Sunday 31 December 2017

The Idiotic Hat Annual



People occasionally ask me if I've ever thought of making a book of these blog posts, to which the answer is "yes". In fact, I had always intended to produce an Idiotic Hat Annual, a bit like the ones we used to get for Christmas when I was a boy, compiling the best bits of the preceding year into a single handy volume. However, the cost and effort involved turned out to be prohibitive. Blurb used to offer a "blog slurping" service, which enabled the text and images of a blog to be hoovered up selectively by date range, or even by ticking individual posts, and then compiled them into a presentable book. However, without extensive editing and the deletion of many posts, I discovered this would have meant ending up with a 300-400 page book costing between 50 and 100 pounds. At which point, I lost interest. Then Blurb abandoned the blog slurper, so I stopped thinking about it.

But recently I came across Blog2Print. This is one of several similar services offering a "blog to book" facility, tailored to the various blogging platforms like Blogger, WordPress, etc. What sold Blog2Print to me was that the uploading process is very straightforward and surprisingly quick (although it's far from the best-designed user interface I've ever used) and, crucially, you can download your blog-book as a PDF file for a low, fixed price of $8.95: the number of pages is not a factor. Producing a printed version is a different matter: there, the page-count is all-important and, again, we're in £50-100 territory. But, once you are in possession of a reasonable-looking PDF of, say, an entire year's output, you can do what you like with it, in terms of editing, copying and distribution. I did actually check this, as it seemed too good to be true; there's a reason Blurb makes you buy a single hard-copy of your book before you can download it as a PDF or create a cheap e-book version!

As with any fully-automated process, it's not perfect.  At its best, it looks like the screen-grab up top: a clean-looking mix of text and images, with a header and date derived from each post, plus a running title and page numbers. But text and images can be left hanging, awkwardly isolated on an otherwise blank page if you choose to have each post start on a fresh page, and any embedded links, picture captions, or block-quotations are poorly handled (see the screen-grab below). This is nothing that a bit of light tidying-up wouldn't fix, if you felt it necessary; PDF editing is no longer the mystery it once was. I don't feel the need, myself: these are perfectly readable e-books as it is, and I'm using them primarily as a form of insurance. If Blogger eventually goes the way of all free software, I'll always have these. Also, I do occasionally take a full XML backup [1] of the entire blog from Blogger (not many people seem to realise you can do this) and I see that other "blog to book" services work from this standard mark-up format, which may give a subtler result. If they, too, can give cheap PDF downloads without committing to buying a full paper version, I'll give them a try.

I suppose I could be persuaded to sell copies, probably on CD or DVD, or possibly USB flash-stick, if anyone was interested enough. I haven't really thought about it, but they needn't be expensive, given the low initial outlay. So far, there are nine files, each covering 1st September to 31st August [2], starting in 2008-09, and ending in 2016-17. Each is about 300-350 pages, and between 20 and 40 MB in size. I suppose it might even be fun to design a complete package in a proper DVD or CD "jewel" case, something I have often done in the past, when this blog's tenth anniversary comes round in September 2018.

If there were ever to be an actual book, though, it would have to be a single-volume "best of", ruthlessly selected from what has already become nearly 4,000 pages of text and nearly as many images. I think I'll leave posterity to think about the value of the sort of effort that would require. But, so long as the PDFs survive, my descendants will at least have the benefit of knowing in unprecedented (not to say excruciatingly tedious) detail how I spent my days, and what idle thoughts passed through my brain. And, if they can be bothered to read them carefully, they may also figure out why that crow keeps looking in at them through the window like that.

So, best wishes and good luck to you all in 2018! I think we're going to need it... What was that thing about living in Interesting Times? It seems that may be exactly where we have ended up in 2017.


[1] XML is worth knowing about, in principle, anyway. Libraries have been doing this for decades, but the agreement on a data mark-up standard has enabled all sorts of Web 2.0 "mashup" apps and services to be developed, when used together with the "Web Services" standard.

[2]  I know... This means "this" year has eight months to go, despite today being New Year's Eve. But I started the blog in September 2008, and was still working in a university then: the academic year gets into your blood. Even our desk-diaries ran September to August! Although, as a professional contrarian, I always insisted on being given a "normal" one, starting in January.

Saturday 30 December 2017

Scenic


Lambert's Castle, Dorset, 27/12/17

Our trusty Renault Scenic, which we bought as a used car in 2004 and which has shared our family adventures at home and abroad ever since, started to misfire after a steep and puddly drive up to the Lambert's Castle hillfort on Wednesday, and then became increasingly underpowered and juddery, so that going up any incline at all was not unlike riding an ancient petrol lawnmower. Then the "toxic fumes" indicator started to flash on the dashboard.

