Tom Roper's Weblog

Passions

If you came here looking for a post on erotic passions, I suggest you look elsewhere. I am using the word in its oldest sense, derived from the Greek πασχω, I suffer. For while I am a militant atheist, for the next week or so I shall be listening to a lot of sacred music, culminating in one of the Bach Passion on Friday. If I tell you that I shall be listening to Gesualdo's Tenebrae responses, settings of the Lamentations by Palestrina, Lassus, Victoria, Couperin and, best of all, Tallis, you may think I have fallen to late-onset religious mania. But there is something about listening to these works at their appointed time int he liturgical calendar that adds to the experience, and it is not necessary to give credence to flying spaghetti monsters, parthenogenesis, transubstantiation or any other hocus-pocus, to be moved by them. I think of it as like drinking a fine wine sur place.

When I first heard Bach it was the Matthew Passion that gripped me, with the dramatic intensity of Peter's denial, the mob's demands that Barrabas be released and Jesus be crucified, the veil of the temple being rent in twain, to name three. And it was a revelation to find the chorale, the hymn that we sang at school and knew as, 'O sacred head, sore wounded', appear in so many different and subtle ways. I laid my hands on a volume of Bach chorales from the library and would play them on the old upright piano in my bedroom; I found them well-suited for my self-taught piano technique. Later I discovered that the John Passion is even more beautiful. I think that's the one I will play on Friday. I have it in the version conducted by John Eliot Gardiner and the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists

Cheltenham: the final day, the Gold Cup

In haste, so I will simply add to my selections that I go for Denman, who I think can put his disappointing performance in the Aon Chase at Newbury behind him.  AP will stay on this time.

130 JCB Triumph Hurdle 2m 1f: Westlin' Winds
205 Vincent O'Brien County Handicap Hurdle 2m 1f:  Rock Noir
240 Albert Bartlett Novices' Hurdle 3m: Najaf
320 totesport Cheltenham Gold Cup 3m 2f 110y: Denman
400 Christie's Foxhunter Chase Challenge Cup 3m 2f 110y: Turthen
440 Martin Pipe Conditional Jockeys' Handicap Hurdle 2m 4 ½f: C'est Ca
515 Johnny Henderson Grand Annual Chase Challenge Cup 2m 110y: Fighting Chance

Surfacing and synthesising issues on the roadmap

CILIP's big conversation starts next month: http://communities.cilip.org.uk/forums/t/11176.aspx

We're stuck with the name, clearly. I hope that I am not the only one in our profession whose hackles rise at some of the crimes against the English language here.

'The conversation will be open to anyone interested in the Knowledge and Information domain.' When did we become a domain? I suppose the author thinks it sounds much more impressive than saying libraries and information services. And why put the K and the I in upper-case?

 "The Conversation will surface and consider issues." How do you surface an issue, please?

 "CILIP Council will synthesise issues from the conversation, then verify with members and wider stakeholders. " Poor issues, having been surfaced, they're now to be synthesised and exposed to these wider stakeholders. How wide, I wonder? I have a vision of portly peasants, armed with stakes, besieging Dracula's castle.

" CILIP Council will develop a roadmap." Of course they will. Nothing these days can possibly happen without a roadmap [sic...I would say road map should appear as two words, or perhaps should be hyphenated]. I suppose I should be grateful it isn't an overarching road map.

This is what happens when we spend too long with consultants, local and national  politicians and their hangers-on and other riff-raff and not enough in the real world.

Cheltenham: third day: Ladbrokes World Hurdle day

I think I should draw a veil over yesterday's selections. I have been kicking myself hard and often, for I looked at the Tizzards' Cue Card in the morning and for some inexplicable reason failed to back the beats, who won yesterday's bumper with aplomb at a price of 40/1 .

