Absolutely clueless
Okay I’m having some trouble with Mr Fayer and his ABSOLUTELY SMALL. Has anyone else read it? In the first place. His Schrodinger’s cats. He suggests 1000 boxes with 1000 cats in them, one each. The cats—ALL the cats, each and EVERY ONE of the cats—are a mixture of 50% alive and 50% dead. Already I’m confused. What do you MEAN 50% alive and 50% dead? What? How? Why? By what MEASUREMENT (which of course is The Question*) are they 50% alive and 50% dead? What does this mean to the CATS? And then, having shut up all these possibly ailing and distressed cats in boxes, which cannot be a positive reinforcement of whatever their level of well-being might have been before you did shut them up in the boxes**, you start . . . opening the boxes. And by the fact of your opening the box and peering inside the cat magically—yes, I said magically—mutates into a pure state of either 100% aliveness or 100% deadness. WHY? THIS IS NOT HOW A CAT IN A BOX BEHAVES.*** Unless of course it DIES of a HEART ATTACK the moment it sees you. And after the first few hundred boxes you have a nervous breakdown as a result of your sense of responsibility for the deaths of (approximately) 500 out of 1000 cats. Not to mention the prospect of trying to support the liveness of 500 frelling cats until you can convince the RSPCA to come and take them away . . . and also try to convince the RSPCA that they shouldn’t sue the crap out of you for animal abuse, although, supposing they arrive before you run out of cat food, the vibrant, 100% healthiness of the 500 live cats should at least confuse the issue.
I don’t think I’m getting out of this example what I’m supposed to be getting out of it.†
And then there’s the whole ‘absolute’ size thing. He goes through the business of how we interpret size as relative. Something is large or small as soon as we have something to compare it to. A photograph of two rocks with a blank background tells us nothing about the size of the rocks till the background is adjusted to have a piece of human being in it for scale. I don’t myself see how this is a difference in kind with his ‘absolutes’ of ‘large’ being something you can set up an experiment to observe with a negligible alteration to the thing observed compared with ‘small’ being something you cannot set up an experiment to observe with negligible alterations—‘small’ means all experiments create non-negligible, which is to say substantial, alterations, no matter how clever you think you are, which pretty well futzes your experiment. How is this not relative? It’s relative to your ability to create an experiment with this or that outcome. It’s relative to your size and galumphingness. If we were the size of photons, we could create a sufficiently sub-photonic experiment to measure photons,†† photons being one of those absolutely-small things. I get it (I think I get it) that large means you can straightforwardly create useful experiments and small means you can’t, but—to this English lit major—this just means some science bozo is inventing new definitions for ‘small’ and ‘large’. That’s fine. The small and large part works. It’s the stuff around it I’m having some trouble with.
And then . . . back to reality . . . He says, ‘Imagine that a small boy weighing 50 pounds runs into you going 20 miles per hour.’ WHAT? How is this small boy weighing 50 pounds managing to run into you going 20 miles per hour? Turbo-charged roller skates?††† His parents should be had up for criminal negligence. Then he says, ‘Now imagine that a 200-pound man runs into you going 5 miles per hour. . . . The small boy is light and moving fast. The man is heavy and moving slow.’ EDITOR’S NOTE: that should be slowly. ‘Both have the same momentum. . . . In some sense, both would have the same impact when they collide with you. Of course, this example should not be taken too literally. The boy might hit you in the legs while the man would hit you in the chest. . . .’ Emphasis mine. He never does mention the boy’s propulsion system. I’m still worried about the chances of a small boy with negligent parents and turbo-charged roller skates living long enough to grow up and become a famous Olympic sprinter.
