The photos are of Ely Chapel, St Etheldreda’s Church, a 13th century church once the London chapel of the Bishops of Ely, Cambridgeshire. It is the only surviving London building from the reign of Edward I (1239-1307). Although a Roman Catholic church again since 1874, in 1836-7, it was an Anglican Church, in the care of Alexander d’Arblay. After its purchase in 1874, the church and crypt were restored by noted architect George Gilbert Scott.
Recent Reading 13
The latest in a sequence of lists of recently-read books. The books are listed in reverse chronological order, with the most recently-read book at the top.
- Dan Shanahan [2017]: Camelot Eclipsed: Connecting the Dots. Independently published.
- China Mieville [2017]: October: The Story of the Russian Revolution. UK: Verso.
- Joshua Rubenstein (Editor) [2007]: The KGB File of Andrei Sakharov. USA: Yale University Press.
- Henry Hemming [2017]: M: Maxwell Knight, MI5’s Greatest Spymaster. UK: Preface Publishing.
- Evelyn Waugh [1935]: Edmund Campion, Jesuit and Martyr. UK: Longmans.
- Alison Barrett [2015]: View from my Tower: Letters from Prague, March 1985 – May 1988. A fascinating series of letters from wife of the British Ambassador to members of her family about her time in Prague, in the period of stasis just before the Velvet Revolution.
- John O Koehler [2008]: Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police. USA: Basic Books.
River Amstel
The River Amstel at 22.50 on the longest day of the Year (Northern Hemisphere), taken from the river terrace of the Hotel InterContinental Amstel Amsterdam.
The beauty of the scene does not reveal the heat or the noise. The entire time there was an ever-changing clamour, as the motors of boats could be heard, as parties of loud party-goers with sound systems playing loudly came and went, and as conversations drifted laterally from the boats. Only the occasional rowers were quiet. The following night at this time, the waters were almost empty, following an electrical storm in the late afternoon. The temperature had dropped ten degrees and there was a chill in the gusty winds.
Tavistock Square, London
Plants in an office window.
Honesty of intention
Some people I have encountered in this life have impressed me with their integrity-of-purpose, the coherence, sincerity and compellingness of their objectives and mission. Sometimes these objectives have been political, as in the case of Don Day and Bill Mansfield. In other cases, they have been spiritual or religious, as in the case of Jes Albert Moeller, whom I first met in 1984. There are other people whose purposes are both political and spiritual, something which seems to have been true for Vaclav Havel.
In my experience, this human attribute is rare. And I have never seen or heard anyone else talk of it, until now. In Judith Wright’s autobiography, she speaks (page 234) of her partner and later husband, the philosopher Jack McKinney, meeting her father:
That my father was grieved by my relationship with Jack is undeniable but, once they met, he gave in to Jack’s obvious honesty of intention and the needs of my own that Jack was filling. . . . “
Judith Wright [1999]: Half a Lifetime. Edited by Patricia Clarke. Melbourne, Australia: Text Publishing.
Pangrams
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
How quickly daft jumping zebras vex!
The five boxing wizards jump quickly.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Liverpool Cathedral
Chapel of the English Martyrs, Metropolitan RC Cathedral, Liverpool.
Gleichgewichtzustandwiederherstellungsmoeglichkeit
Gleichgewichtzustandwiederherstellungsmoeglichkeit (German, noun): The possibility of re-establishing a condition of equilibrium.
Piping 101
Leslie Claret (Kurtwood Smith) in Patriot (S1, Ep2, min 17):
Sell them on the structure. You can talk about it with confidence. Keep it simple. A little something like this, John.
Hey. Let me walk you through the Donnelly nut spacing and crack system rim-riding rip configuration. Using a field of half-C sprats, and brass-fitted nickel slits, our bracketed caps, and splay-flexed brace columns, vent dampers to dampening hatch depths of one half meter from the damper crown to the spur of plinth. How? Well, we bolster twelve husked nuts to each girdle-jerry, while flex tandems press a task apparatus of ten vertically-composited patch-hamplers. Then, pinflam-fastened pan traps at both maiden-apexes of the jim-joist.
A little something like that, Lakeman.
Praise to the writers of this series! The sounds here reminded me of the second stanza of Browning’s The Pied Piper of Hamelin:
Hamelin Town’s in Brunswick,
By famous Hanover city;
The river Weser, deep and wide,
Washes its wall on the southern side;
A pleasanter spot you never spied;
But, when begins my ditty,
Almost five hundred years ago,
To see the townsfolk suffer so
From vermin, was a pity.Rats!
They fought the dogs and killed the cats,
And bit the babies in the cradles,
And ate the cheeses out of the vats,
And licked the soup from the cooks’ own ladles,
Split open the kegs of salted sprats,
Made nests inside men’s Sunday hats,
And even spoiled the women’s chats,
By drowning their speaking
With shrieking and squeaking
In fifty different sharps and flats.
Wave
In the spirit of the dynamic geometric abstract film projection art of Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack here is an excerpt from the 2009 video a wave of Peter Campus. The art has been made by slowing down the film, and enlarging selected pixels in a film of surf, abstracting away from the original images, with the sound being that of the breaking surf. The result, like much minimalist art, is meditative and sublime.
The video is part of a current exhibition of Campus’ video art, Video ergo sum, at Jeu de Paume in Paris, France. The image is a still from the video.