Corner-Shop Window

The time has long passed when I had to concede that I would never shoot film again.  Hardly a wrench, for me.  Unlike a lot of self-declared film-nostalgists, I did actually get through a fair amount of the stuff (averaged out, around three medium-format rolls of colour negative a week, plus a diminishing amount of home-processed 35mm and medium-format black and white) and it cost me deep in the purse, as they used to say in the old film-era ballads.  I've already described the horror of the darkroom, so won't go there again.

And yet I still have film cameras cluttering the house, ranging from cute little Olympus pocket cameras (Mju and XA), through various old "folders", box cameras, and a couple of SLRs, to my Fuji GS645S, the film camera with which I had the most extended romance.  All of which I bought second-hand (more likely, third- or fourth-hand).  It's hard to recall now, but film cameras used to be robust enough to have many owners over several decades, and were cheap.  The Agfa Isolette folder I used for the project that became the book Downward Skies --  with top of the range f/3.5 Solinar lens and Synchro-Compur shutter -- was made in 1954 (same year as me) and cost me £15 in 2001.

It's a shame they won't get any more use, but none of them is worth enough to sell on, and practically impossible to give away.  Here, please take this device off my hands that -- if you use it -- will cost you more money over a single year in film and processing than the price of decent digital camera! Um, no thanks.

However, I know there are people out there who still use or would like to use film, and in the spirit of the traditional card placed in the window of a corner-shop, I make them this offer:

Mamiya C330f  (incl. Beattie screen, collapsible viewfinder, soft case, body cap, manual)
80mm lens (silver)
55mm lens (black)
180mm lens (black w. original leather case)
Porrofinder (damaged mirror but useable)
Porrofinder, metered
Paramender (fixes parallax)
Right-angle grip with release button
Mamiya quick release plate

WHOLE LOT sold as kit:  to you, dear reader, £350

The Mamiya C330f is the real deal, a twin-lens reflex with interchangeable lenses, and capable of the very highest quality in medium-format photography.  All metal, all beautifully machined, totally robust.  With the grip and porrofinder attached, you can even use it hand-held, which I usually did.  It looks great on top of a tripod, though, if you're that way inclined; it says "serious photographer at work" almost as much as a view camera.  The Beattie screen is simply magic, and brightens up the viewfinder to an amazing degree.

This may have to be UK only, but we can discuss that: it's mainly a question of the cost of packing and postage. PayPal preferred. Anyone interested should contact me via email. If you don't have my email address, leave a comment with your email address  (I will delete your comment immediately on receipt).  Preference to long-term commenters.  As they used to say in the Exchange & Mart:  no time-wasters, please!

I also have a WANTED card to put in the window:

Does anyone have any unwanted old Instamatic (110) size transparencies in their mounts (or even just the mounts)?  I need to scan some old 110 negatives, and that seems the most practical way of doing it. I also need one of those Instamatic transparency adapters, to make them the same size as a 35mm transparency (I know Gepe used to make them).  If you can help (or have a better suggestion for scanning 110 negatives), please contact me as above.

 

Concrete Poetry

One thing that is very hard to fake is the harmony of chance, whether it be the self-ordering of the natural world, or the unintended by-products of human activity.  One of the great advances of 20th century art -- perhaps the greatest -- was to grant us permission to regard these non-intentional, aleatory markings and arrangements as an expressive form in their own right.  Much of abstract art is, to my mind, simply the attempt of professional artists to take credit for recognizing what is all around us.  "Appropriation" is not restricted to stealing other people's photographs.

As soon as you try to paint or draw this mysterious harmony it starts to evaporate.  Deliberate marks have their own beauty, of course, but to recreate deep harmony takes considerable skill.  In the end, it is hard to separate one's admiration of a painting from one's admiration for the talent of its painter, most obviously where hyper-realism is the goal (see the work of John Salt or Eliot Hodgkin, for example).  But few people grasp the extent to which an artist like Picasso was trying and failing, in his work, to escape the prison of his own boring facility.

Not so random marks on a wall.  They are simply there, to be remarked, to be used, or to be ignored.  No success or failure attaches to them.  Though it might be said that, in admiring them, you are merely admiring your own sensibility.  Well, and why not?  What else are you going to do with it?

The wonder of photography, in its purest form, is its ability to put in the hands of anybody -- anybody! -- the means to frame selections from the world and say, in effect, I saw this, and was moved to preserve it and to share it with you.  It's one reason why photo-purists reject image manipulation, going right back to the reaction of Group f/64 in the 1930s to the "painterly" conventions and tweakings of the Pictorialists.  It's like a implied breach of trust.  Though it's interesting how much emphasis purists tend to put on their skill -- particularly their skill at re-rendering a photograph to more nearly resemble their original "vision" -- presumably to put some distance between themselves and "anybody".

It's also why "found" photographs so often trump the deliberate work of self-conscious photo-artists.  They come to us with their mystery and their harmony restored, with any of the original photographer's intentions and associations shorn away, and with the perfect, open charm of a concrete object that has bobbed up into our consciousness from the hazy depths of the past. 

© 2011 John and Teenuh Foster 

From the Foster Collection

The Sense of a River

You can feel the presence of a living body of water, even when you can't see it.  The vegetation, the light, the wildlife, all announce that you are now entering the riparian zone.

 The presence of a busy motorway -- just yards beyond the trees beyond the viaduct -- is somehow less obvious.  Apart, of course, from the constant noise.  There is no transitional zone, no distinctive ecology, although it's true the motorways themselves are becoming an ecosystem in their own right.  The bounty of roadkill along the central reservations and verges is one reason for the rapid spread of carrion eaters like the Red Kite, I'm sure.

Maybe it's that lack of a distinctive sense of transition that leads pheasants, foxes, badgers and deer to stride boldly out across the carriageway.  After all, you don't see a constant flow of such creatures floating downstream, Eeyore-like, having mistakenly tried to dash across the river.