And finally . . . the maths question. On the VERY FIRST PAGE of the preface Fayer says that all we have to do is develop our ‘quantum mechanics intuition’ which is what this book is for. He says: ‘This lack of a picture of how [certain quantum-challenged] things work arises from a seemingly insurmountable barrier to understanding. Usually that barrier is mathematics.’ To understand these things not immediately obvious to the unenhanced human eye ‘ . . . requires an understanding of quantum theory BUT IT ACTUALLY DOESN’T REQUIRE MATHEMATICS.’ Emphasis again mine. ‘ . . . the presentation in this book is descriptive. Diagrams replace the many equations with the exception of SOME SMALL ALGEBRAIC EQUATIONS—AND THESE SIMPLE EQUATIONS ARE EXPLAINED IN DETAIL.’
THIS IS MATHS! THIS IS TOTALLY MATHS!
I don’t think it’s merely an excess of figgy pudding pressing on my brain here.‡
* * *
* See: absolutely small, which means that you can’t create a means to observe it without also creating non-negligible change to what you’re trying to observe. This is also a working definition of ‘spitchered’.
** Speaking of altering what you were trying to observe.
*** This is much more my experience of cats in boxes: http://www.cafepress.co.uk/+womens_dark_tshirt,137590640
† He says demurely ‘I have to admit to simplifying a little bit here. . . .’ Um. But it turns out all he’s referring to is the number of live and dead cats. You probably would not get exactly 500 of the one and 500 of the other. Oh. Okay. Like that addresses any of my problems with this parable.
†† And if he gets his totally-ignoring-reality Schrodinger’s cat metaphor then I get this totally-ignoring-reality itty-bitty extremely molecularly dense human metaphor.
††† Aren’t there some physics, speaking of physics, about how fast it’s literally possible for a substantially shorter rather than a substantially taller person to run, aside from talent and fitness and so on? Which means a small boy—fifty pounds is little—is even more unlikely to be going 20 mph. Without turbo-charged roller skates.
‡ EMoon:
Where is the digestion I had in my 20s, when immense amounts of anything I liked could be ingested without discomfort or weight gain or…whatever?
The one . . . the one thing to be said for having spent the last forty frelling years fighting my own personal daily battle with my waistline is that when I hit menopause and the diet wars became dirty, scorched-earth and take-no-prisoners, I was to some degree ready. I mean, I wasn’t ready, I’m appalled at how little I get to eat^ and how much I pay for it when I stray a spoonful of brandy butter over the line. But I am used to the mindset of Calories Are the Enemy, and most of my menopausal friends weren’t, aren’t and won’t be. I’m not utterly without, you should forgive the term, form in the matter of assuming all food is guilty until proved innocent.^^ This is not to say I won’t eventually get old and tired and say THE HELL WITH IT. I WANT TO EAT TOAST AGAIN. WITH BUTTER. AND MARMALADE. But at the moment—and this is a conversation I have had with myself at least every winter solstice holiday period for several years now, and at various less predictable times dotted about the calendar, and the situation is getting relentlessly more extreme—I’m still thinking about my rather ramshackle skeletal system, its weight-bearing capacity, and the hurtling of hellhounds, and I figure I can live like this a while longer. Which is, I repeat, not to say there will not come a day when I decide on toast.^^^ But preferably after SHADOWS—or the PEGASUS trilogy—has made me a multi-zillionaire and I can afford to replace my entire wardrobe.
^ And how much less than that I do in fact eat, so I can keep my CHOCOLATE and sugar in my tea.
^^ And in this courtroom, it won’t be proved innocent.
^^^ One might almost say ‘plump for’.
Boxing Day
In which we take all the boxes, the bags, the ribbons, the wrapping paper, the already-broken bits, the totally unidentifiable shreds of whatever and the stuff that should go straight to Oxfam and bundle it up somehow and start making vague plans to have a Major Dump Run in the near future.
I think I’m suffering Caloric Hangover. Or that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.* I started ABSOLUTELY SMALL on Pooka on the morning hurtle** and it’s like . . . what?*** Oh, gods, frelling science again.† I thought it was going to be the last lost volume of THE BORROWERS.
I’m also still listening to Christmas carols while hellhounds and I lie on the sofa admiring the view††† and reading about roses and maths.‡ This year’s favourite album is an old Maddy Prior and the Carnival Band one: Gold Frankincense & Myrrh‡‡ which I slap back into the player every time Peter is out of the room for a bit.‡‡‡ The lyrics are included. Maybe I could try singing along. . . .