Given we had to drive back to Southampton the next day, this was a problem. I tried the RAC, but after several lengthy sessions of listening to the same recordings ("We're exceptionally busy right now...") I gave up. There's one subscription I won't be renewing this year. But a web search threw up a Renault specialist in nearby Axmister with a 24 hour recovery service. So I rang, and he answered. Yes! He diagnosed the likely problem over the phone (the notorious unsealed Renault ignition coils), ordered the parts, and we limped into town the next morning.


A good garage, I think, should not look like a soft-furnishings salesroom, but more like an oil-encrusted rubbish dump, preferably with a blackened yard roughly defined by battered Portakabin units and old sheds, and with an external bell on the office phone which never stops ringing. This one was perfect, in a frosty spot down by the river, and our car was back to its old self just one hour later. Should you ever experience car problems down Axminster way, I recommend Robin Wilson. In fact, I may even drive the Scenic down there for its next service.

Axminster, 28/12/17

Thursday 28 December 2017

Hoodie Hound



The weather in Dorset brightened considerably yesterday, though it was still very cold with a cutting north wind, so we went down to Charmouth for a wander along the famous fossil beach. Where I saw the spectacle above. If I had to nominate my weirdest Christmas moment, this would have to be it.

The "uncanny" is a psychological condition classically defined as "doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might be, in fact, animate", leading to a disturbing, temporary "cognitive dissonance" in the observer. Colloquially, though, I think it can be said that any cognitively-dissonant event is uncanny when the brain is briefly locked into a "WTF state" (i.e. "What the Freud is THAT??"). I had a serious dose of the uncanny seeing that shamanic, dog-headed woman simultaneously staring at me while picking over the pebbles in her fancy wellingtons. I'm slightly short-sighted these days but hate wearing my glasses, so it took me a few myopic seconds to determine that she was, in fact, wearing a hood that, yes, was also a dog's head. Luckily, for once I had the presence of mind to raise the camera and press the button before she raised her head and spoiled the effect.

So I wonder where I might get one of those? I can think of a few people I'd enjoy treating to an uncanny moment or two... Woof!

Charmouth Beach

Tuesday 26 December 2017

Christmas Day



Christmas Day, Lyme Regis.

Gale-force winds, driving rain... What's not to like?


Saturday 23 December 2017

Five Gold Rings



One of the frustrating things about young people is that they are unaware of the things we older folk consider to be essential and important about the past. That is, our past. Or, if they do appear to know about them, not having been there at the time, how could they really know? They've just read about it! This can become annoying when these particular young people are the ones reviewing things in your favourite journals, hoping to build a CV and a reputation based on their all-round cultural knowingness. But what the hell do you know about Joe Strummer or Joni Mitchell, kid? Knowest thou it, because thou wast then born? Or because the number of thy days is great? No, I thought not.

But we need to cut the young some slack, here. The fact is that we older folk weren't there either, in our own younger days. Obviously, whatever knowledge or opinions I might have on anything that happened before about 1960 are entirely based on hearsay evidence, filtered through a postwar sensibility, and curated for me by the media's less than museum-quality nostalgia. How annoying, ill-informed, and arrogant we must have seemed to our parents, who, in turn, must have been a serious source of irritation to our grandparents, quietly simmering about the misinformation being bandied about concerning life in Edwardian England. I'll give you Upstairs, Downstairs, matey!

One of the curious things about culture is that it is not cumulative. You might suppose it to be like one of those counting songs with an ever-lengthening chorus – "One Man went to Mow", or "The Twelve Days of Christmas" – with the added torment that the culture song never ends, and the chorus just gets longer and longer and longer. In which case the aspiring young critic would need, ideally, to know everything you know, plus everything your forebears knew, plus everything that has happened since you stopped paying attention. Not forgetting Old Ma Riley and her cow, and the partridge in a pear tree.

But, of course, it's not like that. Beyond a certain point (which I'd set around 1980, which just happens to be when I stopped paying attention to a lot of things, but might as well be 1880) there is simply too much stuff to know. So, things get ignored or forgotten (I was outraged to hear the Third Ear Band described as "totally obscure" on the radio recently), recast into a portable shorthand travesty ("Punk was a reaction to Prog"), or appropriated as a "rediscovery" every time there is a shift in sensibility (see: Nick Drake or William Blake), which is quite often, these days.

So, a culture is not so much about the accuracy, temporal persistence, or sum total of its "facts", as these would interest a historian, but about the way they mutate and are transmitted into the present day. It is also very rarely about the real, lived experience of the past. I mean, what have we really retained from Victorian family life? We live in the same streets and houses, but utterly transformed with the addition of electricity, running water, mains sewage, and central heating, and the subtraction of smoky fires, gaslight, abject poverty, unpaved roads, and (for the well-off) an endless supply of cheap servants. Who today would need or even know how to darn a sock, or give a brass farthing about scrubbing their doorstep every day? Life for the majority was not just hard, it was pretty grim. Or so I read, imagine, and project, retrospectively. But maybe it didn't seem so bad at the time? Maybe having socks to darn and a doorstep to scrub felt like real progress.