Rainy Day

It was good to get out of the house and go for a stroll in the spring rain this afternoon, through the meadows that lie alongside the River Test where it passes under the Hockley Viaduct.  It is odd, though:  the first swallows and swifts are appearing, but things are generally so behind schedule it feels as if we're having April in May.

St. Catherine's Hill in the rain

Hockley Viaduct in the rain

But nothing brings out the saturation of the colours like a rainy day.  It always feels like a slightly high-risk activity, though, as far as delicate electronic kit is concerned.  One of these days I'll invest in a weatherproof camera.

R and R

Last week, on May Day, I found this cryptic symbol sprayed on the pavement next to a bus shelter on Hill Lane in Southampton:

I photographed it mainly because of the shadows, of course.  Then, at the weekend, without realising what I was looking at, I found something very similar in a tunnel under the railway line near Hockley Viaduct outside Winchester:

Is it an "R"? Or a "12"? Or is it the common symbol for some infrastructural object  -- pipes or wires, maybe?  It seems too simple, discreet and utilitarian to be someone's grafitti "tag".  I'm intrigued.

Faking It

Reports of academic fakery are all over the place at the moment.  This recent article from the New York Times is particularly interesting, as it explores the issues and motivations behind a recently-uncovered systematic fraudster of some eminence in the Netherlands.  Psychology aside, it seems to boil down to three things.  First, if you want to get ahead, tell 'em what they want to hear.  Second, so much academic work is less than rigorous in its evaluation of data (especially if the data are leading to the "wrong" conclusion) that downright fakery is just one easy psychological and ethical step beyond.  Third, nothing succeeds like success.  A cynic might say, so what's new?  No-one ever got anywhere by playing by the rules.

Issues of the ethics of "manipulation" trouble photographers, too.  I have lost count of the number of agonized (and mainly specious) discussions I have read of how far it is "right" to alter or enhance what the unmediated lens delivers.  Obviously, photo-journalists are a special case, and stand in the same relationship to "truth" as journalists: get caught faking it, and your career is likely over.  Amongst others, Magnum's Paolo Pellegrin fell foul of this high standard recently.  But, just as journalists also stand in relation to novelists on a spectrum of writing as "truth telling", so PJs stand in relation to artist-photographers as far as visual truth is concerned.

It's an interesting question -- and one which I am not remotely qualified to discuss -- whether "truth" has a necessary aesthetic dimension.  A lot of people seem to think so.  Famously, Buckminster Fuller was of the opinion that "when I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong." Though I think I am more inclined to favour H.L. Mencken's equally famous view that "For every problem, there is one solution which is simple, neat, and wrong."

By the same token, one might wonder whether the reverse is true, that in creating an aesthetically-pleasing object, one is also creating a truth, or at least something very like it. A lot of the supposed "value" of art resides in that rather dodgy presumption.  Can you reverse-engineer the beauty of a sausage into the "truth" of a pig?  I don't think so, but I'm not aware that anyone has ever tackled that particular problem.  A good sausage is its own kind of truth, of course.

But back to photography.  Now, let's just accept that there is inherent jiggery-pokery involved in capturing the beams of light reflected off a scene, snapping them off just so, and turning the withered beam-ends into electrickery which can be stored, passed through wires, and reconstituted like instant coffee into a 2-D representation bearing a sort-of resemblance to the original scene.  Miraculous! Frankly, to worry about the truthiness of the end product seems downright ungrateful.  But it's usually the ethical truth people are worrying about, rather than the epistemological truth.  How far is too far?

Consider these three images, recently submitted to my own Ethics Committee:

The first I showed in a recent post.  It's a "straight" photo, inasmuch as anything which been slightly cropped, and had its colour-channel levels, saturation, and sharpness adjusted in Photoshop can be said to be "straight".  The Ethics Committee are not even slightly troubled by it.

The second, obviously, is the same file, a little more tightly cropped, and rendered as a monochrome image, so as to resemble the colour and tonal range of a platinum-type print.  It looks really great printed on Hahnemühle Matt Fine Art paper.  But it's a fake, in that it is not a platinum print, with all the skill and artisanal wizardry that would imply.  Do I care?  No.  But I think the Ethics Committee would have a problem, if I were to go very much further down this road, to the point where I could be said to be trying to pass this off as a hand-crafted platinum print.  I could easily put an irregular "hand-coated" border around the image, for example, and maybe varnish it to give it a more interesting finish.  I have seen precisely such work for sale in expensive limited editions.  We're in "wood effect" or "tribute act" territory here, I think.

The third, equally obviously, is the same file as the second, but with the cow moved by the power of Photoshop in an attempt to "improve" the composition.  If I were a carpenter painter, and had scraped out my first attempt and replaced it elsewhere on my canvas, no-one would have a problem.  It's what painters do.  But one of the most venerable taboos of art is "truth to materials".  To start moving things around in a photograph is something that divides the Ethics Committee violently.  "It's no longer a true photograph!", shouts one faction.  "You're stuck in the past by your own self-imposed rules!!", screams the other.  Committee adjourned, sine die.

The fourth version -- in which the cow has been removed, and an enormous, glistening roast-beef joint occupies the pen, with the words MEAT IS MURDER printed on it -- is not shown here because it is on display at the Dosh Kerching Gallery in London, vastly enlarged, and gratifyingly highly priced.  Wittily, it is part of a conceptual series about the ethics of representation.  I didn't even bother to show it to the Ethics Committee.  So sue me.

Bank Holiday

It's been a bank holiday weekend here and, unusually, it hasn't been raining.  We went out for a bit of a stroll yesterday out by the viaduct and the wetlands down by the Itchen Navigation.  I took some pictures.

Today I've got my feet up, doing some reading.  I'm reading The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt.  It's a good book.  That's it.  See you later.

