(A Little) About Tycho Brahe

It is reported that Tycho Brahe (Tyge Ottesen Brahe, 1546-1601), the Danish nobleman astronomer and alchemist, lost part of his nose during a duel with Manderup Parsbjerg in the dark at Christmas 1566 (Brahe was 20) and after that wore a prosthetic replacement made of silver and gold (the injury sparked his interest in medicine and alchemy). At one time in the 1580s he was said to own 1% of the entire wealth of Denmark. He also numbered among his retinue a clairvoyant dwarf called Jepp who resided under the table at banquets, and a moose who unfortunately died after one such banquet, having drunk too much beer and finally fallen down the stairs.

He also made progress in astronomy, but I have chosen not to mention that today.

Races and isms

Foreign countries and people are a bit of a mystery in the beginning. There was we and us and our village and the people we knew about, but then sometimes there was something else too. Of course, to them, we were the strange ones, but we didn't know that then.

Are foreigners strange and mythical? Are they legendary beasts who live in the places on the map illustrated with dragons?

Are different people different from you? Do they even look different? Perhaps we people who think we all look the same really look quite varied. We just don't really think about it.

Anyway, once upon a time the idea of the foreigner was born and it lived several lives. Some of the lives were used to keep foreigners foreign - like wartime propaganda. No, we can't have you thinking they are human, or you will want to be friends with them.

A few of the lives made us think that the way of living in a far-away place might be better than that here, or at least there might be significant advantages to it.

As humans, we can't help being sympathetic to a character (unless we are psychologically unwell), as long as we have a little time to think about it. Unfortunately we aren't always given time to think about it - because the propaganda machine must keep us on the move! (going round in circles)

Characters like Fu Manchu or Ming the Merciless (although Ming is from the planet Mongo so presumably not literally intended to be Chinese) obviously owe their existence to racist misperceptions and misinformation, yet...they are rather exciting. Let's have a bit of thrill and passion in life please! And often the well-behaved characters are not the most interesting...

And someone like Mr Moto the detective equally relies on the idea that foreigners are different, yet there is enough to empathise with in the character that we can perhaps watch without becoming too disturbed. While the question will always remain (to modern eyes though less so to eyes of its own time) - why is this actor not Japanese? - and so on, Mr Moto's portrayal by Peter Lorre is very sympathetic and allows the part of us that lives stories and doesn't just read them (a childlike part) to follow the character and care for what happens to him. Lorre was born László Löwenstein and played outsiders to perfection, such as the serial killer in Fritz Lang's M("M - Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder"). I would hazard a guess that his ability to empathise with the outsider comes not from his own status as such a person (Jewish, Hungarian, Austrian or whatever) but from his ability to act.

So there's a lot of racism about and has been for a long time, yet at least it gives us the chance to think about people different from ourselves, and perhaps to find out a little about them - and us.

Now see what you think.

Enescu Lives

I'm saying this is a "must-hear".

Sometimes, listening to a performer of the past play something of the "standard repertoire" seems strange, because each age has its own "standard" way of playing. Fashion is always fashionable until it ceases to be so. That's why the way we play today will one day be seen as strange (I hope, because it sounds rather strange to me now). Yet to hear someone of any age play his own music poses no cultural problems for the ear. Every part of the style is perfect and perfectly appropriate.

Here is Enescu! He's playing some of his magic music for you.

I'm afraid I can't work out which Sonata this is he's playing here - but there are only a few so we should find out eventually.

Real People

It's hard to imagine old black-and-white people as real colour people. All the old people - Busoni, Liszt, Rachmaninov, Alkan, Chopin and company - they were all colour people.

And then it's hard to hear old recordings as real performances ("colour"). I hear Rachmaninov tearing away at 300 mph in his 3rd Concerto and wonder what he really sounded like.

I'm sure we can get closer to imagining what it was all really like.

They were people, like all the people you see today. Not monochrome prints.

Something must be done to invite them to step out of the page...

Chasse-neige (Snowdrift)

Liszt is strange sometimes. He had problems with being considered serious. He wrote so much for the crowd that he must have felt a bit odd. Maybe he felt he was not quite being himself most of the time. Was he a serious composer or just an octave-merchant? Well, you know, Beethoven wrote octaves...but not like that!

