Glorying in the brief Washington spring, Rita proves she really is English by feeling nostalgic for something she never had…

As I write the demented robin who inhabits the dogwood tree in our garden is repeatedly flinging himself against the window in a kind of avian kamikaze assault. The thump, thump, thump of bird meeting glass is a strange counterpoint to the sweet tweeting and trilling of the other garden birds. I don’t know why the robin does this every day for hours, but it is disturbing and quite out of sync with the pretty scene painted by blossoms of forsythia, cherry, dogwood, azalea, and lilac in the Washington area spring garden. All the more precious because it is so fleeting, spring in Washington is a time of splendid garden beauty. But as the blossoms fade and fall, a suffocating blanket of hot, muggy air stifles the enthusiasm of even the most devoted gardener. In spring I dream of creating a perfect English garden here on foreign soil, but as soon as the heat and humidity descend I scurry inside to air conditioned cool while my garden runs wild with overgrown weeds.

Can you be nostalgic for something you never had? I may long for the glories of an English garden now like a longing for home, but in truth I never had a proper English garden and certainly never had any interest in possessing one until I became an exile. I was a bit of a bookish snob in my youth and wouldn’t have been caught dead with a trowel in my hand.  The earliest garden I remember at the house in Dagenham where I was born had an air raid shelter repurposed as a garden shed. During my growing up years on the Marks Gate council estate our garden was a rectangular patch of scruffy grass that served as a soccer pitch for my brothers and a place to hang out the washing for my mother. There were a few nondescript bushes towards the end screening a wild area where we played jungle explorers and built houses for fairies out of leaves and twigs. Hedgehogs and a tortoise were our occasional companions. The houses were built in an oval facing outwards, with the central space divided into back gardens by wire fencing so we could easily spy on our neighbors. When London was declared a smoke-free zone in an attempt to clear the Dickensian yellow fogs, garden bonfires were outlawed.  That didn’t deter one neighbor who regularly burned enormous fires belching thick smoke in defiance of the regulations.  We wondered how he managed to find so much stuff to burn in his tiny garden and of course imagined dastardly deeds must be behind it.

I suppose the only real gardener I knew was our next-door neighbor Mr. Wingfield, though I never actually saw his garden.  He built a high wooden fence to screen it from prying eyes and was said to grow prizewinning roses. We felt sorry for his two sons who weren’t allowed to play in their garden. If we threw a ball over the fence by mistake he didn’t throw it back as the other neighbors did.  He once complained to my parents that we had destroyed one of his prizewinners with an errant ball. He seemed to think it was a deliberate act of destruction in retaliation for our missing balls. We were indignant. How were we supposed to know it was prizewinning? And anyway, since we couldn’t even see over the fence how could we take such accurate aim? The incident made for rather awkward neighbor relations for a time as we had apparently denied him the opportunity to win first prize in some prestigious flower show. Years later I was in their house for a reason I don’t recall. I saw a large net bag hanging in the storage room, filled with all the balls that had gone over the fence during our childhood. Seeing me staring at it in amazement, his wife gave a rueful, apologetic look but nothing was said by either of us.

After we all grew up and left home my mother finally had time to enjoy her garden. I returned home for the first time in seven years one summer in the late Seventies. I was amazed at the change. The lawn was no longer mud-churned from soccer games but green and lovely to sit on in the, to me, cool afternoons. My baby lay on an old tea cloth in the shade while my father sunbathed shirtless in a deckchair. According to him the 70F degree temperature qualified as a heat wave. My mother had planted some nice shrubs and flowers and built a rock grotto with a statue of the Virgin Mary. Some of the rocks had seashells embedded in them – I don’t know how she came by them – but one of them sits in my own garden now.  Somehow I got it through customs! The rose-growing neighbors had moved away and children played in the newly visible, unkempt garden. I tossed a ball back when it came over the fence.

My California years coincided with the hippie back-to-the-land movement and we participated in a desultory sort of way by trying to grow vegetables. The only success I remember is giant zucchinis, which forced us to eat rather tasteless zucchini bread for months on end. My dream of an English garden really began at Sissinghurst on one of my visits home.  Here the idea of a garden could be fused with my interest in literature and history. That such a literary luminary as Vita Sackville-West could handle a trowel made it more acceptable, even glamorous. On my return home to Maryland I began checking out every English gardening book acquired by the library. I became a fan of Elizabethan knot gardens and Capability Brown landscapes.  ot that I had any hope of creating one of those in my humble suburban plot. But the classic English border, lush with old-fashioned perennials; that was my dream.  Alas it was harder to achieve than I imagined. It turns out that those old-fashioned flowers like hollyhocks and foxgloves that flourish in the English climate are no match for the heat of Washington. The hopeful little plants of spring would droop just as I do once the weather turned humid.  And gardens must be tended. You cannot plant in spring and ignore in summer, but that is just what I do every year as I retreat into the air conditioning, an English gardener defeated once more.

So I appreciate every pleasant, cool day of spring.  It will be over far too soon.  My favorite poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote:

Nothing is so beautiful as spring –
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush.

Father Hopkins was obviously not a gardener.  He loved weeds!  He praised nature in the raw and “all things counter, original, spare, strange.”  I welcome his ghost into my summer garden.  He will feel quite at home amid all the long, lovely, lush weeds.  And perhaps he can persuade St. Francis, or Pope Francis, to do something about that poor, mad robin.

