Grave Colours Brightening

Alasdair Gray's 2010 collaboration with Pringle of Scotland is not wholly comparable to Gorbachev's advert for Louis Vuitton. But it is odd. I like it, though.

Rafael Viñoly

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It was terrible - in terms of the British Constitution if nothing else - when Prince Charles's letter-writing got the Qatari Royal Family to drop Richard Rogers' design for Chelsea Barracks. Our Prince's desire to protect the loyal citizenry from those modernists like Lord Rogers, with their monstrous carbuncles, was not just over-reaching personal preference. It was symptomatic of a folksy merrie-old-England philistinism that infects this country still. Even Cool Britannia did not get rid of it.

I am so pleased, then, that Dundee is building something outstanding with the new V&A by Kengo Kuma. (http://VandAatDundee.com/your-future/PDF/KengoKuma_full.pdf) And Aberdeen is planning something bold - we don't know what yet - in Union Terrace Gardens.

Fortunately, Charles doesn't own all of London. Rafael Viñoly, a favourite architect of mine, whom I have drawn a sketch of in pencil, has designed something bold for 20 Fenchurch St in the City.

Cole Porter

Sitting in the car in Kincorth, waiting for Niamh to finish her reporter's incursion into the community council, I am listening to Cole Porter songs and have drawn a sketch of him in biro from a photograph of him on the Internet.

From "Let's Do It", I think the best lyrics of all the improbable lyrics are these:

Sturgeon, thank God, do it,

Have some caviar, dear.

In shady shoals, English soles do it,

Goldfish, in the privacy of bowls, do it,

Let's do it, let's fall in love.

Sent from my iPad

Two Ways of Thinking: An Introspective Observation

What kind of thought is this wooden guitarist having? Cognitive therapy, and the cognitive revolution in general, freed us from the limits of both psychoanalysis and behaviourism. Freud and Skinner each in their own way devalued the thought, which cognitivists think is ineluctable, revealing and valuable. However, it is not to devalue thoughts to say that they are not all equal qualitatively. It may be a brave step for a cognitivist to take, especially since is merely an untestable introspective observation.

Obviously, not all thoughts are created equal. Some are profound, coming at the expense of great psychic effort. Others are about dinner. The President of the United States' thoughts can influence war and peace; a hermit's may never influence another person directly. But even when dealing with the same issue, a person can have two dissonant thoughts without hearing the dissonance. Is that because one is "louder", or more valuable, or even more convenient? Not always, in my experience. Thoughts can feel different.

When an exam is coming, I know that I have it, but put off studying. In abstract: I have the thought of the impending exam, and the thought of the importance of studying, but fail to structure my activity around that second thought. It has value to me - I do not ignore it - but it fails to be an efficacious thought. Then, at some point, and without cue, I feel a great emotional desire and cognitive imperative to study. I already knew that I had an exam coming, but at that point I know it in a deeply affective way that structures my behaviour, not to mention holding my emotions and sympathetic nervous system in its thrall.

To me, that represents best my observation that thoughts exist in two ways: a superficial and purely cognitive way; and a deep, cognitive-affective way that structures other thought. I would call the former a superficial thought and the latter an embedded thought.

I have seen similar in my very limited exposure to patients with phobias, or even in patients who have insight into hallucinations. I wonder what literature addresses this phenomenon.

The Pig Society

http://www.flickr.com/photos/58146205@N00/6032189860/

I know that it is a complex issue. I do not claim to have the final word on the riots in England with this cartoon. But what struck me most strongly was that the riots were ever so slightly oriented around the axis of Owning Stuff.

This quickly-done cartoon is in Indian ink, with watercolour tint.

The Curious Case of the Changing Citation

The Wikipedia Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp, ink on paper

 

On Twitter a few months ago, Anne Marie Cunningham mentioned an academic paper she had read, which referenced the theory of the Four Stages of Competence. This is a model of learning widely used in medical and business pedagogy, but the paper talked about a fifth stage of the theory, and referenced Wikipedia for this. However, the Wikipedia article it referenced had no mention of the fifth stage at the time she accessed it. Because of this, a few of us on Twitter started looking a little further.

