Tom Roper's Weblog

Through a glass darkly

By the low-tech method of visiting the London Review Bookshop and browsing, I see that Nigel Jones's life of Patrick Hamilton, Through a Glass Darkly has been republished by Black Spring [not Swan as I erroneously wrote. Thanks to Nigel Jones for  pointing out the error]

The poetry of silence

On the recommendation of the nicest and best art historian of the modern epoch, I went to the Royal Academy to see the Vilhelm Hammershøi exhibition, The Poetry of Silence. I knew nothing of Hammershøi before, but was deeply impressed by his pictures, mostly interiors, sometimes empty, sometimes peopled by a single woman, frequently seen from the back.

The area set aside for the galleries is inadequate; five rooms were crammed with gallery goers and some who I think were merely sheltering expensively (£8 for admission) from the rain. Two tours through the crowded rooms were not enough to allow me to give everything the attention it deserved. I suppose the correct technique is to stand immovably in front of a picture and ignore the jostling, but I lack the patience.

Three of my fellow devotees annoyed me particularly. A man of my age, more or less, with two younger companions, all dressed from a jumble sale, stood in the most inconvenient places they could find and held a conversation. I could not shake them off, and by the time I reached the last room, devoted to Hammershøi's late work before his death in 1916, the oldest one was expounding the plot of Woody Allen's Annie Hall at the top of his voice. I cannot imagine why, unless he arrived there by way of Allen's enthusiasm for Nordic cinema. Whatever trail of thought had taken him to this irrelevance, I had a great urge to hit him hard with the bust of a past academician. Perhaps I should have reminded him of the exhibition's title.

Unacknowledged legislator at the MLA

I can find remarkably little comment on the news that Andrew Motion has been appointed chair of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA). I imagine that he will be paid in ready money, rather than in the hogsheads of Canary wine reputed to be his reward for the day job as Poet Laureate.

One would hope that the appointment of a poet to the MLA is good news, particularly for libraries, though how someone with an ear for language will cope with their highly obscure dialect of officialese will be interesting.

I wonder which past laureate would have made the best Chair of MLA. I would quite like to have seen Ted Hughes in the job, or perhaps Colley Cibber.

Eclipse Day

Today is the day of the race named after the greatest racehorse of the eighteenth century. Painted by Stubbs, and his body dissected by St Bel, founder of the Royal Veterinary College, his skeleton was at one time owned by the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, long before I worked for them, but is now reputed to be in the National Horseracing Museum

See an excellent article in the Guardian by Nicholas Clee: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2007/mar/04/horseracing.features

Clee is, the article says, writing a book about Eclipse, Amazon giving a publication date of March 2009. He also blogs on food, but I could not see any horse recipes.

Sandown 210: Ancien Regime
Sandown 240: Masaalek
Haydock 300: Turbo Linn
Sandown 320: Pipedreamer
Haydock 335: Buccellati

Machines for reading in

In his post Bibbly-O-Tek, on his splendid blog, Nasty Brutalist and Short, sometimes known as Sit down man, you're a bloody tragedy, Owen Hatherley discusses library architecture, including Senate House and the British Library, in a way that I wish one could read in the voluminous discussions on library planning and design in our professional literature. That literature makes a virtue of philistinism, our tendency to dismiss aesthetic theory and concentrate instead on floors' load-bearing capacity. Many of us though will recognise his characterisation of building a new library as including 'lengthy gestation, controversy, changes in design, and most of all squabbles over money'.In thirty years of library work, I have rarely been lucky enough to work in interesting buildings. The public libraries of my early career seemed to have been designed to a universal template, whose guiding principle was to be as inoffensive as possible.NHS libraries were generally dire, though my predecessor at Edgware General Hospital was immensely proud of the hand-basin in her office, apparently been included in the design at her express request.
The honourable exception to all this is Basil Spence's library at the University of Sussex, where I worked, though not for long enough.

PowerBook Schwärmerei

How odd! Twice recently I have been accosted by complete strangers in cafés asking about my laptop. It's a PowerBook G4 12", no longer made, which suggests that Apple are missing something. I bought it for its compactness, the quality these strangers admire. I first had one for my job at Brighton and Sussex Medical School, which I had to hand back when I finished there, sobought one of my own.

It is lamentable that it is my computer that attracts attention, not me, and that only from suited men. No mysteriously-veiled beautiful woman whispers to a friend, 'look at the handsome man with the PowerBook G4 12", isn't he oddly compelling?'