* * *
* Mmmm. Christmas pudding with brandy butter. Mmmm.
** The drawback to frelling holidays is that TOTALLY FRAUDULENT sense that you HAVE MORE TIME TO DO STUFF. Of course in the present situation what I haven’t got is more time, but there are only so many hours a day I can spend on SHADOWS without a total systems crash, and trying to defibrillate wetware can be tricky. So I spent some quality time this morning, while I was testing the amount of caffeine required to get us on line, putting 1,000,000,000 pairs of All Stars back on their shelves^ and hoovering up the ankle-deep shed geranium petals in the cottage attic. And in consequence found myself eating lunch at 3 pm again. Drat.
^ Yes. I have All Star shelves.
*** I’m also having some trouble with the narrator, who I think in an attempt to sound properly serious and scientific instead sounds like your old chemistry teacher who really wanted to fail you.
† Although I suspect Fayer of having forgotten, or rather of never having known in the first place, what it’s like being an ordinary dumb^ non-science person. In my day one of the few things I ‘learnt’ about the scientific method was that it was lofty and detached and had no contact either with individual subjective humanness^^ or with whatever was being studied. The scientist stood at the correct distance with his (or occasionally her) clipboard and took cool objective notes.^^^ Then they discovered that inconvenient business about how the simple fact of observing certain things—teeny subatomic particles, say—changed them, and what do we all do now? In this 2010 book Fayer mentions in passing at the beginning that ‘of course we interact with what we observe’ . . . and then keeps going to make his real point about the ‘absolute’ difference between small and large.~ WAIT A MINUTE. EVERY SCIENCE TEACHER I EVER HAD~~ IS STANDING IN THE BACK OF THE ROOM AND GIBBERING.
And if that’s not bad enough, he starts with Schrodinger’s damn cat. But @juliagertrud posted the perfect answer to all things Schrodinger’s cat on Twitter a few days ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itQVDA6_TME&feature=g-user-u&context=G2ac07aeUCGXQYbcTJ33bJuwRQr7QRamAJkMSiCooYTc_y_vBnibw
And I’m delighted to hear that Schrodinger himself called it ‘burlesque’.
^ I’m still going to get back to you on the not-calling-myself-dumb thing. But not tonight.
^^ ‘I ate too much Christmas pudding last night.’ ‘Is that really cute lab tech trying to catch my eye?’ ‘If I don’t pick up my dry cleaning soon they’re going to give it to Oxfam.’
^^^ This is, just by the way, one of the reasons I bailed on the scientific method. There is no such thing as objectivity. Except in a pure, philosophical, Plato’s-cave sort of way, which is of limited use down here on the ground.
~ Which seems to be—but I haven’t got my hard copy of the paper book here to check, and this is probably another one I’ll have to listen to twice—that ‘absolutely small’ means that you can’t set up an experiment that won’t disturb it to a disruptive degree. ‘Large’ means that you can set up an experiment that will not be derailed by the fact that you’re observing it. I think this is deeply cool (supposing I’ve got it right). It’s like you grew up with north, south, east and west and if you ever said well what about in or out or Middle Earth you were given detention. And someone is now telling you no, it’s vortex, gron, megabat, dibbleworthy and trout, and it’s more like Middle Earth than it is like north and south. Oh. Okay. Give me a minute. I think I’ll like this. If maybe you could just give me a bucket of ice water for my head.
~~ This would be up to fifty years ago, remember. Fifty years ago we were still hunting mammoths with spears.
†† Diane in MN wrote:
May your computer come to the miracle step of its flowchart and return to normal function.
How I love Sidney Harris, who decades before xkcd^ was telling us science was funny: http://www.leasingnews.org/Sidney_Harris/probability.gif
http://two.leasingnews.org/cartoons/RUSTY-(5).jpg
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. . . And who clearly also has dogs.
