Henry James' advice to writers

Published by peter on 2014-09-13 in Writing. 0 Comments

Earlier this year, The Spectator magazine ran a competition asking for 150 words of advice to intending writers purporting to be from well-known writers.   Had he still been alive, this would have been the advice that Henry James would not have given:

The – and it is, one would venture, most appropriate to deploy the definite article in this, admittedly ambiguous, context, although many may well disagree, and so the utterance will surely not remain uncontested, but, one hopes, always unrebutted – first – because the established custom in our society, at least that part having a certain level of education and – how shall I best acknowledge this? – breeding, is to denumerate from the first numeral, for, after all, exactly how could no elements even be articulated, let alone counted? – rule – although our society, however flawed, and it is flawed, is law-governed, or rather aspires to be thus – is – and there can be none, at least none of social consequence, who could argue or question what the meaning of is is – to be – for we are dealing with the invocation of existence in reference to something primeval, inchoate, even struggling to be birth-éd – concise.”

Chickens, roosting, home

Published by peter on 2014-09-09 in Africa, History and Politics. 0 Comments

Re-reading Ian Hancock’s fine history of liberal white politics in Rhodesia reminds me that the first politician in that sad country to harass and intimidate his political opponents was not Robert Gabriel Mugabe, but Ian Douglas Smith. Smith and his Rhodesian Front party arrested, tortured, silenced, detained, and killed black opponents of white rule.  As far as I know, no white opponents were murdered, but they were arrested, deported, silenced, shouted-down in public meetings, made the victims of malicious innuendo, traduction, and defamation, and otherwise intimidated if they dared oppose RF rule.  I know at least one opponent who committed suicide rather than kill his fellow citizens in defence of white privilege.  These actions, Smith insisted, were for the maintenance of Western, Christian, values. Bah, humbug! As early as May 1965, in Smith’s first election as an incumbent prime minister, he prevented any white or black opposition politician from gaining access to state-owned media.  In contrast, Smith himself was treated with great deference and respect, despite continuing to hold racist views that would have shamed a Klansman, after Mugabe came to power in 1980.  He should have been tried as a war criminal.  In a more just world, he would have been.
The terror that Robert Mugabe has unleashed on his homeland is different in scale, perhaps, but not in kind from that of Ian Smith.  The evil that men do may well outlive them.
Reference:
Ian Hancock [1984]: White Liberals, Moderates and Radicals in Rhodesia 1953-1980. New York: St Martin’s Press.

Mash-up culture

Published by peter on 2014-09-06 in Architecture, Art, Creativity, Culture and Places. 0 Comments

If one trope could define the full diversity of artistic endeavour in this Millenium period, it is the mash-up. For visual art, we have become used to collages of images, videos, fashion, and even material junk.  Ditto for sound objects and events.  In movies, Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi (1982) became a popular example, at least among college students. And now computer scientists are exploring mashups of programming languages, for instance, here. But not even architecture has escaped.  The increasingly widespread Bauhaus-influenced style seen in new office and apartment buildings in Europe and North America these last two decades is one of  life’s great pleasures of looking.
What distinguishes this architecture? The influence of Bauhaus and de Stijl ideas is evident in straight edges, flat roofs, vertical walls, and structures comprising rectangular prisms.  But these are not the single-box prisms of the International Style skyscrapers of 50 years ago.  Rather, each structure comprises multiple, intersecting prisms, expressing a multiplicity of interpenetrating shapes.  The result is that external walls are not flat or simply lying in a single vertical plane, but extruding or withdrawing into multiple vertical planes. The effect of this interleaving mash-up is most pleasing.

Second, external surfaces are no longer a single, uniform colour or material.   Typically, the different prisms, or the different interpenetrating vertical planes, will be made from different materials:  red-brick, white stone or concrete, grey aluminium sheets, etc.  Here, the mash-up of materials and colours is unlike most western domestic or office architecture of the past two centuries.

Here are some examples.  First is the red-brick apartment building across the street in this photo, in Madison, Wisconsin (Source: via The Dish).  Notice how the external walls do not all lie in the same vertical plane, and note the use of different coloured and perhaps even types of surfaces – red-brick, light-coloured brick, and grey slate.   There is a white trim.

