Turnstable Country

As a birthday celebration for my partner, we went up to London last weekend to see the exhibition Turner & Constable: Rivals & Originals at Tate Britain with our two children and their partners. I don't know whether it's a symptom of advancing age or an impatience with the desire of our national art institutions to pack 'em in (both pictures and visitors) as often as possible, but I have to say I am not very keen on these so-called "blockbuster" exhibitions. As I wrote in the post Go Van Gogh, following a visit to the National Gallery's Van Gogh: Poets & Lovers show:

All blockbuster exhibitions are exhausting, I find, particularly when they feature an overwhelming quantity of work by just one blockbuster artist, some of whose blockbuster pictures are so familiar – from posters, coasters, postcards, tea towels, key fobs, fridge magnets, and whatever other gift-shop tat can carry a reproduction of an image – that they have ceased being works of art and become a blockbuster brand, even recognisable by people who don't care about "art" at all. To be honest, I'd rather come across a few deservedly famous paintings when walking through a gallery, like bumping into old friends on the street, than navigate whole roomfuls of major and minor masterpieces which, however thoughtfully curated, is always more like attending a reunion or a wedding, where the meeting-with-people quotient of a "high-functioning introvert" like me gets stretched a little thin. "Hello, 'Trunk of a Tree', I believe you know 'View of Arles', we were at Montmajour together in 1888? Oh, do excuse me, but I've just spotted 'The Yellow House' talking to 'The Bedroom', and I must have a word..."

I mean, I enjoy a top-quality Constable or Turner as much as anybody, but to trudge through room after room after room of not dissimilar paintings, a good 80% of which fall somewhat short of "masterpiece" status, eventually becomes a negative experience. The first couple of rooms always feel revelatory – Good grief, Turner was sixteen when he painted that? – but thereafter most shows are bogged down by the curatorial desire to impose some thematic orchestration, in this case to construct a parallel narrative out of the lives of what were, in the end, two rather different professional painters trying to make a living in a very different world to ours. In those days you were entirely dependent on sales and patronage: there were no grants or lucrative prizes to reward your personal artistic "genius", not even for turning the lights on and off, or letting gallery visitors remove your clothes with scissors.

In the end, it can feel a bit too much like being trapped inside a catalogue raisonné, and I, at least, always find myself looking for small visual pleasures as a relief from the, um, bigger picture superimposed by the curators. Which Constable paintings show swallows skimming the water? for example. Or amusing trivia: I enjoyed the name of this particular donor, for example:

E. Farquhar Buzzard... Now there's someone who must have had some character-building experiences at school. Or, look, here's yer actual John Constable's collapsible sketching chair on a plinth:

Very nice... Don't think I wasn't tempted to hop up and give it a try.

Which is not to say that the exhibition didn't have an effect on me. On a very brief visit to Mottisfont Abbey on Saturday I seemed to be walking through a landscape of just the sort conjured up on canvas by the painters of that time. The light and the clouds were exhilarating – all four of these photographs were taken within a single 20 minute period – even though the meadows were very marshy underfoot, and almost impassable in places. What wouldn't the likes of Turner or Constable have given for a device that could sketch a view with such fidelity in just 1/200th of a second? But then, what wouldn't you give to be able to sketch like a Constable or a Turner?

It is an Ancient Blogger

So, Christmas and New Year...

Fun as it is to see it enacted on a primary-school stage, not many of us in these sceptical days – surely even those of a "Christian heritage" – put much credence in the enchanting but somewhat dubious Christian origin story. After all, its more credibility-stretching aspects must rely, at best, on the sole testimony of mother Mary, stand-in dad Joseph having quietly and somewhat mysteriously dropped out of the narrative along the way (what, you'd never noticed that? So much for "patriarchy"...). Angels, too, seem to have become even more scarce than shepherds in subsequent centuries, which is a pity, I think. [1]

I dare say the theologians have neat, hand-wavy explanations to tidy all this up to their own satisfaction, but they have never seemed particularly inclined to share these with the rest of us: too difficult and too profound, no doubt, for their simple-minded flock of metaphorical sheep to grasp (that would be us). Or perhaps rather too transparently aligned with Old Testament messianic prophesies and cunningly superimposed onto long-standing pagan winter festivities (see my post It's All About the Children).

More prosaically, of course, not everyone on the planet regards January 1st as the start of a New Year, or even as "January 1st", but let's not get into that. Packaging the two events together works for us, not least because such propitiously-timed seasonal goings-on have been going on in these light-starved regions forever. Come back, sun, please come back! Oh, all right, since you ask so nicely... Hooray! Party Time! For school-kids, working stiffs and wage-slaves (that's most of the population, I'd imagine) it's a welcome break from the workaday norm, a week or two studded with twinkling lights, seasonal treats, and officially-endorsed occasions for anticipation and celebration.

It has been becoming a much more private and secular holiday over the years, too. It has been a while since any kids came round to knock on our door "carolling", even in its vestigial form, i.e. waiting for the door to open and launching into a truncated, 10-second chorus of "We wish you a merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year!" Unlike Hallowe'en's trickle treating [2], I don't think either carollers or most carollees had much idea of what was supposed to happen next, which led to nothing more than a series of awkward doorstep moments. Even the Rotarians seem to have given up trawling the streets around here with their canned carols blaring from a van, and rattling their collecting buckets. I don't miss it; "Silent Night", indeed.

