, regarding you balefully and picking at its rope with long skinny monkey paws.

The proprietor is having the mango tree in back cut down; apparently its roots are breaking up the septic tank.

Now, I never thought of myself as a tree-hugger, or even as one emotionally attached to what is popularly called Nature. I have never heard the screams of the vegetables, as they say. The green and growing world was simply a backdrop to the far more important sphere of human activity. Important to preserve, to be sure, but for the same reason that you would not, say, pound nails into your car tires or drink paint thinner. The earth was important because there were people on it.

But seeing that tree being cut down, I felt sick - positively sick to my stomach, physically distressed at the very sight. It was cut down in bits - the magnificent branches lopped off one by one, the leaves slowly curling up as the limbs began to dry in the sun.

I was far more distressed over the killing of that plant than I am over the killing of most animals. Goats, for instance. I look at goats these days, and I see gambolling bouncing sacks of delicious meat. But the tree - it’s been there for at least 30 years, probably fifty, and now it’s just so much firewood. I wished again for a revival of the Greek times, when an injured dryad could punish the ones who were harming trees.

Huh.

Just when I think that I live in a relatively straightforward office environment…

“This isn’t a project report! I didn’t ask you for a project report! Why are you sending me this project report! Go give it to the regional manager.”
“No, take it, take it, you’re supposed to take it.”
“I’m not taking this! You go give to to R-!”
(small altercation, which ends in the guy who was bringing the project report driving off with it)
“You shouldn’t have been so hard on him.”
“Yes, he might come back this afternoon and hit you.”
“But that wasn’t even a project report! That was a bank-book from the credit union, a notebook, and an audio tape!”
“Yeah, but he’s not quite all there.”
“The director’s cousin, you know… a bit soft in the head.”

Ladies and Gentlemen, I have heard the worst song in the world.

Not just a bad song in that it is a song that fails to live up to the potential of its songhood. I mean a song that is an active evil - possibly an active moral evil, although I may be confusing this with the homicidal rage it drives me into every time I hear it.

By now you must all be quite curious, and since this is the internet, I would normally be expected to provide a link so you all could recoil in delicious horror. Unfortunately, so far from having a link to the song, I don’t even know its name, and so you must settle for the old-fashioned: the power of description.

First, how many of you know the Couper Decaler? There are a couple of examples on the CD I made, which should be more than enough. For those who don’t have the CD, and example of the lyrics:
Couper
Decaler
Couper
Decaler
(repeat, adding various other verbs of your choice)

This has been remixed more times than the Bible has been translated, and it is the current remix which has apparently been created by Satan himself. It consists of just the beat, and instead of a melody, a track of a child crying (and occasionally laughing) has been layered over it, cut and looped so that the changing pitch of the wail follows the standard Couper Decaler Tune.

It’s a clever idea.

For about 30 seconds.

I’m told that by the end of this song (some eight minutes into it) the crying has been replaced by farting noises and a voice saying “Ca pue!” I’ve never lasted that long; I’ve always taken off before I shoved my bottle through the subwoofer.