Away, away, (I was bound)

Today marks the tenth anniversary of my relocation to Germany (from Baltimore), which rather astounds me. The intervening decade -- though it's seen its share of joys, sorrows, struggles, defeats and victories -- has flown by in a way that makes me more than a bit uneasy about the decade to come.

I think if I were to meet that rather younger man who disembarked from some plane or other on 21 June 2001, I'd not entirely recognise him as myself. Though I would certainly congratulate him on having taken a step that would lead to his life becoming better, richer and more exciting than he ever could have expected. (This, of course, was not only down to the move itself but also to the main reason for it. You've all met her, I believe.)

Anyway, at the moment, I'm too sunk in preliminary research on a new project (about which you'll be hearing more when I get a chance to surface) to really give this personal milestone the attention it deserves.

But thanks to one of The Wife's recent purchases, this song came on the car stereo this morning, and it seemed somehow appropriate.


Cake, 'Bound Away' from Showroom of Compassion

Here's to mad decisions.

A critical comment

I am rather irritated by Colin Burrow's review of David Lodge's A Man of Parts, his biographical novel of H.G. Wells, in the new LRB (16 June). It is quite obvious that Burrow likes neither novel nor author, but what bugs me most is the way he uses this vehicle to slip in a few other pet hates - from Rebecca West's odd metaphors to popular neuroscience:

[Wells] was very interested in the mechanics of the human brain. Were he alive today, he would be happy to believe that the mind is the same as the brain, and would present TV programmes in which he wired himself up to a brain-scanner in order to show bits of his cortext lighting up when he thought of Rebecca West.

Flippant, dumb and utterly gratuitous.

Palingate cancelled

No, Sarah Palin's emails are not particularly exciting. Well, who would have thought it. Even the Guardian has abandoned its initially hysterical reportage ("Join the fray! Comb the mail! Make the scoop!") and turned to ... I don't know, Glastonbury or whatever. The Syrian man blogger.

The most insightful thing to learn from "The Palin Emails" so far has been her exasperation at the claim that she believed that humans and dinosaurs coexisted at one point in the Earth's history.

Well didn't they - I mean, coexist? Here's a little tune to restore your faith, Sarah (Sorry, I just couldn't help it):

It's his GCSE history wot did it

That's the only way I can explain why ("student") Darren, 19, from somewhere in Norfolk, turned his parents' shed into an "incredible shrine" to Dad's Army (and installed an Anderson shelter in the garden).

Of course The Traily Shprail loves the chubby-cheeked lad with the unhealthy obsession for a TV show that even forty years ago was fundamentally unfunny.

Don't get me wrong: I love the detail of his display, and that he's collected all those Bisto ads and mint condition ration cards and authentic (though by now congealing) gobstoppers, I honestly do. But don't British kids have anything else to think about but WWII?

Early harvest

It is only Pentecost and yet here I am plucking tomatoes and cutting courgettes grown on the balcony (which is one hell of a suntrap: in the garden, we're still on to the strawberries and the currants).

And pumpkins. These will soon be turned into a yummy stew or creamy soup:


Picture taken around 7am this morning, as the sunlight was flooding into the kitchen. More evidence of the gloriousness of the day:

Roll over Beethoven, usw.

An interesting article at the Guardian on the now fifty-year-old dance known as the Twist led me to something unknown to me until now: the musical monstrosity that conscripted Friedrich Liszt's Liebestraum kicking and screaming into the twisting craze.

The horror....



More amusing was the way that twisting was analysed with great seriousness, as Time magazine noted in 1962:

If he could hear what has happened to his schöne, weltbekannte melody, Papa Liszt no doubt would be writhing, not twisting. And he would have plenty of company—solid German doctors who warn against "accelerating one's hips and legs in opposite directions," parents and churchmen who deplore "the overt sexual implications of the dance." But some German intellectuals defend the twist. It is, says one Munich psychiatrist, "a proper cure for working off frustrations." And a psychiatrist in Berlin, where the cold war takes the rap for all sorts of aberrations, sees it as a byproduct of an anxious age. ''The twist craze," says he, "can be attributed to Atomangst".

I suspect a twisting revival can't be too far, then, over the German cultural horizon.

The pinnacle of pointlessness

In idle moments, I sometimes contemplate what might be the ultimate symbol of uselessness.

Up to this point, my leading contender was an empty ice-tray in the freezer.

But I think this tops that: a headline from Spiegel Online that reads (my translation) "Catholic Doctors Want to Cure Homosexuals with Homeopathy".

Amazing: doctors trying to cure something that is not a disease with something that is not medicine.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a new champion in the world of meaninglessness.

"You would come to me then without answers"

This is very nice for a Saturday evening. And for other times...



Fleet Foxes, "Grown Ocean"

Echoes from the past

While looking up something else recently, I ran across the excellent British Pathé film collection, more specifically a filmed edition of the BBC radio show, 'The Brains Trust'. The show started in 1941 and was based on the concept 'get a bunch of smart people together and make them spontaneously answer random questions from the public'.

This version, from 1945, was the first episode that was filmed. It's pretty fascinating.

Part 1:

THE B.B.C. BRAINS TRUST ANSWERING "ANY QUESTIONS?" Reel 1

For the rest of it: Part 2, Part 3.

There are a few rather slow moments in these videos, I'll admit (this is clearly an age before intellectuals learned to play to the camera, but I find this makes them all the more charming).

As a general comment, I think that most of the participants come across rather well, except for C.E.M. Joad, who seems a bit of a reactionary loudmouth. (His answer to the question about 'what makes a happy marriage' in part one might be partly explained by his own experiences in this area.) Both Jennie Lee (a key figure in the foundation of one of my present employers, the Open University, among other achievements) and Julian Huxley do, at least in my view, especially well.

Other interesting things I then ran across while hanging around the Pathé site were:

1. A fascinating documentary about women's emancipation in Britain, probably from the early 1970s (judging by the reference at the end to Arthur Marwick -- also of the Open University -- as academic consultant). It's terribly old-fashioned in terms of its voice-over (not that this is a bad thing...); however, the images are fascinating.

EMANCIPATION OF WOMEN

Part 2.

2. A 1961 documentary entitled 'Beat School' about Burgess Hill school, at which students were allowed to do...well, essentially what they wanted to. Including -- gasp -- smoking and listening to records. Smoking, after all, 'calms the nerves'.