Speaking purely personally, Christmas lost most of its charm for me around age 11 when my sister – eight years older than me – left home under the very traditional shadow of a hastily-arranged marriage. My parents seemed suddenly to fade into a perpetually-tired middle-age but then, and worse from my p-o-v, quickly settled into the role of doting grandparents. Christmas from then on rarely took place under our own roof, and I found I had been handed a minor walk-on part as "churlish teenage uncle". So I would take every opportunity to escape and begin the study of the ways of delinquency with like-minded friends, hanging about in various dark and frosty corners. Which was actually a lot more "magical" than Christmas, although not without risk: I was careful and I was lucky, but a few of us didn't make it out of our teens alive or without the unwanted gift of a brand-new criminal record. 

Having your own children revives the fun of Christmas, of course, but brings with it the stress of actually having to make the fun happen. It takes some kind of domestic saint to prepare a celebratory meal with unaccustomed ingredients and for an unusual quantity of diners, including at least one vegetarian and/or other dietary restrictions, or to take joy in ensuring that the right gifts have been bought and that an acceptable balance of generosity between recipients has been achieved. The whole thing is a nightmare of potentially disastrous pitfalls: a turkey that has resisted roasting for hours beyond the calculated timing, let's say, and served up by an angry cook far later than scheduled to a sullen and sarcastic family – accompanied by overcooked, warmed-up vegetables – is nobody's idea of a festive feast. Or so I'm told. 

Sadly, any compensatory seasonal sparkle does begin to fade once your children are no longer lighting up the house with the exuberant wattage of their excitement, and really just want to escape and study the ways of delinquency with their like-minded friends. Nothing brings on the indigestion quite like lying awake at 3 a.m., wondering when your teenage daughter will stagger home from a night out clubbing, all the while mentally apologising to your deceased parents for having done much the same to them. Or, ah, so I imagine.

Since those anxious years, for us Christmas has evolved into a more relaxed family get-together on neutral ground: generally a rented cottage near the sea in Dorset, big enough to let the different folks indulge their different strokes – it is frankly impossible to read in the same room as whooping kidults playing Mario Kart – but cosy enough for congenial gatherings around the table or a log-burning stove. From there, the two of us will generally retreat to our Bristol flat for a quiet New Year, returning here to Southampton before Twelfth Night, like Tudor aristocrats. Which reminds me of one of those strange marginal annotations Coleridge added to the 1817 edition of The Ancient Mariner, from Part IV:

In his loneliness and fixedness he yearneth towards the journeying Moon, and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward; and every where the blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest, and their native country and their own natural homes, which they enter unannounced, as lords that are certainly expected and yet there is a silent joy at their arrival.

No servants await us at home, of course, but we have their 21st century equivalents: there's milk on the doorstep, the heating is on, there's food in the freezer, and the Wi-Fi leaps eagerly back into action. As does the Ancient Blogger:

I pass, like night, from land to land;
I have strange power of speech;
That moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me:
To him my tale I teach.

 

1. My partner's niece, having grown up in the distinctly cross-cultural environment of Bristol, as a child referred to Muslim women in hijabs or other head coverings as "shepherds", due to their resemblance to children dressed up for a Nativity play. I know! I'm afraid it's a coinage too cute not to adopt, at least safely in private.

2. Another cute and useful coinage by a neighbour's small son.

Raking

I really meant to put up some of the photographs I took over our Christmas / New Year break today but, unexpectedly, it SNOWED here during the night on Sunday – a whole five millimetres I'd guess, easily enough to bring the entire county to a standstill – and Monday was a classic blue-skies freezing-cold winter day, so... What else was I going to do?

Although, actually, once I'd got over the novelty of the sugar coating on the pots and frozen water dishes in the back garden (sorry about that, thirsty birds, but the hammer just bounced off!), it was the brilliant raking light that kept me outside all afternoon. There is something exhilarating about the sensory contradiction between bright sunshine and temperatures hovering around 0° C. It's a sort of natural sauna effect that is probably deeply boring to those living in frostier latitudes, but down here on the south coast is a rare treat. I did keep all my clothes on, though.

Good Bones

Strange, isn't it, how things can "go viral" and yet pass you by. But then, not everybody catches a real virus like flu either, even in an epidemic. An inoculation against the latter helps, of course – I had mine months ago – and keeping well away from social media is a sensible measure if you don't want to get coughed over by me-too merchants anxious to share whatever it is they've just caught off the web.

So when I came across a poem recently, "Good Bones", looking for something quite different, I was surprised to learn, according to Wikipedia, that:

Smith's poem "Good Bones", originally published in the journal Waxwing in June 2016, has been widely circulated on social media and read by an estimated one million people. A Wall Street Journal story in May 2020 described it as "keeping the realities of life's ugliness from young innocents" and noted that the poem has gone viral after catastrophes such as the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting, the May 2017 suicide bombing at a concert in Manchester, England, the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas, and the coronavirus pandemic. PRI called it "the official poem of 2016".

