Idiotic Hat

The Ghost in the Machine

2012-01-31T17:49:00.002Z

An inclination to invest inanimate objects with thoughts, feelings, and personality seems to be one of humanity's more indelible characteristics; what you might call an animistic cast of mind. It takes a far sterner rationalist than me to bin a favourite cup when its handle comes off, for example. Eventually I will do it, but there needs to be a suitable period of mourning first, while the cup lies in state on a shelf. Most young children, of course, seem to inhabit a permanently liminal world, where consciousness swirls in and out of things like a tide.

My daughter was particularly susceptible as a toddler, occasionally entering a state we referred to as "goggling", which involved holding her breath and trembling visibly in an open-mouthed, wide-eyed stare of rapture, as (we presumed) the toys arranged before her came to vivid life. She was our little living-room shaman. That animistic tide keeps going out much further as we grow, of course, until the edgy moment arrives so hilariously (and poignantly) captured by the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band: "Mummy, teddy's stopped breathing!"

But the idea that certain categories of thing acquire a personality in use is not just a vestige of childhood enchantment. New instruments need to be "played in" to develop their tone, and the quality of their final tone may well depend on the quality and character of their initial playing-in. What could be more full of personality than a pair of old shoes, and more devoid of personality than a pair of new ones? And who does not keep an assortment of pebbles, conkers and the like in their coat pockets, that gradually over the years acquire a deep patina and "pocket polish"? Ah, OK; just me, then.

I am convinced that cameras, too, exert some kind of influence over the pictures that emerge from them that far exceeds their mechanical functioning. You have to meet a camera half-way, get to know it, persuade it to do its best for you. Have you ever noticed how awful the first batches of images from a new camera are? You can set it on "auto everything" or on full manual, you can even use a cable release, spirit level and tripod in extremis, and still get rubbish. Blurry, over-exposed, poorly-composed rubbish. Yet, a few months later, if you've played it in nicely, you can forget to check what settings you're using, and you and your camera will still get your act together -- magic begins to happen.

I'm just about reaching that point with the used G3 I bought late last year. In some weird way, I had to exorcise the ghost in the machine installed by the previous owner, who had clearly not

liked the camera; after all, he'd sold it on "priced to sell" not long after he'd bought it. It's a bit like buying a dog from the kennels: it takes time for an abusive or unloving owner's traces to be erased. Sounds nutty, I know.

The opposite case is a disenchanted object. Sometimes, in the back of a cupboard or the depths of a drawer, you'll come across a keepsake, or a forgotten item once in everyday use -- a cigarette lighter, a pen, a postcard. You'll look at it, and remember why you kept it, but wonder where the magic went. The ghost has finally gone, and you can safely bin it.

In the Arena

2012-01-29T22:22:00.002Z

As I mentioned in the previous post, I was booked to speak to the Arena Photographers group at 2:00 pm today, primarily to turn them on to (or off of) the joys and benefits of blogging for photographers. The Arena Group has been going for 25 years, and clearly has an active and distinguished membership. I must admit that, when first invited, I made the error of muddling the links on the Group's website to "photographers' websites" with the links to "members' websites", and very nearly refused the invitation, having seen what I took to be the celestial general standard of the Arena Group's work. Only when I began to wonder why Joel Meyerowitz or Lewis Baltz would be crossing the Atlantic to a village hall in Berkshire did the penny drop. Phew. Not quite that distinguished, then.

The day began with a phone call from the Chair, Graham, explaining that there had been a double-booking on the hall: could I make it for 12:00, instead? Now, the venue is an hour's drive away, it was already 10:00, and I had intended to spend the morning putting my presentation notes together, so it took a minute or two to agree, not least because I was still undressed, and at least one cup of tea short of full consciousness. But it's not every day you get to pretend to be famous, so why not?

When I arrived, I discovered it was clearly not being Graham's day. It was taking rather a long while to connect to the internet (rural West Berkshire is clearly off the grid -- my phone was struggling, too), but he stayed wonderfully calm and systematically swapped cables and dongles and eventually laptops until we had a combination that worked, everybody gathered in chairs in front of the screen -- about 25 people or so -- and I gave my piece. They seemed to enjoy it; at least, no-one fell asleep, walked out, or heckled.

Graham has an interesting line in faceted landscapes

Although I am not by nature a "joiner", I think such groups are important, and perform a vital function for artists and enthusiasts working in isolation. A large part of their session is spent showing and viewing each other's work, and there is nothing more likely to encourage and stimulate one's "growth"and persistence as an artist than sharing work with like-minded people. It's empowering, it's fun, and it's good to know you're not alone.

Although, speaking purely personally, I myself appreciate a level of ruthless honesty in a critique of my work that most people mistake for an unforgivably aggressive lack of manners, and instinctively back away from. This kind of "tough love" critique you can generally only get from a professional, puritanical curmudgeon who holds him or herself to the highest, most unforgiving standards, and cannot understand why you wouldn't want to, either. These are in short supply. I'm thinking Thomas Joshua Cooper. I don't think Tom is much of a joiner, either.

But it's a great thing, to see people taking each other seriously as photographers, and producing good work, and I enjoyed myself. Thanks to Arena for inviting me.

[N.B. For the person who asked: this post took me 90 mins to produce, with a break for a beer halfway through!]

Quick Singles

2012-01-26T21:19:00.002Z

No boundaries, but a couple of quick singles today. They're always useful (are you listening, England?) because every sequence needs "filler". A sequence (especially a book sequence) in which every image is a smash hit never seems to work -- there's no rhythm, no narrative, just "Bang, Bang, Bang!"

I've been a bit quiet this week because (a) I have to earn a living, (b) I've been struggling with a cold and some botched dentistry (is there any other kind?), and (c) I've been invited to give a talk to a photographic group (emphatically not a "camera club") this weekend, and need to make sure I've got something to say. I'll tell you all about it after Sunday.

Fours and Sixes

2012-01-21T20:16:00.004Z

Sportsmen talk about finding their form, and I think I've hit a certain groove recently: I find that I keep hitting boundaries. Here are a couple from this week -- I'll leave it to the umpires to decide whether they're fours or sixes.

If you've been following this blog for a while, you'll recognise how this recent work builds on elements in the "university windows" theme that ended up as the Curriculum book. I think of it as "trees and facades" and already have enough fours and sixes to start considering it as a new sequence. The problem, as ever, will be knowing when to stop...

Usually, there comes a point when I'm simply repeating and refining what I already have; the thrill has gone but the compulsion to go on has not. In life, continuing beyond this point is a necessary virtue, in art it's not...

Like A Falling Star

2012-01-19T12:44:00.000Z

I saw this interesting configuration of elements the other morning, and it put these words into my mind:

... how he fell
From Heav'n, they fabl'd, thrown by angry Jove
Sheer o're the Chrystal Battlements: from Morn
To Noon he fell, from Noon to dewy Eve,
A Summers day; and with the setting Sun
Dropt from the Zenith like a falling Star
On Lemnos th' Ægean Ile ...

John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I

Ever read Paradise Lost? No? Not many people have. I probably wouldn't have myself, if it hadn't been a set text at school. It gives off a stuffy aura that is somehow off-putting, and I suppose few kids these days can manage even the most basic of the Biblical and classical references in what is a highly-allusive text. Lothlorien and Tatooine, yes; Arcadia and Scythia, not so much.

But, open it and start reading, and you'll find that it is one of the most glorious things ever written in the English language, a grandiloquent, intensely visual epic story told in the grand style; in places it resembles a sophisticated graphic novel, or screenplay. Just read that extract above, describing the fall of Mulciber, architect angel of Hell, out loud -- really out loud -- and feel the thrill it sends down your spine. There's magic there, and plenty more where that came from.

Should you feel like giving it a go, there's quite a good online version here.

The Owl of Minerva

2012-01-18T12:01:00.003Z

Here's an enlightening quote, from the "Blowback" section of Doonesbury, commenting on this recent strip:

The quote in the first panel of today's strip comes from "Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush," Ron Suskind's terrifying article in the NYT Magazine of October 17, 2004. Here's the full quote, which reveals just how delusional that administration was: "In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency. The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'" My guess is that the senior aide was Karl Rove, but who knows? They were all crazy.

Scary, or what? It seems post-modernism has been driving the policies of the most powerful nation on earth. On the other hand, if you think about it, is post-modernism as a creed any more scary than fundamentalist or "End Times" Christianity? And, if you think about it a little further, Rove (or whoever it was) is pretty much stating a reality. Here is Hegel, that exemplar of clearly-expressed common sense, writing in 1820:

One more word about teaching what the world ought to be: Philosophy always arrives too late to do any such teaching. As the thought of the world, philosophy appears only in the period after actuality has been achieved and has completed its formative process. The lesson of the concept, which necessarily is also taught by history, is that only in the ripeness of actuality does the ideal appear over against the real, and that only then does this ideal comprehend this same real world in its substance and build it up for itself into the configuration of an intellectual realm. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then a configuration of life has grown old, and cannot be rejuvenated by this grey in grey, but only understood; the Owl of Minerva takes flight only as the dusk begins to fall.

Preface to The Philosophy of Right

Basically, what he is saying -- trust me -- is what everyone (except experts) knows to be true about complex social events: that experts always get them wrong, until they've become history. But lack of understanding never prevented a politician from acting, and acts, however stupid, always have consequences. What those consequences are, we only discover afterwards. Sometimes, long afterwards.

In 1972 Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai was asked about the consequences of the French Revolution and, famously, he confused the events of 1789 with Les Événements of May 1968 and, as a consequence, delivered up an unintended but much quoted bon mot: "Too soon to tell", he replied.

Delicious. It seems that sometimes the Owl of Minerva can be knocked out of its tree prematurely, but usually only by accident...

By Candle-Light

2012-01-15T20:52:00.000Z

When we got back from our walk about 4:30 this afternoon, we found the house in darkness and none of the switches would turn on a light. Our daughter was sitting bathed in the eery light of her laptop display. "Power cut", she said.

It's been a while since we had a proper power cut. This is, after all and despite appearances, one of the world's most advanced economies. I did oversleep a couple of weeks ago because we'd had one during the night, and my antiquated bedside radio alarm cannot reset itself, but that's the only one I can recall in the past year or two.

What you rediscover at such moments is how deeply you take things like electric light for granted. Turn off the power, and the darkness returns, instantly. Silence, too. The electric kettle won't work, the fridge is off, the radio is off, the computers are down, the central heating pump has stopped, there's nothing except the annoying tick of a battery-operated wall clock. It's quite fun, really, until you trip over your own carelessly-dropped backpack in the hall, going to fetch candles.

It didn't take long to return ourselves to something like 19th century conditions. We put candles and nightlights in strategic spots, and had a pan of water heating on the gas stove. We know where we keep the torches and the batteries. But once you try to actually do something more complicated than admiring your partner's hair in the candlelight you realise how difficult life must have been at night, before electricity.

Just making a pot of tea is quite tricky. Pouring boiling water in semi-darkness is not very sensible, to start with. You simply can't see inside the teapot, so it's hard to judge -- other than by weight -- when enough water has been poured in. In fact, it's hard to judge whether the water is going in the teapot at all. So the prospect of preparing a meal by candlelight was not enticing. Unless you were wearing chain-mail fire-proof gauntlets, you'd probably want to leave that until daylight.

Reading? Forget about it -- I can't imagine how anyone coped with any sort of close work, especially in the days before the widespread availability of spectacles. Evenings, for the elderly and short-sighted, must have been fraught with hazards. No wonder everything always had its allotted place, preferably inside a cupboard or drawer: you were less likely to trip over stuff or walk into it. I guess you'd probably have hunkered down by the fire with a simple meal and got to bed very early indeed. No wonder families were so large.

But, as I walked down to the corner shop to get some more matches, the streetlights suddenly came back on, and we were restored to the 21st century. You could hear muffled cheers coming from inside houses all down the street and a few chirping smoke alarms, presumably triggered by all the candle-smoke. It was a little trial run, I suppose, of how things could be going in the future.

Mild Winter

2012-01-13T21:23:00.005Z

What a strange winter it's been so far. I think I'm correct in saying that this morning was only the third time I've had to scrape frost off the car. Of course, things could change radically over the next couple of months, but it's odd to look back and recall the heavy snowfall and freezes of twelve months ago. We've barely needed the central heating this year that, last year, was taken down by a frozen pipe.

Still, there was a certain glacial clarity in this week's winter sunshine that seemed to hold a promise of cold days to come.

On Wednesday I was about to back the car out of the garage after taking it in for its annual MOT test, when I saw this little tableau through the side window, including that strange reflection in the car parked next to me. The camera was on the passenger seat, so I wound down the window and grabbed the shot -- I think I still had reverse gear engaged and my foot on the clutch.

A Kiss With A Fist (Is Better Than None)

2012-01-12T08:40:00.000Z

It's been a while since we had a rant, so here we go.

One of the things that strikes me as most characteristic of human society, the older I get, is our bottomless capacity for what you might call therapeutic self-delusion. We see what we want to see. This seems to be a characteristic particularly evident in those who are in love with the idea of art. Art lovers are like people trapped in an abusive relationship, staggering out of the house with a black eye, only to return later that evening for more of the same.

Artists of a modernist, post-modern or conceptual persuasion, of course, are the habitual abusers. They adore basking in the sunshine of the love of the art lovers, but are violently opposed to the idea that any sentimental little bourgeois could possibly understand what they're on about. Much art has, in essence, become little more than two fingers waved in the tear-streaked face of an incomprehending yet love-struck public. It's not a pretty sight.

Just like the victims of abuse, art lovers provide their own justifications for this appalling behaviour. The cult of "genius" has let a lot of real monsters off the hook, socially and artistically. I'm both impressed and depressed by the public's ability to take the cold, cosmic pessimism of modernist despair and turn it into something cosy, optimistic and trite. Oh, he's really saying "We should pay more attention to our everyday surroundings", or "It's the small things that matter", or "You have to work really hard to see the point of this work, its pointlessness is its point, that's why I love ~~him~~ it so"...

Sweet, really. Artists don't deserve it, by and large. You want to say: Listen, they mean it, these bastards: they believe in nothing, they abhor "beauty", they despise the very idea of transcendence, and want nothing more than to humiliate you for your persistent soppy belief in the "truth of feelings". And yet they also want to take your money, love and admiration as if by right. Leave him, girl, he ain't worth it!

Pointless. We see what we want to see. That human gift for therapeutic self-delusion will labour as hard as is necessary to re-read work of deliberate in-your-face meaninglessness as work of revelatory significance, to the point where a room with the lights going on and off, or a blank sheet of A4 crumpled into a ball (both actual works by Martin Creed) are prime candidates for the most prestigious art prizes and exhibition spaces in the land.

Ah, but that is precisely the point, say the art lovers, squinting painfully through two swollen black eyes.

Meanwhile, dear old David Hockney is offering us shelter from the storm. He's everywhere at the moment, putting the case for painting and the pleasure and discipline of looking. I particularly enjoyed the slogan on the poster for his recent exhibition, "All the works here were made by the artist himself, personally". It reminds me of the reassurances of purity printed all over my morning box of muesli, or on the old Levi's jeans label ("bar-tacked at points of strain"). He may deny that this is a dig at the likes of Damien Hirst, but I don't believe him.

And that other thing he has been slyly slipping into public consciousness -- a Chinese saying that "to paint you need the eye, the hand and the heart. Two won't do" -- may well end up doing a lot for the health of contemporary art and art-lovers. Having the words that help you to say "No" is a big step out of any abusive relationship.

Don't see what you want to see, see what is truly there. If you don't like it, leave it alone. But be open to surprise. Admire and support the ones who help you see what is there, not those who play on your worst fear, that there is nothing there. Do you know the song "Simple" by K.D. Lang, on her album Hymns of the 49th Parallel? It's one of my favourites, and always seems to hit the right note:

I worship this tenacity
And the beautiful struggle we're in
Love will not elude us
Love is simple

Amen, sister.

Beercans On The Moon

2012-01-08T22:57:00.004Z

It is one of the truths revealed by photography that the moon is far smaller in the sky, objectively, than we perceive it. I think it's generally said to be "half a degree of arc", which sounds as tiny as it looks in this photo. Yet, it appeared so enormous and clear to my brain that I could practically see the astronauts' footsteps, and the "beercans on the moon" (a song by the beat combo The Fugs, m'lud; I see Ed Sanders has got an autobiography out).

Getting closer doesn't seem to make it much bigger, either. But it does make for a more satisfying photograph. So much for "context"...

The Dark Side of the Viaduct

2012-01-05T21:01:00.000Z

Not being at work this week, I've been setting up little adventures for myself. Today, after I had dropped my daughter off to catch her bus to college at 07:50, I headed straight on up the motorway for St. Catherine's Hill and the Hockley Viaduct. I wanted to see what the place would look like in an early morning light, rather than the customary late afternoon light. It was still dark and it was raining, but I like being outdoors at times and in weathers when others usually are not and, besides, the chances were that it would clear up as it got light.

It didn't; at least not straight away. In fact, it got worse. Halfway up the south end of the hill near the viaduct, overlooking the motorway cutting, I had to shelter in the trees from heavy rain driven horizontally by a very strong, gusting westerly wind. The trees were creaking and rattling so much it sounded like some weird musical performance was taking place around me. But it blew over, and around 09:00 the sun came up over Twyford Down, and there was a beautiful strong south-easterly light for about an hour. I went back down the hill and photographed "the dark side of the viaduct" for a bit.

Then it rained again, and I drove home for a nice hot cup of tea.

Two Houses, Both Alike

2012-01-03T10:45:00.006Z

Here you go, two pictures from yesterday afternoon, taken in difficult late afternoon winter sunshine, one taken with a Panasonic G3, the other with an iPhone 4s. But which is which?

Obviously, the iPhone image is half the resolution of the 16 Mpixel G3, but with a degree of Photoshop and with both downsized as JPEG files, I think you'll agree the, um, phone does a creditable job as a camera. The camera, on the other hand, wouldn't work as a phone, no matter in which direction I pointed it, or how loud I shouted into it. Nor would it let me look at my email, or check the traffic situation on the M3 going home from Winchester.

I think if your main interest was in simply recording what things looked like, and sharing small images with other phone and computer users, then the iPhone 4s is actually pretty remarkable. Though it does cost rather more than many decent cameras, of course...

On the other hand, I am very pleased indeed with the used G3 I bought a couple of months ago (having looked at the specs of the GX1, and thought, why not go for the same sensor with a built-in viewfinder?) and am perfectly happy with the free LG P500 Android smartphone that came with the cheapest pay monthly contract on Orange. The camera on that phone really is a POS, but everything else is fine.

Until someone comes up with something compellingly new -- say, the sort of array of linked multiple smartphone imagers that several people have proposed as a potential portable digital view camera (now wouldn't that be something?) -- I can't see serious photographers abandoning cameras any time soon, except as an equivalent to the "toy camera" work that some people do with Holgas, Dianas, and the like. And the iPhone is already too good for that, I'd say. But "convergence" is clearly the name of the game, and it can't be long before smart-ness starts being built into cameras. It would be handy to save backups of one's files in the Cloud, for example, or to email them to the News Desk, or to receive firmware updates directly.

I think I'd feel an idiot holding a camera to my ear, though.

New Year's Day 2012

2012-01-01T19:03:00.000Z

I like to get out on New Year's Day and take a photo or two, however perfunctory. I left it a bit late today, so all I managed was a stroll round the neighbourhood. It was pouring with rain, so I had the LX3 under my coat, and was the only pedestrian on the streets.

There you go, "context". One resolution down. It's a start, anyway.

Resolution in the Head

2011-12-31T21:29:00.002Z

Look out, here it comes again, that strange moment when one year tips over into another. I like the fact that, unlike some calendrical celebrations I could mention, this is not an entirely arbitrarily chosen date, but one tied intimately to life on planet Earth. A new cycle really does start round about this time, if you accept that a poetic truth (an endless cycle of decline, death, rebirth, and flourishing) can give meaningful shape to an astronomical truth (the movement of the Earth round the Sun, and the Moon round the Earth). How could you not? Well, by being Chinese, I suppose.

I'm not so keen on New Year's Eve, viewed as an annual excuse for a noisy, vomit-spattered booze-up. Drink really has become a problem in this country in the last decade (not a sentence I'd ever thought I'd watch myself write). I keep well out of harm's way, these days, but that's just my age showing. I do like hearing all the ships' foghorns go off at midnight in Southampton Water, though, accompanied by volleys of fireworks and, last year for the first time here, flying Chinese lanterns. I also like New Year's Resolutions. They map nicely onto that spirit of "fail again, fail better" (© S. Beckett) that is the only sane attitude towards the "two steps forward, one point nine nine steps back" experience most of us have in our lives.

So, how do I intend to fail better in 2012?

Well, for a start, I keep meaning to update my website, but keep putting it off. My problem is that I like to write my own HTML code but -- if the site is to be an adequate platform for the work I intend to display on it -- that means getting fully up to speed with all the Javascript, CSS, Flash, and whatever else has come along in recent years to improve the appearance and user experience of websites. That prospect just makes me feel tired, though, not excited as it once would have -- age, again, I suppose.

But all I have on the Web currently is this blog and my Blurb bookstore. The blog is great for showing bits of new work as they happen, but terrible for showing coherent bodies of work. The bookstore is great for showing work that has made its way into printed form, but not for sets and sequences that haven't. As showing coherent bodies of work is what I want to do, this is not ideal. Even if I did get my website back up, keeping it updated would be a real pain.

The answer is obvious, of course. There is a reason why image-sharing sites like Flickr and Tumblr are so popular: they make a complex and tiresome job easy. So, Resolution Number One is to set up a Flickr account, and start filling it with pictures.

Resolution Number Two is to shift the boundaries of my photographic comfort zone, in two ways. I love photographs of people, and I take a fair few of friends and family, but I've never got into that state of mind which regards "people" as the ultimate, true and most challenging subject. I may change that, this year, if only as a way of shaking up my "practice" (sorry, I must stop talking to artists). I'm not a huge fan of so-called "street" photography, where the consent of the subject is taken for granted, and their dignity regarded as disposable, but some sort of portrait project may be on the cards. The category "Angels" keeps popping into my mind (though I'm thinking more Rilke than Robbie Williams).

I also intend to shift those boundaries in a more literal way: my characteristic approach in recent years has been to get in close and fill the frame. Nothing wrong with that -- it's a good way to get strong photographs, has served me well, and I'd recommend it to anyone. In the words of Robert Capa, "If your photographs are not good enough, you're not close enough". But I'm increasingly aware of the missing context, and I have a desire to deliberately include those extraneous elements that I have previously rigorously excluded. This means stepping back and letting the lens and the camera sensor do the work. Whether my kit is up to this -- it's the traditional strength of large-format view cameras -- we'll have to see.

I have other resolutions, too, but most of those are of the tedious "housekeeping" variety, both literal and metaphorical.

But here's a rather random thing which I have just discovered. Do you dislike that mannered, over-decorated, arpeggiated vocal style that is so inescapable now? It was cool when Stevie Wonder and Aretha Franklin did it, but now it has just become really annoying; almost as annoying, universal and pointless as the words "Belgian chocolate". Well, it has a name: melisma. Sounds like a disease, doesn't it? If I were in a position to do so, I'd launch a campaign to "Stamp Out Melisma in 2012!" But first I'd have to go round explaining what "melisma" means, which sounds like the definition of a lost cause.

Happy New Year to you all. Let's hope for better things and less Interesting Times in 2012.

It's a Family Affair

2011-12-30T14:46:00.000Z

"A son's your son 'til he takes a wife, but a daughter's your daughter for the rest of your life". My mother recited this saying often enough in my hearing for me to get the message, loud and clear: it's OK to cut your moorings and join another family circle (if you're a boy). Just send us a postcard.

That's pretty much how it's worked out, too. You know when you're a bit of a stranger in your own family when you discover, at your mother's funeral, that you have an extra cousin you had either forgotten or never known about. Well, hello, there! The simple fact is they're not really my tribe any more.

By contrast, I have been assimilated into my partner's tribe. She has two sisters (both of whom, curiously, have also paired up with guys called Mike --I sometimes wonder whether there's some obscure family joke being perpetrated here) and we generally meet up en famille around Christmas time for a ritual exchange of presents. It used to be at the picturesque cottage where two of their aunts lived, but now they've both died we've started meeting up in an olde tea shoppe, dominating the place with our table for twelve and loud voices.

On the way over, I realised I'd forgotten to bring a camera. Then I remembered I had my loaner iPhone in my coat pocket, so decided to give it a try. I must admit, I felt a bit of a fool, fumbling with a fancy phone in an unfamiliar mode, though it turned out half the table were iPhone aficionados. "Is Siri male or female?" they kept asking, to my profound confusion, not least because we'd only just pulled some crackers and read out the jokes (best one: "Q: What does an auctioneer need to know? A: Lots!").

Looking at the results, I must say I wonder at the standards of those people who say "My iPhone 4s is now my main take-everywhere camera!" I mean, they're OK for a phone, but I'd be seriously considering getting another camera.

Is this thing on? Ah, wrong camera...

Silly old fool, he's half deaf as well, you know...

Still, I will try it again before I have to give it back to the quartermaster's stores. Preferably when I haven't got a raucous table of merrymakers trying to put me off my game...

