The sausage fork - an update

Sausages curl when fried, making it difficult to brown them on four sides. The Bonden Sausfork, knocked up at a cost of £15 by a local fabricator, solves the problem. The sausages are slid longitudinally on to the fork tines; no extra piercing is needed since the sausages already have a hole at each end. To rotate the sausages use a pair of wooden spatulas.

The Sausfork shown is Version 2. It differs from Version 1 in that the tines are wide enough apart to take bratwursts. Should one brown four sides? From a gustatory point of view, possibly not. Aesthetically it’s essential. Take-up is unlikely to be dramatic. Virtually everyone who comments on Works Well already has too many kitchen appliances.

WANT TO WRITE A NOVEL? Then you could face this sort of problem. Hatch, at a moment which will change his career and (if I feel like it) his life, designs and creates a fairly simple mechanical system. The system’s components, their function and their raison d’etre are open to scrutiny by the plot. Should I describe the system in detail so that the reader understands it fully (and thereby risk inserting a passage that could have been ripped from an instruction manual) or take an arty-flighty approach which may leave the reader in the dark? The answer is I should be writing about a poet or a teacher rather than a production engineer.

Novel progress 17/3/10.Ch. 17: 2299 words. Chs. 1 - 16: 73,302. Comments: Clare admits to a dark side.

Dedication plays away

Strictly come dancing (Breton duet)
Dedicated to Lucy and Tom
“My dear why don’t I mull some wine? Our Mol
Is bored and I’ve suppressed a thousand yawns.”
“You’ve had your Dowland, now let’s both enthrall
To streams of photons from Cartesian dawns.”

“My dear I’m neutron-mad, I learnt from you.
I am your wife, no mass, but critical.”
“But too naïve so take the vector view
Embracing targets algometrical.”

“My dear, these shining shells, these angled arms
Don’t sing to me of Werner’s certainties.”
“And yet in mining grace from physics’ charms
You ditch the maths and seek analogies.”

“My dear, but tell me where’s the parallel
With made-up faces and a sliding gait?”
“The face, uncertain, is the particle
The slide its even more uncertain state.”

“My dear - ” “Dear wife it’s time to mull the wine,
Heat the Bourgueil, not the blest Lafite
While I sit mulling on an endless line
Eight on its side, so hard and yet so neat.”

NOTE: Colours have no politico-significance

Novel progress 13/3/10.Ch. 17: 0 words. Chs. 1 - 16: 73,302. Comments: After re-reading and editing Ch. 16 I shrank it from 6037 words to 5674 words.

Penalties of being an art-film fan

A recent sequence of great visual and aural experiences, all involving sub-titles. The Life of Others (film, BBC4 - East Germany during the Stasi days), The White Ribbon (film, Hereford’s Borderline Film Festival – Germany prior to WW1, another masterpiece by Michael Haneke, director of Hidden and The Piano Teacher), St Matthew Passion (triumphant all-star version in Birmingham conducted by His Majesty Rattle), Departures (film, Borderline – Japan, put together like a Fabergé egg, moving, profound, funny).

Sub-titles can be burden on TV. When, say, the story is told against snowy landscapes the technicians contrive a black background to the letters to make things easier. But with Wild Strawberries the alternating scenes of sunlight and shadows (Another Bergman film?) make this impossible and words are lost. Solution: watch the film several times (it’s worth it) until the dialogue is memorised.

If you know the original language sub-titles are fun. With French I am astonished at the compression achieved in the translation. With German the fun comes from first reading the English and waiting for the spoken past participle at the end of the sentence. The Bach sub-titles are put up by someone who can read a score to correspond with what is being sung and to avoid repetitions.

THE NOVEL – TECHNO BIT With over 70,000 words written I am, of course, backing up. I use a Zip disc which looks like a larger, thicker floppy but stores 100 MB. One thing I can’t understand. If I’m halfway through a chapter the newer, longer file over-writes the shorter, previously recorded file and a pop-up identifying the two files asks me if this is OK. But sometimes the new file is smaller than the earlier file. How can that be?