Journey's End

About halfway down Hill Lane, at the south end of Southampton Common, is Southampton Old Cemetery.  It was one of England’s earliest municipal cemeteries, established by the Southampton Cemetery Act of 1843, and covers 27 acres.  Although a team of council workers is generally at work somewhere in the grounds, nature has pretty much been allowed to have its way and, as I said in the previous post, so many trees have grown to full height -- including giant redwood conifers and monkey-puzzle trees -- that the crowded, tilted and tumbled gravestones appear to be a species of undergrowth in a forest.

I ended up in there on my May Day walk.  It's always something of a personal dare, for me, to enter a graveyard, on two levels.

First, I am immediately rendered into an 8-year-old trespasser, as primed to be spooked as the audience of a horror film.  I was raised as a sort of Baptist-agnostic in a town without much history, where the few conventional graveyards belonged to rural Anglican churches swallowed up by the new-build estates, and thus represented an older, alien way of death.  The clean, modern way of "disposal" was cremation, of course, and a dank, overgrown bit of ground containing actual bodies (or more probably, and worse,  skellingtons) seemed to exhale infection and spiritual danger.  There were other dangers, too; a boy was caned in front of our school morning assembly for taking green marble chippings from a grave, and distributing them in the playground. We just didn't know how to behave around dead folk, and it was best simply to leave them alone.

Second, I am acutely aware, surrounded by all those ranks of headstones, and all those picturesque monuments, and all those fading inscriptions, of the way generation after generation of amateur photographers have come here in search of clichés.  I tell you, it takes courage merely to raise a camera.  But I have a blog to feed, and an invincible belief in my own capacity to enter into the Valley of the Shadow of Death and emerge unscathed and with a decent set of snaps.

That second one gave me a bit of a start.  What my presbyopic vision took for a grinning Hallowe'en-style pumpkin skull turned out to be merely an eroded "lamb and flag".  Phew.  I knew that.  The first one has a bit of a mocking monkey face on it, too, if you're that way inclined.  Paranoia?  Paranormal? No,  pareidolia!

May Day

Wednesday being my regular day off, I took a walk down a long road in the May Day sunshine.  As a photographer, you have an ambivalent relationship with the sort of sunshine that gladdens other people's hearts.  Too harsh, too contrasty, you're thinking, as everyone else is rejoicing and casting off clouts way too soon.

In such circumstances, I seek out reflective and translucent surfaces, and places where the light may be playing interesting tricks, transforming dull things into exciting things.  You really can't beat a very long north-south road with varied domestic and corporate architecture down one side and natural vegetation down the other, with an assortment of bus shelters, barriers and other interesting street furniture.  Especially if it leads, say, to a picturesque Victorian cemetery so overgrown with trees that the jumbled gravestones appear to be growing out of a sun-dappled forest floor.  Happily, I know just such a road, called Hill Lane.

Along the way I came across these two two-dimensional May Queens, revealed as semi-divine beings by the sunshine on dull corporate advertising matter. One was on a bus shelter placard facing out onto the road, the other was on a vinyl banner attached to the railings of a local sixth form college.

Pan Pipes

A pen, a trough, a cow, a double fence and some thorn bushes at the bottom of the east side of St. Catherine's Hill.  Nothing more, nothing less.

Yet there often seems to be a disquieting mystery at the heart of such quiet harmony, one which puts me in mind of those hysterical but memorable words, quoted from Büchner's Woyzek, displayed on screen at the start of Werner Herzog's film The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. Over a shot of a wheat field writhing in a blustery wind, accompanied by Pachelbel's Canon, we see a text: "Don't you hear that horrible screaming all round you? That screaming men call silence?"*

Well, I did say they were hysterical words (as in "excessively emotional or agitated", rather than "wildly funny") but I'm sure you understand what he means.  We're not talking about tinnitus here.  Longer-term readers may recall my own experience with El Tiburón, and you may have had similar experiences of your own.

Büchner's words are an example of what I like to call "heavy breathing", a tendency both Romantics and Modernists have in common.  That is, a tendency to talk up the hidden horrors of the world, and their attendant alienation, in such a way as to draw an audience into unwilling complicity.  "Hmm, yes, I think you like this too, really, don't you, my dear?"  It's the seamy side of the Sublime.

A more venerable account of the experience is embodied in the etymology of "panic", originally an inexplicable surge of fear experienced in a wild place, said to be the mischievous god Pan making himself known.  Perhaps that terrible screaming is simply the sound of the piper at the Gates of Dawn, playing in a key and register normally beyond the range of human ears.

Sheep on Brown Clee hill

* Actually, to be accurate, the text we see is "Hören Sie denn nicht das entsetzliche Schreien ringsum, das man gewöhnlich die Stille heißt?" with English subtitles, delivered in two bites.  The German might more accurately be translated as "Don’t you hear that terrible screaming all around, which is customarily called silence?".  To be even more accurate, Herzog's film is actually called "Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle" i.e. "Every man for himself and God against everyone" which pretty much lays Werner's cards on the table.

Ashes Time

According to Robert Bly, the poet who became more famous as a thinker about the "crisis of masculinity" with his book Iron John, young viking men would often enter a permitted period of lassitude, when they would simply lie around the hall doing nothing much, maybe listening to Björk or more likely Burzum, and often sleeping in the warm ashes of the fire.  This was known, apparently, as "ashes time".

These would presumably have been young noble vikings, and not the sons of working-stiff vikings (and certainly not anybody's daughters).  "Hey, there may be no daylight today but wood needs chopping to make fresh ashes for his lordship to wallow in, you lazy git -- get out of bed right now!"

One of the great advances of modern society since the 1970s has been the democratisation of ashes time. In the absence of any actual work to do -- not even any wood seems to need chopping -- whole sections of the population have nothing better to do than stay in bed.  For the first decade or two, this can seem like an extremely fine idea.