Another One Gone

2011-12-28T23:18:00.002Z

I was sad to read the obituary this week, in the Guardian's "Other Lives" section, of Gerald Anstock, the headmaster of my primary school. I have mentioned Mr. Anstock and his remarkable school in this blog several times (for example, in what is -- by a mile -- my most visited post, due to a link to it from a popular website dealing with corporal punishment).

On second thoughts, "sad" is a rather conventional emotion, and rings hollow. Yes, it's always sad when someone we knew and who had a profound influence on our lives dies. But Gerry Anstock was 94, and no doubt had been having his share of the infirmities of old age. "A good innings", as they say, as another old cricketer leaves the crease. No, I think what I truly felt was, first, surprise (I had assumed he had returned to the eternal pavilion some years ago) and, second, relief.

Why relief, of all things? Because, if I am utterly honest, it is a relief that there is now one less person in the world who might reproach me for not making something more of my life. In fact, there are now probably none such. All gone, the ones who once said to me, "You could do well and go far, lad, if you give it your best shot!", and meant it. Sorry, guys, this is as far as I got. It might look a long way from where I started, but from here all I can see is how much further there was to go, and how far I might have gone.

This is a total projection, of course. It is not they who feel the disappointment, but me. In truth, I would be surprised if many of them had remembered me at all; sadly, even my mother didn't know who I was towards the very end of her life. Teachers do have remarkable memories, it's true. As kids, we take it for granted that all 30 members of our class are known to our teacher by name and probably reputation from Day One. And they usually are. This is quite a good trick -- do they teach mnemonic methods in teacher training? However, after a career of, say, 35 years, a degree of amnesia is probably inevitable and even necessary. 1962-65 was a long time ago, especially for someone over 80.

This is only part of a picture of the whole school:
A free scan of the whole thing to anyone who
can reasonably claim to be in it.

Of course, everyone else's memories tend to be, from our own point-of-view, and where they concern us, brutally and insultingly partial and incomplete. I remember when an old acquaintance from our college days bumped into the Prof at a conference a few years ago. This woman had, I am certain, known both of us equally well back in 1974. The inevitable catching up and filling in took place, and the Prof shared the information that she and I were still together. "Mike who?", said this other prof, "No, don't remember him, I'm afraid." Sigh. Ah, well, I did my best to be unforgettable, but... We presume so much on the total recall of others, but this is as unfair as my presumption that you, dear readers, have all read all 500+ posts in this blog.

But we remember what we remember, and sometimes we do remember the same things. I think anyone who went to Peartree Junior School in Stevenage in Gerry Anstock's time will certainly never forget two things: the animals, and the music. I have mentioned the animals before (how many state primary schools have peafowl wandering freely about the premises, or bantam chickens scratching in the playground, I wonder?) so this time I'll mention the music.

Music -- recorded classical, orchestral music -- played a big part in the life of the school. Every morning, we were played in and out of morning assembly to a piece of music played on the school gramophone. The school was divided into houses, and you knew when it was a special "house day", because that morning's music would be the house theme: Beethoven's 5th Symphony for Churchill, Grieg's In The Hall of the Mountain King for Hillary, Bach's Toccata & Fugue in D minor for Schweitzer, and the RAF March Past for Bader. On ordinary days, a selection of classical "lollipops" suitable for children would be rotated: things like Rossini's Thieving Magpie overture, or Holst's Planets Suite. It was -- and was obviously intended to be -- an education in itself for children from our sort of background. Ditto the animals, of course. Backed up with the very real threat of the cane for those who didn't see things Gerry Anstock's way.

For some, there was also the sport. Anstock's Peartree took competitive team sports very seriously indeed. We played to win, sometimes to a degree that could, perhaps, turn a little ugly. The school was, I am told, somewhat feared on the football fields and netball courts of other schools. I was quite good at cricket in those days, and opened the batting and fielded in that suicidal position known as Silly Mid On. Who knows, perhaps somewhere the carefully-compiled score-books for those long-ago seasons still exist.

At one match, fielding on a sunny afternoon in 1965, the batsman clipped a ball into a short low arc that was destined to pass by my left side. Acting entirely from instinct, I dived full length and caught the ball cleanly in my left hand, just before it reached the ground. The field and the spectators erupted; Gerry Anstock's parade-ground bellow of praise carried the length of the field. For the first and last time in my life, I knew what it was to be a true sporting hero; it was a sort of ecstasy. Later that year, our team played a parents' XI, which included my father, with G.H. Anstock keeping wicket. "Watch out for that boy of yours, Doug," said Gerry, "He'll catch you if anyone can!" I will probably remember the pride and pleasure of that summer for the rest of my life.

So, yes, maybe "sad" is the right word after all. If only because they don't make them like that any more. The heads of my own children's schools were bland, harrassed, managerial types, obsessed with grades and tables, and hidden from the children behind secretaries and mountains of paperwork. Gerry would probably have seen off any OFSTED inspectors with a few choice words and a stick. The inevitable disciplinary investigation, the health and safety audit (did you say chickens?), and the suspension on full pay pending an enquiry into unorthodox teaching methods would, sooner or later, have followed. It worked for me, though, peacocks, ferrets, and all. Thanks for that, Mr. Anstock, sir.

Christmas Debrief

2011-12-27T15:57:00.006Z

Did everyone survive their Yuletide stresses and excesses? I hope so: I know some readers of this blog will have been having a more difficult time at Christmas this year than most of us. My best wishes to you -- you know who you are.

I had a very satisfactory spread of loot this year: a book*, a bottle, a video, a pair of trousers, and a new wallet. Oh, and one of those fantasy Oxfam goats. I bought the Prof one of those new, cheaper Kindles,** and setting it up this afternoon reminded me of one the funnier things I saw this year: a sketch on YouTube from the Norwegian show "Øystein og jeg" from 2001 (written by Knut Nærum), generally referred to as Mediaeval Help Desk. It is particularly funny if you have ever tried to help extremely intelligent people -- who really don't enjoy being made to feel stupid -- cope with unfamiliar IT. Both actors play their roles to perfection.

Talking of Help Desks, the IT department at my university have declared a total IT shut-down from 3-6 January, due to an urgent need to replace faulty electrical circuits in their main machine room. As I would have pretty much nothing to do on those four days, I'm taking them as leave, which -- added to the main closure from Christmas to New Year -- means I'm getting an unprecedented two week break this year.

This idea of closing for the week between the two main mass binges seems to be becoming quite normal for large institutions, and probably needs to be questioned (in a very quiet voice, though) -- I know it drives our overseas students nuts, not to be able to access basic facilities like libraries or catering during that time. I suspect it is seen as simply (yet more) evidence of the decline of our godless, hedonistic civilisation into decadence.

If this is decadence, then bring it on, is what I say. Know what? I think I'm in the mood for another mince pie!

* The book was Richard Misrach's "Destroy This Memory". I was grateful, of course, but I've decided that one of my New Year's Resolutions is going to be: No more photobooks which are too big for a normal bookshelf i.e. taller than 30cm or deeper than 32cm. In fact, I may start buying exclusively "small" ones i.e. smaller than A4.

** Myself, I'm lusting after the Kindle Fire, rumoured to be due for release in the UK in January.

Sniffing Glue at Christmas

2011-12-22T23:00:00.002Z

In the comments to the previous post I wrote: "There's a film (can't remember which) where someone says that Christmas, for them, always smells of oranges. For me, it always smells of Airfix glue... I always imagine thousands of small boys, high as kites on solvents, bent over plastic model kits on Boxing Day."

That set me off down a very pleasant seasonal chain of associations, and I spent a couple of idle hours googling in the World Wide Curiosity Shop -- surprisingly successfully -- for items from my own personal remote past. It's shocking, really, how much easier it is to retrieve trivia like toys from oblivion than it it is to find, say, the actual friends you used to play with. Anyway, think of this as an Idiotic Hat Christmas Special, reeking of butanone.

I'm pretty sure my very first "plastic assembly kit" was a Frog brand WW2 propeller-driven American fighter aircraft, the Republic Thunderbolt, which someone must have bought me for Christmas around 1960. Going on six years old, I was clearly too young to build it unaided. It was the sort of unthinking present for a minor relative that is snatched off a peg in Woolworth's at the last minute (well, we've all been there). Nevertheless, it happened to spark a lasting enthusiasm.

My father, being a practical man with a love of engineering, was only too ready to help. He was still young enough to feel the attraction of toys, and he liked the novelty and precision of combining the tiny plastic pieces into "assemblies", in a way which mimicked real-world engineering. I adored my father, and we spent many happy hours hunched over the dining room table together, sticking Part A to Part B. I think those times, with him patiently explaining the differences between jet and prop-driven aircraft, or the significance of the wooden construction of the De Havilland Mosquito, were probably the closest moments we ever spent together. There was also the added thrill of learning that the tiny 1:72 representation in his hands was the self-same Stuka dive-bomber or Messerschmitt ME-109 that had attacked him repeatedly and in deadly earnest 20 years previously. I have no idea how he really felt about this, but he didn't seem to take it personally.*

Above all, there was the shared satisfaction of getting it right. My Dad was a bit of stickler for doing things properly, and model-making was an ideal opportunity to induct me into the ways of bloke-ish perfectionism. To blow gently on a propeller and see it spin freely, or to get the undercarriage to set at just the right springy angle, or even simply to attach a cockpit canopy of clear plastic without smearing it with tiny gluey fingerprints was, I came to see, a source of deep and lasting satisfaction. After a couple of years, I was ready to go solo.

But we kept up our Christmas ritual for many more years. One of my most-anticipated presents would always be a special model kit, which we would make together over the long holiday afternoons. I can still remember most of them: the Red Knight of Vienna, a Bald Eagle with spread wings atop a mountain peak, a Mammoth Skeleton (crikey, that one was fiddly!), the Revell HMS Beagle, the Renwal Ontos tank, a pair of duelling pistols, and, our final outing together in 1968, the Revell 1:32 "Werner Voss" Fokker DR1 Triplane. After that, girls and records were all I wanted for Christmas.

It's only in retrospect that I realise the intensity of my engagement with this hobby; not so much with the objects themselves, but with the processes and peripherals. I came to love the analytical flair and representational clarity of a good sheet of instructions, for example, and still do. No words needed.** Is there anything more insightful, more brilliant in its just-right simplicity, than a carefully-drawn "exploded" view? If nothing else, it was all a good preparation for IKEA self-assembly furniture in adult life, I suppose. But, actually, I think you learn a lot about analysing a problem from such things: how a large problem can be broken down into its constituent parts, and how these parts relate to each other, and in what order various processes must be completed. This is not trivial stuff.

There is also poetry and art in model-making. There is the rich vocabulary of engineering in miniature: fuselage, nacelle, chassis, strut, cockpit, canopy, sprue, sprocket, propeller and aileron. Wonderful, evocative, precisely-meaningful words. Done properly, you also learn, literally and metaphorically, what is "fitting" and what is not. You learn the functional poetry of form, you acquire the ability to interpret and honour the intentions behind a design, and -- in time -- you learn the pleasure of going beyond those intentions to create something new, even if it is merely to paint your Spitfire pink.

You also come to appreciate the artistry of the original model maker, too, as well as the finer points of manufacture. The better modellers would pay close attention to matters of texture, surface, volume and moulding, and the better manufacturers could manage to convey this in pieces of mass-produced injection-moulded plastic. As it happens, my own favourite thing was often the little sheet of transfers (decals) that came with most kits, to enable insignia and other markings to be added to the model. These were often masterpieces of design, and items of pop art in their own right (before cutting them up!); variations in branding (nationality, arm of service etc.) might have to be accommodated on the same sheet, resulting in complex, interlaced layouts with exciting bold patterns of echoes and symmetries.

But for sheer, open-mouthed, pre-teen, gawping pleasure, there is little to beat the magnificence of model "box art", depicting the aircraft or vehicle in question imagined in context -- guns blazing, soaring through clouds, or crashing through mountainous waves, with every strut and rivet correctly placed. As with movie posters, an evocative painting can seem so much more enticing than a bland photograph of the box contents. All model-making requires a significant investment of imagination to make the thing come alive, and box art is the nudge that most of us need. I understand that artists like Roy Cross, Jo Kotula, Jack Leynwood, Brian Knight, and many others are much admired and collected. Google their names and you'll see why.

Then, of course, there's the glue... Or rather, "polystyrene cement", for as any fule kno plastic kits are welded together by melting the plastic in a solvent, rather than "stuck". Hence that never-forgotten sensation of sliding a lug into an aperture that had seemed too snug before applying the lubricating solvent [That's enough of that! Santa's elves are getting the giggles. Ed.]. Hence also those disfiguring fingerprints gluey young fingers can leave etched into a smooth wing or ship's sail. I have no idea idea how far the absorbed happiness of those long-ago Christmas holiday afternoons was due to being "glue happy". Not too far, I think, as in more recent years I rediscovered that very same sensation of shared, absorbed concentration, when helping my son with his own favourite Christmas treat -- an enormous Lego set, preferably Star Wars related, with a fiendishly baroque complexity of construction. Lego, of course, is famously glue-free.

In the end, happy is happy. I hope that you find some spells of true happiness, however achieved, over the Christmas holiday and throughout the New Year.

* Buying Japanese goods was a different matter. Most Burma veterans felt similarly. Dad would have loved to have driven an Audi, if he could have afforded it, but you couldn't have given him a Honda, free.

** Just as well: in my "girls and records" years, I had a good friend who was still building models, and he would buy some of the classy Japanese imports that were coming onto the market in the late 1960s. We would have hysterics trying to understand the Japlish instructions concerning "supu-rocket wheels" (sprocket wheels) and the like. Great kits, though (but I didn't tell Dad about them).

Sunday Squared

2011-12-20T16:02:00.001Z

I'm afraid I've been a bit uncommunicative since last week -- I've been in bed for several days with the traditional pre-Christmas virus, and still feel pretty dreadful. Odd, how this happens. It's probably the body's way of saying, "Nooo!!" ...

Like everyone over eight, I have mixed feelings about this time of year. I sometimes wonder if the only reason WW1 went on so long was that initial rash promise that it would all be over by Christmas. "Can't we make it, over by -- say -- next summer, sarge? I ain't that keen on getting back fer Chrissmas, truth be told... Our Sissie's s'posed to be comin' over this year, an' 'er kids drive me round the bend... Pass me that there rum." Only a tiny percentage of the army was ever in the trenches; everyone else was getting the regular meals, semi-skilled work, good company and family-free life that is the secret dream of most young men. Not least in 1914, when a large proportion of the British male population was found to be undersized, undernourished, and living in over-crowded domestic conditions.

In bed, feverish and half-awake, I found myself visited by the ghosts of Christmas Past. Nothing dramatic or Dickensian: I remembered shapes and textures that have now vanished: red and green crepe paper, concertina-folded paper chains, a brace of pheasants hanging unplucked in the larder, blancmange, and my mother's rock-hard cake icing, white, smooth and inviolable as dental plaster. I remembered seeing red-faced aunts and uncles playing slightly risqué competitive party games in a community hall, involving standing in lines to pass keys on a string up, down and through clothing (causing much squealing and showing of knickers), or to manoeuvre a balloon from person to person without the use of hands, with us kids goggle-eyed and forgotten on the sidelines with our orangeade and crisps. I remembered a swooning sense of bliss, high on a sugar rush and up several hours past my usual bedtime, lying on the carpet in a darkened living room under the Christmas tree, looking up through the branches at the blinking coloured lights, like a happy drunk in a gutter.

I also remembered some truly appalling days earning Christmas cash, one year stretching the necks and plucking the feathers of turkeys in a freezing barn, and another trudging through driving sleet as a temporary postman. Above all, I recalled the sheer, screaming tedium of being 16, and counting the minutes until I could escape from the overheated fug of a Christmas night in a fourth-floor two-bedroomed flat jammed with family members bent on nothing more entertaining than watching Morecambe and Wise on the TV.

Christmas and Boxing Day, in the years before the 1980s, were like Sunday squared; nothing to do, plenty of time to do it in, and no-one to do it with. Everything was shut; leaving your family home (other than to test ride a new bike or roller skates) was, if not technically illegal, an act of rebellion liable to have you branded as a teddy-boy delinquent. That character-building boredom has now become as historic as Dickens (whose fault, I am given to understand, Christmas largely is). Nothing much is now shut for more than ten minutes over Christmas, and few kids seem to have the urge to escape from the house to hang out in the cold with their mates (unless they really are teddy-boy delinquents). In fact, it's the kids that want the bloody TV on all night, and seem to have no interest whatsoever in antiquated games that involve chasing paper fish with a rolled up newspaper, or rolling a balloon over your sister-in-law's bottom with your chin. Ah, well, we had to make our own entertainment in those days...

Talking of Dickens, is anyone out there a ghost story fan? It's a genre I've never really explored, mainly because the few I have read did nothing for me. I actually read a couple of M.R. James stories last night, alone in a semi-darkened room, and found them risible; the much-praised "Whistle And I'll Come To You" is, frankly, utterly daft, practically Python-esque in its silliness. Does anyone have any more modern takes on the ghost story to recommend?

The Book of Shadows

2011-12-13T14:01:00.001Z

These days poet Don Paterson is as well-known as any contemporary poet can hope to be, and I am increasingly subject to that twinge of jealousy you get when a personal "discovery" becomes public property.

One of my favourite books of his is not a book of poetry at all, but his collection of notebook jottings and aphorisms called The Book of Shadows, which I often mine for thought-provoking nuggets when I am at a loose end towards the end of the day. I like aphorisms, they're a very un-British genre. The true masters of the form are nearly all European -- Kafka and Lichtenberg spring to mind. They display a condensed cleverness that is deeply embarrassing to the Anglo-Saxon psyche. Paterson is a Scot, of course, which may help.

I was recently struck by this observation of his:

"If only poets and novelists could be translated into musicianhood, even for a few seconds; then we'd see the vast majority, after only a few notes, revealed as a bunch of desperate scrapers and parpers without a tune in their heads or the rudiments of technique. God, the time we would save..."

Don Paterson, The Book of Shadows

How true that is, and how strange that it should be so -- that competence in music should be instantly apparent, whereas incompetence in writing can go undetected for years. In wondering about its more general applicability -- say, to photography -- I realised that this aperçu reveals Don Paterson as a believer in the Real Thing. An essentialist, no less.

I suspect he has not made allowance for the contemporary aesthetic of self-maimed art, of work that is afraid of its own authority, that is intentionally less than competent. Not so much "so bad it's good" as embarrassed by its own self-belief. Quite often, these days, a superficial competence is a marker of kitsch, not art. Even, I'm sorry to say, in music.

It's a strange world we have invented for ourselves, where the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. Now where have I heard that before?

Colour Management

2011-12-11T16:43:00.003Z

I said in a previous post that it was reassuring to see, looking at the display on my loaner iPhone, that my own Windows colour management setup was not telling me lies. I should qualify that: it may not have been telling me outright, eye-stretching lies, but it was definitely, shall we say, sparing my feelings more than was necessary.

If there's one issue that plagues all but the most conscienscious and technically-minded photographers, it is colour management. It has taken me years to begin to understand the issues and what the most effective solutions are. Indeed, only yesterday was a final piece put in the jigsaw for me. I think I may finally be there.

The basic problem is simple. You take pictures with your digital camera (or scan some film) and import the images into your computer. You edit them to your satisfaction in your image editing software. So far, so good. You then want the colours in the image that comes out of your printer to resemble the colours in the image you see on your monitor as closely as possible. Uh oh! Frustration and great expense in paper and ink ensue. Most of us never progress far beyond that point. It's surprising how flexible the concept of "good enough" can become...

The thing is, your computer monitor fools your eyes into seeing colours using combinations of red, green and blue pixels, the so-called RGB method. You can see this clearly if you ever get water droplets on your screen (let's not go into how this might happen -- Gesundheit!). The droplets act as mini magnifying glasses, and the RGB pixels are clearly visible. Because they are back-illuminated, these RGB colours also have an attractive, jewel-like intensity.

Your printer, on the other hand, fools your eyes into seeing colours using tiny droplets of cyan, magenta, yellow and black ink, the so-called CMYK method, exactly the same as any other printed matter. Because the illusion of these "colours" is produced by splatters of dry CMYK inks on white paper, they are naturally duller than those gorgeous screen colours. They are also just different -- a colour produced by the RGB method on a screen can only be approximated by the CMYK method on paper.

This was most glaringly obvious in the days when my kids used to use simple paint programs to draw stuff on the computer. They would colour the wings of the pterosaur a brilliant pure green, and it would emerge from the printer as a sludgy khaki. Yuk. You learn early on that children, unfortunately, have a far less flexible concept of "good enough" than adults. I understand Steve Jobs was a bit of a toddler, emotionally, which probably explains the brilliant colour-management built in to Apple products...

To make things worse, in between your screen and your printer sits a chain: image files (in various different formats), your image editing software, your printer driver, and several dozen other things I have never heard of, like bit depth, colour space, and chroma subsampling. It's a nightmare: all of these elements at different times have to store, re-interpret, and pass on the colours, in a game of electronic Chinese Whispers. It is a miracle of engineering that anything even remotely like the original image emerges at the other end.

But there are two fairly simple things you can do, that go 90% of the way to eliminating the problem.

The first, is to calibrate your screen. I use a cheap, cut-down version of the calibration device from ColorVision, the Spyder2express. It couldn't be simpler: you plug the cable of the "spyder" into your USB port, dangle it in front of your screen, and run the software. It checks what your display is really showing when it claims to be displaying different colours at different intensities, and builds a corrective profile that is loaded every time you start up the computer. If you fail to re-calibrate the display after your chosen reminder period, it badgers you until you do.

For some years, I muddled through with just this. My printer didn't offer much in the way of colour management, so I simply put up with the mismatch between screen and prints. But then I got my Epson Stylus Photo 1400, and suddenly had the ability to tweak the colours coming out of the printer, too. Finally!

Now, there are two ways to do this, the easy way and the hard way. As these choices are not labelled in this helpful manner, I first chose the hard way a.k.a. "let the printer driver control colour management". It seemed a good idea at the time. Total control, and all that.

Basically, there is a dialogue screen in most printer drivers which enables you to adjust the colour balance, brightness, etc., of the output. If you've ever worked with a colour enlarger in the darkroom, you'll know how this works -- dial in a little more yellow? A little less magenta? No? Maybe try a lot more cyan? No? Perhaps no cyan at all? It is the very embodiment of Samuel Beckett's famous words, "Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better". You'll also know what a STUPID, STUPID waste of your valuable time it is fated to be. Every tweak in one direction requires two counter-tweaks in another, until you are ankle-deep in discarded, annotated test prints. Aaaargh!!

Eventually, I did reach an approximation that worked for me a lot of the time, and -- being an emotionally-mature grown-up -- simply stretched the concept of "good enough" to fit. But the idea that the alternative approach (a.k.a. "let the image editor control colour management") might yield better results nagged in the background, and then I read Ctein's article on Colour Management the other day. I resolved to give it a try.

The idea behind this approach is similar to display calibration i.e. the deviation of your printer from an established norm is measured (for a particular ink and paper combination) and a corrective "ICC" profile provided, which is then used by your image editor to control the printer. To be honest, I had tried using the ICC profiles supplied with the printer very early on, and abandoned them as useless. But the key to this approach is to have a custom profile built for your very own printer/ink/paper combo by someone who knows what they are doing. It seemed worth a try.

I chose UK-based Hermitage Photo Services. Their instructions on how to prepare and send the target prints were simple and clear, the price seemed reasonable (but not suspiciously reasonable), they accepted PayPal, and I received my profile as an email attachment the day after posting the target prints off. Roger Barrett of Hermitage was also extremely helpful with a couple of after-sales queries I had, and I am one extremely satisfied customer. It works!

The only adjustment I now have to make, when printing, is to make some allowance for that difference in brightness between screen and paper. I think of it as the equivalent of making allowance for "dry down" in the traditional darkroom. Basically, I get the image to look right on screen, and save it. To print it subsequently, I now print it twice: once "as is", and once with a temporary adjustment of "levels" to about 1.26, which seems to bring screen and paper into line. Sometimes I prefer the punch of the darker version, sometimes I prefer the accuracy and subtlety of the adjusted version.

But the colours are always right. Finally.

Just another ~~tequila~~ campus sunrise...

Forgetfulness

2011-12-10T14:40:00.005Z

This poem (which I came across recently in an animated version you can see here) spoke to my own increasing absence of mind, slowness of recall, and inability to remember the names of colleagues I have worked with for years. Yes, I have seen my doctor about it, and no, he doesn't think it's anything to worry about. Just the, uh, penumbra of the shadow of eventual personal extinction beginning to extend itself over my being. That's not actually what he said. I can't remember his name just now, though I know it begins with L, like the river in the poem.

It's not a poem that goes much beyond its own surface meaning, but it's nicely put and nicely made, and I like the line about joining those "who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle".

Forgetfulness, by Billy Collins

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

Lowe! That's it... Dr. Lowe! Phew.

East and West

2011-12-05T21:39:00.002Z

There are two facades on the campus which, under the right conditions, always get my attention. The first is made of metal panels and decorated glass and faces east, and reflects the rising sun like a mirror:

The second faces west, and is a cliff face of glass sitting over a shallow atrium with narrow walkways lined with coloured panels, and reflects the late afternoon sun:

It's not every day that both buildings put on a show, but today they did.

