Victor Venema was a climate scientist in the Meteorological Institute, University of Bonn, Germany. His main scientific interest was in the variability of data in complex systems. In particular, the study of variability in weather data and homogenization. In his own words (archived): 

"At the moment most of my work and this blog is about the removal of non-climatic changes (variability) from historical stations data, which is called homogenization." 

Dr Venema contributed to climate science on many fronts beyond the university. He was an advocate for open science, inclusivity in science, scientific communication and bringing science to the general public. He did not merely advocate for change, he helped make change. He was active in various roles with the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) over many years. He was Chair of the Parallel Observations Science Team (POST) of the International Surface Temperature Initiative (ISTI) and a member of the ISTI Benchmarking and Assessment working group. He was also prolific online, including with Climate Feedback and Hypothesis, a web tool that enabled experts and others to comment on articles published on the web. He was very keen to overcome language and other barriers including through GrassRoots Journals and the Translate Science initiative. (I've probably left out many of his contributions and achievements.)

Victor was a keen observer of behaviour on social media. On occasion he referred to some aspects as "toxic", particularly on Twitter and on climate science denial blogs. Once again, he wasn't just talk. Together with Frank Sonntag, he set up an instance for scientists at Mastodon, FediScience.org.

Victor was a wonderful science communicator. He was able to explain otherwise difficult concepts in ways that everyone, scientist or not, could understand. It was Eli Rabbet on RabbetRun who first introduced me to his blog. It was hard to resist his wit, perspicacity and disdain of efforts from deniers to claim that climate science is a hoax. Back in 2012, Victor wrote an article "Blog review of the Watts et al. (2012) manuscript on surface temperature trends". He also wrote a blog article on one of the points science deniers seemed unable to understand with weather data, "A short introduction to the time of observation bias and its correction." (Watts later promised a rebuttal to his own paper, which has yet to see the light of day.)

Victor was a regular commenter at HotWhopper almost from its beginning. He supported my efforts publicly and in private over many years. We shared the same sense of humour. Victor was a valued friend to me and to many, many people. (See also the tribute at ATTP - ...and Then There's Physics.) His death is a great loss to me personally, to climate science, to science in general, and to the world at large.

In his most recent blog post, Victor wrote: "Dying is naturally not nice for the ones you leave behind." It is not nice at all, particularly with someone young who gave so much to so many. His work doing and explaining science and making science open and more inclusive will endure.

Chus Martinez has junked the discredited literary tradition of actually writing original material. They thought that with such great shit out there in the experimental and transgressive fiction worlds, they'd just hi-jack stuff that grooved them. So Chus gets their point of view over by re-arranging old schlock without the hassle of slaving long hours over a computer keyboard. Students of anti-literature will probably have long words for this kind of cut-and-paste book and they'll invoke everything from isms to hauntology. I would describe it as ripping the piss.

The story, as much as there is one, is about some old pornographer being harassed by a copyright enforcer and being kidnapped by hot young women. But don't worry, there isn't too much conventional narrative and before you know it, Martinez has lost the plot and digressed into providing a discography of records that promote conspiracy theories about JFK.

Lots of paragraphs I recognised - especially the utterly depraved and filthy depictions of sex  - but often I couldn't name the source. Even using the helpful "You Have Been Reading' list on pages 128-135, I remained flummoxed about where some of the material originated. But then a lot of what's referenced at the back are records and TV shows. Given The Bastardizer is the most important novel about copyright since the Berne Convention was foisted on the world, infringement in left field rock and roll plays a big part in its body odour boogie. The message to the man and on copyright is 'burn, baby, burn'.

Of course Martinez is always getting into deep trouble for their plagiaristic antics and threatened with lawsuits. But any 142 page book that finishes with the words 'A5 Paperback 128pp' has got to be a winner! You couldn't make it up and Chus certainly didn't because they ripped it off! Each section is standout, since Martinez takes virtually every piece of avant-garde and pornographic trash you ever wanted to read, edits it down to a bite-sized chunk and re-uses it. Genius.

On the face of it mocking a load of famous literary works is a juvenile thing to do - but as burlesque it works a treat!  The Bastardizer is essential reading. I ought to know, I published it and I wrote the introduction - although this initial section was plagiarised from one of my books without my permission, so perhaps I should sue! You ought to buy this novel while it is briefly available, since once some uptight literary estate takes it out of circulation, it'll be a gold-plated and unbelievably expensive collector's item!

Use this link to find the cheapest place to buy the book that disappeared up its own arse and returned to tell the tale!

The order for this event was: Credence, The Dead, Iron Butterfly, Sly and Steppenwolf. My memory is that Sly put on the most exciting show. I think for me the attractions were The Dead and Steppenwolf ('Born to Be Wild' was a great hit of summer '68). The Dead were not playing in there proper element, and of course their set was way shorter than the usual. (Alas, this was the only time I ever saw the Dead, or any of the others for that matter.) Iron Butterfly of course we all scorned and thought were way overblown. I guess Steppenwolf was good but I have no memory of them. Nor of Creedence, who were known at the time chiefly for their single, "Suzie Q." They may have played "Proud Mary," which was released shortly after the concert.

Here's a review of the concert, from the Wilmington Delaware Morning News, on Dec. 9. There is much to comment on about the review, but let's just say that where I agree with it is (1) The Dead were not impressive (2) the sound was shitty and (3) Sly & Co. were terrific.

Since returning to Tokyo in July last year after 14 years, I’ve been immersing myself in web3. I’ve also been frantically catching up with everything I missed in Japan - the food, my friends, Japan’s mostly failed attempts at digital transformation and the new generation of Gen Z kids.

I set up the Center for Radical Transformation at the Chiba Institute of Technology; took a new role, Chief Architect, at the company I co-founded, Digital Garage; and advise various government agencies and industry groups. I also launched a bunch of media projects. I have a podcast, a book on web3, a TV show on TV Tokyo’s satellite network, and a YouTube channel. I’ve been focused on publishing and interacting in Japanese, but I thought I’d check in with the Anglosphere to give you an update and share this • Notion page • on web3 in Japan in English.

Japan is trying very hard to transform society in many ways, and it’s wonderful being back and contributing to the effort.

I’d gotten away from posting on this, because I got heavily involved in local environmental politics. If you look up big developments and fire in San Diego for the last two years, I’ve been involved in that. Still am, really, which is why I can’t talk about it. Regardless, things are slowing down, and I’ve had a chance to read some interesting articles that might help with science fiction worldbuilding, so I’ll post them here.

And, of course, there’s US politics, which I’m not going to write about. I’m guessing that, if you’re reading this, you want a break from it? Regardless, it’s not clear whether we actually have any right to privacy at the moment, so I’m not going to post detailed diatribes over whether it would be reasonable to doxx certain high level judges in the US at the moment or not. I assume the answer is no, incidentally, but we’re not talking about that here.

Instead, this is about a new paper. There seems to be better evidence for what caused the PETM. The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum 56 mya is currently one of the better models for anthropogenic climate change. This article shows there’s some decent evidence that it was caused by volcanism, specifically, Iceland.

This didn’t surprise me. Iceland’s odd. Basically it’s a hotspot volcano like Yellowstone or Hawai’i, and during the Paleogene it was tracking across Greenland and into the widening north Atlantic. Now the hotspot is under the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and I’m not sure if it will stay stuck there or keep moving. That hotspot X spreading center combination is unique in the world as far as I know. What’s a spreading rift, you ask? Well, in some models, it’s a row of hotspot volcanoes that…nevermind. I don’t know why some volcanism makes rifts (East Africa) and others make hotspots (the Pacific high islands).

It’s the details that matter, both for our current climate change nightmare and for worldbuilding on ancient SF planets.

–First off, the PETM carbon emissions were significantly higher than our fossil fuel supplies, so we could (if incredibly stupid) burn all our fuel and not get that hot. Since we’re burning fuel on the order of 300 years (most in the last 50 or so) and the PETM took 3,000-6,000 years, life WILL NOT adapt to our terafart as it did to the PETM. This is was incredibly stupid means. We’re not slowly boiling the climate frog, we’re microwaving it, and we need to control our emissions ASAP. Still, +8oC in the next 500 years seems to be off the table. Which is good, seeing how civilization’s rivets are starting to pop at a +1oC increase.

–Second, the clathrate gun hypothesis seems to be less supported. That’s the idea that methane released from the ocean floor can flood the atmosphere and rapidly raise temperatures. As the 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout showed, when mass quantities of methane are released into the ocean, they get gobbled by methanotrophic archea and bacteria before they make it to the surface. So this isn’t (thank Gaia) as likely a doomsday scenario as it was 20 years ago.

And then we get to the proposed mechanism for how Iceland blew carbon, and it’s kind of cool. It’s also relevant for worldbuilding on a science fiction world.

