This is the wrong Christmas
in the right place: mistletoe
water there is no kissing
under; the soused holly
of the wrack, and birds coming
to the bird-table with
no red on their breast. All
night it has snowed
foam on the splintering
beaches, but the dawn-
wind carries it away, load
after load, and look,
the sand at the year’s
solstice is young flesh
on a green crib, product
of an immaculate conception.
by R.S. Thomas (1913-2000).
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As the media frenzy abates after the latest experimental results from the Large Hadron Collider show tantalising but inconclusive evidence for the existence of the Higgs boson, it’s perhaps now time to focus on the hard facts surrounding this elusive particle. At yesterday’s Christmas lunch I stumbled upon one piece of information of which I was previously unaware and which is clearly of national importance. The eponymous creator of the Higgs particle, Professor Peter Higgs, was in fact born in the fine city of Newcastle upon Tyne, which really is in The North. This fact identifies him as a Geordie, although having just heard him on the radio I think there’s not much sign of it in his accent.
Anyway, in honour of this important discovery I respectfully submit that The Large Hadron Collider should be given a more appropriate name, i.e. The Geet Big Hadron Basher. And I’m sure God won’t mind if the Higg’s boson is henceforth known as the Geordie Particle.
Follow @telescoperAt the bad time, nothing betrays outwardly the harsh findings,
The studies and hospital records. Carols play.
Sitting upright in the transit system, the widow-like women
Wait, hands folded in their laps, as monumental as bread.
In the shopping center lots, lights mounted on cold standards
Tower and stir, condensing the blue vapour
Of the stars; between the rows of cars people in coats walk
Bundling packages in their arms or holding the hands of children.
Across the highway, where a town thickens by the tracks
With stores open late and creches in front of the churches,
Even in the bars a businesslike set of the face keeps off
The nostalgic pitfall of the carols, tugging. In bed,
How low and still the people lie, some awake, holding the carols
Consciously at bay, Oh Little Town, enveloped in unease.
by Robert Pinsky (b. 1940)
Follow @telescoperToday’s the day for our infamous annual departmental Christmas Lunch, which last year started at 12.30 and carried on until 3.30 the following morning (at least for me and a few other diehards). I thought I’d mark the occasion this year with an appropriate piece of music featuring one of my favourite jazz artists, saxophonist Eric Dolphy. This is the title track of the pioneering free jazz album Out to Lunch. This album is without doubt one of the high points of 1960s avant-garde jazz, primarily because of Dolphy’s extraordinary playing but also because of the brilliance of the other musicians. It’s a virtuoso performance all round, and it’s especially hard to believe that the superb drummer Tony Williams was only 18 when this track was recorded!
Unfortunately the original track is a bit too long for Youtube so this is in two parts; you’ll have to click through for the second bit.
Anyway, this would definitely be one of my Desert Island Discs and it probably also serves as an accurate musical illustration of the state my brain will be in later today. Enjoy!
Follow @telescoperIt’s a strange tradition that the Christmas season tends to bring with it an appetite for ghost stories and other tales of supernatural horror. It’s probably a reflection of a much earlier age when the winter was a harsh and dangerous time, during which food was scarce and survival through the winter meant huddling around a fire trying to stay warm. It seems natural to me that the kind of stories that would be told in such an environment would be of fear and foreboding. It’s not really a Christian tradition, therefore, but the legacy of a much older pagan one. Like Christmas itself, as a matter of fact.
Anyway, a few days ago at our little cosmology group Christmas night out the subject of horror films came up. I’ve never been a particular aficianado of this genre, and I’m afraid most modern horror films are so formulaic that they bore me to tears. I do enjoy the classics enormously, however. James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein, for example, has to my mind never been bettered; a great film turned into a masterpiece by an unforgettably moving performance by Boris Karloff. I think that’s a wonderful film, but I have to say I never found it particularly frightening, even as a child.
The first film I remember seeing that really terrified me was Roger Corman’s The Fall of the House of Usher starring the inimitable Vincent Price, a film based on a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. When I was around 8 or 9 I was once left home alone on a Friday night by my parents. In those days the BBC used to show horror films late at night on Fridays and, against parental guidance, I decided to watch this one. It scared me witless and when my parents got home they found me a gibbering wreck. I don’t really know why I found it so scary – younger people reared on a diet of slasher movies probably find it very tame, as you don’t actually see anything particularly shocking – but the whole atmosphere of it really got to me. Here’s an example.
This reminds me that I need to get some replastering done in the new year….