Phone Fun

2011-12-04T18:43:00.002Z

Instinctively, I am an anti-Apple person. I have always used DOS/Windows, and use Unix a lot of the time at work and, although I have no particularly warm feelings towards Microsoft or Sun, I find Apple products over-designed and essentially patronising with their "don't worry your pretty little head about that" attitude to basic things like file management and navigation. Of course, a lot of people like it like that, and don't want to worry their pretty little heads about nerdy stuff like that.

However, it is impossible not to acknowledge the hands-down superiority of Apple in matters of colour management and touch-screen technology, and I have long resented but understood the "Apple only" mentality of anyone designing a fine art or photographic mobile "app". So it was with a deal of curiosity and anticipation that I found myself at the receiving end of the loan of a sleek, white iPhone 4S this week.

Why this bounteous good fortune? Have you seen what those things cost? Well, basically, we are developing a mobile app within the University for students, and the library is a core element. But, clearly, it's hard for me to be involved if I can't see what the thing looks like on an iPhone, so the university, like a wealthy parent, has kindly provided me with one until the end of the project. Cor, thanks, uni!

Obviously, the first things I downloaded were (a) my Curriculum e-book and (b) Tom Phillips' Humument app. What can I say? The screen quality is sensational, and the responsiveness of the touch navigation (compared to, say, the Android phones I have tried) is absolutely first class. I am simply blown away by the sheer eye-candy of the colours: the Humument app is just a visual delight - for a mere £4.50, it is a ridiculous bargain. I am also reassured that the colours, contrast and brightness of my own work is pretty much as I'd expect it i.e. my own Windows screen and colour-management setup is not telling me lies.

The camera looks fun, too. Obviously, that screen makes a lot of difference, but I begin to see why people talk increasingly seriously of their iPhone as their go-anywhere device for snaps. Five megapixels isn't much, but it's enough for the equivalent of 6"x4" prints, plus you've got all that social media stuff that lets you send pictures (sorry, pix) of yourself to all your "friends" that I'm too old to understand. Then there are the apps... The cult of Instagram and Hipstamatic is obviously appealing, if you're the sort of person who likes to fake the look of 1970s Polaroids. Am I that sort of person? I'll let you know, but I have to say I never once used the "art" filters built in to the Olympus Pen. Other apps, e.g. those for working out the position of the sun and moon, or lens hyperfocal distances, could be more useful. I'll try to remember to use the camera while I've still got the phone.

However, as a phone I'm unconvinced... For a start, why would any sane person carry such a head-turning, universally-recognised and covetable gadget in public? You can get a perfectly decent Android smartphone free on the cheapest pay-monthly contracts. OK, you can't play with A Humument on the bus, but would you ever dare get the thing out anyway? I suppose it depends where you live.

Then there's the navigation. The touch screen is a joy to use, but there's a complete absence of signposts and buttons. I suppose they are thought to clutter up the simplicity of the design. What BS! How are you supposed to go back a step, for example (Android has a special button for this)? And why such a reliance on shortcuts and arcane twiddly finger movements? For example, I was astonished to find there is neither a stop nor a comma on the "alphabet" keyboard -- you have to swap to the "numbers and symbols" keyboard for those. What? I'm sure there's a shortcut, but... I'm seeing a triumph of design over sense (and I'm hearing the words, "No! NO!! There can only be ONE button!").

I suppose the real test will be how I feel when I have to hand it back in March...

St. Catherine's Hill seen across the Twyford road cutting
(and not through an iPhone)

Reflector

2011-12-03T17:20:00.003Z

The light has been relentlessly grey this week, with the weather on the verge of rain pretty much every day. I was on strike on Wednesday (does this man never work?) but for once chose to spend the day at home (all right, in bed). Let the young 'uns freeze their butts on the picket line.

Talking of impassable barriers, one of my old lunchtime haunts, the so-called Valley Garden, is still closed for "improvements", and my heart sinks whenever I look over the fence to see (a) the sort of "improvements" that are going on and (b) the wonderful autumnal scenes that are going waste. Not to mention the fruit: when my daughter was a toddler at the university day nursery we used to go for lunchtime walks in the Valley Garden and pick the apples, that otherwise would have rotted in the grass. She tells me she still sometimes dreams about our Secret Magic Garden.

The contrast is rather lacking in this "over the fence" picture, but the yellows and oranges are still worth the effort. What is needed is a natural reflector of some kind. Hmmm... Turn around 180 degrees, and that is precisely what you have. The Students' Union swimming pool is clad in corrugated metal sheets, that give an eery "interior" feel to the immediate surroundings. It's like being in one of those giant studios that are used for photographing cars.

You wouldn't think it was the same day.

Winter Palette

2011-11-28T21:15:00.001Z

The main photographic challenge at this time of year, even on the south coast of England, is finding enough light. Even a sunny afternoon is pretty dim in the shade, and come 4:00 p.m. it's all fading fast into darkness. The contrasts are extreme, and can make for ugly photographs. A little cloud helps, diffusing the light nicely, but that also brings on the late afternoon gloom a lot quicker.

This Sunday I was chasing a variety of afternoon light conditions all round St. Catherine's Hill. It just never stopped changing. I was also taken by surprise by the extremity of the change of the sun's angle to the SSW since my previous visit a couple of weeks ago; all illumination was cut off to the west face of the viaduct, and the rays of the setting sun were not beaming straight up the Twyford Down cutting as I had expected. Too bad: photographers in the landscape are like hunter-gatherers, and must interpret the situation on the ground to their advantage.

After criss-crossing the road next to the viaduct for a bit, and dodging the constant stream of returning Christmas shoppers in their cars, I opted for height and decided to climb St. Catherine's Hill the steep "back way". On the way up I met a work colleague, who occupies the office next to mine, jogging effortlessly down the track in shorts and a tee shirt. He lives nearby in Winchester, and has that enviable light build that (presumably) makes cross-country running a pleasure and not a leaden-legged torment. I have to say I could never understand running for pleasure even when I was young, fit, and two stone lighter.

I can walk though; once up high, the rich warm light of the setting sun was raking the tree tops, and was very pretty, but close to unphotographable. The case for some kind of "high dynamic range" procedure -- merging multiple identical images in software, made at different exposures -- was compelling, but I didn't have a tripod so that was that. One of these days I must give HDR a try. Done with restraint, it may be the answer to the "white skies and purple twigs" syndrome that disfigures so much digital landscape photography.

In allen Wipfeln spürest du kaum einen Hauch...

There is some detail in those shadows, honest, but probably not much in the JPEG you're seeing. In fact, the range of dark and golden tones in there is very subtle, and makes for a very pleasing print. I'm getting quite a taste for those rich, dark, blended colours setting off glowing, warm highlights, like fruit-cake or pumpernickel. It's a true winter palette.

Four Dawns

2011-11-26T12:16:00.005Z

Once upon a time, I was a quasi-nocturnal creature, getting to bed in the small hours and rising in the late afternoon. Thirty years of work and twenty years of parenting have put a stop to that way of life, and these days my alarm is set for 6:00 am.

There's not a lot to be said for early rising (I can't say I've noticed any great accumulation of the proverbial health, wealth or wisdom) but one compensation at this time of year is that I get to see the sun rising, an event that usually puts the world into photo-opp mood.

These four were all taken this week, as the cleaners and the early staff were exchanging greetings going home and coming in, respectively. As any office worker knows, it's vital to have a good understanding with your cleaner, or you'll come in one morning to discover your papers neatly rearranged into irretrievable tidiness, and your whiteboard scrubbed clean.

Snails In A Bucket

2011-11-24T18:20:00.003Z

Many years ago, aged 18 or so, I was home from university during a vacation, and went for an early evening drink in a town centre pub. By any standards, my appearance had changed since I was eight years old. Apart from the fact I had grown (a bit, anyway), I had a full beard and shoulder-length hair. I was therefore taken aback when another lad came up to me and said, "You're Mick, aren't you? Do you remember me? I'm Garry, from down the road. I used to help you collect snails in a bucket!"

It seems that our true colours shine through, no matter how heavy the disguise. Inside, I suspect, I will always be that boy from down the road that collects snails in a bucket. And not only snails. Everyone -- neighbours, schoolfriends, relatives -- knew that I was mad about "nature". No-one minded if I strayed into their gardens in pursuit of caterpillars -- we kids were like cats, anyway, liable to turn up anywhere -- and a steady procession of moribund bits of the natural world found their way to our front door. "Dad found this and wondered if your Michael would like it!"

Among the prizes donated by neighbours was a Privet Hawk-Moth, a magnificent creature, wonderfully large compared to even the biggest moths that settled on our windows on a summer night, with a pink and dark chocolate hooped body, white cabled antennae, and business-like wings swept back like a fighter plane. Even dead, it looked like it might zoom across the room if carefully launched like a balsawood glider. I kept mine in a polythene bag sellotaped to the wall. I used to love comparing its numinous reality with its picture in the Observer's Book of Larger Moths. To be its custodian gave me an enormous sense of privilege.

I also had a terrifying black and yellow wasp, about 1.5" long, with a sting almost as long as its body. Luckily, like the hawk-moth, it had been found dead, or else someone would surely have smacked it flat with a rolled-up newspaper. Again, I had the deep satisfaction of matching it, unmistakably, against its image in an identification book. It was a Wood Wasp, which -- despite the name -- is not a wasp but a sawfly, and uses its preposterous "sting" to lay eggs deep in rotten tree trunks. As a user of protective mimicry, you can't help but feel the Wood Wasp has gone over the top, being waspier than the waspiest wasp. I used to keep it in the matchbox it arrived in.

For years I wanted to be a naturalist, until it gradually dawned on me that I would never make it as a scientist. Not just because "science" was too hard (which it was) but because I clearly didn't get any science which didn't involve using coloured pencils to draw things. I'm sure you have heard the cliché, "I must have been away from school the day X was explained." Well, cliché or not, I'm pretty sure I was off sick the day they explained the point and purpose of chemistry, at least as taught in my school (and assuming the point wasn't to try and secretly fill another boy's blazer pocket with water from a lab squeeze bottle). I also found that I lack the component in the human brain that enables mathematics to take place there.

Still, there was always one sort-of science in which an ability with coloured pencils was an asset. One of the themes that has developed in this blog is "paths not taken", and this is yet another one: I might once easily have become a geographer. Even at 6th form level, entire geography lessons could be taken up happily copying elaborate coloured chalk drawings from the blackboard, which explained climate patterns, mountain formation or population distribution in graphical form.

Even better, there were field trips into the landscape, where terminal moraines and hanging valleys could be rambled over, fossils collected, and the strike and dip of strata pondered. There is no question that my two years studying geography enhanced my later life just as much as studying literature or languages. I think there are few greater pleasures than being out in a striking landscape on a bright, frosty winter's day, properly dressed and in good company, with a pub meal or even just a good hot cup of tea in prospect.

Unless it is, on such a walk, to come across a freshly dug quarry yielding museum-quality fossils to stuff your pockets with, like the one we found in mid-Wales a couple of years ago. Once a collector, always a collector. Or even just to see something, some perfect alignment of landscape and light, and to photograph it, hoping as always that what you've got will not just be a pale reflection of what you saw, but a transmutation of it into something rich and strange that will convey something of the depth of what you felt to others; the magical reverse of the pretty pebble collected on the beach that turns into a dull stone as it dries.

November 2009

You Can All Join In

2011-11-18T18:17:00.000Z

Do you know that famous tease by Virginia Woolf, that "on or about December, 1910, human character changed" (Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown)? Well, on or about, let's say, December 1968, I think something similar happened. Amongst other things, British pop and R&B mutated into "rock", and a brave new world began. Or so it seemed at the time.

I remember the moment well: it coincided with that snowy winter 1968/69 that followed the release of the Beatles' White Album, their failed attempt to come to grips with the new "progressive blues" paradigm. Next thing you knew, the Beatles were gone, and the likes of Led Zeppelin were shaking the stage. Personally, I never really liked that twee, psychedelic phase that dominated British pop in the mid-1960s, but as soon as I heard the new, riff-driven, "heavy" blues, I felt that thrill you only get a few times in a lifetime, when something sets up an overwhelming sympathetic resonance in your soul. Well, you're only 15 once, and if ever there was a music for 15-year-olds (15-year-old boys, anyway), this is it.

If you are of a similar age to me, you will probably remember those "sampler" albums that the new rock-oriented labels started putting out: most significantly, for the nascent British Prog Blues generation, You Can All Join In and Nice Enough To Eat from Island. These were loss-leading prospectuses aimed right at YOU; it was clear that someone really wanted to get their hands on your pocket-money.

Popular music has always been a business, naturally, but 1968/69 marks the point when music tipped over from being an accessory to social life to becoming a lifestyle package, a brand you could adopt and live inside. For a while, the word "alternative" was loosely stuck on the front of "lifestyle" as part of the packaging, but that label fell off somewhere in the early 80s. There's nothing alternative about getting your lifestyle off the peg in a High Street shop.

It suddenly seemed normal for youngsters from any background to imagine themselves as leading characters in a far more exotic and colourful narrative than the one lived by their parents, or even their older brothers and sisters. A sort of mass permission was granted, by some mysterious sprinkling of Zeitgeisty fairy dust, that allowed thousands of us to fantasize about becoming poets and vagabond musicians, rather than teachers and chartered accountants. It was as if, having unprecedentedly more choices in our lives, we had decided to add the powers of flight and telepathy to the list. Hey, why not? (Well, lots of reasons why not, but that's another post).

It was the spirit of the times, of course. Primary schools at the cusp of the 1950s and 1960s were all about free expression, play, and the untrammelled development of personality. We were encouraged to grow, imaginatively, and not to limit our horizons to a dull job at the nearest shop or factory. Typically, there was a dressing up box in the corner of every classroom, full of oddments of adult clothing and accessories, bags and scarves and hats. If you had the imagination and inclination, you could dress up and go anywhere and be anything between the morning milk break and dinner-time. See Emily play!

The new music was, in a sense, an extension of that dressing-up box attitude into adolescence. It might have been assembled from off-cuts of blues, folk, and R&B (with maybe more than a bit of Black and White Minstrel Show "blacking up" thrown in), but joining in didn't require anyone to become a musician. There was a symbiosis, a "scene", between performers and fan-base that created a new paradigm for popular culture.

Getting into the music, adopting the look -- and no-one should underestimate the aggro it caused back then simply to let one's hair grow long -- was to be more than a "fan". It was an elective affinity, a freemasonry of youth that crossed boundaries of class and geography, whose clandestine handshakes were the LP record sleeve tucked under a great-coated arm and the packet of Rizla papers with the mysteriously missing top.

The essence of that era is nicely captured by the cover of You Can All Join In. All the musicians on the album are herded together in a group photograph, like a school outing with a hangover, dressed in the DIY surplus-store uniform of early prog rock; smirking, scowling scruffs in donkey jackets and army greatcoats, with unstyled, grown-out thatches of unruly hair. Sandy Denny, the only girl, wears a charity-shop fur coat, and the cheeky boys from Jethro Tull are pulling faces at the back. It wasn't a difficult look to aspire to, and very low-maintenance -- we could all join in!

Ever since, fresh generations have revelled in those feelings of conspiracy and solidarity, of having a delightful shared secret, that being part of a Scene engenders; I suspect the 1980s "rave" scene may even have taken it further and done it better. But, we wrote the book or, if you prefer, we opened Pandora's dressing-up box.

Just another teenage dirtbag...

So far, so nostalgic. But there is a down-side to all this.

When he was 12 or so, my son became interested in those fantasy-gaming models branded as "Warhammer", and sold in Games Workshop stores. If you don't know them, they are miniature versions of those grotesque creatures that populate Heavy Metal album cover-art, all spikes and fangs and improbable armour. It's a phase many boys go through, but they seem to pass unscathed out the other side (though one of my younger colleagues did tell me of her dismay at discovering boxes and boxes of the stuff under her 30-year-old boyfriend's bed).

So, there I am, in about 2003, standing for the first time in a Games Workshop, doing some Christmas shopping. A bunch of kids in Heavy Metal tee-shirts are sitting round a table, dabbing paint onto models, and nodding their shaggy heads rhythmically. The muzak is loud and, I notice, oddly familiar. My God, I realise: that's Black Sabbath... These boys are listening to Paranoid! This music is thirty three years old!!

It was as if we, in 1970, the year of that album's release, had been listening without irony to music by Glenn Miller or Fats Waller. Very, very weird.

A style like Heavy Metal crystallised out of the primal progressive blues soup quite quickly, and has been with us, essentially unchanged, ever since. This is astonishing. And it's not just Heavy Metal: I can't remember the last time I heard something and thought, "Hey, this is new..." Even rap is 30 years old. Something odd is going on, wouldn't you say, when the latest musical scene for the style-conscious teen is yet another retread of musical styles established 30 or 40 years ago? In some weird way, 1968 has become the Year Zero of pop music -- anything before is "retro", anything after is "contemporary".

Seeing those 14-year-olds nodding along to Black Sabbath in 2003 made me think: this music has infantilized so many of us. We are stuck, unable to grow out of the sounds that intoxicated us before we had our first serious affair, before we had raised children, before we had experienced the full range of adult emotions. We have mistaken nursery rhymes for poetry. It's no wonder so many of us have a problem choosing music for a funeral.

As serious as your life...
John Coltrane, by Roy DeCarava

Part of the problem, of course, is that an alternative is hard to find. Unless you enjoy visiting those musical museums called "classical" and "jazz" (I do), there is very little accessible, serious contemporary music being broadcast. It doesn't help that screeching monsters like Harrison Birtwistle are blocking the way -- "serious" has become synonymous with "unlistenable".

A handful of listenable pieces by the likes of Arvo Pärt do get played to death as background (amusingly, there is a campaign on BBC Radio 4's Feedback programme to stop Phillip Glass's haunting Facades being used as "atmosphere" more than twice a week), but, infuriatingly, such pieces are rarely identified and as a consequence it's hard to put a name to these attractive, oddly familiar sounds. It's a real challenge, trying to break the rock/pop stranglehold, and find contemporary music by and for adults.

But let's not get too gloomy. Music isn't everything. And I find I never tire of seeing the parade of ageing geezers wheeled in as talking heads on rock nostalgia TV shows, one-time rock-dandies now looking like welders or accountants. Who'd have guessed that Nick Mason, Pink Floyd's drummer, was going to turn into Dennis Healey? Or that the elfin John Martyn of 1970 would become a one-legged, bloated Falstaff before he died in 2009? You may be forever 15 in your head, but your body is telling a very different story.

Surely, though, if only for the sake of preventing the human race from dying of boredom, we're overdue for another change? On or about December 2011, perhaps? By definition, of course, at 57 years old I will hate it; but even so I really, really look forward to it. Come on, kids, let Dads' Music be Dads' Music! Get your own groovy noise!

Tree Encounters

2011-11-15T20:16:00.004Z

Three very different encounters with trees and autumn light from today; just after dawn, mid-morning, and early afternoon. The yellow spire in the middle one is not a church, but a spectacular gingko tree, seen through the mulberry tree outside my office window.

Golden Planets -- Final Result

2011-11-14T12:46:00.004Z

For those of you following the story of the 200 million golden planets, I have added an Addendum to the post When This Old Hat Was New (posted on 10/11/2011).

To save you the trouble, here is the quote that sparked the enquiry:

A few years before Franklin drafted his will, philosopher Richard Price rhapsodized in a sober treatise on the national debt, “One penny, put out at our Savior’s birth to 5 percent compound interest, would, in the present year 1781, have increased to a greater sum than would be contained in two hundred millions of earths, all solid gold. But, if put out to simple interest, it would, in the same time, have amounted to no more than seven shillings and sixpence.”

My challenge was this: "That's surely the 18th century equivalent of Hunter S. Thompson-esque 'gonzo journalism' -- too much coffee and snuff, probably. Can anyone out there do the maths?"

Well, here is the answer, provided by old friend Andy S., a.k.a. Science Man:

1d invested for 1780 years at 5% would yield 1 x 1.05^1780 = 5.2 x 10^37 d

Price of gold was fixed by Isaac Newton in 1717 at £4 8s 9d per Troy ounce (it stayed this way for about 200 years)

1 Troy ounce = 31.03g

Therefore price of gold = 4x240 + 8x12 + 9 d/Troy ounce = 1065 d/Troy Ounce

1065d/31.103g = 34.32d/g = 34,320d/kg

Therefore 5.2 x 10^37d could buy (5.2 x 10^37)/(34320) kg of gold = 1.52 x 10^33 kg

The Mass of the Earth is about 5.978 x 10^24 kg (OU Science Data Book 1978)

Therefore 1.52 x 10^33 represents (1.52 x10^33)/(5.978 x 10^24) Earth Masses = 2.54 x 10^8 Earth Masses

i.e. about 250 million Earth Masses (at 1780 Gold Prices)

How about that? Thanks, Science Man! Seems it wasn't the snuff talking, after all.

Small Ads Dept.

2011-11-14T11:30:00.003Z

Anyone out there want a Panasonic GF-1 body? Last year I had some "funny money" and decided to spend it on a second GF-1 body, but it turns out that I have barely used it. It's the silver version, and as you would expect it is boxed, with all accessories (charger, manuals, etc.) intact and mainly still sealed in their polythene bags.

I've got it for sale on Amazon at £225, but I will sell it to any regular reader of this blog for £195 plus post & packaging to wherever you happen to live. Email me to do the deal (PayPal would be fine).

Remembrance Sunday

2011-11-13T09:22:00.002Z

Two friends, photographed one after the other in front of an improvised sheet backdrop, somewhere in Northern France, probably Noeux-les-Mines, 1914. Both recently promoted to sergeant in the 1st/1st Battalion, Hertfordshire Regiment, a territorial regiment that went over to France in the British Expeditionary Force of 1914, the so-called "Old Contemptibles" who fought at the retreat from Mons.

This is my grandfather, Douglas William Chisholm, a bookbinder, who moved from Edinburgh to the Elephant & Castle in London, and then to Letchworth in Hertfordshire to work at the Temple Press of the publishing firm J.M. Dent.

This is his friend, Frank Edward Young, also of North Hertfordshire. Eventually, as the army ran out of proper gentlemen, Douglas and Frank were both promoted to 2nd Lieutenant -- "temporary gentlemen", as such promotions were known. Amusingly, the form for admission to officer training asks, amongst other things, for "Schools or Colleges at which educated" and "Whether able to ride". Grandad's answers were "Sayer Street, Southwark" and "No".

Frank won a medal, in the last year of the war. His citation reads:

On 18 September 1918 south-east of Havrincourt, France, during an enemy counter-attack and throughout intense enemy fire, Second Lieutenant Young visited all posts, warned the garrisons and encouraged the men. In the early stages of the attack he rescued two of his men who had been captured and bombed and silenced an enemy machine-gun. Then he fought his way back to the main barricade and drove out a party of the enemy assembling there. Throughout four hours of heavy fighting this officer set a fine example and was last seen fighting hand-to-hand against a considerable number of the enemy.

The medal was the Victoria Cross. Frank died, aged 22, and is buried at Hermies Hill British Cemetery, Pas-de-Calais.

Here they are, waiting for the train at Letchworth station at the very start of the war (the woman in the white hat is my grandmother, the amazing Daisy, also a bookbinder and an active trades unionist). It looks like a renactment club outing, doesn't it? Funny how the "real thing" can look so banal. Even the caption is misspelled (or perhaps it's a feeble pun).

Apparently grandad (who died the year before I was born) would never talk about Frank's medal, except to say, "He earned it, boy, he earned it". Like my father after him, he had no patience with the sentimental, militarist aspects of Remembrance Day. Perhaps it sounds odd, but I always don't wear a poppy, in remembrance of him, Frank, and all the other poor devils, British, French, German, Austrian, Italian, Russian, and whoever else, who set out in uniform from stations at little towns all over Europe. It seems the least I can do.

Modern Classics

2011-11-12T10:10:00.003Z

"Not for the first time I find myself thinking what a privilege it was to grow up in a house without books — or art. Those Penguin Modern Classics did not have the allure of drugs or under-age drinking; there was nothing illegal or subversive about them (except insofar as the constant infusion of knowledge steadily undermined parental authority), but consuming them was an expression of independence and discovery. Let’s put it as modestly as possible: acquiring and reading them provided an opportunity to accomplish what every adolescent craves — going somewhere and doing something without one’s parents."

Geoff Dyer, The Art of the Novel, NY Times, 3/11/2011

I have long been an admirer of Geoff Dyer, ever since picking up a copy of The Missing of the Somme in a Dublin bookshop. His acute but sporadic insights always dance around areas I find interesting -- we clearly have very similar enthusiasms -- and one of these days he's going to write something really good (miaow!). Actually, I think his collection of jazz stories, But Beautiful, is really good; his portrait of Thelonious Monk, in particular, is very moving.

But the quote above, from an online article I read recently, really set me thinking. The importance of Penguin Modern Classics in the formation of young minds in the 60s and 70s is beyond dispute; the attractions of under-age drinking and drug consumption are also clear (well, to a 17-year-old, anyway). But to put the two together -- to assert their equivalence -- in the context of growing up in a bookless, culture-free suburban home, really spoke to me.

