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Congenital nerdiness

My grandmother, may she rest in peace, was a remarkable woman. I’ll write a full post on how awesome she was soon. But right now, I just want to point out that she was a librarian. She started at the University of Washington in 1930–the autumn after the crash. She studied to become a librarian–what was contemporaneously coming to be known as library science, and what we’d probably call information management. Along the way she earned her letter in riflery (yes, it’s a thing). When she graduated, she decided to take a job as the children’s librarian for North Hollywood, and she moved down to Los Angeles, sight unseen. I think it was very brave of her.

Flash forward almost 80 years. My Auntie Ann, left alone at the beach house for a weekend, decides to create an index of the thousand-odd mystery novels there. She creates a binder: arranged once by author & title, and separately by author & publication date. “Each list,” she wrote in an email to the family, “has columns so you can initial when you have read one, in case your memory is as bad as mine.”

All of this is to say that the curating and cataloguing (not to mention reading) have always been something of a family tradition. And so it should come as no surprise that yesterday I attended a full day training on approaches to asset preservation, run by the British Library and Research Libraries UK for the benefit of the professional staffs at smaller libraries and archives. Something of an interloper, I enjoyed the day thoroughly. As a regular user of a variety of libraries, archives, muniments, and the like, I took no small amount of pleasure in peaking behind the curtain to see how we hoi polloi are viewed by those entrusted with custodial oversight of our collections of knowledge.

In reality, I went because I’m interested in (and increasingly concerned about) digital preservation. I’ll save the detail for later, but as a historian I’m deeply worried that in 200 years very little of all the material we create in today’s digital world will survive. I find that very sad, but also problematic for society. A very small portion of the day ended up being about digital preservation. That didn’t bother me particularly: they’re planning a full day on it for next year, and it’s good to understand the digital in it’s broader preservation context.

Significantly more worrisome was the fact that the instructor didn’t seem to know more than I did about digital preservation. As my colleague Simon pointed out: that means there’s space for me to become the world expert on the topic. As I responded, though, I’m not interested in glory; I’m interested in the problem getting solved. And if we’re counting on me to solve this particular problem, we as a civilisation are in real trouble.

Hard for tabloids to go wrong…

I’m trapped in the Dublin airport indefinitely because high winds are stopping my plane from landing. Boo.

In the meanwhile, this quote from the LRB (along with a super hot taxi driver) made my day:

The other great thing about the Rugby World Cup has been one of the best sport-related tabloid scandals for some years. Several England players went to a bar in a hard-partying place called Queenstown, where extreme sports fans go to blow off steam after – for instance – taking part in the world’s longest bungee jump: 134 metres, or 440 feet. (Who does that for fun?) Anyway, the bar was having a ‘mad midget weekender’ featuring a dwarf-throwing competition – though apparently the dwarfs aren’t thrown so much as slid across the floor; it would be more accurate to call the activity ‘dwarf-curling’. The players got hammered, and one of them went outside for what looked like a brief canoodle with an ample-figured blonde. Why is this news? Because the player was the England captain, Mike Tindall, who a few weeks before had married Zara Phillips, Princess Anne’s daughter and 13th in line to the throne. As several commentators observed, it’s hard for the tabloids to go wrong with a story which features the following terms: mystery blondeWorld Cupbreastsroyal family,England rugby captaindrunkdwarf-throwing.

Rules for drinking

When I headed off to university, my mother didn’t tell me not to drink. Or even not to drink too much. Obviously both would be futile when advising a university student anywhere in the world at any point in history. So instead, she gave me my first rule of drinking:
1) Only drink when you can afford to drink well.
Drinking isn’t necessary; it’s not eating. And drinking cheap booze generally makes for a worse hangover. This is therefore an important rule, but one which is notably difficult to live by as a student.

I actually didn’t drink my first year. Not because I couldn’t afford to do so well. Georgetown, after all, is in the United States, so I couldn’t buy alcohol. Additionally there is (or  at least was) a tradition on the Hilltop that upperclassmen host free parties which underclassmen attend. I just didn’t fancy it. So I’m not sure when someone told me the rules of drinking at Georgetown…or who it was. But here they are:
2) No waste.
3) Don’t die. 
Now, we always said that the order of these rules was important. I still think that’s true. In my aged state, though, I’ve decided to revise the meaning of rule #2. Rather than leaving nothing on the table, I now treat it as: if one is drunk, drinking anything more is a waste. If it’s good, one can’t appreciate it, and if it’s bad one shouldn’t be drinking it anyway.

Oxford didn’t add to my drinking rules, perhaps because funds were rather tight. I did very much enjoy being able to buy a pint in the buttery for £1.50 before heading in to dinner in hall. Other than large quantities of wine in the GCR, or large quantities of bad cocktails at Cardinals, the evening pint was my main indulgence, and it was rather self-regulating–as so many things in Oxford seem to be.