Rita Byrne Tull is an ex-pat librarian who lives in Maryland.

This summer Penguin Books are celebrating The Old Ways’ spirit of adventure with a competition aimed at finding and fostering a new generation of explorers and thinkers. We reviewed The Old Ways in Hardback last year and absolutely loved its lyrical description of the physical and spiritual pathways that we create across our landscape – and this is a great competition with some fantastic prizes to be won too, so don’t miss out!

We’re pleased to announce The Penguin Wayfarer Competition, to celebrate the paperback publication of The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane (published in Penguin Paperback on May 30th, 2013). You can find more details about the book and the launch at ajourneyonfoot.com.

Show us around your favourite ancient tracks, holloways, and sea paths and you could spend your summer trekking across the country for Penguin Books and The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane. We’re looking for someone who doesn’t mind getting their boots dirty, can string a sentence or two together, and who can get creative about how they share their journey with the world – you should already know your way around social networks and be able to produce short videos on your own.

The winner will become our Wayfarer and will get paid to travel around the UK throughout July and August on our shout (so please only enter if you’ll be available all summer). You’ll visit some of the Old Ways paths, but more importantly, you’ll strike out on your own and make some new discoveries, on or off the beaten path. You will then report back on your adventures through blog posts, photos, videos and tweets.

Sound like the perfect way to spend your summer? Head to our entry page at ajourneyonfoot.com and submit a short (two-minute) video before midnight on Sunday, June 9.

From there we’ll choose a longlist of 20 and hand it over to the public to vote for their favourite Wayfarer. Robert Macfarlane will choose the winner from the top 10 vote-getters and we’ll announce the Wayfarer winner on June 28.

Are you ready to follow in Macfarlane’s footsteps?

The Wayfarer Mission

• you will be available five days a week during July/August and flexible with evenings/weekends.

• you will plan a travel itinerary with feedback and approval from the Penguin team.

• you will work with the Penguin team to keep the travel itinerary to a budget – accommodation will most often involve camping! (but camping equipment generously provided by Snow + Rock)

• you will stay in touch with the Penguin team during your travels and post online content at least five days a week.

Prizes

The Wayfarer will receive a daily fee and travel expenses from Penguin during July-August, outdoor gear (plus GPS and camera) from Snow + Rock (value: £2500), a two-month train pass from CrossCountry Trains, select accommodation and activities covered by Virgin Experience Days, and the longlist and shortlist prizes below.

The 20 longlisted candidates will receive a signed copy of The Old Ways paperback. The 10 shortlisted candidates will also receive a limited edition print by Stanley Donwood based on the linocut he created for The Old Ways paperback jacket, signed by both Donwood and Macfarlane.

PLUS – SPECIAL DABBLER COMPETITION

Any Dabbler who enters before May 30 (Old Ways paperback publication day) gets five free books from Penguin. To be in with a chance simply email theoldways@uk.penguingroup.com with “Dabbler” in the subject line after you’ve entered and the amazing peeps at Penguin will make sure to hook you up with some literary goodies of your choice.

Nige revisits Beckett’s first novel – ‘very Irish, very clever’, and prefiguring the great works that came after..

His troubles had begun early. To go back no farther than the vagitus. It had not been the proper A of international concert pitch, with 435 double vibrations per second, but the double flat of this. How he winced, the honest obstetrician, a devout member of the old Dublin Orchestral Society and an amateur flautist of some merit. With what sorrow he recorded that of all the millions of little larynges cursing in unison at that particular moment, the infant Murphy’s alone was off the note. To go back no farther than the vagitus.
His rattle will make amends.

Winking seductively at me from the Oxfam shelf was Samuel Beckett’s Murphy, his first novel, in an elegant Calder & Boyars reprint from the 1970s. (Also available for a penny from Amazon.) I had read it before, but it must have been nearly 30 years ago, so I thought I would refresh my memory by reading it again… Oddly (for a reader as forgetful as me), I had remembered most of what is good in it, and forgotten most of what is not. The good in it – and it’s very good – is mostly that which foreshadows Beckett’s future work and shows glimmers of his genius: essentially Murphy himself, as distinct from the strenuous comic novel in which his travails are embedded.

I had remembered the opening sentences: ‘The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. Murphy sat out of it, as though he were free, in a mew in West Brompton…’ I had remembered the rocking chair in which he sat, naked and bound, striving to achieve his peculiar form of oblivion, as described in the great Chapter Six, which begins: ‘It is most unfortunate, but the point of this story has been reached where a justification of the expression “Murphy’s mind” has to be attempted. Happily we need not concern ourselves with this apparatus as it really was – that would be an extravagance and an impertinence – but solely with what it felt and pictured itself to be…’ Which is ‘as a large hollow sphere, hermetically closed to the universe without’.

His efforts to disconnect himself from his body having set him ‘more and more free in his mind, he took to spending less and less time in the light, spitting at the breakers of the world; and less in the half light, where the choice of bliss introduced an element of effort; and more and more and more in the dark, in the will-lessness, a mote in its absolute freedom. This painful duty having been discharged [the chapter ends] no further bulletins will be issued.’

