tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-53962222024-03-07T07:31:14.885+00:00Some Men Are BrothersA provincial hack's commonplace bookJasper Milvainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08417909012663712109noreply@blogger.comBlogger262125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5396222.post-56734600377117767182014-07-22T09:06:00.000+01:002014-07-22T09:06:16.492+01:00There is one thing wrong with the new Foyles<p>I was expecting to love <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/10889771/A-browsers-view-of-the-new-Foyles.html">the huge, shiny new Foyles</a> in the former Central St Martins building on Charing Cross Road, but it's even better than I expected. The space and light and organisation don't blot out the eccentricity and curiosity; they accentuate it. No building containing this many freestanding shelves will ever be free of odd corners, however open its floorplan, and the imaginative ways the extra display space is used give a vivid sense of the fine individual tastes stocking the shop. There's more of everything, as far as I can tell. The magazine selection, already quite good, is now very good: I saw my first print copy of <em>The Baffler</em> there yesterday, and bought it. But the way the magazines are stocked is wildly frustrating.</p> <p>Consider three magazines at the intersection of politics and culture: <em>The Baffler</em>, <em>Adbusters</em>, <em>Dissent</em>. They are none of them easily obtainable in Britain, and Foyles has the lot. Great! Now try to find them. <em>Adbusters</em> is easy: it's in the magazine display at the front, which looks extensive enough to be the whole thing, until you notice a little sign explaining that this is only the art and design magazines: a discreet colour-coded map lists selections of magazines on five different floors. And in fact that underestimates the complexity: most floors have several caches of magazines scattered around their different sections, and there are no signs within sections to tell you where the magazines might be hiding.</p><p> <em>Dissent</em> is, logically enough, among the politics magazines, which as promised are on the second floor - on a back wall underneath a secondhand book selection, just to the left of magazines about jazz and world music. (Magazines about rock, pop, film and theatre are on the far side of the same floor.) <em>The Baffler</em>, meanwhile, because of its bookish format, has been classified as a literary magazine: that puts it on the floor below. I look forward to browsing magazines at the new Foyles. I foresee a lot of exercise.</p> <p>The scattered arrangement also seems to discourage stocking of weeklies: there were some in business, but literature didn't have the <em>New Yorker</em> (or the <em>Atlantic</em> or <em>Harpers</em> - perhaps they're all on another floor) and politics seemed very heavy on quarterlies and quite light on anything else. Stocking magazines is more of a North American bookshop habit than a British one; it's to be encouraged, especially now that so many newsagents are concentrating on the chocolate-and-booze business; but all the American bookstores I've been in kept the magazines together in one place, and there are good reasons for that.</p>Jasper Milvainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08417909012663712109noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5396222.post-40710064772097222572013-04-28T17:58:00.000+01:002013-04-28T17:58:41.260+01:00Tell me a story<p>A sketch from the childhood of Kingsley Martin, future editor of the <i>New Statesman</i>. Basil Martin is his father, a socialistically inclined Congregational minister:</p> <p><blockquote>Kingsley's illnesses as a boy were frequent, facilitating much reading in bed but also involving - in a way typical of the family and the period - his mother and his elder sister in long sessions of reading to him: Henry Seton Merriman, Stanley Weyman, Dickens, Rider Haggard, Baroness Orczy - and <em>Ivanhoe</em> (in a mercifully abridged edition) many times over. The whole family were great readers aloud; which in those days was common among literate families with little or no money to spend on places of entertainment. Visitors to the house were assured of a welcome by the children if they would read a story. Speakers down from London for Basil Martin's Sunday afternoon "conferences" (which, truth to tell, were usually Socialist seminars) would often stay at his house - and read to his children. Among these was Mrs Despard, the suffragette leader, who read them <em>Alice in Wonderland</em> and was canonised from that day.</blockquote></p><p>[<em>From </em>Kinglsey: The Life, Letters and Diaries of Kingsley Martin<em>, by C.H. Rolph, Gollancz, 1973. For a pious life-and-letters, published five years after its subject's death, this is remarkably entertaining: Martin was both a great gossip and a great cause of gossip. It's a sort of compliment to Rolph that I found myself yearning for someone to do his job over again, because he is frank enough to show you when he's being discreet, marshalling whole crowds of anonymous and pseudonymous lovers and deploying euphemisms whose effect may have become more or less severe with time. Perhaps the </em>New Statesman<em>'s centenary will have landed someone there the relevant book deal. I can hope...</em>]Jasper Milvainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08417909012663712109noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5396222.post-2167617427198638502012-10-17T12:07:00.000+01:002012-10-17T12:07:31.261+01:00How to make someone enjoy a mediocre curry<p>The other day I found myself needing a late lunch near St Albans City station. (This is what will sometimes happen if you go for bike rides on your days off.) I went into a nearby pub that had a big menu outside.</p> <blockquote> <p>"Hello. Is the food still on?"</p> <p>"Ye-es. Until three." (It was quarter to.)</p> <p>"Thank you! I'd like the chicken curry and a pint of the Tribute."</p> <p>"Would you like chips with that?"</p> <p>"Um. Can I have rice?"</p> <p>"I'll call the kitchen. We ran out the other day."