The general problem with terrestrial worlds is that a biosphere that can support multicellular life has a limited lifespan. It requires oxygen (long story) and our planet, it took billions of years for that atmosphere to form (mostly because a huge amount of iron, sulfur, and other elements needed to be oxidized before surplus oxygen could flood the atmosphere). Another trap is that keeping carbon in the air requires active plate tectonics. Unfortunately, as planets age, absent some other source of energy, radioactive elements in the core decay, the core cools, the crust cools and thickens, and volcanoes and plate tectonics grind to a halt. This traps carbon underground, and multicellular life becomes impossible.

Thing is, our planet already has old rocks, and the PETM event shows an interesting way carbon can be blown back into the atmosphere.

From the article:

“CO2 and other gases can bubble out of tectonic plates as they dive into the mantle, percolating up into the underside of thick crusts like Greenland's, and forming carbonate formations that can be stable for millions or even billions of years.

“If the crust is ever pulled apart by rifting, however, the trapped carbon can spill upward and erupt as rare carbonatite lava, which contains far more CO2 than standard lava. Indeed, such a process appears to be underway in East Africa right now, where a rift has begun to tear the horn of Africa away from the rest of the continent…”

“Similarly, the hot spot that burned through Greenland starting 60 million years ago could have mobilized any carbonate under its crust, Gernon says. When the rifting began to open up what today is the northeastern Atlantic Ocean, ‘you'll have a huge amount of carbon venting.’

“Evidence of the carbon-rich melt is abundant on either side of the North Atlantic rift, the tectonic division that marks the old boundary between Greenland and Europe…”

The worldbuilding point of this is that, even on worlds with thick crust and little active rifting, carbon-rich lavas are possible (Ol Doinyo Lengai is the current example), and that’s how carbon will come back into the air.

If I had to guess, this will turn out to be the major mechanism for Earth’s mass extinctions: massive volcanoes hitting carbon-rich rocks. It’s almost certainly what caused the End Permian (the Siberian Traps burning through a huge, young coal field). The end-Triassic extinction is associated with the rifting open of the Atlantic (more thick, old rock getting cooked), and so on.

So, as long as flood volcanism and rifts can continue on a planet, both short term mass extinctions and long-term life may well continue. It will turn out to be both interesting and obnoxious if the long-term survival of life on Earth and Earth-like worlds is inseparable from the geology that also causes mass extinctions.

 When the decision was made to build the last racer, the first 3 thoughts went through my head:

1. This is going to be a lot of work.
2. This should be a lot of fun when it is done.
3. This is going to generate a lot of stupid comments.
   

1. Low CG motorcycles are hard to balance - ever try balancing a short broom?
2. That's just a copy of the Gurney Alligator!
3. You'll die if you crash or run into something!
4. All those ball joints and rods kill steering feel!
5. The rider can't see where he's going on the track!
   
6. Can't properly stand on the pegs whilst riding over bumps!
7. KANEDA!

In 1972, the government drew up plans to construct a deportation facility off the coast of Ireland that could house as many as 70 million people - the entire population of the UK, if need be. The intention was to make it an exact replica of the United Kingdom and call it Bad Kingdom. Nobody, it seemed, fulfilled the increasingly stringent criteria of what it meant to be truly British. 

Experts estimated that, by 2050, the United Kingdom's only remaining residents would be members of the Cabinet, the Royal family, and bald-headed perpetually enraged men with a poor command of the English language whose idea of patriotism was to attack with deckchairs anyone who so much as spoke with a foreign accent. 

In all likelihood, without enough people to maintain a working infrastructure, these UK residents would have to sneak into Bad Kingdom in order to stock up on supplies and to have a shower, although doing so would be illegal and carry a sentence of deportation back to the United Kingdom where they risked being deported to Bad Kingdom, leaving the UK empty.

The effect of the Aswan Dam on Nubians, one elderly Nubian told me in the late 90s: "Have you heard of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima? The Aswan Dam was our Hiroshima bomb."

 The last video shown yesterday (June 13) at the House January 6 hearings featured several insurrectionists explaining that they were present at the Capitol that day because Trump had called them to it. I think this is the last of the insurrectionists interviewed. I noticed that he was wearing a kufiya, but didn't manage to get my camera out in time to take a picture. Luckily my very alert friend Tim did, and he sent this photo to me.

 I've written rather extensively about the push by the Palestinian rebels to impose kufiyas on Palestinian males at the height of the 1936-39 revolt, in fall 1938. And I just came across another story about those events, courtesy Zeina Ghandour's A Discourse on Domination in Mandate Palestine: Imperialism, Property and Insurgency (Routledge 2010). This is from her interview with Said Hassan Me'ary, originally from the village of Sha'b, in the Acre district, found on page 113.

I very much like this photo of a Nubian (I presume) kid looking at the photo welcoming USSR Premier Nikita Krushchev on his May, 1964 visit to Egypt. (I apologize for not keeping a record of where I grabbed this from.) I visited Aswan with my family that same year, in November. Here's a photo.

As is often the case, someone sent this to me (thanks, can't remember who did!), and it took some time for me to get around to posting.

During the Queen's Silver Jubilee in 1977 a ghostly figure was spotted by alarmed viewers in a BBC broadcast. The spectre appeared to be sitting beside the Queen in her carriage. The apparition's identity remains unknown, though some claim it is Scarfolk resident Herbert Empire. 

Empire, a proud slaughterhouse owner and staunch monarchist, died after trying to tattoo a likeness of the royal family on his own brain using the pin on the back of a royal souvenir badge that depicted the young Prince Andrew meticulously checking the gender of a Corgi with his nose. A post mortem also revealed that Empire had swallowed substantial quantities of red, white and blue paint, later found to contain toxins, to ensure that everything he discharged was patriotic. 

The Queen was encouraged to publicly acknowledge Empire's loyal actions on his birthday, which annoyed her because it would mean missing her favourite radio programme called I Know God Doesn't Exist But I'm Not Saying Anything Because the Peasants Still Think Royals Are Divinely Chosen.

 "Are you amongst us, spirit? Wake up, be bright, be golden and light. Bagpuss, oh hear what I sing..."

From page 37 of the Children's Guide To Séances & Cuddly Demons (Scarfolk Books, 1973). The book encouraged children to contact the apparitions of children's deceased television stars. It was banned briefly, however, in 1975 when Noddy and Big Ears, deranged by their time in the spirit world, broke through to the earthly realm and wreaked havoc in a branch of Marks & Spencer, causing thousands of pounds worth of damage. Additionally, a priest had to be called to perform an exorcism over the shop's entire stock of varicose vein support tights.

 In Berlin the popo are keeping a close watch on kufiya wearers. 

The kufiya, they seem to have determined, is a sign of anti-Semitism.

(posted May 20, 2022)

Steady hands. Nimble fingers. 

It may be easy to assume that anesthesiologists hold a lot of power in their hands when we do things quickly. It may be easier to think that a simple needle or catheter insertion has nothing to do with God or His hands either. I have always wanted to "paint" myself a reminder of the fact that - it is always His power that works through me. 

Was. Is. And will be. 

For as long as He has allowed it. 

Underneath are His everlasting arms, keeping me steady. 

"Praise the Lord, who is my rock. He trains my hands for war and gives my fingers skill for battle." Psalm 144:1

Fake Album Cover Infinite Gesture Unrecorded Lyrics by R.U. Sirius by Jay Cornell visit his Undated Records for more great visuals https://undatedrecords.com Avant God (2016) I want an avant god Loving perversity Unlimited diversity Optimized for your VR cabal Totally portable Sometimes snortable Gendered or not Maybe subject to rot Why not? The avant god is as real As the knees on which they...

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Herein is the whole secret of that eerie realism with which Dickens could always vitalise some dark or dull corner of London. There are details in the Dickens descriptions - a window, or a railing, or the keyhole of a door - which he endows with demoniac life. The things seem more actual than things really are. Indeed, that degree of realism does not exist in reality: it is the unbearable realism of a dream. And this kind of realism can only be gained by walking dreamily in a place; it cannot be gained by walking observantly. Dickens himself has given a perfect instance of how these nightmare minutiae grew upon him in his trance of abstraction. He mentions among the coffee-shops into which he crept in those wretched days one in St. Martin’s Lane, “of which I only recollect that it stood near the church, and that in the door there was an oval glass plate with ‘COFFEE ROOM’ painted on it, addressed towards the street. If I ever find myself in a very different kind of coffee-room now, but where there is such an inscription on glass, and read it backwards on the wrong side, MOOR EEFFOC (as I often used to do then in a dismal reverie), a shock goes through my blood”. That wild word, “Moor Eeffoc, "is the motto of all effective realism; it is the masterpiece of the good realistic principle - the principle that the most fantastic thing of all is often the precise fact. And that elvish kind of realism Dickens adopted everywhere. His world was alive with inanimate objects.

Charles Dickens: A Critical Study by G. K. Chesterton. New York, Dodd, Mead & Company (1906).