We found that the mention of the fifth stage was there, but had been removed. We also found that the theory is often attributed to Abraham Maslow, but it seems that there is no citable material on the Internet to support this, and it is not in his main works in any case. However, there were some decent references linking the theory to Noel Burch, a former employee of a Gordon Training International, a human relations training organisation of San Diego County, California. I attributed the theory to Burch and the organisation on Wikipedia. After doing so, I had hoped to expand the Wikipedia article, and did slightly. But it is still a stub, and there was very little in the way of citable material on the Internet that I could use to support any more writing. The little material there was tended to mention that other authors besides Burch and GTI had added a fifth stage of some kind, so I added the section back in.

 

The Dynamic Reference

By adding it back in, did I not make the academic paper more valid? It is an intriguing thought, and one that belongs to the wiki age, but perhaps to no age before it. Obviously, any reference is only to the Wikipedia page as it was at the time it was read. That is why we put dates of access. But that is not how Wikipedia is used: it is constantly changing, and only the most responsible and oddest of people would trawl through past edits, and regard them as wholly valid, while discounting the current and presumably most evolved version of the page.

The academic paper was certainly lacking when following its references lead to a dead end, so in a sense, I did improve that paper, while of course being nothing to do with it. If people keep referencing Wikipedia, it therefore raises a mildly thrilling prospect in academia. The community could improve an article written by someone, just by improving the quality of the material it cites.

 

Cite Uncite

Not long afterwards, though, I found that a Wikipedian, Gti123, had removed the reference to the fifth stage again. I looked at Gti123's edit history, and found that they had only edited articles about Gordon Training International, or Dr Thomas Gordon, its founder. I posted a message to the user talk page explaining why I felt the fifth stage should stay, which was because I felt it had encyclopaedic value. The section on the fifth stage has since remained. Recently, on Gti123's talk page, the user said that, as I suspected, they were from Gordon Training International, and that the account was operated by Linda Adams, President and CEO, whose late husband is Thomas Gordon. I can see from her website that she is a well-trained social scientist who, along with her daughter, continues her husband's work with dedication.

It is clear that Ms Adams was performing a good service by trying to increase the amount and accuracy of information online. Of course, she knows more about GTI and its learning model that anyone else does, and is to be lauded for trying to make that information public. Indeed, she mentioned that she had been in touch with the late Noel Burch by email on this particular matter.

Certainly, though, I had a wider idea of what is germane to an encyclopaedia article. I see it as a place to include any knowledge that is relevant to the topic, as long as it is referenced to clear, verifiable, external sources, and its inclusion is in proportion to the rest of the article. The article on Karl Popper's theory of falsifiability, for example, does not just expound Popper's doctrine. It discusses it, mentions its development by others, puts it is its historical context, and explains critisisms of it. That is what makes it an encylcopaedia article, with a neutral point of view: it can widen the focus, and live up to the etymology of "encyclopaedia".

Once a theory is published - once it is "out" - its author has the right that it be attributed to them. I am glad that this theory is now attributed to Noel Burch and Gordon Training International. But they lose some ownership of it: they will find it discussed, developed, refined or abused. That is the nature of the community of ideas. There is going to be all the more wrangling over the narrative that structures and defines an idea in the wiki age. The Wikipedia article on anything is, to many people, a sort of "front page" for the subject itself, and we see only one of them unless we care to investigate previous edits.

 

Futher Information

In the famous Rembrandt painting, An Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp, we see the essence of medical education: the students are learning from the open textbook, the open cadaver, and Dr Tulp himself. The book relies on its author, the book relies on the real facts of the anatomy, the student relies on the book and the teacher, and the teacher relies on everything. Everything is reflexive, but everything is stable. 

To move away from Gordon Training International, whose motives were unquestionably good, this affair raises a disquieting notion. Of course, any paper could be totally deracinated by having the material it references removed from wikis. That is what happened briefly to the academic paper. It was done unwittingly. But if the material an academic paper references is labile, then something more sinister could happen that its simply disappearing. A reference could be subtly modified, or subtly brought into line, so that the paper's contention loses its validity in degree or in part. I do not think that this is a reason to stop using collaborative sources in science, because it is an ineluctable fact that Wikipedia is, for many people, the "front page" for any idea. But it is a reason for caution and vigilance.