Then, of course, I moved to London. Unlike Oxford, one can’t count on bumping to friends spontaneously; almost all social activity requires planning. I also have a job now, and some consideration must be made for that. And so, since it can take an hour to get between two points in Inner London, I created some new rules for drinking. Strictly speaking, I guess they’re rules about when & where to drink. But they’re important for maintaining my sanity in the metropolis, given my deep distaste for the tube.

4) Don’t drink in more than one neighbourhood in a single night. 
When I lived on Piccadilly I used to joke that if something was 3 or fewer tube stops away, I’d take the bus…and if it was more than 3 stops away, I wasn’t going. This rule can be partially modified to allow a second neighbourhood when it is one’s own neighbourhood. But it doesn’t allow going from home to, say, Southwark for a drink and then to Hampstead for dinner.

5) Don’t get farther from your bed after 11pm. 
If you change venues after the pubs close, make sure you’re heading in the right direction: towards bed. This is the rule I ignored to my peril last Saturday evening.

6) After 1am, head home if there are two songs in a row that you don’t like.
I’ll admit this rule is a bit arbitrary, but I’ve found that if I’m still out at 1am I need a (quite simple) heuristic for deciding when to throw in the towel. Otherwise inertia can easily carry me through to 4am, which is rarely a place I want to be.

After last Saturday, I feel I a new rule would be well worth making, and so:
7) Don’t go out after hosting a dinner.
Especially if dinner involved more than one bottle of wine per person. It won’t end well. Stay home. Tidy up a little bit, and crawl into bed with a book.

 8) Don’t drink after 5pm on Sundays.
This is more an aspiration than a rule for me at this point. Sunday pub lunch becomes Sunday pub afternoon. And then suddenly it’s last orders and you’re miles from home and all you want is 11 hours of sleep before starting in on another week. Must remember to avoid that in the future.

 

What a week

“Blake Glover, 30, a stylist, said that he and his partner, Austen Sydara, 23, a retail buyer, imagined a wedding with a “Brideshead Revisited” theme, because they loved the movie.” -Here come the (stylish) grooms [NYTimes]

Yes, and it ended so well for the Marchmains…and Charles, for that matter. Even the first, halcyon section of the book begins with the epigram Et in arcadia ego. It does offer up some fantastic quotes, but they mostly derive from the pathos of the story.

This week has been excruciating. For one thing, it went awfully slowly for my being so busy. For another, I was in Milan on Wednesday. For a third, it took me several days just to recover, after having put myself so thoroughly hors de combat last Satuday night. Anyway, I had coffee with David on Tuesday to relive the horrors of Saturday and attempt a collaborative reconstruction of events. As far as we can tell, we left the Winchester at about 4. He very kindly lent me his scarf as we drunkenly stumbled/rambled our way down Upper Street. At some point we ran into Andrew, at which point we put David in a taxi and continued our stumble home. I have other hazy recollections that are embarrassing but not illegal. That is all.

Anyhow, Sunday we got a Zip Car and drove to Richmond for dinner at Tati & Sam’s. We underestimated the amount of time it would take to drive, though, which was lame of us. But we had ribs & home made apple pie. It was great.

Monday and Tuesday were a busy blur. Wednesday I was in Milan. Thursday morning I got some work done but the afternoon was dominated by endless back to back meetings. I launched “The New Grid” (the internal productivity tool I’ve been building for the past several months), though, which was nice.

Thursday evening I did double dinner duty: first with Mike, whom I hadn’t seen since a couple weeks before the wedding, which is awfully lame of us. We went to a Japanese place called Toku on lower Regent Street, which was good (and cheap considering the quality). Then Andrew and I met Levi at our old standby Chilango, at which point we were too exhausted to do anything else, and we went to bed happy.

Yesterday I worked from home, which was a necessary expedient so that I could rapidly identify and fix bugs in the new grid. After that, I went to meet Andrew, Ryan and Carlos in Soho for a drink. All in all, a busy and middling sort of week, I guess.

 

You heard it here first…

‎”With the exceptions of the top-lit centrally planned Roman Catholic church of the Holy Rood in Abingdon Road, it is hard to think of a single public building of any distinction in Oxford, outside the University, dating from the first three post-war decades: an indictment all the worse for the fact that these decades saw a level of prosperity unmatched in any earlier period of English history. Fortunately, economic recession and public revulsion against the worst architectural excesses intervened before more damage could be done.”

Taking the long view (updated)

Así se expresa uno de los más grandes artistas de nuestra época: Rodin. (So says one of the greatest artists of our time: Rodin) –Mexico City’s cathedral website

Rodin, of course, died in 1917. Say what one will about the failings of the Church–and I won’t deny that it has failings–one must admit that it takes a long view. In fact, I suspect many would see that as among the Church’s primary failings. I don’t see it that way. Ever since the invention of the steam engine, technological advances have whittled away at the isolating effects of space and time. Travelling and communicating today take a fraction of the time that they did when Rodin died.