Unfortunately, as the Nouveau Idle do not stand to inherit the Great Hall or the dragon-headed ship, and will not by right of birth lead raids or steer great enterprises of state, this period of wool-gathering, day-dreaming and daytime TV amounts to nothing more than an extended false start to life.

Ashes, indeed.

Someone has been busy making ash piles up on St. Catherine's Hill.  The view is gradually opening up, as trees and scrub are felled and burned, in an attempt to recreate "proper" chalk downland.

However, I suspect that the scrub will be planning its counter-attack right now.  Thorn and brambles never sleep.  They know the weakness of our species, with our fondness for permitted or enforced periods of lassitude.  They'll be back.

Path to Nowhere

Found myself out by Hockley Viaduct and St. Catherine's Hill last weekend.  Looked up, saw a Red Kite.  Ho hum.  No starlings, though.

It's strange, the way they have "renovated" the viaduct.  As I must have mentioned before, one of the reasons it is a remarkable thing is that it was one the first ever poured-concrete structures, made in 1888.  The fancy brick exterior is merely a cladding. Yet all that seems to have been done is that the brick parapet has been repaired (you can see the repointed brickwork in the photograph) and the old railbed cleared and given a tarmac surface.  I suppose someone must have checked the structural integrity of the edifice -- is the underlying concrete sound?  -- but there is no evidence of it.

It has now become a rather pointless but safe (?) elevated path to nowhere, popular with parents with buggies and small children on trainer-bikes.  This is fitting, in a way, as the viaduct was originally constructed because one of two railway companies which were building competing lines from London to Southampton went bust when it reached Winchester.  To save the truncated line to the east of St. Catherine's Hill becoming a highway to nowhere, a link was made from that line to the one to the west of the hill -- hence the viaduct, built to get the linking track over the River Test.  Now that only the successful line survives, the viaduct is a large brick-clad anomaly in a field next to a motorway slip-road.

View (much cropped) from St. Catherine's Hill, over the Hockley 

Viaduct and M3 motorway towards the Winchester Park and Ride

I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down

I have been reminiscing with old schoolfriend Zouk about our former lives as deadly ninja warriors in training.  Which is to say, like thousands of small kids tired of being jumped on by larger kids, we once did a bit of junior judo.

Judo had a strange, almost magical aura in the 1960s.  It was seen as the uncanny Japanese art of throwing improbably large opponents across a room, effortlessly and elegantly.  Secret agents like James Bond and Emma Peel did judo, but in that careful-but-spectacular way that only a willing or exceptionally stupid victim (and a suitably-placed safety mat) will allow.  Ah so!  Judo was a metaphor, as much as anything: the triumph of cunning over brute force by using an opponent's own weight and fury against him. Although more deadly and aggressive martial arts like karate were already part of popular culture, judo was usually the only game in town if you wanted to learn one, especially if "town" was a small provincial backwater.

I attended classes once a week from about age 10.  For the first few years this was in a slightly dingy local community centre.  The tatami mats were kept in a large wall-cupboard, and our first task on a Saturday morning was to assemble our own dojo floor, placing the mats side by side, putting wooden stretchers around the perimeter, and then hauling and lashing the canvas covering into place.  The sense-memory of bare feet stepping out of dojo slippers (a.k.a. rubber flip-flops) onto a canvas pulled taut over tatami mats is still an exciting feeling.

Our teacher was a stout moustachioed man who had not progressed beyond a blue belt, and was given to retreating outside for a cigarette while we practised our breakfalls.  He was a kind and patient teacher, though, and good with kids, but his own lack of progress was bound to be a brake on ours.  Well, what do you expect for half-a-crown a week in a New Town community centre?

A lot of children start judo classes, but not many last more than a few months.  It's hard work acquiring the necessary techniques, and constant, boring repetition is required to train your "muscle memory".  It quickly transpires that there is no magic or secret knowledge involved.  Also, there is no hitting and, at junior level, no strangling, choking or arm-twisting, which some find a disappointment. But I was reasonably good at it, and really liked the sense of a cultural hinterland behind the Japanese names and rituals, so I stuck with it.

A lot of myths about the irrelevance of size and strength are attached to judo.   Being short and stocky does give you a low centre of gravity, and certain throws ( morote-seionage and hip-throws like o-goshi, for example) play to your strengths.  Others, especially those requiring long legs and crane-like leverage (say, o-soto-gari or harai-goshi) do not.  At competition level, contestants are weight-matched, just as they are in boxing.  Trust me, a good big 'un will flatten a good little 'un, every time.

Once a year we'd travel all the way from Stevenage to Luton for grading sessions, which in those days required actual combat, and usually came back with a new red stripe or mon on our belts. Somewhere, I still have my British Judo Association license, a little black booklet with my advancing grades filled in and signed off like a school report.  There was always something a little thrilling about being licensed to perform judo.

Of course, the irony is that being known to practise judo only serves to attract more, not less, attention from bullies.  You soon learn to shut up about it -- a valuable lesson in itself.  The zen-like art of keeping a low profile is the natural protective colouration of the school playground, and this chameleon-like attitude is the essence of what is meant by the expression "street-wise".

Alas, in a wicked world, the truth is that judo is pretty ineffectual as a form of self-defence.  Setting aside the problem that our streets are not populated by co-operative partners, barefoot in "angry white pyjamas", the sad fact is that judo is essentially a sport, with careful rules and restrictions precisely aimed at not maiming or disabling your opponent.  Faced with a bad man with a bad attitude, possibly armed with a weapon, stepping in close enough to pull him into a dance-like embrace is never going to be a good move. As sports go, I would recommend athletics -- sprinting and middle-distance running, ideally -- as the wisest choice for self-defence purposes.

Where judo does come into its own is in falling over.  If you've ever been a fan of any form of intoxication, or are just clumsy or unobservant, you'll have tripped or simply fallen over from time to time.  I know I have.  Constant practice of breakfalls in my youth, however, means that cat-like muscle memory takes over as I head for the floor, and serious injury or embarrassment is generally averted.