Perhaps this is one reason he liked to paraphrase (transcribe) other people's music.

Yet Liszt also wrote more serious-sounding music, such as his earnest and for-posterity Sonata in B minor. Serious composers wrote sonatas, remember!

On the one hand, to me this work sounds like a more cerebral version of the Mephisto Waltz no. 1, with added religious subject matter (also improved with things stolen from Alkan's Quatre Âges sonata). On the other hand, the Faust story (Liszt picked the Lenau version, but he would obviously have known the Goethe one too), no matter how sensational the episode, has serious philosophical undertones - and with Liszt, as a cultured and intelligent man, no matter how much of the music is directed at the gallery, I think there is always some serious purpose not far away from the surface.

Anyway, there is a nice piece at the end of his Transcendental Studies, called Chasse-neige.

These studies are often difficult, and often quite big and "Lisztian". Yet writing studies is a scholarly occupation, like writing sonatas, so Liszt is being serious again as well.

Bearing this in mind, I think it's interesting that he ends with a more introverted piece. It's true, it does get loud, but also it has some of the quietest, lightest writing of the twelve studies.

What I wanted to tell you was this.

Liszt seems to me to go in a serious direction at the end of the Transcendental Studies. This serious snow-music reminds me of something else - the lonely figure at the end of Schubert's Winterreise, left out of the village like the old organ-grinder, in the end perhaps being erased by the white snowy landscape.

I find it amusing to note that while Schubert does it his way, Liszt's idea has us not so much erased by frozen blank finality - more like completely buried in the avalanche!

It was rather a dramatic snow-storm, after all.

But we shouldn't judge Liszt by our own standards, or anyone else's. Times were different then.

All the same, I rather like this piece.

It's really transcendental, too. To play it at its best would not sound particularly obviously difficult. But someone good enough to do that would be quite shockingly good!

I don't think I've ever heard it played exactly as I imagine it...but Mr. Arrau is good.

ALKAN

I do like to read some nice information about Alkan. The fact that I have written it myself doesn't put me off at all, oh no.

Alkan is...well you really should know. If not find out!

Alkan is my favourite composer. Although my favourite piece is the Beethoven Violin Concerto (not by Alkan). However, statistically Alkan wins by having more pieces I like. But let's not have Alkan and Beethoven competing, please. After all, they are different. There is no comparison!

So what to tell you about Alkan? The following shiny fishes of delight, which I have gathered from Ronald Smith's book (two books in one now, Alkan: The Man/Alkan: The Music). In English it's the main book (or only book?) for reading in some depth about this great composer. Yes, great, not odd or unusual. Busoni says, in the Foreword to his edition of Liszt's Studies:

These fifty-eight pianoforte pieces alone would place Liszt in the rank of the greatest "pianoforte" composers since Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, Alkan, Brahms.

And that's true so just think about it please.

OK good things to tell you about Alkan:

1. He entered the Paris Conservatoire at the age of six.
2. He won first prize for solfège at the age of seven and a half.
3. He won first prize for piano when he was eleven!
4. Much later, when he was teaching at the Conservatoire, he awarded a special prize to César Franck. The reason was that Franck decided his sight-reading exam was too easy so played the piece perfectly but in a different key and thereby failed the exam! Presumably Alkan thought he was worth a prize.
5. Alkan may have had (or definitely had, or something) a son known as Delaborde, who was keen on swimming. A joint natatory outing in the river Seine shortly preceded Bizet's death! Not only that but soon after Bizet died, perhaps from swimming with Delaborde, the survivor began the process of marrying Mme. Bizet!
6. Well actually these are all quite gossipy facts, aren't they. Wouldn't it be better to talk about something more useful?

Yes, I certainly will. But that's for next time...

Basketball Saves Lives

Basketball saves lives - it saves the lives of dolphins.

How can this be, you ask?

Dolphins sometimes get bits of plastic stuck in their stomachs. They are friendly but it's not very friendly of us to leave plastic flosting around for them to swallow.

