Peter's Notebook

7/4 and terza rima

2008-03-19T19:52:00.006Z

Turns out I like 7/4 time and terza rima. Terza rima has been sinking in since I read Clive James' "To Prue Shaw: A letter from Cambridge" for the first time in about 2005. 7/4 time struck me today, listening to Peter Gabriel's "Solsbury Hill". I was thinking, when God walks in and says "grab your things, I've come to take you home", what do you grab. Then I got to the last verse and "you can keep my things, they've come to take me home", but that doesn't quite work for me. Do you leave everything behind or do you take something back with you? So I'm still asking - what do you grab. What's the thing you try to forget last? Never heard Solsbury Hill and don't know what I'm on about with 7/4 time? There's a video at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMwn_hnoS5Y
Try counting the beat (1, 2, 3, 4) and you'll find you have to count to 7.

Never heard of terza rima or Prue Shaw? Here's the beginning. Watch the rhyme structure and feel the delicious run ons!

I miss you. As I settle down to write,
Creating for my forearm room to rest,
I see the hard grey winter evening light
Is scribbled on with lipstick in the west
As just another drowsy Cambridge day
Discreetly shines and shyly looks its best
Before, with eyeballs glazed, it slides away
And slips into a night's sleep deeper still,
Where Morpheus holds undisputed sway
Throughout the weary academic mill -
An atmosphere of cosy somnolence
I hope that I can summon up the will
To counteract. I'm striving to condense
Within the terza rima my ideas
Concerning us, the arts and world events...

(this continues for about 300 lines)
from Clive James "The Book of My Enemy" (2003, Picador)

Geography

2008-01-01T17:40:00.001Z

Geography at university should be about exploring the differences that follow from changing your position. What could possibly be any more geographical than that? People always start by thinking Geography is all about where things are. In fact it is about where you look at them from.

At first I couldn't tell

2007-12-04T21:37:00.001Z

At first I couldn't tell it was a drawing of a heart.

What we see

2007-10-24T18:10:00.000+01:00

I've just been starting the exercise I like to try with first-year students each year, hoping to begin encouraging them to see more in the world and to recognise more ways of seeing the world, where I ask them to tell me what they see when they look out of the window. As the discussion has developed this time around, one of the students this week picked me up on my comment that "what I see depends only partly on what is actually there". Thinking about that, I started wondering what we would get if we tried to graph what we see against what is actually there. Plot a graph with "what is actually there" on the vertical axis and "what I can see" on the horizontal. For people who see exactly what is there, they will no doubt expect their line to be straight and sloping at 45 degrees. Did I just write "no doubt"? I must be tired.

My great job!

2007-10-03T18:41:00.001+01:00

I have a great job. Every year at about this time the University gives me a bunch of the country's brightest youngsters, all of whom have signed up because they want to know more about our amazing world, and for three years I get to learn about how they see the world, and I get to watch them learn to see the world in new ways so that they gradually appreciate it more and more.

From Barry Lopez' "Arctic Dreams"

2007-09-01T15:21:00.000+01:00

"This time around, however, the element in the ecosystem at greatest risk is not the bowhead but the coherent vision of an indigenous people. We have no alternative, long-lived narrative to theirs, no story of human relationships with that landscape independent of Western science and any desire to control or possess. Our intimacy lacks historical depth, and is still largely innocent of what is obscure and subtle there"
Barry Lopez (1999) "Arctic Dreams" p11.

From Clive James' "Cultural Amnesia"

2007-09-01T15:13:00.000+01:00

"...it is true that most of our knowledge will drop away after we have condensed from it the principles which will connect into a view, but the principles can't exist to be extracted unless teh knowledge is acquired in the first instance. Certainly the mind too impressed by knowledge will attain nothing else. Ezra Pound famously said that culture begins when you forget what book that came from. Unfortunately he himself never forgot any citation that suited his mania, and his work as a totality is hopelessly vitiated by the half-witted diligence of the trainspotter."
Clive James (2007) "Cultural Amnesia" p.60.