BEAT SCHOOL

Enjoy!

Random association re: G8

I couldn't help myself. Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy are in Deauville.

Together. Again.

This calls for an appropriate soundtrack.



But what will Carla say?

Apocalypse delayed

And a good thing, too. But for all those disappointed unraptured brethren (and sisters) out there, here's an image that looks mildly apocalyptic to me:

That little souvenir of a terrible year

I'm going through a bit of musical nostalgia recently, which I may be inflicting on you all in the coming days.

This, for instance, came on my mp3 player today: can it really be (slightly over) twenty years old? I saw them on the tour for this album when I was in college.

Which means I'm...old.

Or oldish at least.

Still: beautiful song.



The Sundays, 'Here's Where the Story Ends', Reading, Writing and Arithmetic, 1990

On being selective

George Orwell, about 70 years ago, describing the actions of himself and his wife after their building was (in the end only slightly)damaged by a bomb:

We slipped on some clothes, grabbed up a few things and went out, at this time imagining that the house might be seriously on fire and it might be impossible to get back. At such times one takes what one feels to be important, and I noticed afterwards that what I had taken was not my typewriter or any documents but my firearms and a haversack containing food, etc., which was always kept ready.

Priorities, priorities....

Wednesday Flower Show

Of course I didn't really need this, especially as I'm not even a sucker for gadgets.

And I do realise that purchasing bright plastic objects with a seriosly limited halflife gives the lie to my whole sanctimonious talk about sustainability.

But it is cute in the way all miniatures are cute.

And since the quality of a camera does not improve my photographing skills (for I am a wobbler and really only good at creating blurs), I thought that I might as well embrace my lack of talent and resort to taking pictures with a memory stick without viewfinder, which merely requires me to point in a very general way, press the button and see what happens.

So, see what happened:

When words hit the road

I steered the Jensen into the slow lane of the M4, and began to read the route signs welcoming me to the outer London suburbs. Ashford, Staines, Hillingdon - impossible destinations that featured only on the mental maps of desperate marketing men. Beyond Heathrow lay the empires of consumerism, and the mystery that obsessed me until the day I walked out of my agency for the last time. How to rouse a dormant people who had everything, who had bought the dreams that money can buy and knew they had found a bargain? (J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come 1)

If you've ever wondered (as I did in my girlish naivety) whether a "Jensen" is a real existing car and not another technological chimera from Ballard's eutopic suburbias, today's Spiegel has a whole photo series of the "Jensen Interceptor III."

Just enjoy the pictures and don't read the text (and don't - DON'T - think about fuel efficiency). According to the comments (I only ever read the comments, really), it's full of unforgiveable mistakes about the intricate inspirational conduits of international auto design.

Ah, love

Along with being Europe Day, today is my parents' 63rd wedding anniversary.

They're no longer around to celebrate it.

But I am.

Here, the happy couple in 1960, about a decade before I appeared on the scene.

And since yesterday was Mother's Day, here's a bonus photo from the archives, taken sometime in the early 1960s when my mother had just gotten her driver's license.

She looks pretty pleased with herself. As she should, having passed her exam in a country that drives, from her perspective, on the wrong side of the road. (She was British before becoming American, you see).

Of course, it may also have something to do with that awesome car she's leaning against....

Something: still better than nothing

Today, thanks to Francis for the reminder, is Europe Day.


Admittedly, the old continent is at the moment a bit tied up in unpleasant matters such as wrangling over how much bailing out Greece is going to cost or whether the borders should (temporarily, they say) go up again. 


So, perhaps a good time to recall something I posted a bit more than a year ago: a quote from Tony Judt.

To their own surprise and occasional consternation, Europeans have begun to do this: to create a bond between human beings that transcends older boundaries and to make out of these new institutional forms something that really is a community. They don't always do it very well, and there is still considerable nostalgia in certain quarters for those old frontiers. But something is better than nothing; and nothing is just what we shall be left with if the fragile international accords, treaties, agencies, laws and institutions that we have erected since 1945 are allowed to rot and decline -- or, worse, are deliberately brought low. As things now stand, boundary breaking and community making are something that Europeans are doing better than anyone else.

Well...'better'...um...maybe not at the moment, but one can always hope for improvement. 

Happy Europe Day!

The fluffy husband and the firebomb

Just coincidentally, following my last post which included a clip from Werner Herzog's Antarctica documentary, I ran across an interesting interview with Herzog about his most recent film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams (via A&L Daily).

Discussion turns, almost inevitably, to Klaus Kinski:

In the documentary that Herzog made about Kinski after his death, My Best Fiend, he alludes in passing to one other time when he sincerely entertained murderous thoughts toward his leading man, when he planned to firebomb Kinski's house until deterred by Kinski's dog. I'd like to know more.

"We had plans to kill each other, strangely enough, at exactly the same time," Herzog begins, a little hesitantly. "But you have to see it as these beautiful plots, like in a detective story, and those were mostly plots, I would say, in sheer fantasy. But at some moment it got closer than just a pure fantasy."

What were you going to do?

[pause] "Well, as I said, I plotted to kill him."

Did you actually have the firebomb?

[long pause] "I can't answer that. I only can answer that he had this very vigilant shepherd dog, and the presence of the shepherd dog dissuaded me."

Herzog insists, though, that he's mellowed since then:

"But let me say one more thing. Those were the times decades back. In a way I have matured. And I'm a very fluffy...at least a fluffy husband. You have to ask my wife."

Filmic wanderings

It's funny how the internet leads you places. Just today, for example, while looking up something quite different I ran across two very interesting videos.

The first, an excerpt from Werner Herzog's Antarctica documentary Encounters at the End of the World:



The second, the trailer from the upcoming Terrence Malik Film, The Tree of Life, which looks excellent:

Set your sights on good fortune

I'm a bit of a sucker for songs with firearm metaphors.

Good thing John Darnielle writes so many of them.


The Mountain Goats: 'For Charles Bronson'.

Save the date

Perhaps wanting to get their apocalypse in before the Mayan one due next year, a band of Christians is apparently seeking to let the world know of their conviction that the world will end in a couple of weeks.

More specifically 21 May.

At around 6 p.m.

Their RV Caravan of Doom pulled into Washington, DC this week to spread the word about the predictions of Harold Camping, who, it seems, already predicted (in 1992) that the world would end in 1994.

