Zoo in the head

A few things you ought to know

It's been a busy week of reviewing films - 13 of them - for the Independent. So a quick round-up of things you need to know:

1) Further to David Gentleman's New Penguin Shakespeare covers, the Guardian Review features an interview with him by Julian Bell, apropos his illustrations for a new edition of George Ewart Evans's Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay. The Shakespeares are only mention in passing; the most surprising revelation is Gentleman's claim that he invented the "Bliar" slogan, which did so much to enrich the debate over the Iraq war.

2) The LRB blog includes a short piece by me on the witchdoctors of old London town. 

3) Nick Clegg's slightly mystifying surge of popularity (did he really say anything that interesting?) has at least riled the Murdoch empire to a rib-tickling degree. Yesterday's Sun devoted a page to bashing Clegg, including facts from his past:

THE son of a rich banker, he had a posh upbringing and an expensive private education. He went to elite Westminster school and Cambridge University.

Instead, the Sun urges you to vote for David Cameron, the working man's friend. Ian Jack in the Guardian a couple of weeks ago told you most of what you need to know. Short version:

The mantra prevails. Social class shouldn't matter in politics. "It's not who you are, it's what you believe." "George Orwell went to Eton, after all." "Britain has changed." "It's where you're going to and not where you've come from that should count." Simon Schama (Haberdashers' Aske's and Oxford) expressed it almost poetically to David Dimbleby (Charterhouse and Oxford) on Question Time this week [actually 7 April]. It was an old and honourable thing, he said, to "leave the circumstance of your pedigree and exchange it for a political philosophy".

David Miliband (Haverstock comprehensive and Oxford) agreed – no Eton-baiting for him. The faces of other panel members looked respectful. Nobody in the audience booed. Nobody pointed out that David Cameron's great grandfather, Sir William Mount, was the Conservative member for Newbury, or that his grandfather, another Sir William Mount, was high sheriff of Berkshire; or that both these gentlemen also went to Eton; or that, given this long chain of privilege and connection, Cameron's "political philosophy" surely derived from caste rather than intellectual conversion or conscience, parked at his bedside together with teddy and cocoa when his parents tiptoed in to kiss him goodnight.

4) That's all for now.

Visitors from beyond

A brief update on who comes to this blog: a big drop-off in zoo-porn aficionados - to be fair, I have no way of knowing they are aficionados: they might be prudes looking for stuff to censor - but still getting lots of searches for bulbasaur and dead zebras. We've also had somebody searching for "Andrew Sullivan's faux British accent": if you're reading this - Andrew Sullivan's British accent is entirely genuine, from Surrey; it's the American bits (rhotic Rs, flattened As) that are faux. And one search for the phrase "So sorry to hear you are starving robert hanks". Which is sweet.

Adam Curtis Day

Yes, I'm declaring the 26th February a national holiday, to celebrate the continued existence of Adam Curtis, the film-maker who gave us Century of the Self and The Trap. He has a rather brilliant blog at the BBC website - the posts on Yemen's dirty colonial back-story and on Joseph Strick's film The Heckler are particular highlights; and some kind soul has posted all of The Mayfair Set (his best programme, because the one with the most substantial, substantiated thesis) on youtube. Your holiday homework starts here:

UPDATE: On the video posted above, at 0:18, an electronically treated photograph of a barn owl floats down the screen. Can anybody explain?

Oi! You!

My friend Graham Farmelo has directed me to this site, which contains interesting thoughts on how to increase website traffic.

The author tried several variations on the phrase "Follow me on Twitter", and found that "As the forcefulness and personal identifiability of the phrase increased, the number of clicks likewise increased": that is, people are more likely to respond if you include clear identifying words such as "you" and "here", include words of moral obligation such as "should", and phrase the whole thing as a command rather than a request.

Scum! Yes, you! Follow me on twitter here or burn in hell now.

That ought to do it.

Why people read blogs

Typepad.com has an option that allows you, if you're this self-obsessed, to find out not only how many people are reading your blog, but what webpage referred them to it. Very often, the referring page is a Google search - for, say, "dead zebras"; the other day, more unnervingly than flatteringly, it was "Robert Hanks May 2009". But most often - more than everything else put together - people come to this blog via a Google image search for the Pokemon Bulbasaur, about whom I posted two months ago, using an image I found myself through Google. And these are searches from Google's homepages in Italy, Portugal, Austria and Denmark, among other places. By accident, I have become the world's leading purveyor of Bulbasaur imagery.