No clue

2007-08-27T15:57:00.001+01:00

The thing is, you just never, really, have a clue. You just can't tell. You can't be sure. You might be wrong. Basically, you just didn't spot it. You didn't realise it at the time and you didn't know anything about it. So why should it be any different now?

Writing

2007-08-25T18:14:00.000+01:00

I am a chronic writer. I don't mean that I write badly, although that may well be the case; I mean that writing is a long-term condition that I don't seem able to shake off. I write everywhere. I have notebooks all over the house and in every pocket. I write online diaries and blogs. I write stories and poems - sometimes on my web site sometimes in a notebook or on one of the many computers that I use. I write for work: books, journals, lectures, booklets. Little bits of the same writing are in different versions in different places: it's a mess.

Organising these blogs

2007-08-10T18:51:00.000+01:00

OK - you know what I'm like... especially lately: everything has to be well organised, classified, sorted out and logical in my mind even if there isn't much physical manifestation of that (have you seen my bookshelves?), so I'm obviously going to have to do something with this blog or, as it now is (or as they now are) these blogs. My old letters pages on the web were really just "what I've been doing" news pages. This blog threatens to get all longwinded and might not do the job for people who just want to know the news, so I've divided it up into three separate blogs. You can see links to the other two in the sidebar to the right of this page. From now on this one is where I'll ramble like this. There's another one for straightforward news and notes so that friends and family can see what I've been up to. There's a third one that will be about what I do at work. If you are here because you used to look at my online letters and just want to keep up with the news, this is now the wrong place! Follow the link in the sidebar to look at the "what I've been doing" blog!

A few days off, to stretch my tense little brain.

2007-08-08T14:26:00.000+01:00

I am trying to take a few days off work. I am trying to relax. I am trying to make space for my poor little tensed up brain to stretch out a little. I'm not doing great, but I'm trying, and I think I am starting to get somewhere. Well, when I say I am getting somewhere I don't mean that I am actually going anywhere: this photo that I took at Nottingham airport yesterday is as close as I expect to get to international travel this summer!

Because I'm not actually going away for long at a time this summer, and because a lot of my work is by e-mail and I use the same e-mail address for both work and personal stuff, it's hard for me to stay totally away from work even if I try to take a few days off. In amongst the welcome e-mails from friends there is a constant flow of purely work-related e-mails that I find hard to ignore. In my inbox today I have a former student needing a job reference, a current student needing help with a summer assignment, a colleague needing to check whether I'll be able to cover some teaching when they need to be away in the autumn and a publisher wanting to set up a meeting about a book project. If I wasn't actually here checking my e-mails these things would just have to wait, but once I see the e-mail I find it hard to keep the person at the other end waiting. The upshot is that I tend to do a little bit of work dealing with issues like these almost every day even when I am taking days off, which is what I am trying to do just now.

I am lucky, I suppose, in that I find it hard sometimes to separate some of what I do for work from what I do for fun: I guess that means I made a good choice of career - a lot of what I do because they pay me is stuff that I would want to do anyway even if they didn't! Look at the picture on the left: me underneath a glacier. That's work, of course, but it's also exactly what I'd like to do for fun if it wasn't already part of the job. Right now for example, I have a pile of books to look at "for work" that I wanted to explore anyway just because they look interesting! I'm teaching a new module next year that considers how art, science and landscape influence each other, especially focussing on the inspirational value of landscape in both art and science. It's a big subject, and although I've been working on it subconsciously for years, now that I have to get my head around a few specific examples that will work well for the students I find I need to go into the literature and explore more carefully. I won a £2,000 prize this year that I can spend on things related to my teaching, so I have put a little of it into buying some books, relevant to this module and my other teaching, that I have been meaning to read for a while. By coincidence, the arrival of these books has coincided with the arrival from Routledge of a book that I have been commissioned to review, and I find myself not quite, but almost, overwhelmed (physically as well as psychologically) by the small mountain of new texts that is here waiting for me to start poking around in it! I have been worrying recently (recently as in for the last five years or more) that I never find (or make) enough time in life for reading, so perhaps this will force (help) me to start doing just that.

