I have never seen so many sweet violets in Sussex, never. Easter Monday, mild, weak sun through cloud. Tadpoles thriving, and gradually being moved to the wildlife pond, but sadly one of our fish, known only as Red One (we gave up naming them, due to rapid turnover, and then these two lived for years) has succumbed to the attentions of a fishing cat. It survived the attack, but died later in the emergency ward. . .

Deeply engrossed all last week in the grim interactive gothic novel my family is still enacting, but yes, with thanks to those who inquired, I have noticed that Spirit is shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke award. An unlikely candidate!, given various constraints, not least that it only got submitted by Gollancz after special pleading. Still, never mind. There are strong books on this short list, April 28th will come, and I'll be delighted for the winner.

Did you know, Escape Plans, the Ur-novel of this protracted sequence, was shortlisted for the very first Arthur C Clarke award, in 1987? Isn't that remarkable.

Hi Jesper, and thanks for your comment on the Dragon Tattoo. . .

I agree! In the first book Salander's computer-whizzness didn't worry me. This obviously isn't realist fiction, and I'm used to the same phenomenon in sf, where some applied technology (eg genetic engineering) works exactly like magic, but I'm supposed to suspend disbelief because the terms and language are "scientific". In the second book I thought Salander's "hacker" credentials really fell apart, and the third, even to my small knowledge of computers, was worse. Also left slightly feeling that if I winced at the computer stuff, real investigative journalists might be grimacing madly at flaws invisible to me. . . But this is still ace bestseller material. It's like a movie being Oscar material: a mystery when you look closely, instantly recognisable from the proper distance.

Wednesday 24th March, very mild, cloud rising and clearing as the afternoon declines. Did I say, on that walk from Woodingdean to Lewes, I never saw so many sweet violets before. These, in the thumbnail, running all along the foot of an old wall by the Downs Hotel, unphased by busy road at their feet. The scent, a delicate blend of Parma sherbert and dog wee. . . presumably passing dogs either like the odour and give it their seal of approval, or else hate it and try to do everyone a good turn by providing their own Febreze.


If you were involved in the Drop the Debt movement a few years back, you probably got an emergency email a week or so ago, over the sabotaging of the Debt Relief (Developing Countries) Bill: a private member's move, that had cross-party support and was about to become law, to protect the poorest countries in the world from toxic lawyers. Here's the link if you'd still like to do something to support that: http://www.globalpovertypromise.com/vulturefunds Sadly, though we may have hoped that the toxic lobbying behind that last minute "objection" from Christopher Chope was private enterprise too, it seems that Mr Cameron may well have approved their attitude: http://ekklesia.co.uk/node/11518

It shouldn't be this way. Justice and Peace should be the openly avowed objectives of the State, globally and locally. Greed and Hypocrisy, those two pillars of the English nation, should be the country's shadow-self, skulking in corners, afraid to speak their own names. Would it were so.


While I'm at it, here's news of another Bill that's going to be law before you know it: a link to Gill Spraggs' post on the Digital Economy Bill. An issue that definitely wants watching. Plus her detailed take on Clause 43

Small item in New Scientist: Surveys have shown that when people insulate their housing to the nth, the saving on energy consumption is considerably less than predicted, for the people are more interested in comfort than conservation, and having stuffed their cavity walls, filled the loft with foam and double-glazed everything else, they then tend to turn the heat up. Same sort of thing happens when Gordon Brown, who doesn't have a clue, or want one, on Environmental Issues, decides to embrace Greenwash. Hence the High Speed Rail Network proposal, a Big, Big, Flagship project that will Save the Planet (as less people will fly from London to Birmingham) so that means huge spending on a completely new build, while leaving the existing network languishing, is perfectly okay. It's having your cake and eating it too! Shame it isn't actually going to connect with Heathrow, but that's a footnote. Here's Christian Woolmar's take: http://www.christianwolmar.co.uk/2009/09/rail-626-network-rail-undermines-case-for-high-speed-line/

Hm. Maybe I should have headed this "please do not read unless you already agree with me". But though it sounds like a ranting set of links, that's because of my grumpy temper this afternoon. Your actual respondents are an even-handed lot, and worth anybody's attention.

Tuesday 23rd March, low cloud and mist, cool. How quickly Spring catches up. Everything's changed since ten days ago. Such an epic winter it's been, I'm sorry to see it go, but I can never resist the spring.
Hazel catkins have expanded, primroses burst into flower on the banks, one of my native daffodils has opened, buds popping open on the hawthorn, visible on the little blackthorn where there were only dead-looking twigs. Frog action, modest but healthy, in the fishpool, clumps of spawn moved into the "wildlife pool" (it has yet to catch on with the wildlife, tho' a couple of frogs have been seen visiting). On Sunday Peter and I walked the Jugg's Road to Lewes from Woodingdean (Jugg's Road: the fishwives of Brighthelmstone carried jugs full of fresh fish to the nearest town this way, long time ago). It's a walk for skies and landscape curves, not detail, so much of the downs under the plough, price of wheat must have gone up again I guess. Very beautiful under that powdery blue sky of early Spring, and uncountable larks, shouting and shouting. We inspected the dewponds on Kingston Hill for amphibs, saw nothing but some charming little snails, tiny glittering beetles scooting around in the submerged grasses, tiny dots of smaller animals. Hey, since we doped our "wildlife pool" with genuine pond water (from the dipping spot at the Heart of Reeds) maybe we'll get some of these.