"As a literary critic, Chesterton was without parallel. His biography of Charles Dickens is credited with sparking the Dickens revival in London in the early 20th century. His biography of St. Thomas Aquinas was called the best book on St. Thomas ever written, by no less than Etienne Gilson, the 20th century's greatest Thomistic scholar. His books Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man are considered the 20th century's finest works of Christian and Catholic apologetics. And audiences still delight in the adventures of Chesterton's priest sleuth, Father Brown, as well as such timeless novels as The Man Who Was Thursday, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, and others”

Of course, fairy-stories are not the only means of recovery, or prophylactic against loss. Humility is enough. And there is (especially for the humble) Mooreeffoc, or Chestertonian Fantasy. Mooreeffoc is a fantastic word, but it could be seen written up in every town in this land. It is Coffee-room, viewed from the inside through a glass door, as it was seen by Dickens on a dark London day; and it was used by Chesterton to denote the queerness of things that have become trite, when they are seen suddenly from a new angle. That kind of “fantasy” most people would allow to be wholesome enough; and it can never lack for material. But it has, I think, only a limited power; for the reason that recovery of freshness of vision is its only virtue. The word Mooreeffoc may cause you suddenly to realise that England is an utterly alien land, lost either in some remote past age glimpsed by history, or in some strange dim future to be reached only by a time-machine; to see the amazing oddity and interest of its inhabitants and their customs and feeding-habits; but it cannot do more than that: act as a time-telescope focused on one spot. Creative fantasy, because it is mainly trying to do something else (make something new), may open your hoard and let all the locked things fly away like cage-birds. The gems all turn into flowers or flames, and you will be warned that all you had (or knew) was dangerous and potent, not really effectively chained, free and wild; no more yours than they were you. The “fantastic” elements in verse and prose of other kinds, even when only decorative or occasional, help in this release. But not so thoroughly as a fairy-story, a thing built on or about Fantasy, of which Fantasy is the core. Fantasy is made out of the Primary World, but a good craftsman loves his material, and has a knowledge and feeling for clay, stone and wood which only the art of making can give.

Tree and Leaf by J. R. R. Tolkien, George Allen and Unwin (1975).

Image © The British Film Institute, used with kind permission.

“By the act of reflection something is altered in the way in which the fact was originally presented in sensation, perception, or conception” — Hegel, 1830, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences

Phenomenology (architecture), based on the experience of building materials and their sensory properties … Phenomenology (archaeology), based upon understanding cultural landscapes from a sensory perspective … Phenomenology (particle physics), a branch of particle physics that deals with the application of theory to high-energy experiments … Phenomenology (philosophy), a philosophical method and school of philosophy founded by Edmund Husserl (1859 - 1938) … Existential phenomenology, in the work of Husserl’s student Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) and his followers … Phenomenology of Perception, the magnum opus of French phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty …Phenomenology of religion, concerning the experiential aspect of religion in terms consistent with the orientation of the worshippers … The Phenomenology of Spirit, a book by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel … Phenomenology (psychology), used in psychology to refer to subjective experiences or their study … Phenomenology (science), used in science to describe a body of knowledge that relates empirical observations of phenomena to each other.

Phenomenology; A term used in philosophy to denote enquiry into one’s conscious and particularly intellectual processes, any preconceptions about external causes and consequences being excluded. It is a method of investigation into the mind that is associated with the name of Edmund Husserl, as it was he who did most to develop it, although when Husserl’s system appeared on the philosophical scene, the word already had a long history and had undergone a conspicuous semantic evolution.

The first use of it goes back to Johann Heinrich Lambert (1728-77), a disciple of Christian Wolff (1679-1754). Lambert published in 1764 a treatise on epistemology dealing with the problem of truth and illusion, under the rather pedantic title of Neues Organon oder Gedanken über die Erforschung des Wahren und der Unterscheidung von Irrtum und Schein (New Organon, or Thoughts on the Search for Truth and the Distinction between Error and Appearance), in the fourth part of which he outlines a theory of illusion that he calls ‘phenomenology or theory of appearance’. Although he belongs to a period in the history of philosophy in which the question of the intuition of essences had not yet been raised, his implicit definition of phenomenology, taken literally, does not sound odd to the post-Husserlian reader, except that to him, Lambert, an appearance (or phenomenon) is necessarily an illusion. More important, Lambert was acquainted with Kant, and Kant in 1770 was writing to him about the need for a 'general phenomenology’ which he conceived as a preparatory step to the metaphysical analysis of natural science. According to Spiegelberg (1960), what Kant called phenomenology was in fact synonymous with his idea of the critique of pure reason, though nothing allows us to suppose that he specifically used the term forged by Lambert to qualify phenomena as antithetic to noumena or things in themselves. It is, however, with Hegel’s Die Phänomenologie des Geistes (Phenomenology of the Mind), published in 1807, that the term is used explicitly for the first time to label a philosophical work of fundamental importance.

A significant step in its evolution from Lambert to Hegel may be found in J. G. Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre (Theory of Science), in which its role is to establish the origin of phenomena as they exist for consciousness; and in Hegel’s elaborate system, its basic task is primarily historical since it aims at discovering the successive steps of realisation of self-consciousness from elementary individual sensations up to the stage of absolute knowledge through dialectic processes.

The few authors worth mentioning who dealt with phenomenological problems between Hegel and Husserl are William Hamilton (1788-1856), who in fact equates phenomenology with psychology as opposed to logic, Eduard von Hartmann (1842-1906), whose studies on religious, ethical, and aesthetic consciousness were greatly inspired by Hegel’s phenomenology, and, to some extent, Charles Sanders Peirce, though his work on the classification of phenomena belongs more to metaphysics than to an actual phenomenology of subjective experience.

Except in the case of Hegel, phenomenology was not a major field of reflection until Husserl’s monumental work. Since Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology is discussed in some detail in the entry under his name, it will suffice here to underline its distinctive features. In contrast with pre-existing philosophies, it is no mere, closed, abstract construct that theoretically allows the philosopher to pronounce on the conditions of principles of experience; it is rather an endless attempt to stick to the reality of experienced phenomena in order to exhibit their universal character. In order to succeed in the endeavour, Husserl has to discard the classic dualistic view, according to which the knowing subject reaches the world only through representation — a position typical of rationalistic and idealistic systems. Hence he refers, after Brentano, to the intentional character of consciousness, and condemns psychologism (the theory that psychology is the foundation of philosophy) in view of the contradiction it brings about: that the supposedly universal laws of logic and mathematics would be dependent on the concrete functioning of psychological mechanisms. The Husserlian standpoint is thus a radical one, since it aims at 'going back to the things themselves’ by claiming that there is no reason to suppose that phenomenon and being are not identical. In other words, the noema (object content) and the noesis (knowing act) are directly related by the intentionality of consciousness, so that every phenomenon is intuitively present to the subject.

However, phenomena, as they are grasped by the subject, are always given under a particular profile. No object whatsoever is given in its totality as a simultaneous exhaustible whole, but every profile conveys its essence under the form of meaning for consciousness. In order to reach the essence of any object, one is bound to proceed to unceasing variations around the object as thematic reality, i.e. to discover the essence through the multiplicity of possible profiles. This procedure applies to all phenomena, ranging from current perceptual experience to the highly intricate constructs characterising the various fields of knowledge, such as physics and psychology.

Every phenomenon belongs to a regional ontology by virtue of its essence, as revealed by the so-called eidetic intuition, the essence (eidos) being the sum of all possible profiles. In the course of this process, consciousness operates as a constitutive moment, i.e. its activity in grasping the essence of phenomena is, perforce, part of the process of their emergence. Thus Husserl overcomes the classic dualism of subject and object. Reaching the universal essence of an object through eidetic intuition, i.e. discovering the basic structure implied by its very existence, is a process which Husserl calls eidetic reduction. This being granted, the next step consists in referring phenomena to subjectivity without falling back into psychologism, since the empirical subject, as referred to psychology’s own regional ontology (or Descartes’ res cogitans), belongs to a realm of contingent being, which cannot furnish by itself the necessary foundation for the organisation of the absolute principles governing universal essences. Husserl is therefore bound to exclude belief in the natural world as the ultimate reference of all our intentional acts. This process is termed phenomenological reduction. It presupposes, in Husserl’s terms, a provisional 'bracketing’ (Einklammerung) of the natural and a description or explication of our intentional acts as referred to pure noematic structures.

The final accomplishment of this process is the transcendental reduction, by which the fundamental conditions of every possible meaningful intentional relation must be elucidated. This is the core of Husserl’s theory of transcendental subjectivity or transcendental ego. Thus Husserl’s phenomenology reconsidered the philosophical problem of consciousness in a radical fashion and contributed thereby to the placing of psychology — and the human sciences in general — within a new epistemological framework. Criticism of the one-sidedness of both empiricist and idealistic standpoints could be developed so that the shortcomings of dualistic views, with all their derivatives such as mechanicism, parallelism, and phenomenalism, became more apparent.

As a fundamental theory of phenomena ranging from perception to creative thinking, it has provided a firm starting point for the integration of concepts of the subject at different levels: hence phenomenologically inspired hypotheses such as those that guided F. J. J. Buytendijk and V. von Weiszäcker in anthropological physiology. The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of the experienced body (1942) and perception (1945) were phenomenological works that contributed to the transforming of the classical standpoints in psychology.

