Story of Alan's life

From Alan Bennett's 2011 diary in the LRB (gated, I think; comes with peculiarly robotic-sounding podcast -- or perhaps that is how all podcasts sound, I rarely listen to any):

15 April. Seeing a banana skin on the pavement reminds me how when I first read the Dandy and the Beano the presence of a banana skin meant that inevitably it was going to be slipped on. No matter that at that time, in the early 1940s, few children had seen let alone eaten a banana, the skin was still shorthand for calamity. Other comic clichés were a fish, almost certain to be stolen by a cat and always represented as a perfect skeleton devoid of flesh but still with the head on; a string of sausages, destined to be grabbed by a dog, the sausages trailing from the dog’s mouth like a scarf in the wind; a bull (beware of) in a field, a billy goat similarly, with a ladder another portent of disaster.

21 May. A plumpish young man gets off the train at Leeds just behind me.
‘Aren’t you famous?’
‘Well I can’t be, can I, if you don’t know my name.’
‘It’s Alan something.’
‘Yes.’
‘From Scarborough?’
‘No.’
‘So which Alan are you?’
‘I’m another Alan.’
‘Are you just a lookalike?’
‘Well, you could say so.’
He pats my arm consolingly.
‘Be happy with that.’

14 October. Were I Adam Werritty and going into lobbying and PR I would have changed my name at the outset. Verity has the literal ring of truth about it, Adam Verity a dauntless fighter for justice, whereas all Werritty suggests is some anxious yapping dog which, whatever his faults, Werritty hardly seems to have been.

"The ambiguity of the apple"

Alan Garner remembers Alan Turing (Guardian):

He was stocky, barrel-chested, with a high-pitched, donnish voice and the aerodynamics of a brick. He was funny and witty and he talked endlessly, but I understood very little of what he was saying, and it became clear that he ran in order to think. He seemed to be obsessed by mathematics and biology. That much I could work out.

We had one thing in common: a fascination with Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, especially the transformation of the Wicked Queen into the Witch. He used to go over the scene in detail, dwelling on the ambiguity of the apple, red on one side, green on the other, one of which gave death. We had both been traumatised by Walt.

Also an appealing piece in Nature News, casting doubt on the claim (which I missed at the time) that cows are magnetic:

Three years ago, Hynek Burda, a zoologist at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany, and his colleagues added cattle to the magnetic family with a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The team used data from Google Earth to show that domestic cattle seem to prefer to align their bodies along Earth’s magnetic field lines¹, and showed a similar phenomenon in field observations of deer. [...] Burda and his colleagues reanalysed the replication attempt by Jelinek and his colleagues⁴. Burda says that half of the Jelinek team's data should be excluded because some of the pastures are on slopes or near high-voltage power lines, for example, or because the images are too poor to make out cattle, or appear to contain hay bales or sheep instead. “One half of their data is just noise,” says Burda.

I wonder if Lydia Davis reads Nature News.

Horses and civil unrest

1. from "Glaucus" by Paul Muldoon (in Horse Latitudes):

It went without saying that after he lost control
of his chariot team at Pelias, and made a hames
of setting them all square,

Glaucus was still on such a roll
it was lost on him that the high point of the games
was his being eaten now by his own mares. 

II. Sylvia Nasar on Keynes, Schumpeter, and the aftermath of Versailles:

In April, thousands of gaunt and ragged men -- unemployed factory workers, paid agitators, demobbed soldiers, many with missing limbs -- descended on Vienna’s Ringstrasse, setting the Parliament building ablaze and attacking the police. The militia finally restored order, but not before a horse was shot out from under a policeman. As the animal lay dead in the street, a hungry mob tore it to pieces and carried off hunks of bloody meat. For ordinary Viennese, who adored the emperor’s white show horses the way Americans loved boxing champions, the incident was a sign that civilization was reverting inexorably to barbarism. 

III. Jon Day on the London riots:

Thick black smoke blotted out the sun. A man carrying a charred rocking horse ran up and clowned around for the phalanx of photographers and cameramen that stood between the riot police and a large group of teenagers. Everyone looked young, most looked under 18.

No riot scene is complete without some kind of horse. This, btw, is the wrong way to do it:


IV. from W.B. Yeats, "Nineteen hundred and nineteen":

Violence upon the roads:  violence of horses;
Some few have handsome riders, are garlanded
On delicate sensitive ear or tossing mane,
But wearied running round and round in their courses
All break and vanish, and evil gathers head:
Herodias' daughters have returned again,
A sudden blast of dusty wind and after
Thunder of feet, tumult of images,
Their purpose in the labyrinth of the wind;
And should some crazy hand dare touch a daughter
All turn with amorous cries, or angry cries,
According to the wind, for all are blind.