Quart into a pint pot

In Search of Beethoven, seen on hard seats in Ross-on-Wye parish church hall, lasts 2 hr 19 min, and covers LvB’s life and fifty of his major works. So, typically, four bars of the Spring Sonata fades to voiceover. But good stuff from the pianists.

Ronald Brautigan. (1) Plays two bars of dense complexity LvB showed to teacher Haydn. “I can’t play that, I just can’t play that.”
(2) “Why is Für Elise so popular?” Plays first line. “It’s not one of his best pieces. You play it two or three times and it gets irritating.”
Emmanuel Ax. (1) “Beethoven is very good at repeating single notes.” Plays same note six times and, lo! the first movement of the Fourth Concerto is triggered in your mind.
(2) Plays a complicated descending cadenza from a middle sonata. “But that wasn’t how Beethoven marked the fingering. It was supposed to be played by the right hand alone. No pianist can do that. Why did he write it that way? Because he could play it with one hand and to get up the noses of those who couldn’t.”
Paul Lewis. Detail in late sonata, possibly Hammerklavier. “Here’s a 27-note (ie, quite short) passage. You might be tempted to play it as a phrase.” Does so; sounds lovely. “But no. Look here on the score. A four-note phrase within those 27 notes.” Plays it; quite different. “It’s meant to hint at fatigue. Very hard to play.”

Barrett Bonden. The movie ends with the Grosse Fuge string quartet. This demanding but deeply satisfying work was the seventh or eighth LP I ever bought. As I played it my brother (a Charlie Parker fan) sat on the stairs and listened. “What was that?” he asked, astonished, afterwards

Novel progress 10/3/10. Ch. 16: 5525 words. Chs. 1 - 15: 67,628 words. Comments: Hatch emerges.

The computer bites back

I went slightly bonkers when computers were introduced (for word processing then for DTP) at my magazine. The benefits were such it is clear I rhapsodised too much about them chez Bonden. Mrs BB avoided the infection and only agreed to receive a laptop some fifteen years later. In the intervening two years she has used it regularly but conservatively.

Those who approve of poetic justice will enjoy hearing the gift has rebounded on me. Take birthday presents. Given our age neither of us hangs about once a need is identified; we go ahead and buy. Marking Mrs BB’s birthday, now only days away, has always been difficult since Hereford is not Regent Street. But the Internet gave me an edge. Not now though. Mrs BB forestalls me by impulse-buying on her own behalf.

Second. Should the laptop go on holiday to the Languedoc villa in June? No, we all agreed; we’ll never be off the damn thing. But time after time last year facts – maddening in their immediacy – needed to be verified, checked or investigated. When my desktop was the only available computer the question didn’t arise. This year the insidious Hewlett Packard may keep me out of the pool.

SONGS OF PRAISE poetry primer
A man that looks on glass/On it may stay his eye
Or if he pleases through it pass/And then the heaven espy.
The exploding metaphor

All may of Thee partake/Nothing could be so mean
Which with this tincture "for thy sake"/Would not grow bright and clean.
Whence came the quotes?

Christian, up and smite them/Counting gain not loss.
Muscular accountancy

Herod then with fear was filled;/“A prince,” he said, “in Jewry!”
All the little boys he killed/At Bethlem (sic) in his fury.
Steady hand on the bathos tiller

Novel progress 6/3/10. Ch. 16: 3422 words. Chs. 1 - 15: 67,628 words. Comments: Hatch starts earning his crust.

All hail Dawkins, Descartes and that lot

This is an attempt to match the more conversational style that Plutarch and Lucy use so well: a structure based on sentences rather than "poetic" clumps of words. Since this approach is still alien I fear I end up with lines that appear tongue-in-cheek. The sonnet, now slightly modified, first appeared on The Crow's blog and is in response to a link where science was being celebrated. Better still it manages to squeak through here by making a distant obeisance to my "mission statement" at the top of the page.