But we will not discuss my computers the day after Christmas.^^
^^ The fact that there is a blog post is all you need to know on the day after Christmas.
††† Didn’t get any tinsel up today however. Hoovering the attic was enough. But Georgiana did come for tea and trained Peter and me rigorously in Kindle use. I had to go download a couple of new things onto Astarte afterward just so I didn’t feel all hopeless and retro. I wonder if I can convince Peter that his Kindle needs a name?
‡ Now there is a combination to fry the eyeballs and turn the brain into pancake batter.
‡‡ Which I bought that year, 2001, when we saw them live at South Bank . . . and I was too chickenlivered to ask for an autograph. Yes. Really.
‡‡‡ When I was first over here we had to negotiate how long and how intensely I was allowed to play my Christmas music. Generally speaking I play it nonstop from Peter’s birthday through New Year’s and stop, and Peter promises not to kill me. Although we do get the MESSIAH all year.
Susan in Melbourne wrote:
To which I offer http://www.youtube.com:80/watch?v=ZCFCeJTEzNU, but you’ll have to watch, not just listen.
My favourite is this, and I can’t remember how I first saw it, but it may well have been someone on the forum:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXh7JR9oKVE
Which you also have to watch as well as listen. One of the things that makes me catch my breath every time is that very first woman standing up and singing. In the circumstances where does she get the nerve?
It’s Sunday, therefore I am short of sleep*
But we had eight ringers this morning. EIGHT. I’m trying to remember the last time we had eight ringers for our eight bells. After a howling gale with rain hammering on the windows at 7:45 am when the frelling alarm went off, and me lurching swollen-eyed around the cottage saying, I don’t want to go out in this, I don’t WANT to go out in this . . . at 8:45 it suddenly cleared off and became blue and dazzling and glorious. And all the bells rang out. . . .
Another day passes as a seventeen-year-old named Maggie.** I envy her the amount she can still eat, but other than that I’m okay to stick with the elderly decrepit me. She’s also a lot better constructed*** to cope with the intrusive magic besieging her landscape than I am. I was thinking about this again after posting about how unsettling I found Aeon Flux the other night at the cinema: I’m what you might call professionally off balance, I’d really rather not fall down the rest of the way, I might hurt myself†. So if a dragon†† flew into the courtyard at the mews††† tomorrow would I be more or less likely than the average bystanding human to say, oh, hey, cool, that’s a dragon, or run screaming?
Blither blither blither blither. It’s been another good day as a seventeen-year-old named Maggie and as a result (a) I have no brain and (b) I’m having some trouble climbing back out of the vocabulary of an alternate-reality teenager. I was also thinking‡ about the way I think of SHADOWS as my first ‘genuine’ teenage high school novel, which probably ought to be DRAGONHAVEN. Except that Jake’s a grown up by the end with a kid of his own‡‡ . . . and more crucially, since a lot of my protagonists start out teenagers, he doesn’t go to high school. Maggie goes to high school. Yeep. She takes algebra. Double yeep. With reference to my saying on these virtual pages some time recently that my hard sciences/maths phobia is probably largely due to very bad teaching . . . it’s probably taken me these forty-plus years also to come to a point where I can face going with a character back through the doors of an average suburban high school. Well, maybe not quite average, but . . . ‡‡‡
Meanwhile, speaking of hard science, I’m about to download§ James Gleick’s CHAOS. www.Audible.co.uk, that ratbag, is having another 25% off sale for members so I was cruising for more tasty hard(ish) science. As I’ve told you before I tend to avoid customer reviews of fiction—what ordinary readers want out of fiction is just too, um, various—but I usually do read reviews of nonfiction because there I am a very ordinary reader and may learn something from the same. Not infrequently you see some aggrieved and outraged person saying, you’re going to have to buy the hard copy too! You’re not going to be able to make sense of the maths from the audio! Snork. I wouldn’t frelling dream of trying to cope with any of this stuff without having the underlinable-paper copy also at hand. Self-improvement is expensive.§§
Having said that, I got out of step with BRIEFER HISTORY OF TIME and, having finished the audiobook a couple of days ago, the paper version finally fell through my door yesterday. And . . . um . . . well, there are no equations§§§ but the illustrations make it worse. Electron interference (p 98)? Feynman diagram of Virtual Particle/Antiparticle Pair (p 123)? What? If I’d picked it up in a shop, instead of on Audible, I’d’ve put it down again.