Any of you who have been following the predecessor to these blogs, my online "letters to friends and family" web pages, will be familiar with my perennial complaint that there's not enough time and that I am constantly running to keep up with everything I am trying to do, but I'm not always very specific about exactly what it is that I am not finding time for. Thinking about it recently I have come to the conclusion that I have gradually fallen into the trap of allowing superficial tasks to blot out the time I need for the more essential and fundamental activities of contemplation, reflection and exploration. I have not been making time to seek out new ideas and I haven't been making time to think about anything in any great depth. I am determined now (yes, yes, I know I've said it before) to do something about it. I think that's one of the biggest and most regrettable of the differences between the way I am now and the way I was, say, 25 years ago (the picture alongside this paragraph was me about then). Of course I know the problem arises largely because I allow myself to take on a lot of different projects and I have a lot of different time-demanding interests, and because I manage my time quite poorly, so it's my own fault, but this also means that I should be able to do something about it! By letting somebody teach me to sit still, perhaps, if I remember my T.S.Eliot.

As usual, once I start thinking about something it crops up all over the place, and somewhere in the last couple of days I read a perfect encapsulation of what I had been thinking about the importance of spending time not preoccupied with superficial tasks. Typically, I cannot now remember exactly what it was or where I read it! Essentially it argued that if you keep your mind busy with little things all the time, is it never going to see the big things. I probably saw it in one of those new books, so I am hoping that I will re-find it as I start to work more methodically through the pile. It serves me right for not writing it down when I first saw it. Another lesson that I frequently teach but evidently still have not learnt.

So, work (or at least the "real" work of writing research papers and devising teaching programmes) has been deprioritized this week. I've been exploring the big pile of new books, playing chess online with a friend (and with a bunch of complete strangers, too, courtesy of Facebook - of which more later), starting this blog, pottering about the house and garden, and having all sorts of different trips out with Debbie and the new dog! It turns out the dog loves trainspotting, truckspotting and planespotting: we should have called him "Spot" instead of Gust! Here he is watching the runway through the perimeter fence of East Midlands Airport yesterday.

I was wondering at the start of the summer whether I was making a mistake planning a summer at home with no exotic field trips: especially as the people I work with have all jetted off to the oxymoronic corners of the globe, with postcards now due in from Iceland, Australia and even Outer Mongolia (yes, really). However, as Debbie with her usual instinctive wisdom pointed out, it's sometimes a lot more relaxing to have nowhere much to go and nothing much to do, for a change. Hence, for a few of these weeks over the summer, my aim to do nothing much and to go nowhere special, so as to stretch my mind back into a usable shape. While doing so, I snapped this photo of a plane taking off from Nottingham, en route to... who knows? Click the picture to see it bigger, and let your mind wonder, or wander. Suggested reading to accompany this picture: The Lonely Planet Guide to Experimental Travel or St.Exupery's Wind Sand and Stars (yes, both were in my newly delivered mountain!).

OK, so this is my blog

2007-08-03T18:10:00.000+01:00

OK, so this is my blog. I'm thinking this might be an improvement on the web-page "letters to friends and family" that I've been using up until now. It makes a change, anyway, so we can see how it goes and make our minds up later. I think it's going to be logistically a little simpler for me, which means I might not be so infrequent with the posts! If you want to see what came before and catch up with older news you can still find the old letters pages, going back to January 2001, at: http://www.petergknight.com/letters

I'm not dropping the website or anything like that, this is just a new way of doing the letters page. All the other stuff will continue to be on the website like before, and I'll keep updating and refreshing that too... just maybe not the letters page, which is replaced by this. OK - that's it, for now!

As always, let me know what you think, either via the website, e-mail, or a comment here.