</p></blockquote> <p>So she called the kitchen and they did have some rice, and I found a table and she brought over the cutlery, along, separately and unasked, with the ketchup, the mayonnaise and the malt vinegar. The curry was all right but oversweet - after its build-up, however, it tasted like a miracle. I didn't try it with the vinegar.</p>Jasper Milvainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08417909012663712109noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5396222.post-89559508776315952332011-03-28T08:51:00.000+01:002011-03-28T18:28:07.774+01:00The rat-eating railway of Forest Hill<p>Pneumatic trains were to the Victorians something like maglev trains are to us: a transport technology of the future that seemed destined to remain there. They even merited some light sarcasm from George Eliot, in <a href="http://www.princeton.edu/~batke/eliot/holt/a_int.html">the introduction</a> to <em>Felix Holt: The Radical</em>:</p> <blockquote><p>"Posterity may be shot, like a bullet through a tube, by atmospheric pressure from Winchester to Newcastle: that is a fine result to have among our hopes; but the slow old-fashioned way of getting from one end of our country to the other is the better thing to have in the memory."</blockquote></p> <p>What I hadn't realised until the other day was that there was an actual pneumatic railway in London in the 1840s - and that I used to live on the route of it. According to <em>The Phoenix Suburb: A South London Social History</em>, by Alan R. Warwick, the London and Croydon Railway ran air-powered trains between West Croydon and Forest Hill from October 1845.</P> <p>The service was smooth, and silent, and apparently capable of exceeding 60mph. It had three ornate architect-designed pumping stations: "the most beautiful things of their kind that have ever been erected in this country". It was also ahead of its time in the literal sense that, when it was built, the materials did not exist to make it work properly.</p> <p>The trains drew their air power from a pipe between the tracks, connecting to it through a "longitudinal valve", which a few decades later would have been made from toughened rubber. In 1845, it was a leather flap lubricated and sealed with a mixture of wax and tallow.</P> <p>This was all right except in summer, when the tallow melted and the leather became too floppy; in winter, when the tallow froze and the leather became too stiff; and in spring and autumn, when rain washed the tallow off altogether. Oh, and the tallow mixture was also delicious to rats, which would "invade the track nightly":</p> <blockquote><p>"When the pumps started up in the morning, rats would be sucked through the pipe into the pumping station. To combat this, the engine room men placed open sacks over the inlet, to catch the rats as they poured in."</p></blockquote> <p>Less than a year after the experiment began, the London and Croydon merged into another railway, and the new company turned off the pumps for good.</p> <p>Spoilsports.</p> <p>[<em>The Phoenix Suburb: A South London Social History, by Alan R. Warwick, Blue Boar Press, 1976. Haven't finished it yet, but so far it is proper old-school local history, full of street names and semi-disclaimed sensational anecdotes. It's also magnificently provincial. "Whether a suburb is S.E. or S.W., or N. or E., or whatever," says the preface, "it represents a way of life." In this sentence, as best I can tell, "whatever" covers the entire world beyond the inner London postcode system.</em>]Jasper Milvainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08417909012663712109noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5396222.post-42781319385362506562011-03-21T07:53:00.004+00:002011-03-21T08:06:57.891+00:00Never read the label<p>Here are three extracts from the packaging of a Pizza Express 'Sloppy Giuseppe' pizza.</p> <p>Extract one, from a list under the heading 'Cooking like a real Pizzaiolo':</p> <blockquote><p>- Now most importantly, <strong>drizzle over a tablespoon of olive oil</strong></p></blockquote> <p>Their bold.</p> <p>Extracts two and three, from the ingredients lists for, first, the dough, and then the toppings:</p> <blockquote><p>- Wheat flour, water, salt, yeast, sugar, flour treatment agent (wheat flour, dextrose, emulsifier E472e, <strong>rapeseed oil</strong>, antioxidant E300)</p> <p>- Tomato sauce (short omitted sublist here), mozarella cheese, spicy beef sauce (long omitted sublist here), red onion, green pepper, <strong>rapeseed oil</strong>, tomato puree</p></blockquote> <p>My bold.</p> <p>I haven't eaten the pizza yet. It will probably be very nice.</p>Jasper Milvainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08417909012663712109noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5396222.post-91249485774237810492010-08-18T18:16:00.004+01:002010-08-18T18:22:04.394+01:00Signs of ageing, newsprint edition<p>When the New York Times worries about mystifying young people, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/magazine/22Adulthood-t.html?_r=1&hp">it now means people younger than me</a>. This is reassuring and depressing at the same time - although given that my twenties fit its anomic, nomadic template (several jobs, periods of return to education and living with parents, failure to marry and have children) not all <em>that</em> reassuring.</p>Jasper Milvainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08417909012663712109noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5396222.post-40347291765672469432010-05-06T10:22:00.003+01:002010-05-06T10:26:57.690+01:00Running away from Radio 4From a discussion on Woman's Hour, just now, on life after retirement:<br /><br /><blockquote>"I loved being a district nurse. I hated the thought of staying at home and listening to the Afternoon Play."</blockquote><br /><br />Oh, madam, it's worse than that. If you don't fill your days with purpose, you could end up listening to You and Yours. <br /><br />The district nurse in question went and volunteered abroad, which eliminated the risk of hearing even Quote Unquote.Jasper Milvainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08417909012663712109noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5396222.post-10796839654796659202010-01-12T19:35:00.003+00:002010-01-12T19:42:50.481+00:00Wolverine: just bad, or criminal?