In which I Learn Persian

Back at the start of the academic year, I signed up for a course of beginners' Persian.  I've been a bit of a Persephile for as long as I can remember, and meaning to take lessons in the language for ages.  Then I learned that the University offers language classes to the public, and that Persian is on the menu.

So I signed up.

It was either that, or blowing the cobwebs of French, or grinding the rust off Russian, or starting German from scratch.  All had their advantages.  But I chose Persian.

Lessons are for three hours on a Tuesday evening; I've been providing a potted précis on Facebook week-by-week since.  But it might be interesting to repost those updates here, with a little elaboration as I deem fit.  I'm going to try to ensure that they appear in "real time" - to the greatest extent possible, the posts will not alter according to what I would come to know or think later.  Having said that, it might be impossible to add to what I was thinking at the time without that kind of distortion.  We shall see.

So, over the next few days, that's what I'll do.  Spoiler alert: I'm not very good at it.

In the meantime, here's a couple of photos from my trip to Iran in 2004.  (Some people go on package tours to the Algarve.  I went to a totalitarian theocracy - albeit one where the totalitarian theocracy seemed only to be skin-deep.)

This was taken in Yazd, where I ended up with sunstroke.  Annoyingly, I can't remember the names of most of the other people who were in the group.  I think the guy with the moustache that you can half-see was Paul.  But I do remember the name of the guy in the foregroud.  He was a German teacher from Aberdeen called Kenny.  Kenny had a very low tolerance for bullshit - in Esfahan, for example, he noticed that there was someone who was following us around during a bit of free time when he, I, and one or two others went for a wander around the city.  He was suspicious that our shadow might have been a policeman of some sort, so went to engage him in conversation.

In the course of that conversation, our shadow claimed that he'd worked in Germany for 20 years.  Naturally, Kenny responded by talking in German.  The shadow had no clue what he was on about.
"But I thought you lived in Germany for two decades?"
"Yes, but we never left our compound."
"For twenty years?"
"..."

Iranian police informers need to be a bit less obvious, I think.

Kenny also had a habit of joking that he was the Hidden Imam.  While the jokes were in English, they were also in public.  I'm not sure of the wisdom of that.

Anyway.

Here's another photo, this time taken under the Khaju bridge in Esfahan.  There's no story that attaches to it in any way; I don't know who the man is.  However, I do like the photo for a couple of reasons.  First, it's one of the rare pictures that I've managed to centre more or less correctly, so the perspective is good.  Second - I can take no credit for this at all - I like the way that the guy's outline follows the lines of perspective: his right arm following the vertical axis, and the line from his head to his left shoulder following the diagonal from the centre to the bottom right.  There's another reason on top of those that I like it, which is that there's a very similar photo that's on the cover of a fairly popular book - though I can't remember for the life of me what it is.  Anyway: that version of the photo on the book doesn't have anyone in it.  I think my picture is better.

So there we are.  The drip-feed record of my adventures in the language will begin anon; in a couple of weeks, we'll be up to the present.  Maybe one or two people will be interested.

The Slow Death of Printed Newspapers, and why it's a Problem.

There was a piece in The Guardian the other day about switching from print to digital newspapers... and then back again.  It's rather Proustian and elegaic in its tone: Stephen Curry writes that, having bought a paper copy of his newspaper,

I sat at the kitchen table with the paper spread out and immersed myself.  The pleasures are simple and deep and have yet to be reproduced on any screen that I have used.  Browsing is easier and feels more natural than with a… browser.  Despite the ease of search that computerised versions offer, you have more command of the content as the eye ranges across a double-page spread, skimming the headlines and noting those stories that you will return to read in full.  And you know where you are with a paper newpaper.  By which I mean you know where you are in the story and how far you have to go.  I was relieved to escape the seemingly endless scolling that disorients digital reading. 

There was also pleasure in the physicality of the interaction.  I had not lost the skill of whipping the wide bundle of sheets to initiate a fold, or the knack of pulling out creases and shaping the page to frame the article selected for attention.  And those muscle memories brought to mind other recollections – an instant reconnection with a childhood in Ballymena that bears the imprint of newsprint.  My father, a dentist in the town, picked up the Irish Times and the Guardian on his walk to work, to peruse in his lunch break and bring home at the end of the day.  In the evening the Belfast Telegraph would thud onto the mat at the front door.

Told you it was elegaic, didn't I?

I think he misses something, though, which occurred to me as I was reading his article (online, natch).  What you don't get with digital newspapers is serendipity.  It's easy to search for things that you want to read; but that means that you're less likely to read things that you didn't want to read but were glad you read - things, I susppose, that you didn't know you wanted to read.

You don't have as much control with the dead-tree press.  That's a good thing.  The alternative is that one is much more likely only ever to read things that confirm one's view, or that are "relevant" to one's life; one stays in one's own information bubble.  (This, incidentally, also provides a defence of the library and the bookshop, both for leisure and academic purposes: giving students the URL of a paper will take them directly to it, and so reduce the chance that they'll look at the table of contents of different editions of a journal and read something out of sheer interest; providing a scanned chapter from a book, or typing a search into Amazon, saves everyone from reading the book that's on the shelf next to it - and so condemns them to not reading it by the same token.)

So when Curry says that, with the newsprint version of a paper, "you have more command of the content as the eye ranges," I think he's wrong - and I think that it's good that he's wrong.  (Or, even if he's correct, I reject the value he imputes to that control.)  In leafing through an actual paper, you eye can be caught by an interesting headline, or picture; you take in half a sentence and follow it up, and sometimes you learn something about the world that you wouldn't have learned otherwise.  It's not impossible to browse an electronic version - but it's harder.  And in having to work for it, you lose the serendipity that is the whole point.