A nice detail from the Washington Post article:

...by lunchtime Thursday, about 50 area residents joined up with the caravan to support his message. Among them was Gary Vollmer, who took a leave of absence from the Department of Homeland Security to spread the word. He’s supposed to go back on May 23. “But I’m not going back,” he said. “I’ll be gone on the 21st.”

Still, not all of them seem quite so certain:

Another man was so perturbed by the May 21 message that he brought over a woman he found on the street who needed money. He asked whether the Camping followers would give her some cash, because there was no need for them to keep money with the world ending. They did not.

Oh, and as to that 6 p.m. timing, don't worry about figuring it out in relation to your own time-zone, as God has worked out this apocalypse to be as convenient as possible:

The end will come sometime around 6 p.m. on May 21 — not 6 p.m. California time or New York time or Hong Kong time. The world will end at 6 p.m. only when it is 6 p.m. locally, Camping said, citing his calculations. “People will see this coming to them from around the world,” he said. “It will follow the sun around.”

Cool.

A job well done

I really have no informed content to add to the debate about the headshot-heard-round-the world.

I'm also aware of all the ambiguities in the War on Terror, and I'm certainly not one to go a whoopin' and a hollerin' through the streets.

Still, it is, to my mind, an unreserved good that the world is now one mass-murdering terrorist mastermind poorer.

And I wanted to congratulate those who made it work like such clockwork, from the Commander-in-Chief on down to the units on the ground.

This article from the New York Times offers a pretty good run-down of this remarkable story.

Well done.

Interesting

 To quote Walter Sobchack, 'I did not know that':

All told, Obama-era choices account for about $1.7 trillion in new debt, according to a separate Washington Post analysis of CBO data over the past decade. Bush-era policies, meanwhile, account for more than $7 trillion and are a major contributor to the trillion-dollar annual budget deficits that are dominating the political debate.

Of course, once we're in a world where the word 'only' and the phrase '$1.7 trillion in new debt' can be brought into close relationship with one another, I admit that I'm a bit out of my depth, counting-wise.

Still, I can see the difference between 1.7 and 7.

Food for thought in considering the current debate.

Like this.

Cavaliers and Roundheads

As the natural-born citizen of a free republic (like at least one other well-known person) who became, by choice, the citizen of another king-free zone, I suppose I should be appalled by today's royalist happenings.

Though, judging by the homepage of one of Germany's leading news magazines today, I suppose this association is less strong than you might think (note the crown in place of the usual 'O'):

Anyway...nonetheless, as the son of a woman (born in the same year as Lizzie II, as it happens) whose membership in the post-Second-World-War British diaspora was (almost, at least as far as I remember) daily renewed by some reference to the Windsors (and who, by breaking through police barriers during some royal tour in the late 1970s managed to briefly hold hands with HRH The Prince of Plant-talkers), I find it difficult not to feel somehow positively disposed toward today's couple.

And there was a moment during the singing of 'Jerusalem' (which sounded at said woman's funeral four years ago, though in the rather less bombastic Billy Bragg version) during which, I must admit, a tear or two was shed.

That's what a sad case I am.

So I wish them well. As she would have done.

[UPDATE]: Norm put it better than I ever could.

Thoughts on a royal wedding

On the occasion of today's nuptials, I thought I'd deck this blog with the appropriate colours:


These are the only items with the Union Jack on them in this household, eternalised by my grotty webcam.

I also thought I'd dedicate a song to Wills Lackhair and his betrothed.



Of course, Morrissey was NOT invited to the event.

But here's a quiz question: Could someone out there explain to me why Morrissey claims that "this royal line" still "salutes" Oliver Cromwell. Do they? Why should the royals salute a republican? I don't get this.

'As heavy as children but not so tractable'. A reading recommendation

Thanks to the recommendation some months ago from a friend of mine in London -- a remarkably incisive historian of early twentieth century vice and its policing in London -- I have happily discovered the fiction of Patrick Hamilton.

I had not heard of Hamilton before, which at first made me feel rather a philistine (a feeling to which I'm no stranger), but since the edition of one of his works that I immediately bought has no less an authority than Doris Lessing calling him 'a marvellous novelist who's grossly neglected' I've decided to not feel so bad about it.

I quickly devoured two novels -- Hangover Square and The Slaves of Solitude -- and am now nearly finished with the trilogy that made his name, three novels later gathered under the wonderfully evocative title Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky.

I don't really feel up to a full-on review of the novels, but wanted merely to pass on the recommendation to anyone else who might be interested in Hamilton's detailed characterisation and keen observations about London life in the 1930s, more specifically about a social context involving (for the most part) people who are rather down-at-heel without being really 'poor' and who drink rather a lot. (In any literary history of alcohol and drunkenness, Hamilton should have a place of honour.)

The Twenty Thousand Streets... series focuses on three people whose lives are connected through a pub 'in the vicinity of the Euston Road and Warren Street' called 'The Midnight Bell': Bob (the waiter), Ella (the barmaid) and Jenny (a prostitute).

The effect of Hamilton's prose is really, I think, something rather cumulative, and it's hard to summarise or provide a single example to express it.

This is not least because part of Hamilton's skill was to get inside the thoughts of his characters and to highlight their uncertainties about what they were experiencing and their constantly changing views of their situations. Characters are continuously misunderstanding each other (and themselves) and their position; or, alternatively, they diagnose their position very well without feeling that they have a way out of it. (This internal psychological perspective is also what makes the recent BBC version of the Twenty Thousand Streets... series, as good as it is, somehow incomplete.)


He also had a knack for efficient though arch descriptions of the fleeting sensations of everyday life. 

And he manages the interesting trick of conveying a certain amount of sympathy and cold-hearted cynicism -- whether serially or simultaneously -- with regard to pretty much all of his characters. 

I thought I'd give a few excerpts from the different stories that make up the trilogy -- which are more descriptive than anything -- and just let them stand as is.