Who knew? Maybe you did. Certainly, not many poems get that sort of distribution; most poets would kill for 1% of that million. In fact, they'd give it serious consideration for just 0.1%. Here it is:

Good Bones, by Maggie Smith

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

It's a good poem, although it could be better – you  might say it has the bones of a very good poem – but I can see how the way it wears its world-weary heart rather rhetorically on its sleeve meets a certain need that would cause it to go viral. I like those opening five lines best, a little reminiscent of Elizabeth Bishop with an astringent dash of Ashbery, and the subsequent repetitions of "though I keep this from my children" are nicely-judged and will speak to any parent who put some youthful effort into having "a past" worthy of a little evasiveness.

There's an awful lot of self-styled poetry out there on the Web; most of it that I have seen (which is not much, admittedly, not even anywhere near that homicide-worthy 0.1%) being little more than some "beautiful" or "sad" sentiments broken up into lines without rhyme, rhythm, or reason. It may be unfair, but take the line breaks away, even from a poem like "Good Bones", and you're often left with what amounts to a passage of heightened prose or perhaps a soliloquy from a play. Although it's interesting how, in the case of "Good Bones", the repetition of "I keep this from my children" now becomes rather odd, perhaps a sign that reads, CAUTION! POET AT WORK. Here it is again:

Life is short, though I keep this from my children. Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways, a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate, though I keep this from my children. For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird. For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world is at least half terrible, and for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you, though I keep this from my children. I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.

The genre known as "found poetry" makes the opposite move, of course: by inserting line breaks into prose text it can be rendered into poetry, or at least something very like it. I have always been susceptible to accidental poetry myself, ever since stumbling across the haiku-adjacent mantra "There is no ozone by the sea, only the smell of rotting seaweed" in Clyne and Williams' General School Chemistry at the age of 15, followed a few years later by the discovery of the "Accidents" section in Palmer's Index to the Times (e.g. "Henry Ford, Sawn Asunder by a Circular Saw at St. Pancras Steam Saw Mills"); see my post Quiet Fun.

Then there's the form known as the "cento" (pronounced "sento", not "chento", apparently, something I can never remember [1]), basically a poem made up entirely of lines lifted from other poems. There's a good one, "99 Poems", in Stephen Knight's volume The Prince of Wails (downloadable PDF here):

The last poem, called "99 Poems" ... is a collection of 99 lines borrowed with great affection from elegies and epitaphs and maybe other sources too, perhaps film, across the centuries, and arranged by first letter from A to Y, starting with the beautiful line (possibly Thomas Hardy?) – A face that, though in shadow, still appears – and ending with the simple physicality of Your hands. Both images – the dead who re-appear and the father’s hand which holds his child’s – recur throughout the book, gaining power along the way. And it can be no accident that this last poem ends on the letter Y, not Z: there is no final letter in the alphabet of this wonderfully haunting collection.
Chris Beckett, londongrip.co.uk

But for me the ultimate example of finding poetry where none was intended is A Humument by Tom Phillips, in which an entire novel, A Human Document by W.H. Mallock, is repeatedly ransacked for a secret narrative hidden among the Victorian verbiage, exposed by burying the rest of the page in decorative art, and linking islands of text together by following typographical "rivers":

If you've never come across A Humument, then I recommend that you get hold of a copy of at least one of the "trade" editions published by Thames & Hudson (there have been six such editions since 1980, all different) before they become collectors-only items following Tom's death in 2022. And if anyone out there has a copy of the mustard-yellow jacketed third (a.k.a. "second revised") edition they'd be willing to sell me – it's the only one I haven't got – I'd be very happy to hear from you.

In a way, you might even see found poetry as an analogue of "art" photography (hey, "only connect..."). How? Well, you find poetic little jewels lurking among the prose of the world, isolate them in your frame and, in the case of a book or sequence, link and present them as a new, coherent whole that generates a new, greater significance. Or not. Obviously, most people do not use photographs in their lives as an art medium, of course, any more than they use a pencil or, indeed, language itself that way. Rather, they see and use photographs as unique records of something important – family, friends, holidays – or as stimulation – a gaudy sunset, adorable cats and dogs, or (so I'm told) scantily-dressed young people. In a very similar way, certain popular poems are used not for literary purposes, but to add a little sprinkling of dignity, or as a stimulus for tears or laughter, at special occasions. A poem is a pre-packaged, high-impact selection of words that, like a ready-meal, can save a lot of effort at a difficult time. Of those million-plus readers of "Good Bones", I wonder how many went on to see what else Maggie Smith had written?

In the same way, W.H. Auden's poem now generally known as "Funeral Blues" has had an afterlife similar to "Good Bones" as a reading at funerals, due entirely to its use in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral. So although to speak of "popular poetry" is something of a contradiction in terms, it is instructive to look at the results of a BBC poll of the 100 most popular poems in Britain, published as an anthology in 1996. The only list of the book's contents I could find is here. "Funeral Blues" is already in with a bullet at no. 19 (still with the title "Twelve Songs IX"), just two years after the release of Four Weddings. But 1996 is a long time ago now, and I'd be surprised if many younger folk today have ever come across most of those poems, not least those that were, in my day, primary-school poetry favourites such as Walter de la Mare's "The Listeners", or even anthology perennials and "poetry corner" regulars like, well, pretty much everything else on that list. I get the impression that most of those surveyed had probably encountered the same few anthologised poems in the course of their school studies – the time when poems make the most lasting impression – but never actually became poetry readers.