Meanwhile . . . Hannah is going to read CHAOS too. We’re going to have a book club of two. And if anyone had told me thirty years ago that Hannah and I were going to agree to read a book describing The Third Great 20th Century Revolution in the Physical Sciences (after relativity and quantum mechanics) at all, let alone over the Christmas holidays for light distraction from the figgy pudding, I’d have probably made myself sick laughing.
Menopause Brain Rules.
* * *
* I was distracted from the passage of time by reading UNDER MILKWOOD. Haven’t read it since college, I think. Golly. I may have to blog about this. I read Dylan Thomas in my teens, of course, As One Does, or at least As One Did if one fancied oneself a sensitive literary intellectual in the 1960s (adolescence, I believe, optional). But . . . GOLLY. Also WOW.
** Over-identification with fictional characters? What you say?
*** You should forgive the term
† Also being elderly, decrepit etc.
†† Although there aren’t any dragons in SHADOWS. I don’t think. Er.
††† And good luck to it: parking is already an ordeal and a torment.
‡ Which is generally considered to be a function limited to those in possession of brains
‡‡ This is not my idea of a spoiler, but if it is any of yours, apologies.
‡‡‡ It’s not as if all my teachers were dire. I had a lovely algebra teacher—I’ve told you about her. We left Japan, and the algebra teacher who told me I was the stupidest child she’d ever taught, mid-school-year, and when we got back to America two months later the principal at my new school laughed a lot and tried to put me back a grade. I could cope with the catch-up everywhere but algebra—and they would have put me back a grade if it hadn’t been for Penelope Windsor Curry. If you’re out there anywhere, and have taken to reading fantasy writers’ blogs in your retirement, thank you very much.
§ I hope I’m about to download . . . insert a few practise screams of rage and frustration here.
§§ And it’s not, it seems to me, as if they’ve got all the bugs out of the electronic delivery system yet either. An iPhone is a finite entity.^ After I’ve listened to something I delete it, of course: if I want to listen to it again I can always re-download it^^ from my Audible ‘library’. But—as the little iPhone warning box tells you—if you delete it you will lose all your notes and bookmarks. Gee. Thanks guys. That’s really foresightful programming.
^ Speaking of finite, as in computer memory, I had an email from Raphael, Computer Archangel, on Friday, and he says what a good thing I went for the ridiculously huge hard drive, that he’d been doing the sums, and . . .
I should have my new laptop next week.
^^ . . . theoretically
§§§ As I recall this was one of the red herrings about the previous one—there were no equations, how hard can it be? Um. . . .
Tangents
I just this minute received an email from someone who says that PEGASUS is the best book she ever read. ::Beams:: *
. . . And at this point I went off on a whole series of tangents, so I’ll just have to tell you about today’s singing lesson** and tonight’s tower practise tomorrow.