<p>A background sentence from a New York Times story on a man who <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/nyregion/13wolverine.html?hp">bought a pre-release bootleg of the film Wolverine from a dodgy bloke in a restaurant, uploaded it to the net, and had the FBI turn up on his doorstep after the leak became a national news story</a>:</p><blockquote><p>In 2003, a New Jersey man was fined and put on probation after uploading an unfinished print of “The Hulk” before its release. But last year, a man who took a copy of “The Love Guru,” from a tape-duplication company was sentenced to six months in prison.</p></blockquote><p>Unresolved issue: was the more severe sentence because that guy physically stole a tape, or because he was causing additional dissemination of The Love Guru? I believe there are critics who would have imposed a harsher sentence.</p>Jasper Milvainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08417909012663712109noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5396222.post-31679662257703633432010-01-06T18:04:00.003+00:002010-01-06T18:19:06.630+00:00Bicycles, snowThis isn't the kind of place where people buy - or, so far as I've seen, sell - <a href="http://www.peterwhitecycles.com/studdedtires.asp">studded bicycle tyres</a>. The few days a year of proper winter weather mean moving from seeking quiet roads to seeking busy ones, where there are gritters and hot-bellied cars and the ice doesn't set in so much. It also means avoiding hills, so that if the ice has set in I can be relatively under control when things go wrong. Peckham is better for this than Sydenham, which was the far side of a very big hill. The problem is that any weather bad enough to make cycling on main roads really unwise will probably also stop the trains and buses, and my boots aren't great. Tomorrow will be the test. Wish me luck.Jasper Milvainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08417909012663712109noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5396222.post-59173665092229424782010-01-05T09:48:00.004+00:002010-01-05T10:03:26.676+00:00Theatre note: Blind Summit's Nineteen Eighty-Four<p>Last night a friend's spare ticket took me to <a href="http://www.blindsummit.com/1984.htm">an adaptation of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four</a> at the Battersea Arts Centre. It was sold to me as a puppet version, which sounded irresistibly unwise. In fact, although there are a couple of puppets, what you mainly see are people, in overalls, performing the story as Brechtian didactic theatre - as if Brecht were a member of the Ingsoc Inner Party. Chunks of the original narration are delivered with a sort of ironic sarcasm, which I suppose cancels out to sincerity. The framing device works brilliantly in the first half, sinister and funny; it helps that you're not wholly certain at first it isn't <em>real</em> bad Brechtian theatre. In the second half, when the company are required to evoke soul-annihilating terror, the frame starts to get in the way. But if soul annihilation isn't your idea of a fun night out, that might be just as well.</p> <p>Weather note: when I came out of the BAC, the saddle of my bicycle had a thick coating of frost. Not lock-freezing cold yet, though, thank God.</p>Jasper Milvainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08417909012663712109noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5396222.post-31738095484293351522010-01-04T08:43:00.006+00:002010-01-04T08:56:27.005+00:00End-of-season's greetings<blockquote><p>They will keep the feast in Stepney. The angel's wings are moved there; he wants to keep them, till there is another child in the house of the right size. He sees them going, shivering in their shroud of fine linen, and watches the Christmas star loaded on to a cart. Christophe asks, 'How would one work it, that savage machine that is all over points?'</p> <p>He draws off one of the canvas sleeves, shows him the gilding. 'Jesus Maria,' the boy says. 'The star that guides us to Bethlehem. I thought it was an instrument of torture.'</p></blockquote><p>From Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, which having just finished it really does appear to be that good. Time is required, though, to certify the level of praise it has received, and time can be particularly hard on historical novels. As the main points of your new year emerge from under canvas, may they turn out to be decorations, rather than instruments of torture.</p>Jasper Milvainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08417909012663712109noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5396222.post-76648700632066184132010-01-03T15:55:00.004+00:002010-01-03T16:26:21.902+00:00Parting shot<p>Stephen Glover was one of three journalists who founded the Independent, in 1986. He went on, in early 1990, to become the founding editor of the Independent on Sunday, from which post he was rapidly ousted amid cost-cutting and acrimony. This is from his description of the board meeting at which he ceased to be an executive director:</p><blockquote><p>I arrived back in the boardroom and sat down. Marcus [Sieff, venerable chairman of Newspaper Publishing plc, the parent company of the two papers] had the air of a man brought in to settle a dispute which he did not really want to understand. He said that there had been a consensus that I should be asked to stay as a [non-executive] director, but there were conditions. In the first place, the arrangement would last for a year, and would be renewed only if the board and I wished it to be. I would get no emoluments (the annual fee for a non-executive director was £12,000) since I had received a year's salary on termination of my contract. So long as I remained as a non-executive director I could not write for any other newspapers, but if I wrote for the Independent or the Independent on Sunday I would not be paid. Finally, I would not be released from my undertaking not to sell any shares before March 31st 1992. That was it.</p> <p>I was getting the impression that some members of the board were not deperately keen that I should become a non-executive director. Andreas [Whittam Smith, editor of the Independent and chief executive of Newspaper Publishing] was sitting to Marcus's right looking red-faced and ruminative. I imagined him at the board meeting, allowing its sillier members to build up this list of conditions, saying nothing when a word from him would have brought an end to all this foolishness.