Of those few that did become poetry readers, of course, their choices of "favourites" will have been so diverse as to render them statistically insignificant in a poll like this. Such is the nature of statistics, if not of poetry-reading. To anyone for whom poetry is as important a part of their life as, say, music, this sort of ranking is completely beside the point. To resort to this sort of off-the-peg Big Occasion poem is to regard poetry as something rather like the empty church visited in Larkin's poem "Church Going": a place where "all our compulsions meet, / Are recognised, and robed as destinies". Or perhaps even like the football World Cup, when everyone suddenly becomes an armchair pundit for a few high-stakes games every four years, and then moves on; a very different thing from following your team from the stands through every wet weekend of yet another disappointing season.

But ours is a game of two halves, and this game
the semi they went on to lose; from here
it’s all down, from the First to the foot of the Second,
McGrandle, Visocchi and Spankie detaching
like bubbles to speed the descent into pitch-sharing,
pay-cuts, pawned silver, the Highland Division,
the absolute sitters ballooned over open goals,
the dismal nutmegs, the scores so obscene
no respectable journal will print them; though one day
Farquhar’s spectacular bicycle-kick
will earn him a name-check in Monday’s obituaries.

Don Paterson, from "Nil Nil"

So, seeing as we've just had a Big Occasion, here, once again, is  a strong candidate for my own favourite Christmas poem, by Thomas Hardy:

The Oxen

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.

“Now they are all on their knees,”

An elder said as we sat in a flock

By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where

They dwelt in their strawy pen,

Nor did it occur to one of us there

To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave

In these years! Yet, I feel,

If someone said on Christmas Eve,

“Come; see the oxen kneel,

“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb

Our childhood used to know,”

I should go with him in the gloom,

Hoping it might be so. 

(Published in The Times, Christmas Eve 1915)

In the end, there's virality, there's popularity, and then there is longevity. A work of art like a poem or a novel might achieve all three, probably at different stages in its life, but in the end it's only longevity – a high score in the Test of Time and a certain imperishable quality – that counts. Who now would ever have heard of W.H. Mallock if it were not for Tom Phillips' appropriation? Will anyone have heard of Tom Phillips, either, 100 years from now? We'll never know. But we can be pretty sure that "good bones" alone or a blunt appeal to our emotions will never be enough to ensure the longevity of a work of art, and these are the chief characteristics of all those perfectly decent poems and pictures piling up in the wastepaper baskets of history.

1. It is pronounced "sento" because the name is derived from a Greek word for a patchwork. Why it is not therefore "kento" I don't know. Worse, being derived from Greek, some people claim its plural is not "centos" but "centones". Pedants! Do they also refer to several octopuses as "octopodes", I wonder? The cento is hardly one of the mainstream poetic forms, though, and gets taken out of the versifier's wardrobe even less frequently than some virtuoso straitjacket like the villanelle.

The Parable of the Poisoned Arrow

In a very early post (Don't Ask Me, 2009) I wrote:

I have always liked the idea that the Buddha regarded certain questions as unanswerable: the so-called "Undetermined Questions." That is, when asked these particular questions, he simply said ... nothing. Depending on which tradition you listen to, there are either fourteen or ten such questions, but to a hyper-logical Western mind there seem at root really only to be four questions, which have been expanded -- in what seems like an anticipation of the user-satisfaction questionnaire -- by the addition of supplementaries, so that "Is the world finite? Or not? Or both? Or neither?" counts as four questions. If you added "At weekends?" I suppose there'd be five.

But the core questions are:

Is the world eternal?
Is the world finite?
Is the self identical with the body?
Does an enlightened being exist after death?

All good questions, but you can see why the Buddha might choose to stare meaningfully into the distance at that point. In many ways, this is a more helpful response than the wheel-spinning scholasticism of the Christian church grappling with such questions, or the linguistic nit-picking of philosophers in later centuries. It's not quite "Don't know, don't care" but you can imagine a certain amount of serene finger-tapping going on whenever those questions came up.

Now, I'm no scholar (I'm also not a Buddhist), so it has taken me 16 years finally to come across The Parable of the Poisoned Arrow.

It seems a certain monk, Malunkyaputta, found this silence deeply annoying. You can imagine him lying awake at night, fuming: Why doesn't he just answer the fucking questions? He either knows the answers, or this is all a con-job, and he's not the Buddha, just a very naughty boy! I know I shouldn't, but tomorrow I'm going to insist that he gives me some answers, or I'm outta here! So, stepping up as a convenient straight man for another Great Teaching, he did.

Siddhartha "Buddha" Gautama's answer goes on a bit – time was not a pressing matter in the serene days before mobile phones or even clocks and watches – and in its descent into ever finer detail you can detect a certain sarcasm, I think. You can read the whole thing here on Wikipedia, in what I trust is an accurate translation. But, essentially, what he is saying is: Hey, you! You've been shot with a poisoned arrow! Do you really want to know all this irrelevant stuff – the name, rank, and number of the guy who shot it, blah blah blah, all the way down to the brand of bowstring he uses – or do you want me to pull the damn thing out and treat the wound? Your choice! Die of pointless time-consuming curiosity, or be saved. Time is running out, idiot!

