Making me happy

I just heard some wonderful news.
Black Sabbath are getting back together for a new album and world tour.
When I was a very small girl, my parents had a couple of Black Sabbath tracks on some compilation albums.
I loved Paranoid, at 8, somehow I got it, although my schoolmates were baffled. (Vol 4, arguably the last of the truly great, truly perfect Sabbath albums, was released in the month I was born)
Growing up to be a teenager I got to hear more of their work, whole albums of sublime music.
My only sadness was that I would never see them live as Ozzy had been expelled for his antics, despite the rest of the band being similarly disposed.
I did get to see Ozzy several times, and loved every single second he was on stage.
Then one day in the late 1990s came the announcement - they were going to play together again.
I can remember going up to Birmingham to see them as soon as possible and bouncing, literally bouncing a foot or more in the air, in the queue with excitement. A few months later I saw them at The Astoria in London and got soaked when Ozzy chucked a bucket of water over the front few lines of the crowd. Then I managed to wangle a trip to Phoenix to see them play on New Year's Eve. I remember very clearly they stopped at midnight, opened the roof of the stadium to reveal a full moon and then they blasted into their encore.

And now they are coming back again - possibly the worst kept secret of the year - and I am delighted. I just wish the tickets went on sale today as I can't wait all week to book!

Long live Black Sabbath   \m/

Shopping

I'm not a fan of shopping for food, I'm not fond of cooking and I have issues with a ridiculous number of foods. So a shopping trip can be very hard work - I have to read the label on everything. All the things I like have a million calories. All the healthy stuff is either going to make me poorly or will taste like mashed tissue paper!
So I set out with good intentions, honest!, but by the time I reach aisle eleven I am usually in a bad mood and grab the first cake I come across, a couple of bottles of milk and something main coursey like a shepherds pie (if there's is no onion in it of course).
Over the next few weeks I am due to have a few hospital visits and tests that I am hoping will  begin to pin down exactly which foods I have a problem with - knowing my luck it will be milk, tea and bread!

I am a member of a few facebook groups dedicated to people with a food intolerance of some sort. The recurring theme I see on them is "no one takes the problem seriously, they think I am being picky." I've had that numerous times. But some people have even had restaurants ignore their needs, leaving them in the loos bringing up the food they just ate.
So next time someone tells you they can't eat apple or any other food, don't ignore it and don't think it will be funny to grate apple into their food!

Best of the Month October 2011

This month I have told you :

1. That Shakespeare was the real deal
2. That there is nothing behind you
3. That I am an enlightened romantic 
4. That you need to know where you are
5. That I'm embarking on NaNoWriMo and you will probably hear a lot more about that next month.

I wonder what else November will bring?

From your favourite information junkie.

NaNoWriMo ready

NaNoWriMo starts at midnight (local time) on November 1st.
It's currently 4pm on October 30th.
32 hours to go.

People are posting on the forums and Facebook that they are nervous.
But I am itching to go. I can't wait, I want to start now.
Whether I will be as excited and enthusiastic next week remains to be seen.
The goal is to write around 1650 to 1700 words per day to get a total of 50,000 in the space of the month.
The aim is not to have a finished novel, not to have perfect prose, not to have edited it all to bits and not to have driven oneself insane.
The aim is to have fun, write loads and be some way towards knowing if your idea can be turned into a novel.
Editing and polishing is for later.

Wish me luck!

Books

I love books. My bookcases are overflowing, books laid on the tops of others, double rows, even a second bookcase hasn't helped.
I have to confess that these days I get most of my books from Amazon (see what I am reading in the list on the left). But I do miss the days of spending hours in an old bookshop browsing through shelves crammed with all sorts of books.
Unfortunately the only book sellers near me now are the supermarkets and The Works. There don't seem to be any dedicated book shops nearby.
Do you know of a good local book shop? In that case I urge you to pay a visit, have a browse, maybe sit and read for a while.
Support your local book sellers.

Shakespeare vs Emmerich

Renowned film director Roland Emmerich has produced a film called Anonymous with a glittering British cast that purports to show that William Shakespeare was not the author of the 37 plays attributed to him.
I disagree, I believe the evidence is strong enough to say that Will of Stratford was The Man. I want to explain why.