</p> <p>"Well, thank you Marcus," I said. "Can I think about it for a day or two? I hadn't expected any conditions and I will need to think about them. Some of them don't matter, but I might want to write for other newspapers, and if Christopher Barton was allowed to sell his shares when he ceased being an executive director I don't see why I shouldn't be. Andreas, you said that you would recommend that I should be able to sell my shares."</p> <p>"Yes," said Andreas, "but the mood of the meeting was that in the circumstances it would be better not to alter that undertaking."</p> <p>"I see. Well, I would like a few days, if I may."</p> <p>"Of course, take as long as you want," said Marcus generously. "I hope it will all work out."</p><p>As I walked down the stairs it occured to me that there was one condition that they had not thought of. They had not said I could not write a book.</p></blockquote><p>From Paper Dreams (1993), the memoir that Glover's former colleagues failed to stop him writing. By this point in the penultimate chaper they would probably have regretted the omission. Paper Dreams is an entertaining book, vivid and witty and languidly readable, but is also an act of vengeance, chiefly against Whittam Smith, and a little too openly vengeful to be effective. The era it describes - when a newspaper could be an exciting start-up business capable of attracting £200m in City capital, and when the Independent could feel disappointed at selling a mere 300,000 - seems almost more remote than that in older Fleet Street memoirs.</p>Jasper Milvainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08417909012663712109noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5396222.post-84610289708824947942010-01-02T09:27:00.003+00:002010-01-02T09:32:28.085+00:00More endurance<p>About 10 years ago, I saw a takeaway in Hyson Green, Nottingham, with a name that suggested the area might have something of a drug problem. But over time I started to think I'd imagined it, or subconsciously improved it. Then I visited some kind friends in the area for new year, and it's not only real but <em>still there</em>:</p> <p><iframe width="425" height="350" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" src="http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=embed&hl=en&geocode=&q=radford+road,+nottingham&sll=51.451722,-0.008478&sspn=0.007368,0.022638&g=radford+road&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Radford+Rd,+Nottingham+NG7,+United+Kingdom&ll=52.970985,-1.174484&spn=0,359.954724&z=15&layer=c&cbll=52.964439,-1.169785&panoid=7bVSBRKxyD_OcMOa3IkKUA&cbp=12,89.59,,0,-1.7&output=svembed"></iframe><br /><small><a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=embed&hl=en&geocode=&q=radford+road,+nottingham&sll=51.451722,-0.008478&sspn=0.007368,0.022638&g=radford+road&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Radford+Rd,+Nottingham+NG7,+United+Kingdom&ll=52.970985,-1.174484&spn=0,359.954724&z=15&layer=c&cbll=52.964439,-1.169785&panoid=7bVSBRKxyD_OcMOa3IkKUA&cbp=12,89.59,,0,-1.7" style="color:#0000FF;text-align:left">View Larger Map</a></small></p> <p>The handpainted sign is also very cute, no?</p>Jasper Milvainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08417909012663712109noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5396222.post-9068624486398148882010-01-01T21:03:00.004+00:002010-01-01T22:01:28.690+00:00"Stuff endures"<p>One of the books that has most stuck in my head in the past year is <em>Ruth Belville: the Greenwich Time Lady</em>, by David Rooney. It's a biography, charming but stretched at less than 200 pages, of a woman famous for one thing. And it's a useful parable for anyone who finds themself in a rapidly, scarily changing industry (hi, fellow journalists!).</p> <p>Ruth Belville inherited from her mother the business of going once a week to the observatory at Greenwich, having a fine 18th-century pocket watch set to the precise astronomically determined time, and touring the jewellers and watchmakers of London selling them time-checks. Her mother had taken on the task when she was widowed, in the 1850s; Ruth took her place from 1892.</p> <p>By 1908, when she was the subject of a flurry of press interest, Ruth Belville already seemed an anachronistic curiosity. She should, everyone assumed, have been replaced by modern, telegraph-based electronic synchronisation. But that was expensive, and of variable reliability. Miss Belville, by contrast, charged very reasonably, and always turned up. Her market niche still existed.</p> <p>The surprise is that Belville continued to make her rounds until 1940, well into the age of the radio and the speaking clock, supported by tradition-minded jewellers. David Rooney draws from this the moral I have taken as the title of my post. The past is still with us, just <a href="http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Gibson">unevenly distributed</a>, and for the best of reasons. "Stuff endures" - Rooney's nice phrase - because of the inertial power of human affection, and because arrangements can continue to yield rewards even if their original rationale has disappeared.</p> <p>I have come to suspect that my own job, as a subeditor, is another example of the phenomenon. Subediting - the cutting, polishing and headlining of journalistic text as a separate job - was a natural corollary of hot-metal publishing, in which it was an essential gearing mechanism between reporters and the intricate, inflexible machinery their work drove. Ever since hot metal went, managers and consultants have sought to abolish subs; and yet subs have endured. They have been too useful and too well-established to be easily dispensed with. Those final corrections, that last touch of polish on the writing, all that minute coordination of detail and timing - it's hard to suddenly do without.</p> <p>Which might give me new hope for my career, except for the fact that stuff doesn't endure for ever. We can't know whether it's 1908 or 1940. But it feels increasingly like 1940. That's what haunts me about Ruth Belville.