— Georges Thinès, 1987, Oxford Companion to the Mind.

No one perhaps has ever felt passionately towards a lead pencil. But there are circumstances in which it can become supremely desirable to possess one; moments when we are set upon having an object, an excuse for walking half across London between tea and dinner. As the foxhunter hunts in order to preserve the breed of foxes, and the golfer plays in order that open spaces may be preserved from the builders, so when the desire comes upon us to go street rambling the pencil does for a pretext, and getting up we say: “Really I must buy a pencil,” as if under cover of this excuse we could indulge safely in the greatest pleasure of town life in winter–rambling the streets of London.

 The hour should be the evening and the season winter, for in winter the champagne brightness of the air and the sociability of the streets are grateful. We are not then taunted as in the summer by the longing for shade and solitude and sweet airs from the hayfields. The evening hour, too, gives us the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow. We are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’s own room. For there we sit surrounded by objects which perpetually express the oddity of our own temperaments and enforce the memories of our own experience. That bowl on the mantelpiece, for instance, was bought at Mantua on a windy day. We were leaving the shop when the sinister old woman plucked at our skirts and said she would find herself starving one of these days, but, “Take it!” she cried, and thrust the blue and white china bowl into our hands as if she never wanted to be reminded of her quixotic generosity. So, guiltily, but suspecting nevertheless how badly we had been fleeced, we carried it back to the little hotel where, in the middle of the night, the innkeeper quarrelled so violently with his wife that we all leant out into the courtyard to look, and saw the vines laced about among the pillars and the stars white in the sky. The moment was stabilized, stamped like a coin indelibly among a million that slipped by imperceptibly. There, too, was the melancholy Englishman, who rose among the coffee cups and the little iron tables and revealed the secrets of his soul–as travellers do. All this–Italy, the windy morning, the vines laced about the pillars, the Englishman and the secrets of his soul–rise up in a cloud from the china bowl on the mantelpiece. And there, as our eyes fall to the floor, is that brown stain on the carpet. Mr. Lloyd George made that. “The man’s a devil!” said Mr. Cummings, putting the kettle down with which he was about to fill the teapot so that it burnt a brown ring on the carpet.

 But when the door shuts on us, all that vanishes. The shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of all these wrinkles and roughnesses a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye. How beautiful a street is in winter! It is at once revealed and obscured. Here vaguely one can trace symmetrical straight avenues of doors and windows; here under the lamps are floating islands of pale light through which pass quickly bright men and women, who, for all their poverty and shabbiness, wear a certain look of unreality, an air of triumph, as if they had given life the slip, so that life, deceived of her prey, blunders on without them. But, after all, we are only gliding smoothly on the surface. The eye is not a miner, not a diver, not a seeker after buried treasure. It floats us smoothly down a stream; resting, pausing, the brain sleeps perhaps as it looks.

 How beautiful a London street is then, with its islands of light, and its long groves of darkness, and on one side of it perhaps some tree-sprinkled, grass-grown space where night is folding herself to sleep naturally and, as one passes the iron railing, one hears those little cracklings and stirrings of leaf and twig which seem to suppose the silence of fields all round them, an owl hooting, and far away the rattle of a train in the valley. But this is London, we are reminded; high among the bare trees are hung oblong frames of reddish yellow light–windows; there are points of brilliance burning steadily like low stars–lamps; this empty ground, which holds the country in it and its peace, is only a London square, set about by offices and houses where at this hour fierce lights burn over maps, over documents, over desks where clerks sit turning with wetted forefinger the files of endless correspondences; or more suffusedly the firelight wavers and the lamplight falls upon the privacy of some drawing-room, its easy chairs, its papers, its china, its inlaid table, and the figure of a woman, accurately measuring out the precise number of spoons of tea which—-She looks at the door as if she heard a ring downstairs and somebody asking, is she in?

But here we must stop peremptorily. We are in danger of digging deeper than the eye approves; we are impeding our passage down the smooth stream by catching at some branch or root. At any moment, the sleeping army may stir itself and wake in us a thousand violins and trumpets in response; the army of human beings may rouse itself and assert all its oddities and sufferings and sordidities. Let us dally a little longer, be content still with surfaces only–the glossy brilliance of the motor omnibuses; the carnal splendour of the butchers’ shops with their yellow flanks and purple steaks; the blue and red bunches of flowers burning so bravely through the plate glass of the florists’ windows.

For the eye has this strange property: it rests only on beauty; like a butterfly it seeks colour and basks in warmth. On a winter’s night like this, when nature has been at pains to polish and preen herself, it brings back the prettiest trophies, breaks off little lumps of emerald and coral as if the whole earth were made of precious stone. The thing it cannot do (one is speaking of the average unprofessional eye) is to compose these trophies in such a way as to bring out the more obscure angles and relationships. Hence after a prolonged diet of this simple, sugary fare, of beauty pure and uncomposed, we become conscious of satiety. We halt at the door of the boot shop and make some little excuse, which has nothing to do with the real reason, for folding up the bright paraphernalia of the streets and withdrawing to some duskier chamber of the being where we may ask, as we raise our left foot obediently upon the stand: “What, then, is it like to be a dwarf?”

She came in escorted by two women who, being of normal size, looked like benevolent giants beside her. Smiling at the shop girls, they seemed to be disclaiming any lot in her deformity and assuring her of their protection. She wore the peevish yet apologetic expression usual on the faces of the deformed. She needed their kindness, yet she resented it. But when the shop girl had been summoned and the giantesses, smiling indulgently, had asked for shoes for “this lady” and the girl had pushed the little stand in front of her, the dwarf stuck her foot out with an impetuosity which seemed to claim all our attention. Look at that! Look at that! she seemed to demand of us all, as she thrust her foot out, for behold it was the shapely, perfectly proportioned foot of a well-grown woman. It was arched; it was aristocratic. Her whole manner changed as she looked at it resting on the stand. She looked soothed and satisfied. Her manner became full of self-confidence. She sent for shoe after shoe; she tried on pair after pair. She got up and pirouetted before a glass which reflected the foot only in yellow shoes, in fawn shoes, in shoes of lizard skin. She raised her little skirts and displayed her little legs. She was thinking that, after all, feet are the most important part of the whole person; women, she said to herself, have been loved for their feet alone. Seeing nothing but her feet, she imagined perhaps that the rest of her body was of a piece with those beautiful feet. She was shabbily dressed, but she was ready to lavish any money upon her shoes. And as this was the only occasion upon which she was hot afraid of being looked at but positively craved attention, she was ready to use any device to prolong the choosing and fitting. Look at my feet, she seemed to be saying, as she took a step this way and then a step that way. The shop girl good-humouredly must have said something flattering, for suddenly her face lit up in ecstasy. But, after all, the giantesses, benevolent though they were, had their own affairs to see to; she must make up her mind; she must decide which to choose. At length, the pair was chosen and, as she walked out between her guardians, with the parcel swinging from her finger, the ecstasy faded, knowledge returned, the old peevishness, the old apology came back, and by the time she had reached the street again she had become a dwarf only.

But she had changed the mood; she had called into being an atmosphere which, as we followed her out into the street, seemed actually to create the humped, the twisted, the deformed. Two bearded men, brothers, apparently, stone-blind, supporting themselves by resting a hand on the head of a small boy between them, marched down the street. On they came with the unyielding yet tremulous tread of the blind, which seems to lend to their approach something of the terror and inevitability of the fate that has overtaken them. As they passed, holding straight on, the little convoy seemed to cleave asunder the passers-by with the momentum of its silence, its directness, its disaster. Indeed, the dwarf had started a hobbling grotesque dance to which everybody in the street now conformed: the stout lady tightly swathed in shiny sealskin; the feeble-minded boy sucking the silver knob of his stick; the old man squatted on a doorstep as if, suddenly overcome by the absurdity of the human spectacle, he had sat down to look at it–all joined in the hobble and tap of the dwarf’s dance.

In what crevices and crannies, one might ask, did they lodge, this maimed company of the halt and the blind? Here, perhaps, in the top rooms of these narrow old houses between Holborn and Soho, where people have such queer names, and pursue so many curious trades, are gold beaters, accordion pleaters, cover buttons, or support life, with even greater fantasticality, upon a traffic in cups without saucers, china umbrella handles, and highly-coloured pictures of martyred saints. There they lodge, and it seems as if the lady in the sealskin jacket must find life tolerable, passing the time of day with the accordion pleater, or the man who covers buttons; life which is so fantastic cannot be altogether tragic. They do not grudge us, we are musing, our prosperity; when, suddenly, turning the corner, we come upon a bearded Jew, wild, hunger-bitten, glaring out of his misery; or pass the humped body of an old woman flung abandoned on the step of a public building with a cloak over her like the hasty covering thrown over a dead horse or donkey. At such sights the nerves of the spine seem to stand erect; a sudden flare is brandished in our eyes; a question is asked which is never answered.  Often enough these derelicts choose to lie not a stone’s throw from theatres, within hearing of barrel organs, almost, as night draws on, within touch of the sequined cloaks and bright legs of diners and dancers. They lie close to those shop windows where commerce offers to a world of old women laid on doorsteps, of blind men, of hobbling dwarfs, sofas which are supported by the gilt necks of proud swans; tables inlaid with baskets of many coloured fruit; sideboards paved with green marble the better to support the weight of boars’ heads; and carpets so softened with age that their carnations have almost vanished in a pale green sea.

