The Devil In The Details

Making slow but sure progress in E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class. 'Sure' in the sense that a slow reading allows for assimilation of the often compelling detail of what it was like back then. And still is today, in so many ways.

Here's a little something from one J. Smith's Memoirs of Wool, published in 1747: 

The poor in the manufacturing counties will never work any more time in general than is necessary just to live and support their weekly debauches... We can fairly aver that a reduction of wages in the woolen manufacture would be a national blessing and advantage , and no real injury to the poor. By this means we might keep our trade, uphold our rents, and reform the people into the bargain.

Thompson doesn't tell us anything about J. Smith but I reckon we can safely 'aver' that he was one of the masters from the upper classes happily looking down on those suffering below. His voice reminds me of those I hear today who favour austerity and an end to unions organising for the rights of ordinary folk to protect them from from creeps like him and those who regard themselves as somehow superior to those who have to genuinely labour manually for a living. 

Nothing much changes, eh?

Unmedicated

Noi was just asking me if I am still taking the pills my neurologist put me on to guard against epileptic seizures. My happy answer came in the negative. As I referenced back on 19 September I managed to persuade my new brain doc that it would be reasonable to terminate the treatment that I'd been pretty cavalier about on a few occasions anyway. I was a good boy and obediently reduced the dosage, as instructed, to one a day for five days and then stopped. And how do I feel? As right as rain, that's how.

I just don't like popping pills, for whatever reason, even if they're doing me good. And I'm pretty sure the epilepsy ones weren't doing anything for me at all. So now I'm happily unmedicated as nature intended.

A Bit Much

Stumbled across an excellent podcast yesterday going under the moniker The Rest is History. The particular episode related to the French Revolution and was extremely informative. So far, so very good. So where's the downside? There's always one somewhere.

Well, in this case not really. Except for a suspicion lurking in the darker part of my mind that the riches so readily available to me through various media could easily become overly rich. And I could find myself drowning in all the choices. And panicking that I can't cope with everything on offer.

My strategy for dealing with this threat is simple. I'm very good, at least for now, at putting off the day when I consciously immerse myself in material I'm longing to swim in. And I don't go looking in a methodical way for anything new. I let it come to me by chance. The strategy, primitive as it is, seems to be working. The challenge will be in keeping it up in a world that's becoming more interesting and exciting than ever.

A Bit Noisy

Another understated heading. I'm not referring to any specific noise today. It's been busy, but calmly so. And the noise I'm hearing now is Cream live at the Albert Hall in 2005. So, by definition, good noise.

But yesterday, in the middle of all the frantic franticness, there I was in SAC. Awash with all the little blighters from Year 1. (SAC, not me.) And I'm suddenly aware, queuing for my tea, that the noise level is dangerously high. Not quite as bad as Deep Purple live at Belle Vue, circa 1971, when they were the loudest band in the world and set young Brian's ears ringing for about two days. But getting there, and in closer proximity than Ian Gillan, Ritchie Blackmore, Ian Paice, Jon Lord and Roger Glover ever were.

Funnily enough the sheer intensity of the racket in SAC had a calming effect in its way. And the tea helped. Assailed as I was, I was somehow outside of it all. Still can't understand how the kids inside it all didn't seem to know they were in the eye of their own storm. The joys of youth, eh?

A Bit Frantic

I got up quite a bit earlier than usual this morning knowing the day was going to be not just unreasonably busy but close to impossibly busy. (The heading above is an understatement.) To be honest, days like this are rare, but they do happen and you've got to be ready for them if you're going to stay reasonably sane.

Now I'm old enough to appreciate the nature of these occasions I've developed the ability to put aside a very tiny part of my mind to sort of monitor what's going on. There's a kind of fascination in realising just how useful basic routines are in holding things together at the same time as being aware of how even the most routine behaviour is under threat of being derailed due to unforeseen circumstances (which manifest with an eerie certainty just when you can't afford the time to deal with them.) It's also very helpful to be able to walk at high speed and ignore urgent messages which aren't quite as urgent as the urgent messages that arrived 60 seconds ahead of them

I think tomorrow will be calmer, but I'm still getting up earlier because you never know. All quite exciting really!