Which, inevitably, brings us to Christmas. Due to the efforts of the likes of Charles Dickens, Prince Albert, the Coca Cola Company, and the greetings-card industry, Christmas still has what we fondly imagine to be a residual but distinctive "Victorian" flavour; an organic vegan turkey-substitute roast, wasabi-sprinkled Christmas pudding and deep-filled Belgian chocolate mince pies, accompanied by a tree hung with ironic decorations, sleighbells in the spray-on snow, and the wailing of wassailers outside in top hats and bonnets, holding lanterns on poles, and doing whatever else wassailing involves. Which, in our street, seems to be mainly driving a van slowly down the middle of the road playing loud, distorted carols over a PA system, while Rotarians in idiotic hats go door to door, extorting cash. To which the most authentically Victorian response is, "Garn, git orf my drive, 'fore I sets the dog on ye! I'll give you deep and crisp and even!"

But let's not be curmudgeonly; it's Christmas, after all! The decline in transmitted seasonal lore amongst the young has its advantages. I, in my time, was never woken up early to go wren-hunting, for a start, or even to observe the livestock bowing at midnight in the barn, and in recent times an ignorance of any carols (and the reluctance of householders to hand over mince-pies and/or cash) has led to a blessed decline in door-to-door carol-begging. This reached its nadir a couple of years ago, when every ten minutes there would be a knock on the door, you'd open it, and yet another pair of young scruffs would instantly start singing, "We WISH you a Merry Crissmuss, we WISH you a Merry Crissmuss, anna Happy Noo Yeeer!" And stop. Well, OK... And? But that was it; not only was that all they knew of that particular song, but the extent of their Yuletide repertoire. So I set the dogs on 'em, didn't I?

Anyway, this year I'm here down by a foggy Dorset coast for the duration, but wherever you are and whatever the meteorological conditions I wish you whatever you need (I'm told alcohol can help) to see you through what, through gritted teeth, we will probably have to learn to call "The Holidays", but hopefully not the mooted "Winterval". Not least because, although it may not be "Christmas" for everyone everywhere, it certainly isn't winter in the Southern Hemisphere for anyone. I also wish you all the best for the coming year (things can only get better? Don't bank on it) and thank you, most sincerely, for reading my efforts during 2017.

Hardown Hill, Dorset

Tuesday 19 December 2017

Sea Fever


They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters (Psalm 107)

I'm probably talking to a very small demographic here[1], but the quotation above always used to make me giggle. First, because of the idea of going down to the sea in a ship (as opposed to on a bus, or on foot); second, because "doing business" was the euphemism our family used for animals shitting e.g. "Urgh, a dog's done its business all over the path!". Heh.

For older Anglophone readers, "going down to the sea" will also almost certainly recall the poem "Sea Fever", which was once part of the general culture, but probably no longer is. Even if you'd never actually read the poem, its first line would somehow have insinuated itself into your consciousness, in the same way as "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears", or, "To be, or not to be, that is the question". So much so, it could reliably be invoked as a scaffolding for parodic purposes. Spike Milligan of the Goon Show, for example:
I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
I left my shoes and socks there; I wonder if they're dry?
Thank you, Spike. Here's the real thing:
Sea Fever
I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.
John Masefield, 1902

It's very much what most people expect (or wish) a poem to be. You know: rhymed, metrical, memorable, musical, evocative, and not too elliptical, allusive or even particularly profound. However, John Masefield, I think it's safe to say, has never figured in any English Literature curriculum ever, anywhere. This, despite being very popular and well-regarded in his time, and having occupied the post of Poet Laureate from 1930 until – incredibly – 1967.

There's a whole generation of these popular, accessible, but minor poets who have been written out of the story of Eng Lit – often referred to as the "Georgian" poets – writers such as Masefield, Robert Bridges, Robert Graves, and Walter de la Mare, who are often now better known for their novels, children's books, and short stories. Their poetic efforts were blown away by the huffing and puffing of Modernism, and have never come back into critical fashion, with the exception of Edward Thomas, and those who distinguished themselves as war poets, such as Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. Their angry-but-gentlemanly, elegiac ironies somehow seemed a perfect match for the senseless industrial slaughter of WW1. However, as well as a general "Goodbye To All That" (the title of Robert Graves' war memoir), 1914-18 seemed to leave lyrical poetry missing, presumed dead, in No Man's Land, too.

As it happens, Masefield is currently getting a fresh blast of publicity, as his (apparently) popular children's book The Box of Delights has been adapted for the stage by Piers Torday at Wilton's Music Hall over Christmas. Who knows, maybe those accessible Georgians are about to make a comeback? Hmm, rhyming metrical poems, though? Nah, it'll never happen...


[1] Tentatively, people brought up in a Bible-rich environment, with contrarian tendencies and a sense of humour that embraces the absurd and the scatalogical.

