Tom Roper's Weblog

Bank holidays

Bank holiday have always been so so dull, from my childhood, when they were like another Sunday, only worse, to now. They don't offer a long enough respite from work to allow one to relax. There is nothing to do, expect try to rinse away the stale taste of the day with tea, or with something stronger.

Road to Rio

I have been invited to give a series of papers on psycholinguists at a conference in Rio de Janeiro. A splendid opportunity, but it was not meant for me. Someone at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro wrote to me, saying that 'we follow your work here with interest, specially the Theory of Mind and recursion papers'. I'm very flattered; it took but a few seconds to discover a Professor Tom Roeper (note the extra e) at the University of Massachusetts who works in this field. I forwarded the message on to him, copying it to the original sender, and explaining that I was Tom Roper, not Tom Roeper, and that I thought the latter was the man they sought.

I thought no more; some thanks might have been pleasant, from either of the parties, but this is 2009. Then I received an e-mail from the distinguished professor, to me, not to the original sender, complaining that he had not had an attached brochure about the conference (yes he had). I imagined that he had not given the message from Brazil a close reading and that when he did, he would see that he needed to reply to the sender in Rio. IN any case, I reasoned, surely the sender in Rio would, when she had my message explaining the mistaken identities, resend her message to the right man. So I did nothing further.

Of course neither the professor nor Rio had done any such thing. Yesterday Professor Roeper e-mailed me, without a copy to the people in Brazil, addressing me as 'Dear Aniela" not a name I have ever used, complaining once more that he had not had the attachment, and telling me that he has to plan other trips and cannot miss too many classes. I have replied once more, in polite but I hope clear terms, pointing out the error, copying to Brazil. I have offered to give them lectures on any aspect of librarianship, classical Greek or marathon running they wish. I hope they will read the message this time.

This is not the first time. DEFRA once offered me £40,000 to do some research on badgers, mistaking me for a Tim Roper., who researches in animal behaviour at the University of Sussex. As in this case I sent it on to him, copying to DEFRA, but neither party bothered to thank me, What baffles me is how people can send important messages like this without checking they are sending them to the right person, and then, when their error is pointed out to them, not acknowledge it. I wonder if I could perhaps make a second income out of these misdirected messages

Light blogging

The small matter of moving house, and a wait of eighteen working days for broadband to be transferred to the new house mean that my updates have been sporadic. I rely on wifi in cafés in London, the over-subscribed and under-powered computers in Seaford library and the iPhone; Seaford is without public wifi, just as, when I tried to buy the London Review of Books in the new W H Smith, I was brusquely told that it is not 'on the list' .

Normal service will return soon but why does it take eighteen working days? I cannot imagine, as I am keeping the same telephone number, on the same exchange. Perhaps the new line will be gilded with several layers of gold leaf by highly-skilled painstaking craftsmen, and wrapped in rare and costly silks brought by camel train from the mystic Orient.

The mark of Cain

A passing reference in Robert Scoble's blog to the CEO of an American company who, to show his faith in his company in the face of the slump, had the company badge tattooed on his leg, set me worrying. What if this were to take off over here?

In Britain such behaviour would meet more scepticism than admiration. Can one imagine a British worker having the company's emblem engraved on his or her body in indelible ink with a vibrating needle? I think not. Imagine the anguish if image consultants were called in to change everything, or the mirth in the HR department when deciding who to sack:

'You can't sack Jenkins. He's had the company logo tattooed on his forehead'
'Oh, but think how funny he'll look in the JobCentre queue'.

And another thing...

...in the wasteland of further education, not only are we not recruiting enough students, not only, thanks to the latest government computer-based fiasco even more are put off because the Learning and Skills Council has made a hash of the EMAs (Education Maintenance Allowance: the financial incentive to lure 16-18 year-olds into colleges), the new catering contractors proudly presented us with the most illiterate menu ever seen. 'Panini's', it offers, along with a 'chicken speacial'. Add to this bizarre capitalisation of random words, and the effect is quite emetic. Will the food be so to?

And another thing....what is all this nonsense about psychological warfare against Al-Qaeda's 'brand'? See the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/aug/26/alqaida.uksecurity. When word reaches the caves of Tora Bora that the focus groups don't like the brand, I'm sure bin-Laden will throw in the towel.

End of rant.

Buggers, pansies and pedants

A new exhibition, The Golden Generation, British Theatre 1945-1968, on theatre censorship opened at the British Library on Wednesday, and was previewed in the Guardian on Tuesday, though, apart from a press release, is curiously absent from the BL's website, though there is a good blog. A memo from the Lord Chamberlain, who exercised censorship over the theatre until 1968, instructs his staff that ,'we will allow the word 'pansy', but not the word 'bugger'.
Though the exhibition sounds fascinating, the effect is spoilt by the failure of the BL's press officer to do basic research. Even a look at Wikipedia, never mind the numerous reference works to hand in a national library, could have told them that there is no such person as a 'retired RAF colonel', as they had Jamie Andrews, head of modern manuscripts, say. The rank of colonel is used only in the British army. Retired officers from all three services will be writing to point this out.

The poetry of silence

On the recommendation of the nicest and best art historian of the modern epoch, I went to the Royal Academy to see the Vilhelm Hammershøi exhibition, The Poetry of Silence. I knew nothing of Hammershøi before, but was deeply impressed by his pictures, mostly interiors, sometimes empty, sometimes peopled by a single woman, frequently seen from the back.

The area set aside for the galleries is inadequate; five rooms were crammed with gallery goers and some who I think were merely sheltering expensively (£8 for admission) from the rain. Two tours through the crowded rooms were not enough to allow me to give everything the attention it deserved. I suppose the correct technique is to stand immovably in front of a picture and ignore the jostling, but I lack the patience.

Three of my fellow devotees annoyed me particularly. A man of my age, more or less, with two younger companions, all dressed from a jumble sale, stood in the most inconvenient places they could find and held a conversation. I could not shake them off, and by the time I reached the last room, devoted to Hammershøi's late work before his death in 1916, the oldest one was expounding the plot of Woody Allen's Annie Hall at the top of his voice. I cannot imagine why, unless he arrived there by way of Allen's enthusiasm for Nordic cinema. Whatever trail of thought had taken him to this irrelevance, I had a great urge to hit him hard with the bust of a past academician. Perhaps I should have reminded him of the exhibition's title.

Putting the elephant in the room back on its feet

I am sure I would be inarticulate and verbally maladroit if interviewed on the Today programme.I hope though I would not mix my metaphors to the extent that the interviewee did just now, discussing failed and failing states, and speaking of the need to put the 'elephant in the room back on its feet'. Poor elephant!

elephants

The death of the telephone enquiry

Today's Times Higher Education carries a report of a telephone survey of twenty university libraries' enquiry services. Repeating a survey carried out by the Polytechnic of North London in 1987, journalists rang up and asked four questions. Alarmingly, only two of the twenty could give the correct boiling point of ethanol, 78.32°C, the others using Wikipedia which at the time of the survey gave a wrong figure. But even worse, several libraries, six in the case of the ethanol question, refused to answer the enquiry at all.

Overheard in the public library

As I was writing a post on a computer in a public library, I heard the following exchange:

Reader: Have you got any books about talking to spirit cats?
Library assistant: Spirit cats?
Reader: Yeah, like, I mean cats that have passed over. To the other side. You know....

cats