But dolphins are long. Tall is what they would be, but they are normally not standing up.

Dolphins are long, and to get the plastic out can be difficult. That is where basketball players can be useful.

Currently the world's tallest man, Bao Xishun (鲍喜顺, "The Mast") played basketball when he was in the army. He had to leave because of rheumatism, so is no longer a basketball player as far as I know. That is the only thing detracting from the truthfulness of today's assertion that "Basketball Saves Lives", but I think it's broadly true. How so? Because the people at the Royal Jidi Ocean World had two dolphins who were suffering with trapped plastic in them, so they called Bao Xishun so he could reach in and get it out. It worked! The same thing happened when a California dolphin swallowed a screw in 1978. The dolphin's name was Mr. Spock, but they had to call Mr. Ray for assistance - Clifford Ray, player for the Chicago Bulls ('71-'74) and the Golden State Warriors ('74-'81). His arm is 114cm long - 8cm longer than Bao Xishun actually, which I bet the dolphin was very glad of. On the whole!

So there you are. That is your useful fact for today.

Blank

Mel Blanc, voice of Bugs Bunny for 49 years, lived from 30th May 1908 to 10th July 1989. Known as the Man of a Thousand Voices, he admitted he could only really lay claim to about 850.

Chain of Command

Godowsky was a genius. A self-taught genius - the only kind there is, of course.

He learned how to do anything at all on the piano, and invented some new things too. If you want to have a lesson with Godowsky, try playing any of his music. It has lots of fingerings and helpful comments written in, so it's very instructive as playing music by a great pianist always is. Of particular note are his Studies on the Etudes of Chopin, which, since they are more difficult than Chopin's originals, raise the standard of piano playing in a rather helpful way.

Heinrich Neuhaus was Godowsky's student. There was a great teacher for you. And he was a great player too, though he spent most of his time teaching. You can learn a lot from his book The Art of Piano Playing. What he says seems obvious though, so you have to keep coming back to the book over many years to appreciate its value.

Then Neuhaus had a student called Sviatoslav Richter. He was good too!

Each of these people had their own talent, but it was helped by meeting one of the others. Destiny somehow allows people to look after each other.

Godowsky set off one day to find out how to play the piano, and look what happened!

Richter wasn't really a teacher but look what he did for us. If you can't learn from any of that, there's a problem somewhere!

Thanks very much to those three men, then. Thank you!

New News

I went to a camera show run by Nikon which purported to be for professional photographers (I am not one, but, you know, when you know the right people....). However I had the feeling that professional photographers would more likely be outside being professional photographers rather than attending a show.

I was not entirely wrong, and you can follow my way of thinking by looking here! Look, it's scantily-clad women wielding industrial welding equipment! It looks like it - anyway they certainly make a lot of sparks! Wow, that looks exciting. Evidently it is supposed to be exciting anyway! And we can imagine that Nikon have pitched this about right, if a lot of the people who buy camera equipment are the same people who buy camera magazines and car magazines and so on. They always have women in, posing in a rather demeaning way (it demeans lots of people!). Oh well, they get paid for it I suppose. You probably get paid more for being an astronaut though....they could try that instead.

So anyway, there were similar types of females featured in a so-called "catwalk opportunity". Also one man, much to everyone's disappointment I am sure. Indeed, nearly everyone attending in the guise of photographer was a man, many many many of whom found it necessary to carry their cameras around their necks so as to show off what they've got, how much it cost, and how many megapixels it has. A lot of them were funny grey men...rather odd, it was.

I would have thought a camera show was not necessarily a good place to learn about photography. For example, it must be a similar type of thing to wanting to learn about music at a piano show, or about painting at a paintbrush show (I've never heard of a paintbrush show, this is entirely fictional), which is to say, it's possible but unlikely.

However the technical side of photography is sufficiently important (important if you want to get it right without guessing, as Ansel Adams wanted to teach us to - though guessing is possible, just time-consuming) that some of the presentations must have been useful.

