Philobiblon

Some semi-good news on malaria in Africa – mosquito nets impregnated with long-lasting insecticide. As usual, of course, the problem is in distribution, and particularly fair distribution to the poor.

Then a couple of funnies to cheer you up. Now I’m a fairly militant atheist, although I think Jesus as a historical character probably did exist, but in Italy, the foundation of the Catholic Church, a judge isn’t satisfied about that.

AN ITALIAN judge has ordered a priest to appear in court this month to prove that Jesus Christ existed.

There’s been a lot of ill-explained claims about the decline of secularism lately (I’ve yet to see anyone give any figures or facts to support this claim), so let’s give the judge a cheer.

And instead of Tupperware parties (the social highlight of my Mum’s circle when I was a child), in America women are now apparently having DIY parties, at which they learn new skills. Sounds like a much more useful idea – a repaired wall will last a lot longer than a salad.

A cold night in an affluent suburb in Denver, Colorado. Inside a well-appointed, detached home a dozen women are gathered.
Aged mainly in their mid-forties, the excited talk among this group of female graduate professionals is of only one thing: tools. They have come here to debate the relative virtues of the V-notch trowel against that of its square-notched rival. Then there is the question of whether to stock up on a few more rolls of waterproof tarp, splash out on a new eight-inch adjustable wrench or invest in that state-of-the art, easy-action caulking gun they have set their hearts on.

Perhaps the most magical address in London is 18 Folgate Street in Spitalfields, otherwise known as Dennis Severs’ House. I wrote a piece about its Christmas display for The Times several years ago (unfortunately not now available free online), but I hope to write again about its “everyday” face soon.

In the meantime, I’ve been reading Severs’ own description of it and its (re)creation as a piece of living history, simply titled 18 Folgate Street. The book is as delightfully nutty and eccentric as the house in the flesh. (Although I have to confess I’m not entirely convinced by his naive-style collages.)

Yet it does explain the house very well. Indeed if I had to sum it up on one phrase it is in his definition of atmosphere as “the space between things. He created what might be called an imaginary theatre display – a whole family lives – eats, sleeps and breathes – in the house, but they’ve always just left the room before you entered – leaving a scent, a half-eaten apple, or other similar signs of their presence. READ MORE

Anatole Kaletsky is always worth reading (even if he always delivers his copy 10 minutes after the absolute, final deadline) – here’s his take on the economics of 2006.

Combining these three negative factors, a significant global slowdown in the year ahead seems almost certain. But a mid-cycle slowdown is very different from a late-cycle downturn of the kind that presages outright recession. In the case of Britain, which was the first of the major economies to tighten monetary policy and experience a slowdown, the worst may already be over. Assuming the Bank of England reduces base rates to around 4 per cent by late summer, I would expect a return to trend growth of around 2.5 per cent and a stable housing market this year.

So not too bad for the UK, but I’d be more worried in the US – which matches my entirely lay view – those deficits have got to bite at some time.

Unfortunately, however, for the environment it is almost certain to be another bad year. Today’s news: fires and record temperatures in Sydney, and the biggest whale slaughter in a generation.

Traditionalists often complain of the lack of craft in modern art, yet the photographer Tom Hunter, in his composition and use of light, shows an equivalent level of skill to any “Old Master” with horsehair brush and oils. There is something astonishingly painterly about his work with a lens.

It is thus something of a shock to come suddenly upon his show at the National Gallery. Walking into the Sunley room, your gaze is attracted by the distant prospect – several galleries on – of Van Dyck’s famous giant equestrian portrait of Charles I. Then you look left, to an image that seems very familiar; a young woman stands holding a letter in the light of a window.

Looking closer, you realise that while you might well have seen it before, this is not the familiar Vermeer painting, but Hunter’s Woman reading a Possession Order, which was modelled on it. Made in 1997, and winner of the Kobal Photographic Portrait Award the following year, it is a highly accessible, yet highly effective, image. Instead of the rich bourgeois setting of the original, this is a dilapidated Hackney room, and beside the woman is not a bundle of richly embroidered cloth but a baby, who looks anxiously at his straight-backed mother, who is carefully holding herself together. READ MORE

Now here’s some depressing news …

Two Booker novels, submitted anonymously and unidentified to publishers and agents, got almost universal rejections. As someone who refers to JK Rowling getting six rejections just a little too often, I’m not surprised.

Then, if you’re suffering from New Year-itis you mightn’t want to read this one: if you’re British you probably noticed that story about the single mother of five who died by “falling out of the loft while getting her children’s presents”. You have to wonder why that story was allowed to run in that form (surely an off-the-record word from a policeman would have stopped it … then again perhaps not, given the desperation for a story), because it looks like it is much darker – a case of suicide.

Then, one of my predictions for 2006 – we’ll see a lot more attacks from the “old” media on the “new”, like this:

There’s something frankly creepy about the explosion we now call the Blogosphere — the big-bang “electroniverse,” where recently wired squatters set up new camps each day. As I write, the number of “blogs” (Web logs) and “bloggers” (those who blog) is estimated in the tens of millions worldwide.
Although I’ve been a blog fan since the beginning, and have written favorably about the value added to journalism and public knowledge thanks to the new “citizen journalist,” I’m also wary of power untempered by restraint and accountability.
Say what you will about the so-called mainstream media, but no industry agonizes more about how to improve its product, police its own members and better serve its communities. Newspapers are filled with carpal-tunneled wretches, overworked and underpaid, who suffer near-pathological allegiance to getting it right.

Well except in sentimental, and unfactual, Christmas stories …

Imagine that you are told that the whole of London is about to be destroyed. The British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, all of the treasures about to be swept away. You’ve got a magic wand and can save just one room. Which would you choose?

Oddly enough, I think I’d chose Gallery 46A at the V&A – the Cast Court – which contains not one original object, but crams into one room an entire art history of almost two millenniums of Europe in a mad, exotic menagerie. There are tombs, fonts, doors, panels, freestanding statues and crosses, portrait busts, monumental memorials. The originals were in bronze, in stone, in wood, but here they are in plaster – that fragile but infinitely malleable magic dough – carefully copied and coloured, preserving every crack and grain, every indentation left by weary buttocks over the ages; not quite real but not quite fake. READ MORE