Sonnet – Lead kindly light
I sigh, I pluck the lute, I turn to Keats
The world, my mistress, is too grand for me.
Her essence is a series of defeats
For my blunt intellectuality.
I ache with lust and would grasp more of her
If I could understand her secrecy
But she is power and charm and gold and myrrh
Bound in the maths of atomicity.
I may not love her but at least I flirt
With tiny glimpses of her gorgeousness
The lens of science renders me alert
To here and there within her boundlessness
I’m pandered to by Maxwell, Gauss and Bohr
Whose flashes lit the dark I now abhor.

NOTES:
(1) Atomicity is a made-up word.
(2) Pander has a darker meaning.

Novel progress 1/3/10. Ch. 16: 2507 words. Chs. 1 - 15: 67,628 words. Comments: Hatch nonplusses Hester.

They never told me this

Old age brings so many predictable changes that much of the experience becomes a cliché. That’s an unexpected change. There are others.

(1) Death. I find myself pondering the form it will take rather than simply averting my eyes. That may change. Question: will dying be a test of atheism?
(2) Clumsiness. But of a special kind. I pick my coffee-mug from the draining rack to dry it. There is a natural trajectory for this which I have never needed to consider. Now, once in fifty times, the mug glances against the mixer-tap spout. The mug has become precious and a bolt of fear passes through my chest.
(3) Irritation. Often related to (2). I place the newspaper half on, half off the coffee table. It slides on to the floor. My brief anger is disproportionate.
(4) Deafness 1. This is predictable and in any case limited to situations with high background levels (for the techies: a poor signal-to-noise ratio). I find I don’t care.
(5) Deafness 2. The sound tracks on American DVDs are blurred: a technical failing quite separate from accent and/or directorial preferences for inarticulacy. Often this turns out to be unimportant.
(6) Keyboard skills. Defects here could be a precursor to Alzheimer. Whole words, sometimes phrases, are missed out as my mind leaps ahead of my fingers. A lifetime’s devotion to revision and improvement solves this for the moment.
(7) Car driving. As far I can tell the skill has not diminished. What has changed is a never-absent fear that it might.
(8) End-of-the-day relaxation. Here the change is one of degree. What was once a mere cessation of labour has turned into sheer voluptuousness, a sensory wallow.
(9) Booze. Ability to withstand hangovers now varies widely.
(10) Vocabulary. Still highish but, as with (7), accompanied by anticipation of the first signs that is on the way down.

Novel progress 26/2/10. Ch. 16: 1447 words. Chs. 1 - 15: 67,628 words. Comments: Hatch opens up like a flower.

Bend the knee to Neil

No picture with this post, but that’s intentional. When the BBC said The History of the World in 100 Objects would be on radio, knee-jerk critics scoffed. “You gotta have telly,” they said. But with the magnificent Neil MacGregor in charge you don’t need pictures. Today it was the Oxus chariot, a model which shows how bigwigs got around the Persian empire, 2500 years ago, in “the Ferrari or Porsche” of its day. Woven into the fifteen-minute broadcast were details of the emperor Cyrus’s enlightened rule (Iran could use him now) and the empire’s astonishing multi-culturalism.

But then both Mrs BB and I believe MacGregor, director of the British Museum, can walk on water. For me he did the impossible. His TV series, Seeing Salvation, drew me into a form of painting (Christian art) I’d regarded as formal, sterile and alien. He’s been offered a knighthood and turned it down, has been approached by New York and turned them down. The Times Online refers to him as Saint Neil but that seriously under-rates him.

NEW SERIES
Hymns Ancient & Modern poetry primer

Who so beset him round/With dismal stories,
Do but themselves confound/His strength the more is
The opportunistic rhyme.

Solid joys and lasting pleasures/None but Zion’s children know.
The inept adjective (two of them).

The holly bears a blossom as white as lily flower
And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ…
The non-sequitur.

There is a green hill faraway/Without a city wall
The planning application.

With salvation's walls surrounded,
Thou may'st smile at all thy foes.
Is that all?

Novel progress 22/2/10. Ch. 16: 0 words. Chs. 1 - 15: 67,628 words. Comments: Hatch in Arcadia.