To repeat what I said in that earlier post: in many ways, this is a more helpful response than the wheel-spinning scholasticism of the Christian church grappling with such questions, or the linguistic and metaphysical nit-picking of philosophers in later centuries. "So, is this "Jumping Jesus!" you cried out to when the arrow hit you of the same substance or of a similar substance to God?" "Can an arrow exist without being perceived in someone's mind (or, in your case, arm)?" Who knows? Who cares? Get this bloody arrow out of me! It hurts! Professionally speaking, you might say this is religion as ER surgery, rather than cloistered theology. And all the better for that, too.

All of which somehow puts me in mind of this beautiful song by K.D. Lang, "Simple", from her album Hymns of the 49th Parallel:

"Love will not elude us: love is simple..." Now there's a New Year's message to take to heart.

So, as the final day of the year approaches I wish you all the best for 2026! But do watch out for those poisoned arrows, real or metaphorical. Should you get hit by one  – it happens – follow Dr. Siddhartha's advice and don't waste time wondering about the who, what, when, or why: just accept that "life hurts", as Doc S. likes to say, and get it seen to right away. Keep it simple.

Tranquility

Two companionable crows admire the sunset

Ah, tranquility! A state much sought after, and best achieved without the aid of tranquilisers if you can manage it; there's lots of tranquility outside, if you just go and look. But, of course, you must do whatever you need to do, in order to stabilise your boat in rough seas, walk that tightrope, keep those plates spinning, or whatever your metaphor of choice is, especially at this stressful time of year. Why do we do this to ourselves?

So do go easy on the alcohol an' that if you're no longer young and stupid: I know it can take some of us a very long time to figure out that they really don't help as much as we think in the tranquility stakes. Actually, my advice is to go easy especially if you're young and stupid. I don't know about you, but I am so grateful mobile phones with video capability were still a Sci Fi fantasy in my younger days. It really doesn't bear thinking about. It's bad enough being remembered as an idiot, but for there to be irrefutable evidence...

So, look, if you're in need of calming down just now, I think I can help. Here's one of the best Joni Mitchell covers I know, Madeleine Peyroux and K.D. Lang duetting on a very laid-back version of "River". Give it a go:

Or how about this fado-ised version of "A Case of You" by Ana Moura:

Tranquility restored, I hope, even if by means of two beautifully sad songs.

BTW, that unusual instrument doing the dulcimer fills from Mitchell's original is a "Portuguese guitar" (as opposed to a Portuguese guitar), a sort of hybrid of a 12-string guitar and a mandolin, and a descendant of the mediaeval cittern as used by troubadours, themselves the distant forebears of singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell. That curious fan-like cluster of rods at the end of the fingerboard are actually the tuners for the twelve strings, an 18th century innovation known (in Britain, anyway) as Preston tuners.

OTOH, if you've overdone the tranquilising and what you're in need of is a bit of livening up, why not give this a try: OK Santa, a contender for Best Christmas Single Ever if ever there was one – admittedly never a strong pool of candidates – from someone definitely in need of a little tranquilising himself, probably with a dart gun from a safe distance, John Otway. Warning: you may not be able to get that catchy tune out of your head for days. And, yes, that is a Sinclair C5.

My annual "book club" post has been taking a break for the past few years, as I have been attempting to moderate my book-buying habit, but I've had a bit of a relapse this year. I'm not going to own up to how big a relapse, so I'll simply recommend these two:

Starlings, by Jem Southam (raft, 2025)

Longer-term readers will know that I have admired the work of Jem Southam for many years, and indeed have been on Christmas-card terms with the great man (simper...) since doing a workshop at Duckspool in 1995. I confess my heart sank a little when this volume was announced: the spectacle of so-called murmurations of starlings gathering to roost has become something of a photographic cliché in recent years, but – having seen the work collected as Four Winters when it was exhibited in Bristol's RWA in January 2023 – it seemed likely he might have something of his own to add.

Indeed, as expected, the photographs in this book, all from one dark December afternoon in 2023, share a strong family resemblance to that body of work: on the edge of darkness starlings gather, flicker over sombre reed beds, and settle for the night. Southam is not one for the jaw-dropping image, unless your jaw is dropped by subtlety of tone, mood, and composition. So, rather than yet another series of spectacular murmuration displays, this is a record of an atmosphere, that same dim, frigid light that was captured so well in Four Winters.

But a really good book is always more than its contents: it is a physical object to be held in the hands, and so its design and materials matter. This one (I have the soft-bound version) has got it just right: large, but not too large to handle (27.5 x 32.5 cm), tactile, and beautifully designed and printed. Unlike far too many photo-books these days, it demands to be held and admired as an object of delight. Highly recommended.

Selfie time! Jem Southam is the one on the right

Near Dark, by Chris Dorley-Brown (Dewi Lewis, 2025)

You may recall that back in June I was encouraging you to sign up for the Kickstarter campaign to fund the publication of this book by Chris Dorley-Brown. It finally arrived in November, and was worth the wait. In a way, it's an urban version of Southam's crepuscular work: London streets caught entre chien et loup (between dog and wolf) as the French say, at that in-between time when the day relaxes, darkness gathers, and the lights come on (cue Angelo Badalamenti's theme music to Twin Peaks). It has always been a favourite time of day for me, a time for waiting for buses, after-work shopping, and anticipation of the evening to come, and Dorley-Brown renders it superbly with the granular detail only a large-format camera can capture.