The future Beckett is also prefigured in the unappealing shape of Collins, the near-mute factotum and go-between who is unable to remove his hat or to sit – he can only stand or lie, until a mysterious transformation towards the end. By then, even their creator seems fed up with Murphy’s supporting cast and their doings. ‘So all things limp together for the only possible,’ he writes wearily.

The novel is most fully alive when Murphy finds his ideal job (having hitherto resisted work of any kind) – caring for the inmates of the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat. Here Murphy is in his element; here he meets the superb lunatic Mr Endon and plays the great game of chess which is fully notated, with commentary (this I had remembered too, and it is very funny) – and here Murphy meets his inevitable end. Except that he was to return to life in some form or another throughout Beckett’s subsequent works, while the comic novel apparatus that surrounds him – very Irish, very clever, sometimes to the point of impenetrability – fell away like the rocket that launches the spacecraft into orbit.

Would you like to recommend one of the thousands of books that can be bought online for a penny (or a cent)? Email your submission to editorial@thedabbler.co.uk

Lost in reproduction: a tiny Venus meets a colossal Samson.

I was recently in Frankfurt for a few hours and visited the Städel gallery, where I reacquainted myself with Lucas Cranach’s Venus (1532), the painting used as the poster image for the Royal Academy Cranach show of 2008.

She is an unforgettable creation, a lightly-modelled snaky gothic lady with a diaphanous and entirely fictitious veil, standing on a heap of lunar rubble.

The poster hangs on a wall in a corner of my house. I have, over the years, spent a lot of time looking at it, thinking about late Northern Gothic, and other things. The poster is, needless to say but also crucially, poster-sized; however, I never thought in all this time to check the dimensions of the painting itself. I was knocked back, therefore, to discover (or rediscover) in the Städel that the panel is only 37.4 by 24.5 cm. Venus is just a few inches high; you are forced to bend in and inspect her, pruriently, as though she were a homunculus summoned in a bottle.

She hangs, moreover, in a corner of a vast room of large compositions – other Cranachs and Dürers and Holbeins, and I don’t recall what else. And through the door at the end, I think I remember, you can see Rembrandt’s Blinding of Samson (1636).

The Rembrandt, in contrast with the Cranach, is a colossal composition, not just in size (206 x 302cm) but in manner – the paint is slapped on in violent gouts and streaks and approximate dollops (in particular on the highlights on the armour and manicles, and on Delilah’s pearls and skirt); both the vividness and vigour of the painting, you begin to understand, and the acuteness of the depicted light penetrating the chamber, do not so much re-enact the violence of the scene, as oppose it: the blinding is realised as a bacchanal of clear and visceral seeing, and the protest would not be so impassioned on a diminished scale.

Size and meaning are intimately linked. Or perhaps meaning is the wrong word. Size is linked to what a painting does. Rothko knew this – he painted radioactive fields of colour big enough to blot out all other visual stimuli, so that you are perceptually aswim in the vast implied non-space – but so did generations of miniaturists and illuminators, who counter-intuitively multiplied detail at the microscopical level at which they worked, so that the eye is anchored to increasingly, insanely, tiny things.

Partly for this reason, none of the Rembrandt’s visceral power is available in reproduction. You have to stand in front of it. But the same is true of the Cranach. Its scale and proportion are a crucial part of what it means – it an intimate, almost devotional object, originally forming a contrastive pendent (probably) with a similar painting of Lucretia; it is a meditative binary system. The manner in which you approach it is very different from the manner in which you approach the Rembrandt.

Reproductions aid memory in many ways, but they do not aid and can in fact confuse memory of scale. We hold our images in a universal card-file index of various standardised sizes – thumbnails, postcards, wallpaper, posters, and so on, and make them available online in high resolutions; but they remain no more than two-dimensional maps of a landscape you once visited, or might one day visit.

Going to see the image doesn’t help much. When you stand in front of a painting, you are unanchored, at large on the ocean of real experience. You move about, you move backwards and forwards, side to side, in and out, from various angles. There is no straightforward procedure for viewing it, as there is with listening to music or reading a book. You are just pitched into the middle of the object and left to paddle or flail about. You will never be able to take a series of calibrated mental snapshots of the object in question; as with most experience in life, you do not really know what it is you are storing up.

In short, presence offers us a certain sort of knowing; memory, quite another. Unfortunately the world -whether of paintings or otherwise – is characterised for us mostly by absence; it is a closed cupboard of concepts and things and people which we can access voluntarily, but never in their entirety, never all at once. And of course, in that cupboard, the objects of memory fade, change, distort, etiolate, as memory plays on one aspect rather than another – we remember the content of a painting, the figures, some anecdote surrounding our visit to it; we recall it to our mind’s eye, but it is hazy, blurry, inaccurate; and one thing we never remember correctly is its size.

Atlas of Norbiton is an occasional bulletin from Norbiton: Ideal City of the Failed Life. Unlike its more comprehensive, detailed and discursive mother site, the Anatomy of Norbiton - the Atlas is intended as a pocket guide to the Failed Life for Failed or Failing Individuals on the move.

Some of the most memorable films live on in our affections not just because they’re beautifully shot or well acted or superbly scripted. Sometimes what really makes them stick in our memory is a song…

The right sort of song – presented in the right way, in the right place, and at the right time – is capable of heightening emotions to such an extent that it crystallises a feeling forever. In the world of cinema, it’s not just musicals that can do this; it can apply to films that just feature a song or two. The very best make the hair on your neck stand on end, not just the first time but every time you hear them.