It's hard to imagine being 17 again. Being 17 now is not the same as being 17 forty years ago; well, obviously, but easy to forget. My son's enthusiasm for Nintendo games like Pokemon, or my daughter's addiction to "must see" light-entertainment TV like Strictly, are a mystery to me; the way they use social media and smartphones to maintain 24/7 contact with their friends is a source of wonder. Penguin Modern Classics are still around, but I doubt many teenagers today are watching that row of uniform spines gradually accumulate on their bookshelf with any degree of fascination or satisfaction. They're just part of a much richer media mix.

But, actually, when I think back to that time, I think Geoff Dyer misses the point here. The real impact on bookish, counter-cultural teens of the 1970s was not made by Penguin Modern Classics, but by the brand new "trade paperback" sized imprints like Paladin, Picador and Abacus, with their elegant white spines and seriffed typefaces. When they first appeared in bookshops their taller size meant they were on a shelf apart from the regular paperbacks, literally and figuratively, and they immediately offered an alternative syllabus to that of those really rather staid and worthy Penguins.

The titles say it all: The Old Straight Track, The View Over Atlantis, Bomb Culture, Mythologies, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, Pricksongs and Descants, The Devil's Picturebook, The Sacred Mushroom and The Cross, Black Elk Speaks, Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, Trout Fishing in America, First Love Last Rites ... Remember those? I owned them all and more, and I expect you did, too. They spoke to a post-60s generation looking for something a little less ponderous than Camus, a little more trippy than Huxley, a lot more far out and revolutionary than D.H. Lawrence.

Yes, our parents may not have read T.S. Eliot or George Eliot, but our teachers had. They had gone to college during the 1950s and early 60s, worn those awful stripey college scarves, puffed on their pipes, and read Sartre and E.P. Thompson. They were the That Was The Week That Was generation -- so serious, so self-satisfied, so very responsible in their engagement. They did not read Richard Brautigan or Ian McEwan, or watch The Old Grey Whistle Test or Monty Python, and had no interest whatsoever in ley lines, shamanism, or magic mushrooms. We did.

In truth, many of us wanted to differ from our teachers more badly than we wanted to be different from our parents. We had stopped believing in their story and, as G.K. Chesterton said, the problem when people stop believing is not that they believe nothing, but that they will believe anything, ley lines included. So I think there was a double move, a knight's move: a move in the direction of bookish culture that separated us from our parents, but also a sideways move in the direction of counter-culture that separated us from our teachers.

Not surprisingly, our generation was regarded by our earnest elders as a bit of a disappointment; a bunch of selfish hedonists and posturing ironists, straws in the wind, signs of a more fragmented, less community-minded consumerist society to come. They were partly right, of course, but as Geoff Dyer says, "In its provincial and limited way my formation by, faith in, and subsequent growing beyond Penguin Modern Classics reproduced the collapse of the grand narratives that is a staple part of Postmodernity 101."

In other words, in that mysterious way that 17-year-olds always are, we were already ahead of the curve, for good or ill. We knew we wanted something new, but were unable to say what it was -- in the Sex Pistols' witty inversion, "Don't know what I want, but I know how to get it..." Did we ever get it? I honestly couldn't say. Post-modernism, as a sort of academic Punk, seems in retrospect more like a terrible virus than a vital new force.

Ah, well, forty years have passed, and now I'm the parent. At least my children will never be able to complain of growing up in a house without books, though I realise growing up in a house where tripping over stacks of books or being brained by falling books is a daily hazard may not be ideal, either. But, hey, kids, we like it like this: if you want to live in a tidy, minimalist loft with a flat-screen home-cinema TV, you know what to do. It's your turn.

When This Old Hat Was New

2011-11-10T18:21:00.004Z

According to our Records Department, this is the 500th post on this blog since October 2008. How about that? Where does the time go?

Of the many mysteries that surround us, the destination of time, and the reasons behind our precious but really rather miserly share of it, are probably the greatest. Personally, I favour the theory that, shortly after the Big Bang, some kind of collateralized loan obligation scam was perpetrated, and large quantities of time shares ended up hidden under a rock, resulting in the subsequent uneven distribution, devaluation and short supply of time. I can't recall whether this is my theory or Terry Pratchett's, however.

Anyway, thinking about time passing, it struck me the other day that a hypothetical very, very old man, who had been sitting on the same bench every day since the year 1011, would have heard our language change from Anglo-Saxon through Middle English to whatever it is we're speaking now (Post-Modern English?). The change would be even more imperceptible than trying to see the hour hand move on an analogue clock, but real all the same. One day, he's going to a church which is little more than a wattle and daub hut, and intoning the Lord's Prayer as "Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum", then, in the blink of a geological eye, various stone structures have been erected on the same site, and the few people who are still going to church are now thinking that "Our Father, which art in heaven" sounds incomprehensibly old-fashioned. Old English, innit?

You don't have to be 1000 years old to experience this, though. Listen to any archived radio programme and the voices are as dated (and dateable) as the graphical style of vintage adverts. When I was a child in the 1950s/60s, broadcasters were still required to affect the clipped accents of the 1930s as the price of entry into the BBC. So-called "received pronunciation" was a clear and non-negotiable marker of class and aspiration. "End nigh, the knee-ooze!" No longer, thank goodness. But I'm really not sure if that continuity guy with the preposterously fruity Caribbean baritone who is all over Radio 4 these days counts as progress.

A thousand years ago, of course, the Vikings were busily carrying out an aggressively proactive programme of linguistic mash-up on these shores. I've been watching a lot of Scandinavian thrillers on TV in the last year, and it has started to bring on a curious sensation, like the awakening of semi-dormant, atavistic elements in my linguistic brain. It reminds you how much Northern Europe is a veritable plasticine ball of languages smeared one into another. After a bit, you feel you almost, but not quite, know how to speak Danish or Swedish. But, if I watch one more series of The Killing or Wallander perhaps my immersion treatment will be complete, and I'll be shouting "Va fan?!" (roughly = "WTF") with the best of them.

I found a nice little anecdote about the cumulative effects of time when reading a piece on "Methuselah trusts" in Lapham's Quarterly (hey, I get around). The idea is that a modest amount of money placed in a "1000-year trust" and invested at compound interest could, if actually brought to maturity, trash the world economy (though I think we now have better ways to do the job on a far shorter timescale). It's rather like that proposition that if you were able to fold a piece of paper in half 42 times, you'd find that it reaches the moon. The Methuselah trust would eventually require a payout that would far exceed anyone's ability to pay it.

Apparently Benjamin Franklin started one of these mad investments in 1790, in his will. Here's the quote from the Lapham's Quarterly article:

A few years before Franklin drafted his will, philosopher Richard Price rhapsodized in a sober treatise on the national debt, “One penny, put out at our Savior’s birth to 5 percent compound interest, would, in the present year 1781, have increased to a greater sum than would be contained in two hundred millions of earths, all solid gold. But, if put out to simple interest, it would, in the same time, have amounted to no more than seven shillings and sixpence.”

Hmm, maybe. Show your working, please. That's surely the 18th century equivalent of Hunter S. Thompson-esque "gonzo journalism" -- too much coffee and snuff, probably. Can anyone out there do the maths?

That mention of 7s 6d reminds me of the now long-ago pre-decimal days in Britain. I had forgotten the strangeness of doing mental "money" arithmetic when there were twelve pennies to the shilling, and twenty shillings to the pound (not to mention one pound and one shilling to the guinea). It makes me wonder whether the only reason our children are still learning the eleven and twelve times tables is because, once upon a time, we had an insane system of coinage. Do other countries make their kids learn multiplication tables up to "times twelve", or do they stop at a rational ten?

But enough ramblings about time. Happy 500th post to you all.

Addendum 14/11/2011:

As hoped, nay expected, my old friend Andy S., a.k.a. Science Man, has come up with the goods:

1d invested for 1780 years at 5% would yield 1 x 1.05^1780 = 5.2 x 10^37 d

Price of gold was fixed by Isaac Newton in 1717 at £4 8s 9d per Troy ounce (it stayed this way for about 200 years)

1 Troy ounce = 31.03g

Therefore price of gold = 4x240 + 8x12 + 9 d/Troy ounce = 1065 d/Troy Ounce

1065d/31.103g = 34.32d/g = 34,320d/kg

Therefore 5.2 x 10^37d could buy (5.2 x 10^37)/(34320) kg of gold = 1.52 x 10^33 kg

The Mass of the Earth is about 5.978 x 10^24 kg (OU Science Data Book 1978)

Therefore 1.52 x 10^33 represents (1.52 x10^33)/(5.978 x 10^24) Earth Masses = 2.54 x 10^8 Earth Masses

i.e. about 250 million Earth Masses (at 1780 Gold Prices)

How about that? Thanks, Science Man! Seems it wasn't the snuff talking, after all.

Broken Images

2011-11-07T16:11:00.003Z

In Broken Images

He is quick, thinking in clear images;
I am slow, thinking in broken images.

He becomes dull, trusting to his clear images;
I become sharp, mistrusting my broken images.

Trusting his images, he assumes their relevance;
Mistrusting my images, I question their relevance.

Assuming their relevance, he assumes the fact;
Questioning their relevance, I question the fact.

When the fact fails him, he questions his senses;
When the fact fails me, I approve my senses.

He continues quick and dull in his clear images;
I continue slow and sharp in my broken images.

He in a new confusion of his understanding;
I in a new understanding of my confusion.

Robert Graves (1895–1985)

And Now, The Weather

2011-11-05T16:21:00.006Z

The Weather

I'd like to live a slower life.
The weather gets in my words
and I want them dry. Line after line
writes itself on my face, not a grace
of age but wrinkled humour. I laugh
more than I should or more
than anyone should. This is good.

But guess again. Everyone leans, each
on each other. This is a life
without an image. But only
because nothing does much more
than just resemble. Do the shamans
do what they say they do, dancing?
This is epistemology.

This is guesswork, this is love,
this is giving up gorgeousness to please you,
you beautiful dead to be. God bless
the weather and the words. Any words. Any weather.
And where or whom. I'd never taken count before.
I wish I had. And then
I did. And here
the weather wrote again.

John Newlove (1938 - 2003)

Mr. Stubbs Takes A Photo

2011-11-02T18:39:00.003Z

There is a certain late-afternoon light at this time of year that, in the right sort of location, instantly calls to mind the paintings of the 18th century landscape tradition. There's a painterly quality to the moulding of the landforms and foliage, and especially to that eye-pleasing trick of combining complementary russet-reds and greens. My knees may no longer appreciate the autumnal mix of cold and damp, but my eyes like what it does to all that relentless green of summer.

This particular knee-taxing, eye-pleasing view is St. Catherine's Hill, Winchester, seen across the plague-pit valley from the very top of the Twyford Down road cutting. We were on our way home from a muddy Sunday afternoon walk when the sun emerged briefly over my left shoulder. I got out the LX3, leaned against the fence, and popped off a couple of auto-everything shots.

What it really needs for the full-on George Stubbs effect is a couple of improbably glossy horses up front, of course, but I'm not a bloody magician. A couple of sleek joggers in lycra might work, I suppose.

If you really want to bring out that sculptural moulding in the landscape, then a monochrome conversion is the thing. I use the Imaging Factory plug-in for Photoshop Elements.

Looks like a mezzotint engraving, doesn't it? I think the impression is enhanced by the LX3's relatively small sensor -- there's sometimes a "watercolour" effect to the pixels viewed at 100% which, under certain unpredictable circumstances, can be pronounced. I only shoot RAW, so this is not some kind of JPEG artefact, though it may be related to the sneaky in-camera lens corrections that the LX3 performs, even on RAW files. I have to say I like it.

The Real Thing

2011-10-31T22:00:00.009Z

Today being Hallowe'en reminds me that I was deeply pissed off at one point over the summer. My daughter is studying English for one of her A Levels, and I discovered that one of the set books was, of all things, Dracula, by Bram Stoker. I'd already been annoyed by the triviality of some of the texts my kids have had to study as "literature", but this seemed to take the blood-sucking biscuit.

Never having read the book myself, I thought it would make sense to actually read it before driving a stake angrily through its heart. For all I knew, it might turn out be a brilliant classic, even if only in a camp, knowing way. Well, it isn't. It is possibly the dullest, most pointless book I have ever read. It is a Pile of Poo. It is an insult to our children, especially the girls, to make them study this drab thing as if it were "literature". As I say, I was deeply pissed off.

So, how has it come to this, that kids at this most wonderful stage in their intellectual development -- when their entire, freshly-minted sensibility and intelligence ought to be concentrated on a few well-chosen true classics, an experience that should shape them for life -- are being required to study trash?

In a way, I sort of feel it's my fault. Back in the mid-1970s, having taken a three-year stroll down Literary High Street (a.k.a. an English degree), I became interested in literary theory. Questions like "Who decides what counts as a classic?" and "What does the reader bring to the literary experience?" seemed worth asking. All a year's further study brought, though, was some puzzling and dispiriting half-answers. I had had every intention of embarking on an academic career, but suddenly I was not so sure. I knew what the problems were, but I didn't see any way forward; indeed, I suspected there was no way forward, and -- looking ahead -- all I could see was an inevitable crisis looming for the Humanities, and unemployment for me. I left the field to others, who were inventing increasingly sterile post-modern games to play.

My killer question at the time (my heuristic device, if you prefer that fancy talk) had been to ask: "Why is the pastime 'reading and writing books' sufficiently well-regarded to be studied at university, when stamp-collecting and mountain-climbing aren't?" Ask yourself that question, and the whole thing falls into place. Or rather, crumbles into dust, like Dracula on a sun-lounger.

At bottom, once you've cleared away the accidents of history and habit, and got bored with the sociological aspects, the problem is an argument over the existence and nature of The Real Thing. It's practically theological.

Before, let's say, 1965, there was pretty much universal agreement about where the Real Thing could be found. In most of Shakespeare, indisputably; in much of Keats, Milton and Chaucer; and in variously-sized bits of a whole pantheon of lesser writers. However, its presence in, say, Arthur Conan Doyle or John Buchan was small, and in the case of writers like Ian Fleming, homeopathic. The presence of the Real Thing was not something that could be objectively measured -- you just knew it was there, or accepted that people who knew better than you said it was there, so you went looking for it. Learning to recognise The Real Thing was the point of the exercise.

Hmm. The trouble is, once the challenge is made -- "Who says this is the Real Thing and that is not, and by what authority?" -- Pandora's Box is opened. There is no way to justify the preferences of a self-appointed aristocracy as the definition of "good taste"; you simply end up playing an upmarket game of "U and Non-U". And once "judgement" has been devalued to "opinion" (as in, "It's just your opinion that David Copperfield is better than Dracula") no-one can agree what the Real Thing is ever again, and never will. It's game over, and "literature" gets devalued to "reading matter".

This process has been going on for 30 years, and the result is that genuine rubbish like Dracula ends up as an A Level set text, because enough people think it is the sort of reading matter that 17-year-olds will find accessible. Hey, it's about vampires, and vampires are cool! It surely cannot be because they think it is any good? Can it? In the words of the Steely Dan song, "Reelin' In The Years":

You wouldn't know a diamond
If you held one in your hand
The things you think are precious
I can't understand

As it is, I'm still pretty sure I know I know what a diamond is, and what makes me angry is that something quite different is being pressed into our children's hands.

A Place to Stand

2011-10-25T15:29:00.001+01:00

As the wind gusted and the light came and went on Sunday, I found myself walking away from the Twyford Down motorway cutting for a change, rather than towards it. This gave me a whole new set of views on that little bit of landscape. I can feel a set of pictures developing, not unlike Henri Rivière's Thirty-Six Views of the Eiffel Tower -- itself a conscious riff on Hokusai's "36 Views of Mount Fuji".

Talking of which, Rivière's Thirty-six Views book is back in print, and well worth buying if that japoniste woodblock print look is to your taste. Long an expensive rarity, it's now been republished in semi-facsimile in connection with an exhibition in San Francisco at an extremely reasonable price. Get it while you can.

Just think, 100 years ago, even the Eiffel Tower was a half-constructed novelty! I find the meeting of japoniste exoticism, the industrial-modernist "shock of the new", and traditional pictorial values in Rivière's work very sympathetic. It's a very French moment -- no wonder those Edwardian Brits escaped to Paris at the first opportunity. So poignant, to know that A War to End All Wars was shortly about to put a stop to it all.

Optics

2011-10-22T17:53:00.006+01:00

David Hockney has this thing, explored at length in his book Secret Knowledge, about the use of optics by the Old Masters. When you look at his evidence, it's obvious that he's right. Lenses and projected images have been around for a long time, and it would be an odd artist who wasn't intrigued by them or who refused to take advantage of them.

At this time of year in northern latitudes, as the low angle of the rising sun comes later in the day and coincides with the rising of those of us lucky enough to have jobs to go to, projected images are everywhere. It makes you very aware of how photography must have been prefigured, in principle, for hundreds of years before anyone figured out how to do it.

Talking of optics and old masters, if you know the poem "Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror" by John Ashbery, and the painting by Parmigianino on which it is based, consider the poem's opening lines:

As Parmigianino did it, the right hand
Bigger than the head, thrust at the viewer
And swerving easily away, as though to protect
What it advertises. A few leaded panes, old beams,
Fur, pleated muslin, a coral ring run together
In a movement supporting the face, which swims
Toward and away like the hand
Except that it is in repose.

Now consider the painting:

Um, right hand?? It strikes me someone should have had a quiet word with Mr. Ashbery before the poem was published. Too late now.

Stage Sets

2011-10-21T15:05:00.000+01:00

Since the start of the new academic year, I've begun doing two "old" things again: walking to work, and carrying the Panasonic LX3. These are not unconnected, obviously -- even compared to a GF1, the LX3 is so light I can forget it's round my neck, but it's right there when the bright, low autumn light transforms the scene at around 8:00 am into a stage set.

The LX3 also has a way with colour and tone in contrasty scenes that is quite special and can sometimes seem a little supernatural. The camera does have a Leica lens, of course. It's certainly not my impeccable technical mastery that is capturing that full range of tones from deep shadow to bright highlight -- I'm simply underexposing a bit, and taking my reading from the brighter part of the scene. Simple stuff.

I also like the way three different image aspect ratios can be selected by a simple twist of a switch on the lens barrel. A curiosity of the LX3 is that all three ratios are crops of the "full" image sensor: you get your 10-ish megapixel image cut out of an 11-ish megapixel sensor ( 3968 x 2232 pixels at 16:9, 3648 x 2736 pixels at 4:3, and 3776 x 2520 pixels at 3:2). The idea is that the same angle of view is maintained, with each ratio getting a much more similar overall pixel count than you'd get from a crop of a "full sensor" image. Brilliantly eccentric. You just have to wonder how they got it past the marketing guys ("Um, explain that bit about the angle to me again?").

Curriculum: the E-Book

2011-10-20T10:36:00.005+01:00

OK, this is unknown territory for me. Blurb has started offering an e-book creation service, which is exciting, but it's Apple Only (for iPad, iPhone, iPod) which is annoying. Not least because I own none of those things, and therefore can't see how well it works.

I have set up the final version of Curriculum as an e-book download, at the low, low price of £3.49. If you go to my Blurb Bookstore you should be able to see it as a purchase option there.

What happens when you have bought it (I think) is that you get the option to download it. These are the instructions:

You can view your ebook on your iPad by manually transferring it to iTunes.

* Download the epub file
* Open iTunes on your computer and then drag the epub file to your iPad folder, under Devices
* Connect your iPad to your computer
* Click Sync
* On your iPad, open iBooks and you should see your book.

You may also be able to find it in an Apple bookstore somehow (via iTunes?).

Does that make sense to you Apple people? If anyone out there wants to give it a go (come on, just £3.49!!) please let me know how you get on. Does it work? Does it look good? Any hitches or gotchas? Can you see it on an Apple Mac, even if you don't have an iThingy?

I can then alert the wider (Apple using) world to this development. Thanks.

Pit Droids

2011-10-17T10:31:00.001+01:00

Over the summer I had a bit of a clear-out of of some of our stuff, a project which is ongoing. At times this feels like trying to empty a swimming pool with a teaspoon, but the journey of a 1000 miles starts with a carrier-bag full of old bits of bubble wrap. Is bubble wrap the new string, I wonder? Just as the previous generation had a thing for string, saving it obsessively in drawers and boxes, so we seem to be incapable of throwing away protective packaging. It looks so useful.

A major delaying factor in this domestic archaeology is the discovery of buried treasure, or at least buried treasure maps. You can be merrily tossing old paperwork into a rubbish bag, when you encounter something -- a child's drawing, a letter, a scribbled note, a bill, even -- that stops you in your tracks, and causes you to make a coffee and sit for a while, lost in the past.

I was surprised to discover, for example, quite how many rejection letters I had accumulated in the period 1995-2005. I had forgotten about all those rounds of developing a project, putting together a proposal, applying for funding or an exhibition or publication, waiting for a response, and the inevitable disappointment of a rejection letter. Back to square one. In those days, in my 40s, I had the fantasy of finally escaping from my "day job", and launching a late-start career as an artist -- all it would take was hard work, a few exhibitions to establish a reputation, maybe a book or two, and I'd be part of the international art circus. Yeah, right.

A more positive moment came when, rattling through a stack of old CD-ROMs containing software that used to entertain our kids when they were small, I found our copy of Star Wars Pit Droids. My son was just the right age to be caught up in that second round of Star Wars fever that accompanied the release of the "prequel trilogy", starting with The Phantom Menace in 1999. If you didn't raise your children in the 1990s or after, you probably don't really understand the impact of brand marketing on family life. The confluence of branded products aimed at children (generally based on a film or TV series), the advent of home computing and video, and the realisation that children were an untapped market was remarkable to witness, and impossible to resist. Think Jurassic Park, Power Rangers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and, above all, Star Wars. I expect PhDs are being written right now about all this.

Most of this flood of merchandizing was bubble-packed ephemeral junk -- action figures, weapons, bits of costume and insignia, and the like -- but some was a brave attempt to slip a little developmental or even educational content into the mix. Lego got on board the Star Wars branding gravy-train very successfully, for example, and not a few ten-year-old brains will have benefitted from constructing a Lego Death Star or Millennium Falcon. Certainly, the business of shopping for Christmas and birthdays is vastly simplified when your offspring can cite exact product codes downloaded off the Web for the precise items they want, or when you can wander through the aisles of Toys'R'Us and spot when the bubble packs and boxes change to the particular branded colourway you're looking for.

But a few products launched on the back of these enthusiasms were outstanding, and Star Wars Pit Droids was one of them. If you're not familiar with the Star Wars universe (lucky you) then you need to know that a "pit droid" is a tireless, multi-tasking robotic grease-monkey, fixing up dented starships and hunting out spare parts in the breakers yards of dusty, faraway planets. The pit droids "game" is well described by Children's Software Revue:

An amazingly strong exercise in logical thinking, the program presents a series of successively more difficult puzzles all housed within graphically rich Star Wars settings. The overall goal of the game is to lead a group of robots called Pit Droids through various obstacle courses until they reach their final destination, The Podrace Arena. Kids have to figure out how to program the Droids so they'll move the right way through each puzzle. They do so by manipulating tiles that have varying functions. For instance, a red arrow makes red Droids turn a certain direction, while a 1:2 ratio tile divides a column of Droids in two directions at the ratio of- you guessed it- one to two. As players correctly navigate each puzzle, they rack up points and can open up deeper levels of the game. Why is this so engaging and educationally robust? First of all, the Droids are downright cute and pretty funny as well. Kids and adults naturally take to these creatures and want to help them reach their goal. Second, the challenge levels are designed so that each hurdle is just a little bit tougher than the last- doable, but tricky.

In a word, it is a brilliant and totally praiseworthy use of a child's brand-stimulated attention. I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that playing Pit Droids on the PC raised and reinforced my son's (admittedly already high) intelligence. Frankly, schools should be using Pit Droids to teach logic and creative lateral thinking. It's fun, too. Needless to say, I have kept our copy.

Funeral Music

2011-10-13T18:30:00.004+01:00

A couple of times now I've started to write a post about the music that people choose, or have chosen for them, at their funerals. But I kept putting it off as the subject was a little raw, there having been a spate of deaths that were too close for comfort -- six relatives, two friends, the child of two friends, two work colleagues, and ~~two~~ three* mentors. But it is an interesting subject, and there's no point in being stand-offish with Death. He/she/it does what he/she/it pleases.

Once upon a time, of course, this wasn't much of an issue, at least in nominally Christian Britain. The Book of Common Prayer does a poetic and workmanlike job of steering grieving relatives and friends through the grim business, and a couple of favourite hymns would give everyone something useful to do with their voice. Job done.

But the exponential secularization of our culture means that people are increasingly thrown back onto their own resources at a very difficult time. It reminds me of the arguments in favour of school uniforms -- the lack of choice used to mean social and cultural differences were smoothed over in a helpful way. You might have been a culture-free, violent and bigoted old sod in life, but in death you finally acquired a touch of class. The freedom to do what you like comes at a price, and a non-Christian funeral is often a confusing and unsatisfactory affair, one where the lack of purpose, belief and -- above all -- taste in many people's lives are mercilessly exposed.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the business of choosing music. Mawkishness and a near-universal inability to hear or understand song lyrics come to the fore, closely followed by a breathtaking lack of tact and sense of occasion. John Cleese truly (hilariously, appropriately) broke the mould with his eulogy at Graham Chapman's funeral; but the choice of the "Chinese version" of Jerusalem ("Bling me my spiel, Oh crowds unford," etc.) and Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life equally truly set the bar for puerile evasion of grief so low that we're still tripping over it.