If you get hold of a copy (which you should) you will notice my name and that of at least one reader of this blog listed in the back as Kickstarter contributors. Well done us! As my special edition "extra" I chose the print of the Regent Street angel:

Regent Street 2021, Chris Dorley-Brown

We'll soon be going away for our customary end of year procession around south-west England: Southampton to Dorset for Christmas, then Bristol for New Year. Sadly (for us), our favoured Dorset rental has now gone off the market – people may actually be living in it, which is good, really, I suppose – so we'll be trying out another one. Who knows, it might be even better! We will have wi-fi, so I might post the odd seasonal reflection or photograph, but if I get very tranquil I also might not.

So thank you for continuing to read this blog, especially those of you who take the trouble to comment, whether publicly on the blog or privately via email (although not you, you annoying fake-comment spammers, who seem to be slipping through a lot more lately), and let's hope for a better, more peaceful year in 2026! Even if that ████ Trump will want to take the credit for it... (oops, there goes my US visa!).

A reminder of spring, for those who like that sort of thing.

(our back garden, March 2025)

The Last Time I Saw Richard

Alice Neel, Richard, 1980

 Oil on canvas. 111.8 x 76.2 cm, 44 x 30 in

⁣ © The Estate of Alice Neel.

The bright white light that falls from above directly on to his face and chest, the Mediterranean blue polo shirt and the stripey seat back, are all evocative of the positive mood that pervades Neel’s magnificent image of Richard… all around his form she paints a bright blue outline, like an electric blue current, containing him, protecting him, emphasising his presence in the world.

Dr Minna Moore Ede, quoted from the publication Alice Neel: There's Still Another I See, 2022

Really? OK, Mike, take a deep breath. Count to ten. Exhale... Maybe do it once or twice more.

So... I have borrowed the painting above, and the quote, from an email sent to me by the Victoria Miro Gallery, of London and Venice, announcing their participation in an upscale art market that goes by the name Art Basel Miami Beach (now there's a confusing car-crash of locations). This painting is prominently displayed as the lead image in the mail, so is clearly intended as a statement of the gallery's values, prestige, and sophistication. Alice Neel (1900-1984) is clearly having a (very) posthumous moment.

Now, setting aside any biographical stuff about Neel's career and troubled life (read the Wikipedia page if you want to know about that), is this indeed a "magnificent image", as declared by Dr. Minna Moore Ede? Or is it even a competent painting? Perhaps what would appear to be its cartoonish distortions of anatomical proportions, and disregard for conventions of paint handling and composition are actually precisely the features that make it magnificent?

As I'm sure you know, I am a scrupulously fair-minded man, who likes to give the new and strange a chance to sink in and do its thing, but I have to say, so far, I don't get it. I admit I have never understood the late style of Philip Guston, either, who seems to lie somewhere at the the origins of this particular approach to painting, which (if my grasp of the art-historical chain of influence is correct) has also led us to the deliberately "naive" work of highly-regarded contemporary artists like Eileen Cooper, Rose Wylie, Chantal Joffe, or Humphrey Ocean, Royal Academicians all. There is clearly something going on here – a rejection of the elitism of talent and mere skill? An expression of the "female gaze"? A celebration of the primary-school art-room look? – but I don't know what it is. Call me Mr. Jones. Actually, don't: he's coming up next.

Rose Wylie exhibition "Let It Settle", Gallery at Windsor 2020.

Let it sink in...

For me, Rose Wylie is something of a test case. Here's the opening paragraph of a review of a solo exhibition of her work in 2017:

This is how Rose Wylie paints the sun. She does a big yellow circle. Then she adds straight yellow lines around it. Underneath she does a couple of palm trees that are brown sticks with dollops of green on top. On the sea, she adds an outline of a ship with black smoke puffing out of it.

The teacher gave her a gold star and pinned it on the classroom wall. His name is Mr Hans-Ulrich Obrist and the nursery is called the Serpentine Sackler Gallery. The exhibition is called Quack Quack. Oh, and young Rose is 83.

Yup. That's about it. The reviewer, Jonathan Jones, should probably also have mentioned that her paintings are not "dolloped" onto a sheet of sugar paper, but fill enormous wall-sized canvases. But wait, here are two of his final paragraphs: 

Wylie is in no danger of the workhouse as her paintings are highly collectable. Several works here have been lent by wealthy Russians. Is it all a bit of a scam? She is not genuinely naive, let alone a child. She went to art college. Is this a terribly sophisticated put-on?

Anywhere but Britain, I might think so. Yet the sad truth is that we still need the shit kicking out of our staid, conservative artistic tradition. For all the Turner prizes and the Grayson Perry TV shows, when it comes to painting we still queue up to admire the correctly painted swimming pools of Mr Hockney. We still expect painters to do a proper, hard-working job.

Jonathan Jones, Guardian 29/11/17

I'm not a fan of the shit-kicking Mr. Jones, who strikes me as one of those commentators who thrive on a rather superficial and bitchy contrarianism. I'm not sure why he dislikes Hockney so much – lately more than willing to resort to this primary-school aesthetic himself – and I note that he's also a major fanboy of Tracey Emin (not sure whether he has reviewed the tea-towels?). So let's take another deep breath and have a closer look at all this.