The first example today undoubtedly falls into the hair-on-end category. It’s from what may well be the most popular film ever made, at least amongst a vast swathe of men and boys – though I struggle to understand how anyone can fail to find Zulu stirring:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Next is a song that was so successful that its fame has probably transcended that of the film it featured in, Laurel and Hardy’s 1937 Way Out West. I remember finding it absolutely hilarious as a boy. It still tickles.

Click here to view the embedded video.

More Welsh singing I’m afraid. But it’s unavoidable, isn’t it? If you watch this clip from How Green Was My Valley to the end you’ll spot a clear indication that what we’re watching is fiction: I just can’t imagine a house-proud Welshwoman, no matter how discombobulated, allowing all those dirty boots into her parlour.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Finally, something from one of the greatest films ever made, not least because of its atmospheric use of music. Wild at Heart is a beautiful, sometimes quite stunning, reworking of a number of filmic traditions. It’s a brutal film but irony has never been so affectionately deployed. Nick Cage plays an infamous wearer of a snakeskin jacket – “a symbol of my individuality, and my belief in personal freedom” – and here he is rocking a number of worlds:

Click here to view the embedded video.

A version of this post originally appeared on The Dabbler in October 2010.

Coo, this is certainly whimsical – who could fail to be impressed by this tale of hi tech spy-pigeons?

Pigeon photography is an aerial photography technique invented in 1907 by the German Julius Neubronner, who also used pigeons to deliver medications. A homing pigeon was fitted with an aluminium breast harness to which a lightweight time-delayed miniature camera could be attached. 

In 1903 Julius Neubronner, resumed a practice begun by his father half a century earlier and received prescriptions from a sanatorium in nearby Falkenstein via pigeon post. He delivered urgent medications up to 75 grams (2.6 oz) by the same method, and positioned some of his pigeons with his wholesaler in Frankfurt to profit from faster deliveries himself. When one of his pigeons lost its orientation in fog and mysteriously arrived, well-fed, four weeks late, Neubronner was inspired with the playful idea of equipping his pigeons with automatic cameras to trace their paths. This thought led him to merge his two hobbies into a new “double sport” combining carrier pigeon fancying with amateur photography. (Neubronner later learned that his pigeon had been in the custody of a restaurant chef in Wiesbaden.)

After successfully testing a Ticka watch camera, Neubronner began the development of a light miniature camera that could be fitted to a pigeon’s breast by means of a harness and an aluminum cuirass. Using wooden camera models, the pigeons were carefully trained for their load. To take an aerial photograph, Neubronner released the pigeons with their cameras about 60 miles from home. The bird, keen to be relieved of its burden, would typically fly home on a direct route. A pneumatic system in the camera controlled the time delay before a photograph was taken. To accommodate the burdened pigeon, the dovecote had a spacious, elastic landing board and a large entry hole.

Neubronner’s invention was at least partially motivated by the prospect of military applications. At the time photographic aerial reconnaissance was possible but cumbersome, as it involved balloons, kites or rockets. The Wright brothers’ successful flight in 1903 presented new possibilities, and surveillance aircraft were introduced and perfected during the First World War. But pigeon-based photography, despite its practical difficulties, promised to deliver complementary, detailed photographs taken from a lower height.

The Prussian War Ministry was interested, but some initial skepticism could only be overcome through a series of successful demonstrations. The pigeons proved relatively indifferent to explosions, but during battle a dovecote may need to be moved, and pigeons can take some time to orient to their new position. The problem of making carrier pigeons accept a displaced dovecote with only a minimum of retraining had been tackled with some success by the Italian army around 1880; the French artillery captain Reynaud solved it by raising the pigeons in an itinerant dovecote. There is no indication that Neubronner was aware of this work, but he knew there must be a solution as he had heard of an itinerant fairground worker who was also a pigeon fancier with a dovecote in his trailer. At the 1909 exhibitions in Dresden and Frankfurt he presented a small carriage that combined a darkroom with a mobile dovecote in flashy colors. In months of laborious work he trained young pigeons to return to the dovecote even after it was displaced.

In 1912 Neubronner completed his task (set in 1909) of photographing the waterworks at Tegel using only his mobile dovecote. Almost 10 years of negotiations were scheduled to end in August 1914 with a practical test at a maneuver in Strasbourg, followed by the state’s acquisition of the invention. Unfortunately, these plans were thwarted by the outbreak of the war. Neubronner had to provide all his pigeons and equipment to the military, which tested them in the battlefield with satisfactory results, but did not employ the technique more widely.

Instead, under the novel conditions of attrition warfare, war pigeons in their traditional role as pigeon post saw a renaissance. Neubronner’s mobile dovecote found its way to the Battle of Verdun, where it proved so advantageous that similar facilities were used on a larger scale in the Battle of the Somme. After the war, the War Ministry responded to Neubronner’s inquiry to the effect that the use of pigeons in aerial photography had no military value and further experiments were not justified.