Sunday 17 December 2017

Twice In A Lifetime


The Philosopher Considers Breakfast and The Meaning of Life

Almost twenty-four years ago I turned 40, and began to wake up from a ten-year trance. Huh? What time is it? What do you mean, a quarter past 1994? I found myself the father of two very young children, working in a stalled professional career that had turned into a part-time job, and without any clear idea of where to go next with my life. Cue up Talking Heads, "Once In A Lifetime" ... Yeah, yeah, midlife crisis... You and a million others. Get a tattoo, or something.

Well, thanks for your concern. So, anyway, instead of buying a powerful motorbike, I decided finally to do something about the alternative life as an artist that had been bubbling under ever since I was (thankfully) persuaded by my teachers not to set my sights on art-school and instead to persist with academic studies, for which, all the available evidence suggested, I probably had rather more talent. In fact, as I eventually discovered, taking exams was my actual main talent, but (as far as my school was concerned) this was pretty much the same thing as an aptitude for scholarship. Which, trust me, it ain't. The world is full of people who ran out of road when there were no more exams to take or dissertations to submit. Frankly, earning a humanities PhD is an excellent way to fast-forward your midlife crisis into your twenties. I know one guy who used to work for me – now there's an abject fate – who had postponed real life a degree too far by doing two doctorates. Nobody ever called him Dr. Dr. Smith, though.

Anyway, that alternative artistic life. At a workshop I once did with German photographer Gerhard Stromberg, it was suggested that an artistic career takes about ten years to happen, starting from the moment you begin to take the idea seriously, and actually do something about it, as opposed to day-dreaming about it. Like: make a substantial body of work, submit it to the appraisal of people not obliged by ties of family or friendship to make encouraging noises, learn to accept serial rejection, and then how to keep on keeping on, making more, better work. It's tough, and it turned out Gerhard was right. For me, that process of serious critical self-examination had started around 1994, and I got my first serious break – a long-running exhibition of photographic work made and shown at Mottisfont Abbey in Hampshire – in about 2003.

Of course, career is not a word to apply, without irony, to the endeavours of 99% of would-be artists, or even to those who appear, on the surface, to have made a success of it. I'm certainly no exception, and I'm glad I never had to try to make a living from my "art"; I'm sure by now I'd have been reduced to producing greetings cards and calendars. Which, come to think of it, is pretty much where I am, anyway. With the crucial difference that – having had a rather enviable part-time day-job that it would have been folly to have given up – I can sit here contentedly mucking about, happily retired from 35 years of public service in academic libraries, with the satisfaction of knowing I spent my working years both usefully and gainfully employed. There are worse fates. So I should tip my idiotic hat to those teachers who cared enough to save me from myself. Thanks, guys!

All of whom, I now realise, without exception, are dead. Or sadly dead, as we should say, apparently. Or who have passed (as if death were an exam), or are no longer with us (like they might yet show up). Yep, but nope: plain dead, all of them. And, what's more – and this is still hard for me to grasp – several of them died at an age rather younger than I am now. Teaching's a tough job, I know, but even so... It seems kind of unfair, doesn't it? To die in your mid-40s or 50s, at the stage of life when a stale career could still be transformed by some new adventure, or chasing some preposterous dream still hanging around from your teenage years? Although it would be far, far worse, I'm sure, to live to regret having put it all off until it was far, far too late. So, go for it, Sir! Buy that powerful motorbike! Come out as gay, or as a political animal with a mission to help the poor, or begin seriously training for a marathon, or why not learn to play the Northumbrian pipes? But, on the other hand, no, don't get a tattoo, Miss... And please: do think twice before blowing the pension.

Evidence: a mind can be expanded too far

Friday 15 December 2017

Don't Panic


Ashmolean Trip (Southampton-Oxford, December 2017)

Despite being pretty well-informed about quite a few things, the boundlessness of my own ignorance is undeniable. There are just so many knowable things I will never know, can never know. We're all in the same position, of course. You should try to do something about it – you might even see it as the nearest thing to a purpose in life – but sometimes it is hard not to experience an overwhelming sensation of pointlessness, when confronted with the infinite dark forests of the Known and Unknown Unknowns stretching in every direction. Help! Why even bother? It's not surprising, really, that most people seem to give up on the Quest for Knowledge somewhere around age 11. Montaigne's famous question, "Que sais-je?"[1], is all too easily re-inflected from a mission statement to a shrug of resignation: "What the hell do I know?". From there, it's just one easy step to, "What do I care?"[2].

But, like breathing, the point is not to inhale all the available oxygen in the atmosphere, but simply to keep on doing it, in order to stay alive. If staying alive by taking a series of tiny atmospheric samples doesn't seem like a pointlessly feeble – not to say doomed – compromise, then neither should maintaining an active curiosity about the world. It's never been easier, after all: Wikipedia, for example, is an incredible and entirely admirable resource, despite its (much overstated) shortcomings[3]. If you doubt the accuracy of what you read there, then why not check it out? Fact-checking is an important instinct to develop in a world increasingly corrupted by Fake News. Remember the reference librarian's credo: Look it up for yourself, you lazy bastard!