You can see his point about the suspicion that it's all "a terribly sophisticated put-on", even if he doesn't think it is. It bears mentioning that Wylie's husband, Roy Oxlade, was also a painter in much the same slap-dash faux-naive style. As it says in Oxlade's obituary, "apparently wild, spontaneous brushwork, bold colour and improvised images characterise his distinctive style". Note the way that the writer has attached "apparently" to "wild, spontaneous" there. Perhaps to be taken seriously as Art, rather than just therapeutic fun, such mark-making has to be seen as intentional, and not really as wild and spontaneous as it might appear? How you can tell the difference I don't know, but admirers of this style seem to value precisely the contrast between a child-like spontaneity (or at least the appearance of it) and the more painstaking, more obviously accomplished sort of painting admired by those ignorant saps, the general public. Jonathan Jones again:

Painting is a wonderful, magic thing. That is why young children love doing it. Wylie has rediscovered in maturity the freedom with which we painted when we were kids.

Well, maybe. The "spontaneous wonderfulness of children's art" thing can be overdone. I admit I failed to learn to love the freedom with which our kids would make apparently wild and spontaneous crayon marks on the wallpaper, but it is also true that, like any proud parents of such self-evidently immensely talented children, we were sufficiently impressed by some of the work that came home from school that we framed several undoubted masterpieces:

In fact that last spontaneous effusion came home from nursery with its three-year-old maker and was taped to the back of the living-room door, thirty years ago, where it has remained to this day. But, let's be honest, fun as it might have been to make, and much as we love it, no wealthy Russian is going to be offering us thousands of pounds for it. There's more to "art" than uninhibited freedom of expression.

Besides, Alice Neel's portrait is hardly wild and free. If anything it's constipated, laboured over, as unfree as any Sunday painter's most painstakingly dull effort. Is it really pervaded by a "positive mood", as Minna Moore Ede claims? To my eye "Richard" exudes the sadness, repression, and anxiety of both artist and subject (her own son, I believe). In the words of Joni Mitchell's song "Edith and the Kingpin":

His left hand holds his right
What does that hand desire
That he grips it so tight?

Perhaps that's the whole point, but psychological insight in itself doesn't make for a magnificent, or even a good painting, any more than mere uninhibited freedom of expression does. I mean, take that peculiar seat. It appears to be constructed out of some sort of thick grey spaghetti, incapable of bearing any weight at all, and has been squashed awkwardly into the constraints of the canvas. Of course, this and all the other "defects" one might point to – that scumbled white area around the head and that blue outline, for example, and what the hell is is he hiding under that shirt? – may be, and probably are, a deliberate provocation. But to what end? If this is meant to be, in Jonathan Jones' words, an exercise in "kicking the shit" out of something, then it's a pretty feeble kick.

Now, call me ignorant, a typical untutored member of the British gallery-going public, but surely this is what a magnificent painting of an anxious man keeping a tight grip on something looks like, not to mention being, again in Jonathan Jones' curiously dismissive words, "a proper hard-working job":

Hans Holbein the Younger, Sir Thomas More (1527)

Look closer:

Wow. And compare:

Seriously? And here's a detail from Rose Wylie's "Cuban Scene":

So has the shit been kicked out of us and our staid, conservative expectations? If so, I think we can take it. Spontaneous the Holbein certainly isn't – there will have been many hours of sittings, taking up the time and patience of an important and busy man – but it is supremely accomplished, deeply insightful and, well, truly magnificent. Sadly, but not surprisingly, no child will ever bring something like that home from school. The other two, though? Well, yes, I can imagine that quite easily. Which, I assume, is the intention.

So is it the case that we can't, or that we won't make work of that stature any more? No more heroes, no more Shakespearoes, perhaps? Maybe the refusal of technical refinement is a cry of pain in a world increasingly running out of control? The Hopi have a word for it: koyaanisqatsi. But any comparison between a typical Holbein and the self-inflicted wound of this particular contemporary painting style surely seems to speak not just of different artistic priorities after 500 years, but of decline; desperation, even. What does it say about us, in the 21st century, that a painting like "Richard" is the centrepiece of a prestigious gallery's tempting offer to well-heeled collectors of art? Or, indeed, that wealthy Russians are collecting the work of Rose Wylie? It says quite a lot, I think, although my layperson's ears still can't seem to make out what it is, exactly, that is being said.

Obviously, skilful technique and realism can't guarantee a good picture, either. Few things are as tedious or as complacent as those photo-realistic pencil portrait drawings you see all over the Web, or yet another bohemian breakfast table rendered in tasteful post-impressionist dabs, or indeed any art whose ambition has stalled at the level of a greetings card [1]. It would be silly to assert otherwise. But surely the remedy for witless skill-for-skill's-sake or oh-so-tasteful retro-cliché is not pretending to paint like a mentally-disturbed six-year-old? Or maybe it was, for a while, but has now become just another off-the-peg style which happens to be in fashion with wealthy collectors, and is therefore peddled to them as "magnificent" by prestigious galleries and art influencers?