James's Shoes

I have not been drawing for a couple of weeks because of my exams. It frustrates me when I cannot draw. I once heard someone say that all children draw, but only some strange adults refuse to give up the habit.

I do not know why we give it up. Plenty of us write our thoughts down in a diary, but never sketch shapes. But drawing makes me happy, and I like to do it as much as I like to write words. Maybe we stop because of the inadequacy of the result. None of us, though, have the draughtsmanship of Leonardo: that does not make it useless to us, since by that thinking, only our finest novelists should pick up a pen to write even a shopping list.

I stopped drawing between when I was 15 and when I was 19. I do not know why. I don't even know why I started again, I just felt the urge to, and have never stopped for more than a few days. My drawing has improved only a little since I started again. I do not think it will ever improve greatly, but I enjoy doing it, and think that more people should make it a part of their lives.

This is a drawing of my flatmate James's feet. He is wearing trainers, sitting in the living room in Rosefield Street, Dundee. There are dirty glasses and a side table in the drawing. There is always something to draw.

Drumming

I am completely entranced by Steve Reich's work. It is so satisfying to recognise a structure, and to hear it played out, and that it what Reich gives us. His kind of music has often been called passionless, and unhuman, but I cannot agree.

In Different Trains, I always feel a quick thrill during the sublime moments when the recorded words are repeated by the strings. There is a quick variation on the melody of the human voice - that particular human voice in the recording - and the train chuffs along. It is so masterful: he has such a command of sound.

And there is little in music to rival the anticipation and excitement when I know a change is about to come in the rhythmic structure in Drumming, not to mention the satisfaction when the rhythmic structure does change. When I get involved in the music, it feels unique: I start counting the beats without thinking of numbers, and the changes come as instincts rather than planned-out events. It is deeply emotional music. 

This is a pencil drawing of Steve Reich in the dark at a piano, not at the drums or the tape deck. The photograph is from decades ago.

Clinician Hyphens

I was interested to read a debate on Twitter today, started by @welsh_gas_doc, discussing the major gaps were in medical undergraduate education. Some argued that basic science was missing, or that their course was too heavy on that, but did not show the clinical relevance of it. Of course, it is difficult to know what skills a doctor should have, especially once they take on additional non-clinical roles, as is the norm. Some training in non-clinical areas related to medicine already occurs in undergraduate and post-graduate medical education. Indeed, @welsh_gas_doc mentioned that management was now part of the course for Fellowship of the Royal College of Anaesthetists.

This is not new, because basic science is not strictly clinically-relevant all of the time. But there is a new professionalisation. For a decade, the MRC has been running the National Clinician Scientist Award Scheme, which is a prestigious scheme to fund research by top-rate scientists who also are clinicians, recognising that having a cadre of people who work as clinicians and as scientists is a boon to both fields. Of course, most doctors do (or have done) some audit or research work at some point, and the clinical academic is a common sight in any hospital or GP surgery. But in the past decades, things have been greatly formalised and, for want of a better word, professionalised. There are now distinct clinical academic career pathways. There are even academic foundation programmes, so that the most junior medical staff - none of whom will have passed membership exams - can now be involved in clinical or clinically-relevant research.

But it is not just basic science that can influence healthcare outcomes, and perhaps we should build cadres of clinicians with well-defined post-graduate training in other non-clinical areas. The clinician-educator, for example, is now a distinct breed, with many opting to do clinical fellowships in medical education.

Infection control teams have input into hospital design, and there are some doctors-turned-architect, like the American George Tingwald. But could there be future professional training in design for some clinicians, so that they can make informed input into design that encourages safe medical practice? Or future professional training in management for those whose interests lie way? Policemen and army officers being promoted to command roles go on courses to train them in management, so why not make a cadre of clinician-managers, whose training in management theory and background in clinical work would both be of benefit. Perhaps we should not rely on a small number of doctors to get themselves MBAs or pick up management on the job, but instead recognise their value and train them for it.