Take novels, for example. I've raised this before, but it bears repeating as a concrete instance of the problem. It's harder to get good figures than you might think, but estimates of how many books are published in the UK each year vary between 70,000 and 100,000, of which, let's say, about 5 percent would be regarded as proper "fiction". So, around 4-5 thousand British novels are published, every year; let's call it 4,500. Now, we can apply the sound general principle that "90% of anything is rubbish". So, of those 4,500 published novels, let's say only 450 are really worth reading. I don't know about you, but identifying, getting hold of, and then reading 8 or more brand new novels every week is beyond my capacity. I'm simply not keeping up as it is – last week I only read one novel, started the week before. And that wasn't a title published this year or even last year! In reality, even if only 45 of this year's crop are really worth reading, I'm never going to get round to reading them all. And I still haven't read any Jane Austen. And that's also completely to ignore the output of any other English-speaking country with a publishing industry. The United States, for example, where I believe the odd novel still gets published.

So, fiction-wise, the situation is beyond hopeless. Every year at this time, the heavyweight papers remind us of that fact with their humiliating "books of the year" lists. The same relentless listing goes on for cinema, TV, recommended restaurants, places to visit... Stop! Just stop! Had we but world enough and time... And yet some of us – a minority, admittedly – do keep on reading, do keep on going to the cinema... What is the matter with us? Well, absolutely nothing. Surely it's obvious that a good life is not well served by a collect-'em-all "bucket list" mentality and, the closer I get to my personal bucket-kicking situation, the more this profound truth impresses itself on me: a few cities well-explored, a few books well-read, some true friends well-loved, maybe just one foreign language well-learned[4]... These are worth a thousand lightly-skimmed, easily-forgotten "experiences". So, don't panic in the face of overwhelming plenitude: just remember to keep breathing, people, and take slow, deep, full breaths!

Obscured by leaves (Paris, October 2017)

 [1] "What do I know?", also the title of a long-running series of informative pocket guides, the model for similar publishing enterprises, such as OUP's "very short introductions".
[2]  "Je m'en fous!" would probably not make a terribly interesting series of pocket guides. Though I don't know...
[3] Next time their plea for funds pops up on your screen, why not send them a few [your currency units here]?
[4] A chance to offload my favourite Russian quotation : znat' tri yazyka nenuzhnaya roskoshch' (to know three languages is an unnecessary luxury - Chekhov).

Wednesday 13 December 2017

Weathercock



Back in October we visited Paris, primarily because my partner had to spend a couple of days working there; why waste the opportunity? One of the highlights of our stay was a comprehensive exhibition of the work of André Derain at the Pompidou Centre, which was something of a revelation. I knew his fauve London paintings, but little else. I'm no art historian, and simply "know" those artists (or, more precisely, individual artworks) that have attracted my attention, magpie-like, over the years. If I like it then in it goes into my mental rag-bag, probably to pop up again, transmogrified, in my own picture-making, possibly decades later. This is the difference between theft and appropriation, or unconscious influence and plagiarism, Your Honour.

I was very struck by Derain's "weathercock" tendencies. It seemed that he adopted something of the style of whoever he had recently been hanging out with: Matisse, Picasso, Cézanne... Hard not to be influenced by such chums, I'd say. I was probably particularly alert to this because I see something of this tendency in myself. Sadly, I don't get to go drinking with the great artistic names of our day, so my weathercock gets spun by whatever I've most recently been admiring; in a gallery, a book, or online. So I was in Oxford's Ashmolean Museum last week, and most strongly felt a breeze of japonisme blowing there, admittedly something of a prevailing wind for me. Hence the above pastiche.

Certain sharp-eyed observers have asked about the Led Zep-alike symbol that has been cropping up in my collages (see top right). Have I joined a cult? What does it mean? Well, no, and nothing, really. While we were in Paris, I spotted the grating below in a wall on the Rive Droite*, below the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Amazing, no? How could I not steal / borrow / appropriate / be influenced by something so ... pointlessly and decoratively mysterious?


Oh, and those other cryptic inscriptions? Should you ever find yourself on Southampton Railway Station, Platform 1, look down at your feet:



* Why on earth do Parisians refer to Left Bank and Right Bank, when they could quite straightforwardly have used "South Bank" and "North Bank" (see: London)? Does everyone always face west in Paris? I think not. The Seine isn't even as wiggly as the Thames! So much for that famous French logic...

Monday 11 December 2017

Calendar 2018: Last Call



If you were still thinking about buying one of my 2018 calendars (see Project Report 2017), now is the time to act. I have just a few extra copies left, and won't be making any more.

They are £15.00 + P&P. If you don't live in the UK, don't be put off: PayPal can handle the conversion into Sterling seamlessly. Just let me know where you live, and I'll adjust the shipping accordingly.


UPDATE 16/12/17: All gone now.

