Friday, September 12, 2008
Flight alarm
In the course of investigating whether the regional airline due to take us to Florence is still in the land of the living - there having been sundry deaths in the business recently - I learn that the share price of United Airlines took an awful wollaping the other day when Mr Google accidently recycled some 6 year old news about them filing for bankruptcy. It seems that this old news went the rounds and lots of investors panicked before anyone got around to checking whether the story was true or not. Not the best advertisement for the all-wisdom of the market place advertised by our friends of the right.
Then the other day I saw a good advertisement for the way words drift. I was passed by a long box lorry on the way to Cheam, with the word 'Wincanton' in big and the words 'Provider of delivery systems' or some such in small. Now many years ago Wincanton was the name of a haulage business which specialised in milk and you used to see a lot of their tankers on and around the A303. Well, this box lorry was clearly not delivering milk. But the logo did suggest that it was delivering delivery systems.
The day before that, I saw an interesting way to get scaffold boards down the side of a building. That is to say, the chap at the top of the building drops the board down to the next chap down, who drops it down again, and so on to the bottom of the building. None of them appeared to be wearing gloves. I certainly wouldn't fancy catching a falling scaffold board without them - but maybe eastern Europeans have tougher hands than I do. I would have thought one would have got some very nasty splinters by the end of the day - clearly they did not.
The day before that, having failed to find any Durrell in the library, I took out 'Aaron's stick' by D H Lawrence, a book I had not read before. Interesting read, which amongst other things built a link between Huxley and Lawrence (see above). That is to say, they both wrote autobiographical novels in which the charectars do a lot of preaching - the novel drifting in the direction of an essay. And both authors published a relatively small number of novels plus quite a few essays, poems and plays. They both painted. They both write about the trials and tribulations of clever boys who manage to climb out of their native sties into the literary world of London: while Lawrence was such a clever boy, Huxley most certainly was not - but the growth of education must have made the breed visible at about that time. They both write about older women. They both write satire about the inhabitants of said literary world. They are both interested in achieving some kind of elevated state, dressed up in fancy language, above the normal run of things. (I should say that I do have some sympathy with the fancy language. It is very hard not to sound silly when talking about higher planes - but some people do have interesting things to say about them).
But Lawrence, unlike Huxley, seems to take a curious view of women, a view in which they are very predatory. He sometimes writes as if he was afraid of their power. That apart, I have been reminded, how hard he works at describing the forces and tensions in our everyday relations with each other. Something that nobody else that I know has really tried. And most novelists don't preach - the only other example I can think of apart from Huxley, is Tolstoy in War and Peace where he sounds off a good bit.
Something which Lawrence did in this book which was new to me, was have some veterans of the first war talk about their experiences; this novel being very aware of the war which had just finished - both in England and Italy. (Coincidentally, I learn from this week's TLS that the Italians took a terrible walloping in the first war from the Austrians, losing 750,000 men). I don't think Huxley, Joyce or Simenon do it - despite being of more or less the same generation.
Then the other day I saw a good advertisement for the way words drift. I was passed by a long box lorry on the way to Cheam, with the word 'Wincanton' in big and the words 'Provider of delivery systems' or some such in small. Now many years ago Wincanton was the name of a haulage business which specialised in milk and you used to see a lot of their tankers on and around the A303. Well, this box lorry was clearly not delivering milk. But the logo did suggest that it was delivering delivery systems.
The day before that, I saw an interesting way to get scaffold boards down the side of a building. That is to say, the chap at the top of the building drops the board down to the next chap down, who drops it down again, and so on to the bottom of the building. None of them appeared to be wearing gloves. I certainly wouldn't fancy catching a falling scaffold board without them - but maybe eastern Europeans have tougher hands than I do. I would have thought one would have got some very nasty splinters by the end of the day - clearly they did not.
The day before that, having failed to find any Durrell in the library, I took out 'Aaron's stick' by D H Lawrence, a book I had not read before. Interesting read, which amongst other things built a link between Huxley and Lawrence (see above). That is to say, they both wrote autobiographical novels in which the charectars do a lot of preaching - the novel drifting in the direction of an essay. And both authors published a relatively small number of novels plus quite a few essays, poems and plays. They both painted. They both write about the trials and tribulations of clever boys who manage to climb out of their native sties into the literary world of London: while Lawrence was such a clever boy, Huxley most certainly was not - but the growth of education must have made the breed visible at about that time. They both write about older women. They both write satire about the inhabitants of said literary world. They are both interested in achieving some kind of elevated state, dressed up in fancy language, above the normal run of things. (I should say that I do have some sympathy with the fancy language. It is very hard not to sound silly when talking about higher planes - but some people do have interesting things to say about them).
But Lawrence, unlike Huxley, seems to take a curious view of women, a view in which they are very predatory. He sometimes writes as if he was afraid of their power. That apart, I have been reminded, how hard he works at describing the forces and tensions in our everyday relations with each other. Something that nobody else that I know has really tried. And most novelists don't preach - the only other example I can think of apart from Huxley, is Tolstoy in War and Peace where he sounds off a good bit.
Something which Lawrence did in this book which was new to me, was have some veterans of the first war talk about their experiences; this novel being very aware of the war which had just finished - both in England and Italy. (Coincidentally, I learn from this week's TLS that the Italians took a terrible walloping in the first war from the Austrians, losing 750,000 men). I don't think Huxley, Joyce or Simenon do it - despite being of more or less the same generation.
# posted by Jim @ 4:19 AM 