So... OK, pop pickers... [cue up At the Sign Of The Swinging Cymbal]...

A poll of 5000 Brits, carried out in 2006, delivered this Funeral Top Ten:

1. Goodbye My Lover - James Blunt
2. Angels - Robbie Williams
3. I’ve Had the Time of My Life - Jennifer Warnes and Bill Medley
4. Wind Beneath My Wings - Bette Midler
5. Pie Jesu - Requiem
6. Candle in the Wind - Elton John
7. With or Without You - U2
8. Tears in Heaven - Eric Clapton
9. Every Breath You Take - The Police
10. Unchained Melody - Righteous Brothers

And here, from the same year, is the Co-Op Funeral Service's Top Ten:

1. Wind Beneath My Wings - Bette Midler
2. My Heart Will Go On - Celine Dion
3. I Will Always Love You - Whitney Houston
4. Simply The Best - Tina Turner
5. Angels - Robbie Williams
6. You'll Never Walk Alone - Gerry And The Pacemakers
7. Candle In The Wind - Elton John
8. Unchained Melody - Righteous Brothers
9. Bridge Over Troubled Water - Simon And Garfunkel
10. Time To Say Goodbye - Sarah Brightman

[Sound effect of skidding record player needle]

Good grief. I mean, honestly. You can see why -- faced with a difficult choice at a difficult time -- someone's family or friends might reach for some of these, but how would you like to be played out to a song about an obsessive stalker (The Police), the implication that you were the stairway to someone else's success (Bette Midler), or best remembered by your smell (James Blunt)?

I doubt any of these songs have been chosen by the, um, "loved one", however. A shame, really: one's funeral is a last chance to play Desert Island Discs, isn't it? I suspect there are a lot of people (alright, men) of my age out there constantly refining their own Funeral Mix. I don't have a problem with this, provided it's a short and well-chosen list. However, I don't want to sit through both sides of anyone's P60 tape on a hard bench, however tastefully thought out.

As I posted a while back, Box of Rain by the Grateful Dead was played at a dear friend's memorial, and -- despite the fact that I generally loathe the Grateful Dead -- it was very moving. It was his choice, and all about him, and damn near rendered two hundred people helpless with sobbing. When it comes to my turn, if I think about it, I'm torn between reducing everyone to gratifying tears (May You Never, by John Martyn, perhaps?) or posthumously kicking off a wild baccanal (free whisky all round and The Pogues?). I'll let you know.

As far as I can see, there are only two up sides to dying young. First, vastly more people are likely to turn up for your funeral, and they are far more likely to know (and care) who you actually were. Second, they're more likely to share your taste in music. The scenario of a memorial where the careful choice of music -- made years earlier by the deceased party -- is played to a three-quarters empty room of uncomprehending, indifferent strangers is a tragi-comic one, reminiscent of a Chekhov short story. Luckily you'll be dead.

* The mentor count went up by one after I started this post. R.I.P. Geoffrey Ford.

Biscay

2011-10-10T14:40:00.000+01:00

The sea is always present in the Basque country. Even miles inland in the Pyrenees its influence is felt as fog and rain; the greenness of Atlantic Spain makes a remarkable contrast with the arid landscapes just a little further south.

It also affects restaurant menus: fish, fish, and more fish. Fresh sardines, squid, bacalao (salt cod), merluza (hake)... It's all good. Though I've never convinced myself to try a plate of angulas (elvers), a disconcerting popular delicacy available in bulk packs, fresh or frozen, at the supermarket ("like short spaghetti with eyes"). Unfortunately, my daughter is not keen on fish, and had to stick to duck or chicken whenever we ate out.

Lighthouse at Getaria

From Itziar

At night we would look out onto the blackness of the sea from our hilltop vantage point near Itziar, and see lines of fishing boat lights (presumably fishing for squid) arranged like streetlamps on the vasty deep.

The Basques are legendary sailors, whalers and cod-fishermen, venturing way out into the North Atlantic and Newfoundland fisheries, and crewing the ships of the Age of Exploration. But the Basque coast has a more refined history, too, of summer seaside resorts for royalty and the bon ton of Europe. Nowadays, though, it's the surfing aristocracy that turn up in the summer, as some of the wave breaks can achieve monster proportions. I, of course, have nothing but ~~envy~~ contempt for these waddling body fascists in their wetsuits, clutching their absurd hi-tech planks.

Zarautz

Holiday Snaps

2011-10-07T13:58:00.001+01:00

Getaria, N. Spain

So, the summer... Where did that go? Suddenly it's October, Fresher's Week has come and gone, and I'm removing cobwebs from the wing mirrors every morning when I wipe the condensation off the car windows. I'm not bothered -- summer is not my favourite time of year.

My favourite time of year is coming up, as the days shorten and we start to roll down the solar hill, straight through Bonfire Night and on towards Christmas. Some people like spring, with its new beginnings, but, if you've been a bit of a swot and have the school year in your blood the way peasants used to have the farming seasons, the real fresh start is now. New teachers, new exercise books and that sense of chaotic communal purpose, like a ship setting out on a voyage.

Of course, if you hated school and love getting your shirt off in the sun then you probably loathe this time of year. Never mind, I expect you've had your fun in the sun, and now it's my turn. Mind, despite our all-round busy-ness, we did manage a two week holiday in the Basque Country. I love Atlantic Spain, with its mix of landscapes and climates, and find the Basques an engaging bunch.

Near Itziar, N. Spain

This year, I discovered the uniquely Basque object known as an argizaiola. There was one on the wall in our holiday let, but until I saw the collection of them in the San Sebastian museum and the penny dropped, I had assumed it was a piece of African wood carving, around which -- for whatever bizarre reason -- someone had wound a length of TV aerial cable.

These things are strange, a real bit of folk-culture weirdness. The "cable" is actually a very long, flexible candle. A Basque family may possess an argizaiola that has been passed down through many generations (some are very old indeed); it is used to represent their ancestors at a special mass, when it is placed flat on the floor of the church, and the end of the long candle is raised up vertically and lit. Yes, folks, ancestor worship in the EEC. I'd love to learn more, but most of the information is concealed behind that impenetrable barrier known as the Basque language.

This photo caused me some aggravation:

It was late at night, still very warm, and a thunderstorm was rolling through the valley. I went out on to the balcony to cool off, and thought I'd try some hand-held shots. I set the camera to ISO 1600, snapped away for a bit, then went back in for a beer. Unfortunately, I forgot I'd changed the ISO, and for several days was working at 1600 in broad daylight. I kept seeing the ludicrous shutter speeds and apertures in the display, thinking, "My, but the light is very bright down here..." Ah, well... I got some impressive depth of field, coupled with less impressive shadow noise.

Seems an odd place for a knitting party,
but check the size of that scarf...

In the Basque Country, you learn to expect the unexpected
around every corner. I have no idea who, what, why...

Break's Over, Get Back to Work!

2011-10-04T17:50:00.001+01:00

Can you hear it, too? All over the internet, I can hear the sound of blogs and websites closing down. A sort of mix of an eery silence and doors banging shut in a vast, echoing corridor.

It's hard to be sure what this means. Partly, it is simply that the action has moved on. Blog City is reverting to the muddy field it was before the circus rolled in, and now it's the turn of the neighbours in Twitter Terrace to complain about the noise. It's probably also a reaction to the fact that there are now simply too many blogs to keep track of. Who's got the time? But I think it is mainly that a generation of early adopters has finally grown weary of making content freely available while platform providers like Google and Facebook get filthy rich.

It reminds me of the situation with academic journals, where publicly-funded research is written up and published by university staff -- completely unremunerated -- in privately-owned journals which then charge truly astronomical subscription prices to the libraries of the very same institutions that employ those academics to do the research. It's a money machine!

The contradictions inherent in Web-based "intellectual property rights" are one of the hot contemporary issues. We all want everything to be freely available on the web, but we all want to be fairly recompensed for our own labour. "Information wants to be free" is a nice slogan, but only half the story. The full, original quotation goes like this:

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

Stewart Brand (Whole Earth Catalog guy) to Steve Wozniak (that other Apple guy) in 1984

Think about it. Let's say one person spends two hours writing a post, and 500 others spend five minutes reading it. Was it an experience worth, say, a negligible ten pence to them? If so, then £50 would be due to the writer. That would be a rate of £25 an hour, or perhaps more realistically £50 a day -- a modest but acceptable return on the writer's labour. Of course, in the case of the more popular blogs with 25 thousand or more readers, that translates to a rate of £2,500 per day.

But these financial transactions never take place; the writer's labour is simply tipped into the bottomless pit of free content that is the World Wide Web. Looking back, I see that I will soon have written 500 posts over the three year life of this blog. If we say that each post was worth that modest £50, then that's £25,000 I have lost down the back of the World Wide Sofa. Multiply that by the number of bloggers and web-site owners and you start to see where the mind-boggling wealth of Google and Facebook is coming from. "Bloggers of the world, unite..."

In case you are wondering, I don't think I am about to stop blogging on principle, however. At least, not until I reach that 500 mark, anyway. I have no illusions about the consequences of withdrawing my labour from the global pool of Web peonage. Google's share price would probably not be affected.

However, I remember back in the 1980s -- when some people were taking the expression "management guru" too literally, and the Way of the Flipchart was being disseminated in gnomic wisdom-tales about frogs, hot water, and the like -- I once heard someone compare leaving an organisation to removing one's hand from a bucket of water. See? It leaves no trace! You are like that hand: don't over-value your contribution to the corporate karma-count, grasshopper! Well, I was bored and decided to speak up and mention that Archimedes bloke and displacement; if nothing else, I learned that gurus don't like to be interrupted or contradicted.

But it's surely true, or truthier, that anything and everything makes a difference to something, somewhere? I am reminded of this demented but presumably correct effusion from the Angry Man of English Letters, Thomas Carlyle:

It is a mathematical fact that the casting of this pebble from my hand alters the centre of gravity of the universe.
Sartor Resartus, 1834

Quite so, Sir, quite so. But mind where you're chucking that pebble, please.

Flying Ant Day 2011

2011-07-25T16:51:00.005+01:00

We interrrupt this blog break to bring you breaking blog news: today is Flying Ant Day in Highfield, Southampton. It's hot, quite humid, with a slight breeze and bright sunshine.

I only mention this because the previous post "Flying Ant Day" has attracted a vast number of hits. I've inspected it quite closely for unintended filth and double entendre, and can see nothing untoward. My conclusion is that an awful lot of people are interested in logging when Flying Ant Day happens. Perhaps the Chinese are betting on it this year?

Combine thousands of flying ants and a breeze with a graduation ceremony and you have an entertaining spectacle, by any standards.

Just thought you'd want to know. Now, back to that break.

Update: here are the weather conditions at the time (15:20 BST):

temp:22°
dew point: 6°
humidity: 35%
visibility: 10km
pressure: 1,009.14 mb (steady)
wind: WNW 13 kmph

Summer Break

2011-07-19T16:59:00.005+01:00

This year, I've decided to give the blog a holiday over the summer, as of tomorrow. I should be back, Blogger and other capricious deities willing, sometime in late September. By all means comment on the existing posts, but don't expect any replies.

These three months are -- popular perception aside -- the busiest of all for us. The university financial year ends in July, so a lot of last minute spending and accounting gets done. Plus everyone expects all upgrades, improvements, building works, stock moves, etc., etc., to be finished by the start of the new session in October. Coordinating all that Stuff with people taking summer leave all over the place is always a bit fraught, and this year is no exception.

Plus the summer "vacation" is the main window of opportunity for most academic staff to do the research they're paid to do, not to mention hosting the conferences where they get to show off last year's research. And the huge numbers of overseas students start to arrive right now for their pre-Sessional English As She Is Spoke, Innit courses. If "vacation" means "emptying the place of people" then it's time we thought of another name. If it means "holiday" then we should definitely think of another name.

But my main reason for having a blog-break is that I want to use my own time to attend to a number of neglected personal projects, not least of which is getting my webpage back up and running -- it's been years since I updated it properly. Webpages are not really where the action is, these days, but it's good to have a reference site where people can see the full range of what you get up to. I also fancy doing a bit of "proper" writing.

So, have a good summer in the Northern Hemisphere, a good winter in the Southern Hemisphere, and good luck to all you people in the permanently hot bit in the middle.

Right Town, Wrong Depot

2011-07-18T08:10:00.004+01:00

A well-known international delivery (sorry, logistics) service tried to deliver a parcel earlier this week. No-one was home. They left a card.

The card didn't say much about my options, so I tried phoning. After 15 minutes of being passed from one automated queue to another, and irritated by various pieces of soothing music, I gave up. So, I went to the website, which is pretty much where both the card and the recorded messages wanted me to go, anyway.

"Find your nearest Customer Centre" it said. Fine. I entered my postcode, and got an address in Eastleigh, a neighbouring town. I tried ringing to establish (a) whether they had my parcel, and (b) what hours they were open. Same automatic queues, same music. I gave up again and went back to the website. My options appeared to be either to schedule a re-delivery, or collect it myself from the Customer Centre. I could see my parcel had started its journey in Eastleigh, and concluded that's where it would be now. I opted to collect.

Next day, I drove over to Eastleigh, to the address given on the website. It was one of those little industrial estates, not much more than a loop of one-way road, with "units" and yards of varying sizes on either side. I drove slowly round, trying to spot the company logo. No luck. I drove round again. And again. So I parked, and walked round the one-way.

I eventually glimpsed a liveried truck through a tall hedge. I walked round the one-way again, trying to find an entrance. It was quite a run-down place -- the road and pavements were cracked and uncared for, with weeds and overgrown hedges everywhere, and beat-up, oil-stained yards behind tall fences topped with razor wire. I felt sorry for anyone who had to work there, although my photographic antennae were twitching like mad.

Eventually, I asked a guy having a fag by the roadside. He said to go round the corner, and press the buzzer by the locked gate. I did, and a woman's voice came over the speaker, asking me what I wanted.

"I want to collect my parcel," I said.
"What's your postcode?" she said. I told her.
"You've come to the wrong depot," she said. "We have two depots in Eastleigh, and you want the other one." Well, of course. She said to come in, unbuzzed the gate, met me at the door, and handed me a photocopied map. This happens all the time, she said. Oh, really? I went back to the car, and drove to the location of the other depot.

Except I couldn't find it, either. The instructions on the map were very like those instructions you get for a rented cottage: "Drive out of town until you see the burned-out phone box, turn left, then after a mile and a half take the unmarked track on the right, until you see the giant wicker man, etc." I had got to the right street without problem, and found a place to park. It was right next to the railway, and on the face of it was a simple residential street of terraced houses. But behind the houses was an alternative universe, a warren of alleyways, fences, yards, workshops and warehouses that made the previous place look utopian in its cleanliness and workmanlike simplicity.

Again, I wandered around looking for the elusive company colours. Again, I asked a man with a fag. Again, I ended up pressing a buzzer on an anonymous gate in a wire-mesh fence.

After a bit, a frail-looking security man with a clipboard and some bits of uniform appeared. He tried to raise some attention from the parcel depot for me, but nothing happened. In the end, he let me through the gate, saying, "See that building over there with the plants growing out of the roof? Go over there and press the buzzer next to the door round the side."

I found a peculiar situation developing there. Various drivers, clearly wearing the uniform of the company in question, were unable to gain admittance to their own depot, and were shouting through the glass door at a woman inside. Something about new codes on the door. The woman looked drunk or stoned to me -- she was swaying slightly, and had that look of vague concern that wasted people affect when they haven't a clue why everyone is shouting at them. The drivers were unphased, however; they clearly expected obstacles to be put in their way, and were taking a resigned pleasure in having their expectations fulfilled. An intoxicated receptionist and changed entry codes was par for the course. Typical, innit?

Anyway. I eventually got my parcel, after a wait of about 20 minutes in a grubby lobby with a couple of chairs that looked like they'd been rescued from a skip. The whole thing was a very depressing experience: what I'd imagined as a 30 minute round trip took me 2 hours. But what was particularly striking was the contrast between the chirpy, "can do!" optimism of the company website, and the dreary, "couldn't give a toss!" inefficiency of the operation on the ground.

Now, I'm still close enough to my roots to understand the bitter truth of that Soviet-era joke: they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work. My uncles' stories of the goings-on in a car-manufacturing plant and the print room of a newspaper in the 1960s were both hilarious and jaw-dropping (mandatory "snooze shifts" and the like). The sheer bloody-minded unco-operativeness of the British worker has been truly heroic in its scope. Although it never did quite match the awe-inspiring incompetence of the British manager. But, put the two together, and you have the industry that gave the world the Austin Allegro. Makes you proud, doesn't it?

But I also know that pretending to work is demoralising. It's like staying in bed all day; it starts out well, but ends in a headache and a depressing feeling of aimlessness. No-one wants to waste their life, of course, but if a job is pointless enough and badly-paid enough, it can seem preferable. It has a certain self-harming dignity, like a hunger strike. But I admit I thought that world had passed away, and that service industries like "logistics" were run by a flip-chart corporatism that requires ant-like subservience, backed up by the very real threat of unemployment. Surely surly blokes with their feet up in a back room, contemplating the finer points of Sam Fox and Linda Lusardi all morning over serial cups of tea, would never nowadays get through their annual appraisal?

It was a salutary glimpse of a world that could easily have been mine. A little less brain power, a little more "attitude" and less tolerance for school, and I would have been a poorly-qualified school leaver in 1970, just in time for the collapse of the 1960s job boom. A life of limited expectations would have awaited me, with alternating stretches of McJobs and unemployment, in a world that seems to have increasingly little use for young men and none at all for old ones. I discovered recently that one of my primary school chums who had gone to secondary modern school ended up emigrating to South Africa in the 1970s. That was one answer, I suppose.

It also reminded me that my father had been made redundant in 1972, when the engineering factory he had worked in since 1946 was closed down. I was "too busy being free" to notice, at the time, or to think much about what this meant for him. But I realise, to my amazement and shame, that he was younger then than I am now. He never really worked again.

But I guess I would have paid more attention if I, too, had wanted a job making useful things out of steel, but could only get minimum-wage work stacking parcels in a warehouse, forced to wear some corporate polo shirt, like the disposable footman of a multinational overlord.

Kronstadt!

2011-07-15T08:29:00.004+01:00

Woke up this mornin' (dum dah, dah dum)... Began to suspect I was dead...

Dead, or transported back in time to around 1973. It was weird. The radio came on, and in place of the Today Programme's bickering politicos and harumphing presenters, some guy was telling me all about Kronstadt and the NEP. "Lenin vsegda s nami!" (Lenin is always with us), someone sang. WTF?? Maybe there had been a revolution. Whatever, it was still time to get up.

It turned out that BBC journalists were on strike, over cuts and job losses at the World Service. The Today Programme finally came on at 7:00, hustled through the ethereal picket lines by a crew of scab journos (Sarah Montague, you disappoint me; Justin Webb, well, I might have known). But my head had well and truly been returned to a previous epoch, when the word "Kronstadt!" signalled a lively discussion, possibly ending in a fist-fight.

I have mentioned my political past a few times before (e.g. Turning Up) but rarely has it seemed quite so long ago as it did this morning. The early history of the Soviet Union once seemed rather like the Big Bang -- it was thought to be crucial to understand the sub-atomic political manoeuverings and betrayals of that time, to stand any chance of understanding the subsequent history of the universe. In March 1921, were the sailors of Kronstadt deluded counter-revolutionaries or heroes of anarchism and freedom from Bolshevik oppression? Was Trotsky a ruthless, murdering oppressor or a clear-eyed revolutionary strategist? Revolutionary politics could often seem like a series of complex, overlapping blood feuds. Or a long-running soap opera.

Nobody cares much now. It's all sitting in the archives somewhere -- all the books, magazines, newspapers, flyers, posters, handouts, minutes, membership lists -- and is gradually acquiring the status of the once-urgent theological disputes of the Middle Ages. History. In retrospect, it is hilarious, and a little tragic, that so many bright young people once wasted so much time trying to turn the crank of a machine that had already had all its fuel stolen (the last of it chucked about as Molotovs in Paris 1968).

Where are they now, our old comrades? A very few have kept the faith, patiently awaiting a change in the political weather. Some have disappeared without trace. Most, like me, have ended up as middle-ranking public servants with self-limited careers, propping up local trades union branches, and eternally skeptical of "management". But some are now household names: prominent academics, journalists, broadcasters, politicians and lawyers, including a former Director of Public Prosecutions, senior members of the Labour Party, and a current Coalition minister. The Establishment, in a word.

I wonder, did any of them wake up this morning, too, and have a flashback to the days when they sat in the proverbial smoke-filled rooms, plotting the downfall of capitalism? And I wonder if any of them then crossed the picket lines at the BBC, too busy and too senior, now, to lose a day's work to "workerist tokenism"?

Special Offer!

2011-07-14T22:25:00.005+01:00

OK, people, here's the deal.

For a limited time (more than a week, less than a month, something like that) I am making available a smaller, 8"x10" version of the Curriculum book, which is "invitation only"; that is, it is not yet publicly-available on the Blurb site, and the only way anyone can see (or buy) it is via the link on this blog. It is offered at cost price i.e. I have added no profit (for me) to the price. You get it at the same price I get it.

I have made these copies available on standard paper, from the softcover at £17.95 to the imagewrap hardcover at £24.95. When the book goes public, I will be selling it as a softcover and an imagewrap hardcover, on premium paper only, with a little profit for me added on, at a price of £23.50 and £30.00 respectively. I can't figure out just yet how to give you the choice to upgrade to premium paper: it's worth the increase in price, as it gives a noticeable improvement in image quality. When I do, I'll turn it on.

If you are surprised by these prices, remember that "print on demand" is publishing for fun, but not for profit; it's "pretend publishing", if you like. Bulk discounts are available from Blurb, but any crazy optimist who buys 100 or more copies of their own book (which will probably sell ten copies, max) simply in order to reduce the cover price by a few pounds is in need of professional help (either from an accountant or a psychotherapist, probably both).

Anyway, here it is: [link removed]

Now do the right thing. Or don't; I really don't mind, as I make nothing either way.

Note that the new book is not an exact, reduced facsimile of the original 13"x11" version. It contains the same pictures and texts in the same sequence, but some of them -- which could be rendered quite small on the large 13"x11" pages -- would have become unintelligible at 8"x10", so I have enlarged them. This has affected the flow of the sequence, so some other relative sizes have been changed, too, so that this version now has its own, slightly different dynamic. I doubt anyone but me would ever notice or care about this.

[And, no, I won't be signing copies of this version. Sorry.]

Curriculum: Final Version

2011-07-11T12:05:00.001+01:00

Here is the final version of the Curriculum book, as submitted to Photography Book Now 2011.

It's hardly a crowd-pleaser, but it's something I'm happy to stand behind as my best effort. I think it's coherent, rhythmic, pleasingly varied, and above all good to look at. Some of the photographs, if I say so myself, are amongst my best work to date.

What more do you want? Yes, I know, a cheaper version... It's coming, soon.

[original Blurb BookShow replaced with current public version]

Thanks to those of you who commented, on and off blog. You wouldn't expect me to agree with or act upon everything suggested by everyone, but it really is an enormous help to have ideas and criticisms to bounce off. As my work colleagues would probably attest, I am not someone who thrives on consensus, but I do love having good people to argue with.

I have already picked up one comment on Blurb. It says, "Outstanding work! Every single shot is brilliantly composed and all together a masterwork. Congratulations". No, really! I swear I have no idea who this person is, and no money has changed hands. However, having seen the list of this year's judges, I know that there's no question of coming even within a mile of the "winners". But, as we all know, it's the taking part that matters...

Not to mention the usefulness of a deadline -- any deadline -- in actually getting things done, instead of daydreaming about them. Not that I have ever had anything against daydreaming; it's something in which I have World Class expertise.

All Growed Up & Saving China

2011-07-10T23:11:00.001+01:00

I was surprised to discover this morning that my daughter is reading Kafka. On her own time, that is, not as part of a course or anything. Well, she is 17 and, as she reminds us from time time, she is our daughter. All the same, I was impressed. The Trial is a long way from Harry Potter. At least, I assume it is, as I've never read any J.K. Rowling (no disrespect, J.K., I've never read any Jane Austen, either). How quickly they grow up and develop a taste for the stronger flavours in life.

Of course, I was her age myself when I first read Kafka, and I've already written about the way getting older has changed my appreciation of his writing (The Next Village). As someone once said, I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now. Actually, I think a lot of us were older then; we seemed to be so much more independent and anxious to fly the nest than kids seem to be today. I read somewhere that the average age, these days, for a young man to leave home is 34. Thirty four!

Earlier this week, she went to Nottingham on the train, meeting her brother halfway in Oxford, as they wanted to catch the Death Cab for Cutie tour (a pop group, m'lud). Apart from catching various trains and buses, and finding a venue in a strange town in time to pick up tickets and eat, this also involved booking and staying in a hotel. This all caused me some anxiety, as I realised that neither of them really knew what they were doing.