Passing, glimpsing, everything seems accidentally but miraculously sprinkled with beauty, as if the tide of trade which deposits its burden so punctually and prosaically upon the shores of Oxford Street had this night cast up nothing but treasure. With no thought of buying, the eye is sportive and generous; it creates; it adorns; it enhances. Standing out in the street, one may build up all the chambers of an imaginary house and furnish them at one’s will with sofa, table, carpet. That rug will do for the hall. That alabaster bowl shall stand on a carved table in the window. Our merrymaking shall be reflected in that thick round mirror. But, having built and furnished the house, one is happily under no obligation to possess it; one can dismantle it in the twinkling of an eye, and build and furnish another house with other chairs and other glasses. Or let us indulge ourselves at the antique jewellers, among the trays of rings and the hanging necklaces. Let us choose those pearls, for example, and then imagine how, if we put them on, life would be changed. It becomes instantly between two and three in the morning; the lamps are burning very white in the deserted streets of Mayfair. Only motor-cars are abroad at this hour, and one has a sense of emptiness, of airiness, of secluded gaiety. Wearing pearls, wearing silk, one steps out onto a balcony which overlooks the gardens of sleeping Mayfair. There are a few lights in the bedrooms of great peers returned from Court, of silk-stockinged footmen, of dowagers who have pressed the hands of statesmen. A cat creeps along the garden wall. Love-making is going on sibilantly, seductively in the darker places of the room behind thick green curtains. Strolling sedately as if he were promenading a terrace beneath which the shires and counties of England lie sun-bathed, the aged Prime Minister recounts to Lady So-and-So with the curls and the emeralds the true history of some great crisis in the affairs of the land. We seem to be riding on the top of the highest mast of the tallest ship; and yet at the same time we know that nothing of this sort matters; love is not proved thus, nor great achievements completed thus; so that we sport with the moment and preen our feathers in it lightly, as we stand on the balcony watching the moonlit cat creep along Princess Mary’s garden wall.

But what could be more absurd? It is, in fact, on the stroke of six; it is a winter’s evening; we are walking to the Strand to buy a pencil. How, then, are we also on a balcony, wearing pearls in June? What could be more absurd? Yet it is nature’s folly, not ours. When she set about her chief masterpiece, the making of man, she should have thought of one thing only. Instead, turning her head, looking over her shoulder, into each one of us she let creep instincts and desires which are utterly at variance with his main being, so that we are streaked, variegated, all of a mixture; the colours have run. Is the true self this which stands on the pavement in January, or that which bends over the balcony in June? Am I here, or am I there? Or is the true self neither this nor that, neither here nor there, but something so varied and wandering that it is only when we give the rein to its wishes and let it take its way unimpeded that we are indeed ourselves? Circumstances compel unity; for convenience sake a man must be a whole. The good citizen when he opens his door in the evening must be banker, golfer, husband, father; not a nomad wandering the desert, a mystic staring at the sky, a debauchee in the slums of San Francisco, a soldier heading a revolution, a pariah howling with scepticism and solitude. When he opens his door, he must run his fingers through his hair and put his umbrella in the stand like the rest.

But here, none too soon, are the second-hand bookshops. Here we find anchorage in these thwarting currents of being; here we balance ourselves after the splendours and miseries of the streets. The very sight of the bookseller’s wife with her foot on the fender, sitting beside a good coal fire, screened from the door, is sobering and cheerful. She is never reading, or only the newspaper; her talk, when it leaves bookselling, which it does so gladly, is about hats; she likes a hat to be practical, she says, as well as pretty. 0 no, they don’t live at the shop; they live in Brixton; she must have a bit of green to look at. In summer a jar of flowers grown in her own garden is stood on the top of some dusty pile to enliven the shop. Books are everywhere; and always the same sense of adventure fills us. Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world. There is always a hope, as we reach down some grayish-white book from an upper shelf, directed by its air of shabbiness and desertion, of meeting here with a man who set out on horseback over a hundred years ago to explore the woollen market in the Midlands and Wales; an unknown traveller, who stayed at inns, drank his pint, noted pretty girls and serious customs, wrote it all down stiffly, laboriously for sheer love of it (the book was published at his own expense); was infinitely prosy, busy, and matter-of-fact, and so let flow in without his knowing it the very scent of hollyhocks and the hay together with such a portrait of himself as gives him forever a seat in the warm corner of the mind’s inglenook. One may buy him for eighteen pence now. He is marked three and sixpence, but the bookseller’s wife, seeing how shabby the covers are and how long the book has stood there since it was bought at some sale of a gentleman’s library in Suffolk, will let it go at that.

Thus, glancing round the bookshop, we make other such sudden capricious friendships with the unknown and the vanished whose only record is, for example, this little book of poems, so fairly printed, so finely engraved, too, with a portrait of the author. For he was a poet and drowned untimely, and his verse, mild as it is and formal and sententious, sends forth still a frail fluty sound like that of a piano organ played in some back street resignedly by an old Italian organ-grinder in a corduroy jacket. There are travellers, too, row upon row of them, still testifying, indomitable spinsters that they were, to the discomforts that they endured and the sunsets they admired in Greece when Queen Victoria was a girl. A tour in Cornwall with a visit to the tin mines was thought worthy of voluminous record. People went slowly up the Rhine and did portraits of each other in Indian ink, sitting reading on deck beside a coil of rope; they measured the pyramids; were lost to civilization for years; converted negroes in pestilential swamps. This packing up and going off, exploring deserts and catching fevers, settling in India for a lifetime, penetrating even to China and then returning to lead a parochial life at Edmonton, tumbles and tosses upon the dusty floor like an uneasy sea, so restless the English are, with the waves at their very door. The waters of travel and adventure seem to break upon little islands of serious effort and lifelong industry stood in jagged column upon the floor. In these piles of puce-bound volumes with gilt monograms on the back, thoughtful clergymen expound the gospels; scholars are to be heard with their hammers and their chisels chipping clear the ancient texts of Euripides and Aeschylus. Thinking, annotating, expounding goes on at a prodigious rate all around us and over everything, like a punctual, everlasting tide, washes the ancient sea of fiction. Innumerable volumes tell how Arthur loved Laura and they were separated and they were unhappy and then they met and they were happy ever after, as was the way when Victoria ruled these islands.

The number of books in the world is infinite, and one is forced to glimpse and nod and move on after a moment of talk, a flash of understanding, as, in the street outside, one catches a word in passing and from a chance phrase fabricates a lifetime. It is about a woman called Kate that they are talking, how “I said to her quite straight last night … if you don’t think I’m worth a penny stamp, I said …” But who Kate is, and to what crisis in their friendship that penny stamp refers, we shall never know; for Kate sinks under the warmth of their volubility; and here, at the street corner, another page of the volume of life is laid open by the sight of two men consulting under the lamp-post. They are spelling out the latest wire from Newmarket in the stop press news. Do they think, then, that fortune will ever convert their rags into fur and broadcloth, sling them with watch-chains, and plant diamond pins where there is now a ragged open shirt? But the main stream of walkers at this hour sweeps too fast to let us ask such questions. They are wrapt, in this short passage from work to home, in some narcotic dream, now that they are free from the desk, and have the fresh air on their cheeks. They put on those bright clothes which they must hang up and lock the key upon all the rest of the day, and are great cricketers, famous actresses, soldiers who have saved their country at the hour of need. Dreaming, gesticulating, often muttering a few words aloud, they sweep over the Strand and across Waterloo Bridge whence they will be slung in long rattling trains, to some prim little villa in Barnes or Surbiton where the sight of the clock in the hall and the smell of the supper in the basement puncture the dream.

But we have come to the Strand now, and as we hesitate on the curb, a little rod about the length of one’s finger begins to lay its bar across the velocity and abundance of life. “Really I must–really I must”–that is it. Without investigating the demand, the mind cringes to the accustomed tyrant. One must, one always must, do something or other; it is not allowed one simply to enjoy oneself. Was it not for this reason that, some time ago, we fabricated the excuse, and invented the necessity of buying something? But what was it? Ah, we remember, it was a pencil. Let us go then and buy this pencil. But just as we are turning to obey the command, another self disputes the right of the tyrant to insist. The usual conflict comes about. Spread out behind the rod of duty we see the whole breadth of the river Thames–wide, mournful, peaceful. And we see it through the eyes of somebody who is leaning over the Embankment on a summer evening, without a care in the world. Let us put off buying the pencil; let us go in search of this person–and soon it becomes apparent that this person is ourselves. For if we could stand there where we stood six months ago, should we not be again as we were then–calm, aloof, content? Let us try then. But the river is rougher and greyer than we remembered. The tide is running out to sea. It brings down with it a tug and two barges, whose load of straw is tightly bound down beneath tarpaulin covers. There is, too, close by us, a couple leaning over the balustrade with the curious lack of self-consciousness lovers have, as if the importance of the affair they are engaged on claims without question the indulgence of the human race. The sights we see and the sounds we hear now have none of the quality of the past; nor have we any share in the serenity of the person who, six months ago, stood precisely where we stand now. His is the happiness of death; ours the insecurity of life. He has no future; the future is even now invading our peace. It is only when we look at the past and take from it the element of uncertainty that we can enjoy perfect peace. As it is, we must turn, we must cross the Strand again, we must find a shop where, even at this hour, they will be ready to sell us a pencil.