Few things are as impressive as a middle-aged man tripping over his suitcase, going into a forward rolling breakfall, and ending up straight back on his feet again.  Hooray!  Do it again, daddy!

Ah, OK, so that WAS a gun in your pocket...

(image borrowed from JudoInfo.com)

Rotten Smoke and Heavenly Alchemy

Shakespeare's probable birthday today.

Sonnet 33

Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly rack on his celestial face,
And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace:
Even so my sun one early morn did shine,
With all triumphant splendour on my brow;
But out, alack, he was but one hour mine,
The region cloud hath mask'd him from me now.
 Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;
 Suns of the world may stain when heaven's sun staineth.

Sonnet 34

Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day,
And make me travel forth without my cloak,
To let base clouds o'ertake me in my way,
Hiding thy bravery in their rotten smoke?
'Tis not enough that through the cloud thou break,
To dry the rain on my storm-beaten face,
For no man well of such a salve can speak
That heals the wound and cures not the disgrace:
Nor can thy shame give physic to my grief;
Though thou repent, yet I have still the loss:
The offender's sorrow lends but weak relief
To him that bears the strong offence's cross.
   Ah! but those tears are pearl which thy love sheds,
   And they are rich and ransom all ill deeds. 

I am an admirer of poet Don Paterson's interpretations of the Sonnets.  Annoyingly flippant and matey in tone, at first sight, you slowly realise the true depth of his engagement with each poem and its place in the whole sequence.  This is quite some achievement.  As he says

"The problem with reading Shakespeare's sonnets is the sonnets themselves, by which I mean their reputation. Much in the same way as it's almost impossible to see the Mona Lisa as anything but a parody of itself, or hear Satie's Trois Gymnopedies without the feeling that someone's trying to sell you something – a bar of chocolate perhaps – it's initially hard to get close to the sonnets, locked as they are in the carapace of their own proverbialism. "A Shakespeare sonnet" is almost as much a synonym for "love poem" as "Mona Lisa" is for "beautiful woman". When something becomes proverbial, it almost disappears; and worse, we're allowed to think we know it when we really don't."

He is in no doubt that Shakespeare was gay or bisexual, and describing a real emotional and physical relationship with another man, complicated by a shared affair with the so-called "dark lady": it is extraordinary how long this obvious reading of the sonnets was resisted.  Evidence?  The poems themselves... In 2013, it is impossible to read them closely and in sequence without reaching any other conclusion.  In 1613?  Who knows? The sheer reckless boldness of this may have been its best disguise, of course; hiding in plain sight, as we say.

If you have an iPad, the Sonnets app from Touch Press is a must-have.  You get the texts, in modern and facsimile 1609 folio versions, readings by actors, plus the full commentary from the Arden edition and interpretations from Don Paterson's book, all interactively and contextually linked together.  You can get happily lost in there for hours.

Mock Tudor

On Saturday, the first truly sunny spring day we've had, I walked along the road that divides the railway from the docks (yet another place where a portable stepladder would come in handy). I'd hoped to get some shots of a massive cruise liner that had been docked when I drove by earlier that morning, but it had already gone.  Well, there's not a lot for cruise passengers to see or do in Southampton docks, unless they have a deep interest in very large cranes, shipping containers, or oil refineries.

But I had never noticed this mock-Tudor block of flats (?) before.  It looks rather like the rear view of an Elizabethan playhouse.

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Afternoon

To misquote Robert Frost, whose woods these are I have no idea, lovely, dark and deep as they are.  Given the sudden advent of spring-like conditions this morning, I think these are probably the last of the Easter snow pictures I will show.

Holy Grails, Batman

Two follow-ups to the previous post.

First, something I would have mentioned, except that that I didn't want to set you too much homework, was a certain resemblance of the "A.D. Harvey" case to that of "T.J. Wise".  The Wise affair is a touchstone in the (admittedly small and specialised) world of historical bibliography; that is, the study of the history of the physical means of production of books and other printed matter.

The year of my life that I endured studying for a master's degree in library and information studies at University College London was greatly enlivened by a course on historical bibliography given by Nicolas Barker, then at the British Library.  It struck me after a couple of his lectures that here was a man who should immediately be given a TV series; Nicolas Barker is the David Attenborough of bibliography.  Flamboyant, entertaining, vastly knowledgeable, and keen to inform, from the moment he removed his cycle clips and dumped a bicycle-basket filled with tatty leather-bound tomes onto a table, dramatically ripping one of them apart, I was spellbound.

Bear in mind that bibliography is potentially dull, dull stuff.  It's all about how printers work, how books are constructed from printed sheets, how type founts (note that spelling, pronounced "font") are developed and used, how paper is made, and ultimately how that knowledge can be used to reverse-engineer a historical book, and thus decide whether it is an earlier or subsequent printing than another, almost identical printing of the same text.  The holy grail, of course, being to establish the precedence of various printed editions of, say, Shakespeare's plays (quartos, folio, etc.).  Nicolas Barker had the gift of making all this dry stuff seem compelling.

One of the most fascinating bibliographic tales is the way the relatively new systematic study of book production uncovered a particularly cunning fraud, whereby T.J. Wise, a respected bibliographer (in the literary sense), seeded his catalogues with "rarities", some of which (mainly those by 19th century authors) did not actually exist, but which he then proceeded to have manufactured and to sell at a good price to collectors.  These items were freshly printed, but others were incomplete copies "made up" using leaves removed by Wise -- a trusted authority -- from items in the British Museum's collection.  The book published in 1934 exposing the skulduggery, An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets, by John Carter and Graham Pollard, is a classic of investigative procedure.

The second thing, on "mad but somehow compelling quests" in general, was this cartoon by Max Beerbohm which I thought was highly relevant:

The Sole Remark Likely to Have Been Made by Benjamin Jowett about the Mural Paintings at the Oxford Union:  "And what were they going to do with the Grail when they found it, Mr. Rossetti?"