* * *
* As I keep saying, the good, friendly book mail far outnumbers the bad and/or hostile book mail.^ But some of the stuff that comes up regularly, if infrequently, from the antipathetic division still baffles me. Now, not all books and not all writers appeal to everyone^^, which is fine. I have a few bizarre prejudices of my own.^^^ But if you don’t like my books, don’t read them, you know? Life is short. Find books you do like. I’m resigned, after over thirty years in the business, to the people who think my books are toooooooo slooooooow.# But there’s a new variant of this, which is the people who think nothing happens in PEGASUS. What? Is there another book out there called PEGASUS? And the post-blog variant on the evergreen question of the character, personality and shortcomings of authors is the ‘I have read your blog and you are the most loathsome, arrogant and self-absorbed pillock I have ever [virtually] met and I’m certainly never going to read any of your books again.’ Oh. Well, aside from whatever happened to ‘if you don’t have anything nice to say, shut the frell up’## . . . I totally understand wanting to back away from the writer of this blog slowly, murmuring words like ‘Valium’### and ‘how much tea does she say she drinks?’, and watching me closely for sudden moves and/or sharp shiny objects. Everyone in my life tells me I need to learn to calm down. If you want to tell me too, get in line. And the self-absorbed . . . sigh. Well, yes, but do you know how hard it is to write a daily blog? I’m the best material I’ve got, because if I say anything too outrageous I’ve only got myself to sue. This includes getting my own research wrong, which can be embarrassing if it’s about anyone else. I also totally understand that I’m not to everyone’s taste any more than my books are. But the same principle applies: no one’s holding a gun to your head. You don’t have to read this blog. I object to the epithets loathsome and arrogant. I probably don’t like you very well either, whoever you are. I suspect you of having a deficient sense of humour.
^ For which I am devoutly grateful. Believe me. Devoutly. Grateful. People who like your books are much likelier to buy them, and the bottom line is still that to keep writing, most writers need to keep eating. Having a day job works for some writers but I don’t have enough brain to have two real jobs. Back in the days when I couldn’t earn a living off my books I mostly did low-brain-activity stuff, like [ancient lost occupation alert] typing up clean submissible copies of other people’s papers and mucking out stalls+. I spent two years full-time in publishing—in a proper job in publishing—and had to quit because I didn’t have enough brain left over to write my own stories. So are we clear about this? I am VERY GRATEFUL for my readers. THANK YOU. They—you—mean I don’t have to retrain as a till operator.++ I have to write stories, so I would be sweating sentences and paragraphs on evenings and weekends+++, whatever else I was doing to keep eating. But if I was having to waste eight-plus hours a day delivering flowers or pumping petrol, I would be writing a lot slower. And I’m slow enough as it is.%
+ Yes, often very similar.
++ I was just talking to someone who said, never mind the tedium of holding millions of items over the bar-code reader—and the eternal poisoned chalice that is plenary contact with the public—think of having to listen to that beeping all day.~
~ There’s a flap going on over here at present about raising retirement age because the population bulge of oldies is going to break social services some day soon. What I am not seeing, although I admit I’m not following the debate very closely, is some discussion of the practical constraints on the elderly end of your work force. Your average builder is not going to be up to carrying hods when he (or she) is seventy, whatever the government says. Nor is your average nursery-school teacher going to be up to chasing three-year-olds all day when she (or he) is seventy—whatever the government says. What are we going to train these people to do instead? And when are we going to do it? If your occupation is listed as ‘nursery school teacher’ or ‘builder’ will you get a postcard through your door on your fiftieth birthday telling you to report to the nearest retraining centre? You also get less trainable as you get older. And you need more downtime: will the over-65s be allowed longer lunch breaks and shorter days? Or are we trying to pretend that old age and death are something that only happen if you’re careless?
+++ Or equivalent. I would probably be looking for graveyard shift jobs. I could go to bed after service ring on Sundays.
% Ten novels in thirty years, approximately. Ugh.
^^ And a good thing too. I wouldn’t want to live in the Big Brother world where they did.
^^^ Shakespeare, for example.
# I permit myself to say that while no writer ever got it exactly right, I do write what I want to read. As a reader I like slow—not too slow, but slow—I adore George Eliot, okay? I’m one of those people who think MIDDLEMARCH is as close to perfect as any novel has ever got.+ Discursive is good. Discursive makes the world open up around you the reader, whether it has fairies and unicorns or snappy barouches drawn by matched pairs of bays in it. The books that annoy me are the ones that are all action adventures. Sit down and look at a tree occasionally, will you? And tell me something about your mates besides that they have legendary swords with names like Meatgrinder and Eyeball Poker.++
+ Except for Will Ladislaw. But I will entertain the argument that he’s supposed to be less than Dorothea is worth, and it’s all about irony and reality.
++ I would not be good at writing this kind of story.