And here is the Jaclyn Building, in Sofia Bulgaria (Architects:  Aedes Studio), again with red brick, grey and white surfaces, but this time less balanced vertically.

And here is an apartment building, The Reach, in Leeds Street, Liverpool, UK, with all the familiar elements along with a curved corner.  The only thing lacking from this building is a single tree in green leaf right up against it, to give the image a textured asymmetry of colour and line.

London life – the past and the future

Published by peter on 2014-08-30 in Computer technology, Corporate culture and Creativity. 0 Comments

In the same week:

  • A meeting at Google Campus London – a superb space, a hive of activity, buzzing with energy and ideas, casual, and a wonderful vibe.
  • An invitation to a reception at the British Computer Society (BCS):  jacket and tie compulsory for all.

Here we are, one-sixth of our way into the 21st century, and the BCS is still insisting on formal dress?  Do they also require that only unmarried women be allowed to program these new-fangled machines, too?  That social, religious, and intellectual radical, Charles Babbage, would be appalled at such deference to established tradition.
You know that one of the people sitting beside you at Google Campus is the next Zuckerberg or Brin.  Maybe it is even you yourself.  Not  a single person at Google was wearing a tie or a suit, though.  I doubt anyone intent on changing the future – or even the present! – is attending events requiring formal dress, but I guess the past is not evenly distributed either.
NOTE:  An early review of the Google London Campus is here.

Charles Burney

Published by peter on 2014-08-27 in Art, Books, Burney Family, History, Literature, Mathematics and Music. 0 Comments

This post is a history of the family of Charles Burney FRS (1726-1814), musician and musicologist, and his ancestors and descendants.
Sir MacBurney was one of the 60 Knights who participated in a jousting tournament, supervised by Geoffrey Chaucer on the orders of Richard II, held at Smithfield in London in 1390.
One James Macburney is said to have come south to London from Scotland with King James I and VI in 1603.   His descendant (likely a grandson), also James Macburney, was born around 1653 and had a house in Whitehall.   His son, also called James Macburney (1678-1749), was born in Great Hanwood, Shropshire, around 1678, and attended Westminster School in London.   In 1697, he eloped with Rebecca Ellis, against his father’s wishes. As a consequence, the younger James was not left anything when his father died.  The  younger man’s stepbrother, Joseph Macburney (born of a second wife) was left the entire estate of their father.
This younger James Macburney (1678-1749) was a dancer, violinist and painter, and was supposedly a wit and bon viveur.  He and Rebecca Ellis had 15 children over 20 years, of whom 9 survived into adulthood.   By 1720, he had moved to Shrewsbury,  and Rebecca had died.  He married again, to Ann Cooper, who apparently brought money to the union which helped her somewhat feckless husband. This second marriage produced 5 further children, among whom were Richard Burney (1723-1792) (christened “Berney”).  The last two children were twins, Charles Burney (1726-1814) and Susanna (1726-1734?), who died at the age of 8.  Their father James had apparently dropped the prefix “Mac” around the time of the birth of the  twins.
One of Charles’ half-brothers was James Burney (1710-1789), who was organist at St. Mary’s Church, Shrewsbury, for 54 years, from 1732 to 1786. Charles Burney worked as his assistant from 1742 until 1744.
For a period, Charles Burney and his family lived in Isaac Newton’s former house at 35 St Martin’s Street, Leicester Square, London.  Among Charles’ children were:

  • Esther Burney (1749-1832), harpsichordist, who married her cousin Charles Rousseau Burney (1747-1819), also a keyboardist and violinist.
  • Rear Admiral James Burney RN FRS (1750-1821), naval historian and sailor, who twice sailed around the world with Captain James Cook RN.
  • Fanny Burney, later Madame d’Arblay (1752-1840), novelist and playwright.
  • Rev. Charles Burney FRS (1757-1817), classical scholar.
  • Charlotte Ann Burney, later Mrs Broome (1761-1838), novelist.
  • Sarah Harriet Burney (1772-1844), novelist.