First up, I saw an interview with of the film's cast members in which is was claimed that the authorship debate was hundreds of years old. This is something of an exaggeration. The first questions about it were only raised in the mid-Victorian period -  around about 150 years ago. Shakespeare was writing about 400 years ago. The Victorians had strong ideas about how status and ability were linked and believed that a poor glove maker's son could not have had the education and skill to write some of the most sublime works of the English language.
Shakespeare was student of a grammar school in Stratford upon Avon. They were called grammar schools for a reason. Students were required to learn Latin by rote and to translate from Latin and Greek to English. In fact the grammar schools taught little else than language (grammar) skills, including drama, rhetoric and debate and the classics such as Homer and Cicero. Will would therefore have been well equipped with the skills and knowledge required.
Emmerich has recently also produced a YouTube clip elucidating ten points that he thinks prove that William was a fraud. Please watch this clip and then read my thoughts about why he may be wrong.


First up I would like to question his calling Shakespeare a fraud. That would imply that Shakespeare himself deliberately set himself up as something he was not. If he had not written the plays, he would say that he had in order to defraud.... well who? The public, the audience, the players, the Master of Revels who was in charge of licensing plays? The Queen? Many of these people knew Will and is hard to credit all of them with the credulity to accept such self aggrandising.
If, as Emmerich's film suggests, some one else had paid Will to take credit for the plays, again it is difficult to believe that his fellow actors, and rival actors, would blindly accept the claim and keep quiet about it.

Emmerich's first point is that there is no existing piece of writing of any sort by William Shakespeare. I would like to know whether he has investigated how much paperwork anyone else of the period left behind. There are few records from the lives of his fellow actors, Henry Condell and John Heminges. I don't know if there is any paperwork from the lives of other contemporaries such as Kit Marlowe and Ben Jonson. It has to be remembered that in the late 1500s paper of good quality was a fairly rare commodity. The First Folio published in 1616 was printed on imported French paper, Paper also is well known for not lasting unless it is well looked after. It is also a fact that 50 years after Shakespeare died huge tracts of London were destroyed by the Great Fire, prior to that the country was ravaged by the Great Plague. Many of the buildings that Shakespeare's papers may have been in are no longer standing. Even the theatre he was so much a part of was destroyed. Absence of proof is not proof of absence. Paper may have existed. It would be quite remarkable if any had survived

The second point is that Shakespeare's daughters were unable to read or write. Shakespeare did have a son but he died at the age of eleven so we don't know whether he read or wrote at all. The boy and his twin sister were four years old when their father moved to London. Their older sister was six. They were therefore brought up by their mother, Anne, who was eight years older than William. In fact the years after the birth of the twins, up until 1592, are considered to be 'lost years' by most scholars, there are no records of Shakespeare's movements. If Anne was bringing the children up with little support she would not have been able to afford the time or money to have all the children learn literacy. (Although there is no information about how much contact Shakespeare had with his family in this period, even so, William was at the beginning of his career, he married at Anne when he was eighteen, he may not have had a lot of money to send home before buying New Place in 1597.) Also, in the late 1500s it was still a fact that women were not considered the equal of men. Women were often considerably less literate than men in spite of Elizabeth I being on the throne and there were not schools for girls. Educated girls would have been quite a rarity in that period.

Thirdly, Emmerich claims Shakespeare wrote above his station and belittled his own working class. Shakespeare was a member of the Lord Chamberlain's Men actors group (later the King's Men when James I came to the throne). We don't know what he did prior to 1592 but he was probably an actor and may have been in other groups that had noble patrons. These groups often toured the fine houses of the country to play. He and his colleagues had access to the Royal Court and to the houses of noble patrons. They would also have had access to servants who would have seen things no one else saw. Hence it is likely they had a fairly good understanding of how the nobility behaved and worked. A lot of his plays would have been written to flatter his patrons and the Queen so inclusion of details about certain Lords and Ladies would have delighted them. Emmerich compares Shakespeare to Ben Jonson. Jonson though was not an actor, though he had tried acting he was the writer for the Admiral's Men. That group suffered a number of setbacks, including being censored by the Master of the Revels. It is possible that it was safer for Jonson to avoid writing about nobility. Emmerich also says Shakespeare betrayed his class by making fun of them. Emmerich must be a very dull man if he and his friends don't have nicknames for each other. I have friends called Hopper, Big Bird, Blondie and Dibber. The names Shakespeare uses are affectionate and are to an extent caricatures of people that his audience would have known well and may have identified with.