## I’m so old. Yes, I remember wearing white gloves and a hat when you got dressed up too.
### I’m allergic to Valium. —I arrived at this place of believing that standard doctor medicine is guilty until proven innocent—and that the side effects are usually worse than the disease—honestly.
** I feel a bit guilty for the amount of time I’ve been spending on music and singing lately since I do try to swap what I write about around a bit to keep it more interesting.^ But it’s really nice having so many of you on the forum talking about your own experiences. Which reminds me. I was chasing something in the forum today and fell into Talk for the first time in months. And discovered several references that indicated that some of you posting believed that I would see them. No. Wrong. If you want me to read a comment it HAS to go on a blog thread. I’m a little time-challenged, you know? I’m not ignoring you because I am arrogant and loathsome, I’m not reading Talk because I don’t have time—but I like the idea that the Days in the Life ‘community’ can have its own conversations without me. I should perhaps check with the mods and Blogmom about this, but I wouldn’t object to a comment in a blog thread that you wanted me to read that wasn’t about the blog post, if you follow me. Or maybe we need a sticky thread at the top of the blog thread category for ‘yo Robin read this’. I’m still probably not going to answer—see: time-challenged—but I do read through all the blog threads. Okay, I don’t absolutely guarantee to be awake at the time, but . . .
^ You are obliged to be passionately interested in method ringing however. You saw that in the fine print when you joined the forum, didn’t you?
Chinese Cresteds and Giraffes
Note: the following is my usual nightly flippancy. But I’m lighting candles for all of you watching Irene come closer and closer.
* * *
The first thing to say about audiobooks is . . . there aren’t nearly enough of them*. And, while I’m on the subject, here’s an Ask Robin that comes up again and again and again—and I have answered it before but maybe if we can get it into the archive loudly enough people will start finding it there—or at least I can stop feeling guilty for failing to answer the steady stream of queries.
Audiobooks—like ebooks—tend, or anyway have tended, to be your publisher’s concern. Usually your standard book contract includes that you’re selling your audio- and e- rights as well as the 3D with pages option.
This is changing. Sigh. Generally speaking, and despite the amount of work it all is, I think that this being on line and a human being among other on-line human beings and producing something, in my case a blog and some tweets, is a good thing for those of us with some public profile—although this is of course going to vary with the kind and intensity of that profile. But the techno-whizzy stuff that makes this direct communication possible makes other things possible too. Sitting at home with your typewriter was at least simple.
Merrilee is busy trying to sort out the perilous shambles of my thirty-plus years of book contracts containing frequently vague, muddled, and un-foresightful language about non-dead-tree editions. She thinks I might have something useful to say about both audio- and e- sooner rather than later. Meanwhile . . . anyone reading this . . . please don’t ask me again. I’ll tell you here as soon as I know anything.
The next thing to say about audiobooks is that I downloaded my first digital masterpiece onto the freshly polished up and fully functioning Pooka for this morning’s hellhound hurtle and . . . twenty minutes later my earphones died. Siiiiigh.**
* * *
Sometimes you get a break you don’t deserve. But then there are a lot of breaks you probably should have had and didn’t*** so you might as well enjoy one that comes along dressed up like a birthday present. I’m still diabolically short of sleep† and working too hard and by this evening post-hurtle and time to go to tower practise I very nearly phoned Niall and cried off. I didn’t only because I know how short-handed we usually are; I told Peter if enough people turned up I’d come home early. There were five to begin, so I couldn’t leave; a sixth turned up and then I really couldn’t leave, because none of us were beginners so we could ring minor. My first break of the evening occurred when Niall, who is curiously deaf to pleas of tiredness, called for St Clements, which has way too many dodges on the front and way too much weirdness at the back and furthermore you have to make places in the middle. It’s one of the methods I’m supposed to know how to ring because he and Colin drag me through it on handbells occasionally. GAAAH.