In the first, from 'The Midnight Bell', Bob climbs the stairs to Jenny's room in a dingy house in Bolsover Street, not far, geographically, from Regents Park but a world away in terms of class:

On each landing three different doors led into three different rooms containing three different families. All the doors were closed, but the awful belligerence of the poor was to be heard and sensed. On the first floor a man was reviling a woman, and a child, in another room, screaming. It did this not as though it was being beaten (which it probably was)  but as though it was being put to death. On the second floor someone was playing a harmonica, but in the front room an old woman groaned. You could not imagine what at, unless it was the harmonica. On the third floor two other children were being put to death. You could hardly believe that three children were being put to death, simultaneously, in the same house, at the precise time of your arrival, but there you were. (169-70)

From 'The Siege of Pleasure', in which Jenny (later to become a prostitute after a single evening goes terribly wrong) takes up a new position as a domestic servant:

It mattered not to Jenny, who had weighty work on hand -- that is not to say weighty in the figurative sense of the term -- but work which involved hauling out mighty bedsteads so as to get round and make the bed, dragging out monstrous furniture so as to dust behind it, emptying vast Edwardian basins of their brimming soap-grey lakes, lifting enormous and replenished jugs and lowering them at arm's length slowly lest they smashed the massive crockery, transporting wabbling pails, as heavy as children but not so tractable, down stairs and along passages, and carrying piled trays about in a world wherein practically everything was breakable, and only terrific muscular exertion and an agonized striving after balance could avert the impending crash -- in brief, 'woman's work'. (258)

From the opening passages of 'The Plains of Cement':

Though it had no wide reputation, all manner of people frequented 'The Midnight Bell'. This was in its nature, of course, since it is notorious that all manner of people frequent all manner of public houses -- which in this respect resemble railway stations and mad-houses. Nevertheless, a student of the streets, conceiving 'The Midnight Bell' as a nucleus of a London zone less than half a mile in diameter, could not have failed to have been impressed by the stupendous variety of humanity huddled within the region thus isolated by the mind's eye. The respectable, residential precincts of Regent's Park, the barracks and lodging-houses of Albany Street, the grim senility of Munster Square, the commercial fury of the Euston and Tottenham Court Roads, the criminal patches and Belgian penury of Charlotte and Whitfield Streets, that vast palace of pain known as Middlesex Hospital, the motor-salesman's paradise in Great Portland Street, the august solemnity of Portland Place itself -- all these would crowd in upon each other in the microcosm thus discriminated -- a microcosm well-nigh as incongruous and grotesque as any that the searcher might be able to alight upon in the endless plains of cement as his disposal. (344)

(All quotations from Patrick Hamilton, Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky [Vintage, 2010]).

Music to watch the girls* ... go up the wooden stairs

Little would I have expected to hear to hear the following in Muji's on Tottenham Court Road:



Claus Doldinger, Tatort-theme

But hear it I did. You can imagine that this did stop me in my tracks for a moment (more concretely: on the staircase that leads up to the upper floor of the shop).

To watch the crime show that goes with the tune, go here.

* refers to this.

Heading for paradise. Or Basingstoke or Reading

As my beloved is abroad in Blighted Blighty and dependent upon the railways, this seems relevant enough.


Robyn Hitchcock, 'I Often Dream of Trains', Live

It has long been a goal of mine to someday be as cool as Robyn Hitchcock. I think I'm never going to achieve that, sadly. But, still, I'm glad that he has.

[UPDATE]

This is also very good.



'Trams of old London Blow my mind'.

Yeah.

It's an accomplishment to take words and extract the meaning from them

Like many of the YouTube videos available of concerts, this one could have benefited from a steadier hand and from fewer people around the person filming who scream stuff.

It also ends rather prematurely and abruptly.

Still, it's a good performance of a great (ahem...) song by a great band.



The Mountain Goats, 'The Sign' (originally by Ace of Base), 9:30 Club, Washington, DC

And hey, it's filmed at the 9:30 Club in DC, where I used to spend a good amount of time.

That's reason enough, I think.

And we have no idea where

This video of Iman al-Obeidi being silenced and taken away by Gaddafi's thugs is one of the most harrowing things I've seen in a while.



I, for one, want to know what happened to this woman.

Apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order... what have the Romans done for us?

Sometime during my primary schooling in the late 1970s or early 1980s I became aware of something called 'The Dark Ages'. The term, as well as the period that stood behind it, always appealed to me greatly since it 1) seemed to involve a lot of things that were sinister and, well, dark and 2) featured a large quantity of swords and bloodshed, things of which I was unduly fond of daydreaming about in that rather warped period of my mental development.

(I suppose I sort of imagined the Dark Ages to be roughly like the covers of Robert E. Howard's 'Conan the Barbarian' books that I was reading avidly at the time.*)

With regard to its name, I think we have to admit that this rather murkily defined era between the Collapse of the Roman Empire to some later time during the Middle Ages when Things Got A Bit Better, had done rather well in terms of what we might call 'general badassness'.

Of course, 'general badassness' is (sadly) not a recognised scholarly criterion.

In any case, as my education continued and I reached university, I discovered that the term 'The Dark Ages' had fallen quite out of fashion based largely on the boringly sensible argument that the period was not, in fact, completely dominated by moody swordsmen and relentless slaughter. More generally, evaluating particular societies or ages as 'better' or 'more civilised' had become not so much the Done Thing.

Thus, in accordance with such principles, out went one allegedly misleading -- if adolescently appealing -- term of art.

As I've focused on the 'modern' period (subject to its own set of sometimes-sensible-sometimes-silly battles around naming and periodisation) it hasn't subsequently really been much of an issue.  

Nonetheless, I was pleased to read Tom Shippey's review of Robin Fleming's Britain after Rome: The Fall and Rise, 400-1070 in the current (or last, can't recall now) London Review of Books. It's behind the subscriber wall, but just a few short excerpts may give you an idea of why my adolescent heart leapt for joy.

First, Shippey confirms the tendency to reject the old label:

In every TV programme about Anglo-Saxon England someone is always wheeled on to say, in effect: ‘Dark Ages? How can anyone call these the Dark Ages? Just look at the amazing jewellery/magnificent artwork/superb illumination.’

Shippey, partly based on Fleming's book, gives a number of reasons to doubt this more optimistic perspective. Such as the fact that, as Fleming notes, 'Levels of trade in second-century Britain, then firmly under Roman imperial rule, were not reached again for 1500 years.'

Which sounds amazing, but remains a bit of an abstraction. Happily more details are at hand. As Roman society waned, everyday life became a bit grimmer:

Villas were not maintained; principal rooms were converted into barns or corn-dryers; the Oxfordshire kilns and the Wealden ironworks stopped producing; the Roman sewers of Canterbury clogged up and were not fixed; in Cirencester the forum was kept clean but the stone flooring, which had worn paper-thin, was not replaced.

