Monday, October 12, 2009
Topic for an educational project
Help at hand for someone in search of a project. Perhaps somebody from our local University of the Media Arts. BH has drawn my attention to the obituary of one Paul Ashbee, an eminent archeologist who died on the 19th August and who was obiturised on the 10th October. BH's interest was in the Mildenhall Treasure Trove, now thought to have been looted from somewhere in Europe at the end of the second world war by our gallant allies. My interest is in the dates. What sort of circumstances result in one being obiturised getting on for two months after the event? Assuming, that is, that the DT has not done a typo. And even if it has, I think the idea remains sound. Step 1: obtain access to a run of DT's. Libraries used to be able to do this, although I suspect you would need to go to a specialist library these days, Step 2: enter key details of all the obituaries onto an Excel spreadsheet. Optional step 3 for those seeking a higher qualification: repeat steps 1 and 2 for 1 or more other quality newspapers. Making sure that the newspaper code is included in key details. Might be an idea to do this anyway, just in case. Step 4: analyse. What is the distribution of obituary lags? What sort of a person do you have to be to rate a two month lag? A three month lag? Compare and contrast the various quality newspapers. Would any of them be open to negociation. I bung you £W and you guarantee me to obuturise me within not less than X days and not more than Y days (of the day of death) provided I die within Z months. Penalty clauses, liquidated damages and all that sort of thing. One might even engage the interest of a bored librarian to the extent that he or she did much of the leg-work for you. Only reasonable in this case that he or she got an hon. mensch. when you came to write the thing up. Along with your long suffering partner and so on.
Holiday reading in Jersey included a slender tome lifted from the second hand bookshop at Earlsfield - an Oxford Classic edition of A. Trollope's autobiography, prompted by some kind words about him in a review of a book about the treatment of lady villains in Victorian fiction in a recent TLS. The reviewer thought that Trollope's treatment of same was both kinder and more sensible than the more emotional treatment in Hardy and Elliot. Anyway, at £2 for a slender tome, rather dear to the cubic inch, but an interesting read all the same. Amongst other things a sort of inverted snobbery in treating his work as a writer, a breed who by the end of his time were supposed to be superior, arty beings with strange life styles, in much the same way as a car mechanic might talk about building up his business of mending cars. A sort of self-help manual for budding writers. Perhaps this last was what he was about, perhaps having seen plenty of hopeful and dewy eyed youngsters crashing onto the rocks of despair. And including a list of all his books and the amount he received from each one of them, down to the last penny. Did quite well as he appears to have averaged more than £2,000 a year over nearly thirty years; quite a good screw in those days. Plus his salary from the Post Office.
As it happens, his mother, F. Trollope, was also a writer, and one who gets a mention in this week's TLS as having been deeply shocked by Jefferson's sexual abuse of the women slaves he owned. A tricky topic these days for a national hero.
Another bit of holiday reading was Narayan, prompted by that same recent TLS. Something I have, for some reason, never tried before. Included an odd story about a young chap who fought off a tiger with furniture. First odd thing was that he managed to chop of three tiger claws using a kitchen knife. Even when barricaded under a very solid table this seems a bit unlikely. I would have thought the tiger would be able to wave his paw around with far too much power for such a thing to be possible. Probably taking your hand off on the way. Second odd thing was the observation that tigers are afraid of chairs. Now I can see some sense in that. A chair is obviously an artefact. Something which is entirely out of place and strange in a jungle. Something which any sensible animal would be afraid of until such time as it knew better.
A thought which reminds me of the park wall we drove past coming out of Weymouth on the way home. Whacking great thing, a brick wall maybe five feet high and miles long, running around the outside of some great man's park. A belt of trees just inside so that from the interior of the park you do not have view of ugly wall. A symbolic wall; too low to keep out either deer or determined people. But a blot on the landscape from the outside. A blot which must have been much worse when it was new. What business does a man have, however rich, enclosing a great chunk of country and asserting his total control of it in this crude way? A softer fence, perhaps chestnut paling, would have been cheaper, more ecological and a much better fit to the countryside. Part of the point being that chestnut paling is see through, unlike a wall which is a blank. A problem of transition. How do I move from the house, onto the ground, out through the park and into the open countryside in an elegant way? The first bit of which problem lots of outdoor sculptures get wrong. That is to say, how to park the sculpture on the ground. What sort of plinth, if any, is appropriate?
The excuse might be that the whacking great wall was just a job creation scheme in some period of agricultural depression. Something a bit less depressing than digging cubic metre holes then filling them up again all day. But a something with a persistent an ugly outcome.
# posted by Jim @ 1:26 AM 
