Cussedness
The natural cussedness of things in general.
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The Ballad Of Peckham Rye and The Girls Of Slender Means by Muriel Spark
So far, I’m nonplussed by Muriel Spark. These two novels are from early in her career, around the same period when she wrote The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie, and they are of similar cloth. They’re short and sharp and technically brilliant, and for some reason they left me feeling indifferent and unsatisfied, but not completely disinclined towards reading more of her.
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MP Correspondence Update (Lies in Science)
I heard back from my MP in reply to my letter about the cryptocreationist nonsense being peddled to kids in UK state schools that got me all worked up last November: she’s written about it to Alan Johnson, Secretary of State for Education and Skills. It’s highly unlikely that he’ll reply to any one specific query, but hopefully other people’s MPs are asking similar questions, which might bring the issue to his attention and get something said or maybe even done about it.
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Crazy Robotic Chair
This obsessive-compulsive self-destroying and reassembling robotic chair is really rather splendid. Via Jim.
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The Auschwitz Report by Primo Levi and Leonardo Debenedetti
My friend bought me this little book for my birthday (thanks Amy!), knowing that I’m a Primo Levi fan, and I was pleased to discover that it was translated from the original by Judith Woolf, who was my tutor for Modern Italian Narrative, one of the few courses in my degree for which I actually managed to raise some enthusiasm. I’m in no position to comment on technical details, having neither the original text nor the ability to read it properly, but I will say that Woolf never let even a mere undergraduate like myself get away with sloppy translation in her seminars, so I’m confident she will have done a good job here. I certainly get the distinct impression that the voice of Levi we hear in other English versions of his work is present in the parts of the report written by him, so I think this must be a sound reading.
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Happy New Year
Apparently this site wasn’t working whilst I was away, due to some misguided meddling with my .htaccess file. Oops. Normal service will be resumed shortly, etcetera.