I am often appalled, for example, at their geographical ignorance -- despite having spent time in both places many times, neither of them can tell the difference between Norfolk and Dorset. It seemed inevitable to me that they'd stand on the wrong platform and end up in Glasgow. They didn't, of course. But in my anxious Kafkan dreams they are still tiny tots, not young adults, lost and in danger in dark streets, and I awake at 3 a.m. in a panic. I'm told this is a permanent and incurable condition for parents.

But I also think of the many narrow scrapes I survived at their age, mainly out of misplaced confidence and boundless ignorance, and how sweet life is when you first taste your independence. I'm pleased they're shifting up a gear. And as I watch them driving away, slightly too fast around the corner, I think of the days just a decade or so ago, when we would be on holiday and the big adventure was taking them to odd little cinemas in Lyme Regis or Swaffham to see the latest Disney summer blockbuster.

I'm not down on Disney, the way some people are. Indeed, I think there was a period in the 1990s when Disney animations took quite a progressive turn. Pocahontas, for example, is stuffed with equal-opps, green, and anti-imperialist messages, not to mention a slightly tripped-out earth mysticism, and was clearly made by indian-friendly hippies. Best of all, Disney made the wonderful Recess cartoon series, one of the best and wisest things that has ever appeared on TV. And any parent who has numbed their arse sitting through interminable kids' films will have welcomed that thread of adult-oriented humour that Disney (and later Pixar) always carefully stitches through the fabric of its products.

In particular, I think of Mushu, the fast-talking ancestral guardian ~~lizard~~ (dragon, DRAGON!) voiced by Eddie Murphy in Mulan -- still my favourite -- watching as Mulan single-handedly saves the Empire and the Emperor from the invading Huns.

"My little baby's all growed up, and... and... (gulp) savin' China!"

Well, readin' Kafka, at any rate. Which will do for now.

Wasting My Time

2011-07-04T23:18:00.002+01:00

I'm not normally a violent man; that is to say, one who reacts to setbacks and frustrations by lashing out physically. But if I could find a way to get next to one (or preferably a whole roomful) of those utter shits who distribute viruses and malware over the Web I would cheerfully beat them to a pulp with an iron bar. Care to join me? No jury in the land would convict us. We'd be public heroes.

At around 5:00 this afternoon, it became apparent that my daughter had acquired a particularly evil piece of malware, merely by visiting an innocuous-looking website. She hadn't downloaded anything, she had merely looked at some maps of Seattle. Masquerading as anti-virus software, the malware then blocked every attempt to run any legitimate program, including the installed anti-malware and anti-virus programs. It was like having your path blocked repeatedly by some grinning bully.

The only remedy I could think of was to restart the laptop in "safe mode", use System Restore to roll back to a "restore point" dated before today, and then update and run a full scan with anti-malware software (I use Malwarebytes). After an eternity of multiple attempts (ever tried getting a Windows Vista laptop into safe mode?) and protracted waits, it seemed to have worked by 9:30 pm.

Of course, the frustration was compounded by having to roll back to a restore point. Every piece of software on the computer is now jostling to be first in the queue to be updated. Windows alone wanted to download and install 43 updates. It's not as if I'd back-dated the computer to 1995. If there's one thing that annoys me almost as much as evil, bullying, pointless malware it's the high-handedly casual attitude of software companies -- from Microsoft down -- to rolling out software updates, now that we're all connected to the internet.*

Barely a day goes by without some "important" updates to something downloading themselves, at length, which then require the computer to be restarted, and then install themselves, at length. It took Windows 7 forty minutes to download a Service Pack onto my laptop last week, which then took another forty minutes to install. I'd only turned the thing on to check my email! I have learned not to anger Windows by pulling the power plug on its interminable updates, though: the last time I did this a computer was rendered completely unusable.

I think it was Heidegger who said that "the modern world is revealed at the horizon of machines that are out-of-order". What did he know? The modern world is revealed at the horizon of machines that promise to be useful but just waste our bloody time.

Can anyone out there understand or explain the mentality of the writers and distributors of computer viruses? How anyone can devote so much intelligence and ingenuity to causing so much random, purposeless harm to ordinary people is beyond me.

* Run a close third by smug Apple Mac users who never get viruses. Don't go there, just don't...

July Is Too Green

2011-07-03T19:20:00.000+01:00

A sultry, overcast July day -- not much fun to be walking around in, but just the thing if subtle gradations of tone are your thing.

I'm never quite sure whether or not I feel like a counterfeiter when I go down the digital monochrome route, but ten minutes mucking about with the controls on Photoshop certainly beats an afternoon breathing noxious fumes in a darkroom. Besides, July is way too green for my taste.

Back in the world of colour, I saw this today:

I'm not sure who's meant to see it, or how, but it's the thought that counts, I suppose. As that witty fellow David Malki puts it in one of his Wondermark cartoons, "Free Tibet! (plus $8.95 shipping and handling)".

War Music

2011-06-26T14:00:00.005+01:00

There are many books in our house. They fill shelves, boxes, trunks, even drawers, and accumulate in temporary piles that can stabilise into quasi-objects of furniture for months. Occasionally, when I need to find one particular book, whereabouts unknown, the quest can become archaeological in its scope.

Today, I was looking for my copy of Heart of Darkness -- I have no idea where that has gone -- and while I was delving in a large cardboard box where I thought it might be buried I came across Christopher Logue's War Music. I instantly forgot about Conrad, and sat down to read Logue.

Over the years, I have had a lot of enthusiasms, some of which last a few weeks and fizzle out completely, while others move between the front and back of my awareness on some mysterious long-term rhythm. I lack that essential single-mindedness that marks the scholar, and am prepared to concede when I am bored with something. Most of these interests have involved the acquisition of a book or two, naturally, so a search like today's becomes a revisiting of old enthusiasms. The puzzling thing is how easy it is to forget about things that have held one's attention completely. War Music is a good example.

Christopher Logue has had a distinguished literary career, but is best known to most Brits over 40 as the man responsible for the "True Stories" and "Pseuds Corner" sections of the satirical magazine Private Eye. Somewhere back in the 1980s I was browsing the poetry shelf in a bookshop and the spine of War Music caught my attention. I hadn't known Logue was a poet, so expected something amusing. I began to read, and was immediately spell-bound.

Logue has been working on his "adaptation" of Homer's Iliad, on and off, for the last 50 years, since being asked to consider it in 1959. Since 1981, he's been publishing chunks as individual books (War Music, Kings, The Husbands, All Day Permanent Red, Cold Calls) with a cumulation of the first three also under the title War Music. It is simply magnificent, some of the most engaging writing I have ever come across.

He has brought off the difficult trick of making this ancient, familiar story of capricious gods and bloodthirsty heroes simultaneously fresh in a contemporary way and yet pleasingly strange, using anachronisms, quotations, and anything else that comes to hand. He was warned, early on, that "The Greeks are not humanistic, not Christian, not sentimental. Please try to understand that. They are musical". By Zeus, did he ever listen to that advice. This is not poetry about the pity of war.

It's hard to give the flavour of such a massive, narrative undertaking without quoting at length: his writing is something like a collaboration between Ted Hughes and John Milton. How about this:

Nine days.
And on the next, Ajax,
Grim underneath his tan as Rommel after 'Alamein,
Summoned the army to the common sand,
Raised his five-acre voice ...

or:

Starred sky. Calm sky.
Only the water's luminosity
Marks the land's end.

A light is moving down the beach.
It wavers. Comes towards the fleet.
The hulls like upturned glasses made of jet.

Is it a god?

No details

Yet.

Now we can hear a drum.

or:

There is a kind of ocean wave
Whose origin remains obscure.
Such waves are solitary, and appear
Just off the cliff-line of Antarctica
Lifting the ocean's face into the wind,
Moistening the wind that pulls, and pulls them on,
Until their height (as trees), their width
(As continents), pace that wind north for 7,000 miles.

or:

Patroclus fought like dreaming:
His head thrown back, his mouth -- wide as a shrieking mask --
Sucked at the air to nourish his infuriated mind
And seemed to draw the Trojans onto him,
To lock them round his waist, red water, washed against his chest,
To lay their tired necks against his sword like birds.

It's gripping stuff, often brutal and lyrical in the same breath, and you'll enjoy it all the more if you know the stories of the Trojan War, and a little of the conventions of epic poetry.

But where the hell is my copy of Heart of Darkness?

The Writing Paper on the Shore

2011-06-24T20:46:00.000+01:00

I'm currently reading Robert Macfarlane's The Wild Places, after having it recommended by any number of people. It's very unwise to comment on a book you're only halfway through, but I wanted to explain out loud to myself something that's been puzzling me. The thing is, I'm finding it a very annoying book.

At first, I didn't notice my annoyance. What I did notice, is that Mr. Macfarlane is a talented writer, with a gift for an unusual turn of phrase. He notices things, and finds witty and memorable ways of expressing them.

Then it started to snow -- light flakes ticking down through the air, settling on every upturned surface. A flake fell on the dark cloth of my jacket, and melted into it, like a ghost passing through a wall.

Perfect -- who hasn't seen that, but who ever thought of such a nice way of expressing it?

But what I then started to notice was that it was precisely these nice turns of phrase that were annoying me. There were so many of them, and they were interrupting the flow of my reading by constantly attracting attention to themselves. Also, too many of them either didn't stand up to scrutiny, or contributed nothing to the business at hand.

Consider that extract above. Ticking snow? It sounds alright, but is that "ticking" as in the quiet, regular noise made by a watch, or as in the jerky, down-and-up movement of a tickmark? Do light flakes of snow ever actually do either of those things? Not that I've noticed, though the suggestion of the inaudible noise of thousands of light impacts might work, I suppose. But perhaps not so much if you're also going to wonder, a few paragraphs later, "how so much motion could provoke so little sound".

And what about that ghost? Beyond being a striking visual image, what actual literary work is that comparison doing? Are we being primed for an encounter with the uncanny, or some other kind of vanishing trick? No. Unless going to sleep in an improvised shelter in a deep wood is either of those things. It is merely something shiny mined out of a writer's notebook.

This clever but purposeless noticing of similarities seems to be an end, for Macfarlane, not any sort of means. At a loch shore he sees "foam, the creamy colour of writing paper"; but this is presumably not foam with the smooth texture or flexibility or thinness or any other property of writing paper. It's true, that scummy foam that gathers on shorelines has a very particular colour, but why compare it to writing paper? As it happens, the colour "blue" is my immediate association with writing paper, but that may say more about me than beach foam.

Walking over some pitted rock, he notices that "in the bottom of each hole was a pebble or rock that fitted the hole snugly, like the head of a countersunk screw". And? Hmm, perhaps if you were to unscrew them, Scotland would fall off the earth? No? What then? You start to feel like a sulky teenager out for a walk with a parent determined to share with you every little associative aperçu that floats through their mind. You want to reply, "So what? I didn't want to come here anyway. I'm cold and wet. Please shut up!".

But, he can also be concise and purposeful. Sheltering from a storm on Coruisk in the Scottish Highlands, he writes, "The darkness beyond the glass was absolute and featureless. Except for the noises of the wind and rain, our hut might have been hurtling through deep space". Nothing pointless about that.

When I was a student, the most useful piece of advice I received -- after handing in yet another essay spinning theories and conjectural connections out of some author's work -- was this: "This is all fascinating, and quite possibly true. But you have given no indication that any literary means were used to achieve it". That made me think, I can tell you. The reverse is also true. That is, if you want to use "fine writing" as your medium, you need to use literary means to achieve your ends. "Look, isn't this like that?" or "Listen, I'm doing proper writing!" are just the start.

Perhaps I expect too much. Perhaps this book is just another victim of the decline of the in-house publisher's editor. So I'll reserve judgement until I've walked a few more miles in his shoes. That's assuming I can rein in my irritation at being required, every ten yards, to stop and admire the contents of his Moleskine notebook.

A Revised Curriculum

2011-06-20T08:22:00.005+01:00

After many weeks of tinkering, some major changes of heart, and at least one lucky last minute discovery of a forgotten image (it always pays to go back through your files), I've drawn a tentative line under the "first final draft" of this latest book. Here it is, for your constructive comments. The "full screen" version of the preview (last button on the right) seems to work best. Some of the text is still too small to read, but it's all about the pictures.

I intend to enter it for the Photography Book Now competition (I know, I know...) which is why it's in this large, expensive, deluxe version. If you can afford it and want one, you can buy direct from Blurb, or contact me and I'll buy and send you one, signed and inscribed ("For [your name here]: il miglior fabbro", whatever you want). Otherwise, I intend to follow up with a standard 8"x10" version at some point.

Of course, some of your comments may cause me to review some of my decisions, so this may not yet be the "final final draft" ...

N.B. if anyone out there has an iPad, I'd be curious to know how the preview looks -- Blurb claim to have optimized the BookShow software for iPad viewing. I'm beginning to resent the special treatment you Apple people are getting... First Tom Phillips' Humument app, and now the new Faber multimedia version of the Waste Land...

The Inner Slacker Speaks

2011-06-17T21:34:00.001+01:00

There have been fewer photographs on this blog recently. Occasionally, I find my need to get out and take photographs declines, and the last month has been such a time. It doesn't usually last long, but such fallow periods are usually the result of a temporary victory of my Inner Slacker over my Inner Puritan and his work ethic.

Photography, as an art medium, has a core problem of being thought to be too easy. Let's be honest, photography is easy. The difference in the level of skill, time, and dedication that is required to practice, say, watercolour painting to the same level of representational adequacy as even the crudest snapshot is enormous. Photography removes those elements -- let's call them "investment" -- from the equation. It's a low-investment medium. People tend not to value low-investment activities, however, and so artists using photography -- wanting their work to be valued -- generally go in one of three compensatory directions.

Some make photography difficult. For example, the investment in exposing large-format film, processing individual sheets by hand, and printing the images out onto hand-coated paper using various complex (and hazardous) "alternative processes" is quite large. But this is "technical" investment. The core process -- letting light in through a hole to expose a light-sensitive medium -- is still the same in its essential simplicity. And concentrating on process, and using recalcitrant mechanisms like tilts, shifts, and tripods, can -- shall we say? -- remove the photographer's attention from the image-making. Difficult photos are not necessarily good photos.

Some make a virtue of that simplicity. Photography is a good match for certain art-philosophical concerns about agency, intention, craft and "conception vs. execution". Skill and talent have had a bad time in the contemporary art world (what, you hadn't noticed?) and using a camera in "idiot" mode neatly sidesteps such embarrassments. "Look", the artist can say, "I am curating, not creating, these mechanically-made images, which do not have any undesirable ideological or aesthetic agenda imposed on them from within my brain. There is no craft fetishism here! They are simply the world as it is". If you are so inclined (and can afford a good lawyer) you can take this a logical step further, and "appropriate" photographs made by other people. Yes, we're looking at you, Richard Prince.

Others rely on subject matter. The kit may be simple to operate, but it can be used in situations that are intimidating or inaccessible to most people. For example, approaching (or confronting) complete strangers is astonishingly hard to do, especially if they are hostile, and/or armed and unpredictable. Placing oneself in a landscape and waiting for the right combination of light and weather requires planning, persistence and patience. Even carefully composing and lighting a portrait or still-life is beyond the capacity of 99.9% of camera owners. The work of "subject" photographers has an obvious "wow" factor. At its best, you have documentary work like that of Sebastiao Salgado or insightful explorations of landscape like Richard Misrach's; at its worst, you have the exquisitely dull, self-described "fine art" landscape photography of any number of calendar-art photographers.

I don't consciously do any of these, but have to say that, for me, the low-investment factor of photography is a big attraction. Not for any ideological reasons, but because I have tried a number of high-investment media, and know that I am too lazy to achieve anything worthwhile in them. I suffer from an urge to make pictures, have a reasonable degree of picture-making talent, but am totally lacking in application. Take etching, for example. I love the look and feel of intaglio prints, and some while ago decided to learn how it was done.

First, you must prepare a plate. The simple technique I was shown involved cutting, polishing, bevelling and degreasing a zinc plate, then heating it and applying a waxy coating or "ground" to the plate. You then make your drawing using any tools that can make marks through the ground to expose the metal. When you have finished, the plate is immersed in an acid bath, to etch away the exposed areas of plate ...

No, I'm sorry, I've already lost interest, and so have you, I can tell. It can take weeks to finish a decent plate. Suffice it to say I only ever managed to make four or five etchings in total. The end result (depending on your skill at both drawing and making the prints) can be very seductive -- check out the work of Leonard Baskin, a frequent collaborator with Ted Hughes -- but it can equally well be very dull, as such a complex and time-consuming procedure encourages a conservative approach. Spontaneous it ain't.

Like most people with a persuasive Inner Slacker, I'm a great one for trying things, and dropping them. Over the years I have made drawings, painted, etched, made lithographs and linocuts, but still couldn't fill a halfway decent portfolio with my work. But, since starting to photograph seriously around 1995, something clicked, and damned if I don't find I have now exhibited locally and internationally, self-published a dozen or more books, and have made enough coherent bodies of work to rival the output of all but the most prolific artists. How did that happen?

Sometimes my Inner Puritan worries that making photographs in this low-investment style isn't difficult enough to warrant the embarrassing attention-seeking that "art" entails. That's OK, counters my Inner Slacker, we don't want that much attention anyway. Otherwise, how can we take the odd month off? Relax...

Not Being There

2011-06-15T21:10:00.002+01:00

I came late to "literature". I had always been a keen and constant reader, but -- unlike the typical literary undergraduate -- I did not pick up an acknowledged "classic" until required to do at school for exam purposes, somewhere around age 16.

Even now, I am the unofficial World Champion of David Lodge's game "Humiliation", in which literary types score points for admitting to the texts they have not read. I don't want to boast, but I have never read a single Jane Austen novel and, so far, only one Dickens (Little Dorrit, studied for A level). I could go on, and raise you a 1984 or a To Kill a Mockingbird, but I think you will concede I hold a winning hand at any serious Humiliation table.

What I used to read -- after I had graduated from Biggles, War Picture Library comics, and Gerald Durrell -- was pulp. Lots of pulp. Dennis Wheatley, H.H. Kirst's "Gunner Asch" stories, the stuff that appeared on the paperback shelves of W.H. Smith with lurid covers aimed at the sensibilities of male adolescents. Not that I wasn't choosy -- James Bond, "Pan horror", and science fiction in general, for example, I rejected.

In the main, what I liked were intense, violent, even brutal tales, usually but not necessarily set during war-time, interspersed with gallows humour and sexy interludes. Of course, Joseph Heller's Catch-22 was pulp, in those days. I read my copy so many times the cover (the classic 1960s black and red cover, "Read it ... and you'll never be quite the same again") disintegrated. So were The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, Last Exit to Brooklyn, Slaughterhouse-Five and any number of other titles now enshrined as canonical works of literary fiction.

But among the books I was most loyal to, the ones I read and reread, were those by the authors Jerzy Kosinski and Sven Hassel. If you don't know The Painted Bird or The Legion of the Damned, their appeal is difficult to describe. They depict the brutality of worlds -- Nazi-occupied Poland, the Russian Front -- where all normal rules of human decency have been suspended. It is as if War Picture Library had given over a special issue to William Burroughs.

I suppose they give you the flattering impression of being a cold-eyed, unillusioned observer of human depravity, of seeing the "skull beneath the skin", rather than a bookish 15-year-old. Kosinski's bleakness and cynicism are existential and total, whereas Hassel does at least offer the cold comforts of temporary loyalty to a contingent array of misfits in a German "penal batallion" (oddly like being at an all-boys school).

Both writers had the ring of authenticity, not least because their fictions were presented as semi-autobiographical. Kosinski, a Polish Jew, had apparently himself lived as a feral child, as described in The Painted Bird, abandoned, adrift and predated upon in Nazi-occupied Europe; Hassel, a Dane, had been recruited into a German Panzer regiment. But, it seems, both of these authors have something deeper in common. They are both frauds. The accusation against both is that their fictions are not based on their own life experiences; at least, not as directly as had been claimed.

The Kosinski family actually spent the war being sheltered by the self-same Polish villagers whom he portrayed as sadistic abusers; it turns out they had lived openly, provided with forged papers, even attending church. Young Jerzy became an altar-boy. Further, it is claimed that The Painted Bird was plagiarised by Kosinsky, and "written" in Polish and rendered into English by various other hands after he had defected to the United States from post-War Poland, using a fictional sponsorship and fake documents.

As for Hassel, the Danish writer Erik Haaest claims that he is actually Børge Villy Redsted Pedersen, a Danish Nazi who never served on the Russian front. Pedersen actually spent the majority of WW2 in occupied Denmark as a member of the Hilfspolizei, an auxiliary Danish police force created by the Gestapo, and his knowledge of combat was acquired second-hand from Danish SS veterans. Haaest also alleges that Hassel's first novel was ghost-written and, when it became a success, that his wife wrote the rest of "his" books (an intriguing thought, given their content).

Ah, well. So it goes, in the refrain of Slaughterhouse-Five (and can it be long before someone demonstrates that Kurt Vonnegut was not actually present at the firebombing of Dresden?). Does any of this matter? After all, I have it on good authority that H.G. Wells did not have a time machine, and that Shakespeare had never personally met Julius Caesar. Shakespeare was also undeniably rather prone to "improving" and compositing other men's tales. In that much-stolen line (one that that Will would doubtless have deployed down at the Mermaid Tavern from time to time): "talent borrows, genius steals".

We're back in "authenticity" territory, again. Where does "making it all up" cross over into "fraud"? Is Seasick Steve (whom I like, if only because we share a fashion sense) a better and more authentic songwriter than Tom Waits, because he has actually lived at street-level? Certainly not. Are Sebastian Faulks or Pat Barker freeloading off the novelized real-life experiences of the protagonists of the First World War? You've got to be kidding.

The difficult cases are those where there is a deliberate hoax, or self-serving deception. These are uncovered surprisingly regularly -- especially, it seems, in France -- and there is clearly a peculiar sort of satisfaction to be derived from pulling off a successful literary scam. Probably only a psychologist could explain why this is. Who knows, for example, what personal payoff a male, American postgraduate student in Edinburgh gets from masquerading as a lesbian blogger in Damascus, as was revealed this week?

Sometimes, the obsessive investigative quest for The Truth behind the scam can seem equally -- if not more -- unbalanced, psychologically. A famous recent example has been the book The Long Walk, by Slavomir Rawicz, published in 1956, and made into the film The Way Back by Peter Weir in 2010. BBC Radio 4 made a brilliant documentary about this case, which you can still hear. Several highly-intelligent people, it seems, have invested significant portions of their lives to "unmasking" a deception so transparent it was suspected almost immediately in the 1950s.

It all puts me in mind of that famous anecdote about Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Olivier on the set of Marathon Man. Olivier asked Hoffman why he looked so dreadful. Hoffman replied that his character was required to look as if he had been kept awake for three nights, and so, being a method actor, that's what he had done. Olivier replied, "Why not try acting, dear boy? It's so much easier."

Or did he? Accounts vary. Hoffman himself claims his remark was actually a jeu d'esprit to explain his appearance after spending all night at Club 54; Olivier's response then seems rather stiff and patrician. Wonderfully, the accuracy of a classic statement of the virtues of "artful pretence" versus "authentic pretence" is itself a matter of dispute, even between those who were there. Funny, how life always gets improved in the retelling. But isn't that exactly what stories are for?

[N.B., in case it's not self-evident, the title of this post refers to Kosinski's most famous book, Being There, in which a simpleton of mysterious origin is mistaken for a sage, by virtue of the self-projections of others. Kosinski committed suicide in 1991.]

Silently and Very Fast

2011-06-14T20:31:00.002+01:00

I'm not sure why, but one of the best and better-known poems by W.H. Auden has been on my mind recently. It may be because it's so easy to identify with that unimportant clerk (presumably pronounced the American way) scrawling on official forms, but it's that unimprovable final stanza that's been insisting on making itself felt. "Altogether elsewhere..."

The Fall of Rome

The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.

Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.

Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.

Cerebrotonic Cato may
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound Marines
Mutiny for food and pay.

Caesar's double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.

Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.

Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.

W.H. Auden

Indian Country

2011-06-09T08:21:00.003+01:00

It's not often you read a poem and think, "My God, this person lives in our house..." Or, perhaps more accurately, lives in a house not unlike ours, and has seen fit to make it a metaphor. Cool. Or, spooky. I refer you to this poem by Louise Erdrich, which I found on the excellent Ordinary finds blog, which celebrates the culturally-significant births and deaths that happen to share today's date.

It seems Louise Erdrich is the latest addition to a small list I discover I have in my head, of interesting people who are of full or partial Native American descent. I'm not sure why this list exists; I think I'm simply jealous. I had a long childhood romance with "indians" which started at primary school and has continued, off and on, ever since. We had the book Indian Crafts and Lore by Ben Hunt in the school library, and I spent many happy wet lunchtimes with it. The book had seen good use -- our school was known as "that school with the totem pole".

Another page spread from Education For Living.
Yes, our school had a number of flat-roof classrooms,
and they were leakier than that tipi.