And then . . . I actually did ring it. What? How did that happen? How mysterious. How gratifying. It was only a plain course, but even a plain course was clearly beyond me tonight.†† Niall and I were just entering into negotiation on the subject of Cambridge††† when Colin and Anthea showed up, which made eight—which meant I still couldn’t leave (gently glowing from my St Clements triumph) because now we could ring major.
I admit I got myself into this one. Niall called for plain bob major and I shuffled my feet a little and asked if I could ring inside. Of course! they all chorused. It’s practise night! So I grabbed the two and trembled. Now, old ringing hands will tell you in an attempt to be reassuring that all the plain bob methods are exactly alike, you just keep adding bells on the back end. Ahem. This is exactly alike like a hairless Crested Chinese Dog is like a giraffe because they’re both mammals. It is true that the basic structure is the same—but the basic structure of the Chinese Crested and the giraffe is the same too. The devil is in the details.
I know what the line is to bob major. I know what the calls mean, and if one of them knocks you off your perch, I even know (theoretically) what you should do next. Theory is great. And in practise you have one-third of a second to get your bell to go ‘dong’ in the right place. Just before we pulled off Colin, who was conducting, looked at the clock and said, I don’t think we quite have time for a quarter peal. I had my mouth open, but Amy, next to me, got in first: No. Better hadn’t, I added. I’ve only ever rung a plain course a few times—I’ve never rung a touch at all. Ahhhhh, said Colin.
I would have been doing well to stagger through a short first touch on a good night, when I was awake and had some brain left. I only ever learn anything by grind, and I haven’t anything like ground bob major to a fine tilth. But . . . every now and then you get a break you don’t deserve, and maybe Niall has a point about ringing handbells (eventually) having some (positive) effect on your tower ringing—and maybe all those hoary old veterans comparing Chinese Cresteds to giraffes aren’t totally out to lunch either—and we had a good band tonight. We rang a long hot, terrifying touch, during which I was frequently convinced there were at least sixteen ropes bobbing up and down—especially as the temperature in the ringing chamber rose—and Colin was taking no prisoners, and some of the calls did knock me off my perch. And once or twice I had to be dragged out of the thickets and pointed back in the direction I was supposed to be going.
But I did it. Twenty minutes of frelling bob major. And to think last week I was complaining about twenty minutes of mere bob doubles.‡
Yaay me.
* * *
*Audible.co.uk shouts Over 50,000 titles! Which, if it were your personal choice of 50,000 titles, would be an overwhelming abundance of riches. But when it’s 50,000 of somebody else’s choice of titles, including a lot of categories you have zero interest^ in, suddenly it’s not a lot of titles. And some of the omissions are astonishing: no Stephen Jay Gould? What? No Patrick Leigh Fermor? And why are the only two William Dalrymple books heavily abridged? The only E Nesbits are some spooky short stories, and a dramatised RAILWAY CHILDREN. (They do get extra points for having even one Edward Eager—and six Marguerite Henrys. No Walter Farley though.)
There aren’t even categories for poetry and music. If you search ‘poetry’ it offers you 217 titles . . . which do not include Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore or W H Auden except glancingly in one or two anthologies; poor Sylvia Plath is interesting mainly for her life; there is zero mention of Robert Lowell or Jane Kenyon.
‘Music’ as a key word only produces 188 hits, and the first one is Soul Music, Discworld #16 . . .
^ Business: over 3000 titles. Erotica: over 1000 titles.+ Sport: to my surprise, only 350 titles. Still, that’s 350 titles I don’t want to listen to.
+ I know. I’m so old and boring. It’s very sad.
** I never did tell you about my surreal experience of trying to join audible, but it’s now muddled up in my ME-dazed, sleep-deprived mind with Pooka’s spectacular descent into sin. Maybe it was audible’s fault.
*** Dogs that eat, say.
† Although I snarled when my alarm went off, turned over and . . . slept till noon.
†† Please do not let him have any ugly ideas about calling a touch.
††† Quote: NOOOOOOOOOO
‡ Bob doubles has a mere five working bells and a nice steadying tenor-behind. Bob major has eight working bells and no tenor-behind.