Posted in Literature on March 1, 2022 by telescoper
It’s St David’s Day today, so I wish you all a great big
Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus!
It has become a bit of a St David’s Day tradition on this this blog to post a piece of verse by the great Welsh poet R.S. Thomas. An Anglican clergyman, Thomas was vicar at St Hywyn’s Church (which was built 1137) in Aberdaron at the western tip of the Llŷn Peninsula. This one, called Pact, carries a message for the sad times we’re living through.
This is my child; that is yours. Let peace be between them when they grow up.
They are far off now; let it not be through war they are brought near. Their languages
are different. Let them both learn it is peace in the hand is the translation of peace in the mind.
Posted in Poetry on February 18, 2022 by telescoper
This house has been far out at sea all night, The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills, Winds stampeding the fields under the window Floundering black astride and blinding wet
Till day rose; then under an orange sky The hills had new places, and wind wielded Blade-light, luminous black and emerald, Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.
At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as The coal-house door. Once I looked up – Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,
The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace, At any second to bang and vanish with a flap; The wind flung a magpie away and a black- Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house
Rang like some fine green goblet in the note That any second would shatter it. Now deep In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,
Or each other. We watch the fire blazing, And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on, Seeing the window tremble to come in, Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.
Posted in Poetry on February 17, 2022 by telescoper
I’ve always been fascinated by Nursery Rhymes. Some people think these are little more than nonsense but in fact they are full of interesting historical insights and offer important advice for the time in which they were written. One such poem, for example, delivers a stern warning against the consequences of placing sleeping babies in the upper branches of trees during windy weather.
In the light of recent events I thought I would continue this old tradition by posting a nursery rhyme of topical relevance. Here it is:
Verse:
The Grand Old Duke of York
He gave twelve million quid
To a girl he never met
For a thing he never did.
When I woke up this morning the radio reminded me that today, 2nd February 2022, is the centenary of the first complete publication of Ulysses by James Joyce. It had been published in installments before that, but it took a publisher in Paris to bite the bullet and publish the whole thing. The publication date also happened to be the 40th birthday of the author.
I have toyed with the idea of going into Dublin on Bloomsday (16th June, the day on which Ulysses is set) and wandering about some of the locations described in, but what with work and lockdowns I haven’t got round to it. Maybe this year will be the time!
Or perhaps instead I’ll prepare dinner this evening in a style that Leopold Bloom would enjoy:
He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with breadcrumbs, fried hen cod’s roe. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.
Or perhaps not.
If you haven’t read Ulysses yet then you definitely should. It’s one of the great works of modern literature. And don’t let people put you off by telling you that it’s a difficult read. It really isn’t. It’s a long read that’s for sure -it’s over 900 pages – but the writing is full of colour and energy and it has a real sense of place. It’s a wonderful book.
(There’s also quite a lot of sex in it….)
I’ve read Ulysses twice, once when I was a teenager and again when I was in my thirties. I then lent my copy to someone and never got it back. The copy shown above is a new one I bought last year with the intention of reading the novel again now that I live in Ireland but I sadly have not had the time yet. I will, though.
Posted in Poetry on December 22, 2021 by telescoper
The renowned Irish Poet Thomas Kinsella has passed away at the age of 93. By way of a small tribute I thought I would post again a poem by him that I first posted about 7 years ago when I had no inkling that I would move to Ireland. Probably his most famous and definitely his most anthologised work Mirror in February gives us a reflection (in more ways than one) on the inexorable and irreversible process of ageing. Kinsella actually wrote this in May 1962 when he would have been just 34 years old and probably had no idea he would live almost another sixty years. Apart from everything else this poem confirms my opinion that shaving is to be avoided…
The day dawns with scent of must and rain,
Of opened soil, dark trees, dry bedroom air.
Under the fading lamp, half dressed – my brain
Idling on some compulsive fantasy-
I towel my shaven jaw and stop, and stare,
Riveted by a dark exhausted eye,
A dry downturning mouth.
It seems again that it is time to learn, In this untiring, crumbling place of growth To which, for the time being, I return. Now plainly in the mirror of my soul I read that I have looked my last on youth And little more; for they are not made whole That reach the age of Christ.
Below my window the awakening trees, Hacked clean for better bearing, stand defaced Suffering their brute necessities, And how should the flesh not quail that span for span Is mutilated more? In slow distaste I fold my towel with what grace I can, Not young and not renewable, but man.
The poet John McCrae served with distinction in the Canadian Field Artillery during the First World War, rising to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. He died in 1918, of pneumonia, shortly before the end of the conflict.
McCrae is best known for writing the poem In Flanders Fields, the imagery of which led to the adoption of the poppy as the emblem of Remembrance Day (11th November i.e. today). He wrote many other interesting poems, however, so I thought I’d share one here to celebrate his life.