Alasdair Gray

It's a parochial thing, but Alasdair Gray is my favourite author. Or perhaps it's not just parochial - not just a Glasgow boy idolising what Anthony Burgess called "the greatest Scottish author since Sir Walter Scott". Like most people, I came to Gray by reading Lanark, his syncretic novel that, by its hodge-podge of different themes and thoughts, attains the coherence of a symphony. But I have come to love his artwork, his poems, and his other prose.

This is a quote of his, put in Indian ink, tinted with watercolour.

Pierre Boulez

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There is nothing like a dogmatist. At the age of 86, Pierre Boulez is still arch-charioteer of the musical vanguard, as well as being the world's leading conductor. His compositions are a rigorous and dogmatically modern way of looking at sound. I like his chamber composition Répons in particular: it presents a definite idea of sound that is quite separate from what came before. While it may go too far, entering the realm of the unlistenable at times, it does so wholesale and coherently. The performance was recorded at IRCAM, the Institute he founded with a huge financial endowment from the French government, and it uses all the insights and research from that Institute.

Boulez does not step over the line - that would be too puny - instead he barges through and occupies his own territory, with a Gallic lack of interest in whether or not you come with him. He is not a wheedling modern-influenced composer, but a muscular modernist. The CD box even gives instructions on how to listen to it (with a stereo, not with headphones).

Boulez is a man of such force of opinion that it strains his face into deep lines. It was curious, then, that in the edition of Diapason magazine in which I saw this photograph of him he seemed washed out in the rain. In the first image, I have painted him in watercolour and washed it out. That runs contrary to his character. The second image, a quick line drawing, is more representative.

A recording of the first part of Répons

 

Michael Nyman

If the music of Michael Nyman can be criticised for relying too heavily on a comfortable Western tonalism, then it can also be praised for the same. His prospectus, in building his music on the Classicist European symphonic canon in which he was trained, is quite unusual in New Music, which is about pushing boundaries. But it is in a sense wholly honest and coherent. He does not dissect away some part of African or Indian music and slot it into Western music. Though I do not criticise those who do - and I love Glass and Reich - I think that his minimalism is in that respect more cogent, if less ground-breaking. Western music has always been enriched from its frontiers; indeed, Brahms and Bartók did that. But it also needs to revise itself from within, in an elemental way, and Nyman has been contributing to that for decades.

Nyman's very occidental minimalism is by its nature introspective, and that is valuable. Apparently, he found his musical style when he played Don Giovanni's catalogue aria in the style of Jerry Lee Lewis. There is something powerful in that: taking Mozart's Don Giovanni - the work that Kierkegaard said was "of total perfection" - and bending it through rock and roll, which is just as tall a totem of Western culture.

In Re Don Giovanni - Introspective Western Music

The illustration is a quick one, in Indian ink and watercolour, that I did based on a photograph I saw.

Shostakovich

Before I heard Shostakovich, I never knew that music could be sarcastic, or that it could be bluffing. I had never considered the possibilty of a disingenuous melody. He is probably my favourite composer. His famous Fifth was the first symphony I bought, and each of the dozens of times I have played it in the years since, I have learned something.

In Leningrad in 1937, they wept when they heard the Largo of his Fifth Symphony. They say that, under the artistic tyranny of socialist realism and the real-life enforced optimism of the Great Purge, no one had dared to show sorrow, for fear that it looked like counter-revolutionary action. The Gulags had dispatched or then still contained over ten million - everyone in Russia had been wrecked by the Terror - but they had had no chance to grieve. But under Mravinsky's baton that night, in D minor, for the first time in years they had permission to cry.

To boot, Shostakovich wrote a tonal work that satisfied the regime, who had made him fear for his life after his dissonant Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District went down badly with apparatchiks. They called it decadent and anti-popular, even counter-revolutionary, and that was a serious charge: Stalin was displeased, and Shostakovich was denounced in Pravda. But the critics were largely satisfied with the Fifth. Alexei Tolstoy, the leading critic in the Soviet Union, famously called it "a Soviet artist’s creative response to justified criticism", but to the audience it was anything but.