The Aiguilles Rouges are featured because that's a detail from the jigsaw that saw me through the winter (as some of you may know, I work on jigsaws while thinking out what to do about chapter seven, and is that character superfluous etc; yes, just like Ax Preston). I usually favour art-jigsaws, I thought it was because of my superior aesthetics, I now concede it's because landscape can be just impossibly hard, making nonsense of my writer's meditation technique. Still, I won't forget them, and they're on a must see list now. Got to walk that black bridge.

Reading/watching. Just finished the Dragon Tattoo books. Excellent best-seller material, wads and wads of simple journalistic prose hung on the hook of a textbook Grimm fairytale. Have to say, the second one was the weakest, possibly because the "diversion", an exposé of sex-trafficking (so well-done in the first, when it was an exposé of corrupt financier's empire), completely failed to deliver. Curious about the titles, I found a page discussing the phenomenon: where I learned that the translator's name is a pseudonym, because the real person, translator with a major reputation, had his name taken off the books. . . Also learned that the title "Men Who Hate Women" was rejected for the English version (though not for any other European market) "because people would think it was Non-Fiction, and be offended". Isn't that interesting!

Have to say #2: not to speak ill of the dead and all, and I do know how it probably happens and why (It's all in Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws) But for a bloke who is so outraged about men hating women, Stieg Larsson has to have spent a great deal of time thinking about young, almost pre-pubertal women suffering aggravated rape, young women getting murdered by sexual torture, women of all varieties getting persecuted and insulted in all kinds of ways. And so it goes, that's what fairytales are always about, after all.

Have to say #3. The Handsome Prince goes missing. . . It's true what you've heard about the movie. Salander is played by someone who looks a lot less like a starved and alienated stray kitten than she should, but our hero is played by someone who is going to puzzle audiences very much indeed, as the second and third episodes appear, and all the fabulously beautiful intellectual bodybuilding ladies crawl at his feet, beggi

Wednesday 10th March, a high-pressure dry blue sky, warm sun, keen breeze; not so bitterly keen as it was yesterday.

Update on the tadpoles. I now have two colonies indoors, one lively, feather-gilled and feeding on lettuce, the second a few days behind and with a few more casualties in the mix. Outdoors, development is much slowed by the cold, tho' I cover the tubs over at night. No more spawn has appeared, the single remaining mating pair returned to their endeavours today, after being under the ice since last week.

I brought my two clumps of spawn in thinking they might be dead, like last year; or that it would only be for a day or two. Now my goal is to rear at least fifteen or twenty froglets & I think I have them indoors for the rest of the month, unless the weather changes. I might buy a magnifying glass.

In my diary for 2009, same date, it says "this has been the coldest, longest winter for a decade". The truth is, by my record winters down here in Brighton have been colder, in terms of days/nights of frost, for quite a while: cold that I'd have thought unusual in Brighton thirty years ago, interrupting spells of well above average temperatures. Chaotic winters, you might say. We didn't get the overly warm periods this time.

Wonder what will happen in 2010/11?

Thursday 4th March, blue sky, bright sun, chill air but no ice or frost. This entry photo stars my cat Ginger, dressed in a table napkin. She's fond of dressing up. Napkins, newspapers, anything that could cover a cat. . .
What shall I do about the spawn? This time last year, our fishpool was a heaving mass of amorous frogs, but none of their spawn survived. Most wasn't fertile, maybe some succumbed to a March cold snap. Many individuals seemed very stressed (reddish skin, skeletal thin) though I didn't see any definite signs of the "red leg" disease. This year, let us say the over-population problem seems to have been resolved. There's one mating pair in the fishpool, nothing going on in the new small pool, and I have two batches of spawn. The first laid is fertile: I have commas indoors and creased oblong eggs outside.

I think I'll bring the whole of the first lot indoors, leave the second lot outside, see how that works.

Tuesday 2nd March, white roofs blue sky, no commas yer. Second batch of spawn in the dead flag leaves, tightly pursed bundle of jelly, hope it's warmer inside there. To be moved from fish pool when small pool ice has melted.

Working as I do in a genre that has been assuming the imminent demise of printed fiction for decades, and expecting (with or without enthusiasm, depending whether you are an Orwellite or an Asimovian) total surveillance culture maybe even longer, I don't know why I'm worried. I'll live in the unregulated chinks, for as long as they survive and same as I do right now. Much of my fiction/nonfiction is free online already & it gets distributed okay, or at anyrate better than I could expect from the Giant Nothing Evil Team.

However, the Google Book Settlement Resistance thing gathers momentum, run by people who are old fashioned enough to act as if they have a voice in the design of governance: and good for them. Here's Gill Spraggs' statement from the Google Books Breakfast last week: Discuss!


The Bookseller reported recently the government sees it as "right" that
the Publishers Association "leads" the UK's response to the Google
Settlement. I've been asked to point out that the rights that the
settlement would license to Google are rights to works created by
authors; rights that in a huge number of cases belong to authors;
publishers may hold licenses to them, but authors own the copyrights.
Many of the rights to out-of-print books have reverted to their authors.
Authors are very big stakeholders in this business; and many of us are
feeling that we are not being taken sufficiently into account. It is
authors who by their original creative work produce the value on which
the entire publishing industry depends.


