pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør
3 May 2012
Marcello and Lena have both reported getting either “you just posted that” (when they didn’t) or “You are posting comments too quickly. Slow down” messages from the WordPress bots. Is anyone else routinely getting these? I had a quick trawl through the support forums and this issue seems widespread (tho not very recently). I don’t understand the explanation myself, but I didn’t expect to.
(If you’re having trouble posting in this comment thread, email me! marksink3r at g00glemail d0t c0m)
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30 April 2012
(WARNING: Very VERY wordy piece still in a rough-ish state: really REALLY don’t read unless you’re an obsessive too! And to explain a little: all this is an ancient passion for me, the tale of how Captain Scott was beaten to the South Pole by Roald Amundsen in early 1912, and failed to make it home. As far back as I can recall the elements in the story called out to me, even as a small Lord Sukrat laying on my grandparents’ snug yellow fitted carpet in mild-weathered Shrewsbury, leafing through the gorgeous photographs in their battered old blue copy of Herbert Ponting’s The Great White South, spooking myself with Ponting’s extracts from Scott’s final journals, or his image of Dr Atkinson’s hideous frostbitten fingers, and dreaming of fabulous bergs and snowponies and famous men who would never return. In 1979, a change in the way the tale was told, catnip to a bolshy teenage Sukrat. Polar historian Roland Huntford published Scott and Amundsen, which upended all pieties: to such a scandalous degree that in the mid-80s it was renamed The Last Place on Earth to coincide with a television dramatisation (feat.Martin “Dub Dob Dee” Shaw as Scott and Sylvester “Who7″ McCoy as Bowers, and scripted by ultra-lefty playwright Trevor Griffiths, whose Comedians I admire enormously). I’ve read and reread LPoE dozens of times over the years, growing oddly fond of Huntford’s abrasive and occasionally lumpily repetitive style, repelled by (but also drawn to) the sheer violence of his name-making dislike for Scott, and fascinated (if not always convinced) by his unsentimental examination of conflicted in-group dynamics, what went sour in each party, and the immediate and long-term tragedies arising. So when — a little over a year ago — this controversial historian returned to his break-out subject, with Race for the South Pole: The Expedition Diaries of Scott and Amundsen (RSP), aggressively recapping almost all his earlier debunking assertions — well, I was always going to be writing something. I just didn’t quite expect it to have to be so much. Skip to the end for an acronym-glossary, and to the footnotes for how this all fits in with my other interests, if it does [1: note -- footnotes not yet written]; for the vast and still somewhat unvarnishedly bleurgh sketches-to-self of what I have to say and how I think, sketches I vaguely hope of a much better piece than this yet is, read GINGERLY on... ) more »
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12 March 2012
<--- Jane Eyre‘s Mr Rochester, in Charlotte Brontë’s (digital) mind’s eye.
From Brian Joseph Davis’s The Composites: “Images created using law enforcement composite sketch software and descriptions of literary characters”
pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør in FT • 4 Comments
8 March 2012
5 March 2012
Quite unrelatedly, I was listening to Stan Tracey’s version of “Under Milk Wood” only this morning, thanks to punctum’s Pink Floyd essay: of course the narrator is Merthyr Tydfil-born Madoc, doing all Dylan Thomas’s voices (as he no doubt had many other times). Also a Doctor Who stalwart: just one of those fixtures, really. Only 77.
(<– He’s not on this one, I don’t think: but I spent long hours as a kid poring over the cover as I listened to my parents’ copy, so I can’t help the association.)
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2 March 2012
In which one syllabubdobdee (who he?) dives into the complexities of “audience response theory” as it applies to Masterchef.
(And introducing Blogging Doesn’t Get Tougher Than This, an outlet for people who can’t not watch food programming on television…: ps not just featuring me as a commentator, either)
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23 February 2012
21 February 2012
… in which Everett True gets the internet to do his PhD homework for him =:)
ET is crowd-sourcing responses to questions that relate to his thesis, which is about music-writing and the internet. Question #2 was “what is the role of the music critic?” — and he’s kicked off the debate with an answer I sent him some time last year. Which in turn links back to my review of Marcello’s book, which drew a distinction between the critic’s role and the reviewer’s. (Yesterday’s was on trolling…)
pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør in FT • 1 Comment
17 February 2012
(This piece was written to coincide with Mike Dibb’s documentary on the jazz saxophonist Barbara Thompson, and how Parkinson’s disease affects her playing life. The first time I saw it, at a screening last year, I knew I wanted to write something about my father, his Parkinson’s and the poem printed below the fold. I’d hoped a newspaper would run it — because I think the general topic’s important as well as interesting, and because I know Mike likes the poem — but though I sent proposals to several, and the finished piece to a couple, it was always going to be a complex balance of getting the proposal right, getting the piece right, getting the right section of the right paper, and getting the timing of my pitch right (not too early, not too late). I knew it was a long shot — it falls somewhat between tidy journalistic categories (poetry & music & health & family) — and in the event, I missed too many lead-times to find time to hustle an appropriate slot for it. So here it is. Update: Barbara Thompson: Playing Against Time, aired on BBC4, Sunday 19 February, 9-10.15pm UK time, but should still be viewable on via BBC iplayer for a while.)
A scientist and teacher by profession, my father had been an excellent amateur calligrapher in his youth, and an artist in ink, as well as an occasional poet. He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease in 1967, but a badly shaky writing hand was the earliest symptom, some time before that, and he had to switch to his other hand to teach himself how to write from scratch, giving up drawing for ever. The condition takes you through cycles of capability — from flail to freeze and back — that mean that you are all too often not to be able to get your limbs to do the most ordinary things, such as picking up the pills which will cycle you through blessed mid-way periods of balance for a while, but then out again into the opposite unbalanced state. The effect on anything more deftly ambitious will eventually be devastating, but for some the slow on-set of the disease will mean — as my father’s poem below suggests — that the passions and possibilities of your art have become intimately tangled with Parkinson’s itself, how you feel about it, how you work with it; what you want to do, what you can no longer do. And in fact he lived with it — as did we, his family — for 43 years, an unusually long time. more »
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10 February 2012
or “You Will be Very Crumpled””
… being a show-by-show TARDIS-esque (ie in effect random) exploration of Doctor Who Soup to Nuts, begun at LJ’s diggerdydum community, and crossposted at FT.
aka the Sorrows of Young Adric, in which everyone’s favourite wooden doughy doe-eyed teen brainiac hatemonkey Adults Up and Takes One for Evolution, cleverly time-slipping an otherwise entirely unremarkable production-line Cyberman planet-bomb into the actual original Alvarez Impact… At this most traumatically significant transition-time for Likeable 5ive and his Famously Too-Numerous Pals, why not mark/muffle/muddle the Breaking of the Fellowship with the first starring role in kid’s pop culture for the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event? Anyway, EarthSoXoR was an ep I’ve heard a LOT, but never seen: SO NOW READ ON more »
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