And:

The hobnailed boots which Romano-British peasants had worn – and often been buried in – disappeared. No nails for boots, or for coffins, and so ‘the British slipped in the mud and buried the people they loved directly in the cold, hard ground.’ As pottery disappeared, teeth got worse with people chewing grit picked up from open hearths. In the fifth century the inhabitants of Cadbury in Somerset were scavenging cremation urns from 200-year-old cemeteries to cook with.

And:

Bone lesions in the skull and round the eyes indicate childhood anaemia; lines on tooth enamel come from malnutrition or parasite infection; lines of increased bone density show that a child stopped growing for a while; bone plaques on the shin go with leg ulcers, a result of injury or infection. Yet another sign of post-Roman decline was the replacement, in urban centres like York, of brick and tile by thatch and timber, much harder to keep free of fleas and lice and dangerous micro-organisms.

One striking thing about this story -- among many -- is the apparent disappearance of knowledge and technology that was common beforehand. And this, not as the result of a single overwhelming apocalyptic catastrophe but rather what seems in retrospect as a gradual, but determined, slow-motion collapse.

Turning back to the 'How can anyone call this a Dark Age?' question noted earlier, Shippey writes:

It’s true that the jewellery at Sutton Hoo would cost megabucks if you asked a modern jeweller to duplicate it. But less commonly noted is the pottery flask found in the same burial. It was a high-status item for the time, wheel-turned and so probably imported, but the finish is rough and the material porous: three centuries earlier a Roman villa-owner wouldn’t have had it in the house, and even one of his workmen would have thought it unremarkable. Nails, pots, tiles, bronze and copper coins: it’s the absence of useful low-cost items in bulk that make a Dark Age, and their loss is not compensated by the ability to manufacture elite bling. [Emphasis added.]

And, as the review also notes, there was no shortage of blood-letting and invasion. 

Apart from all the various insights I've gained from the review, two things have become clear.

First, I've never thought about hit this way, but I never want to live in a society that has lost the ability to make clay pots and forge iron nails. That, dear reader, is the absolute minimum that I am willing to accept.

Second, I am going to go back to using the term 'Dark Ages'. There are worse ways to relive one's youth.

Now, where did I leave those Conan books....


*I am, of course, aware that Conan's various adventures took place in the Hyborian Age, but as an adolescent I didn't go in so much for attending to such pedantic details.

Checking in and checking out ....*

"How I enjoy the thought of a Royal Personage being sea-sick in crossing the Channel!"

I don't know which historical event caused George Gissing to write this in his Commonplace Book, but it seems a timely comment - not so much because of a certain royal wedding over which Telegraph readers have been fretting for ages now, but rather because I'm halfway on my way to an academic event in which the author of the above quote plays a not insignificant role.

Toodlepip, everyone!

*Title refers to this song.

Let's begin again

Thanks to 'random play' on my mp3 player, the following came up today.

And it reminded me of how much I love the album that this comes from.



REM, 'Begin the Begin'

Money speaks for money, the devil for his own

John Darnielle sings Billy Bragg.

Man, this is like nirvana.


'There is power in a union', by Billy Bragg, sung by John Darnielle.

And as to the 'Wisconsin' reference: here, here and here.

Here's hoping

My general agreement with the UN security council's decision to authorise the use of military force against the Gaddafi regime is, at the moment, tinged by sadness on two issues.

First, it may be too little, too late, though this doesn't negate, in my view, the point of trying to salvage what one can from this not at all optimistic-looking situation.

Second, I'm disappointed not only that the Luftwaffe will not be taking part (except, perhaps, as crew in AWACS planes) but also that Germany didn't use its vote on the security council in favour of the operation.

Yet another embarrassing misstep by an increasingly embarrassing government.

Ah well.

Far more importantly: here's hoping that the bombs fall only where they should and that the aircrews make it back safely.

I'll put a gun up to my head if you treat me this way

Just feeling a bit nostalgic tonight.



Please allow.

What a long, strange trip it was

Owsley Stanley -- LSD pioneer and Grateful Dead sound technician -- died a few days ago.

Being a long-time fan of...well...let's just say the Grateful Dead, I found this sort of sad.

But I noted an interesting fact of Mr. Stanley's biography, via the obituary in the New York Times:

Mr. Stanley was previously a ballet dancer and a member of the United States Air Force.

Yeah, I suppose that's the kind of thing that leads to a life as the king of hallucinogens.

RIP Owsley.

Just connecting ...

Two related statements from today's online edition of Der Spiegel.

In the top story about the Fukushima catstrophe:

"Inzwischen hat ein Ingenieur, der am Bau beteiligt war, schwere Mängel bei der Konstruktion der Anlage eingeräumt." ("In the meantime, an engineer involved in the construction of the plant has acknowledged major construction flaws.")

In a less prominent (but oddly related) report in the "Uni-Spiegel" section (which deals with anything related to education) we learn that

"[i]n Informatik, Naturwissenschaften und in Ingenieurstudiengängen brechen besonders viele Studenten ab: Fast jeder Zweite hält nicht durch, jeder Vierte verlässt die Uni sogar ganz ohne Abschluss." ("In IT, the natural sciences and engineering, a particularly large number of students abandon their degrees: Nearly every second student gives up, every fourth fails to graduate at all.")

Well, one must be grateful for small mercies. Given the current "Fachkräftemangel" in Germany chances are that even a technical dimwit like me would be hired to design a nuclear power station and situate it slap-bang in the middle of an earthquake-prone area.

Oh, language!

Read in the window of a Washington nail salon:

"Receptionist need it."

Heard, during boarding, on the plane from Washington to Frankfurt:

"Let me first get situated."

Vorwärts, und nicht vergessen

Women at shooting practice, England in the 1930s (Via)

In honour of the 100th International Women's Day, the Guardian has created a list of the top 100 'inspiring' women.

Some of the choices make me applaud, others less so; but keeping with the theme of brotherly solidarity with the sisterhood, I won't go into that.

Anyway I just wanted to say how fortunate I am to have one inspiring woman in my own household.

And there was something I recently ran across that I thought might be appropriate.

CHAMPIONS ALL

'Champions All', Pathé newsreel film, 1920s.