In this country professional book authors who have looked into the
Google Settlement hate it. I am talking about authors who license their
books to trade publishers in return for an advance on royalties, and who
have built their careers wholly or partly round writing; authors who
sell books in large numbers, and authors who are hoping that their
latest book will break out into the big time. Witness the many UK names
on the opt-out list, an amazing range of talent that spans the genres,
the generations and the political spectrum. The debate among authors in
the run up to the opt-out deadline was focused on the best way to escape
from the thing: opt out, or opt in and remove your books. I know several
who have taken the latter course; anecdotally, I know there are others,
probably very many. Some are relying on promises from their publishers
to pull their books from Google's database. I can only find one
professional UK book author who has praised the settlement: Maureen
Duffy, Honorary President of ALCS and a representative plaintiff.


The Settlement has been a PR disaster for Google. Authors worldwide
write blogs that are read by fans, friends, family, and many wannabe
authors. In recent months, comments on forums and blogs have become
increasingly hostile to Google. This includes comments on news sites,
and even, remarkably, in geek strongholds like the famous Slashdot site.


Google claims that out-of-print books are of no economic value, and that
the settlement is the only way that authors can benefit from them.
Professional authors know this is nonsense. Winning an award; getting a
TV or movie deal; bringing out a new book in a series; writing in a
genre that comes into vogue, or on a theme that becomes topical; all
these things and more can 'breathe

Tuesday 23rd February, not raining right now and the sky is a brighter shade of grey.

One ball of fresh spawn, though I've seen only one frog, definitely not carrying a freight of eggs, and no mating action. The spawn doesn't look too good but I moved it out of the fish pool anyway.

Last year there was a lot of action, but all the spawn died. Same complete loss in 2006. In 2007, 2008, tads survived and about 20 or so succeeded in becoming froglets.

Monday February 22nd, February fill-dyke. It's still winter further north, here it's just rain, a raw fresh air, huge puddles when I sneaked out between downpours.

Band of Gypsys 2nd edition free online

When he read Bold As Love (published Aug 2001), Kim Stanley Robinson told me it was one of the few books that year that could have been written after 9/11. I'm not totally sure what Stan meant by that, but in fact the first three Bold As Love books were "written" before September 2001. I had them all worked out, just had to decide on the details as I typed. But people talk about "9/11": for me it was 03/03. It was March 2003 when I knew I'd woken up in a different world, and a worse world. As I've said elsewhere, to me "9/11" was a proposal. Hey George, sez Osama. You're cute. How about you and me wreck Western Civilisation together, hell, we can wreck Islam too, I don't care. Lets destroy everything that's decent in both our worlds! C'mon, it'll be fun! In March 2003 the courtship was over, the marriage of true minds was consummated. Tony and George leapt joyfully into their mentor's arms.

So in my chronology, Band of Gypsys was the first post 9/11 episode. The consequences can be seen from page one, in which my "West Wing"-style benign US President gets written out of the script. It wasn't meant to happen like that: I just found I couldn't stand the sight of him.

Ash Wednesday, 17th February, clear skies, mouse ice, 9 shoots of native daffodils now, and a frog vertical in the weeds, seeming to look up from under the ice in the little new pool. Alive or dead? Can't tell until the sun warms it. Christmas reading feature, final entry

There are two women. One is young and harsh and good with figures. The other is an old, sweet-natured, unworldly artist. Both are outsiders in a small Nordic community: the old woman isolated by status in her big house, the young woman isolated by nature, and by her ambivalent status as the community's fixer; she solves minor business problems, but her solutions make people uneasy. There's a dog, controlled but untamed companion; there's the harsh girl's simple-minded brother. There are other characters, serving to illustrate the central problem. The young woman wants something from the old woman. Basically, she wants a share of the old woman's wealth, but the catch is that she cannot bear to ask for the money, to earn the money, or to deserve the money. Her self-esteem requires her to ask nothing of the world, she has to take. But she has to take by what she considers fair means, and that means (it turns out) by besting the old woman in mind games.

The clueless old woman paints pictures of the forest floor. Her ability to concentrate on the finest detail of what's going on in the living world, right under everyone's feet,is her obsession. Somehow, a population of cute rabbits, rabbits with flowery fur, invaded this passionate life's work. The flowery rabbits irritate her, but they have made her famous. She's plagued by floods of letters from little children, which she tries to take seriously, and floods of international business proposals: which she does not take seriously. She lets herself be cheated, because she isn't interested in figures and she doesn't care.

If you are a Moomin fan, and since this is Tove Jansson talking, you will get the picture. You loved The Summer House, you loved A Winter Book; you may find this one a little disquieting. You may find yourself thinking, hang on, I don't know if I want to know this. . .

The whole action of the novel is contained by the dark, icy snowlit months of a Nordic winter, during which the calculating young woman strips the old artist of her elective naivety about business and other matters, and the old artist strips the calculating young woman of her pride and her self-containment. It's a gripping introverts' adventure, I can't explain how such petty drama and unsparing candour can be so attractive. Like, let me see, Cranford distilled to a fiery strength, but with the cosy warmth and light surgically removed. I think it's the old artist who turns out to be the stronger (did you guess?) but you must make up your own mind.

Spoiler warning, don't get too attached to the flowery rabbits. But if you didn't know already that the Moomins are really people, showing the very peculiar, almost chilling, characteristics that quite ordinary people display (Nordic or not; when you look close, with an unsparing eye); then I can't help you.