Anyway, I’d be interested in hearing other suggestions for the most scariest film through the Comments box…
Follow @telescoperI’ve posted about Albert Ayler before, but the excuse for posting this remarkable track is that it is preceded by a rare recording of him talking. It dates back to January 1963 and was recorded in Copenhagen; Ayler had relocated to Sweden in 1962 in the hope that he would find a freer artistic environment than was available in the USA at the time. In the spoken segment, he comes across as a very quiet and thoughtful young man and gives little hint of his troubled character, but his life was a constant struggle against depressive illness and critical disdain for his music. Especially moving is the phrase he utters at the end “One day, everything will be as it should be”. Sadly that wasn’t to be the case for him, and in 1970 he took his own life. The track is a standard tune, Bye Bye Blackbird, on which he uses his extraordinary saxophone tone to give voice to some of the pain he obviously couldn’t express in words.
Follow @telescoperBeing bombarded with advertising for a new Sherlock Holmes film I thought I’d remind myself of the greatest Holmes of all, Jeremy Brett. I have a complete collection on DVD of all the episodes produced by Granada TV between 1984 and 1994. I chose a couple at random to watch last night and it turned out that the pair included the very last one in the last series, based on the dark and disturbing story The Adventure of the Cardboard Box from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes.
Brett was gravely ill during the filming of the last series, largely owing to side-effects of the medication he had to take to deal with a severe depressive illness which plagued him for most of his life. It didn’t help that he had become almost obsessive about the character of Holmes, putting all his energy into doing the best possible job. It obviously took a lot out of him. He looks so much older in the last series than in the first, although it was only ten years after he made the first episodes. Jeremy Brett passed away in 1995, just a year after the last episode was filmed, but his Sherlock Holmes will live forever.
The last words spoken by Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes are at the end (from 8.55 onwards) of the following clip, a piece of film so poignant that I find it almost unbearable to watch.
Follow @telescoperWhat is the meaning of it, Watson? What is the object of this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must have a purpose, or our universe has no meaning, and that is unthinkable. But what purpose? That is humanity’s great problem, to which reason so far, has no answer.
I’m struggling to get into the festive spirit this year, but this should help. Here’s a Christmas song that even Ebenezer Scrooge himself would find hard to resist. It’s the old carol “O Holy Night” sung in magnificent style (and in Swedish) by the wondrous Swedish tenor, Jussi Björling.
Follow @telescoperYesterday was a memorable day for more reasons than the outbreak of Higgs-teria I blogged about. The main event was in fact the PhD examination of my student Jo Short. Being the supervisor, I didn’t actually attend the examination in person but did get to have lunch with the Chair and other examiners, including external examiner Andrew Jaffe from Imperial College, who blogs at Leaves on the Line.
After lunch the Examiners, Chair and candidate disappeared into the special room we keep for such occasions (complete with thumbscrews, etc) and I went back to my office to wait it out while Jo was grilled. I always feel a bit protective towards my PhD students, and a viva voce examination always brings back painful memories of the similar ordeal I went through twenty-odd years ago. Although I had every confidence in Jo, I was a bit nervous sitting in my office wondering how it was going. However, this is something a PhD candidate has to go through on their own, a sort of rite of passage during which the supervisor has to stand aside and let them stand up for their own work.
About 90 minutes after the viva started I remembered that I had to pick up some medication from a chemist, so braved the inclement weather to do that. Yesterday, incidentally, threw an extraordinary range of weather at us: hail, thunder, gales and dark apocalyptic clouds. When I returned the examination was already over; Jo passed with minimal corrections to be made. My nerves clearly weren’t justified. Congratulations Dr Short!
Caught on the hop by the fact that the viva finished in just over 2 hours, I then had to mobilize the obligatory champagne which was chilling in a fridge belonging to the Astronomy Instrumentation Group. Worse, a team of PhD students which had been dispatched to buy celebratory gifts hadn’t returned with the goodies by the time we opened the bubbly. Nevertheless, an appropriate celebration was eventually held in the department, followed – so I’m told – by an evening of revelry in the town. I didn’t go to the latter, as I’m far too old for that sort of thing.
By the way, Jo’s thesis is partly about the analysis of the pattern of temperature variations in the cosmic microwave background and partly about modelling galaxy clustering revealed by the Herschel Space Observatory and she’s staying on at Cardiff on a research fellowship.
P.S. Our genial external was last seen getting into a taxi to get to the station and thence back to London. I assume he got home safely…
P.P.S. For the sake of complete disclosure I should admit that I wrote this blog post while chairing another viva…
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In the Dark 