One of the things that I miss with the decline of the Indy, which I only ever bought on a Saturday, was reading the book reviews over a slow breakfast on a Sunday.  I've added any number of titles to my wishlist on the basis of that that I would never before have considered, or even encountered, otherwise.  And you can put a hot plate of oatcakes on a newspaper without having to worry about the damage that might be done to it by molten cheese, too.

What goes for book reviews goes, pari passu, for the parts of a newspaper that are probably quite a lot more important than books.  Of course, exposure to things that one would not otherwise have read is imperfect even with an actual newspaper, since the editor does preselect them for you - in choosing the Indy over, say, The Times or the Express, I narrowed my focus a little - but, still.

I am not the first person to worry that internet searches may only tell us what we want to hear.  But it'd not occurred to me that the printed press might be at least part of the solution to that problem.  An imperfect one, to be sure, since one chooses one's newspaper according to one's tastes; but a part of it.

If the printed press is in decline, we shouldn't mourn it (just) for Curry's essentially sentimental reasons.  We should be concerned in other ways, too.

I Don't Understand Poetry

This post is meant as a bit of an encomium of Ian McMillan, Bard of Barnsley and potential Patron Saint of Speech Radio - though, on re-reading, I'm a bit worried that it won't sound like it.

The other morning, he posted this on twitter:

I love this poem by Norman Nicholson

The poem in question is called "Five Minutes".  Here it is:

"I'm having five minutes," he said,
Fitting the shelter of the cobble wall
Over his shoulders like a cape. His head
Was wrapped in a cap as green
As the lichened stone he sat on. The winter wind
Whined in the ashes like a saw,
And thorn and briar shook their red
Badges of hip and haw;
The fields were white with smoke of blowing lime;
Rusty iron brackets of sorel stood
In grass grey as the whiskers round an old dog's nose.
"Just five minutes," he said;
And the next day I heard that he was dead,
Having five minutes to the end of time.

I've always had a problem with poetry.  I simply don't get it; and this poem is a good example of why.  I don't understand why it can't be rendered as a paragraph, for one thing:

'I'm having five minutes,' he said, fitting the shelter of the cobble wall over his shoulders like a cape.  His head was wrapped in a cap as green as the lichened stone he sat on.  The winter wind whined in the ashes like a saw, and thorn and briar shook their red badges of hip and haw; the fields were white with smoke of blowing lime; rusty iron brackets of sorel stood in grass grey as the whiskers round an old dog's nose.  "Just five minutes," he said; and the next day I heard that he was dead, having five minutes to the end of time.

It'd be - for my money - a slightly over-baked paragraph; writing as such throws into relief what is over-done about it ("red badges of hip and haw"?  Hmmm), but for the life of me I can't see what's missing.  Indeed, it seems to be that the piece is more successful when rendered as prose, because the line breaks are distracting.  Why are they where they are?  (I can't tell that there's a rhythmic need; and the rhyme structure is too tenuous. A-B-A-C-D-E-F-E-G-H-I-F-A-G, if I've counted correctly.  Oooh: wait: 14 lines.  So does that make it a sonnet?  And why does that matter?)  In the prose version, you don't have to worry about that; but you do have the freedom to stress what you will - to pick out the rhythms and rhymes as they present themselves, without the prompt.

Anyway: I replied to McMillan, because... well, because Twitter makes you think that that's OK.  "I have never understood poetry," I wrote.  "Why couldn't this be (overbaked) prose?  Who/ what should I read to see what I'm missing?  I believe I *am* missing something, but what?  I feel like a blind man in a gallery".

Saving Money is Easy.

Here's a bit of silliness that's just popped up on my FB feed: something called the 365 Day Penny Challenge.

Want to know the easiest way to save £667.95 in a year?
Then I’ve got the thing for you…
The 365 Day Penny Challenge.
All you need is:

• A jar 
• Pennies 
• Will Power

Day 1 (usually 1st January) put 1p in the jar, the next day (Day 2) put 2p in and so on and so forth. 

At the end of the 365 you will have save[d] £667.95! 

You're not doubling what you save; day 3 would involve putting in 3p, day 100 £1, and so on.

All groovy... except I doubt that it's sustainable.  A person could quite easily have, say, £3 in their pocket to put into the jar on day 300.  But that they'd have almost £3 on day 299, AND £3 on day 300, AND £3.01 on day 301, and so on looks to me to be more of a stretch.  (That'd amount to over £21 in loose change over the course of a week.)

If you do have that amount of loose change every day, I suspect it's because you're going to the bank and taking out £5 every day, some of which you spend on odds and sods.  But you're still taking out £5.  Banking the change - which is in effect what you're doing by putting the change in a jar - is not making a saving.  It's just a matter of not spending the change.

Genius.

People are sharing this and calling it a good idea.

Besides: who pays for everything with cash anyway?  The whole premise of this rests on the idea that you're going to be forced to take money out from the bank every day in fixed denominations greater than you would want to spend (unless you're withdrawing money just so that you can put it in your jar, which is ridiculous).  But Tesco and pubs all take plastic now.  Hell, even my milkman takes a direct debit.

In other words, the idea isn't just capitalising on people withdrawing cash in fixed denominations greater than they would want to spend; it requires it, in the face of there being much more efficient and secure ways to buy stuff.  The only people for whom this could conceivably work are in the cash-in-hand economy.  For people who aren't my window-cleaner or builder... it's a bit dim.