Tuesday 16th February, much milder. A grey, damp, breezy morning, a charm of goldfinches squabbling

Here's something I've been waiting to post. Gill Spraggs analysis and investigation of the Google Book Settlement (spoiler warning: she's not in favour of those Do No Evil lads' approach to the Digital Future) now has a blog and a mailing list

If you're a writer and you think you've opted out but you've had no confirmation you can check your name on the lawyers' list of no-thanks responders: http://thepublicindex.org/docs/amended_settlement/Allen_declaration2.pdf


Look carefully, the name order is a bit weird

In the genre world, Ursula Le Guin is also being very active.

Now what? Just saying no is easy enough, if you have an ounce of bloody-mindedness in you, and what writer does not, you can easily skip through the Do No Evil team's obstacle course. Thinking of another way, and putting it into practice, especially supposing you are not incredibly rich and powerful: that's the challenge.

Tuesday 2nd February, still raining. Candlemas did not dawn bright and clear.

Not likely to be any Fair Maids of February in my garden, either. Only two of my new native daffodils (responsibly sourced) are showing above ground, the rest of the narcissi not very far advanced either.

We interrupt this belated review of Christmas and New Year books with some other essential reading, just to show I'm not entirely cut off from the world.

PW on Macmillan vs Amazon

Gill Spraggs on the GBS

Also from Gill Spraggs, this morning, in my Inbox, a call to arms. I'll post you the URL if I get one.

& here's two entries from Common Dream

Peace Prize President's War Budget

Afghan geological resources worth trillions

Now I can't think of a single other thing to do at this desk, so I'll have to do some work.

Tuesday 2nd February, no frost, grey rain.

For completism.

I read the second tome of Stephen Walsh's Stravinsky biography (Stravinsky: The Second Exile: France and America, 1934–1971) in December when I had the flu. The massiveness of the book was a friend to me, when the misery of flu was making time pass very slowly, and I'll remember it fondly for that reason.

Whoever said (commenting on my first Stravinsky post), that biographies of artists/musicians are a bit of a pitfall she was dead right, but I'm always curious, it's the History of Ideas student in me. On the whole, I learned a little about Modernism, both brands, and that was interesting (and thanks for the Penderecky tip greywyvern, but I'm not really a convert. I'll dip in and out of Modernism, same as Jazz, but it's not for me). Stravinsky himself becomes more human as he gets older, sheds first the Enfant Terrible and then the HardNosed Marketplace Artist persona. He said, in the end "All artists are carried on the shoulder of tradition", (and went on to reference the St Christopher and the Christ Child legend, which kind of positions Stravinsky as the Christ, ha!; but never mind). He refused, withering the suggestion with scorn, to "interview" Shostakovich, when he visited the USA. "What's the point in talking to him? He is not free!", which shows more sense than other expats tactlessly trying to get the man to denounce the Soviet State.

I listened to a lot of Stravinsky, liked some of it very much (probably, apart from The Rite Of Spring, the least-Stravinskyish works: couldn't get on with the Sacred music at all), & the biography gave me the entry, because I'm the slave of words. But every biographer has a thesis, of course they do or it wouldn't be a book it'd be a list of dates. In Ian MacDonald's dramatic "secret dissident" reading of Shostakovich's career, it's about Soviet history and music-politics and relates directly to the music. Stephen Walsh's big idea is the unmasking of a third party: not Stravinsky, for all his faults, but Robert Craft, Stravinsky's amanuensis, companion, secretary, substitute son. Stravinsky, a "bad, hard-hearted father", who demanded his children's devotion and treated them like chattels, got his come-uppance when he fell into the clutches of a "son", maybe neither bad nor hard-hearted, who worked the old man into the ground, alienated him from his (first) family and treated him like property. . . You can't call this inadmissable, because nobody disputes that Craft did take over Stravinsky's papers. He controlled the composer's post-mortem reputation. If he suppressed, edited, deleted, "interpreted" anything he didn't like, that's got to be fascinating, also very annoying, for any biographer who comes after, and detects the traces. I'm not sure it's all that fascinating for someone trying to place the composer in his times. But you can read Craft's immensely detailed refutation here, if you're really interested.

Monday 1st February, bright clear day, fading now: hard frost, dead calm

Name a world-famous female UK artist, working now, who is also an outspoken and highly influential political figure. Doesn't have to be a novelist or essayist, can be anything: film-maker, painter, musician.

No, you can't have Tracy Emin. Complaining that you have to pay too much tax when you earn a lot of money doesn't count as a political opinion.

You're struggling, right? Maybe they manage these things much better in France, and if I were not so insular & ignorant, I could name a half-dozen arts-celebrity salonistas who make or break all the State's policies. But even if it were so, it's not the point: first because she has to be famous outside her own country, and second because she has to be a public figure in her own right, an independent voice, not a female power-behind-the-throne. I think we need to go further afield -ironically, to countries where the inequality of women's rights is far more openly acknowledged. Nawal El Saadawi ; Arundhati Roy
They'll do, though they don't operate on the same scale (realtively) as De Staël.

Why did she pretty much vanish from the halls of political fame? It could be because she was incapable of changing her mind.