Owing to the rapid perfection of aviation during the war, Neubronner abandoned his experiments. The idea was briefly resurrected in the 1930s by a Swiss clockmaker, and reportedly also by the German and French militaries. Although war pigeons were deployed extensively during the Second World War, it is unclear to what extent, if any, birds were involved in aerial reconnaissance. The CIA later developed a battery-powered camera designed for espionage pigeon photography; details of its use still remain classified.

Hooray, it’s Eurovision Song Contest time again! Frank enthuses about the Irish and Montenegrin entries…

Watching the first Eurovision Song Contest semi-final earlier this week, I was pleased to learn that the Irish contestant was accompanied to Malmö for the occasion by his priest.

I learned other things, too, chief among them being that Montenegrin rappers dressed in spacesuits should, by law, be the only people allowed to rap. But let that pass.

I applauded the young Irish crooner for taking his priest with him. It struck me that, just as Gloria Steinem in 1993 instituted “Take Your Daughter To Work Day”, so “Take Your Priest To The Eurovision Song Contest” could be extended to “Take Your Priest To Work Day”. After all, few of us are likely to get the opportunity to perform at Eurovision.

The advantages of taking your priest to work are legion, and also blindingly obvious, so I will not bother to enumerate them. Suffice to say that priests are surprisingly adept at photocopying, refilling the paper cup dispenser, and celebrating mass. Everybody wins.

Unlike Eurovision, where there can be only one winner. My fervent hope is that the Montenegrin rappers in spacesuits come out on top. While waiting for the result, however, one question is playing on my mind. Who, exactly, are those teeming throngs in the live audience, cheering and waving national flags? I ask because I have never, ever met anybody who has attended the Eurovision Song Contest, nor anybody who knows anybody who has. And I am willing to bet that no Dabbleristas know of such a person either. It is a pretty conundrum, to be sure.

If you’re looking for a double entendre, Mr Slang is just the man to give you one…

Those who, gazing at last week’s cab-referrent illustration, could tear their eyes from what Joyce, a connoisseur of such things, would have termed Judy Geeson’s ‘frillies’, would have noticed the strapline: ‘He gets more than his fare share.’ This, of course, is a pun. It is also a double entendre, the difference being sometimes hard to discern but the definers of the latter tend to advert to the term ‘racy’. I shall leave such fine-tuning to those swifter than I, and, while accepting the inevitable overlaps, concentrate on what rhetoric terms paronomasia (Greek ‘a play on words’) and the Nobel laureate Henri Bergson set down as a sentence or utterance in which ‘two different sets of ideas are expressed, and we are confronted with only one series of words.’

Or, as Shakespeare has it in Henry V:  ‘Pistol’s cock is up and flashing fire will follow,’ or Kenneth Williams, channeling Talbot Rothwell in Carry on Cleo: ‘Infamy, infamy, they’ve all got it in for me.’[1]

Slang, a Carry On movie (but perhaps not quite a Shakespeare) scripted from the entirety of the national language, is of course smitten with puns. The lists offer some 628, plus another 754 where I have opted for ‘a play on’, typically bosom friend, for a louse.  Being a man-made lexis, and in the way of men seeing the world through the priorities of the little head rather than of the large one, such usage may often veer towards the double entendre. There is little I can do.

Many of the puns refer to sex. We have abandoned habits, which playing on their morality and their dress, refers to the up-market courtesans who frequented Rotten Row in London’s Hyde Park. We have the airplane blonde, who may appear to sport golden tresses, but on closer inspection reveals her ‘black box’.  We have the agreeable ruts of life, the vagina, where rut encompasses bestial intercourse and one of the many variations on ‘slit’ that have been attached to the fermale genitals. We have the article of virtue, playing on the French objet de vertu, a curio or an antique, and which betokens a virgin. And that, as will be noticed, is but a sample of the letter A. If we refine things down, say to ‘brothel,’ we find finishing academy and seminary, clap-trap, cunny-warren (coney being both vagina and rabbit, with all that that implies), and so on. There are also a good number of internal slang-on-slang puns. Bobtail, properly a cropped horse, which can mean a eunuch or at least an impotent man, has had his ‘tail’ cut off, while the homonymous use as prostitute refers to one who, still in horse country, both sports her own variety of ‘tail’ and in addition is ‘good for a ride’.

It is hard,[2] and how can we overlook the adventures of the solicitor-general in the low countries, but lets us at least try to abandon the narrow delights of standing room for one[3], of naval engagements and indeed of two-handed put, both a card-game and a play on French putain, a whore.[4]

Barking dogs, for instance, are painful feet, a foot being one of the dog’s many roles in slang, a blunderbuss, usually a weapon, was once any ill-handling vehicle, a botanical excursion transportation to New South Wales, i.e. ‘Botany Bay, a Bryant and May, for the matches, was a ‘light’ ale, while modern Scotland offers a low-flying birdie, a shot of Old Grouse whisky. A chamber of commerce, on US campuses around 1905, was a lavatory: therein one ‘does one’s business’.  Captain Grose, in 1785, offers go to the diet of worms, to die, the anodyne necklace, the hangman’s noose which plays on a necklace of herbs which being anodyne ‘cures one’s pain’; hanging could also be the hearty choke with caper sauce, further extended as a vegetable breakfast. Still with Grose there are backgammon player, a sodomite, one of many such that play on ‘back’ ( though modern equivalents have opted, scatalogically, for ‘chocolate’), the king of Spain’s trumpeter, a.k.a. ‘Don Key’, manoeuvre the apostles, playing on ‘rob Peter to pay Paul’, master of the mint, a gardener, a catching harvest, combining the standard term for unpredictable, unsettled weather with the possibility that the highwayman may get ‘caught’, is an unpropitious moment for a hold-up,  and custom house goods, a vagina ‘because fairly entered’;  the revenue also gives Earl Rochester’s customs house, again the vagina ‘wherein Adam made the first entry’ and as cited in Hotten, the customs house officer, a laxative, which ‘permits goods to pass through.’