Musica politica

Don't know how this one sneaked in on my otherwise carnevalesque (ha ha - you don't seriously believe that, do you?) mood this evening. I had completely forgotten that this is vaguely about PTSD - but don't ask me why I had to think of it.



Kenny Rogers (whose looks have improved with age), "Ruby"

Never forget what it felt like to live in rooms like these

There's an upcoming Mountain Goats album, All Eternals Deck.

This, 'Birth of Serpents', is one of its songs.

I like. Very much.



Hope you do to.

Copy, Paste, Delete*

I'm sorry.

However: if someone who has committed blatant intellectual fraud (g) and been caught out in the most thorough and pathetic manner (g) finally accepts the fact that his position has become ultimately untenable but nevertheless still not only tries to depict himself as a victim (e) of the media (despite the support of the nation's largest circulation newspaper) but also manipulates the real tragedy of soldiers' deaths to relativise his crimes, then I think he's lost all claim to anyone's sympathy as well as any justification for receiving an opportunity for a 'political comeback' any time soon.

And a chancellor who tries to downplay (g) the genuine and legitimate outrage -- not only of her nation's academic elite but also of several leading figures in her own party -- at the arrogant posturing of such a fraudulent poser as merely 'hypocrisy' (Scheinheiligkeit) (g) has also, in my estimation, demonstrated a lack of honesty and seriousness.

Still, I'm feeling pretty good, in that, remarkably enough, I live in a country where a posse of outraged academics can bring down a popular defence minister on the basis of intellectual rectitude.

Which is not what I expected (e).

In some way, that's a good sign.

Compared to Italy (g) we're doing quite well.

*Title taken from Der Spiegel. (See, KT, it's not that hard to cite your sources.)

A mad wanker in his bloodstained funny clothes

There is a long and noble tradition of comics making dictators ridiculous, and I think Charlie Brooker upholds it pretty well:



(via German Joys).

Meanwhile, at the London School of Economics ....

It's ironic that as the numerous commentators on the Guttenplag-affair are finally addressing some of the systemic specificities that made the German defence secretary's botched doctorate possible in the first place, we learn about a similar case in a British academic institution of some standing (including the transfer of substantial sums of money).

Surely the honourable Freiherr would have never expected to have things in common with one of Colonel Gaddafi's sons - apart from the penchant for middle-brow popular music (here and here) with which he has tried to procure what he deems to be street-cred in the past.

Maybe we should take this as an omen?

UPDATE: Damn it! Here's me mixing up the offspring of gaga dictators (which is not surprising in this apocalyptic age where the end seems nigh for so many greater and lesser totalitarian regimes). Of course Guttenberg shares a penchant for middle-brow music with Kim Jong-Il's podgy filius. Which makes the whole thing even more ironic!

If anybody says Slowhand now I'll scream!

Listen to the silence, let it ring on.

This has been on regular headphone play recently. Thought I'd share.



Joy Division, 'Transmission'.

Stephen Morris is so awesome. Thought I'd just register that thought.

Hot content

Finally, after nearly five years, I realise that I've been doing this whole blogging thing wrong.

Unlike, as I learn via the New York Times, one Heather Armstrong:

Her site brings in an estimated $30,000 to $50,000 a month or more — and that’s not even counting the revenue from her two books, healthy speaking fees and the contracts she signed to promote Verizon and appear on HGTV. She won’t confirm her income (“We’re a privately held company and don’t reveal our financials”). But the sales rep for Federated Media, the agency that sells ads for Dooce, calls Armstrong “one of our most successful bloggers,” then notes a few beats later in our conversation that “our most successful bloggers can gross $1 million.”

Wow, outstanding, how do they manage that?

By talking about poop and spit up. And stomach viruses and washing-machine repairs. And home design, and high-strung dogs, and reality television, and sewer-line disasters, and chiropractor visits. And countless other banalities of one mother’s eclectic life that, for some reason, hundreds of thousands of strangers tune in, regularly, to read.

This suggests that, should we want to be more successful with this whole new media thingy, we should, as Oprah might put it, 'share a bit more of ourselves'.

Of course, there's a definite shortage of 'poop and spit up' in our four walls about which to opine.

Though, I have to say, keeping things that way definitely seems worth 30-40 grand a month.

Possibly more.

That's the Chicago way

Ah, I've just run across a reminder of the dulcet tones that characterise my native* city's political culture, which I have to say that I've gotten rather out of touch with.

From a recent debate in Chicago's mayoral election:

[Carol] Moseley Braun, who had hoped she would win over most of the city's African-American vote, was angered by a comment by one of the marginal contestants, the community activist Patricia Van Pelt-Watkins, who said she had not heard much from Moseley Braun in the past seven years.

Moseley Braun responded in the no-holds-barred way for which the city is notorious: "Patricia, just because you didn't know who I was for the last seven years is because you were on crack." Van Pelt-Watkins has been drug-free for at least two decades.

Sweet home Chicago.

*OK, so I grew up in the suburbs, but I took my first breaths in Cook County and always identified with the broader term 'Chicagoland'.

Drunk on the spirt and high on fumes....

I love this song:




A previous version is here.

Doctor, Doctor

There are many More Important Things going on in the world than the growing fuss here about the doctoral dissertation completed by German defence secretary Karl-Theodor Freiherr zu Guttenberg at the University of Bayreuth in 2007.

More specifically, there have been allegations that various parts of that dissertation were plagiarised.

Unlike those More Important Things I mentioned -- such as the uprisings in North Africa and the Gulf or the turbulence on the currency markets -- I know a thing-'er-two about writing academic articles and books.

That experience, actually, tends to make me a bit more forgiving about honest 'mistakes'. Strange things, I have discovered, sometimes do happen in the writing or editing process. Footnotes get mis-assigned, say, and typos work their way into quotations.

Things like that.

Also, given the amount of things one reads and hears in academic contexts, it's not all that surprising if, perhaps, a particular way of phrasing an idea gets picked up, lodged in one's brain and used without what, in all fairness, should have been an attribution.

Were someone to go through the tens of thousands of words I've published with a fine-toothed comb, it is not outside the realm of possibility that he or she will find some errors of the above-mentioned varieties.

However, you would not find something of a rather different nature: the insertion of substantial blocks of text from other people's writing without quotation marks, footnotes or any of the other things expected when you make use of other peoples' words .

And that, friends, seems to be what we are dealing with in this case.

