Why Aren't we Remembering the Centenary of His Death?

James McIntyre (1827-1906)
'Ode on the Mammoth Cheese Weighing Over 7000 Pounds'

We have seen you, Queen of Cheese,
Laying quietly at your ease,
Gently fanned by evening breeze -
Thy fair form no flies dare seize.

All gaily dressed soon you'll go
To the great Provincial Show,
To be admired by many a beau
In the city of Toronto.

Cows numerous as a swarm of bees -
Or as the leaves upon the trees -
It did require to make thee please,
And stand unrivalled Queen of Cheese.

May you not receive a scar as
We have heard that Mr. Harris
Intends to send you off as far as
The great World's Show at Paris.

Of the youth - beware of these -
For some of them might rudely squeeze
And bite your cheek; then songs or glees
We could not sing, O Queen of Cheese.

Wert thou suspended from balloon,
You'd cast a shade, even at noon;
Folks would think it was the moon
About to fall and crush them soon.

The picture has nothing directly to do with the poem: it is surprisingly difficult to find images on the internet of gigantic cheeses. Although a search for images of "huge cheeses" gives you, on its first page of results, a link to my brother's webpage. Is this embarrassing, or is it just the sort of happy coincidence we should cling to?

Aurora Borealis

So, it's Lauren's birthday. She lives on my floor and is from Tennessee. In fact, she is from Chattanooga, Tennessee, a place I have hitherto only known of because of its choochoo. But, it's her birthday today - she is twenty-one. We made some party food, mostly involving various combinations of garlic and cheese. My present to her was to teach her how to make Dark And Stormies: the important thing is not to stint on the amount of lime you add, especially as most ginger beer is far too sweet. So - did I say this before? - it's Lauren's birthday, and we're drinking the aforementioned Dark and Stormies. Someone looks out of the window and says, "Hey, the Northern Lights!". And we look out of the window and what do you know, there they are. They are primarily green today, except they fade into blue every now and again. They ripple and move and grow brighter and darker. Everyone from my floor walks down to the beach in order to be able to see them without so much light pollution. It is one of those things that you look at and say, "Ah!" - like fireworks or new-born children.

This is a post which would work much better with some of my photographs in it, but all the attempts I made to photograph the Northern Lights were hopeless. This is a page with some pictures which look very little like what I actually saw, but it'll have to do until my brother comes out to visit me, bringing his high-quality space-age camera with him.

Bust

Is it just me, or is the Victorian era open to particularly easy parody?

Typical...

I heard, as attentive readers - is there anyone out there? - will have noticed, a fun concert a couple of weeks ago. Malcolm Arnold and Dmitri Shostakovich. I'd never knowingly heard anything by Arnold before - I've never, for example, seen The Bridge on the River Kwai

Incidentally, did you know that the novel on which The Bridge on the River Kwai was based - Le pont de la rivière Kwai - is by the same author, Pierre Boulle, who wrote Planet of the Apes, or, I suppose, La planète des singes? Anyhow, even though everybody thinks he's seen The Bridge on the River Kwai - you know, Alec Guinness, evil Oriental soldiers, stiff upper lips, something getting blown up at the end - I realise I never actually have sat down and watched the thing all the way through.

But this is a digression. I liked Malcolm Arnold. I liked the Fifth Symphony. I was going to get interested in him and hear some more of his music. And I still may. But I opened the papers a few days ago, and - yes - was slightly pertubed to find that he had died.

I have previous with this sort of thing. In 1997, I went to live in Moscow for a year. Before I went out there, one of the Russian musicians I was slowly getting to like and enjoy was Bulat Okudzhava. I thought I'd be able to find some of his songs on cassettes somewhere - a slightly vague, but certainly heartfelt plan. Then I bought the paper one day, and - all over the back pages - fulsome obituaries, assessments of his impact, discussion of his work....

If you follow the Okudzhava link, you'll find a nice quote from his mother: 'Bulat Okudzhava spoke and wrote only in Russian. This was because his mother, who spoke Georgian, Azeri, and Armenian, had always requested that everyone who came to visit her house "Please, speak the language of Lenin - Russian".'

I Submitted My Thesis

Too Much of a Good Thing

This was, apparently, an academic conference.

Silvio Rodríguez

The Cuban singer-songwriter Silvio Rodríguez came to give a concert in the Barbican, his first in England for twenty-two years. At this rate, he will be eighty-two by the time of the next one, and I will be forty-nine. So, we thought we'd catch him while we had the chance. This rather blurry photograph is intended as evidence.

He was, by the way, very good.

More Icelandic Graffiti

I don't need to go to the zoo now, I suppose. Although the Reykjavík zoo is designed for children, with a lot of interaction between the animals and the visitors. Therefore, unlikely to contain either vicious man-eating wolves, or agressive and easily startled two-tonne giraffes.

Erró

Erró is, as of course we all know, the greatest Icelandic pop artist. He stopped trying to make sense in about the middle of the 1980s and is much the better for it, perhaps. The early paintings and screen prints are funny, but a bit obvious. For example, he went through a period of making quite interesting photo-realist pictures of Venice, into the foreground of which he would then paint the massed hordes of the Chinese Army. East vs. West, capitalist decadence (Venice is literally sinking), and so on. There are also some good but obvious pictures which have: at the top, a picture from a propaganda poster of a Japanese soldier running towards the enemy; at the bottom, a picture from some Classical Japanese pornography. Sex and death, and so on. And then in the 1980s he got into Marvel comics and high vs. low art, and becomes funnier and less concerned with trying to get a message across. And much the better for it, perhaps.

Icelandic Graffiti

I followed where the arrow led, but found it rather disappointing.