Drinking, as is slang’s way, plays its part. A Geneva print is gin, which one ‘reads’; to have been at Geneva is to be drunk. The term plays on genever, the Dutch gin that plagued the 18^th century, although a Dutch girl is, no prizes here, a lesbian. The grapes of wrath has been wine, and Australia’s shout, to buy someone a drink gives shout oneself hoarse, to buy for the whole bar. Jon Bee adds put this reckoning up to the Dover wagoner, to put a drink on the slate, and which turns out to be a laborious reference to the word ‘owing’ and to the contemporary Dover wagoner, one ‘Owen’.

On it goes. Let us depart then, with a sample from that unrivalled generator of the old Jack Lang, Australia. The term Buckley’s, which means ‘no chance’. It is possible that this refers to one William Buckley (1780–1856), an escaped convict who spent 32 years living with Aborigines in South Victoria. It is, however, far more likely that we have, gratifyingly, another pun, on the name of defunct firm of Buckley and Nunn. You got two chances, mate: Buckley’s and none. Boom bloody boom!

This automated poetry-writing computer system is so good that most readers ‘strongly prefer’ its verses to those of Shakespeare. Or at any rate, that’s what its creator claims. Jonathan Law investigates…

On a bone-cold day in March the Wikiworm brought us some much needed cheer by digging out “The Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year … a humorous literary award that is given annually to the book deemed to have the oddest title.” The winds cut like a skinning knife, the skies lowered with snow: but who would not be warmed by the thought of the 2002 winner Living with Crazy Buttocks or 2003’s The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories or indeed Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice (1978)?

I’m in the book business myself, so this stuff, great as it is, was not really new (just occasionally I’ve run into the prize’s founder, Bruce Robertson, at book fairs – the undeniable longueurs of which inspired him to begin his collection of strange titles back in the 1970s). However, I’d quite forgotten one of the more piquant details in Worm’s account – the moves to disqualify the 2008 winner, The 2009–2014 World Outlook for 60-milligram Containers of Fromage Frais, on the grounds that it had been created by a computer, rather than by its listed author, Philip M. Parker. And what I didn’t realize at all was the sheer range and volume of work produced by this Parker, a professor of management science with a background in marketing and economics; indeed with some 200,000 titles to his name, he could probably claim to be the most productive ‘writer’ in history.

A little Googling shows that Professor Parker has also concocted the following page-turners, any one of which could surely have been a contender for the Diagram:

The 2007-2012 World Outlook for Rotary Pumps with Designed Pressure of 100 psi or Less and Designed Capacity of 10 gpm or Less.

Avocados: A Medical Dictionary, Bibliography, and Annotated Research Guide

The 2007-2012 Outlook for Golf Bags in India

Webster’s Albanian to English Crossword Puzzles: Level 1.

Oculocutaneous Albinism – A Bibliography and Dictionary for Physicians, Patients and Genome Researchers.

The 2007-2012 Outlook for Premoistened Towelettes and Baby Wipes in Greater China

These, and many, many like them, have been created by Parker’s patented book-writing system – a modus operandi designed to eliminate what he refers to with some scorn as the “costs associated with human labour, such as authors, editors, graphic artists, data analysts, translators, distributors, and marketing personnel”. Essentially, Parker creates the template for a particular type of book – a handbook on a rare medical condition, or a survey of the sales outlook for the nichest of niche products – and then uses his algorithms to trawl the Internet and his own vast databases for content. The computer decants this into the prepared mould, takes care of grammar and format, and – hey prestissimo – you’ve something that looks like a book.

The  beauty of the Parker system is that it is not so much print on demand as write on demand: only the title need exist until somebody, somewhere admits to the hole in their life that can only be filled by, say, The 2007 Report on Wood Toilet Seats: World Market Segmentation by City. An order is placed – and the computer creates a unique literary product that is then dispatched to the lucky punter. Parker has estimated that the total cost of producing a book in this way, which might sell for upwards of £200, is something like 12p.

Until now, Parker’s published works have all been in fields that might be considered friendly to the algorithmic approach – medical and marketing texts, solvers for crosswords and other word games. But – and this is the real subject of this post – recent years have seen him move into something altogether more intriguing. Using a notion of ‘semantic webs’ based on graph theory and a new suite of programs that he has nicknamed ‘Eve’, Professor Parker is now making a bold assault on the literary genre that might seem most inimical to his methods – poetry.