As an adolescent I used to watch the High Chaparral TV series hoping that this week Cochise's Apaches would finally come whooping down on the ranch in their stylish boots and leggings, cruelly slaughter the egregious Blue and Buck, and carry off Victoria and ... well, um, let's not go there. In college, when I was supposed to be reading Middlemarch, I was often reading the likes of Dee Brown's Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee or Black Elk Speaks, with shamanic excursions south of the border into Carlos Castaneda territory. Later, I developed a fascination for the photographic work of pioneers of the West like Timothy O'Sullivan and, of course, the inescapable Edward Curtis.

N.C. Wyeth

Most of this stuff is utterly inauthentic, of course -- mere projections of the white, western id and colonial dominance and guilt. But authenticity is always a dodgy concept, and the way stereotypes and images from a Central Casting mentality can overwhelm reality is an interesting topic in its own right -- though you do have to pity any genuine members of the Sioux Nation trying to hold onto (or reconstruct) a cultural identity in the face of the power of Hollywood. It makes the Scottish struggle with tartan seem trivial by comparison (and, at least as far as I know, the Sioux don't do the equivalent self-harm of Burns Night to themselves).

Back in 1981, we had the opportunity to visit some friends living in Oakland, California. As it happens, our friend Jim is a linguist and anthropologist, studying Native American languages. While we were staying, he had a field trip planned way up into the north of the state, to interview one of the few remaining speakers of a language of interest to him, up near Crescent City. We tagged along for the ride. A very good ride it was, too, up along the California redwood coast, staying in motels and imbibing Americana by the gallon (literally, it seemed, in the case of ice-cream servings).

I don't know what I was expecting, but the appearance of Jim's informant surprised me. He was small, rotund, and vaguely Asian -- he looked like Nikita Khrushchev in a lumberjack shirt and baseball cap, with not a moccassin or parfleche in sight. It was an enlightening experience, for me, anyway. I took a giant step out of Central Casting.*

About a decade later I had the opportunity to do a residential photographic workshop at Duckspool with Thomas Joshua Cooper, one of the great contemporary photographers, and usually described as "of Cherokee descent". This time I was ready. I had my eye open for Khrushchev.

When I finally turned up at Broomfield, most of the participants had already arrived, and were sitting around the magnificent dining table, getting to know each other. I sat down next to a sandy-haired, red-bearded guy, and said, "When's he turning up?" "Who?", he said. "Thomas Joshua Cooper", I said. "That would be me", he said.

Not quite ready enough, then. Mind you, when I met him, he was part-way on the journey from this person to this person. Despite his undoubted and enviable ancestry, I don't think he's going to be picking up any work as an extra in Hollywood.

* BTW, have you ever pondered the ethnicity of the guys standing beside Bob Dylan on the cover photo of John Wesley Harding? It turns out they are indeed indians, but from India. They are "brothers Luxman and Purna Das, two Bengali Bauls, South Asian musicians brought to Woodstock by Dylan's manager, Albert Grossman. Behind Dylan is Charlie Joy, a local stonemason and carpenter". It astonished me, anyway.

The Thousand and One Nights

2011-06-07T17:54:00.000+01:00

I enjoyed this piece -- Ode To A four-Letter Word, by Kathryn Schulz -- and thought you might, too. It's worth reading just for the word "prisserati". I don't suppose I'll ever actually buy a copy, but just knowing that there now exists a spoof kids' book entitled Go The Fuck To Sleep makes me smile with recognition, as it doubtless will any other parents out there. As I have said before, the secret shame of all parents is how narrow the line can become, at 3 a.m., that divides "perfectly normal response" from "call Social Services".

Now that my kids are virtually indistinguishable from adult human beings -- to the untrained eye, at least -- it is poignant to be reminded how fervently, 15 or 20 years ago, I sometimes wished for the day to arrive when this would be the case. You forget. After all, nursing a sick child into the small hours, and changing bedclothes covered in vomit for the third time, when you have an important meeting first thing in the morning is not a memory to look back on with any fondness, even if it is a true measure of parental commitment. It does, however, explain why those in the higher reaches of any profession tend to be male, childless, or wealthy enough to afford live-in childcare.

But you also forget how charmingly weird small children are. It's like sharing your house with elves, or some other small, bafflingly alien species. I was reading through an old notebook the other day, and was delighted to discover that I had documented my children's early attempts at language, and the ways they found to entertain themselves. These seemed often to cross over into the territory of performance art.

My son had an activity known as "planging", which involved stretching threads of cotton across a room, onto which he would hang carefully-chosen arrays of plastic animal figures and dinosaurs. My daughter pursued a complementary project known as "pic-nics": neat assemblages of items in odd corners of the floor, and quite often composed on a step of the staircase. Given these impediments could remain in place for days, even weeks, to venture out of a bedroom in our house at night required full alertness, and was like the scene in a caper movie where the jewel thief cunningly evades laser detection devices and booby traps. Or, in the absence of full consciousness, it was more like the scene in a Steve Martin movie where the parent steps on a stray skate and takes an elaborate, serial pratfall.

They escaped Planging,
only to be Picnicked

It is a curious fact of human development that a child's memory is pretty much wiped at age three. Virtually no-one has a true memory from their infancy, and anything before age 5 is usually pretty vague or suspiciously clear. This is probably just as well, as it's a humiliatingly helpless time, and no-one should be haunted for the rest of their life by visions of red-eyed, snarling parents fighting back the anger at being woken up yet again to chase away the monsters in the room. We are the monsters in your room, kid.

But, as parents, we'd like to think those thousand and one nights are not completely forgotten, that some kind of karmic reward is stored up, somewhere, for sitting there night after night, hour after hour -- sometimes reading aloud, sometimes muttering angry profanities, sometimes brooding silently in the darkness -- trying to perform the alchemy that converts wakefulness into sleep.

And, if the truth be told, I have never felt so acutely aware of being alive, before or since, or of being so intimately connected to humanity's history, as I did then. Or perhaps I should say, more acutely aware of being awake. Wakefulness is its own reward, perhaps. But now, of course, it's me that can't sleep at 3 a.m. and I have to say I'm beginning to suspect they were right all along about those monsters.

That's Why I Chose Furniture City

2011-06-03T08:28:00.005+01:00

I'm beginning to suspect the United States is a country with too much time on its hands. First, there was the That's Why I Chose Yale video (if you haven't seen it, do -- it's amazing, and what is known as a "game changer"). Now, I see on the Doonesbury "Daily Video" slot, there's The Grand Rapids LipDub.

Grand Rapids is in Michigan. It has a population of 188,040, most of whom appear in this video at least once.

According to Wikipedia, "In 1836 John Ball, representing a group of New York land speculators, bypassed Detroit for a better deal in Grand Rapids. Ball declared the Grand River valley 'the promised land, or at least the most promising one for my operations.'"

Grand Rapids boasts the Gerald R. Ford Museum, and is the final resting place of the 38th President of the United States. It is also home to five of the world's leading office furniture companies and is known, very appropriately, as the "Furniture City".

Education For Living

2011-06-01T22:25:00.000+01:00

I came across a passage in a book, years ago, which I transcribed into a notebook, but unfortunately I can't find it just now. In effect, it says, "we sociologists are studying these kids growing up in new-build estates and New Towns, and we see them as dystopic places, where only alienation and inauthenticity can flourish; but, one day, there will be a generation of adults who have grown up in such places, and for them these streets will have become sites of nostalgia and authenticity".

The class analysis, whether strictly Marxist or vaguely sociological, has fallen out of favour in recent times. Feminist, "queer", and various other perspectives have supplanted it. If one wanted to be cynical, one might say this is because it allows middle-class academics to locate themselves "inside looking out" of their analysis, rather than "outside looking in". "Identity politics" has been all the rage. So many perspectives, so little tenure. But I think it's more that the truth of a sort of phenomenological relativism -- one person's ceiling is another person's floor -- has, for whatever reasons, become overwhelmingly self-evident. "Grand narratives" have become embarrassing.

A good friend took me to task, not so long ago, over something I'd written here: you are now middle class, he said, like it or not. Well, yes and no. True, I have acquired a few degrees, some middle-class attitudes, earn a middle-class income in a middle-class job with a final-salary pension scheme, and tend not to watch TV or chat about sport. But I didn't have a middle-class childhood, was state-educated locally, as were my kids, and my neighbours are much the same mix of lower-middle and working-class everyfolk that I grew up with. Despite everything, I seem not to have come very far in the world. But I like to think this mongrel mix of attitudes is what makes me interesting, at least to myself. Forced to wear a label, I think I'd call myself a "petit bourgeois bohemian".

Of course, our nostalgias are mainly false-memory constructs. The past is not somewhere we can visit, and that phenomenological relativism that has become so self-evident tells us that "The Past" was the aggregate of millions of individually-experienced parallel and interacting realities, anyway. I have no real idea how it would have been to have grown up as a girl, for example, born to my family in the same town in the same year, with the same abilities and attributes.

Sometimes those of us at the humbler end of society do get studied intensively, but our actual identities and experiences get processed into aggregated statistics and evidence, that represent everyone and no-one. Nobody is as dull as their statistics. Imagine the surprise, then, last year, of opening a book being discarded from our library shelves (Education For Living, by J.R.C. Yglesias, published by Cory, Adams & Mackay, 1965) and seeing photographs of familiar faces and scenes I hadn't seen for 45 years.

The book is a study of my own primary school, Peartree Spring Junior, illustrated with many photographs by Margaret Murray (and, incidentally, a classic of mid-60s book design) taken during school activities in 1963/4. And, yes, I am in one of them (I think), looking dubiously at some school custard. Most amazingly, this is my school as I remember it. It is a book about a school as a lived experience, as a beacon of good practice, about ordinary children being valued and nurtured as individuals, about good teachers being given the chance to do a good job. It is a book about optimism.

Miss Hendey... Worth a whole post in her own right.

There's a telling autobiographical passage in the book:

I was at school with Trevor Huddlestone and Peter Pears. Neither shone in the eyes of their contemporaries half as much as did the captains of cricket and of football. Today I cannot remember the names of those athletic giants, but I follow with admiration the careers of Trevor Huddlestone and Peter Pears ... At the same school there were others, equally sensitive, who took a long time to recover from an education which allowed boys to value games and 'good form' so highly and to mock at deeper human qualities. To be clever and artistic and sensitive was to be scorned and humiliated.

It's a story you hear so often from those who have been privately-educated in single-sex environments, and that deep sense of resentment against the bullying Masters of the Universe seems often to underpin the commitment to social justice of many activists. We shouldn't knock it -- without middle-class reformers, we'd still be sending our kids up chimneys. But it's not my story. I don't have those middle-class ghosts to lay.

My story has two early parts. First, it's an optimistic story about growing up in a brief window of opportunity when Britain came as close as it ever has to becoming -- in some special places at least -- a socialist utopia, where resources were poured into public schemes -- schools, housing, libraries, swimming pools, community centres, light industry, transport. Part Two is about how it was all taken away in the late 1970s, just as we came into adulthood. No more public investment, no more jobs, no more future. Sorry. Were you expecting more?

This is where my ghosts live, and I doubt I'm the only one. I'm 57 now, and approaching retirement, and I still haven't really come to terms with the fact that "Part One" will probably never, ever happen again. It's hard not to interpolate that national failure of nerve into a personal failure. It's like an expulsion from Eden.

And if anyone ever wanted evidence for why Grand Narratives have become embarrassing, the failure of Britain to secure and build on the social progress made in the 1950s and 1960s is it. We (we?) seem to have decided we simply couldn't afford that Big Story any more. Despite everything, we finally managed to become a nation as dull as our statistics.

The Impossibility of Playing The Piano

2011-05-27T10:50:00.001+01:00

Awesome. I heard part of an amazing new recording of Beethoven's "Waldstein" sonata Wednesday morning on Radio 3 (Piano Sonata No.21 in C major, Op. 53, played by Martin Roscoe). There's really nothing quite like a Beethoven piano sonata, and the first movement of the Waldstein has an almost cartoonish sense of fun and dynamism. Composed in 1804, it makes you wonder whether we're really trying any more. "No more heros, No more Shakespearos..."

I have always loved the sound of a piano. It is one of the great regrets of my life that I never had access to a piano or lessons as a child. Who knows, perhaps by now I could have been Keith Jarrett, effortlessly spinning improvisational magic before rapt audiences, or at the very least that bloke down the pub who can vamp his way through Roll Out The Barrel and Whole Lotta Shakin'.

I did have trumpet lessons, briefly, at school. It didn't work out, as there was a monumental clash of assumptions. The peripatetic tutor who visited the school was a dry old stick, who had never heard of, never mind listened to, Dizzy Gillespie or Miles Davis. He liked scales, proper posture and embouchure, and sight reading.

We played tunes which were supposed to be helpfully familiar, but which I had never heard in my life. "Drink To Me Only With Thine Eyes", for God's sake! I was an eleven-year old whose exposure to music was limited to the BBC Home Service on the radio and my father's taste in jazz. Plus my mother's cousin happened to be married to Ivan "Buzz" Trueman, a trumpeter with the Edmundo Ros orchestra, a popular combo in the 1950s and 60s, who played Latin American dance music. To me the trumpet was a hot instrument, but trumpet lessons were dull, dull, dull. I gave it up.

My mistake, really. It is one of the misperceptions that a generation of self-taught popular musicians has brought about, that true music-making is a spontaneous, expressive thing, a million miles from the academy and those baffling black dots and squiggles on paper. I am a moderately competent self-taught guitarist, and capable of making a thoroughly pleasing and convincing noise on pretty much any instrument. But I am no musician.

As consumers of music, we tend to be obsessed with music's expressive power, and worship the musicians whose improvisatory skill and individuality of voice goes beyond the bounds of "mere" musicality. But, at heart, all music is about learning complex patterns which you can repeat, again and again, reliably and accurately. The basic key to music-making is sticking to the plan.

A musician is someone who has thoroughly learned to play the patterns on their instrument, can understand and remember (or read) the precise patterns they are asked to play for a particular piece of music, and is able to stick to the plan. The plan may be very rigid (A Beethoven sonata) or it may be quite loose ("ten bars in we shift to A flat, Miles solos until he lifts a hand, then McLaughlin does that crazy guitar thing he's been working on") but the plan is what makes music out of merely pleasant noises.

Ever been in a music shop, where a 14-year-old is sat in the corner "shredding" a guitar? Up and down the neck, lick after lick, very fast, very impressive. But try asking him (it's usually a him) to play Happy Birthday in D major. The kid's not a musician.

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that a decent musician is a form of computer. You feed them a program in the form of musical notation, and out comes music. Same every time. It's a marvel. One of the people who works in my office used to be a music teacher and can sight read: put sheet music in front of him and away he goes, "Pom pom-pom POM pom-pom POM!" Makes me laugh out loud with admiration every time.

Some years ago I was offered a used electric piano at a bargain price -- a proper 88 key job -- and snapped it up, ostensibly to give our kids the chance to figure out whether or not it might be something they'd like to learn. But my secret plan was, finally, to learn to play the piano. I would be Keith Jarrett, or more probably that guy down the pub.

What I discovered was quite disturbing. In a word: playing the piano is impossible. The idea of using one hand to play one set of notes and the other hand to play quite another set of notes is ludicrous. It can't be done -- I know, I've tried. It doesn't help being left-handed, I'm sure, but even so... The sheer improbability of being able to split yourself into two independent halves, each performing different, complex finger-wiggling moves at the same time... It's self-evidently impossible.

This discovery led to some dark thoughts. Had some world-historical fraud been perpetuated on us, and how? Multi-track recording? Mirrors? Invisible accomplices? Surgery? Hypnotism? It seemed unlikely. Besides, I've seen (or thought I'd seen) people playing a piano. It appeared that, effortlessly, these magicians did one complicated thing with one hand, whilst doing another with the other. The image of Russ Conway's evil smile and wink to camera, as he tinkled away on Sunday Night at the London Palladium, haunted and mocked me. The bastard didn't even have a full complement of fingers!

No, I had to come to the humbling conclusion that -- unlike, say, becoming Home Secretary -- playing the piano required years of dedication, effort, and -- yes -- practice, practice, practice; ideally reinforced by a degree of talent, and merciless lessons given at a young age by either a saint or a sadist (opinions seem to differ). And, yes, sometimes a dog is too old to learn new tricks.

If there is a moral to this story, it is that the world shrinks when we judge and limit others by our own capacities, and that a lowest common denominator society would be one without the Waldstein sonata. "Don't bother with that, mate, it's impossible!" There's also a useful lesson here when passing judgement on the artistic productions of others, who may (whisper it) be more talented, more committed, more advanced in achievement than we are. "It's rubbish -- my ten -year-old could it!"

We must do everything we can to make this world a safe place for Shakespearos.

Me and Bob Dylan, Slight Return

2011-05-25T08:19:00.007+01:00

I remember now. I remember why Dylan seemed less than essential when I turned 14 in 1968. Two simple lists might do it:

Dylan releases:

1967 John Wesley Harding
1968
1969 Nashville Skyline

World events:

1967 list here
1968 list here
1969 list here

From those lists, I suppose I would highlight the escalation of the Vietnam War and anti-war protest, the dangerous nuclear face-offs of the Cold War, race riots in the USA, the events of May '68 in Paris, the RAF (Baader-Meinhof), the "Six Day War" in the Middle East, the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the shootings of Rudi Dutschke and Andy Warhol, Enoch Powell's "Rivers of Blood" speech, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Days of Rage, British troops in Northern Ireland ...

It was a turbulent, angry time. People who focus on the "Summer of Love" have no idea what they're talking about. Dylan's turn to quiescent Americana and away from politics at that precise moment in history seemed merely to underline his irrelevance. Radical left politics was on the upturn, and a singer who had formerly seemed a spokesman for radical youth was recording in Nashville with Johnny Cash (not then the apotheosis of Cool he has somehow subsequently become).

I rest my case. I also note that those Wikipedia lists record the first performances of Fairport Convention and Led Zeppelin. One might also note the launch of Island Records' "pink label", surely a defining event in anyone's chronicle of World Events.

Me and Bob Dylan

2011-05-24T16:14:00.003+01:00

The media are all over Bob Dylan this week, for obvious reasons. But, in case you haven't been paying attention, he turns 70 today. Seventy!

And in case you really haven't been paying attention, Bob Dylan is a highly-rated but controversial popular music artist, a self-described "song and dance man", who emerged in the New York folk scene in the early 1960s, and came to rapid prominence, partly on the coattails of the Civil Rights movement, and partly due to his uncanny ability to channel the Old Weird America into something poptastically new and strange. Once in the door, though, they couldn't chuck him out, even when he lost interest in being a "protest singer", and he spent the next 45 years annoying, frustrating, enchanting, intriguing, entertaining and generally mystifying everyone and anyone. Yes, that Bob Dylan.

I took the opportunity of watching the second part of Martin Scorsese's No Direction Home the other night, as it's there on the BBC iPlayer. It's a superb piece of work, but fails, I think, to explain the Dylan phenomenon, simply because it's an insider's picture (you have to wonder how often the likes of Joan Baez, Al Kooper and Robbie Robertson can stand to repeat their well-honed reminiscences of "Bobbie" to camera one more time). It also reminded me of how viscerally I dislike Pete Seeger. I'd cut his power line with an axe any day. "Green corn, green corn..." Thwack.

Neither, at the other extreme, does the portrait of extreme head-case Dylanologist A.J. Weberman (Tangled Up With Dylan, also on iPlayer) tell us much about the phenomenon, though I think this does get closer. Few, if any, artists have attracted creepy obsessives as much as Dylan. No, the best thing I've heard recently was the BBC Radio 4 programme in the Saturday night "Archive on 4" slot, Bob Dylan and Me, in which performers, writers and even academics who have been influenced by Dylan spoke of their relationship with the music.

This is the whole point, surely: the vast mass of Dylan fans never got to know "Bobbie", or stand on a stage with him, or even shout "Judas" at a concert; they simply knew his albums, inside out, back in the days when a vinyl LP was a statement, an item of contemplation, an event. For every Baez or Weberman, there are a thousand ordinary folk in their late middle age who have had an intense relationship with at least one Dylan album, probably more intense than their early relationships with girl- or boyfriends.

It's curious how often it is only one or two albums. Or perhaps not, given the unevenness of Dylan's output. In my case -- and I am far from being a Dylan fanatic -- it's Bringing It All Back Home and Blood On The Tracks. I know pretty well most of the other albums released before 1980, and a few of those released after, but it's only those two that matter to me. Why? Simply because they're the ones I owned, at a time when it mattered.

I know Blonde on Blonde is indispensible to many people, or The Basement Tapes to others, and it sometimes seems that I must at some time have owned copies of Desire and Highway 61 Revisited, but I simply don't care about any of those albums. But the songs on Bringing It All Back Home and Blood On The Tracks -- their lyrics, their attitude, their irony, their wise foolishness -- are in my bloodstream. Every note, every inflection, right down to the stoned laughter that breaks up the start of Bob Dylan's 115th Dream, or the bass playing on Simple Twist of Fate.

This is odd, really, because -- if I can put it this way -- I 'm not aware, at a conscious level, that I have ever really liked Bob Dylan that much. I can't remember the last time I played a Dylan album. But I only have to hear the opening notes of one of those songs to recall the intensity of my relationship with it. Only to forget it again. I think part of it is that Dylan was over, in a sense, before I was old enough to pay attention. He belongs to the over-65s -- I have watched several highly-intelligent people of that ur-boomer generation tear up and dissolve into mumbling inarticulacy, trying to describe what those early albums meant to them. Blood on the Tracks -- released in 1975 when I was 21 -- was a comeback album, for God's sake!

The music aside, though, what is so striking in watching video of old interviews and press conferences, and what may be the true root of his significance, is how far Dylan's modernity as a personality was in advance of the times. Not least here in stuffy, stick-up-the-arse mid-60s Britain. It's embarrassing. You cringe as a pack of plummy-voiced, RAF-moustached reporters ask their wordy, patronising questions. And you wonder as Dylan, like an unflattering mirror, reflects back the absurdity of the literal sense of the words falling from their lips. He is Andy Warhol with attitude. He is a visitor from the future, fey and amused, a real-life Dr. Who.

My favourite moment like this, is that press conference in LA in 1965, featured in No Direction Home:

Reporter: How many people who labor in the same musical vineyard in which you toil, how many are protest singers? That is, people who use their music, and use the songs to protest the, ah, social state in which we live today. The matter of war, the matter of crime, or whatever it might be.
Dylan: Um...how many?
Reporter: Yes. How many?
Dylan: Uh, I think there's about, uh ... 136.
Reporter: You say about 136, or do you mean exactly 136?
Dylan: Uh, it's either 136 or 142.

Look out, kid, it's somethin' you did -- God knows when, but you're doin' it again...

The A303

2011-05-21T13:47:00.005+01:00

If you haven't seen it, and have access to the BBC iPlayer (is it available overseas?), may I recommend a programme which went out on BBC Four TV last week on Thursday, A303: Highway to the Sun? Tom Fort does a nice, unflashy job of looking at the palimpsestic nature of the British landscape, as revealed by the journey along a road I know only too well.

Apart from its intrinsic merits as a typical example of the best of current "B list" BBC programme-making -- there's clearly something of a Silver Age happening on BBC Four, and if I had more time I'd be watching more such programmes -- I think it gives a nice insight into the world as seen from this blog. A world populated by middle-aged, white-haired enthusiasts, annoying the hell out of people by pulling off roads and parking scruffy, "characterful" cars in odd, often illegal, spots on the side of the road, just to get a particular view, or to visit an obscure monument.

Britain is full of such people, quietly pursuing semi-academic / quasi-artistic / mildly physical enthusiasms, and they are my tribe. Often retired public-sector professionals, they are the inheritors of traditions of amateurism handed down from 18th and 19th century clergymen, those diggers of barrows and collectors of butterflies and rocks. If you can understand Tom Fort's enthusiasm for one road, as a way of drilling down through the impacted layers of our history, you will understand why I spend my weekends hanging around the M3 cutting and the Hockley viaduct.

The programme was part of a BBC Four "landscape week", and I'll catch up with the others (including Alice Roberts doing some "wild" swimming, à la Roger Deakin) in due course.

Flying Ant Day

2011-05-19T08:49:00.007+01:00

In the light of various things that have been discussed on this blog in recent times, I refer you to this piece, The Importance of Unwritten Postcards, published two days ago by Steve Himmer, and which I read this morning via wood s lot. Not to mention the piece by Jennifer Egan he refers to, published in the Guardian on May 7th. It is sometimes amusing, sometimes scary, to see how the same issues occur to different people at much the same time.

I have stopped asking myself questions like, "What are the chances of my post connecting teenage backpacking with panic attacks being followed, the next day, by a piece in a national newspaper doing precisely the same thing?" This is not about chance, or coincidence. It's like that day in the summer, when all the flying ants emerge all over town, responding to some instinctive timetable or arcane combination of signals. I always note it down in my notebook as "Flying Ant Day", and always forget to check when it happened in previous years.

Despite appearances, despite the way it feels, we are not outside looking in (or inside looking out): we are all deeply and inextricably a part of the same processes. I'm put in mind of one of my favourite quotations from philosopher-photographer Frederick Sommer:

Some speak of a return to nature. One wonders where they could have been.