It is always an adventure to enter a new room for the lives and characters of its owners have distilled their atmosphere into it, and directly we enter it we breast some new wave of emotion. Here, without a doubt, in the stationer’s shop people had been quarrelling. Their anger shot through the air. They both stopped; the old woman–they were husband and wife evidently–retired to a back room; the old man whose rounded forehead and globular eyes would have looked well on the frontispiece of some Elizabethan folio, stayed to serve us. “A pencil, a pencil,” he repeated, “certainly, certainly.” He spoke with the distraction yet effusiveness of one whose emotions have been roused and checked in full flood. He began opening box after box and shutting them again. He said that it was very difficult to find things when they kept so many different articles. He launched into a story about some legal gentleman who had got into deep waters owing to the conduct of his wife. He had known him for years; he had been connected with the Temple for half a century, he said, as if he wished his wife in the back room to overhear him. He upset a box of rubber bands. At last, exasperated by his incompetence, he pushed the swing door open and called out roughly: “Where d'you keep the pencils?” as if his wife had hidden them. The old lady came in. Looking at nobody, she put her hand with a fine air of righteous severity upon the right box. There were pencils. How then could he do without her? Was she not indispensable to him? In order to keep them there, standing side by side in forced neutrality, one had to be particular in one’s choice of pencils; this was too soft, that too hard. They stood silently looking on. The longer they stood there, the calmer they grew; their heat was going down, their anger disappearing. Now, without a word said on either side, the quarrel was made up. The old man, who would not have disgraced Ben Jonson’s title-page, reached the box back to its proper place, bowed profoundly his good-night to us, and they disappeared. She would get out her sewing; he would read his newspaper; the canary would scatter them impartially with seed. The quarrel was over.

In these minutes in which a ghost has been sought for, a quarrel composed, and a pencil bought, the streets had become completely empty. Life had withdrawn to the top floor, and lamps were lit. The pavement was dry and hard; the road was of hammered silver. Walking home through the desolation one could tell oneself the story of the dwarf, of the blind men, of the party in the Mayfair mansion, of the quarrel in the stationer’s shop. Into each of these lives one could penetrate a little way, far enough to give oneself the illusion that one is not tethered to a single mind, but can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others. One could become a washerwoman, a publican, a street singer. And what greater delight and wonder can there be than to leave the straight lines of personality and deviate into those footpaths that lead beneath brambles and thick tree trunks into the heart of the forest where live those wild beasts, our fellow men?

That is true: to escape is the greatest of pleasures; street haunting in winter the greatest of adventures. Still as we approach our own doorstep again, it is comforting to feel the old possessions, the old prejudices, fold us round; and the self, which has been blown about at so many street corners, which has battered like a moth at the flame of so many inaccessible lanterns, sheltered and enclosed. Here again is the usual door; here the chair turned as we left it and the china bowl and the brown ring on the carpet. And here–let us examine it tenderly, let us touch it with reverence–is the only spoil we have retrieved from all the treasures of the city, a lead pencil.

https://shop.bfi.org.uk/penda-s-fen.html

“The Owl Service — Granada’s first major all location, fully-scripted drama serial — was adapted in eight episodes by Cheshire author Alan Garner from his award-winning book. The story is based on a strange old Welsh legend which gradually unfolds while three teenagers — Alison, Roger and Gwyn — are on holiday in Wales’ — Granada TV 1978 press release

"​The Owl Service is a kind of ghost story, in real life as well as on the film or page. Right from the start things happened that haven’t happened with any other book I’ve written​. ​​It began when I read an old Welsh legend about Lleu, and his wife Blodeuwedd, who was made for him out of flowers. Later she fell in love with Gronw Pebyr, and together they murdered Lleu. Lleu was brought back to life by magic, and he killed Gronw by throwing a spear with such force that it went​ ​right​ ​through the rock behind which Gronw was sheltering; and the rock, says the legend, is called the Stone of Gronw​ ​to this day. Blodeuwedd, for her part in her husband’s murder, was turned into an owl​” ​—​ ​Alan Garner​, Filming The Owl Service.

“They took the flowers of the oak, and the flowers of the broom, and the flowers of the meadowsweet, and from those they called forth the very fairest and best endowed maiden that mortal ever saw" — The Mabinogion

"Many accomplished actors live the parts they are playing, but it’s no joke when a legend takes such a grip on them that it affects their private lives even after filming is over. This is precisely what happened to blonde actress Gillian Hills (she was one of the little girls who stripped off in Blow Up), Francis Wallis and Michael Holden. They play the three teenagers, step-brother and sister Roger and Alison and Welsh boy Gwyn in Granada’s current mystery serial, The Owl Service. The story, which centres round an old Welsh legend, is set in a remote mid-Wales valley near the town of Dinas Mawddwy, where much of the filming was done. The trio discover an old dinner service in an attic and Alison finds that if she traces its unusual pattern and fits it together, the figure of an owl appears. In fact, owls are the key to the whole intriguing mystery (now in its third week) in which the three become involved in the ancient legend of the beautiful Blodeuwedd. Created out of flowers as a wife for the hero Lleu, she was turned into an owl after being unfaithful to him with her lover Gronw. The cruelties and passions generated by these legendary figures still disturb the valley, and begin to take possession of Gwyn, Alison and Roger. Slightly sceptical of the legend, I invited the trio to a reunion down in the depths of the Essex country-side. I took with me one of the original plates, with startling results. It conjured instant memories which hurtled us all mentally into mid-Wales. Brought up in a converted shepherd’s cottage in Snowdonia, 19-year-old Michael Holden described how the legend took control of them during filming” — Ann Beveridge​, ​The Observer on Sunday magazine, January 1970​

“It was an incredible experience for all of us. It was as if we personally were really living the thing. The legend, the spirit of the valley was so strong that we became obsessed by it. I felt very close to the whole thing. The area was so much like where I grew up in Bethesda—and it was nice to go back to being outnumbered by sheep” — Michael Holden​, The Observer on Sunday magazine, January 1970​

“The Owl Service is a kind of ghost story, in real life as well as on the film or page. Right from the start things happened that haven’t happened with any other book I’ve written. It began when I read an old Welsh legend about Lleu, and his wife Blodeuwedd, who was made for him out of flowers. Later she fell in love with Gronw Pebyr, and together they murdered Lleu. Lleu was brought back to life by magic, and he killed Gronw by throwing a spear with such force that it went right through the rock behind which Gronw was sheltering; and the rock, says the legend, is called the Stone of Gronw to this day. Blodeuwedd, for her part in her husband’s murder, was turned into an owl. The legend stuck in my mind for several years, and then one day Griselda’s mother showed me an old dinner service that she had. She had noticed that the floral pattern round the edges of the plates could be seen as the body, wings and head of an owl. Griselda traced the pattern, juggled it a bit, and there it was-a paper owl" — Alan Garner, Filming The Owl Service, an Armada special, 1970​

"Rehearsals began at Poulton, and I met the actors for the first time. It was a nasty experience. "Well,” said Peter, “do they look right?” I wanted to run. They looked too right. It was like a waking dream. Here were the people I’d thought about, who’d lived in my head for so long ; but now they were real. I couldn’t accept that they were only actors. And this feeling got worse when they began to read their parts, and speak the words I’d given them. We took the cast to Wales for a couple of days right at the start, so that they coil hi get the feel of the original setting. Now my waking dream grew worse. The characters were where I’d imagined them, and it was as if I was looking at live ghosts" — Alan Garner, Filming The Owl Service, an Armada special, 1970​

Bridget Appleby (Graphic Artist) Richard Branczik (Camera Assistant) Harry Brookes (Sound Recordist) Peter Caldwell (Designer) Jack Coggins (Generator Operator) Stewart Darby (Stills Photographer) Sue Fox (Press & Publicity) Alan Garner (Scriptwriter) Ray Goode (Cameraman) James Green (Chargehand Electrician) Frank Griffiths (Music Recordist) Don Kelly (Film Editor) Alan Kennedy (Props Manager) Neil Kingsbury (Sound Assistant) John Martin (Electrician) Ian McAnulty (Stage Hand) John Murphy (Casting Director) Marjorie Norrey (Wardrobe) John Oakins (Unit Manager) Peter Plummer (Producer & Director) Dick Pope (Camera Assistant) Michael Popley (Camera Assistant) Jon Prince (Asst. Film Editor) Harry Rabbie (Camera Assistant) Elvira Riddell (Make-up) Phil Smith (Sound Recordist) Michael Thomson (Camera Assistant) Peter Walker (Dubbing Mixer) Alan Waterfall (Set Dresser) Louise Williams (Production Assistant) David Wood (Cameraman).​

Granada Television for ITV​. ​December 21, 1969​ ​— ​​February 8, 1970.​ 16mm, colour. ​Filming locations: Dinas Mawddwy, Gwynedd, Wales, UK and Poulton Hall, Liverpool, Merseyside, England, UK.