Sunday 10 December 2017

Book Club 2017

For me, this year has not been a stand-out year for photo-books. No bad thing, as I've been trying to ease off on my book-buying, anyway, partly because I've got far too many already, but also because I think the photo-book boom has got out of hand, and the rewards are diminishing as more and more half-baked projects get the full-on luxury treatment. You know the sort of thing: a top-quality, cloth-bound publication with tasteful but possibly over-designed layouts, accompanied by an incredibly expensive "special" edition in a slipcase or clamshell box with a small print and a signed archival envelope of the artist's nail-clippings thrown in for good measure. But the actual work? Meh. True talent is always spread thin, and it only gets spread thinner by this sort of hyperventilated, premature publication.

Nonetheless ... I have bought a few books of particular interest, so allow me to draw your attention to some of them.

Nancy Rexroth, Iowa
I said my piece on this landmark book (from that landmark year, 1977) in this blog post, and have nothing to add. If you didn't buy a copy then, I can't see you're going to buy one now. Even though you should.

Michael Wolf, Tokyo Compression Final Cut
Michael Wolf (website here) is a photographer whose thematic compilations are full of interest (particularly those delightful small books from German publisher Peperoni Books collating objects like brooms and chairs found in the back-alleys of Hong Kong), but the series of "Tokyo Compression" books – in which tube passengers in Tokyo are captured crushed against grimy, condensation-covered windows – established a genre and brought him to wider attention. This "Final Cut" edition is his own selection of the best of these wonderful images, that capture moments of private interiority in conditions of enforced intimacy with the rest of humanity. We've all been there. Christmas is coming.

Stephen Gill, Night Procession
I'm ambivalent about Stephen Gill's work, which often seems to be driven more by some gimmick than any real vision or theme, but when he's good he's really good, and he really knows how to put a top-quality book together. The gimmick of Night Procession is the use of a movement-triggered camera and infra-red flash to capture nocturnal wildlife in his new rural Swedish neighbourhood – quite a radical change from the grimy streets of Hackney (some sample images here and a book preview here). They have an ethereally-drawn quality that I find very beautiful. And the book itself is a real pleasure to handle.

Stephen Coates, X-Ray Audio
This book is one part of an extraordinary project, documenting the use of old x-ray plates to create bootleg audio-recordings of forbidden music like jazz and rock'n'roll in the Soviet era (website here). As visual objects, these discs are simply remarkable (and, it has to be said, spookily reminiscent of some of my own work), and although I am very familiar with Russian samizdat print publications from that era I had never come across this phenomenon before. File under Weird and Wonderful.

Andrew Tatham, A Group Photograph
I must admit I haven't got around to reading this one yet, the result of another multi-output long-term project, but just the idea of it sold it to me (website here). In recent years, like so many, I've become very interested in my own family history, and have shown various vintage group photographs of, for example, my grandfather in WW1 on this blog. Anyone in possession of such photographs must surely have wondered about the identities of the other, non-family members in the group, but will almost certainly have done nothing about it. Andrew Tatham has, and – taking it several stages further – has not only tracked down every man in a particular formal WW1 group photograph in his possession, but also their pre- and post-war lives and careers, and even found their descendants. It's a remarkable enterprise, that took over twenty years; as the website says, every man has been remembered "as if he were a part of your own family". Like all such acts of "remembrance", one hundred years on, it's both deeply moving and gloriously pointless. That's a recommendation, in case you were wondering, and also, of course, a fairly sound definition of "art". In fact, you might even say that this sort of project is a true form of conceptual art, that puts the empty, ego-driven posturings of most work trading under that label to shame.
As always, I'd urge you to buy your books either directly from the artist's or the publisher's website, or from a specialist bookseller. In the UK I use both Beyond Words and PhotoBookStore, both of which offer an excellent service. If I lived in the USA, I'd probably recommend photo-eye. These booksellers all run what libraries call a "current awareness" service, in the form of a regular newsletter and a "what's new" spot on their websites. Sign up, if you like your photo-books, but be like a patient watcher of the skies, waiting for a rare glimpse of a spectacular comet. You have to keep your eye on the constant stream of the ordinary to know the truly wonderful when it appears, and be quick to capture it before it goes.

Saturday 9 December 2017

Market Farces


Shadow trap...
“We are deliberately thinking of higher education as a market, and as a market, it has a number of points of failure. Young people are taking out substantial loans to pay for courses without much effective help and advice, and the institutions concerned are under very little competitive pressure to provide best value. If this was a regulated financial market we would be raising the question of mis-selling. The Department is taking action to address some of these issues, but there is a lot that remains to be done.”
Amyas Morse, head of the National Audit Office, 8 December 2017
It was a vintage morning wake-up session yesterday with BBC Radio 4's Today programme. After a slightly hallucinatory encounter with a spokes-trilobite from the Cambrian, the coverage of a report from the National Audit Office, "The Higher Education Market", had me wide awake and laughing. Which is, admittedly, not a bad way to start the day.