The fourth point Emmerich makes is that Shakespeare's signatures are so different and shaky. I wonder if perhaps there was some reason Shakespeare had trouble writing. Maybe arthritis or an injury. Maybe he had to sign with assistance from someone guiding his hand. This would also explain why there is no existing correspondence of his. Perhaps he just physically could not write. There is no reason why he could not have dictated his plays and sonnets to someone else in the troupe or to a hired secretary. This certainly does not prove he was not an author.

Shakespeare did not write about his family, specifically Emmerich mentions there is no scene or poem about the death of Hamnet in 1596. As mentioned before, Shakespeare did not live with his family for several years after the children were born so perhaps he was not that close to them, even when he bought property in Stratford he travelled to London frequently. Perhaps his older wife had a friend that the children were closer to, we will never know, perhaps she forbade him from writing about their family. Perhaps he was just a private person, after all his plays are frequently about larger issues than personal problems. That is not to say he didn't draw on his life as inspiration, simply that he made those inspirations into something that everyone could connect with. Also one in three children of that period died before the age of ten so to have three children reach eleven was quite good going for the Shakespeares. Again Emmerich mentions Jonson. He had already lost a daughter at six months when his son died of the plague at the age of seven, he had more time with his family and possibly felt the losses more keenly.

In point 6 Emmerich says there are no records of Shakespeare's attendance at Stratford Grammar School. However in the book 1599, James Shapiro states "(Richard) Field and Shakespeare had been schoolmates in Stratford's grammar school". There may be no records but it is an academically accepted truth that he did go to King's New School. It is highly improbable that William did not get an education in Stratford, particularly as he was entitled to a free place since his father was the town bailiff. Emmerich goes on to say that Shakespeare would not have known about the varied subjects his plays include. At Grammar school he would have learned about music and astronomy as well as languages and the classics. I have already described how he would have had some access to higher circles than that of a glovemaker's son from Stratford. I have also mentioned that there are seven or eight lost years, during which time we have no idea what Shakespeare was doing. We therefore can not say he was not educating himself in some way. Perhaps through liaisons with wealthy women, perhaps by travelling, almost certainly he would have eavesdropped a little in taverns and picked up some information. He was also part of a group of actors. We know a little of some of them. Richard Burbage, and his brother James, were co owners of the theatres that the actors worked in. That would have made them part of a business elite and given them access to people in a variety of trades. John Heminges was a member of the Grocer's Guild and apprenticed ten young men to the guild. He would have met with people of the other Guilds and learned more about the world. Henry Condell was an church warden. The troupe had numerous members and each would have had a little knowledge that added to sum of the things the actors could draw on in their work. I believe that while William Shakespeare was the genius that created the plays, his fellow actors would have had input, perhaps suggesting a phrase heard in a pub, the inclusion of a dog among the players in Midsomer Night's Dream, a description of a burial or a little knowledge about a particular subject. Maybe they even brainstormed with him if he ever got stuck. Shakespeare may have had a vocabulary of 60, 000 words but I would be willing to be that at least a few thousand of them were learned from his fellow actors. At the end of this point Emmerich almost contradicts himself by suggesting that such a vocabulary is "not quite grammar school level". I don't quite know what he means by that.

Point seven is about the lack of work produced by Shakespeare after he retired to Stratford in his forties (He died aged 52). We know that Shakespeare was a witness in a London court case in 1612, bought property in 1613 and was in London in 1614, two years before his death. I suggested earlier that he might have had a condition that prevented him from writing.  Perhaps there was something else that forced him to stop creating works, maybe something political happened to make it more difficult for him to work. Perhaps he was simply enjoying the big house he lived in with his family. Perhaps he had writers' block. Perhaps there are lost works from that period. I don't think it in anyway proves William Shakespeare was not author of his plays.