</p>Jasper Milvainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08417909012663712109noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5396222.post-52745255729213346332009-12-30T12:23:00.002+00:002009-12-30T12:25:26.671+00:00Social mobilityThis Christmas, I booked my train back to Nottingham early enough to score a cheap first-class ticket. And so I was able to discover the main difference, these days, between the atmosphere in first and second class. You know you're in first class because the crisps are louder.Jasper Milvainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08417909012663712109noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5396222.post-52457606787927183652009-11-12T21:14:00.004+00:002009-11-12T21:47:14.830+00:00Scene-setting<p>Rye Lane, in Peckham, south London - where I moved a month ago, and regained internet access this morning - has at least two distinct characters as a commercial street.</p> <p>On the one hand, it's a forcing ground for small businesses, mostly run by and for the local African community. These shops are busy and various, but margins must be tight and turnover rapid, because many traders don't get around to installing their own signs; we have a grocer apparently called "Big Girl Clothing Company". This aspect of Rye Lane is most evident towards the southern end.</p> <P>On the other hand, clustered at the north, and matching Rye Lane's character as about the busiest stretch in Peckham, there are the chain stores: Boots, Argos, Currys, Carphone Warehouse, WH Smith.</p> <p>At the transitional point between the two Rye Lanes, on opposite sides of the street, two people ply their trades most Saturday afternoons.</p> <p>One is a preacher with a megaphone. An Islamic preacher, although because his diction is not brilliant it took me some time to be sure of that. He seems embattled, even by the standards of street preachers - many of the rooms above the shops are occupied by vigorous little Pentecostal churches - but he isn't giving up.</p> <p>The other is a woman in a jester's hat, who twists thin balloons into obscene-looking toy swords. By the end of the day you sometimes see small children swordfighting; the loser is presumably the one whose sword bursts.</p> <p>I think I'm going to like it here.</p>Jasper Milvainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08417909012663712109noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5396222.post-48626209494490550732009-08-12T13:56:00.005+01:002009-08-16T20:15:50.471+01:00Links here, nonlinks elsewhere<p>New in the sidebar is a widget displaying my shared items from Google Reader; this will sometimes display homework for <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/series/literary-linklog">the Guardian books linklog</a>, but is also a quick way of linklogging my non-bookish concerns. It should update even when the rest of this still badly neglected site doesn't. (Although I'm planning another minor blogging binge, so even the rest of the site may update.)</p> <p>The other consequence of that linklog is that my other writing tends to be swamped by it on my whizzy Guardian profile page. So here's an index of recent stuff, by subject.</p> <p><b>Journalism, design, &c</b><br />- <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/organgrinder/2009/jul/27/telegraphmediagroup-dailytelegraph">Stylebook geekout</a> (published in Monday media section) plus <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/quiz/2009/jul/27/pressandpublishing-theguardian">matching quiz</a><br />- Brief eyebrow-raise blog at <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/organgrinder/2009/jul/15/neville-brody-wallpaper-cover">Wallpaper* cover with logo white on white</a><br />- <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/organgrinder/2009/jun/22/times-nightjack-blogger">The anonymity of Thomas Barnes's Times</a>, contrasted with the current blogger-outing version<br />- Moan about <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/organgrinder/2009/apr/22/international-herald-tribune-jean-seberg">alteration to International Herald Tribune masthead</a></p><p><b>Bicycles</b><br />- Sometimes it's <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/ethicallivingblog/2009/jul/27/bike-blog-politeness">nice not to shout at people</a> - controversial, eh?<br />- Review-after-buying-with-own-money of <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/ethicallivingblog/2009/jun/24/cycle-clothing-tfl">TfL's supposedly stylish Bspoke cycle jacket</a> (update: two weeks later the zip broke, and I got the shop to replace it with a Gore jacket that actually works)<br />- Recommendation of <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2009/jun/10/london-transport">CycleStreets.net</a></p><p><b>Books</b><br />- On <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/jul/20/secondhand-bookshops-indecision">almost buying secondhand books</a><br />- Review of <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/jun/17/cooler-bebook-ebook-ereader">two not-terribly good e-readers</a> for Tech section<br />- On reading innovative and imitative books <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/may/20/georges-perec-edward-platt">in the wrong order</a><br />- On "<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/may/19/2">shelftalkers</a>" (those staff pick slips in bookshops)<br />- On reviews that are <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/apr/14/book-reviews-critics-samuel-johnson">better for ignoring the books</a><br />- On <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/apr/03/nostalgia-books-pastiche-retro">facsimile reprints and fake facsimile reprints</a></p><p><b>Random</b><br />- <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/may/26/microsoft-zune-history">Bad things</a> that happen to the Zune</p>Jasper Milvainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08417909012663712109noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5396222.post-3387971816732373032009-05-10T14:37:00.002+01:002009-05-10T14:44:40.492+01:00Cold War nostalgia and the new Russia<p>The Nation is still publishing long, heated articles about <a href="http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090525/guttenplan/single">who was a spy, who was a fellow-traveller and who was neither</a> in the 1930s and 40s; these days, though, the online version comes with a Google-served ad for a Russian dating/bridal/I-really-don't-want-to-click-and-find-out agency. Not sure what that symbolises, but it certainly symbolises <em>something</em>.