That’s a pretty amazing change, and it has had many positive secondary effects. But it has also made our modern world an impatient one. I’m always reminded of this when a friend visits from overseas and doesn’t have a mobile phone that works in the UK. Suddenly, they are not ubiquitously available. I cannot get in touch with them at every moment. In fact, their ability to receive messages is suddenly both time-bound and space-bound: they’ll receive my voicemail when they get back to their hotel; they’ll get your email the next time they stop by an internet cafe.

We’ve gotten used to the convenience of ubiquitous connectivity very quickly. Or, most of us have. My father still doesn’t have a mobile phone. That said, like most of us, he spends the grand majority of his time in a very small number of places: home, office, country club. Were there to be an emergency, we’d be able to track him down without too much trouble. But reaching most people, 24 hours a day, can be done by punching ~14 numbers into any phone in the world. Or, increasingly, by sending an email.

And so we think now is the thing that matters the most. In the process, many of us forget the past and neglect to prepare for the future. I think living in the moment is very important. But I think perspective is even more important. Perspective helps one avoid assuming that proximity (either in time or in space) indicates importance.

The long view is, of course, relative. One of my favourite things about Google is that it takes a long view. Or, at least, it takes a longer view than Wall Street does. And given the absolute idiocy evident in the stock market over the past 3 years, I think Google’s approach is thoroughly justified (even when that means my stock options are underwater).

The scale of Oxford’s long view is a bit different. I’m reading a great book right now on the architectural history of Oxford, and I (re)learned something that might surprise you: the first women entered the university in 1878, and the first women’s colleges were founded soon thereafter. But they could only attend lectures. It wasn’t until 1920 (42 years later) that they were allowed to take degrees.

The Catholic Church also takes a long view, but I’ll save my views on the Church and pre-modern notions of law for a later post. For now, it will suffice to say that I am fully confident the Church will eventually change its mind on the gays, gay marriage, clerical celibacy and a host of other social issues. It may not happen in my lifetime. Or that of my children…or their children. But it will happen. That’s a long view.

At the other end of the spectrum is me at work, where I like to say I don’t worry about anything that won’t be remembered in 10 years. That rule helps me keep perspective. Some people think I’m crazy, but I’d prefer that number was 100+. Life is short and time is long, and worrying about things in the present is a distraction from being grateful and loving and other things that actually matter in the presence. I think so, anyway.

Useless police

“so you’re taking it from both ends?” -coworker Stephen

Andrew’s phone got stolen on Saturday night at a pub. We called the useless Metropolitan Police almost immediately. Because he had Latitude enabled on his phone, and because the wifi was on, we could tell the police, almost to a house, where the device was at 6am.

Since they’ve declined to do anything with that information, I’m posting it here for posterity: either 91 Goldsmith Road, London E10 5EX or 95 Goldsmith Road, London E10 5EX was hosting a mobile phone thief (or at least it was around 6am BST on Sunday 15 October). Boo.

On grandeur

In 2003, just before I moved to England, a bunch of us went to Washington for what is anachronistically called ‘sailing weekend’. Breakfast at the Supreme Court. Lunch in the Senate. Tea at the Library of Congress. Lunch at the Cosmos Club. Things like that. It was all delightful, of course. But two parts of the week stand out in my memory. The first, which can be disposed of very quickly: my first encounter with Pimms, that staple of the English summer (exhibit #1: a photo I took at Henley this year).

My second memory of the week was a vague disappointment that these bastions of tradition and power were not as grand as I had expected them to be. In fact, I remember being left with the distinct impression that all of them felt rather like movie sets. Now, it must be said, I was no great shakes with grandeur at the time. I was coming off my year in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, where I’d lived on $80 a month pocket money plus $2 a day for food, and working full time in Portland’s skid row. But I could still tell something was amiss, even if I couldn’t put my finger on it.

Of course I went from thence to Oxford, and a very few weeks later I found myself at a reception in Buckingham Palace hosted by The Queen. After DC, I anticipated the same feeling of mild disappointment as I made my way to the palace’s throne room and several of its drawing rooms. But, lo and behold, those places did feel grand. Before you ask, it was not simply because I was next to a throne (which really just looks like a chair). Nor was it because I was in the presence of the sovereign (who, having now been presented to her 3 times, I can say is more dignified than grand…like the matriarch of a family, if that family had 60 million people in it.) I wondered at the time whether it was simply the attention to detail. The urinals, for example, went all the way to the ground (I love that), and they had angled glass at the bottom of them to keep any splash from hitting one’s shoes.