“The Owl Service was much admired but because I could never bear to watch myself I have seen it only now. Father’s very proper English family frowned at having an actress in the family yet they watched the first episode to see what I was like and followed the whole series. That was a huge compliment. The Owl Service was a magnificent gift that allowed me to haul back a slice of my lost youth. It had fallen by the wayside at fourteen when I was ‘discovered’ by Roger Vadim. No more contact with kids my age meant there was a chink in my learning compass. So my memory is not of anecdotes, stories. I was totally engrossed with the feel of Alison. In effect, Alison allowed me to become while she too was unfolding. It also played a part in changing the course of my life. The graphics designer for The Owl Service came while we were filming and I told him how curious I was about his work: when I was a recording artist in Paris I’d go round to see my friends at the music magazine Salut Les Copains - I adored the way the magazine was being put together. The designer invited me to visit the TV centre where they produced the visuals, soon I began at St Martins, but work was always taking me away, then Sir John Cass, Saturdays - but I was filming a lot. Throughout my childhood I was always drawing. My grandmother was a painter but we never met. When I began acting I gave up drawing. Three years after The Owl Service I would plunge into illustrating. The Owl Service is a peculiar work. Singular. Mesmerising. It stands out as a one off … I never thought The Owl Service was for children only. It felt as if it fit a larger audience. That’s what made it special. Because it also belongs somewhere where the memory of one’s own adolescence lies. It is super-real to the extent that it becomes unreal. Wagnerian. And too, like an old film it unreels itself repeatedly, then begins again. Any criticism that the series was unsuitably adult for children is untrue. Never underestimate the child; it is pure, it observes, makes up its own mind. But then is taught to see things otherwise … I have not read Peter’s book I’ve Seen a Ghost. I was unaware of it and maybe I should not read it. My grand father, the superlative Polish poet Boleslaw Lesmian, was ruled by his exceeding 'superstitiousness,’ so the family was too. Artists are sensitive to this in varying degrees. I am glad I focused on Alison. But if something unusual happened I would keep it to myself. I prefer to believe I am contemplating the cosiness of a blanket than a levitating counterpane"​ ​— Gillian Hills in conversation with Kevin Lyons, The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Film and Television​, 2008

I’ve Seen a Ghost: True Stories from Show Business by compiled by Richard Davis. Hutchinson, 1979.

"​The mood of this book darkens perceptibly with Mr Plummer’s piece. Many of you will remember the excellent TV adaptation of Alan Garner’s ’ The Owl Service’, that strange novel about spiritual possession, haunting and fascinating in its own right. As you will read, uncanny events took place of screen as well as on. It seems that when you are creating productions about the super-natural in whatever medium, you are laying yourself wide open to psychical onslaught​"​

"We shot it on location at a little village church in Cheshire and it concerned the theory that the 'dark lady’ referred to in Shakespeare’s sonnets was a local girl, Mary Fitton. Her ghost is said to haunt the area around the church which is, in any case, a strangely solemn and timeless setting of still pond, dark trees and ancient gravestones. It had rained hard the night before we arrived, but now, as we came to the village, a hot summer sun suddenly blazed out from behind the clouds and David’s camera was presented with the extraordinary sight of individual mists rising from each of the quickly heated stones of the old flat box-tombs. All the way across the big churchyard these white veils were being drawn up from every grave. As the mist closed, it revealed, lying on the newly mown grass by the south door of the church, a scythe. Presumably the rain had interrupted the mower the previous evening. Anyway, as a piece of tempus fugit symbolism it was just too tempting and we used it in the film as a requiescat for poor Mary.​ ​After a gap of many years — nine years after the making of 'The Owl Service’, in fact — I found myself once more back at that same remote village church, this time to attend a service. It was the winter of 1977-78. A grey day offering neither sun, cloud nor vision. The mechanics of the service determined that we enter the church by the north door and leave by the south. As we came out into the cold fresh air through that south door, there, on the grass, was the scythe.​ ​I correct myself. There on the grass was a scythe. Between the first and second sightings lay a gap of some fifteen years. I know very well that the object can’t have been lying there on that grass verge for that length of time. For all I know they now use a motor-mower and I can only guess at the chances that brought the thing to that spot the second time around. But you may care to know that the occasion which had brought me back to that church was the funeral of David Wood who, some years earlier, had decided to come and live in the village.​ ​All of which — if you have ever read Alan Garner’s original book of 'The Owl Service’ — or indeed any of his books — is not quite such a detour from our starting point as it might seem. Because an idea whose variations dominate Alan’s books and films is that all time runs, in a sense, in parallel, and that patterns of violently emotional climaxes can imprint themselves through from one parallel to another. This is, if you like, rather in the way that 'pre-echo’ can occur in gramophone records or that aligned areas of sound tape can occasionally suffer from a print-through so that magnetic patterns of certain particularly strong resonances may occasionally be duplicated out of context in adjoining areas of that tape spool. As a result, when we come to play the tape it runs in continuous and uninterrupted sequence but occasionally we hear displaced echoes both before and after their true situation.​ ​Is this what happened with 'The Owl Service’? And were Alan’s book and Granada’s television film themselves the inevitable echoes, and 'prints-through’, from the past event? Or, just as plausibly, were they and was the vision of the original men who 'created’ the legend pre-echoes? Were they 'prints-back’ from a shattering primary event that, on a normal consideration of time, hasn’t yet happened?”

About three weeks ago, I went for a hike in Castle Rock Park, alone, going far, and I talked to a plant for a long time. A madrone with a duckbeak snag and a moss beard.  I haven’t used pot or alcohol for twenty-five years, but I still like to be high.  When I find […]

The post Be High first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

Where do I get my ideas for science fiction? This continues my earlier post on the topic. The material is taken from interviews. That 3d plastic slug was 3d printed for me by Chuck Shotton. Interviewed by Heath Row for The National Fantasy Fan, July, 2009. New York. You asked how I between the value […]

The post How To Write: Getting Ideas, Part II first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

These poems were my way of beginning to be a writer. I wrote them in two batches. The first batch came during 1975-1978 while I was teaching math at the state college of Geneseo, in upstate New York—the five of us: Sylvia, me, and our three kids. I’d read my poems at English department readings. […]

The post Poems: "Light Fuse And Get Away" first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

You can have anything you want. But what do you want? Some of the appeal of SF comes from its association with the old idea of the Magic Wish. Any number of fairy tales deal with a hero (humble woodcutter, poor fisherman, disinherited princess) who gets into a situation where he or she is free […]

The post How To Write: What SF Writers Want first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

Lately I’ve been writing some “How to Write” posts for my blog and for Medium. For this one, I’m using excerpts from my huge document All the Interviews, which you can read as a PDF online. Today’s topic is “Getting Ideas.”  And I have a Part II on my blog and on Medium as well. […]

The post How To Write. Getting Ideas, Part I first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

The Singularity was brought on by some nanomachines known as orphids. The orphids used quantum computing and propelled themselves with electrostatic fields. The self-reproducing orphids doubled their numbers every few minutes at first; fortunately, they'd been designed to level out at a sustainable population of some sextillion orphids upon Earth's surface. This meant there were […]

The post Visions of the Metanovel first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

Selections from interviews asking about my painting and my writing. #217. Elephants. 2009. Interview by Charlie Jane Anders for io9. Q. Do you think your writing changed when you started painting a lot? A. All along, I’ve made little pen and paper drawings of my scenes before writing them, but now I enjoy the more […]

The post Writing and Painting. first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

Here’s the January, 2022, version of a story I’ve been revising off and on for a couple of years.  I think this version is pretty tight and funny.  I published an early version of it in the zine Big Echo back in October, 2020. And that would  make it hard to publish the new version […]

The post "Everything Is Everything." SF Story. first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

A crazy new SF adventure…with entitled realtors from the infinite subdimensions. So  my last novel Juicy Ghosts is out there, and I've been idle for a few months, so now—what to do? Nescio. That's Latin for "I don't know, son." Don't know what I'll write next, don't know if I'll ever write again. But I'll start […]

The post Everything is Everything. Start. first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

The controversy over the recently announced decision by YouTube to remove publicly viewable “Dislike” counts from all videos is continuing to grow. Many YT creators feel that the loss of a publicly viewable Like/Dislike ratio will be a serious detriment. I know that I consider that ratio useful.

There are some good arguments by Google/YouTube for this action, particularly relating to harassment campaigns targeting the Dislikes on specific videos. However, I believe that YouTube has gone too far in this instance, when a more nuanced approach would be preferable.