Illustration by Max Beerbohm from "Rossetti and his Circle" (1922)

Fake For Fake's Sake

The subject of fakes, forgeries, and hoaxes is a fascinating one, and if you have any kind of anti-authoritarian streak it does have a certain appeal, but it also has a depressing side.  It is one thing to forge a million pounds-worth of perfect banknotes or to knock out fake Vermeers, but to carefully insinuate works by minor (or fictional) artists into the art market, backed up by false documentation, or to seed academic journals with false data to prop up an otherwise unsupportable case is quite a sad sort of enterprise.  Rather than boldly challenging the greed of the market (and making large sums of real money in the process), that second sort of activity simply undermines confidence in accepted processes of verification.  Its psychology is not so much criminal as adolescent:  See, so-called expert? You thought you were so clever, but you're not!

I read the TLS most weeks, so it's no surprise to me that it publishes readable articles by experts on subjects of significance and interest.  But one of the articles in last week's issue (10th April 2013) has attracted an unusual amount of attention on the Web, and has come as close as a piece in a scholarly weekly is ever likely to come to "going viral".

Rather than repeat or summarise a complex and entertainingly-written piece, I invite you to read it yourself.  You'll be away for some time, so I will now go and make a cup of tea.  Meanwhile, here's a (genuine) picture.

Welcome back.  A curious case, no?  You do encounter such people if you work in a university.  I'd say barely a week goes by without the unsolicited gift of a work of "independent scholarship" arriving in the library, or an emailed invitation to purchase some self-proclaimed (and self-published) work of overlooked genius.  Nearly all of these, of course, are perfectly genuine, although many are clearly the product of an unquiet mind with a weakness for conspiracies. But it got me thinking about some other some unresolved cases of, uh, enigmatic origins that keep the private scholars and alternative theorists busy.

One such is the Voynich Manuscript.  If you have never come across this intriguing object before, and have a taste for cryptographic mysteries or truly weird pictures, then this may be of interest.  Again, rather than rehearse a story that others have told better, here is a link to a recent article that may or may not shed some light on this curious case.  Time for another pictorial interlude.

Welcome back again.  I think the most telling paragraph in that article is this:

Kircher was not up to the task, and neither was Friedman, who never published anything on the Voynich save a footnote to a paper on Chaucer that he and his wife wrote for Philological Quarterly. The footnote was anagrammed (in the tradition of Galileo’s repudiation of Ptolemy), with its solution provided in a sealed envelope for later disclosure, when Friedman believed he would have solved the cypher. The anagram, which reaches the limit of Friedman’s sense of humor, reads, “I put no trust in anagrammatic acrostic cyphers, for they are of little real value—a waste—and may prove nothing.—Finis.” Readers wrote in possible solutions, some delightfully reprinted in an editor’s note (“To arrive at a solution of the Voynich Manuscript, try these general tactics: a song, a punt, a prayer. William F. Friedman.” Or “This is a trap, not a trot. Actually I can see no apt way of unraveling the rare Voynich Manuscript. For me, defeat is grim.”) Friedman never managed to solve the Voynich, and after his death, the editor of Philological Quarterly opened the envelope bearing the solution to the anagram: “The Voynich Manuscript was an early attempt to construct an artificial or universal language of the A-Priori type.—Friedman.” A synthetic language, rather than a cryptogram, was his best guess.

What I find telling is how brilliantly apposite the attempts to solve the anagram are.  Yet completely wrong.  Even in a case where there is a known cipher, addressing a known problem, in a known language, you simply step into a bewildering hall of mirrors with no exit.  That way, surely, madness lies.

Talking of Hamlet, all this clue-hunting and code-breaking reminds me of the eternal hunt for secret messages concealed in Shakespeare, clues to the "real" identity of the author of the plays.  One of the best demonstrations of the futility of such quests is the astonishing fact that the words "To be or not to be: that is the question, whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" are -- outrageously -- an anagram of "in one of the Bard's best-thought-of tragedies, our insistent hero Hamlet queries on two fronts about how life turns rotten ..."

As the man says, it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.  Especially if that idiot has been faking the evidence all along.

Obnoxious

The Thatcher Thing has inevitably re-awakened some old memories.  I do try to keep away from nostalgia if I possibly can, though it does make for an easy blog-post.  This is partly because my memory has started to resemble that Caspar David Friedrich painting, "The Wanderer Above the Mists".  Certain events stand out like islands, whilst everything else has disappeared beneath a fog of forgetting.  I remember what I remember, the rest is silence.  Especially where the Thatcher years are concerned.

Where did I put those keys?

But it's also because every time I venture down Memory Lane, someone emerges from a house and starts shouting abuse at me over the hedge.  I'm sure they must have me muddled with someone else, but...

I recently mentioned a get-together in Oxford back in the summer of 2004, one of a series of such events (three, or was it four? Ah, I remember it well ...) which are themselves slowly disappearing into that all-enveloping mist, and turning into a single, jumbled memory.  But I do vividly remember one very hot June afternoon at the Trout Inn, sat around several garden tables with a cohort of friends, comrades and, um, others.  And I particularly remember being buttonholed by a woman I thought I barely knew, now apparently something quite senior in the legal profession, despite once having had all the gravitas of Goldie Hawn.

"You were really obnoxious, you know!"
"Who, me?"
"Yes, you were always dressed as a skinhead, and were very rude to people!"
"Who, ME??"
"Yes, you always had braces on your trousers ..."
"Ah, true, sometimes..."
"... And you always wore bovver boots ..."
"Those were ordinary Dr. Martens..."
"...  And you would say the most appalling things, just to upset people!  Totally obnoxious!!"
"Guilty as charged, Ma'am.  Though I am now much reformed.  Where did you buy those ridiculous sandals, by the way?  Poundland?"