When Napoleon stopped being the darling of the intellectual liberals, and ran a police state at home, while parcelling out Europe as his family's private fief, it wasn't a change of plan or a change of heart (at least I don't think so). It was more that the intellectuals and artists of the world, such as Beethoven, had been seeing what they wanted to see. In France most of them went on doing just that. Men in public life, or who wanted to be in public life, reverted instantly to the Ancien Regime mindset. You've got to have a position at Court. As you may remember, there were draconian laws in the Ancien Regime, forbidding anyone remotely "noble" from earning a living, but that was only part of it. You didn't have to be greedy for money, you only had to be greedy for influence, for visibility, for power-to-do-good even. In post-Revolutionary France everyone who was anyone, from the hardest of hard Left Jacobins to devout unreconstructed Royalists, started scrabbling for positions in Napoleon's Government. My old friend Francois de Chateaubriand among them (tho' he did resign when D'Enghien was assassinated, and he did it before he knew how his colleagues were going to jump). It was shameless, it was horrible. Germaine De Staël was disgusted & she refused to kowtow. She said destiny was not morality, and she would stick with morality. She ended up in exile, banished from France, her writing suppressed, her new books pulped. She knew she was ruining her children's lives, as they would never get a decent job. She had good reason to fear for her life, but she never surrendered.

Mind you, she didn't have a lot of choice, when it came to public office. The French Revolution had played out (for women) as several others have done since; cf Iran 1979. They womaned the barricades, they ran political clubs, they had impasssioned speeches made in defence of their talents, their rights. They ended up explicitly restricted to the domestic sphere by the Constitution, 1791, long before Napoleon got going.

But she could have been a salonista. Napoleon would have loved her to be his salonista. She wouldn't do it. She didn't change her mind because, like Albert Camus, she met one of those moments (Camus was speaking of fascism) when one has to decide, do two and two make four? Or do they not? She decided not to agree that two and two makes whatever the Emperor says it makes.

Now,

Monday January 18th, a mild damp misty morning; birdsong

Just a brief post, to point out that the three Bold As Love novels I've re-edited and Spirit are now available permanently on this site, see under "Webpage Links". And remember, if you download one of my pdf books it is yours to keep , just as if you'd bought print and paper. I can't delete it from your kindle access, I can't decide I don't like chapter five or that I should make the ending more upbeat, dip into your text and change it.

I was quite interested in the kindle idea, until I found out about the breaking and entering aspect. Tuh. People are such sheep!

NB, should you be in Brighton tomorrow and free at lunchtime, you could come along to the Chapel Royal, North St., where Gabriel is playing a recital. Here's the details. The Bach is the Prelude and Fugue in E flat

Wednesday 13th January, after dark, snow on the roofs, can't tell if it's freezing out there, I'm going to try and take the train to Manchester tomorrow:should be fine, wish me luck.

Holiday reading interrupted for a special announcement, it's the New Year, and as promised the full text of Spirit has returned, download here, free online. Soon I'll get all the online books on sidebar links on this new blog. If you want a word file not the pdf, just ask.

So Google are pulling out of China. I'm not saying they shouldn't, but what a blow. How abandoned all those people must feel.

Wednesday 13th January, Fresh snow in the night and snow falling all morning, but the air is warmer and the snow is melting now, twilight gathering, the skies still low and unbroken grey.

Finally, the winter holiday reading feature. Germaine De Stael, born Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, daughter of Jacques Necker, Finance Minister to Louis XVI who (amazingly) became the hero of the first phase, the hopeful bit, of the French Revolution. Madame De Stael, "French Revolutionary Activist and Theorist of European Romanticism", the Spirit of Eighty Nine in person. "The most influential woman in Europe. . . How come I've never read anything by her before now? Because she was a woman and therefore "her fame has not survived"? I'm not so sure about that. I wonder how many of you out there are well up on my old friend Francois? (meaning Francois Eugene Rene De Chateaubriand, the other highly influential French writer of those times). I think there was something else deeply wrong with Germaine De Stael, of which more later. . .

Anyway, the books I read were a fragment called "Ten Years Of Exile", which is interesting but fragmentary, and her second novel Corinne, Or Italy. I should now formally warn against spoilers (stupid concept, really). You're duly warned. There's a hero called Oswald (a name that sounded different at the time, I can only think). He's the strong, sensitive, vulnerable yet hunky type, given to modest heroism between bouts of spitting blood. He goes to Italy and encounters Corinne, who is just about as famous as God, though not in an an arrogant way. In fact, she's almost like the Anti-Napoleon, because she's the Queen of Peace, Mistress of the arts, of dance and poetry and drama, champion of liberty, equality, amitie, (sorry, I can't be bothered to do accents); plus another one, which Mme De Stael has just invented, diversity. In real life, at the time when this book came out, "Italy" was just a bundle of political interests, arranged around some battlefields where Napoleon had recently triumphed. In Corinne, Mme De Stael invents a nation, a federation of states, all equal but different, none of them smothering any of the others. Oswald falls madly in love, they have a long but chaste (just about) free and easy courtship (no chaperones, no caution, plenty of reputation ruining trips to the provinces), and then he tells her he absolutely adores all her talents, but when they marry, if they marry, he expects all that stuff to be his own personal property. She can do what she likes if she can fit it all in with her domestic duties, but no showing off in front of an audience, and definitely no working outside the home... This puts rather a damper on Corinne's dream of perfect trust and perfect union.

It's not going to work. Oswald, after a lot of soul-searching, weeping at Corinne's feet, making her life a misery etc, goes back to England and falls for Corinne's mild-mannered half-sister, but since he's going to carry a torch for Corinne for the rest of his life, he naturally makes the innocent young girl utterly miserable too...