Amid my books I lived the hurrying years,
Disdaining kinship with my fellow man;
Alike to me were human smiles and tears,
I cared not whither Earth’s great life-stream ran,
Till as I knelt before my mouldered shrine,
God made me look into a woman’s eyes;
And I, who thought all earthly wisdom mine,
Knew in a moment that the eternal skies
Were measured but in inches, to the quest
That lay before me in that mystic gaze.
“Surely I have been errant; it is best
That I should tread, with men their human ways.”
God took the teacher, ere the task was learned,
And to my lonely books again I turned.
Knowing that not all readers of this blog have a flair for writing like what I have got, I thought I’d pass on a link to a paper that appeared on the arXiv earlier this week. Here is the abstract:
Writing is a vital component of a modern career in astronomical research. Very few researchers, however, receive any training in how to produce high-quality written work in an efficient manner. We present a step-by-step guide to writing in astronomy. We concentrate on how to write scientific papers, and address various aspects including how to crystallise the ideas that underlie the research project, and how the paper is constructed considering the audience and the chosen journal. We also describe a number of grammar and spelling issues that often cause trouble to writers, including some that are particularly hard to master for non-native English speakers. This paper is aimed primarily at Master’s and PhD level students who are presented with the daunting task of writing their first scientific paper, but more senior researchers or writing instructors may well find the ideas presented here useful.
Knapen et al. 2021, arXiv:2110.05503
The title of the paper is actually Writing Scientific Papers in Astronomy, which seems curious wording to me – rather like Writing Scientific Papers in French (for example) – which is why I didn’t use it for the title of this post. Not that I’m pedantic or anything.
One of the problems with the scientific literature is that most journals have their own style rules which are often in conflict with one another so the detailed guidance on grammar, etc is probably of lesser value than the good tips on how to structure a paper. Those bits apply to any scientific field really, not just astronomy.
I remember very well what a struggle I found it when I wrote my first scientific paper. I had invaluable help, though, from my supervisor, who was an excellent writer. This is well worth reading for those early career researchers who want to avoid at least some of the pain!
The only tip I can offer to a postgraduate student struggling to write a paper is to think of who is going to be reading it. In most cases that will mainly be other early career researchers, so write in such a way that you can connect with them. That usually means, for example, taking special care to explain the things that you found difficult when you started in the area. In other words, you should put enough in your paper to allow someone else entering the field to understand it.
Other tips are of course welcome through the Comments Box.
This week I had visitors from Cardiff, one of whom runs a bookshop in Penarth, as a consequence of which on Thursday evening I attended a Zoom event featuring acclaimed author Colm Tóibín whose book The Magician is on sale now. It’s a fictionalised account of the live of Thomas Mann. The event was so interesting that today I went to the local bookshop in Maynooth and bought a copy.
The life of Thomas Mann was colourful to say the least. Born in the German city of Lübeck in 1875, Mann’s father was a wealthy merchant and his mother was from Brazil. His elder brother Heinrich Mann was also a novelist essayist and playwright of considerable reputation. Despite his homosexuality, Thomas Mann married Katia Pringsheim in 1905, his wife seemingly not minding about his sexual orientation. He led a comfortable life until he began to see the signs of the coming descent of Europe into the First World War. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929 and went into exile from Nazism in 1933, becoming an American citizen in 1944. He spent the last year’s of his life in Zurich, where he died in 1955.
I haven’t read The Magician yet – I’ll post a review when I have – but the event inspired me to dig out my copy of Mann’s greatest novel, The Magic Mountain. The stamp inside reveals that I bought it in 1987, while I was doing my DPhil at Sussex.
In 1912 – the year Death in Venice was published – Thomas Mann and his wife spent some time in a sanatorium where he got the idea for his greatest novel, The Magic Mountain, though it took him over a decade to finish it. It was finally published in 1924 and in my view it merits a place among the greatest works of 20th Century literature.
I had read Death in Venice before The Magic Mountain and there are definite thematic similarities, illness and death being metaphors for the state of Europe at the time. In The Magic Mountain Hans Castorp goes to a Swiss sanatorium for a three-week stay and ends up spending seven years there on a kind of spiritual journey, his isolation from the rest of the world and the ever-present shadow of death heightening his emotional awareness. When he eventually leaves for “real life” outside the dream-like sanatorium, he heads straight for the Great War with the inevitable consequence.
But trying to summarize The Magic Mountain in terms of a plot is pointless. It’s a novel of atmosphere and internal questioning. I found it hard going but immensely rewarding. I always intended to follow up with Buddenbrooks and the Confessions of Felix Krull, but for some reason I never got around to them. I suppose there’s still time, though.
It will not always be like this, The air windless, a few last Leaves adding their decoration To the trees’ shoulders, braiding the cuffs Of the boughs with gold; a bird preening
In the lawn’s mirror. Having looked up From the day’s chores, pause a minute, Let the mind take its photograph Of the bright scene, something to wear Against the heart in the long cold.
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In the Dark 