In point eight Emmerich says there are no records that Shakespeare ever left England. This was the late 1500s-early 1600s. If you weren't nobility, having a brush with the law or in the forces records of your activities were limited. During his lost years there are no tax records for him either. We would be very lucky to find the passenger manifests of all the ships that left British ports in those years. When the Mary Rose sank in 1545 no one knew how many men were on board, between 400 and 700, and they were all naval and military men. To say Shakespeare never went abroad is akin to saying he never ate peas. It is not something we can know. Again I remind you of the lost years. It is perfectly possible he travelled through Europe, which would explain why there is no record of him being in England. Again I suggest he may well also have had contact with people who had visited foreign shores, whether they were fellow actors or noble patrons or people he simply spoke with. He was also able to read. Many of his works are drawn from older work. Plutarch's Lives is known to be one source of inspiration, AmLeth was the inspiration for Hamlet and of course the lives of previous Kings of England inspired his Histories. Which ever, it is not impossible for him to have known about foreign places. Some people point to inaccuracies in his geography. Well Shakespeare is also renowned for tweaking history. It is called artistic licence, something Emmerich surely knows plenty about

The monument in Stratford is the subject of point 9. Apparently it now looks somewhat different from its original design. An early image of the monument shows Shakespeare holding a sack of grain, not the quill and paper we see today. The monument was erected in Stratford after Shakespeare's death. In Stratford he was known as a wealthy local man who invested heavily in malt grain and was able to make loans to other residents. The fact that the monument originally showed him with a sack of grain should not be such a surprise.  His grave mentions that he is a poet, but does not mention playwriting. Emmerich himself makes the point that playwriting was not a gentleman's profession in his film.The restoration of the monument was in the 1700s, by which time Shakespeare as a playwright was much revered. David Garrick was the most famous actor of Shakespeare's work in the mid 1700s and was well respected, being a friend of Joshua Reynolds and painted by Hogarth. It would be natural for the citizens of Stratford to want to reflect their town's fame as his home in the monument.

Point 10, the famous will! His last will and testament mentions no plays, just goods and chattels. Famously Shakespeare left his 'second best bed' to his wife. Some people think it may have been the marital bed, some that it was a snub to Anne (perhaps she had found herself a friend while Shakespeare was away). Perhaps his best bed was the one in the house he shared with his family and so part of the chattels he left to Susanna. He also left money to some of his friends from the King's Men (formerly the Lord Chamberlain's Men) for them to have rings made to remember him by. Two of these friends were Henry Condell and John Heminges. These two men are the ones who finally published the complete plays of William Shakespeare as the First Folio in 1623. Emmerich asks why there are no manuscripts or other versions of the plays in the will. Copyright was a concept in its infancy in the 1600s. Copyright is the legal ownership of intellectual property; such as plays, novels, songs, films. In the 1600s only the Stationers' Company was allowed to register publications, usually books. Anything published outside of their register was effectively unprotected, and the Stationers were allowed to seize works that offended their sensibilities. As none of his plays were formally published in his lifetime, Shakespeare may have believed that he was not legally the owner of the works. He may have given the original manuscripts to the actors of his troupe, or indeed may never have truly been the owner of papers that were used regularly and exclusively by the Lord Chamberlain's/King's Men. Parliament did not exist until more than 50 years after his death, and copyright as a legal concept was not fully recognised until then. Omitting his works from his will does not mean he did not make them, only that he felt he did not own them or have the right to pass them on. Even the folio published by Condell and Heminges would not have had full copyright protection and they would not have been able to pass it on to their heirs.

Of course Emmerich wants to invoke controversy and outrage, he has a film to promote. However it is of some concern that he has not fully developed his arguments and I believe the film does not present any alternative to his version. It is rumoured that some American schools plan to use the film in teaching Shakespeare, I can only hope that they teach the full story.

Please take the time to investigate for yourself, read 1599 (see Favourite Books on the left), read other texts on the subject, read or watch the plays. Go to Stratford-Upon-Avon and visit his houses. Read what the Shakespeare's Birthplace Trust have to say on the matter. Who ever wrote the plays it is the work that is a cornerstone of British literature and language. I believe it could well have been the man from Stratford. I believe they matter more than their author now.

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(PS William Shakespeare is buried in Stratford under a gravestone that says:

"Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear,"

"To dig the dust enclosed here."