In particular, my view is that it is reasonable to remove the publicly viewable Dislike counts from videos by default, but that creators should be provided with an option to re-enable those counts on their specific videos (or on all of their videos) if they wish to do so.

With YouTube removing the counts by default, YouTube creators who are not aware of these issues will be automatically protected. But creators who feel that showing Dislike counts is good for them could opt to display them. Win-win!

–Lauren–

UPDATE (September 3, 2021): Apple has now announced that “based on feedback” they are delaying the launch of this project to “collect input and make improvements” before release.

– – –

Apple’s newly revealed plan to scan users’ Apple devices for photos and messages related to child abuse is actually fairly easy to explain from a high-level technical standpoint.

Apple has abandoned their “end-to-end” encrypted messaging promises. They’re gone. Poof! Flushed down the john. Because a communication system that supposedly is end-to-end encrypted — but has a backdoor built into user devices — is like being sold a beautiful car and discovering after the fact that it doesn’t have any engine. It’s fraudulent.

The depth of Apple’s betrayal of its users is not specifically in the context of dealing with child abuse — which we all agree is a very important issue indeed — but that by building any kind of backdoor mechanism into their devices they’ve opened the legal door to courts and other government entities around the world to make ever broader demands for secret, remote access to the data on your Apple phones and other devices. And even if you trust your government today with such power — imagine what a future government in whom you have less faith may do.

In essence, Apple has given away the game. It’s as if you went into a hospital to have your appendix removed, and when you awoke you learned that they also removed one of your kidneys and an eye. Surprise!

There is no general requirement that Apple (or other firms) provide end-to-end crypto in their products. But Apple has routinely proclaimed itself to be a bastion of users’ privacy, while simultaneously being highly critical of various other major firms’ privacy practices. 

That’s all just history now, a popped balloon. Apple hasn’t only jumped the shark, they’ve fallen into the water and are sinking like a stone to the bottom.

–Lauren–

As the COVID “Delta” variant continues its spread around the globe, the Biden administration has deployed something of a basketball-style full-court press against misinformation on social media sites. That its intentions are laudable is evident and not at issue. Misinformation on social media and in other venues (such as various cable “news” channels), definitely play a major role in vaccine hesitancy — though it appears that political and peer allegiances play a significant role in this as well, even for persons who have accurate information about the available vaccines.

Yet good intentions by the administration do not necessarily always translate into optimum statements and actions, especially in an ecosystem as large and complex as social media. When President Biden recently asserted that Facebook is “killing people” (a statement that he later walked back) it raised many eyebrows both in the U.S. and internationally.

I implied above that the extent to which vaccine misinformation (as opposed to or in combination with other factors) is directly related to COVID infections and/or deaths is not a straightforward metric. But we can still certainly assert that Facebook has traditionally been an enormous — likely the largest — source of misinformation on social media. And it is also true, as Facebook strongly retorted in the wake of Biden’s original remark, that Facebook has been working to reduce COVID misinformation and increase the viewing of accurate disease and vaccine information on their platform. Other firms such as Twitter and Google have also been putting enormous resources toward misinformation control (and its subset of “disinformation” — which is misinformation being purposely disseminated with the knowledge that it is false).

But for those both inside and outside government who assert that these firms “aren’t doing enough” to control misinformation, there are technical realities that need to be fully understood. And key among these is this: There is no practical way to eliminate all misinformation from these platforms. It is fundamentally impossible without preventing ordinary users from posting content at all — at which point these platforms wouldn’t be social media any longer.

Even if it were possible for a human moderator (or humans in concert with automated scanning) to pre-moderate every single user posting before permitting them to be seen and/or shared publicly, differences in interpretation (“Is this statement in this post really misinformation?”), errors, and other factors would mean that some misinformation is bound to spread — and that can happen very quickly and in ways that would not necessarily be easily detected either by human moderators or by automated content scanning systems. But this is academic. Without drastically curtailing the amount of User Generated Content (UGC) being submitted to these platforms, such pre-moderation models are impractical.

Some other statements from the administration also triggered concerns. The administration appeared to suggest that the same misinformation standards should be applied by all social media firms — a concept that would obviously eliminate the ability of the Trust & Safety teams at these firms to make independent decisions on these matters. And while the administration denied that it was dictating to firms what content should be removed as misinformation, they did say that they were in frequent contact with firms about perceived misinformation. Exactly what that means is uncertain. The administration also said that a short list of “influencers” were responsible for most misinformation on social media — though it wasn’t really apparent what the administration would want firms to do with that list. Disable all associated accounts? Watch those accounts more closely for disinformation? I certainly don’t know what was meant.

But the fundamental nature of the dilemma is even more basic. For governments to become involved at all in social media firms’ decisions about misinformation is a classic slippery slope, for multiple reasons.

Even if government entities are only providing social media firms with “suggestions” or “pointers” to what they believe to be misinformation, the oversized influence that these could have on firms’ decisions cannot be overestimated, especially when some of these same governments have been threatening these same firms with antitrust and other actions.

Perhaps of even more concern, government involvement in misinformation content decisions could potentially undermine the currently very strong argument that these firms are not subject to First Amendment considerations, and so are able to make their own decisions about what content they will permit on their platforms. Loss of this crucial protection would be a big win for those politicians and groups who wish to prevent social media firms from removing hate speech and misinformation from their platforms. So ironically, government involvement in suggesting that particular content is misinformation could end up making it even more difficult for these firms to remove misinformation at all!

Even if you feel that the COVID crisis is reason enough to endorse government involvement in social media content takedowns, please consider for a moment the next steps. Today we’re talking about COVID misinformation. What sort of misinformation — there’s a lot out there! — will we be talking about tomorrow? Do we want the government urging content removal about various other kinds of misinformation? How do we even define misinformation in widely different subject areas?

And even if you agree with the current administration’s views on misinformation, how do you know that you will agree with the next administration’s views on these topics? If you want the current administration to have these powers, will you be agreeable to potentially a very different kind of administration having such powers in the future? The previous administration and the current one have vastly diverging views on a multitude of issues. We have every reason to expect at least some future administrations to follow this pattern.

The bottom line is clear. Even with the best of motives, governments should not be involved in content decisions involving misinformation on social media. Period.

–Lauren–

Ransomware is currently a huge topic in the news. A crucial gasoline pipeline shuts down. A major meat processor is sidelined. It almost feels as if there are new announced ransomware attacks every few days, and there are certainly many such attacks that are never made public.

We see commentators claiming that ransomware attacks are the software equivalent of 9/11, and that perpetrators should be treated as terrorists. Over on one popular right-wing news channel, a commentator gave a literal “thumbs up” to the idea that ransomware perpetrators might be assassinated.

The Biden administration and others are suggesting that if Russia’s Putin isn’t responsible for these attacks, he at least must be giving his tacit approval to the ones apparently originating there. For his part, Putin is laughing off such ideas.

There clearly is political hay to be made from linking ransomware attacks to state actors, but it is certainly true that ransomware attacks can potentially have much the same devastating impacts on crucial infrastructure and operations as more “traditional” cyberattacks.

And while it is definitely possible for a destruction-oriented cyberattack to masquerade as a ransomware attack, it is also true that the vast majority of ransomware attacks appear to be aimed not at actually causing damage, but for the rather more prosaic purpose of extorting money from the targeted firms.

All this having been said, there is actually a much more alarming bottom line. The vast majority of these ransomware attacks are not terribly sophisticated in execution. They don’t need to depend on armies of top-tier black-hat hackers. They usually leverage well-known authentication weaknesses, such as corporate networks accessible without robust 2-factor authentication techniques, and/or firms’ reliance on outmoded firewall/VPN security models.

Too often, we see that a single compromised password gives attackers essentially unlimited access behind corporate firewalls, with predictably dire results.

The irony is that the means to avoid these kinds of attacks are already available — but too many firms just don’t want to make the efforts to deploy them. In effect, their systems are left largely exposed — and then there’s professed surprise when the crooks simply saunter in! There are hobbyist forums on the Net, having already implemented these security improvements, that are now actually better protected than many major corporations!

I’ve discussed the specifics many times in the past. The use of 2-factor (aka 2-step) authentication can make compromised username/password combinations far less useful to attackers. When FIDO/U2F security keys are properly deployed to provide this authentication, successful fraudulent logins tend rapidly toward nil.

Combining these security key models with “zero trust” authentication, such as Google’s “BeyondCorp” (https://cloud.google.com/beyondcorp), and security is even further enhanced, since no longer can an attacker simply penetrating a firewall or compromised VPN find themselves with largely unfettered access to targeted internal corporate resources.

These kinds of security tools are available immediately. There is no need to wait for government actions or admissions from Putin! And sooner rather than later, firms and institutions that continue to stall on deploying these kinds of security methodologies will likely find themselves answering ever more pointed questions from their stockholders or other stakeholders, demanding to know why these security improvements weren’t already made *before* these organizations were targeted by new highly publicized ransomware attacks!

–Lauren–