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To demonstrate his belief that perfectly good poetry can be written by program, Parker has devised a set of heuristics to “mimic what I think my brain does when it is asked to write a poem on a particular topic using a particular poetic form (as assigned to me in grade school or college)”. In very simple terms, a set of algorithms is used to search over the semantic web associated with the chosen subject – ‘dogs’ perhaps, or ‘Charles Darwin’, or ‘Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’. The results are then filtered through a further set of constraints imposed by a given poetic form – chiefly metre, scansion, and line-count. In this way, Parker can create a ‘poem’ based on (virtually) any word in the English language, in any one of a series of demanding technical forms. The professor of management science claims, on this basis, to be the author of over 1.3 million poems.

To see how this might work in practice, you can click through to the website of Parker’s Toto Poetry Project and have a go yourself. Put a word or subject into the box, click search, and lo, you have a set of digital poems – in forms ranging from the traditional sonnet, limerick, or haiku to some choice new ones of Parker’s own devising (for more on which, read on).

So, to start with the altogether obvious, what do Parker’s patent poetry-writing programs make of the subject ‘Dabbler’? On the simplest level we get this seven-word diagonal acrostic:

Well, I suspect most of us Dabblers are five or six or seven of those, so full marks for accuracy, at least. Moving up a notch or two on the technical side, we get this enigmatic rondelet – a French form consisting of a seven-line stanza alternating lines of four and eight syllables:

Dabbler
Causal agent,
skilful in administration.
Causal agent,
field engineering department.
Traffic conditioning function,
composition of transmission.
Causal agent.

An indirect treatment, certainly, but I think it’s a grower. Rather less oblique is this little quinzaine (a poem consisting of three lines, comprising a total of 15 syllables):

Dabbler
Dabblers are several sprays.
Are they concordant?
Do you care?

Two very pertinent questions, I’m sure you’ll agree (the answer, I take it, is ‘Not really’). Next up, two of the more ingenious verse forms devised by Prof Parker himself:

Dabbler: Master, can I become adroit?
A dilettante, without exception, you were!
An authority, you have not been!
An instructor, you are not!
A babbler, you will continuously be!

That is a Yoda – a four-line poem based on the distinctive inverted speech patterns of the Jedi Grand Master.

Dabbler
Can I pass a pulse, published so pupils might see
Fully cheerful allusions, perhaps educating, and oh but revealed free?
Dipper or picker look all too absolute. But is fumbler?
Macerator, lover? – or dampener, twiddler? Darn! I excluded mumbler!
I wonder irrigator and otherwise disturber, but frankly ought I
I – state concepts so – abstracts crafted from computers spry?

And that – which reads a bit like some of the more recent work of Geoffrey Hill – is a Pi: a verse form in which the letter counts of the words follow the sequence in the celebrated ratio (3.1415926 and so on).

Trusting that this has whetted your appetite, let’s go on to see what Parker’s algorithms make of our esteemed editors. I’m afraid the program seems to have something of a crush on young Brit:

That’s another Parker-devised form – a Zed – and a piece to prove the old critical nostrum that strict formal constraints need do nothing to inhibit the expression of passionate feeling.

I’m afraid that Gaw fares a good deal worse in this ‘phrasal cinquaine’:

Gaw
look stupidly
to watch intently
a fathead or flathead
goggle

and this simple acrostic:

Gaping
askew
wonky

He is also the putative subject of this weird but strangely effective rondelet:

Gaw
Grid element
take into consideration
Grid element,
consent to publish agreement.
Caesarean operation,
to perceive by mental vision.
Grid element.

On the promising subject of Worm, who after all inspired this post, I can offer you a nonet – a somewhat vermiform piece in which the first line has nine syllables and each subsequent line has one syllable less:

Worm

slides which children ride at blazing speeds
editorial management
triangulation network
vermiform appendix
a wisp or fibre
caterpillar
filament
maggot
grub

On the surely inexhaustible subject of Malty, ‘Eve’ takes a predictable line of attack, producing this ‘mirror cinquain’:

and this tight octosyllablc couplet:

Really pickled and boozy.
But also raddled and woozy.

I could go on and on, but as a final test let’s see how the Parker machine fares with that most unforgiving of strict literary forms, the limerick:

Dabbler
There was a young gal from Croaker,
She needed a word for soaker.
Like sperminator?
Or impregnator!
So smart that woman from Croaker.

Brit
There was a young gal from Khotan,
She needed a word for rotan.
Pelvic punisher?
No, it’s britisher!
That literate gal from Khotan.

Malty
There was a young girl from Balty,
She wanted a word for malty.
Could it be spunk trunk?
But settled on drunk!
That literate gal from Balty.

Mr Slang
There was a young lad from Solvang,
And he wanted a word for slang.
Such as bajingo?
But then thought lingo!
That literate lad from Solvang.

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Of course, it’s no real surprise that a computer can work within certain formal and semantic constraints to produce something that reads a bit like poetry. If you can teach a machine the rules of chess, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t also learn the requirements of a quinzaine or limerick. What this doesn’t address, unfortunately, is the whole question of literary value – are Parker’s ‘graph theoretic poems’ any good, as poems?