I did learn a few things. I learned about the history of digital photography - e.g. the first digital camera had less then 2 megapixels of resolution and cost around £20, 000! Also I heard someone from Nikon saying that megapixels were not everything - other factors define a good camera. Interesting to hear that from the top of the camera production tree.

Also, contrary to what you might have been expecting from the above, there was A PHOTOGRAPHER! Yes, a professional photographer (so there was at least one!) called Bruno Barbey, showing many of his pictures and saying a little bit about them. It was quite exciting because I had recently seen some of his pictures in a book called Magnum Ireland so now I caould see that he was a real person! He was officially there for the purpose of telling us that he now uses a computer and a printer to make exhibition prints (rather than developing them the okd way) and has been satisfied with the results. Also he appeared to endorse digital photography -he laughed when he said this though, probably because it's what everyone seems to talk about. My identification test for people who say they are interested in photography is: what is the first thing they say when I mention the subject. Often, in fact nearly always, they say "What camera do you use?" - indeed, this is an interesting topic, and I often wonder what camera people use, however it is probably somewhere down at the bottom of the list of interesting topics, because, as Ken Rockwell says on his completely useful website, it's not the camera that takes the pictures. Yes, it is your brain! When Edward Steichen took a portrait of Isadora Duncan at the Parthenon in 1921, he borrowed a Kodak camera from the head waiter at his hotel. Looking at his amazing photographs, I can only assume that he knew what he was doing!

Bruno Barbey seemed a bit embarrassed (did you know there is a place called Embarrass, Wisconsin? Also one in Minnesota) to be talking about digital, I don't really know why. He said it was very good for shooting in the dark. Perhaps that is the only time he would use one? Ha ha, actually night photography is good, you just have to hang around a bit while the camera gets enough light in it so you can see something. He probably meant digital photography sees into the darkness very well. This is true since the manufacturers has concentrated on optimising for the dark areas in an image - they decided they wanted dark patches to have more visible detail, The result of this is that they have been successful, and consequently digital images burn out to white in the highlights very easily - analogue film took bright light more gracefully.

Howeveritmaybeso, M. Barbey showed us his pictures shot on film (some using Kodachrome, which was developed by Godowsky's son Leo (who married Gershwin's sister) and his school friend Leopold Mannes (who was a president of the Mannes College of Music, founded by his parents)), and very good they were too. This is the one I remember first:



(See a bigger one here) It's interesting because it has little colour yet in the scale of colours it has, there is great variation (the red umbrellas - and the red hat! - in the middle are very exciting, I think). It shows an excellent control of proportions and colours, and is a very resonant image. Things that are good make me feel calm or give me a sense of wonder or make me feel I am part of them, and that's what I feel with this image. That he could achieve this as a photojournalist is something we can be amazed at. Nobody sets these pictures up, you know - good photographers have to be good improvisers.

He talked about painters a little bit (e.g. Matisse) so you can see he was interested in the image more than the hardware. Actually that is a little bit of a redundant statement - we can see he was interested in the image from his images!

So that, my friends, was what I learned from the Nikon show. It was a while ago but still newsworthy, I hope?

Manxman

Ned Maddrell died on December 27th, 1974. He was the last native speaker of Manx, the language of the Isle of Man (in the sea between England and Ireland - have a look!)

Here is a quotation from a newspaper article about him written around 1959 (I can't tell you what newspaper it's from because I found it on the internet where everything has no source and is either true or not, though mostly not)

Ned Maddrell, who went to sea at 13, found he was able to keep his Manx "alive" by talking to Gaelic-speaking sailors on British ships. He was brought up in the remote village of Cregneash, where "unless you had the Manx you were a deaf and dumb man and no good to anybody."

This was not the case in the towns. "Nobody there wanted to talk Manx, even those who had it well. They were ashamed, like. "It will never earn a penny for you," they said". Ned is a sprightly old man, a trifle deaf but very proud of his role as one of the last native speakers. "They have tape recordings of me telling legends and stories in Manx," he said "in Ireland and in America and in places you never heard of."

You can hear Ned speaking on this page.

They have revived Manx since then, but like Cornish and Hebrew, it is likely not the same language now we have lost the connection. Still, a good variety of languages is positive I think. I mean, it gives me something to write about, and linguists something to argue about! Oh yes, and it gives people something to talk about at home - in their own language!