</p>Jasper Milvainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08417909012663712109noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5396222.post-87854928441552079952009-05-09T18:08:00.004+01:002009-05-09T18:28:27.124+01:00What happened to Marie Antoinette's wigmakers?<p>There is apparently a significant industry - one containing at least several companies - dedicated to the manufacture of "deal toys", given by financial-industry types to mark the signing of large contracts. Its signature material is lucite, a clear plastic heavier and more expensive than glass, into which plaques and objects of symbolic significance can be embedded. Obviously, this industry is in deep trouble.</p> <p>Also: the FT's Weekend magazine placed <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/6e75d2aa-3aa7-11de-8a2d-00144feabdc0,s01=1.html">its wonderfully dry piece on the subject</a> - my source for everything in the paragraph above - immediately after its serialisation of the Gillian Tett book on how ill-advised financial-indsutry deals blew up the world economy. I sometimes suspect that FT Weekend is trying to incite a revolution, probably aimed at readers of <a href="http://www.ft.com/howtospendit">How to Spend It</a>.</p>Jasper Milvainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08417909012663712109noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5396222.post-72503646509822491662009-05-06T07:48:00.002+01:002009-05-06T07:54:14.629+01:00A small wishOne day I'd like to have enough space, or few enough books, to look at a shelf like <a href="http://feeds.latimes.com/~r/JacketCopy/~3/mqZGzf27ob0/bookshelf-cravings-the-wisdom-tree.html">this</a> and just think "Cool!", rather than imagine myself snapping a curlicue as I try desperately to stuff on another couple of Oxford World's Classics.Jasper Milvainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08417909012663712109noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5396222.post-60569836452912918702009-05-05T08:31:00.002+01:002009-05-05T08:45:58.706+01:00Links, apologies<p>This is a badly neglected blog. I now hope to change that - the aim will be to have something, even if just links, up every day. Holding your breath probably remains a bad idea. But...</p> <p>- If you liked <a href="http://spacesick.blogspot.com/2009/01/i-can-read-movies-series.html">films redesigned as Romek Marber-ish paperbacks</a>, you will probably also like <a href="<br />http://fontfeed.com/archives/wu-note-%E2%80%93-wu-%E2%80%8Btang-albums-as-blue-note-releases/">the Blue Note version of the Wu-Tang Clan</a>.</p> <p>- <a href="http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2009/05/reviewing-the-nastiness-test.html">Mary Beard proposes a do-as-you-would-be-done-by school of reviewing</a>, which seems sensible in the context of reviewing books about classics for the TLS, where the interests of author and reader are relatively close together, but may not apply to the reviewing of general-readership books for a general readership.</p> <p>Get your stereotypes of Germany <a href="http://obscenedesserts.blogspot.com/2009/05/bummeling.html">direct from Berlin</a>, where J Carter Wood is reading <i>Three Men on a Bummel</i>. Of his quotes, I particularly liked this one:</p> <blockquote>This is the charm of German law: misdemeanour in Germany has its fixed price. You are not kept awake all night, as in England, wondering whether you will get off with a caution, be fined forty shillings, or, catching the magistrate in an unhappy moment for yourself, get seven days. You know exactly what your fun is going to cost you. You can spread out your money on the table, open your Police Guide, and plan out your holiday to a fifty pfennig piece. For a really cheap evening, I would recommend walking on the wrong side of the pavement after being cautioned not to do so. I calculate that by choosing your district and keeping to the quiet side streets you could walk for a whole evening on the wrong side of the pavement at a cost of little over three marks.</p></blockquote> <p>Coming soon-ish here: posts on <i>Leadville</i>, the reprinting of <i>Cooking in a Bedsitter</i> and the decline (long ago) of competition in the British regional press; plus the instalment of the Street View abecedary I promised a month and a day ago...</p>Jasper Milvainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08417909012663712109noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5396222.post-50728558475484606272009-04-19T21:11:00.004+01:002009-04-19T22:12:57.215+01:00The second lump of sugar<blockquote><p>In our view, the effect of every policy must first be regarded from the standpoint of the workers of the Nation, and of the poorest and most helpless among them. The charwoman who lives in St Giles', the seamstress who is sweated in Whitechapel, the labourer who stands begging for work outside the docckyard gates in St George's-in-the-East ... The policy which annexes even an Empire, wins an immortal battle, raises this man or that to the Premiership, or sweeps the board at a general election, shall appear to us infamous, not glorious - evil, not good - a thing to weep over, not to acclaim, if it does nothing towards making the lives of these people brighter and happier. On the other hand, the policy will appear to us worthy of everlasting thanks, and of ineffaceable glory, that does no more than enable the charwoman to put two pieces of sugar in her cup instead of one, and that adds one farthing a day to the wage of the seamstress or labourer.</p></blockquote><p>That is <a href="http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Joconnor.htm">TP O'Connor</a>, writing in the leader column of the first number of The Star, his popular London evening paper, in 1888. You can find it quoted in <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tickle-Public-Hundred-Years-Popular/dp/0575400838">Matthew Engel's <i>Tickle the Public</i></a>, or wherever learned British journalists grow teary about their trade. I came across it again in <i>The Last Chronicle of Bouverie Street</i>, a 1963 book about the death in 1960 of the News Chronicle newspaper, and incidentally of the Star. While I knew some of the details of the Chronicle's demise - others were shocking; I may blog about them later - the Star's story came as more of a surprise.