Last December, I came across Jonathan Raban’s soft city in Oxfam. I impulse-bought it, because it played to my fascination with big cities, and with their impact on the imaginations of their inhabitants and visitors.

As I wrote elsewhere, I was torn between admiration for Raban’s erudition and prose style, and irritation at his disdain for non-academics trying to think by themselves. Mostly, I liked it just because there still aren’t enough people writing about cities in the same rose-tinted way they write about nature.

Now I find that Raban is a bit more interesting than the parochial academic I’d pegged him as after

Soft City

. He’s moved on from London, lived in Seattle for a decade, and written

Passage to Juneau

, a book about sailing in the Pacific Northwest. From the reviews, it seems he’s trying to do for the sea the same as

Soft City

did for cities – the book is even subtitled

A sea and its meanings

. I find that strangely inspiring. I normally avoid books about the sea or the countryside for fear of sentimentality: since I grew up in the country, I’d rather save my sentimentality for the city. But Raban I might make an exception for – if he can write poetically about London, then perhaps he can also write non-romantically about Alaska. It’s easy to be inspired by a book about something you love anyway. I’m wondering whether I’ll manage to be equally inspired by a book about something as alien to me as the sea. So

Passage to Juneau

goes on the reading list.

It turns out that, oddly enough, nobody can recognise me without a photo. So, for the benefit of fiona_kitty, elise, atreic, and anyone else who’s been quietly wondering about my secret identity, here I am.

My delightful sister tells me she’s not visiting this weekend because she has no clean clothes. harumph.

This leaves me with an empty weekend. What should I do with it? Answers on a postcard, please.

Anyone who suggests ‘work’ will be hanged by the neck until they be dead.

Bruno is about the best way I’ve found to cheer myself up when I’m down. This sequence (which goes on for about a month) is particularly uplifting and chicken-soup-esque. I’m impressed – there’s a small child involved, and I still loved it.

Dubious, but hilarious. The town name ‘Baldock’ is apparently a corruption of ‘Baghdad’, and the result of exotically-minded Knights Templar settling there in the 12th century.

Then ‘catamite’, a word which seems to be cropping up everywhere in my set texts, is derived from Ganymede. Ganymede? Catamite? There’s an intermediate latin stage of Catamus, but that doesn’t really explain it.

Yoinked from whotheheckami

1. Been interviewed on a South African radio station

2. Kept pigs

3. Got a free vacation in the USA by playing Dungeons and Dragons

4. Had an essay published in a book with Kurt Vonnegut and Naomi Klein

5. Taught English in a building opposite Red Square

6. Been analysed in a writing course at an American university

7. Worked for a Count, shared an office with a Lady, and been to a party in a room previously occupied by Byron, Andrew Huxley and James Clark Maxwell (not at the same time)

8. Translated the newswire for the (now privatised) former Soviet ministry of propaganda

9. Caused a security alert at a US military base, and been praised for it by a dozen MPs

10. Carried an artist’s portfolio for a month, as part of a tenancy agreement

Ryan writes about the lost art of academic jibes. He’s a little pessimistic – take this recent gem of a footnote from Richard Drayton’s recent book Nature’s Government

‘”I owe a particdular debt to Mr. Desmond for rescuing me from writing the more parochial history of Kew which would have followed from the publication of my doctoral dissertation. He read and commented on it in 1994, but failed to cite it since, he later advised me, he had ‘put it aside’ before writing. I take encouragement from the fact that Desmond was able so often to agree with the patterns and periods I had described for Kew’s history”‘

Today’s earth-shattering revelation is the similarity between journalists and comparative linguists. The both bug an assortment of subject experts, then string together garbled misinterpretations of the responses, and publish to acclaim from the ignorant.

In a less huffy mood, I might have some good things to say about interdisciplinarity and spreading information.

Iranian protesters have a nice method to escape prosecution: they encourage people to do things which might, or might not, be protests. For example , they might call for people to drive into the city centre. The protest succeeds if the traffic is obviously heavier than usual, but the police can’t sift the dissidents from the commuters.

I’m wondering what other systems – for protest, or for anything else – do, or could, use the same kind of deniability system. It’s probably dealt with smewhere in the security or politics literature, btu of course I have no idea where.

Yes, I do already have a webpage, and a livejournal, and I’m starting a politics group-blog elsewhere, and a blosxom private blog/note-collection, and have strewn plenty of debris elsewhere on the net. Why another one?

1. because I want somewhere to write about social software and other technology without boring everyone else. Livejournal is for friends, tran is for hacks, blosxom is for me and me alone.
2. To respond to other blogs – to ‘participate in the conversation’, as the jargon du jour would put it. To have somewhere I can trackback to posts, without baffling all comers
3. To stop writing off-topic comments. I keep writing comments on other people’s blogs that are only tangentially connected to the original post. It isn’t fair on them to keep begging forgiveness for going off on detours. Now I can digress on my own time.

So that’s the plan. I’m sure it won’t work out as neatly as all that. Either this blog will die, or it will go somewhere I didn’t expect it to. That’s life.