The Süddeutsche Zeitung has helpfully brought the main relevant passages together with their (unacknowledged) sources.

Like this:

Even if you can't read German, it's obvious 1) that they match, 2) that they are of substantial length and 3) that the problem re-appears on several pages.

(Just how many is unclear. A quickly organised website called Gutenplag Wiki has been formulating a complete listing of alleged instances of plagiarism in the work, but it may be that many of these might turn out to be either red herrings or more ambiguous cases.)

I just listened on the radio to Guttenberg's response, which was pretty pathetic, not least since he didn't really address any of the specific issues while also trying to play on public sympathies by highlighting that he had written the dissertation while also carrying out another job and being a family man.

Poor baby: it's not like many, many other people don't manage to do the same without resorting (allegedly) to plagiarism. (He has said, however, that he will 'temporarily' refrain from using his academic title.)

The University of Bayreuth, which awarded the doctorate in question, is looking into the matter; and from the statements they've made so far, they sound understandably pissed off. Certainly, for an institution that has been advertising itself using Guttenberg's image as one of their most prominent alumni, this is a bit embarrassing.

I do feel for the university (where I used to work -- mainly teaching law students English -- and about which I have many fond memories). Not only is Guttenberg's reputation on the line (and he's made much of being, in contrast to other politicians, a straight-talker) but so is that of the institution that awarded him the academic title.

There is, I admit, something ridiculous and petty and meaningless about this whole thing; however, perhaps because of my own experiences, it bothers me immensely.

I find not only Guttenberg's plagiarism (if true) but also his blasé manner of responding to the charges to be an affront to serious scholarship and to those people who do take the more difficult step of being careful (and of doing their own thinking and writing) on that hard road to the doctorate. Moreover, I've spent several years (on and off) teaching students not to do precisely what has in this case (allegedly) been done.

Not, necessarily, that the German public more generally is going to care much about this. The vox pops I've seen or heard so far have been of the 'Well, I did something like that in school, so it's not all that bad' variety. (I mean, what percentage of the population has ever given serious consideration to footnotes?)

In any case, Guttenberg -- for reasons that have always eluded me -- appears to be one of the most popular politicians in this country, and, probably at worst there'll be some kind of deal where he creates a 'revised' version with all of the correct citations and all will be forgiven.

That, I think, is a shame. And if there are no serious consequences, I think that the reputation not only of the University Bayreuth but of German academia more generally will be (perhaps justly) damaged.

Like most academics, I sweated blood over the details in my own dissertation and in whatever else I've published since (the second book manuscript, as you read this, is wending its slow, steady way toward completion), so it bothers me that someone (let alone a privileged-bloody-aristocrat) might just coast through via a winning smile and some intellectual theft.

Furthermore, I had to go through a certain rigamarole to get my doctorate recognised in Germany so that I could officially use the title 'Dr'. I'm not generally the sort to insist on its use, but it was something that I worked hard for and which is relevant to my employment. (And, yes, given that such things are especially central to Germany's status obsessions, I want to get the most mileage out of whatever markers of respect I can.)

I had a relatively easy time of it; however, the principle behind this procedure is obviously that standards elsewhere in the world might not be as strict as they are here in the land of poets and thinkers.

And, you know, at the moment that proposition is looking a bit doubtful.

[UPDATE] A few years ago, our friend Andrew commented on something relevant to this discussion:

In one way, young members of the European nobility have it worse than wealthy Americans: Europe's state-dominated education system has no real counterpart to America's sprawling network of non-selective private colleges of the dumb rich, who will happily accept giant tuition checks to make sure junior gets some college degree, and will even arrange discreet rehab-clinic stays if necessary. In Europe, a wealthy 19-year old with a glittering title will have to compete against the hoi polloi to get into a state university, because those are the only institutions that confer real prestige.
[...]
Especially in Germany, drawing excess attention to your title or wealth is taboo, so in order to establish status distinction, you'll have to sit through a few boring classical concerts, get that precious doctorate (g), and read some books about art and philosophy now and then, just like all your non-titled friends.

Yes, the existence of 'colleges of the dumb rich' is one aspect of Americanisation that I think we can do without.

I hope that the University of Bayreuth also sees it this way.

Freitagsmusik

Sans mots:



Jonny, "Candyfloss"

They've gotten inside my head

While checking up on whether a publication was being cited, I ran across the following rather mystifying 'related searches' list from Google:

I have to say, I neither have, nor have ever had, any particular commercial relationship with any 'house of pancakes'.

However, just personally, I'm a big fan of IHOP going way back.

How Google would know this, however, is beyond me.

Is there a Muslim sisterhood, too?

In The Guardian today, popular Lacanian Slavoj Z. contemplates on the "miracle of Tahrir Square." To explain the revolutionary rupture that in his view accompanies the collapse of Mubarak's regime, he makes a troubling comparison:

In Shah of Shahs, a classic account of the Khomeini revolution, Ryszard Kapuscincki located the precise moment of this rupture: at a Tehran crossroads, a single demonstrator refused to budge when a policeman shouted at him to move, and the embarrassed policeman withdrew; within hours, all Tehran knew about this incident, and although street fights went on for weeks, everyone somehow knew the game was over.

I, too have been thinking a lot about "the Khomeini revolution" these past weeks, though I guess in a somewhat more defeatist way. Slavoj ends his piece by warning against the dangers of realpolitik, apparently choosing to forget how often in human history revolutionary enthusiasm has ended in slaughter. I kind of like realpolitik, especially if it is of the calm, pluralistic way of enlightened democracies. I'm an old-fashioned girl, as you know.

How long, I wonder, until the veil will become mandatory for Egyptian women, how long until women who refuse to obey it will be stuck in a bag and machine-gunned?

Ixnay on the azi-Nay

We're still a bit sunk in the work-related grind at the moment, hence the light blogging.

And I'm aware that the following video isn't very new.

But I certainly enjoyed it.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
24-Hour Nazi Party People
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

Sometime soon our Will to Blog will return.

But until then: who is this 'Gerr-bels' person with whom these commentators are so obsessed?

Money makes the wheels on the world go round

Thanks to a Christmas gift, this has been on the obsessive MP3-Player rotation for the last few weeks:



Just wanted to share.