</p> <p>At the time of its death, when it was rolled into the London Evening News for no more than the cost of its pension obligations and week-a-year redundancy payments to its staff, the Star had a circulation - and remember this was a London-only title - of about 700,000. In other words, <a href="http://www.abc.org.uk/cgi-bin/gen5?runprog=nav/abc&noc=y">it was selling 200,000 more copies daily than The London Paper now manages to give away</a>. But in 1960, that was only enough to make it the second-best-selling evening paper in Britain. And it had been losing money consistently since 1956. The poorest and most helpless, while numerous enough to make for a substantial readership, were not a demographic attractive to advertisers.</p> <p>The city and the country's biggest evening paper, it should be noted, was not the London Evening Standard, eventual sole survivor of this three-way fight, but the title into which the Star was merged, the Evening News. The Standard won out not because of sales but because it attracted the most affluent, advertising-friendly readers. In the end, raw numbers are not enough. That might be considered a parable for the age of the unique-user count.</p> <p>The other thought the story brings to mind is prompted by O'Connor's leader - as a good a manifesto for intelligent populist journalism as anyone could hope for. Here's the thing. If the conventional media were swept away tomorrow, expert coverage and scandalmongering-shading-into-muckracking would probably continue without much interruption. There are bloggers and others for all of that. What it might take a while to rebuild is any organisation with a wide enough reportorial reach, and a deep enough attachment to a wide enough public, to keep an eye on that second lump of sugar.</p>Jasper Milvainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08417909012663712109noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5396222.post-23716702878364100252009-04-03T13:54:00.002+01:002009-04-03T13:56:38.038+01:00Further elsewheresHere is my <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/apr/03/nostalgia-books-pastiche-retro">Guardian blogging debut</a>. The clever site software automatically generates a feed for me; it will go in the sidebar once there's more than one item in it. I haven't forgotten the promise of another letter in the abecedary; but it may be tomorrow before I get around to it.Jasper Milvainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08417909012663712109noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5396222.post-82354521523232584142009-03-28T21:22:00.005+00:002009-03-28T22:26:30.107+00:00Street View abecedary: J is for John, but which John?<p>Strange how, at least if you're as word-obsessed as me, a view can rearrange itself around a piece of lettering. This stretch of Stockwell Road is in many respects rather generically contemporary, for a long-timescale, fairly cynical value of contemporary: some boxy 60s or 70s flats, a boarded-up shop and a fried-chicken francise - which might be very good, for all I know; there's a branch of the same microchain in Sydenham, but I haven't tried it. And then there are the fading painted advertisements on the gable end, which suddenly anchor the picture in the 40s or 50s:</p><br /><br /><p><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_p7IpkyqDxQ0f0UKWSpDeVUcaRpJ99dpKfPdyCn6WhaaDvO2VVxaNcf6P-n3RHVWqa7Zt8EgbMG9yztkoxtYpddBiXRdukr0rn4UAOeLLFT4SBfvElQe2EklRGhzD6TjUt8UbJw/s1600-h/john.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_p7IpkyqDxQ0f0UKWSpDeVUcaRpJ99dpKfPdyCn6WhaaDvO2VVxaNcf6P-n3RHVWqa7Zt8EgbMG9yztkoxtYpddBiXRdukr0rn4UAOeLLFT4SBfvElQe2EklRGhzD6TjUt8UbJw/s400/john.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5318353928776727362" /></a></p><p>And in Googlecontext:</p><p><iframe width="410" height="240" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" src="http://maps.google.co.uk/maps/sv?cbp=12,139.759818066689,,1,-9.999999999999998&cbll=51.469937,-0.120196&v=1&panoid=&gl=&hl=en"></iframe><br /><small><a id="cbembedlink" href="http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?cbp=12,139.759818066689,,1,-9.999999999999998&cbll=51.469937,-0.120196&ll=51.469937,-0.120196&layer=c" style="color:#0000FF;text-align:left">View Larger Map</a></small></p><br /><br /><p>The first product advertised is easy to identify: everyone knows <em>Picture Post</em>. Its photography was <a href="http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1624849,00.html">famous</a>, and its publication dates place these advertisements somewhere between 1938 and 1957. The second, broken panel is trickier. John who? If it's another magazine, then the obvious answer is <em>John Bull</em>, a popular weekly that seems to have been known at different times for rabble-rousing patriotism and nice illustrations. (The two aren't mutually exclusive, of course.)</p> <p>Wikipedia is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bull_(magazine)">entertainingly vague</a> about <em>John Bull</em>, noting a scatter of dates when it definitely existed and concluding that it "may have closed in 1962". You can do much better with the British Library newspaper catalogue, which traces the main 20th-century carrier of the name - the magazine that was famously edited by <a href="http://www.lhi.org.uk/projects_directory/projects_by_region/south_east/east_sussex/the_rise_and_fall_of_horatio_bottomley/silver_tongued.html">Horatio Bottomley</a> - from 1906 to 1958, then through a flurry of minor rebranding as it swallows a couple of other magazines, and then to a relaunch in February 1960 as something called <em>Today</em>, which itself comes to an end without any word of continuation in 1964. <em>John Bull</em> clocks up the best part of 2,800 issues in 54 years, which suggests more or less continuous weekly publication over that span. It's easy to imagine it being advertised alongside <em>Picture Post</em>.