It reminded of the old joke about the patient who complains, "Doctor, it hurts when I do this...", to which the doctor replies, "Then stop doing that!" I mean, really, of course if you think of higher education as a market it all looks a bit dodgy. That's why it's been such a stupid idea all along: higher education is not a market, no matter how long you look at it or fervently wish it was. Neither is it a frying pan, a swimming pool, a fleeting shadow on a sunlit field, or an ancient oriental art of self-defense. Sorry, it just isn't. Although there may be people out there who think otherwise, those people are in need of professional psychiatric help, and should definitely not be occupying positions of influence paid for out of our taxes.

Here are some highlights from the report's press release, with some marginal annotations:
Only 32% of higher education students consider their course offers value for money, and competition between providers to drive improvements on price and quality has yet to prove effective, according to today’s report from the National Audit Office.
I'm not sure what proportion of students gain upper-second or first-class degrees, but I'm suspecting a close correlation with "only 32%" here. There have been many stories about poorly-performing students complaining that they paid good money in good faith, and therefore the university had a duty to steer them to a first, or at least an upper-second. Then there were the courses in "pet grooming and astrology" and the like, developed as money-spinning crowd-pleasers. These all used to be passed on as self-evidently hilarious; now, not so much. But is a middling-to-poor degree "value for money" if you paid considerably less for it, though? And is it OK to offer a piss-poor course if it's the cheapest on the higher-ed "market"? Hey, you get what you pay for!
There is no meaningful price competition in the sector and market incentives for higher education providers to compete for students on course quality are weak. In 2016, 87 of the top 90 English universities charged the maximum permissible fee of £9,000 a year for all courses. The relationship between course quality and providers’ fee income is also weak. The NAO finds that, on average, a provider moving up five places in a league table gains just 0.25% of additional fee income.
 Oh, please. See above. Did the government really expect any institution as complex and as expensive to run as a university to take a voluntary cut in income, in acknowledgment of its abject performance in some dubiously-framed beauty competition? Yes, minister, it seems even the less prestigious universities have to use electricity, pay their staff a decent wage (some of them, anyway, let's not get into that right now), as well as stock their libraries and maintain laboratories and up-to-date computer infrastructure. But have you ever looked at the "market" in academic journal prices, minister? Now there's a rip-off worth investigating.
Students can do little to influence quality once on a course. The sector ombudsman considers that providers have improved their handling of complaints and feedback, with a 25% drop in student complaints referred to it since 2014. However, students are unable to drive quality through switching providers. There is also not yet evidence that more providers entering and exiting the market will improve quality in the sector, and protections for students are untested.
This is the bit that made me laugh.

I love the idea of students driving quality by "switching providers". Imagine the scenario. Student Hugo Entitled-Dicke scrapes three grade C A-levels at some fee-paying crammer, and gets himself onto a politics course at Smalltown Uni. He finds the course (and the all-important "student experience") not up to his elevated expectations, not least in not equipping him for the career in politics he considers to be his manifest destiny. Entitled-Dicke hears that PPE at Oxford is a much better course, with consistently better career outcomes. So, given he is already paying the same fee at Smalltown as those Oxford PPE students, he decides to switch providers. Well, you can fill in the rest of this scenario. That markets can be a two-way thing seems not to have occurred to the National Audit Office.

I was also amused by the idea of students not being able to influence the quality of a course in an imperfect market situation. Oh, really? Now, I have to hold up a hand here. Once, a long time ago, I was part of a small group of dissatisfied students (customers?) of English Language & Literature, who considered our university's course to be disgracefully old-fashioned: Anglo-Saxon was compulsory; the curriculum stopped somewhere around 1940; it completely ignored literary theory (and in particular the continental, feminist, and Marxist theories we were so keen to study); and anything not written in the British Isles was, well, not English. We agitated for change and, a few student generations later, what do you know, change happened. Too late for us, but change nonetheless, change which we had initiated. Without us even threatening to switch our "provider", either! Though we may have threatened to occupy the English Faculty building, my memory is fuzzy on that point. Some of us had certainly occupied both the Examination Schools and an administrative building on separate occasions the previous year, but that's another story*.

In a market-style interpretation of universities I wonder what sort of intervention an occupation is? A hostile takeover, perhaps? Or a stakeholders' revolt? Which reminds me of a saying current in those far-off days of innocence: we don't want a bigger slice of the cake, we want to own the bloody bakery!

Fleeting shadow corral...

* And one well documented and well told in: Thompson, Fiona. Fight for a CSU! Oxford Polytechnic, 1975. A true collector's item.

Friday 8 December 2017

Cambrian Specs: Update

Incredibly, there was a "news" spot on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 this morning outlining the importance of the evolution of eyes in the so-called Cambrian Explosion. I had always assumed this was an established theory, but they were interviewing a trilobite who said, "Yeah, it was incredibly important. Suddenly, we could, like, see everything around us, instead of, you know, bumping into it. It's hard to imagine, now, how mind-blowing that was at the time. Especially when your mind is just a few swollen ganglions, or whatever they're called. I mean, whoah... I'm afraid it did all become a bit of an all you can see you can eat buffet for a while down there on the sea floor... I'd put my hand up to that, sure, except I don't have any! Heh... I mean, srsly, evolution, eh?"