I won't tell you how it ends.

This is an interesting concept. See, what De Stael is doing here is writing a formulaic novel very popular at the time, which you will surely recognise because it is still going strong: starring the Romantic Hero, the Passionate Woman, with the Suitable Girl in a supporting role, and a p

Monday January 11th, snow eroding from roofs and pavements, still freezing; thick low skies

Correction. There aren't any actual hippies in Dhalgren. Your hippie is, or was originally, a hard-core radical political animal, with all that implies in range from idiot, corrupt freeloader to dedicated selfless visionary. In Dhalgren there's only a "commune" of clueless flower-children getting back to nature in the park. They have several hapless projects (weaving, washing their own clothes) and are held up to derision for same, but the "coffee out of the beans" reference really comes from Philip Marsden's Polish Travel/Memoir The Bronski House, it's the report of a former Polish aristocrat, looking back long afterwards to the days when she was young and her world collapsed around her ears. The day when the servants were gone, and the family were left staring at these small, hard brown objects, with literally no idea how to transform them into that rich, comforting dark liquid which always used to appear in a silver pot. . . The connection being about people who are completely unaware that they are helpless parasistes on a mightily unfair system. Come to think of it, I also reccomend The Spirit Wrestlers, Marsden's Russian book, same kind of deep cultural exploration in form of travelogue.

Yesterday, blizzards having failed to materialise, Peter and I took the bus out to Stanmer Park. A whole lot of people were tobogganning on the east slopes, we went for a walk in the woods instead and I'm glad we took the road less travelled. Our last snow was freezing as it fell, and there wasn't enough wind to drift but enough to drive it gently: every tree, every branch, every twig was burdened with white, flags and plumes, and the woods went on and on, everything familiar looking different, we went round and round, up along the ridge, managed to lose ourselves at least once: meanwhile discussing quite seriously whether we should take a shovel, rugs, a torch, water and food in the car, when we made our daring expedition north. Maybe the mediafolk are right, and what looks like a harmless winter day is just trying to fool us. . . These woods, esp the part that used to be Stanmer Great Wood, are nearly all young growth, dated by the hurricane of 87, which flattened nearly everything. Every so often a fragment of the old great beech vistas survives.

We decided against the blankets and thermos. Those mediafolk are insane. Now Gabriel is back in London, and the Winter Holidays are over.

Since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.


For me, by Houseman's reckoning, that figure should now be twenty. All the more reason to waste nothing.

Friday January 8th, hard frost, snow roofs, snow-skies; light-suffused grey with a gilt hem.

This morning both cats refused, categorically to go outside. I ejected Milo, squalling, Ginger protesting: Ginger bounced straight back in again, but she went out for a while of her own accord later. The reason for this cruelty? Well, they have a litter tray each and Milo is using his (but he wees in the bath, which is all right as long as you know. . .) Ginger is not using hers, which makes us uneasy. Either that little cat is constipated back up to her neck, or we are going to find evil withered little offerings somewhere very cunning and obscure. Last night, after two episodes of Wire 4 and watching Gabriel beat the half-way fortress of the 2D Wi Mario, Peter and I spent at least half an hour searching for Dhalgren, which I clearly remembered leaving on the sofa in plain sight, about 7pm when I decided to listen to Stravinsky and work on my Alpine jigsaw instead... Today I found it, behind the leg of the low table we use for eating on all but the most formal occasions, pushed back into the window alcove,looking exactly like a chunk of wood, not a book. I'm getting there, I'll have finished it by the end of the day. A lot of things I don't remember, a lot of longeurs (polite term for boring bits) I found equally tiresome the first time round. Why does this book deserve Masterworks status? Google hits. Can't argue with Google hits, and I won't, they are the stuff of the SF-Establishment. My job is to analyse, and to give (no, this is my pleasure) a historical perspective. I was about ten years old when the autobigraphical events on which this book is based actually happened, but when they're supposed to have happened, believe me I was there. Casting a cold eye. "Middle class" kids (middle class means something different in my country, nb), born and bred parasites who do not have the faintest idea how to get the coffee out of the beans, pshaw, and think it is cool to ape the behaviour of the helpless and the lost. . .

Anyway, I have listened to the news, and found out where our doorstep milk has gone. Into the slurry pit, every pint of it, reports a dairy farmer from Partridge Green, sounding absolutely gutted. Have watched the bluetits on the buddelia seeds, hopefullywatched our uneaten suet ball (birds are not used to finding shop-food in our garden, for obvious reasons). Have listened to Gabriel practicing the Appassionata downstairs, have coloured-in my Shrinkles stegosaurus (she still looks angry, probably because the text says she has an "unusually small brain", which of course is why I say "she"), have eaten Christmas cake.

In 1963 (it says here, on the bbc site) the temperature didn't rise above freezing for two months. Schools did NOT close, and there was no such thing as central heating, so people had coal fires or just got cold. I remember the fires, twisting the papers and clearing the ash (training that would come in d***ed useful later in life), the tobogganing, once by moonlight, and one particular icon, a broken egg that remained intact under the ice, swimming in the fragments of its shell, on Wilson Rd, right until March.

Books and composers stack up, I mean to post about my Winter Holiday reading soon.