Josef In Print

Josef Hofmann - the pianist - was born 100 years before me and died in 1957. He came from Poland and went to live in America. There is more detail aside from these scanty facts but I have chosen not to provide it!

From 1901 Hofmann contributed a series of articles to the Ladies' Home Journal, on the subject of piano playing. These are now available as a book (with a compilation of questions and answers on the same subject) called "Piano Playing with Piano Questions Answered". It's useful of course, but also quite funny to see what questions he was asked. Here they have him, the greatest pianist they will probably ever encounter, and what questions do they ask?

I am just beginning to reach an intelligent interpretation of Beethoven's music. Now, in what order should the Sonatats be studied?

Must I play all the Sonatas of Beethoven in order to become a good player, or is a certain number sufficient, and, if so, how many would you advise?

Actually on the whole the questions are well chosen and cover material you will probably have wondered about, if you are a pianist. The answers are of course on a reliable high level and sometimes quite understatedly funny too:

In Chopin's Barcarolle there is a number of trills preceded by grace notes. Are they to be executed according to Philipp Emmanuel Bach's rule, so that the grace notes take their time from the note that follows them?

Philipp Emmanuel Bach's rule is a safe one to follow, but do not confound a rule with a law. If you have reached that plane on which an attempt at the Barcarolle by Chopin is rational, you must feel that your individual taste will not lead you too far astray even if it should prompt you occasionally to depart from the rule.

That is my favourite. If you have reached a plane on which an attempt at this piece is rational!

It must be nice to be on that plane!

Rrrrrrhapsody

A film about Rachmaninoff is going to be made, directed by Bruce Beresford (director of Driving Miss Daisy) and called Rhapsody.

Based on a true story as told through the eyes of Rachmaninoff's widow, the story will include never-before-revealed details about the secretive musician and the love triangle that inspired some of his greatest works at the time of the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia.

(Reuters, found on various websites)

And if we want to know more about this film we can go to the Internet Movie Database and look at some details about it. What do we find? All this:

* Tsarist Russia
* War Refugee
* Threesome
* Childhood Memory
* Separation
* Uprising
* Title Based On Song
* Classical Concert
* Separated
* Unfaithful Husband
* Secret
* California History
* Secret Love
* Unfaithful Groom
* Three Some
* Childhood Trauma
* Siberia
* Unfaithfulness
* Teacher Student Relationship
* Classical Music Score
* Symphony Orchestra
* Wartime Romance
* Symphony
* Classical Music
* Surrogate Mother
* Young Love
* Secret Lover
* California
* Summer Home
* Wealthy Family
* Summer House
* Character Study
* Rachmaninov
* Writer's Block
* Student Teacher Relations
* Cheating Husband
* Adopted Nephew
* Young Lovers
* Turn Of The Century
* Celebrity Status
* Marriage
* Winter
* Love
* Women's Prison
* Adoption
* WWI
* Independent Film
* USA As Promised Land
* Based On True Story
* World Music
* Achievement
* U.s.s.r.
* Absent Parents
* Women Rivals For Man
* Adapted Score
* USSR
* Historical
* University Student
* Youth Orchestra

Can you make a film out of that? I betcha Hollywood can too!

Extremely Mediocre

What is happening? What is happening is that the whole country of Great Britain is going a bit mad. Based purely on the level and intensity of media response, it seems that everyone is highly affected by the hot weather we are having.

As everyone prepares to be blasted by "the hottest recorded temperature in Britain EVER" I am left wondering why it is that I find it merely warm. Can it be that it is not actually dangerously hot? Well, you wonder, what temperature are we talking about here? Well, the hottest temperature EVER in Britain would be something like 38°C. When it gets over 30, British things start to melt and break. 38 is hot but...there are places in this world of ours where 38 is fairly normal!

The hottest recorded temperature "EVER" on the surface of the Earth was 57.7°C in Al 'Aziziyah in Libya, on 13th September 1922. Now THAT is very HOT.