Cheep, Cheep

2011-05-18T18:02:00.007+01:00

I've mentioned before my problems with getting historical timelines right (Steppeth Not Upon My Shoes of Blue Suede), and I've been having another mental realignment of "what took place when". I'm currently reading Richard Holmes' The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, and have just been reading the chapter about the first balloon flights.

I had no idea that the first experiments with flight took place in the mid-1770s. Why, that's the Age of Wigs! I don't know about you, but my perception of the Montgolfier Brothers and the other intrepid pioneers of "aerostation" has been corrupted by popular culture to the extent I believed balloon flight was pioneered in the Age of Moustaches. I blame Disney. Or perhaps Wacky Races.

I love it when scenes from two completely different movies overlap. In this case, I read that Gilbert White was quietly observing nature in his rectory garden at Selborne in October 1784, when Jean-Pierre Blanchard passed overhead in a hydrogen balloon. According to White in The Natural History of Selborne, even through a telescope it appeared to be no bigger than a large tea-urn. He had a few thoughts on the nature of the Sublime, and then returned to watching the birds. I don't suppose Blanchard realised he had just passed through someone else's story.

And how about this for insight:

I hope these new mechanic meteors will prove only playthings for the learned and idle, and not be converted into new engines of destruction to the human race -- as is so often the case of refinements or discoveries in Science. The wicked wit of Man always studies to apply the results of talents to enslaving, destroying or cheating his fellow creatures. Could we reach the moon, we should think of reducing it to a province of some European kingdom.

Horace Walpole, letter to H. Mann, 2 Dec. 1783

Plus ça change ...

Ballooning in the Age of Wigs, ca. 1785
(Snuff box, from the Penn-Gaskell Collection
of 'Ballooniana', Science Museum).

Meanwhile, back in the Age of Mobile Phones, I was walking down our street when I heard a familiar cheeping noise. Cheep, cheep. Cheep, cheep, cheep. Cheep, cheep. No, not a ringtone. I knew instantly what it was: a male House Sparrow doing his thing in a shrub in someone's front garden. I was astonished: I haven't seen or heard a House Sparrow in our part of town for 20 years. What with that, and the Chiffchaff and the Goldfinches that have appeared in our garden this spring, I'm beginning to believe that the birds believe things are looking up. Perhaps they're right.

El Tiburón, part 2 -- take 2

2011-05-14T18:44:00.000+01:00

I think nobody enjoys their twenties. It's the worst of times. Your life is a mess, and you seem to be permanently in a state of transition, usually from something bad to something worse. I certainly didn't enjoy mine; I found that the closer I got to 30 the more I was changing from the person I thought I was into someone I didn't much like. I didn't particularly like anyone else, either, and I put a lot of creative effort into being disagreeable. Um. My apologies if you met me between about 1977 and 1984...

Anyway. One summer in our 20s, not long after the death of generalissimo Franco, my partner and I shared a Ford Fiesta with another couple we knew, and toured around the Basque country, Cantabria, Asturias, and Galicia in northern Spain, camping out or staying in cheap hotels. Rural Spain, back then, was remarkably under-developed. No sooner had you crossed the border from France than you started to see ox-carts in the fields and peasants threshing grain by hand with flails. Seriously. It was like driving into a Breughel painting.

The disadvantages of touring a hot country in summer with four adults in a small car designed for suburban shopping don't need pointing out, I'm sure. If, in addition, one of the company is a non-driver and prickly provocateur (that would be me), then the difficulties, anxieties, and petty squabbles resulting from just co-existing at close quarters are not eased. Mild disagreements on diet, where to go next, what to do there, and how to spend the night can build the tension like a summer storm, until released explosively in a "free and frank exchange of views". Luckily, our friends were remarkably tolerant, and remain our friends to this day.

We had heard that the Picos de Europa mountains were worth a visit, and decided to take a look. If the coastal lowlands were a little backward, the remoter mountain passes of the Picos seemed primeval. Paved roads quickly degenerated into rutted tracks, and there was a watchful silence in the tiny, ramshackle settlements that made you feel like a visitor from outer space. The last bears and wolves in Western Europe are said to roam in these mountains.

We found ourselves camping near a strange, end-of-the-road place called Caín (no, really). Beyond it was a spectacular, steep-sided mountain gorge, the Garganta de Cares, along and through which, perched halfway up the cliff-face, some lunatic had blasted a canal before WW1, in order to feed a hydroelectric scheme. Right alongside the canal runs a precarious rock-hewn path. This path is little more than 4 or 5 feet wide in places, has no handrail, and it's a long way down. The canal runs in and out of the cliff, and where it is open to the air swallows dart along, skimming the water for insects within a couple of feet of your nose.

Most bizarrely, perhaps because of the lack of steep gradients, even back then it was a popular track for recreational walking. Occasionally, whole families would come strolling up the hazardous rocky path, wearing flip-flops and even high heels. Passing the oncoming traffic was an ordeal, not least because two of our party had serious issues with heights and steep places. I can't imagine why we even started up that track in the first place.

Eventually, the inevitable happened, and we reached a stretch of path that had been knocked out by a landslide. It was easy enough to negotiate, you simply had to drop down onto the fan of scree, and scramble across. But, due to the combination of height, slope, and real or imagined peril, D (one of our friends) froze; she simply could not, would not go any further. The family parties simply went around us, in their flip-flops and high-heels, shrieking in mock terror as they tottered over the loose rocks. But D's terror was very real: by the time we had forcibly manouevred her stiff legs one in front of the other, step by step, she was shaking with fright.

I don't think I had ever seen such raw, elemental fear expressed before, and something in D's reaction lit a fuse buried deep inside me. When we stopped for a rest later on, I climbed up by myself onto a rocky promontory, out of view of the others, ostensibly to look at the view. What happened then is quite hard to explain.

Gazing across at the opposite bluff, hundreds of feet high, I noticed it was shaped like the snout of a gigantic rising shark. The film Jaws was then still quite current, and the poster image was everywhere. I started to feel a deep, mounting terror. It was as if I had gone fishing for mackerel, and caught the world-fish on my line. There seemed to be a basso profundo roar running through the landscape like an earthquake, or a volcano humming to itself. I knew -- simultaneously -- that the bluff opposite was merely a formation of jagged Carboniferous limestone, and that it was also a gigantic shark surging out of the depths of the earth. I knew -- both at the same time -- that I was perfectly safe and in mortal danger. I was acutely aware of the utter inconsequence if I were to die at that moment. The sensation lasted only 30 seconds or so, but it was the most intense experience of existential dread I had ever endured, and I went back down the hill a chastened, not to say changed, man.

I came to call my new, terrible acquaintance El Tiburón -- the shark. My secret mantra was the quotation from Büchner's Woyzek, displayed on screen by Werner Herzog at the start of his film The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser over a shot of a wheat field writhing in a blustery wind: "Don’t you hear that terrible screaming all around, which is conventionally called silence?". Being of a literary bent, I presumed I had had an encounter with a full-on manifestation of what the early landscape enthusiasts called The Sublime, or perhaps I had even had some kind of brutal enlightenment experience, a satori. There's nothing so reassuring as self-importance and up-market labels.

The next time I encountered El Tiburón I was driving a car on a busy road in Hampshire, and I was convinced I was having a heart attack. As well as the sense of overwhelming danger, I had pins and needles in my face and hands, and had to pull off the road onto the hard shoulder to recover. My doctor explained that I had not been having a heart attack, however, but a panic attack. Ah. He recommended substantial changes in lifestyle, and maybe a little therapy. The next 25 years were the story of me learning to come to terms with Old Sharkie, and his tendency to come roaring out of the floor without warning, especially, it seemed, when travelling abroad.

If nothing else, I am much better company these many years later, and rarely if ever seek to upset or alienate anybody -- I know how tough it can be when your life story has, ah, "jumped the shark", and things need to change. People don't need pointless aggression from their friends. I also know how remarkably easy it is to mistake a panic attack for some kind of satori; we are all ridiculous in our vanity, in the end.

On the other hand, I know El Tiburón is always down there, figuratively at least, and have learned how not to be bothered by this. Some days you eat the shark, some days the shark eats you... A large part of the secret, I can divulge, is remembering to breathe at all times.

Well, That Was Weird

2011-05-14T17:20:00.003+01:00

Blogger went down on Thursday night and didn't come back until late yesterday. All posts and comments from Thursday night onwards were deleted and, despite Google / Blogger's claim to the contrary, mine are still missing. A shame, as I had spent time on Wednesday writing "El Tiburon, Part 2", and posted it on Thursday evening. Friday 13th. Hmm. I'm not going there.

Luckily, one of my Australian readers was able to rescue the text from his RSS feed and mail it to me -- many thanks, Leigh! I'll re-post it later on.

Anyone else lost posts? I hope it's not just me... Maybe it's time to consider a change of host? I hear Typepad is OK. Mind you, have you noticed how the blogging action has cooled off lately in favour of Twitter, or whatever it is the cool kids are doing now? Many of the blogs I used to follow seem to be defunct, posting once in a blue moon. Blogging is so 2006 ...

Curriculum

2011-05-08T12:44:00.006+01:00

I thought some of you might be interested to see this first rough-cut of a complete book sequence, based on the "university windows" images. To organise the sequence a bit, I have revived an old idea from my first series (which tracked a stream that runs through our campus) i.e. the three parts of the mediaeval university curriculum, the so-called "trivium" of Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric.

This is still very much a first draft -- anything could change, and probably will. However, I'm acutely aware that there are two great and opposing vices in this sort of project. The first is the boredom induced by familarity. That is, it's very easy to chuck out good but over-familar old stuff in favour of the excitement of novelty. The second is misplaced loyalty to things that are not working any more. It's tempting to continually rework the entire book around images (and combinations of images) that can seem set in stone.

The main thing I'm working on is the rhythm of the sequence. I want the viewer's eye to be carried along, intrigued and refreshed by a network of patterns of shape, size, colour and subject, and I also want this patterning to relate to the three part "music" of the overall theme. Ambitious, but... "Fail again, fail better", as we like to say.

Unsolicited Testimonials

2011-05-07T18:55:00.002+01:00

While I'm in the mood, here are a couple of good things to pass on:

The always interesting wood s lot blog has pointed out an interesting development:

Moscow film company Mosfilm has just made 50 Russian classics (including Tarkovsky’s Mirror, Solaris, and Andrei Rublev) available on YouTube in high definition. According to Yahoo News, Mosfilm has pledged to release five more films each week, all in HD with English subtitles, eventually bringing the total for the year to 200.

You can look over the whole list of currently available classics at Mosfilm’s YouTube channel.

I'm a huge fan of Tarkovsky, but have somehow never seen Andrei Rublev (I've got most of the others on DVD), so this is great news.

Next up: I've just taken delivery of a Pinwide from Wanderlust Cameras. I used to do a lot of pinhole stuff when I still used film -- I made myself a sweet medium-format pinhole camera out of an old bakelite Ilford Envoy camera -- but never quite got the results I was hoping for. The Pinwide is basically a Micro Four Thirds body cap modified with a pinhole, and I'm looking forward to giving it a try.

N.B. If you're thinking of getting one and will be using it on a Panasonic GF1, here's a tip: you need to go to the [CUSTOM MENU] and set [SHOOT W/O LENS] to ON. Otherwise you'll get an error "Please check that the lens is attached correctly" and won't be able to take a picture.

El Tiburón, part 1

2011-05-06T21:21:00.001+01:00

I don't know about you, but I rarely have profound, existential revelations in the privacy and comfort of my own home. On the other hand, I quite often have them when I'm travelling abroad. I don't know why this should be, but it can be a bit of a nuisance.

I was reflecting on this following Tony_C's reminder of our hitchhiking experiences as teenagers. In retrospect, it was an extraordinary thing, the way large numbers of young people -- actually, little more than children, boys and girls -- would take to the roads of Europe in a sort of mass rite of passage every summer. The queue of hitchhikers lined up on the slip-roads out of popular destinations like Amsterdam could be hundreds of yards long, back in the early 1970s.

In recent decades, I simply can't remember the last time I saw a hitchhiker in Europe, though it's true I've mainly driven in France and Spain, which were always regarded as hitchhiking limbos. As I've mentioned before, the numbers of aimless travellers were large enough to cause a logistical problem for local authorities on the main arterial routes, who would open schools and other public buildings as temporary "sleep ins" where clueless and vulnerable teens could spend the night on a hard floor and have access to basic facilities.

Familiar title, 1971 edition...
Et in Europa Douglas Adams

"Clueless and vulnerable" is perhaps an understatement. The thieves and predators of Europe must have been having some fat years, back then. Everyone has their horror stories, though I and my several travelling companions were probably just streetwise enough to avoid any serious problems. But, in many ways, the whole point of the exercise was to go in search of "anxiety as fun". A few brushes with the law or the seamier side of life, plus some memorable mishaps, added spice to what otherwise could be a rather dull preoccupation with getting lifts, food and finding a place to sleep.

I mention this, because it occurs to me, 40 years later, that maybe those years laid a foundation which has sometimes given a bit of a wobble to my later journeyings. At times, I realise now, I was both more scared and in more danger than I knew at the time. Being prodded awake at 3 a.m. with a night-stick and questioned aggressively by American MPs looking for deserters, as you try to snatch some sleep on a railway station platform, is not fun. Neither is losing your passport in Rome, or finding yourself alone and incapably drunk in a back street of a town you don't know in a country whose language you can't read, never mind speak.

Don't misunderstand me: I had more than enough compensating moments of fun, even exhilaration and excitement. During my Wanderjahre I was lucky enough to suffer nothing more disastrous than a few bruises, a few moments of pure panic, and a few more character-building humiliations than I'd expected. But perhaps the unconscious mind is wiser than our teenage bravado, and there is a delayed reaction to the suppressed, scarier side of this sort of adventure. You don't have to have stared at a loaded pistol (as happened to one friend of mine) to become a young adult subject to anxious aftershocks.

Which brings me to El Tiburón. But it's late, I'm tired, and I have an episode of West Wing to watch, so I'll do this one in two parts. (Did I say I've been watching West Wing on DVD? That's why posts have been a bit thin lately...)

California

2011-05-02T16:53:00.001+01:00

It's odd, how some photographs can persist in your mind. Often, I suppose, this is because they are expressive in a way that is personal and goes beyond any analysis. This one is an example: it has pretty much every "fault" a photo can have, and yet it's never far from the surface of my mind. I found myself thinking of it this afternoon, as I crawled around on the shed roof on my knees putting on fresh roofing felt. Perhaps some subliminal, bituminous smell is associated by my anosmic brain with the occasion of its taking.

When the kids were smaller, we used to drive over to Lyme Regis on the Saturday nearest to November 5th, because a large bonfire is lit on the beach next to The Cobb (the curving seawall made famous in the film of The French Lieutenant's Woman) and fireworks are set off, making a spectacular display. There's something magical about being "at the seaside" on a cold November night, and watching a municipal firework display reflected in the sea. There's also something deeply atavistic about being part of a large crowd in festive mood gathered around a huge fire.

The photo above was made using my Olympus Mju II -- a film camera that, in pre-digital days, was often my camera of choice as I settled into the role of "family man". I still have it: it fits in a jeans pocket, has a sweet f/2.8 lens, and delivers results easily good enough for any purpose I could imagine.

I can remember the occasion well. After sitting on the beach in the dark for a bit, we found ourselves a good spot to stand on the promenade, as the crowds began to gather. Just before the fireworks began, I looked away from The Cobb back up the beach, and saw the moon reflected in the sea and another distant bonfire, presumably on the beach at Charmouth. I took out the Mju, braced myself against the promenade rail, and took a literal shot in the dark. The exposure must have been something like two seconds.

I like the way the camera movement has "textured" the beach, and the overall graphical effect of the blurriness. The warm, unreal colours, too, work for me in a way I can't quite put my finger on. On one level, I suspect the scene reminds me of my first holiday without my parents, aged 16, camping with a schoolfriend in a tiny clifftop place on the Norfolk coast called California. We would walk the three miles down into Great Yarmouth, get drunk, and stagger back up the coast to our campsite, sometimes not making it and sleeping on the beach. I seem to remember it all looked a bit like that, warm, fuzzy and distinctly blurred...

N.B. I believe much of California has crumbled into the sea, since, which will give Steely Dan fans pause for thought (check out the lyrics of "My Old School" on the Countdown to Ecstasy album, still my benchmark of excellence, after all these years). I keep meaning to write to Donald Fagen.

Matchmaking

2011-04-29T19:08:00.002+01:00

While the world goes mad, swooning over the nonsense taking place in London today, I have nonetheless been grateful for (yet another) day off work, so I can get on with putting together a book of my "university walls & windows" photographs.

It's a severe discipline, editing a picture sequence. Matches which seemed made in heaven must be put asunder (sorry, for some reason marriage vocabulary is leaking into my brain from somewhere) in the interests of the wider whole. Some favourite images won't make the final cut, because they don't fit, or seem to send the sequence in unwanted directions -- an image can actually be too good or too self-contained for a book.

This is a screen shot of me using BookSmart this afternoon, the (free) Blurb book composition software (yes, I am still using Windows XP at home). It makes the whole business of viewing page spreads and sequences so much easier. I used to make 6"x4" prints and assemble them in a "landscape" slip-in photo album, and it was a lot of work. Worst of all, it worked against wanting ever to change your mind, once parts of the book were assembled -- the frustration of simply moving everything up a page was immense. It reminded me of work in the days before PCs (ever typed an office memo with carbon-paper copies? Those were not the days). With BookSmart you can tinker endlessly.

I have a pool of 400 plus photographs to draw on: of these, about 150 are in the "select" category, i.e. resized and saved as JPEG files, ready for use in BookSmart. As I think I've said before, I'm keen to keep the book to 80 pages (it will keep the price down) and am using paired, facing images. That means the final book will have something like 100 images in it, which is a lot.

Both of these are useful constraints. It's too easy to let a book grow into a baggy monster by simply adding more and more. Also, creating suitable pairs and then ordering them into a satisfying order demands a lot more attention to the flow and "narrative" of the book than the usual "blank page / photo / blank page / photo" arrangement, not least because the book's viewers will have no choice but to notice that I'm up to something a little more sophisticated than just shovelling the pictures in. I hope so, anyway. I suspect most photo-book users pay little or no attention to the ordering of the images, which is a pity, given the effort that will have gone into it.

So, I'm set for the extra long weekend, and almost hoping for rain. An odd stretch of days this, with royalist pomp and circumstance at one end and May Day marches at the other. I must re-read Guy Debord's "The Society of the Spectacle" sometime soon...

Other Arches Are Available

2011-04-27T23:13:00.003+01:00

There are other substantial bits of transport infrastructure near St. Catherine's Hill, in addition to the romantic abandoned viaduct. Two large underpasses go under the elevated motorway; one allows the B3335 to pass beneath, the other carries the River Itchen on its way to the old water meadows beyond.

They're less obviously photogenic, but that only makes them more interesting.

Home Art Gone

2011-04-23T14:11:00.005+01:00

Today is the day traditionally assigned as the day of William Shakespeare's birth in 1564, and also his death in 1616.

Fear no more the heat o' the sun;
Nor the furious winter's rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages;
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

Fear no more the frown o' the great,
Thou art past the tyrant's stroke;
Care no more to clothe and eat;
To thee the reed is as the oak;
The sceptre, learning, physic, must
All follow this, and come to dust.

Fear no more the lightning-flash,
Nor the all-dreaded thunder-stone;
Fear not slander, censure rash;
Thou hast finish'd joy and moan:
All lovers young, all lovers must
Consign to thee, and come to dust.

No exorciser harm thee!
Nor no witchcraft charm thee!
Ghost unlaid forbear thee!
Nothing ill come near thee!
Quiet consummation have;
And renowned be thy grave!

Cymbeline, Act 4, scene ii (for DJO)

Good Friday

2011-04-22T16:55:00.003+01:00

I live on the mountain
no one knows.
Among white clouds
eternal perfect silence

Han Shan, Cold Mountain Poems, no. XCV (trans. J.P. Seaton)

When men see Han-shan
They all say he's crazy
And not much to look at
Dressed in rags and hides.
They don't get what I say
& I don't talk their language.
All I can say to those I meet:
"Try and make it to Cold Mountain."

Gary Snyder, Cold Mountain Poems 24

Hot Tub In The Rain

2011-04-20T14:52:00.000+01:00

I have mentioned that we have been returning annually at Easter to the Welsh Borders for over thirty years. Quite a lot has changed in that time.

In the 1970s this upland area was, despite -- or perhaps because of -- its proximity to the lush English borderlands of Herefordshire and Shropshire, isolated and surprisingly "backward". Tumble-down farms without electricity, and ancient, muddy men in string-tied coats who had retreated to the one habitable room in their timber-framed farmhouse were commonplace. If you have read Bruce Chatwin's novel On The Black Hill, you will know how it was. There was a strong sense of a pre-WW2 Britain.

Indeed, if you have an affinity for such things, you can still sense a continuity with the standing stones, burial mounds and hillforts that litter the place, often used as the basis of improvised shelters for livestock, combined with rattling sheets of corrugated iron and flapping feed bags. It is a place where History telescopes in and out quite dramatically.

In those days, the many second-hand shops in towns like Llandrindod Wells and Presteigne were Aladdin's Caves of Victoriana. As farmers died and farms were cleared, large quantities of crockery, ornaments, books and furniture emerged into daylight, and were carted off to the nearest market town. My partner having a weakness for Victorian plates, and me having a weakness for books and bizarrerie, we spent many happy rainy-day hours rummaging through the heaped boxes and bookshelves in damp back rooms.

In the intervening years, much has changed. Things like quad-bikes and EEC grants have rejuvenated hill-farming, and many younger farmers are bravely trying to make a business out of what is, at heart, a way of life. But the main agent of change has been a steady influx of incomers, especially those in pursuit of alternative lifestyles and "quality of life". For all its remoteness, it has always been remarkably easy to buy organic wholemeal bread and even tofu in the Welsh Marches. Galleries, craft shops, meditation centres and the like are easier to find than a Post Office. Large properties with land have been relatively cheap, and communities of sophisticated, like-minded settlers are scattered everywhere.

This last week, we had an odd encounter. The Prof and I drove out to a pretty valley in the hills, where we intended to do a modest circular walk in the rain. Now, though we've walked for recreation most of our lives, we have never been "lifestyle" walkers, and have always found amusement in the people you encounter on long-distance paths like Offa's Dyke, kitted out with matching cagoules, gaiters, and those preposterous ski-pole type sticks people have started using, often with one in each hand. To be honest, we probably look more like a couple of tramps, in our battered wellies and improvised multiple layers of clothing, than public-sector professionals on vacation.

As we came out of a muddy field onto a track, we noticed up ahead that a farmer had recently built a little cluster of some truly ugly, wooden chalet-style holiday lets in a field. As we came nearer, I could hear music, which gradually resolved itself into the unmistakable, plangent sound of Adele singing "Someone Like You". And then, as we passed one of the little chalets, we saw something amazing: a naked couple sat in a garden hot tub, drinking wine with the stereo pointed out of the window, as the gentle rain fell and the sheep grazed.

I'm no Martin Parr, so I didn't have the nerve to get the truly brilliant shot that lay before me. Besides, we were giggling so much I doubt I could have held the camera steady (MP, of course, would have blasted the scene with his flash, then pretended to be looking up at the hillside). Another one that got away. Ah, well.

Ones That Get Away

2011-04-17T22:48:00.003+01:00

It was good weather for colour photography last week -- overcast with occasional light rain and occasional soft sunshine, just right -- and I got some "pleasing but predictable" images. Hey, I was on holiday, not working for National Geographic, get off my case!

But if I ever needed a demonstration of why I'm not working for National Geographic, I got two. The first happened as we were walking across a field just below the brow of a hill. My hearing is not great these days, but I started to hear a strange pulsing noise, something like a cross between a hairdryer and an old-fashioned lawn mower. Just as I formed the words "What the...?" in my mind, a huge prop-driven aircraft came up from behind the hill, about 50 feet off the ground, and travelling at the speed of a fast bicycle. It was surreal.

The plane was clearly military, painted grey all over, and completely unmarked. No insignia, no numbers, no nothing. It was also very quiet, given it passed close enough overhead for me to count the rivets (that's a figure of speech -- I didn't actually count the rivets). We just watched open-mouthed as it hugged the ground and passed slowly into the next valley. We are used to jet aircraft screaming out of nowhere, but this was new; it was like something out of a Miyazaki anime movie.

On reflection, it was probably the SAS rehearsing their next humiliating encounter with pitchfork-wielding yokels. They were probably lost and looking for a phone booth (does their brand need urgent repositioning, or what?). But, more importantly: did I take a photograph? Did it even occur to me to get a camera out? Don't ask.

The second demonstration came at the end of a walk, in those final minutes as you amble back to the car, and start to contemplate a nice cup of tea. We passed through a churchyard, and I thought some of the monuments, especially the angels seen from behind, looked interesting against the landscape. I was tired, and took a couple of perfunctory snaps, without even checking the camera settings. Only today, as I go through the haul, do I realise how close I came to something really interesting. But: aperture wide open, shutter speed slow, focus off... All I have are some blurry, "what if..." pictures. Maybe next time.