A company of obnoxious rogues.  The sharp-eyed may spot the man

 recently crowned "The Prince of Press Regulation" by Private Eye.

Well!  I'm just a soul whose intentions are good...  But, sadly, you have no control over other people's memories.  If they remember you as totally obnoxious -- truly laughable though that is -- there's no point in arguing the matter.  Obnoxious it is!

But the point is:  the past has gone.  Really gone.  You cannot revisit it, or pass through it on your way to somewhere else, or stumble into one of its forgotten suburbs.  I am especially conscious of this as much of "my" physical past has literally gone. The house I was born in:  demolished and built over.  My primary school: demolished and built over.  The block of flats where I spent my adolescence: demolished and built over.  All constructed in the utopian dreamtime of the 50s and 60s, all wrecked in the cynical aftermath.

Which is not to say that the consequences of the past do not live with us every minute of every day. But there is no Tribunal of Truth or Court of History where the accuracy of competing accounts can finally be settled by omniscient recording angels, and there never will be. I think many people find this one of the hardest childhood illusions to shed -- it's a last vestige of naive religiosity, but it's also one of the wellsprings of our innate sense of justice.

Which brings us back to Thatcher, naturally.

Now, I really am not going all the way to London on Wednesday to shake my fist at a corpse.  After all, I spent a good part of the 1980s shaking my fist, at an endless series of protests, mass demonstrations, and picket lines. A lot of people now claim also to have done so, but I don't remember seeing their faces. A lot of fantasists claim to have been at Goose Green and Port Stanley, too.  Maybe they were, maybe they weren't.

Perhaps they were all really shaking their fists at a TV screen, which is not, I believe, generally regarded as an effective form of political action. Who knows, maybe if a few more people had just turned up back then things might have turned out differently?  Perhaps a lot of the current fist-shaking, chest-beating and hyperventilating over the Wicked Witch is actually guilt and regret:  I could have done more, but chose to concentrate on my career, my family, my personal projects.  Curse you, Margaret Thatcher!  It's all a bit reminiscent of the statue of Saddam Hussein coming down.

Margaret Thatcher, as the apologists asking for some respect to be shown say, quite rightly, was merely a single human being, who rode her luck and played her political cards well. It takes the acquiescence of a whole society to bring about the sort of wholesale changes that happened in the 1980s.  Did you or your parents buy your council house? Did you or your parents collect shares in de-nationalised utilities? Did you or your parents even bother to vote in 1979, 1983, 1987, or 1992?

"Obnoxious? Who, me?", Thatcher must have said to herself, from time to time.  "I merely did what I thought was right.  I have no regrets.  How about you?"

Your blogger assembles a magic totem, ca. 1979.

"Out, demons, out!"

Mountain Memory

The hills of mid-Wales are not spectacular, but do have a quiet grandeur that is typical of British uplands.  Any aspiration to being "mountainous" was ground out of them in successive ice ages, leaving a hard core of deeply-furrowed, round-shouldered hills. They're mainly Silurian and Ordovician sedimentary rocks with volcanic "intrusions" and the consequent metamorphic rocks -- slate, most famously -- are extensively quarried.  We know at least one "hill" which is like a Potemkin village facade, utterly hollowed out on the far side.

They have also been mined for metals such as lead and gold since the Bronze Age, and the remains of Roman and later mines can still be found littering the landscape.  Often, it seems, with a stolen car abandoned at the bottom.  Well, it's an ironic sort of recycling, I suppose.

Cwmystwyth, April 2005

Although bleak now, there has been inhabitation for thousands of years, mainly in periods of milder climate.  The recent snow was of precisely the right sort -- relatively dry, not too heavy, and easily wind-blown -- to reveal surface features, and aerial archaeologists had a field day (or possibly field month). From the sky, these hills are scribbled with prehistory, a veritable palimpsest, to use a favourite word of this blog.

My picture above seems to show two landscapes for the price of one: the illusion of a range of snow-covered jagged peaks -- perhaps a memory of what it may have looked like a couple of Ice Ages ago -- and a worn upland grooved with mysterious ditches and trackways.

Somehow Interrupted

Apologies in advance: what follows may come across as snarky.  Insofar as "snark" is a form of sublimated anger, the charge may be justified.  I plead provocation, your honour.

A while ago, I observed that much contemporary photography is, well, boring.  Of course, what strikes a 59-year old straight white male as dull may not be the best guide to current fashions, it's true.  I'm very aware that my mid-period boomer sensibility is gradually becoming as historic as, say, the use of a Claude glass.  But, although it is only natural that one's tastes and influences are gradually pushed to the periphery by new things, a lot of the work that gets the attention these days is pretty uninteresting, isn't it?

Why?  Well, I think photography's primary strength -- its essential passive verity -- has become its main disadvantage as a medium.  It has become a lazy way to achieve that "hands off" approach so sought after by those who -- for art-historical and philosophical reasons that have never felt convincing to me -- experience a horror at the thought of being held personally responsible for anything so unironic and downright earnest as a well-crafted aesthetic object or experience, or who reject the very attempt to express something of what it is like to be alive in the current moment.

The realisation of the existence of multiple selves within a single body and multiple realities within one world, not to mention the constructedness of our perceptions and social conventions -- gasp! -- seems to throw some people into a guilty panic.  Add in a degree of complicity with the suppression and exploitation of The Other, and various category-error confusions (speech is really a form of writing, didn't you know?!) and you have the Perfect Storm of the post-modern-lite sensibility.

The panic and the guilt need not be genuine, of course.  A show of existential, epistemological confusion is a fashionable move, seemingly taught in all the best art-schools.  "Feel the fear and get the project award, anyway", you might say.  Consider this puff for a photo-book: "Writing about X's work, distinguished art historian Z notes: 'X has learned that all observation, including the seemingly most objective, is always subjective, selective, slanted, focused, blurred, disconnected, or somehow interrupted.'”