I thought I wouldn't ever want to watch the Wire again, after majestic Stringer Bell, evil and noble, got his just desserts. But I find I do.

Monday 4th January, clear skies, hard frost.

Intercalary days. . . It's still officially Christmas in this house, where we keep the oldstyle festive season, so the decorations are still up, the one we call the Chinese Foil Lantern shedding its traditional glittering pattern over the ceiling for Ginger to admire, as I eat my working-day marmite toast. Writing the intro for the Gollancz Masterworks new edition of The Time Machine will occupy me this week, that and re-reading Dhalgren. (I once had a book up for inclusion in the Masterworks list myself, but it didn't come to anything, ah well). Male black cap poking around in the sycamore, our charm of goldfinches on Linda and Ron's feeders as usual, the one red camellia flower that opened just before Christmas succumbed to bruising, is there any kind of winter weather these winter blooming beauties like? Anyway, thank you Diana I am pretty much better now. I'd have liked a month's gentle convalescence in an Alpine spa of some kind, but overeating madly seems to have done the trick okay.

In fine weather, the sky in January is the bluest you ever see it in England.

Friday 18th December, in snowlight

Felled by flu-like symptoms I've been living in a dreamworld, walled in fog, feverish painful doze alternating with feverish painful wakefulness (usually in the middle of the night), only eased by mechanically passing my eyes over the blurred pages of The Second Exile (Vol II of Stephen Walsh's monumental Stravinsky biog). Peter, intrigued, checked out my symptoms on NHS direct and found me well-qualified for a Tamiflu voucher, wanted to know if he should print one out and collect the elixir from the chemists?

No!

Leavemealone, stupidgovernment medicine boundtoberubbish...

Diagnosis by clueless lay person multiple choice, for God's sake. Give me a workstation that can tell the amateur how to take a cheek swab, process the swab and deliver the results to robodoc... then maybe I'll listen.

Hey, I'm a PC and I invented that!

I've never suffered from seasickness but by reports this particular flu is similar. Your actual symptoms are trivial and fairly harmless (fever, sore throat, cough, aches) but the effect is such pure misery, so you know there's not much wrong but you sincerely want to die.

Meanwhile, Copenhagen seems to be foundering, just as predicted months ago. The Flood Countries rescue deal sorely hampered by the absence of Ax Preston, and the presence of National Governments.It's been strange for me (though I missed most of the actual action) to track Copenhagen, thinking of the same conference as staged, fictionally, in Amsterdam in Castles Made Of Sand. I note that in the years 1999-2000 (when CMOS was written) I:

a) Had no idea that climate change would take hold so fast
b) Was convinced that civil unrest would be the first result of the building global disaster, and that the economic growth model had to be shattered before anything could be achieved.

I could still be right. Certainly Africa already presents a horrible model on those very lines. I'm sure of one thing (but this is hardly news). The Business as Usual model cannot do a thing to halt the devastation. What's happened this week proves the ridiculous futility. Gordon Brown approves the third runway at Heathrow with one hand, while with the other he supports trenchant (ha) emission cuts. . .

Ginger comes to visit, checks me out: sometimes she gives me a bit of a wash and curls up on the pillow, whereupon she smacks me if I invade her space. Milo flees, terrified by a coughing fit. The last time I had flu was 2005, the end of January and Frank was still alive, I remember his warm, comforting weight against my side. When Frank felt affectionate, he leaned on you.

The last think I remember before the flu took over was Richard Strauss's Salome on the tv, arguing with Peter who would not believe the libretto was by Oscar Wilde. Please. I think I know Oscar Wilde, says I. Listen to her, how daft, John the Baptist's body white as snow etc etc, he's been living in the desert wearing a bit of camelskin. No he has not, says Peter, he's been in incommunicado detention bottom of that tin-roofed well-sort-of-thing for months.

Oh, okay. . .

Something's wrong with my comments again. I'll try to fix it when better. Meanwhile, Beth, yes, it was Hard Times. . . Yes, I did watch the Ballets Russes and we're going to see them re-enacted live on the Big Screen at the Dukes for our Christmas treat next week. Convalescent today, and the snow is falling on Brighton. We love the snow, because of the light.

Another clear blue sky morning, no frost

Squirrels romping in the bare branches, the colony of goldfinch scolding around the feeders in Linda and Ron's acacia, but apparently the "unsettled weather" =rain, wind, depressingly high temperatures, is still roaming around, will be back over Brighton by midday. A big weekend for us has just passed, Gabriel playing the Grieg piano concerto with the BYO at St Andrews Moulescoomb, it's a thirties church, rather handsome, and equiped with a small, elderly and not in great condition grand piano. It did its best and thankfully did not fly apart, though it was touch and go at moments. The boy done good. If you missed this fabulous occasion, there's a reprise at the big BYO concert in February in Hove Town Hall.

Monday morning I look at the BBC news, thinking as the little green squares fill up, what would be good news? Can I imagine any good news? Yes, there is good news: Copenhagen makes the top headline. . . Wow. Of course it was back to the hundredth of OUR BRAVE BOYS dying in Afghanistan and the proposed new runway at Gatwick, by the afternoon. The sight of a coffin with a flag over it does very odd things to a lot of people. Eventually (so I've heard) they change their minds, stop feeling all warm and excited and start asking why, but why am I immune right now?

How I do keep banging on!

So, anyway, here's a link for you: http://www.avaaz.org/en/real_deal_map

Still working on the new version of Gypsys & excited because Thursday is a big day for me.