So for today:
1:30 Jewson Novices´Handicap Chase:  Seven is my Number
2:05 Pertemps Final Handicap Hurdle: Don't Push It
2:40 Ryanair Chase: Petit Robin
3:20 Ladbrokes World Hurdle: Tidal Bay
4:00 Byrne Group Plate Handicap Chase: I'm So Lucky
4:40 Fulke Walwyn Kim Muir Challenge Cup: Shillingstone

In the last race of the day, the Lady Riders Charity Race, run to raise money for Cancer Research UK, most off-course bookies aren't offering odds, but Paul Nicholls seems to have confidence in Watergate on the faster going, ridden by Georgie Browne. I certainly wouldn't back anything ridden by a Murdoch.
You can donate to CancerResarch UK at http://www.justgiving.com/soliver

Cheltenham: second day: Queen Mother Champion Chase

I missed the first day of Cheltenham, Champion Hurdle day. This is very unlike me, as it used to be the day I would visit the festival, to see Istabraq win the Champion Hurdle again and again. I know the racing world has been lost without my selections. I can only apologise and offer you today's:
1:30 140th Year of The National Hunt Chase Challenge Cup: Mobaasher
2:05 Neptune Investment Management Novices´Hurdle: Rite of Passage
2:40 RSA Chase: Punchestowns
3:20 Seasons Holidays Queen Mother Champion Chase: Twist Magic
4:00 Coral Cup: On Raglan Road
4:40 Fred Winter Juvenile Novices´Handicap Hurdle: Hunterview
5:15 Weatherbys Champion Bumper: Shoot from the Hip

Titles and forms of address

'F--- off, grandad!', yelled an aggressive young man with a bicycle at me at Clapham Junction station the other day. It is, I think, the first time I have been called that, but since I am now over half-way through my sixtieth decade, I should not complain. It set me thinking about the modes of address we use for others to whom we have not yet been introduced. In truth, there are no satisfactory ones. Consider the possibilities:

Sir or madam: too archaic for everyday use. When addressed as sir in a shop or restaurant my democratic spirit rebels.

Mate: again has an old-fashioned feel

Boss: much used by students at work, though in tones laden with sarcasm. In any case, too American.

Only revolutionary societies have satisfactorily solved this problem: citizen in France, comrade in Russia. I may start to address others by these titles.

“They order,” said I, “this matter better in France"

While British librarians confine themselves to spats on lis-link about retrospective cataloguing, the French, as one might expect, do things on a grander scale. In an article entitled Numérisation des livres : Google or not Google ? Le Monde des Livres reports on the disagreement between Jean-Noel Jeanneny and Bruno Racine about Google. This is a curiously public disagreement which in this country would be conducted behind closed doors, for Racine succeeded Jeanneney as president of the Bibliothèque nationale de France in 2007. It is as if Brian Lang and Lynne Brindley were to fall out on Newsnight, or in the pages of the London Review of Books or the Times Literary Supplement.

Both men are former ministers. Jeanneny has issued a revised version of his pamphlet Quand Google défie l'Europe while Racine has produced Google et le nouveau monde. The former argues that the Europeana project is the way to go, the latter is much more friendly to Google and is reported to be negotiating with them, following in the Italian government's footsteps.

How will this develop? Europeana has yet to deliver much, if anything, while the monopolistic pretensions of Google are often denounced whenever librarians gather together. A realistic British position might be to say a plague on both your houses; one wonders that the French do not do the same.

Absolutely

Ian McMillan held forth, quite rightly, on the abuse of the word absolutely in Saturday's Guardian. I'm as guilty as any of the use of this as a modish substitute for the simple word 'yes'. However I think he is wrong to claim this as a recent phenomenon. When I was at university in the mid-seventies, a group of well-born hippies who marched around campus in gumboots and ethnic finery, known to us as the wretched of the earth, appropriated the word into their argot, uttering it in every sentence with a stoned lengthening of the third syllable. It was their catch phrase. And later, in the eighties, one would hear it from the lips of estate agents and financial advisors, and other shock-troops of the Thatcherite counter-revolution.