If this heat crisis continues I shall probably start finding this country more attractive. I don't start to warm up before we reach 30°C so I will be feeling fine I should expect. But what of my fellow countrymen? To be honest, I haven't asked them. I have just read reports (apparently it reached 52°C on a bus and 47 on the Tube - so some concern is justified I think, not from me though because I don't use either of these normally). But I think we have to admit that htis country is used to quite a middle-of-the-road sort of temperature. It never really boils and it never really freezes. Isn't the national temperament much the same? One could well gripe at that, but I think these days particularly we can be glad that extremism is largely missing from the British psyche.

My sister

My sister is SUPER!

She is raising money for breast cancer research as part of the Aviva Weekend to Breakthrough, a sponsored 60km walk. 60 km!

Because she is good and is helping other people (instead of hanging around not helping anybody, a popular alternative) you can now be good yourself and HELP HER!!!

Please, if you would like to make any donations go to her special Aviva page and follow the instructions!

Thank you!

Paderewski's Parrot

Paderewski had a parrot. He got it in New Zealand. It would scratch at the door when he was practising. Then when it was let in, it would perch on his pedalling foot. At certain moments it would exclaim,"Lord, what beautiful music!"

I read this in The Paderewski Memoirs. There is no mention of the parrot on the Internet, which is why I had to tell you the story myself. If you ask me, there is something wrong with people. Fancy not knowing about this parrot!

Roosting, Twinkling

There is a whitish pigeon sleeping outside my front door. I thought it was an ornament! But it moved very very slightly...

I don't have a picture of it.

Today is the 8th May. That is Gottschalk's birthday, and the day Ethel Smyth and Luigi Nono died (not the same year...)

For the last four days, a giant mechanical elephant and a giant little girl have been performing in London, near Trafalgar Square/Piccadilly/St. James's Park. Not only do I not have a picture of it, I didn't even see it!

This is something I have seen, many times. It is the constellation Orion (Orion the Hunter) which is the constellation I most easily recognise in the sky over England. (Photo credit: Matthew Spinelli)

Enormous and Hideous

I needed to get to the Royal College of Music in Kensington. Since it was so sunny I walked through Hyde Park to get there.

Now, I know that the Royal College of Music is in front of (or behind) the Royal Albert Hall. And I sort of knew that there was something called the Albert Memorial behind (or in front of) that. I thought I would probably find it alright. It's true, I did.

As I approached the A.M., I could see that I would be there quite soon. Ten minutes later, I still hadn't got any closer despite continuous ambulatory motion of the legs (walking). Was it a medium-sized monument in the middle distance, or was it a large monument further away? Now I can tell you: it is an enormous monument a bit further away than I thought!

The other thing that it is (as you may have guessed from the title today) is hideous. Hid-e-ous. It seemed to me that it was not very tasteful, at least. This was partly because it was too big (it seems that when humans get pleased with themselves they build big things to show they rule the earth!) but mostly because it was black and gold. Well, I don't much like black-coloured things anymore because they look gloomy, and the gold just seemed wrong too. But you see the whole of the Victorian era was about being dark and gloomy. I am thankful that England is recovering a little now.

The Albert Memorial was commissioned by Queen Victoria (1819-1901, reigned 1837-1901) in memory of her husband Prince Albert.

I like the trees better. Some of them are big, too...

Identity

I have heard of two young pianists who changed their names.

One did it because there was already a pianist with the same name.

The other seemingly changed his name because his real name wasn't very interesting. I'm not sure about that, but certainly his new choice of name was much more exotic!

Actually, both names were changed to a more "exotic" one. Exotic means foreign, non-English, basically. The classic example was the American pianist Olga Samaroff (1880-1948, born Lucy Mary Olga Agnes Hickenlooper, in Texas). She later married Leopold Stokowski (1882-1977), who, though he had a Polish name and an indeterminate Mid-East-European accent, was from London. I know he was, there is a plaque about him on a school just up the road from my house. Actually it appears that Stokowski, despite having an exotic name, accent, hairstyle, etc, actually changed his name to a less exotic one! If what I read is correct, he was born Antoni Stanisław Bolesławowicz. I guess the public wouldn't have known what to do with that name. Well, I'm not a Stokowski biography expert (did you guess?) so we will have to leave him there for now.