At first hearing, of course, the symphony can sound like honest tonal music, a Mahler past its time, which is how Shostakovich is often criticised. It could be heard as a heroic socialist realist work for the New Soviet Man. But the composer wrote a lie so he could say what he had to say. So much of his music is like that. I love its imperfection: it is so human, and behind its dishonesty is a raw, bleeding honesty. Shostakovich used to sleep in the hallway with his bag packed so that his family would not be harmed when he was taken away to the Gulag, and you can hear that bitterness and fear in music. You can hear the injustice and the frustration.

In his String Quartet No. 8, you can hear his deepest sorrow and profoundest self-loathing as he joined the Party after so many years of resisting. You can hear in his Leningrad Symphony his hatred of Stalin and Lenin: how disturbed he was by seeing his town turning into "St Leningrad", as he once called it. He took the artifice and the angry machinations and put it in notes and mocked it, and used it to write from his soul.

Of course, the Party blocked and frustrated him, and it wrecked him. It is hard to imagine having one's life so strangulated and macerated. At every point in his life, his music tells of how that savaged him to the depths of his soul, because although he was sarcastic and satirical, they took their toll on him. Shostakovich wished that he had been able to write what he wanted, and a man as talented as him could well have produced unparalleled music. But in his oeuvre is the most human and soulful and thinking of music, and though he was beaten, he has that as his legacy.

Chanel

There is something wonderful about how comprehensively Mlle Chanel informed the way women dress. Clothes have changed greatly since she changed everything, but no one person has been behind it all, and it has never been so sudden or so definitive as was her contribution.

It came from a practicality, and a simple conception of how the form actually was. Any "look", fundamentally, is just a different comment on the form, but her comment seems so irrefutable. This is the form as we see it today.

This is a quick watercolour that I did, copying a photograph I saw in a book. It is from the 1960 Autumn/Winter collection, but in the shot, which was styled in 2004 by Karl Lagerfeld, it looks as striking and modern as anything else I have seen.

The Budget

This budget is going to be quite something. A lot of things will change.

The Frontal Lobe and Ettore Sottsass

I had a lecture on neurobiology yesterday, and of course Phineas Gage came up. I suppose that everyone who has ever studied any neuroscience has heard of Gage's frontal lobe, and a few too many times. If you haven't studied it, it is not worth too much reading: Gage was a railroad worker who was unlucky enough to have an iron rod driven through the front of his skull and when, remarkably, he survived, he had sustained injuries to his frontal lobe that lead to behavioural changes. He ended up a perfect illustration of simple - if not everyday - neurology, and the perfect way to fill out the first thirty minutes of the first neurology lecture in every medical school on Earth.

Because he has the same illustrative power, but in a much more pleasant way, I am sure that everyone who has studied design has studied Ettore Sottsass. His Olivetti typewriters were childish and beautiful, and his post-modernist Memphis work was clever and with a sort of sprezzatura that disguised all the decisions behind it. His work after Memphis always showed his interest in India, and the way that objects there seemed charged with emotion and ritualistic value. He tried to design without first principles to make objects that displayed this "sacrality", that were affective rather than rational and machinistic.

What has always impressed me about design is that it can be about decisions like that. Innumerable decisions, even those that seem remote from plastic considerations, mould physical objects.

Every object around us was shaped by thousands of human decisions, from the highest inspiration to the lowest detail. Perhaps Sottsass would choose to make a panel on a chair how-ever-many centimetres by just-a-few-more centimetres than you expected. Or maybe he would choose crimson for any one of a thousand reasons, with any number of influences, conscious and subconscious. And perhaps he would choose to conform to or depart from your expectations about how an object should line up with other objects of the same type.

At the highest level, he would in much of his later work try to convey an object that, in its Gestalt impression, was emotionally-charged or that felt like it that ritualistic value, the sacrality of India. But, while he made a critique of the mass-produced design to which he was a great contributor, and put all his efforts into designing to subvert it, I wonder if he ever felt that he had in a way already won. Even in the bland sheen on the mass-produced object, there is the intense humanism of thoughts, decisions, brains, frontal lobes.