Anyway, I’ve long wondered about this, and in the past week or so–while looking at various people’s wedding photos, actually–I think I may have put my finger on some of the issues that affect my perception of grandeur…or otherwise.

The real kicker, I’ve decided, is continuity. In even the most resplendent public or quasi-public buildings I’ve seen in the US, there is a sharp–often instantaneous–divide between ceremonial and functional space. A marble corridor with beautifully carved woodwork will have a utilitarian green metal elevator door next to the stairs. Or an otherwise amazing reception room will be accessed via a hallway with linoleum and hideous yellow walls. There is always a divide between what might in other circumstances be called upstairs and downstairs, but the lack of transitions between the two often seems to introduce aesthetic discord that significantly undermines the grandeur of a particular space.

There is something to be said for attention to detail, especially in the extreme. No amount of artistic skill, for example, will make painted dry wall look like a fresco. Aluminum windows, whatever the functional claims that seem to have made them ubiquitous in post-war buildings, cannot do justice to a rococo interior.

Finally, and not to be understimated, is shabbiness. A certain degree of shabbiness is a necessary precondition to grandeur, relying as it does on the illusory romance of the past. Walking into a room that seems to have been created yesterday–or, indeed, a decade ago–breaks that connection to the past and does much to undermine grandeur.

I’m still not sure I’ve entirely got it nailed down, but I do feel much more confident than I was a week or so ago. I’ll keep considering, though, and update if I think of anything else.

Freshman error

Quote of the day: “Well, there’s a difference between cumming and orasming…” –dinner last night

I’ve convinced Andrew that it’s a good idea for us to have people around to dinner on Saturday evenings that we’re both in town–somewhat shockingly, that only seems to be 5 or 6 Saturdays per quarter. Last night was our first go. We had Tab, Julie and David over. We started with a salad with toasted pumpkin seeds, caramelised shallots and goat’s cheese, followed by beef stew (yummy but the steak didn’t get tender enough), mashed potatoes, and a stir fried sugar snap pea/butternut squash/cubed pancetta concoction.

True to form, we drank ourselves into a tizzy. I think it was something like a bottle of wine per person plus vodka/gin/scotch afterwards. And then I made a freshman error: moving farther from my bed after 11pm. (Note to self: do a post on drinking rules). We left the flat after midnight for The Winchester, where we drank and danced and (I think) left at around 4.30am. Ouch.

Anyway, the night didn’t end there, because Andrew’s mobile got knicked. So when we got home we had to file a police report and get it bricked through tech support at work, etc. We ended up getting to bed around 6.30am. Way too late for my old self. So today I had a lie in, and then we went to lunch at Villandry with Aaron. Their truffle & parmesan chips are fantastic. My burger was good, too, but Andrew’s chicken & bacon sandwich was meh, and the service was…below meh. Oh well.

Gonna grab a quick nap now, and then we’re heading to Richmond for dinner.

Paintballable offences

In my Rules for Bicycling post I mentioned paintballable offences, so I thought I’d provide a little bit more detail on what I meant by those.

The basic problem, as I see it, is this: in our modern world (or at least in our modern metropolis), there aren’t enough societal units through which people can be told that they’re being idiots and/or jerks. Basically, there aren’t enough venues for the types of mild shaming that can correct minor forms of antisocial behaviour.

Now I don’t have rose-tinted spectacles about the past. Those forms of casual, identity-defining social units–parishes, unions, sports teams, tightly-knit neighbourhoods, etc–were (and are still) used to pressure people in rather intolerable ways, e.g. to pressure people not to date or marry people from other communities, or not to be gay, or not to violate other arbitrary and deeply dehumanising social strictures.

That said, our existing means of punishing jerks and idiots (broadly grouped into felonies and misdemeanours) fail to address the frequent, minor failures of civility that we see every day.

So here’s my proposal: we should create a third category of legal offences that are open to vigilante justice in the form of hitting the offender with a pellet of brightly coloured paint, thus indicating in a durable but not permanent way that they were caught being an idiot and/or a jerk.

What sorts of things could be categorised this way? Here’s a list off the top of my head:

  • driving while talking on a mobile phone.
  • spitting on the sidewalk.
  • dropping your gum or cigarette butt anywhere other than a proper receptacle.
  • wearing baggy trousers with a suit.
  • pretending you don’t see that old person/pregnant woman who could use your seat on public transport.
  • being intolerably picky about food as a dinner party guest.
  • cutting a queue.
  • bicycling on the sidewalk.
  • using a mobile phone on a train’s quiet carriage.
  • that menacing type of loitering that British youths seem particularly good at.
  • clipping one’s fingernails on public transport (indeed: doing any type of grooming that requires an implement on public transport).

There are lots of other things, of course, but hopefully you get my drift. I think this could be a fast, cost-effective way to punish malefactors–not evil-doers, mind you, but annoying-doers.