Well, jolly well done, X!  Now you've learned that the best pictures are always subjective, selective, slanted, focused, blurred, disconnected, and somehow interrupted, you've got the all-important attention and approval of the aesthetic gatekeepers!  Milk it while you can.  But doesn't the word "illustration" springs to mind? Aren't you just making pictures that illustrate an approved sensibility?  Shouldn't they be struggling to explain you, not the other way round?

Ironically, that hands-off, affectless, non-expressive approach has become a style in its own right.  It's everywhere.  It's a look, a sort of visual executive summary of some really quite tricky philosophical territory.  Well, let's be honest: a style is something far more readily understood and appropriated by the aspiring young artist, typically someone for whom the study of boring, difficult, and contradictory texts was always going to be challenging.

Cameras are innocent: they have no ideological baggage, and no commitment to suspect grand narratives.  Excellent! With photographs you can have your aesthetic-philosophic cake, and eat it, too.  Rather than express your problematic self, you can "curate" images created at one remove by an impassive recording machine, and yet still take the credit.  The less skill the better.  Why, you can even appropriate work made by someone else.

Perfectly contemporary! But very, very boring.

Water-Break-Its-Neck

I believe it is true that, at certain designated touristic viewpoints, Kodak used to put footprints on the ground, showing you the proper place to stand to take your photograph.  These days, various tourism-oriented bodies put "interpretation boards" at designated sites, telling you the proper things to think. Sometimes there's even a handy simplified picture, in case you have difficulty with seeing what is in front of you. They mean well, I suppose.

Mid-Wales is not yet over-afflicted with such domestication, but one of our favourite sites has now officially been put on the tourist map.  Why, they've even extended the trackway and put a little car-park nearby, so you don't even have to make the ten-minute trudge up the valley to see it.  So considerate!

Luckily, the snow, the cold, and the rather dodgy iced and pot-holed track meant that we did have Water-Break-Its-Neck to ourselves.  It does seem to have shrunk, though, and its mystery somehow diminished by the provision of proper safety-conscious paths.

Mind you, it is a dangerous place:  those glassy ledges are slippery with wet algae even when they're not iced over, and if you foolishly try to climb the falls -- let's say, in search of a better place to stand for a photograph -- you will soon find yourself back at the bottom again.

The Wicked Witch is Dead

Just heard the news.  No crocodile tears, no balance, no regrets... Let the dancing commence!

... And We're Back

Oddly, the thought uppermost in my mind as we return from Wales is that, like sparrows, starlings seem to be making a comeback.

Several decades ago, I remember going deep into the desolate heartland of Mid-Wales where  -- it was rumoured, if you were lucky -- on the edge of a certain field on a certain hill, you might catch a glimpse of a Red Kite, one of a handful still surviving.  Our luck was in that day, and we felt blessed to watch the dipping, slipping flight of that wonderful fork-tailed bird, as it quartered the hillside in the light spring rain.

How things change.

In June 2004 I was returning from a get-together in Oxford, and as the train pulled out of Reading station I was amazed to see two Red Kites circling high in the blue suburban skies. A reintroduction scheme has been spectacularly successful, and now they are regularly seen in the M3 and M4 motorway corridors as far south as Winchester.  It's just a matter of time before one appears over our back garden.

In the meantime, sparrows and starlings seemed to have made themselves as scarce as Red Kites.  Perhaps they felt under-appreciated.  Whatever the reasons, it has come to something when, in 2013, it is a flock of starlings that causes you to grab your binoculars in a state of excitement.  Suddenly, this Easter, lambing sheds and cow barns were alive with that unmistakable chatter, and flocks would burst out of them and barrel in tight formation over the hedges and fields.

The snow and the delayed spring, of course, were the main features of our week.  The day we arrived, my partner went for a stroll up the lane, and found a post-van stuck in a drift.  The driver, a Brummie, had driven straight into a four-foot wall of snow across the road with the over-optimistic expectation of emerging on the other side.  Not quite.  It took a tractor and a tow-rope to get him out.

The cold weather meant that I didn't sleep too well.  Not because of the cold, but because the barn conversion we use has an under-floor heating system powered by an extremely green heat-exchange mechanism buried in the hillside.  The barn was completely rebuilt from fresh-cut oak timbers in 2010 and has polished wood flooring.  It looks great, but the whole thing creaks and cracks all the way through the night as the heating kicks in.  It can seem as if several ghostly insomniacs are endlessly pacing about.  I suppose you'd get used it eventually, but it's a bit too much like being in a wooden ship afloat in a sea of frosty air.

We had a good week, though, and I'll trickle out some of the better photographs during this week, rather than laying out the whole deck now.

One Red Berry

[Last of this week's front-loaded posts]

 It is always amazing to me that there is anything left for the wildlife to eat out there by this time of year.  You'd think the cupboard would be bare after four months of constant winter foraging, but -- thankfully -- it never is, quite.  Even in an agricultural landscape like the one above (Test Valley near Mottisfont) -- systematically strip-mined of vegetation by the plough, strung with high-tension electricity cables, and planted with inedible and alien monoculture species like wheat and barley -- the remaining trees and hedgerows provide enough food and shelter.

In fact, incredibly, there are now thought to be more deer at large in Britain than at any time since the last Ice Age.  It's true, you do see them everywhere, stood in the middle of fields with ears pricked as your train rattles by.  We hear them barking at night in our suburban corner of the South Coast conurbation, and a few years ago, a female Roe Deer appeared looking speculatively over our garden wall.  Venison steaks and sausages regularly appear in most supermarkets.

Most wild creatures seem to have an inbuilt restraint that prevents them from scoffing the lot, when confronted by a hedge full of ripe berries.  They must have been pleasantly surprised about 10,000 years ago, when those greedy two-legged monkeys, with their sharp eyes, baskets and digging sticks, stopped competing for a limited supply of seasonal treats, and started planting their own.