"Blessed be the man that spares these stones,"

"And cursed be he who moves my bones.

So far Shakespeare's wish has been honoured, even during restoration of the church in 2008, and until one day someone breaks his wish and accepts the curse, we may never know all there is to know about him. Perhaps he is buried with his manuscripts, perhaps there is evidence that he was unable to hold a quill pen. Perhaps he is not even there. We will never know.)

Where am I?

I was recently watching All Roads Lead Home and heard Stephen Mangan say "If you are not aware of where you are, you are not really there".
I don't generally expect depth and profundity from comedians but I thought this was a remarkable observation.
If your mind is not thinking about the place you are in then where is it?
Sometimes it is good for the mind to wander, to explore ideas or imaginary worlds, and I would recommend such mental exercise when doing something mundane like the washing up. But if you are on a journey, in a new place or even having quiet time at home, take some time to admire your surroundings and get to know the place you are in, and make yourself really be there.

I'm a Romantic at Heart

Romanticism isn't about boy meets girl, it is about the way nature asserts, or reasserts itself over the work of man. It is about man being of nature, inspired by it and creating work to honour it. It is about the individual as a creator of beautiful things. Noted Romantics include Scott, Byron, Shelley, Mary Shelley, Taylor Colerridge and Turner.

Tintern Abbey by JMW Turner

As a movement it began as a reaction to Enlightenment, a period of scientific discovery and invention that set the ball rolling for the Industrial Revolution. Some people, then as now, feared that industrialisation would over run the country and destroy the beauty of the British countryside. The natural intuitive instinct of man was prized by the Romantics over rationalism. They valued ingenuity, authentic authorship and inspiration above laborious repetition and recording of data.

So I am a contradiction. I love science, particularly physics, and yet I hanker for the realm of the imagination, the lone individual rising above to create works of heroic individuality. I have an enlightened head and a romantic heart!

Write your own story.

When you think you might want to write a novel or short story, sometime the idea you have is really good but it's just a kernel, a few sentences. So what you need to do is to write it down, as below.

Expand the first sentence into three sentences. Then ask a question about each sentence. Write three sentences to answer each question.

Keep going till you have half a dozen pages - there you are you've written a short story! All you need to do now is refine it, tidy up the descriptions, make sure it all makes sense and remember to save it!

If you want to make a novel out of it, just keep expanding. You don't have to follow every thread you've created, some won't be as interesting as others. You may find one thread leads you off on a whole new tangent.

This concept was inspired by Lazette's Phase system of outlining a novel. Nobosy's way is the write way, just suggestions to help you build up your own way.

The News or the Daily Drama

Today I happened to be listening to Radio 2 in the car. In the business section of Simon Mayo's show they interviewed a person from the HPA (Health Protection Agency) who said that they had found that there was a small theoretical risk of infection from the Garra Rufa fish pedicures.
2 hours later, again in the car, I was listening to a local commercial station who get their news from Sky. They ran the same story with the words "A government agency has proved that HIV and Hepatitis can be passed on by fish pedicures". Now that phrasing gives and entirely different perspective on the story. They didn't offer any interviews with or explanations from spokespeople from the HPA, just a salon owner who offers the fish pedicure.
The first article was reasoned, calm, informative and honest.
The second was alarmist, inaccurate and probably quite damaging to the people who offer the treatment.
Imagine if you only heard the second item. You would believe that the treatment is dangerous.
Now imagine if all you listen to is inaccurate, commercial news. The whole world becomes full of evil and danger.
But who can you trust? If often seems that even the BBC is becoming more sensationalist and alarmist.
I think the answer is to read around, look around. Try to find your information from as many sources as you can. After a while you will start to recognise the ones that are alarmist and sensationalist and you will begin to tune your awareness and will recognise who to trust.
Make your mind up from the best sources you can find, don't put your faith in just one.

NaNoWriMo

NaNoWriMo = National Novel Writing Month (although it is now international). It is now an annual event that takes place over the course of November. It is essentially a challenge to write, from scratch 50,000 words that will form the basis of a novel. Most novels are around about 90 to 10 thousand words. The idea is to just write. Not to worry about the quality, not to fret over details, and even not to worry about the thread of the plot. Just go.
This is the first time I've done this and since I have hit a brick wall with the story I have been working on I figured I may as well drop that for now and go down the WriMo route for four weeks.
I have the vague beginnings of an idea forming so I hope that when November 1st arrives I will be able to get started.
Wish me luck.