Thoughts on the naked woman in the shower

I wouldn't want to necessarily endorse anything else in this essay from Slavoj Žižek, but I quite liked this passage:

We are often told that privacy is disappearing, that the most intimate secrets are open to public probing. But the reality is the opposite: what is effectively disappearing is public space, with its attendant dignity. Cases abound in our daily lives in which not telling all is the proper thing to do. In Baisers volés, Delphine Seyrig explains to her young lover the difference between politeness and tact: ‘Imagine you inadvertently enter a bathroom where a woman is standing naked under the shower. Politeness requires that you quickly close the door and say, “Pardon, Madame!”, whereas tact would be to quickly close the door and say: “Pardon, Monsieur!”’ It is only in the second case, by pretending not to have seen enough even to make out the sex of the person under the shower, that one displays true tact.

Politics here or there, that's a distinction I feel I can approve of.

Remember my old home, haven't forgotten yet. What happens on the day when I forget?

John Darnielle and "Enoch 18:14".



Very nice.

There are worse ways to end the week.

Your kōan for the week

A student, looking for pointers on preparing for the end-of-course exam, asks:

I understand everything, but what should I know?

Priceless.

The answer, if you're wondering, did not do the question justice and was of a largely practical nature.

Apt Music

Catching this song on the radio today I was struck by how - in the right light and from the right angle - David Byrne sounds a little like Tom Petty. Though not so much in this live version:



David Byrne, "Life is Long"

Dedicated to my bro' and his shite genes.

Good morning Britain

Quite good stuff, as is to be expected, from Charlie Brooker today:

"There are millions of people in Alarm Clock Britain," Clegg writes. "People, like Sun readers, who have to get up every morning and work hard to get on in life."

Basically, Alarm Clock Britain consists of people who use alarm clocks. That counts me out, because I wake each morning to the sound of my own despairing screams. Which I guess makes me part of Scream Wake Britain – a demographic Clegg has chosen to ignore.

I find that the point at which politicians start droning on about about the sacrifices of ordinary people who...uh...get up and go to work is essentially the point at which they might as well admit that they really don't have anything useful to contribute to the debate.

To any debate.

It's rather equivalent to defending your policy by saying 'think of the children', i.e., an admission of intellectual bankruptcy.

Although I have to say Nick Clegg has suprised me in at least one way: I never thought I'd find him more embarrassing than David Cameron.

Other than being positively disposed towards Germany, I can't say that Nick has much going for him these days.

And, given that he's in some way tarnishing us Germans by association with his silly pandering to Sun readers, I think he's best start Mentioning the War pretty soon, so as to save us some embarrassment.

Red sky at night...

This picture does only rudimentary justice to the beauty of the sunset currently going on in front of our house.

But even so, I thought it was worth sharing.

Wishing you all a good Wochenende.

Bird of the Day

Although, as you might know, there is a great love for the Common Redstart (Phoenicurus phoenicurus) in this here household, we are of course aware that there's plenty of other sweet birds in the skies around Château Pudding. Like for instance Aegithalos caudatus, aka the Long-tailed Tit:

Via.

Now just imagine a whole posse of these cute little snowballs (with tails) frolicking in amidst the bare branches of a wild rose bush, like the ones I saw this morning when out running.

Coming home I did a little pre-weekend research and decided that the long-tailed tit was even sweeter than I had imagined. They're not only very sociable animals, who tend to muck about in flocks of around 20 or so individuals. It also seems that they have their collective life sorted out quite splendidly.

For instance, this marvellous species has an admirable albeit complicated sleep ritual (depending on whether it's winter or summer), involving (in the cold months) mutual preening, pseudo courtship rituals and collective cuddling. This is from the German Wikipedia entry (which I can't be asked to translate):

Innerhalb der Winterschwärme wird auch gemeinsam in eng aneinander geschmiegten Schlafgesellschaften geschlafen, was eine größere Widerstandsfähigkeit gegen besonders niedrige Temperaturen ermöglicht. Die Schlafplätze liegen meist in dichtem Gebüsch in 1–10 m Höhe. Der Schlafplatz wird gezielt angeflogen und die Individuen des Schwarms sammeln sich in der Nähe des Schlafzweiges. Dann wird in einer ritualisierten Handlung ähnlich der Balz die Individualdistanz überwunden. Zwei Individuen lassen sich auf dem Schlafzweig nieder und rutschen hin und her. Nach dem Zusammenrücken schauen sie voneinander weg und putzen sich. Dann fliegen weitere Individuen in die Mitte. Die Bildung der Reihe, in der die Ranghöchsten in der Mitte sitzen, erfolgt unter leisem Zwitschern. Bisweilen wird der Vorgang durch noch aggressive Individuen gestört und wird von neuem begonnen. Er dauert daher meist bis zu 30 Minuten. Die Schwänze der aufgereihten Vögel zeigen am Ende in unterschiedliche Richtungen, manchmal wird auch eine Kugel mit nach außen gerichteten Schwänzen gebildet. Am Morgen wird die Versammlung ohne weitere Zeremonie aufgelöst.

As John would say: "Now that's civilisation."

They're also extremely capable architects:

Via.

Political Dyscourse

Well, there we are: for anyone who thought that the recent terrible events in Arizona would lead to some serious soul searching and an improvement in the climate of American political discussion, I would suggest that Sarah Palin's latest thoughtful contribution to the matter pounds a pretty hefty nail in that hope's coffin.

Not that others weren't already busily hammerin' away.

(I was not one of those optimists; however, a load of work -- combined with a general fury and disgust at the whole dreadful thing -- has kept me from commenting, so you'll just have to take my word on it.)

For what it's worth: a couple of comments that I did think worthwhile: MGK and PZ.

Now, I'm going to return to thinking about something that doesn't make me want to throw up.

[UPDATE] This comment from Adam Serwer is also good.

[UPDATE] And this, via Boing Boing too (just surveying, mind):

[UPDATE] And this, at Bouphonia.

Brief aspirational aside

Now added to the list of Things I Want to See Happen: a race horse with the same name as this blog. If other blogs can have one, why can't we?

(C'mon, it would at least be better than 'Yorkshire Knight'...)

Anne Francis starred in "Forbidden Planet"

R.I.P. Anne Francis

R I.P. Pete Postlethwaite

... I am so very sad that you are no longer with us.

And istn't it odd that I should get Distant Voices, Still Lives as a Christmas present, the trailer of which today almost seems like a requiem?



I mean: "I loved our dad"?