</p> <p>That would have been a nice neat story, and I wish I could fully believe it. I had thought the two magazines shared an ownership, but it looks like that's wrong - Wiki does have Hulton, which owned <em>Picture Post</em>, selling out to Odhams, which owned <em>John Bull</em>, but only after <em>Picture Post</em> had closed. Another piece of evidence is <a href="http://www.advertisingarchives.co.uk/gallery_johnbull.php">a selection of <em>John Bull</em> covers on sale at the Advertising Archive</a>. These have good, consistent branding, in a series of different serif styles that have little in common with the punchy, jauntily arranged sans on this wall. I suppose it could be a <em>John Bull</em> look from before the Advertising Archives' holdings - those seem to start in 1946 - but it could easily be another John altogether.</p> <p>You'd need street directories and old photographs to get the full story, I suspect - Google, even with Street View, has its limits. This series will continue to explore them on Wednesday, when my alphabetical hopscotch will land on the letter B.</p>Jasper Milvainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08417909012663712109noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5396222.post-54889006356679068482009-03-25T10:12:00.005+00:002009-03-25T11:32:00.626+00:00The Match King and the fading of fraud<p>Frank Partnoy's <em>The Match King</em> - a biography of Ivar Krueger, by some accounts the greatest financial swindler who ever lived - has the appearance of a book born under a lucky star. The author's previous works include <em>Infectious Greed</em>, a warning about the dangers of modern Wall Street complexities. So this feels like his moment. My friend Robert Colvile has <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/4736838/It-is-only-bad-timing-that-turns-prophecy-into-comedy.html">said so in print</a>. There was even time, before publication, to put a reference to Bernard Madoff into the introduction.</p> <p>It isn't that simple, I'm afraid. Despite that mention of Madoff, <em>The Match King</em> is not prepared to give its subject the treatment that the times might now demand. In its conclusion, he is praised for his "financial innovation". He was, we are told, the first man to evade tax and scrutiny using Lichtenstein; the inventor of many brilliant schemes for handing investors apparent ownership stakes in a company without surrendering any control. Many of his ideas are still in corporate use today! I'm sure all this seemed less equivocally good a few months ago. Partnoy reserves judgment on just how much of Krueger's fall was panic and the effects of the depression - he was <a href="http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19291028,00.html"><em>Time</em>'s cover boy for October 28, 1929</a>, and seemed at first to be surviving, but ran out of credit-lines in a now rather familiar way - and how much was an unravelling swindle. Perhaps judgment has to be reserved, although it makes for an unsatisfying book. Let me summarise.</p> <p>Ivar Krueger was "the Match King" because he built a match monopoly in Sweden, and came to America in the early 1920s asking for investment on the prospectus that he would use it to buy match monopolies in other countries. Tobacco was everywhere; the Bic lighter was <a href="http://www.bicworld.com/inter_us/lighters/product_history/index.asp">50 years away</a>; matches were a big deal. Krueger paid dividends upwards of 20 per cent over a sustained period, and Partnoy is careful to establish that he didn't just do this out of subsequent investors' money - the match factories and their profits were real, and he did succeed in buying several monopolies.</p> <p>On the other hand, Partnoy lays out several sets of alarming facts without quite drawing conclusions. Krueger apparently had a habit, whenever a deal was signed, of commissioning a rubber stamp of the other party's signature. We get nothing about any practical use he may have made of these souvenirs. He died - a suicide or a suspicious death - with his empire under great strain, and his reputation was destroyed when his associates tried to rescue the business using a document they found in his office safe. It was a monopoly agreement with Mussolini's Italy; and, as they subsequently discovered, it was a crude forgery. But Krueger doesn't appear to have told anyone about it - he merely hinted that something big was in the offing - or tried to use it himself. What gives? Then there is his preference for entrusting his most essential business to underqualified people he could control completely, rather than to anyone who might challenge him; and the way that the most important details of his empire remained inside his head.</p> <p>It is the reason given for his vagueness that seems most suspicious to me. The case was that he couldn't give details on what he was doing with investors' money, because the details of his negotiations with foreign governments could bring those governments down. This is a confidence-trickster pitch: you elicit trust by admitting that you <em>are</em> trying to get one over on somebody - somebody else. It also plays to American assumptions about the venality of all other countries. "You sound like a conman" is far from a conclusive case, however, and if Partnoy is right we lack the detail to ever know exactly what Krueger was up to.</p> <p>JK Galbraith thought Kreuger's story could function as <a href="http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/peter_robins/blog/2009/01/02/a_personal_recovery">an immunising memory</a> - a reminder that this is a kind of person to be cautious of, fully crooked or otherwise, with sincerity possibly more dangerous than cynicism. That clearly isn't working. His top Google results, which are probably what passes these days for the verdict of history, include several defences and celebrations, and a get-rich-quick site with his name as the brand. Will today's fraudsters slip into a similar soft focus? They are probably better documented - but that may merely mean we have too much, rather than too little, information to be certain.</p>Jasper Milvainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08417909012663712109noreply@blogger.com0