I think that's how it went, but admittedly I was still half asleep. But you read it here first, folks; I may change the name of the blog to Zeitgeist Hat. "Synchronicity spoken here", as we used to say.


Thursday 7 December 2017

Cambrian Specs



If you're a regular reader of Mike Johnston's TOP blog you've probably noticed how, over the years, his posts have alternated unevenly between obsessive examinations of photographic gear and jeremiads about not obsessing about photographic gear. It's all about the pictures, you gearheads! No, wait, it's all about the best standard prime lens money can buy! At the moment, Gear Mike seems to have the upper hand over Picture Mike (a cynic might say that this, realistically, probably does return better reader figures) so a recent post about how the pleasure of seeing precedes photography stood out all the more. He concluded that "these things remind me that before photography comes the joy and the wonder of simply seeing. It's one of the reasons for photography in the first place." Well, yep and amen.

I was going to make some idiotic comment there* about the superiority of "Eyes 1.0", but realised that would make me sound like a creationist. In evolutionary release-number terms, we must really be on Eyes version X.Y, where "X" is a very large number, and "Y" is an even larger number. Technically, we may even still be in the beta phase. Eyes have come a long way since the Cambrian, 500 million years ago, but are still far from perfect. I have recently come to realise that my phone screen is not blurry, and I may have to start using reading-glasses soon. Like Apple devices, eyes look great, but lack the necessary ports for essential peripherals. What was that about a blind watchmaker?

Of course, seeing may primarily involve Eyes X.Y, but it also requires Nervous System X.Y, Vascular System X.Y, and so on. The joy of seeing is a whole body experience that situates us convincingly and quite often ecstatically in the world. It also makes extensive use of whatever the latest release of one's own emotional and aesthetic firmware might be. Which is problematic; a lot of us, it seems, fail to regularly update that firmware, and may even still be using a very early version indeed. What else can explain the popularity of videos of cats on social media?

I suppose the point is not just that eyes make cameras look a little simple, but that "photography" is not so much a way of seeing as a way of making things to look at. Although I have a long-standing sympathy for those who argue that using a camera to make pictures is more than a mechanical process – well, of course it is – it isn't much more than that, when compared to whole-body input-and-output experiences like painting or drawing. If you have ever tried to draw a convincing likeness of a person (never mind one that seems to offers insight into the personality of both the sitter and the drawer) you will know how mechanical and – crucially – external to your "whole self" the skill-set of photography really is. Although it is equally true that, if you have ever despaired of the ability of your eyes, brain, nerves, muscles and tendons to make sufficiently satisfying marks on paper to create such a likeness, you may well have fallen back on the mechanical almost-perfection of a photograph; not as an end, but as an aid.

Which, I suppose, is why I'm increasingly interested in picture-making from photographic elements, rather than in photographs as an end in themselves. Whatever anyone else makes of the resulting images, it's just so much more satisfying to do, and consistently and reliably takes me into a similar place to Mike Johnston's "joy and the wonder of simply seeing".


* A number of my comments on TOP have ended up as a "Featured Comment", which would be gratifying, except that it has the annoying side-effect of removing any link back to this blog! I mean, why else would I be making a comment, other than a transparent attempt to attract new readers?

Monday 4 December 2017

This Is Just To Say



This is just to say that, yep, this three-part obsession could get relentless. For a while anyway. I'm imagining this thing printed at its native size of 85cm x 30cm (essentially a sheet of A3 flanked by two sheets of A4, a proper euro-spec triptych), or perhaps a bit smaller to tighten things up, then framed with a generous border, about 110cm x 55cm overall. Large, but not ridiculously large. Or maybe that is ridiculously large? Do speak up if you have any views.

Listen, why not speak up anyway? It's boring for me never to hear from so many of you, and – who knows? – some early feedback could save me from myself. Although it's true my reader numbers have taken a dive in recent years, I can't decide whether this is because people are voting with their metaphorical feet as my content is no longer so interesting, or a symptom of a general fall-off in interest in blogs as such. Curse you, TwitterBook!

By the way, for another kind of three-parter, why not check out the current Wondermark cartoon? It's a classic, although if you don't recall a certain famous poem, and in particular the name of its author, it will make very little sense. Nice one, Malki!

Saturday 2 December 2017

Three in One



For some reason the triptych thing has been grabbing my attention. I made these two this afternoon, and although I suspect they may turn out to be nothing more than exercises in ingenuity, there's definitely something exciting there that I need to pursue, and what more can you ask for on a cold, dark December afternoon than that? Although a nice cup of tea and a couple of slices of toast wouldn't go amiss, either.