Information Junkie

One of the many ways I describe myself is as an Information Junkie.
For as long as I can remember I have been unable to pass any text without reading it, and rereading it, and again, even if it is just the blurb on the cornflakes packet and milk carton. (This is not to say I retain all the information.) I always pick up leaflets, bits of paper in National Trust properties, the flyers they hand out at gigs, anything off a big display of pamphlets. Articles in magazines that I clip out and put in a folder. I want to know. I can't resist. I need to know. (Sometimes I eventually get round to recycling the leaflet.)
I don't remember when I first became a sharer. These days though whenever I read something I usually think of someone who might find the information useful - not so much with my cereal box I admit - and will email it to them or write it down for the next time I see them. Just recently I sent a friend a picture of an elephant ornament you can paint - she loves elephants - and for once I got a thank you. I think most people just assume I am bonkers. Perhaps they forget that once, 5 years ago, they mentioned that they wanted to find a wim wom for their mustard mill and now they don't know why I am sending them pictures of wim woms.
Some people find it a bit annoying - "stop filling my inbox up" - but it is never done with malice. I truly believe that I might one day find the key piece of information that will really make a difference to someone's life. Part of me even believes that I might eventually stumble across something that makes the difference to my own life. Perhaps one day I may make a really important connection - like sending a picture of a helix to Francis Crick, asking Shakespeare why people breed or telling Copernicus I feel dizzy when I look up at the sun.

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Thanks to Ma for the wonderful phrase 'a wim wom off a mustard mill' to describe a thingamajig.

Subtitles or signed

How do you think?
I know a lot of people think as though they are watching a video of the actions they are thinking about.
Stephen Hawking clearly thinks in numbers.
I know of one person who has a mental Roladex (TM) in her head and when she wants to retrieve an idea she simply flicks though the cards.
Me? Every thought I have is subtitled. The words hover there in front of my mind's eye (as a result I often watch telly with the subtitles on and then wonder why it looks weird if I watch someone else's TV). And, like live subtitles, if a word feels wrong I will edit it as I go, kind of like word processing! As you can see from my blog though, my retrieval system is pretty haphazard. It can be effective, if I visualise a word I can often recall various associations with it -  a mental thesaurus if you like.
So how about you? How do you process the world in your mind? How do you dig up memories, facts and faces?

It's behind you

First thought, and one that has bothered me for a while now, is why can't you see behind you?
Seems obvious right? It's cos our eyes are at the front.
But my point is where does your vision stop? And what does the brain fill it with?
Imagine your head is a sphere, like an orange. If you cut it in half, roughly from ear to ear and over the top of your skull, one half, with your eyes in it represents all you can see from one edge of your peripheral vision to the other. The other half is the back of your head. As far as your vision is concerned it doesn't exist.
But concentrate for a minute, stare at the screen but think about what is at the edges of your vision -for me it's the book case one side and the wall the other. Now I know what is beyond because it's my room, but there is no black line where the edge is, there is no big black void where I can't see. On the other hand the image of the bookcase is 180 degrees from that of the wall. They don't join up.
So what is my brain doing? Ignoring it all? It certainly isn't filling it up with dark space. I am completely unaware of what is behind me until I turn to see it.
Do babies have this void? Or is it something our brains just learn to ignore so that by the time we are walking it is so invisible we can't even see it if we focus hard?

What is behind you?

Notes

I have a notebook in every room, one in every bag and two in the car. I never leave home without a pen. I love the feel of a pen gliding across the paper, transmitting the contents of my mind to a permanent record.
I want to capture these fluttering thoughts, wrangle and wrestle them into submission and get them down so I can ponder and cogitate on the issues they raise.
As well as my thoughts I will share with you weblinks relevant to these ideas: answers to my questions. I hope that along the way we will all learn something new and one day some of us might hit upon the single notion that might change our lives.

My portfolio of thoughts

Here I am to share my thoughts with the world.
Some will be questions, some ideas, some totally random, other inspired by life as it happens.