Charles’ nephew, Edward Francisco Burney (1760-1848), artist and violinist, was a brother to Charles Rousseau Burney, both sons of Richard Burney (1723-1792), Charles’s elder brother.  This is a self-portrait of Edward Francisco Burney (Creative Commons License from National Portrait Gallery, London):
image
In 1793, Fanny Burney married Alexandre-Jean-Baptiste Piochard D’Arblay (1754-1818), an emigre French aristocrat and soldier, and adjutant-general to Lafayette. Their son, Alexander d’Arblay (1794-1837), was a poet and keen chess-player, and was 10th wrangler in the Mathematics Tripos at Cambridge in 1818, where he was a friend of fellow-student Charles Babbage.  He was also a member of Babbage’s Analytical Society (forerunner of the Cambridge Philosophical Society), which sought to introduce modern analysis, including Leibnizian notation for the differential calculus, into mathematics teaching at Cambridge. d’Arblay was ordained and served as founding minister of Camden Town Chapel (later the Greek Orthodox All Saints Camden) from 1824-1837, and then served briefly at Ely Chapel in High Holborn, London. The founding organist at Camden Town Chapel was Samuel Wesley (1766-1837).
Not everyone was a fan of clan Burney. Here is William Hazlitt:

“There are whole families who are born classical, and are entered in the heralds’ college of reputation by the right of consanguinity. Literature, like nobility, runs in the blood. There is the Burney family. There is no end of it or its pretensions. It produces wits, scholars, novelists, musicians, artists in ‘numbers numberless.’ The name is alone a passport to the Temple of Fame. Those who bear it are free of Parnassus by birthright. The founder of it was himself an historian and a musician, but more of a courtier and man of the world than either. The secret of his success may perhaps be discovered in the following passage, where, in alluding to three eminent performers on different instruments, he says: ‘These three illustrious personages were introduced at the Emperor’s court,’ etc.; speaking of them as if they were foreign ambassadors or princes of the blood, and thus magnifying himself and his profession. This overshadowing manner carries nearly everything before it, and mystifies a great many. There is nothing like putting the best face upon things, and leaving others to find out the difference. He who could call three musicians ‘personages’ would himself play a personage through life, and succeed in his leading object. Sir Joshua Reynolds, remarking on this passage, said: ‘No one had a greater respect than he had for his profession, but that he should never think of applying to it epithets that were appropriated merely to external rank and distinction.’ Madame d’Arblay, it must be owned, had cleverness enough to stock a whole family, and to set up her cousin-germans, male and female, for wits and virtuosos to the third and fourth generation. The rest have done nothing, that I know of, but keep up the name.” (On the Aristocracy of Letters, 1822).

References:
ODNB
K. S. Grant: ” Charles Burney”, Grove Music Online. (Accessed 2006-12-10.)
POST MOST RECENTLY UPDATED:  2014-08-30.

London life – WW I

Published by peter on 2014-08-08 in Art, History and Places. 0 Comments

On 22.00 on Monday 4 August 2014, Ryoji Ikeda turned-on an installation of a vertical light at Westminster,  entitled Spectra, to commemorate the centenary of the entry of Britain into World War I.   The light can be seen from many places elsewhere in central London, appearing to curve over the viewer and ending in a burst of brightness.  The effect is ominous and hauntingly beautiful, particularly in the early hours of the morning when alone on the streets.

London Life

Published by peter on 2014-08-05 in Culture and Places. 0 Comments

Some of the crowd waiting to see Yemeni-American video stars Adam Saleh and Sheikh Akbar (aka TruestoryASA) in Hyde Park London on Sunday 3 August 2014.  The stars were rescued by police.  Report here.
 
HydeParkCrowdforTruestoryASA-3August2014

Juju

Published by peter on 2014-08-03 in Jazz, Music and Recent Listening. 0 Comments

Wayne Shorter’s album Juju was recorded at the Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey on 3 August 1964, 50 years ago today.  The ensemble comprised Shorter on tenor sax, McCoy Tyner on piano, Reginald Workman on bass, and Elvin Jones on drums.  The album has six original compositions, all by Shorter; the modern remastered version has two alternative takes. The music is sublime.