Haven't started reading Stravinsky Part II yet, but we've signed up for the live transmission of the Paris ballet reproducing early Ballets Russes, at the Dukes on 22nd. Our Christmas outing.

Tuesday December 1st. Clear morning, a touch of hoar frost on the grass.

A clear night, last night, and the night drop in temperature we miss so much. I saw Orion through the landing window, one of my winter pleasures, for the first time in weeks. Sadly, it's not going to last.

Bad news for me, my machine is misbehaving. It passed out twice yesterday afternoon, and various scans revealed nothing I could fix. It's over ten years old, so does not owe me anything. So, my Santa list may need changing. . .

cooler, grey skies, after a very rainy and windy weekend. I was wrong, no real change yet.

I made up my mind to find out about C20th music, because Gabriel was playing from Shostakovich's Preludes and Fugues, he brought the Ashkenazy recording home and I found I liked them very much. Ravel should have been next in this occasional series, but my blog was down, and now I've moved on to the Sacred Monster, whose music I only knew of through childhood exposure (ballet was unavoidably big when I was a child) to the nice ballets, Petrushka and The Firebird. And the dinosaurs, of course. So now I'm reading Stephen Walsh's two-part biography (Part I A Creative Spring) & I've been here before. I am late in the day, this is Stravinsky debunked: the official version, Stravinsky's own version and his apostle's version, corrected by recourse to the evidence, only unlike "Shostakovich, secret voice of suffering Russia, speaker in code, closet dissident?" Igor Stravinsky does not come out with rep repaired and his face cleaned. Hm. Stravinsky was born near Petersburg, to an urbanised gentry family, and like Shostakovich brought up in that unhygenic, West-facing city of culture. His father was a (regionally) famous opera singer, bass baritone, specialising in character parts, a selfish patriarch with a nasty temper, his mother the long-suffering helpmate of a great artist, who sank into that role and never said boo; the children had a bit of a thin time. A pattern that was to be repeated. Definitely not an infant prodigy (but his father would have stepped over him like a ruck in the carpet if he'd been a young Mozart, Walsh rather thinks), he didn't really get started in music until he was past twenty. But he could sight-read, and if you're born being able to sight-read, if you can read music in full sentences instead of having to spell out the words letter by letter, without training: that means you can compose.

So, anyway, his father hustled for him and he became a protege of Rimsky-Korsakov, who was then a professor at the Petersburg Conservatoire and a decent sort of bloke, not only supported the students over their actions in the 1905 rehearsal for a revolution, he put his job on the line for them. Petersburg music was in ferment, modernism but not as we know it had already arrived: Russianism, mythicism, feuds, cliques, Fiveists versus World of Art-ists, everybody denouncing everybody else as cr*p and savagely supporting their own teams. Young Igor plunged with enthusiasm into the nest of vipers, in which he was to spend his creative life, and took to it like a duck to water. In 1909 he secured, by tangled and bewildering means, a commission from Diaghilev to write the music for a scenario called The Firebird, and the rest is history. He left Russia very early (in terms of the revolution). His great early ballets were all premiered in Paris, a city he immediately recognised as the centre of his world; he spent the great war living in Geneva (where a very early attempt at producing The Soldier's Tale fell victim to the Spanish flu in 1918), and spent the subsequent decades, while becoming a fantastically significant figure in Modern music, riccocheting to and fro between the A-list Paris art world (he had an affair with Coco Chanel, a big love-hate thing going on with Cocteau); where he kept his long-term mistress, various rented summer dachas for the family in Switzerland, Nice and the Savoie, and punishing concert tours of the USA, England, continental Europe.

It took me a while to get into this immensely detailed account of a life, because what it recounts

Friday 27th November, chill air in the morning after another night of rain and wind.

Is the flood weather over? Something feels different this morning. Yesterday I went down to my local branch of A Certain Very Big Building Society, to rearrange my small savings, a nice man at the counter having pointed out to me that I was getting no interest at all on any of it. Oh, right, I heard about that, I muttered, feeling caught out. I don't expect my assets to be fed turtle soup with a golden spoon (Dickens ref, can you name the novel?) but I do draw the line at putting my money out to hire for no wages whatever, that's cruel. So, anyway, I met my personal banking assistant, who suggested I try her best product, where you put your money down the saltmines for a six year stretch, and at the end it gets paid 12% guaranteed, but you could earn a lot more, as this fund is linked to major stock markets! Eerm, says I, doesn't that make rather less than 3% a year, and can't I get 3% guaranteed on a shorter term? Personal banking assistant a little taken aback, customers not supposed to be able to count. Well, yes, but you could make a lot more. Sorry, says I, diffidently, but the trouble is, I'm not one of the people who thinks the recession is over...At which, bless her, my personal banking assistant burst out laughing. "Oh God, no!" she cried. "Of course is isn't! Nothing like!"

Since you ask, I mainly ended up going for that new over-fifties deal, and that's me sorted again until the latest suite of "savings" accounts go dead. But dear reader (and if you are reading this, I bet you don't), should you have anything substantial to put aside right now take my advice, which is the advice of Bill Bonner over at The Daily Reckoning. Keep doing this until I tell you it's safe to adopt a different strategy. (Er, better if you don't let on to your neighbours, or the folk in the pub)

1Buy Gold.
2 Keep it in a sock under the mattress.