Christophe Lemaire's Hermès Collection

I was pretty thrilled by what I have seen on the Internet of Christophe Lemaire's first collection for Hermès, particularly the first photograph of it in The Sartorialist. What I have always liked about Hermès is the French Colonial Empire aesthetic that it sometimes touches: it seems more pied-noir than Faubourg St-Honoré at times, and those are the times when it is most striking.

One piece in particular, the one I have illustrated here, Indian ink with watercolour tint, really evokes that. It makes me think of an Antoine de Saint-Exupéry character downed in an other-worldly desert, and of airmen stealing a drink of cognac in the cockpit over Algiers.

Apart from this, the show was full of stark cuts and vibrant colours accenting stable and strong neurals.

Three Sinister Carnations, My Room

When I was younger, and I spent days at my grandmother's house, I remember her picking flowers from her garden in the morning. By the afternoon, the stems were flaccid and the leaves circled the vase like wedding confetti. But I bought £1 plastic-looking posies from Tesco last week.  They had a fourteen-day guarantee on them and they lasted fourteen days exactly. I couldn't believe it, and I really wonder how they came to last so long. There was something sinister about it.

William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams has long fascinated me. I recently read a poem of his called Libertad! Igualdad! Fraternidad! that talked about dreams: "it is dreams that have destroyed us...dreams are not a bad thing".

It reminds me of something I read from the Iliad: καὶ γάρ τ' ὄναρ ἐκ Διός ἐστιν, "Dreams, too, come from Zeus".  I know very little about Greek, but I think that is the meaning. In any case, Williams would have been fairly contemptuous of any Classical allusion. That is a line that has always stayed with me since I read it, although I don't know if I have the idiom or the meaning when I think about it. Nevertheless, I think about the words as they appear to me, and in different ways.

First, I think of our aspirations and inspirations as being special, and high in value, a power of which we should be appreciative. We should not waste our sparks of thought or long-held wishes, rather we should value them and structure our lives around them.  Perhaps that is fairy-cake nonsense: that is certainly a risk when you talk about dreams.

In another and less saccharine sense, our dreams and hopes seem part of a shared greater experience that is a degree separated from us and the worldly. It is not just because they are dreams or hopes and not reality that they are different from reality. Nightmares of the Real Real and visions of true happiness are perfect only because they are remote from possibility while at the same time seeming possible because we can imagine them: we can have our consuming horror or consuming pleasure and not be consumed by it; we can have our cake and not be eaten by it, too.

In another way, the phrase feels like a kindly smile on hopeless hope, a benediction on the unattainable dream. That may be the simplest sense, but in a way also the most difficult. Is there not something sickening about false hope but also something uplifting? Is it not grimily ignoble while also being noble?

This is a quick drawing, Indian ink with watercolour tint, that I did of William Carlos Williams from a picture of him that I saw on the Internet.

Waiting for my man

It would be nice if the psychiatrist's office were oak panelled, with a bust of Freud. But it is usually just bad NHS furniture on bare desks, with phones from the 1980s and hard plastic chairs. Last year, I drew this ballpoint sketch of the consulting room where I was waiting for the psychiatrist who was supervising my attachment to his department.

In Psychiatry, there is a lot of waiting.

Thomas Reid

Thomas Reid, the philosopher of the Scottish School of Common Sense, was renowned for the clarity and illustrativeness of his writing.  In his time, his work was better-regarded than Hume's.  But as well as holding academic positions, including being Adam Smith's successor as Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow, he was a Church of Scotland minister.  That allowed his talent at philosophy to collide with his greatest ineptitude.  Apparently, he could not give an appealing public speech.  As a lecturer away from the pulpit, he was similarly bad.

It is odd that seemingly similar types of work - writing a treatise and writing a speech - were not the same to Reid.  Perhaps it was stage fright and perhaps it was something else.  We all seem to have small niggles that arrest our development in some area, while leaving the other untouched.

When I was nine, I was in the school choir and we were rehearsing a song for our first performance since I had joined.  I enjoyed the two or three weeks I had been going to the lessons, but we sang a song with a line about a grandmother.  I knew that mine would be in the audience when we sang it, and I was seized by a preposterous embarassment at the thought of singing any line referring to a grandmother.  A strange little boy, I left the choir.  I really cannot sing at all, and I wonder if I would now be able to sing had I not left the class for a nonsense embarassment.