Magnificent Self Control

I don't know about you but I get more than a little fed up when a remote control for some electronic device suddenly stops functioning because the batteries have taken it upon themselves to leak but the stupid thing gives no indication that the batteries are running down; in fact in darker moments I find myself harbouring the thought that our mighty Tech Overlords those nice people at Starhub may have designed the stupid thing to fail so you have to buy a new one. And don't get me going on the fact that when you try and start the set-box it's incredibly difficult to find the manual controls on it and when you try to change channels it's, again, incredibly difficult to do so because you can hardly see the stupid controls on the stupid box and they work at an incredibly slow speed. First world problems eh?!

So I'm not going to rant about this stupid situation. Except for just a bit.

Over and out.

At Ease

Life is never exactly easy, is it? I don't think it's really meant to be. But after hot lentil soup and accompanying crusty bread it gets pretty close.

Out Of Nowhere

Listened to Crimso's improv Starless and Bible Black for the first time in years today. When I first heard it, as the title track off the album, I thought it was an actual composition, as opposed to an improvised piece, which I'm guessing would have been true for the vast majority of listeners back in 1974.

And even though I know it was improvised on the spot I still can't get away from the half-belief that it was carefully composed. Astonishing. The way those guys somehow knew what each of the four was about to play. 

Also astonishing to think that David Cross came to be regarded as the weak link in the band. His work on the keyboards and violin, so sympathetic to everything else that's going on, is what elevates the whole to the next level, the highest level.

Above all, this is a brilliant example of what can happen when people listen to each other.

Reading Lists

I think I first read E.P. Thompson's magisterial The Making of the English Working Class around 1978, just after leaving university. I know it made a huge impact on me in terms of its explanatory power. But I suspect I rushed through it somewhat, driven by the excitement of the discoveries I was making.

I say this since I have a strong sense on rereading it some forty-something years later that I'm taking in a lot more of the fine detail this time around. This is particularly true of the various lists that Thompson provides. Reading Perec's Life: A User's Manual taught me the immense value of even the most random-seeming list, and I find myself deliberately slowing down when I encounter a list like that enumerating some of the products of Birmingham's skilled artisans around 1807: buckles, cutlery, spurs, candlesticks, toys, guns, buttons, whip handles, coffee pots, ink stands, bells, carriage-fittings, steam-engines, snuff-boxes, lead pipes, jewellery, lamps, kitchen implements. As Thompson notes, the list in itself evokes an intricate constellation of skills. A sort of lost world, in its way.

Back in 1978 I suspect I would have just glanced at the list and impatiently took it in as a kind of whole with little or no sense of the particularities. Now the whip handles alone fascinate.

Over The Moon

I've been taken by surprise at the sheer number of poems Ted Hughes wrote for Moon Whales and other Moon Poems. I've never actually owned a copy of the collection, though I'm very familiar with a number of the poems from encounters in various anthologies, and I've always taken it for granted that the original book was about the same length as Meet My Folks. But reading the Moon poems as they are sequenced in Ted Hughes: Collected Poems for Children it's obvious that this book was not intended in any way as a kind of companion to the earlier publication.

Indeed, the general tone is quite different. I think it's reasonable to say that Meet My Folks is essentially comically cheerful. Moon Poems is often downright disturbing. The rhythms are more obviously galumphingly broken; the images surreally weird so that what might have been intended as funny isn't, except in a funny strange way.

As evidence, the opening lines of The Snail of the Moon:

Saddest of all things on the moon is the snail without a shell. / You locate him by his wail, a wail heart-rending and terrible...

Not sure I'd want to read that out to a class of ten-year-olds. But I love reading it to myself.