Thursday, October 07, 2010
Savings
Disappointed that the Conservatives did not choose to showcase at their conference my suggestion for saving lots of money by running government drug shops at a profit rather than running drug prisons at a loss, but perhaps they will choose to take action on this one. It seems that some bright spark in the University of Milan is working on some drug which will make us live 20% longer. So the beleaguered government of Italy should save some money by closing down the department concerned and the government of this country should take pre-emptive action by banning the drug or drugs in question. We are not doing well enough with the old people we have got to be wanting 20% more of them.
And the LRB tells me about some more odd research. It seems that given names are a fascinating business. One can study the rise and fall of particular given names. One can study the number of names. Why do some cultures have lots and some have few? One can research into why mums think that this or that name is posh. One can look into what names mean or into whether they mean. One might learn, for example, that Dennis is a derivative of Dionysus, the god of booze. Clearly the parents of the late Sir Dennis Thatcher Bart. had him marked down from an early age. And there is a large bunch of people out there who think that the study of names in ancient Greece is fascinating. To the point where the OUP is publishing volume Va of its lexicon of ancient Greek names. A snip at £125 for 496 pages. There may be an even better deal for concessions. Now this is all good fun, but is it the sort of thing the government should be funding when they can't whack up the washers for a new trident?
The same LRB had a much less fun article about the relative merits of literary criticism and creative writing as subjects for study at university. Didn't understand much of its several pages at all. But I do think I prefer the days when writers wrote in garrets and did not need the support of group therapy to ply their trade. Something vaguely indecent about exhibiting all the tricks of the trade in that way.
And then there is the chap in the TLS to whom I shall refer to as HCE. As far as I can make out HCE is a middling sort of poet who ekes out his income by doing poetry readings in festivals in places like Sandbach and hosting residential creative writing workshops in places like rural France. HCE also writes what used to be a weekly column for the TLS, although, of late, he seems to have been demoted to occasional. But I like his pieces. Light and jolly while erudite apercus on the life of the working poet. So rather surprised to come across one of his poems which involves him drilling though his own head, more or less from ear to ear, with an electric drill, while watching the proceedings in his bathroom mirror. Rather unpleasant and I would much rather not know about it.
# posted by Jim @ 1:24 AM 