As always, the question is: how do I monetize?

Splash

Right, I've had my cup of coffee, while indulging in a vice so abhorrent I dare not name it. How do you eat yours?

To recap, the Splash awards: you get one from another blogger (in my case, Caustic Cover Critic); then you display the logo, thus - 

- and then you nominate "up to 9 blogs which allure, amuse, bewitch, impress or inspire you."

My nine, in no particular order:

1. Mick Hartley - eclectic blend of politics (centre-left, a bit Euston Manifesto-ish), music, photographs of life in London, especially Hackney.
2. Qwerty2009 - Andrew Marshall's very insightful musings on the future of the press.
3. Making Maps - riveting and often beautiful cartography blog.
4. David Bordwell - a misnomer, since it's a joint effort by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, frighteningly knowledgeable and acute film critics.
5. On an Overgrown Path - informed, occasionally maddening, commentary on music, mainly classical.
6. Chris's Invincible Super-Blog - Chris Sims criticises, satirises, eulogises comics, mostly the superhero kind.
7. The Book Design Review - what it says: lots of book covers, with intelligent commentary by Joseph Sullivan.
8. A Blog from the Back Room - Hopi Sen (he swears it's his real name) shows that it is still possible to be a) thoughtful and pleasant, b) honest and c) a loyal Labour Party supporter. I wish I could pull off the same trick.
9. Old Bike Blog - also what it says. Which reminds me that I haven't yet blogged even slightly on bicycles. This will change.

Covered in glory

Caustic Cover Critic has nominated this blog for a Splash award, with the following explanation:

The Splash award is given to alluring, amusing, bewitching, impressive, and inspiring blogs. When you receive this award, you must:
1. Put the logo on your blog/post.
2. Nominate up to 9 blogs which allure, amuse, bewitch, impress or inspire you.
3. Be sure to link to your nominees within your post.
4. Let them know that they have been splashed by commenting on their blog.
5. Remember to link to the person from whom you received your Splash award.

I'll have to have a cup of coffee and a think about who to nominate; in the meantime, can I note my pleasure at being nominated alongside Eddie Campbell. Rifling through the chest of mouldering comics that sits underneath several boxes of bicycle tools and spare parts in a corner of my office, I find - nestled among old copies of Badger, Tales from Gimbley and American Flagg - the first half-dozen issues of Deadface:

 

Deadface is the god Bacchus - immortal, of course, but looking a bit rough on account of "wine, women and song", also of course: Greek myth meets gangster noir. I'd love to find out where the story went after issue #6.

Also via Caustic Cover Critic:

I've come to the Neglected Books Page, which offers a really broad and interesting selection of titles (though I'd quibble hard with the idea that either The Third Policeman or Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate are neglected - both in print, both recipients of plenty of critical attention). I second their recommendations of Augustus Carp, Esq. - a book that gets revived, in a minor way, every couple of decades - and Michael Frayn's Sweet Dreams, a vision of heaven that is one of the coolest satires on bourgeois liberal morality ever written. They also recommend Frayn's early volume of philosophy, Constructions, which I happened to come across in a shop yesterday - now back in print, I suppose because of the attention paid his more recent The Human Touch.

And I discovered the GenderAnalyzer, which claims to be able to discern the sex of the author of any homepage. GenderAnalyzer says: "We guess http://roberthanks.typepad.com/zoo_in_the_head/ is written by a woman (53%), however it's quite gender neutral." I'd always thought I was quite butch, and don't know whether to feel chuffed or humiliated.

Future? What future?

All newspeople, ex-newspeople and sometimes-interested-in-newspeople should be following Qwerty2009: Andrew Marshall (among many other things, former foreign editor of the Independent, and a dear, dear friend) has been blogging since the New Year on the future of the news media, picking up some interesting debates and offering the benefit of his enviably vast experience. The overall message so far is, roughly, "Christ. Shit. What just happened?" Though Andy puts it better than that.