Parker himself seems to be in two minds here. At times, he is careful to minimize any claims on this score, arguing that the poems were created “for educational or didactic purposes” only – most obviously, to illustrate a variety of complex poetic forms but also to help students of English acquire and retain vocabulary. Elsewhere, however, he takes a bolder line, arguing that his programs have been designed with an inbuilt tendency to create poems that will satisfy the author (programmer) and match the tastes of his readers. Can literary merit be defined in terms that will translate into programming language? Parker is quite sure that it can. Aesthetic value, he argues

 … is a mathematical problem of constrained optimization, where an economic utility function is being maximized. [Also] there is a portfolio problem given that there are exogenous social constraints, especially the perceived preferences of the reader … In economics, this is similar to a matching function between “buyer” and “seller” where there needs to be an equilibrium of sorts between consumers … Solving this problem becomes important when there are many poems that each maximize the utility function, or when social constraints are more “important” than the traditional utility maximization problem.

That’s a way of putting it, I suppose – but it’s hardly the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads or Shelley’s Defence of Poetry (“the mind in creation is as a fading coal” etc).

More provocatively still, Parker maintains that his poetry-writing computer passes the Turing test in terms of being indistinguishable from a poetry-writing human. Blind reviews suggest that his own “graph theoretic poems are basically indistinguishable from traditional poems … and in some cases judged by many to be of better ‘quality’ than traditional poems.” Indeed, Parker goes so far as to state that reviewers have shown a “strong preference” for his own work over that of Shakespeare, even when the authorship is revealed – a finding that he attributes “to the fact that most people generally do not like Elizabethan sonnets.” His final thoughts on the matter are expressed with an infuriating mildness: “my best guess is that graph theoretic poems, matching genre and topic, are no better than any others, but they are really not much worse either” (my italics).

Having conquered the world of poetry, Professor Parker is now planning to extend his method to the writing of romantic fiction.

Jonathan Law is a writer and editor of reference books at Market House Books.

Machines are already better than humans at chess, and now computers are increasingly important in sports like cricket and baseball. Author Jon Hotten ponders the implications…

Writing about the 1986 world championship match between Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov, Martin Amis said of chess: ‘[They are playing] the foremost game of pure skill yet devised by the human mind, a game that is in fact beyond the scope of the human mind, well beyond it, an unmasterable game’.

Eleven years later, Kasparov was defeated by a computer called Deep Blue. The match and its aftermath were conducted in an atmosphere of paranoia and intrigue, of fear and loathing. Kasparov claimed to have detected a ‘deep intelligence and creativity’ in the machine, his suggestion being that there had been some human intervention in its play. By 2006, a software programme called Deep Fritz was beating another world champ, Vladimir Kramnik, and now the various machines even play each other and gain their own rankings.

Ultimately, the machines beat the humans through sheer grunt: they could calculate more outcomes more quickly. They never got tired or paranoid, they didn’t suffer from the anxiety that Kasparov felt while representing the entire human race against them. The only achievement ahead of the machines is whether they can actually ‘solve’ chess; that is, calculate the perfect outcome of any game from any position.

There is no element of ‘chaos’ in chess: there are no bad bounces or freak weather, the board and the pieces don’t change. Its variables are perhaps finite. It might be a leap to suggest that sport is as vulnerable to computing power as a game, but there is no doubt that it will shape its future.

Some sports will be more resistant to numbers than others. Football generates a haze of meaningless TV stats because it exists in chaos, statistically speaking. It’s a fluid, random game that lacks the rigidity to support really conclusive analysis. Gridiron exists towards the other end of the ‘scale’ in that it’s quite rigorously positioned and patterned.

Michael Lewis, who wrote Moneyball, the book that represents a kind of year zero moment for modern sporting stattos, also wrote about Gridiron. Blindside was in part the story of the importance of a certain extremely rare physique playing in a particular position. Here, where biomechanics meet statistics, are the threads of cricket’s future.

At Loughborough University, where the England and Wales Cricket Board has its Performance Centre, almost every ball bowled in any form of international cricket is logged, its outcome added to an already vast database. It becomes a kind of anatomical chart of everyone playing the game. Broad and specific patterns in each format emerge, and from those come not just tactics, but the types of player needed to implement them.

You could call this the ‘known half’ of stats research, in that it’s open to anyone with the resources to do it. It’s also in its way unmediated and random. It’s produced by a wide base of playing skills, from guys that grew up playing tape-ball to players coached systematically from their early teens.

The other half, lesser known, comes where biomechanics meets with statistical analysis. England’s coaching teams believe that they have identified five common factors that all international fast bowlers have, and similarly, five possessed by all top-level spinners. There is specific work on six hitting, on revolutions on the ball in spin bowling and lots more.

This work creates paradigms into which suitable players are fitted and then driven up the elite coaching ‘pathways’ devised to produce players for the England team. There’s some brilliant and revelatory work going on, but it is in a way reminiscent of the way that Deep Blue began to ‘solve’ chess. It strips away mystery, and to a degree individuality.

England are a very good side, but they did not come up with reverse swing, they have never produced a mystery spinner. Their two really innovative players, Kevin Pietersen and Eoin Morgan, come from outside of their systems. What they do very well is refine technique in a ruthless way to produce the fine margins needed to win at the highest level. ‘Executing their skills’ as they call it. As such, they are already becoming the product of the research work done.

Martin Amis thought chess was an unmasterable game, but the machines are proving him wrong. Cricket, with all of its variations and oddities, its geographical sweep, its luck and its superstitions, its weather and its deadly psychology, actually might be. But some of its deeper mysteries are being revealed, and new kinds of machines are emerging to play it.