In the painting here, I tried to make Reid a gormless incapable, but with wisdom behind his eyes.  That he was bad in public but good inside his own head seems slightly incongrous with his philosophical position.  The painting is not very faithful to his actual appearance, which may be due to lack of skill.  I think that the headgear he is wearing is a chaperon.

Margaret Thatcher

This is a consideration of Margaret Thatcher as a reptilian character, ink with watercolour tint.  It is perhaps unfair.  It exploits the way that Thatcher is seen as unfeeling and inhuman, a steeled machine that slept five hours a night and didn't flinch when her bathroom was bombed.   It exploits the perception of her as a cold creature, emptied of a soul, who sacked the North, Scotland, and Wales, let Irishmen die, and wrecked everyone except "Our People".  But this ability to be an extremist, to be clear-headed to the point of cruelty, all the while feeling that one is a bearer of painful virtue, has nothing to do with monsters.  It is a truly human trait.

She wore that trait with glee, and her ability to wear things was evident, the aura that gave her allure. She wore her hair and her clothes with sterness and perfection that must have made her feel like she had mastered her appearance.  It was chilling and self-confident, its effect on us coming from watching her eyes tell us that she was wallowing with joy in the mastery she had made of things.  Equally, she revelled in her extremism.  The sanctimony of the Sermon on the Mound, the obstinacy of her dealing with miners: these were her powerful aesthetic.  There is a great humanity in wearing a trait or dressing in a stark opinion.

Michel Deverne

Michel Deverne is a French sculptor whose work has always dealt with the relationship between art and architecture in the city.  During the post-war reconstruction of France, a proportion of the budget for new government buildings was devoted by law to commission art.  His sculptures appear in many of France's prominent government buildings as a result.  Perhaps this profligacy is impossible here and now, or perhaps as we develop a higher aesthetic demand in other areas of our life we will come to demand more from our environment.

This sketch of him, in Indian ink with watercolour tint, is from a picture of him in Wallpaper magazine, Jan 2011

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Half Rhyme

 

I have always preferred half-rhymes.  They seem more inventive, and they avoid the cringe of the rhyme.  Perhaps the impact of a rhyme is in its cringe, of course: the cringe seems integral, as anyone who has accidentally rhymed in conversation knows.

A couple of weekends ago, the Met started staging a revival of John Adams' 1987 opera Nixon in China.  It was broadcast to the DCA in Dundee, but I missed it because I was too busy, which is regrettable, because it is one of my favourite operas.

It has one of my favourite half-rhymes.

No, not De Gaulle,
I would not file him in that pigeon-hole.

I did a bad Fauvist watercolour of General de Gaulle a few months ago.

James Jesus Angleton

To anyone who knows it, the name James Jesus Angleton means counter-intelligence, and a scurrying mistrustfulness that comes close to diagnosable paranoia.  It means red lines through type-written lists of names because of no more than a whispered doubt.  This was a man who thought that Harold Wilson was a Soviet spy, who even was suspicious of Henry Kissinger.  I am intrigued by him because he was a resolute man, a flawed man who rose and fell because of his flaw. 

It is hard to know if he was even an anti-Communist: he was perhaps not a zealot, but a man who enjoyed the feeling of zeal.  That is his appeal to me.  He was so mistrustful that people were mistrustful of him, and the outcome of that was obviously that he was ousted from the CIA in disgrace.  I wonder if he knew that that was coming; I wonder if he saw the inevitability of it all.  Perhaps that made him resolute and defiant.

But that is not the only reason he appeals to me.  Angleton was a modernist poet.  At Yale in the 1930s, he edited Furioso, which published poems by Pound, Williams and Cummings, and he had an extensive correspondence with them, and with Eliot.  I get the image of free verse forming in his mind as he interrogates someone through files and reports - the double agent, the triple agent - thinking do I trust him, must I trust him, when was he turned?

This is a sketch I drew from a photograph of him.