An interesting idea from the Guardian; you can get the name and address of a (presumably undecided or swingable) voter in a key constituency and write them to give your view. Here.

Who knows, it might even make a difference. My prediction is that the election will be undecided 48 hours after the vote has finished and it will all end up in the courts again. Partly, this will be because it is so close, but also because I suspect that the idea of “Her Majesty’s loyal opposition” (which is a pretty odd concept in historical terms) — a preparedness to accept you will lose power and gain it again in due course — has broken down in the US, at least among Republicans.

You might ask about her life; little is known except what the Pillow Book reveals, and it is by no means a conventional diary. Her father was a poet and a scholar, and she may have been briefly married to a court official and had a son. The introduction says: “There is a tradition that she died in lonely poverty; but this is probably an invention of moralists.”

A few more of her words:

Item 74: Things That Lose by Being Painted
Pinks, cherry blossoms, yellow roses. Men or women who are praised in romances as being beautiful.

Item 75: Things That Gain by Being Painted
Pines, Autumn fields. Mountain villages and paths. Cranes and deer. A very cold winter scene; an unspeakably hot summer scene. (p. 138.)

Item 174. The Way in Which Carpenters Eat
The way in which carpenters eat is really odd. When they had finished the main building and were working on the eastern wing, some carpenters squatted in a row to have their meal; I say on the veranda and watched them. The moment the food was brought, they fell on the soup bowls and gulped down the contents. They they pushed the bowls aside and finished off all the vegetables. I wondered whether they were going to leave their rice; a moment later their wasn’t a grain left in the bowls. They all behaved in exactly the same way, so I suppose this must be the custom of carpenters. I should not call it a very charming one.” (p. 255.)

More here and here.

I’ve been thinking about the process of blogging and its predecessors, which took me back to one of my favourite books of all time, The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, by a lady-in-waiting to the Japanese empress in the last decade of the 10th century AD. It’s a journal, a commonplace book, a collection of poetry and in some ways a conduct book. Sei was, no doubt typically of her time, a terrible snob, but delightfully free from repressive morality.

Her conduct advice still seems pretty good:
“A good lover will behave as elegantly at dawn as at any other time. He drags himself out of bed, with a look of dismay on his face. The lady urges him on: ‘Come, my friend, it’s getting light. You don’t want anyone to find you here.’ He gives a deep sigh, as if to say that the night has not been nearly long enough and that it is agony to leave. Once up, he does not instantly pull on his trousers. Instead he comes close to the lady and whispers whatever was left unsaid during the night. Even when he is dressed, he still lingers, vaguely pretending to be fastening his sash.
Presently he raises the lattice, and the two lovers stand together by the side door while he tells her how he dreads the coming day, which will keep them apart; then he slips away. The lady watches him go, and this moment of parting will remain among her most charming memories.
Indeed, one’s attachment to a man depends largely on the elegance of his leave-taking. When he jumps out of bed, scurries about the room, tightly fastens his trouser-sash, rolls up the sleeves of his Court cloak, over-robe or hunting costume, stuffs his belongings into the breast of his robe and then briskly secures the outer sash – one really begins to hate him.”

(Trans. I Morris, Penguin, London, 1967, p. 49-50

… is the “big” title of Marilyn French’s latest, a big three-volume set, from the sound of the Guardian review.

The reviewer’s not sold, but it still sounds like a great idea.

I spent this afternoon working at the British Museum’s Big Draw event. It’s a day when the Great Court really comes into its own, as a great hive of buzzing, excited people. It is surprising how keen people of all ages are to express themselves with a crayon when given the chance.

Then I stewarded a talk by the artist Professor Michael Craig Martin. (I’ll confess I hadn’t heard of him; while I enjoy modern art I’ve not developed the interest as much as I would like.) Some samples here.

He made some interesting observations, obviously from an artist/philosopher’s eye.

* Objects are becoming more and more alike, and their functions less and less obvious, e.g. telephones. In the Seventies it was obvious how you held a handset, where you talked and where you listened, but that is not true of mobiles today.

* Asked about the apparent lack of emotion in his work, he questioned why we assume a violent squiggled line is more “expressive” or “emotional” than a straight line.

* He argued a true personal expression is something that the artist cannot help; that’s what tells you what the artist is.

* Asked about the YBA movement (many of whose members he taught) he said that while many might lack traditional skills, this was not a handicap, indeed it could be an advantage, because they had to discover an individual way to express themselves, a way to dominate what they did. “When you are talking about a skill it is something we recognise; it already exists.”

The talk was supposed to be mainly about the “Drawing the Line” exhibition, which he curated. It matched, or paired, drawings from all ages, and it was interesting how some of the most modernist sat beautifully beside a Raphael or a Michelangelo, each telling you something about the other.

From today’s DNB email: “There is some evidence to suggest that Godwine [father of Henry II of England] was the son of the late tenth-century renegade and pirate Wulfnoth of Sussex, who had rebelled spectacularly against Aethelred the Unready and had purloined his fleet; and judging from the location of Godwine’s estates it does appear that the family had long been established as thegns in Sussex and Hampshire.”