BBC NEWS | World | Europe | Pope 'is breathing for himself'

How weird. They've changed it. I wonder what "breathing for himself" is in Italian? Perhaps it's serene? (unlikely, i know.)

BBC NEWS | World | Europe | Pope 'serene' following surgery

I mean, this basically means he's going to die very soon, right? "Serenity", after all, is pretty close to heavenly tranquility. But I guess if you're God's representative on earth, you probably get some special treatment in the pre-death stages; where everyone else has to just live with being "stable", you get to be "serene" and "blissful". My.

scabs

sitting in the sleepily warm OO, waiting for a phone call and *marvelling* at how little work I have to do, when the following suddenly occurs to me: why is the consistency of scabs so variable? the scab on my wrist, Attractiveness Fans, is very much a scab of two parts: thick and gristly looking at one end, and then sort of thin and flakey on the other. How has one half of the scab healed so much more quickly than the other? and why is the other half so deep? and if i pick it off in a moment of masochistic glory, will i get a scar? and, oooh, how come there's only one letter different between "scab" and "scar" (a glance at the OED has not really helped me here, but I have learnt a new word -- "cicatrisation". I'm a bit disappointed because I wanted the etymology of "scar" to be in some way related to being "beneath" a scab. Or something.)

this also makes me worry a bit about what i'll do a week on monday, after the web site has actually launched. already i have time to sit contemplating my scab. but suddenly i'll also have evenings and weekends, and lunch hours (lunch hours!), and it's making me a bit panicky. but perhaps it will be alright; perhaps i'll get a lot more scabs, which should pass the time quite nicely. hmmm.

comedy and plotting

This is on my mind this morning, because I've just finished "The Pursuit of Love" -- a slight, and slightly undeveloped, novel, that is yet extremely charming and amusing and full of eminently quotable lines, but slightly unfulfilling as a whole. The beauty of the novel is in the characterisation, and where it falls down utterly is where the characters have to *do* things, and move the narrative on. The ending -- while, in a way, fairly natural -- is so typical of many comic novels in that it's almost arrived because the author is bored and can't tell what to do next. Had Nancy Mitford risked her comic bravery and allowed nothing to happen, rather than imposing a "dramatic", yet totally unemotional and unnecessary ending, then it would be a much much better novel I think. Because, as well, she falls into the trap, several times, of trying to unify other characters around one extraordinary character: the point of an extraordinary characters is that, actually, they create fissure around them -- they can maintain their *own* world, but not really be part of a greater ecosystem.

This, of course, in distinction to A Dance to the Music of Time, where the narrator becomes less and less singular with every novel, and in which a very limited number of the characters around him (really, only Widmerpool) become more and more extraordinary. The first few novels are much more directly comic -- full of singular lines and witticisms -- and become later on much more stately and to do with remarkable events. Hmmm. And this is really only possible, I think, because it's a 12 novel sequence. I mean, admittedly, Mitford hits her stride much more with Love in a Cold Climate (which I think is probably a slimmer proof of the same phenomemon), but as a comparison, the two things are interesting.

Actually, "comedy and plotting" is wrong; it should be "comedy, plotting, and character". Novels based around plot are very different to novels based around character, and the outcomes of the two forms are very different. With regard to comedy, a plot-led comic novel tends to be more farcical (giddy, stage-like, belly laughs), while a character-led comic novel is both more gentle and somehow more profoundly funny, because it's not really at all ridiculous in the same way -- much more likely and life-like, because it's so much more about interior motivations and what that particular person would do. So much more time is spent establishing the character, that anything becomes possible, and is much more believable. By which I mean it's about how ridiculous *people* can be rather than *situations*, because very often with individual people there's no control in the same way there is in a group situation.

So, for an example, Wodehouse is at his best when writing novels of situation rather than character. The Jeeves and Wooster novels are actually (according to my totally made-up theory) the most masterly kind of situation novel, because -- beyond the set-up established in the first one (fecklessness, aunts, the Drones club, fear of marriage and a taste for ridiculous waistcoats), Bertie doesn't change at all. There's no element of sentimental education, and Bertie's relationship with Jeeves is always the same. By keeping the characters exactly the same, and needing no room for internal exposition, Wodehouse can do whatever he likes with them because he has skilfully reduced the number of variable factors the reader has to cope with. (Although, importantly, these variables are restricted yet again by setting, making it even more theatrical: the action often takes place in small villages and country houses, where the most banal things become shocking. So I suppose it's also about context. Hmmm.)

And so this kind of novel can be seen as part of a direct line that connects Restoration comedy to pantomime to bedroom farce to situation comedy and Carry On films; formulaic characters who get into unpredictable situations.

A particularly good example of the other, character-led approach is, strangely, not really a comedy at all, but something that shares many characteristics of a comedy. "Au Rebours" by Huysmans has a perfectly self-contained microclimate: the main character (whose name escapes me) is allowed to engage in totally extreme behaviour, which is -- in a strange way -- totally believable, because he's locked away on his own. There's no atmospheric interference, nothing to puncture the bubble. So only eating green food, or whatever it is he does, and decorating his tortoise is by no means as extraordinary as it would be if he were a side-character, briefly alluded to, in some larger and more sprawling novel, in which case he would be a mere, and unbelievable, oddity. I'm sure there's a name for this, but I can't remember for the life of me what that would be. However, the point of it is that Huysmans keeps the world of the novel extremely tight, and the extraordinariness of it is possible because -- although extreme and bizarre -- the setting is so limited. I mean, it's easy to be a giant in a room full of dwarves.

Anyway, oh dear, this is very half-baked, but I'm nearly getting there. What persuades me that I'm right is the way that novels that try to do both things just don't every quite come off. Two recent comic novels that I read (one by Daniel Handler, and one by someone whose name I can't remember!) both begin hilariously and heroically and both gesture towards brilliance, before falling victim to increasingly ridiculous plot twists trying to live up to the extremity of the situations they've established.

And so I suppose what I'm saying is that there needs to be a limit to extraordinariness. Or that, really, the most effective comic novels seem to happen when only one thing is extraordinary, and that one thing is allowed to be as extraordinary as possible. Hmmm.

Anthony Powell at Oxford

"It was here that Powell began to grasp what an exciting period this was for the arts. At Oxford he was handicapped by being neither rich nor homosexual, and despite attending some amusing parties was often sunk in gloom."

Michael Barber, ‘Powell, Anthony Dymoke (1905-2000)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/73965, accessed 11 Feb 2005]

Roller Toaster

I was just in our work canteen, where there's one of those big industrial toaster thingies, where you put your toast on the top, and it moves round a toasting conveyor belt, dropping out the other end all toasty and delicious. And I noticed, to my delight, that the aforesaid machine is called a "Roller Toaster". Sometimes, life seems just perfect.

BBC - Radio 4 - Tristram Shandy

Nice little user-generated content thingy to get people to write their own Shaggy Dog Stories and send them in.