What I was thinking was, if there was another pianist called Philip Howard, what would I do? You know, the genuine answer to that is I would expect him to change his name. I wonder what that tells you about me? I must be very egotistical! But not as much as people who take fake identitites. After all, they must be proud people who try to protect the new myth of themselves - so that nobody notices how boring they really are.

Except you, Leopold! Because, of course, the truth is everyone is a lot more interesting than they realise. If only they would have more confidence in themselves!

You heard it here first.

Weather, oh!

I have been checking the weather forecast for a few weeks.

Always it says that in two or three days the temperature will go up higher by a few degrees.

Then when the day arrives, nothing has changed - in two or three days the temperature will go up higher by a few degrees! Oh, why do they torture me so?

But, as you know, the weather is not predictable over longer than two or three days on the whole.

Seemingly the weather forecast is entirely predictable!

Rain is good but I do prefer the sunshine. Which I am unlikely to see in London very often!

Where else should I go? Any suggestions? You could form a Philip Howard Escape Committee. Those who want me further away, send in the name of a suitable place. Those who want me nearer, write in with the name of the place where you live.

I wonder where I would end up like that? Anyway, I know you are too polite to make suggestions like that. You will just have to wait and see.

Now, which way is the sun going? I should follow that.

I heard that Alexander the Great went to see the Greek philosopher Diogenes. Diogenes lived in a barrel and was lying down next to it when Alexander came. He said to Diogenes,"I am ruler of half the world. Whatever you ask of me, it shall be done. Now what do you wish?" and Diogenes said please could you move a bit to the right, you're blocking my sun...

You know, a barrel rolls. It must be a good way of following the sun. I wonder if that's a possibility?

What did the barrel have in it before Diogenes? Wine? Fish? Heraclitus? It makes all the difference to the internal ambience.

But I guess the sun is always the same, eh? When you can see it.

Rostrum Camera: Ken Morse

A rostrum camera is a special camera used in television and film to animate a still picture or object. The most famous rostrum camera operator, also the most credited film cameraman in history, is Ken Morse. Here is his picture (since you never normally get to see him from the other side of a camera):




So now you know who it is.

Rostrum Camera: Ken Morse.

Takk and tak

As part of my travel plans for the future, I'm back to learning Polish. There is this word, 'tak', which means 'yes'. So far so good, that's all quite clear (in some pronunciation you can even hear a bit of a 'd' sound at the start, so you can think of 'da' in Russian and know for sure that this word means yes). But in Norwegian (which we discussed at length, starting on 25th June) the word takk means thanks. I get just a little bit confused as I try to decide whether I'm saying yes or thanks. Solutions: get focused into speaking Polish and not have any other options for the 'tak' sound in my mind; or, concentrate on the different sounds between the two words - which are very different, if you get close enough to see all the differences - and associate different pictures and feelings with each one which will always be there when I use the words.

It may seem a small thing to be talking about. But once you know bits of a few languages, some of the bits can fall into some of the other languages, so I'd like to know what you do about that.

One great linguist (polyglot, or by definition, hyperpolyglot - speaking more than six languages fluently) - the first that I think of - is Richard Francis Burton, the great English ...well, there isn't a word for what he was, he was everything - and everything England was not, so we can be thankful for having him (1821-1890). He was one of the first Westerners into Mecca - he went in disguise, linguistically as well as everything else (you can read about this in Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Mecca). He translated the Arabian Nights (the Alf Laylah Wa Laylah, or "Thousand Nights and One Night") and the Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana - among others. Burton, who was supposed to know 29 languages, was an incredible man who went everywhere and did everything - fantastical, unlikely, impossible, but he did it. He even discovered the source of the Nile. Read something by him or about him. Then have a think about what you have to do to qualify as 'being alive'. Lord Derby said of RFB: "Before middle age, he compressed into his life more of study, more of hardship, and more of successful enterprise and adventure, than would have sufficed to fill up the existence of half a dozen ordinary men".