A lot of questions there, all going unanswered. So, to repeat Mr. Jones' own key question: "is this a terribly sophisticated put-on?" Well, as I'm sure those who prize spontaneity above all else would agree: first thought, best thought, Jonathan. When talented, highly-trained artists are producing simulacra of the work of untalented, untrained children, however sincerely, you know something resembling a terribly sophisticated dressing-up game is going on. Is this game the best, most representative, most expressive art of our times? I suppose, as always, only time and the cultural gatekeepers of the future will tell.

Anyway, rant over. And, yes, I do feel better now, thanks very much. And exhale...

And yet, like any choice of style, when it works, it works...

(Ben Hartley, "Woman and chickens")

1. I confess that I particularly dislike anything featuring hares. Hares are threadbare glove-puppets that say, "I'm a bit of a pagan, in touch with folkways, and the feel and flow of the land and its seasons. I'm earthy and yet spiritual, and my kitchen is filled with the smell of baking bread..." I mean, what could be more annoying?

Jaws

 Going through my backfiles looking for something completely different I noticed some overlooked pictures with a common theme. Which reminds me: I should probably arrange my six-monthly dental check-up.

Martin Parr

At 71, I am prepared for a generation of heroes, generally a decade or so older, to start dying out. Farewell, Sir Tom! Hold on, Joni! Not yet, Bob! But the swish of the Reaper's scythe can seem to be getting increasingly and uncomfortably close at times. Martin Parr has just died, at the ridiculously early age of 73. If you've already watched the film released earlier this year, I Am Martin Parr (it's on both Amazon Prime Video and BBC iPlayer), you'll have realised he was unwell: not many street photographers use a walking frame. Even fewer manage to look so grimly cheerful about it. Probably just him, in fact.

If you don't know who Martin Parr is then I really don't know why you are reading this blog. There will be plenty of obituaries, so I won't go over the obvious biographical ground. Let's stick to what Martin has done for me!

On London's Charing Cross Road, once known for its many bookshops, there used to be a famous art and photography bookshop known as Zwemmer's. In the days before the internet, the best way – really, the only way – to discover new publications and new artists was to visit such a specialist shop, and browse the stock. In the 1980s and 90s, whenever I was "in town", as we say, I would make a point of visiting Zwemmer's, hoping to find something special to add to my growing photobook collection.

Art bookshop browsers are a grubby, inky-fingered bunch, so Zwemmer's used to wrap the books on display in clear film, which meant that you at least stood a chance of buying an unblemished copy. Now that books generally arrive in the post in a pristine, shrink-wrapped state, it's easy to forget how "shop-worn" a substantial volume might get on the shelves before anyone actually bought it. As it happened, Zwemmer's also published a few books itself, and one of these was Bad Weather, which contained a series of wryly-observed black and white photographs of people in "bad weather" scenarios, some of them hilarious, by an up and coming photographer named Martin Parr, who had used an underwater camera to make them. There was a stack of them, unwrapped and in mint condition, so I bought one.

I became something of a fan, and bought everything of his that was published. I might even blame Martin for igniting my passion for collecting photobooks. although, unlike Martin himself, I am a collector and completist who knows when to stop. I mean, honestly, Saddam Hussein watches... Why, Martin, why? So, although I bought all his books of breakthrough colour work like The Last Resort when they appeared, I stopped after Small World, as it seemed he was repeating himself. Besides, flash photography of plates of baked beans and garish cakes were really not my thing; I preferred the hunt for abandoned Morris Minors in Irish fields (A Fair Day). I think the only subsequent volumes of his I ever bought were the magisterial three-volume The Photobook: a History, compiled with Gerry Badger.

In those days I was still only in the early stages of becoming a photographer myself. I had recently bought my first SLR – an Olympus OM-1n – and was feeling my way past the glossy honeytraps and gearhead porn of Amateur Photographer to the more austere monochrome art uplands of Creative Camera. As I have mentioned before, while starting our working lives in Bristol we happened to occupy the flat above some guy called Paul Graham, and I was still sufficiently photographically illiterate that the only reason I bought a copy of his first self-published book, A1: the Great North Road, when it appeared in a nearby bookshop on Whiteladies Road, was because it amused me that the address of the publisher, Grey Editions, was also mine.

But by the 1990s I felt I was finally getting somewhere as a photographer, but was in need of some direction and validation; I began signing up for workshops at Peter Goldfield's Duckspool establishment in Somerset, one of the best decisions I have ever made. So in September 1992 I attended a four-day residential workshop with Martin Parr.

Although I already knew that his style of "street" documentary would never be mine I was still an admirer of his work; my most recent Parr purchase had been One Day Trip, his photographs of "booze cruise" Channel ferry crossings, commissioned by the Mission photographique transmanche of the Centre régional de la photographie Nord-Pas-de-Calais. However, unlike the workshop I'd done with Thomas Joshua Cooper the previous year, this one was going to be an interesting but not transformative experience.

I think it's fair to say that Martin was not a great teacher. Great teachers who are also first rank practitioners are very rare. True, he was a very incisive speaker about his own work, and the work of others working in a similar documentary vein, but had little to say about other approaches to photography, or even about simply poor, derivative work, which is after all what mainly turns up at workshops. Where Cooper (also not a great teacher, but a very charismatic individual), confronted by shabby or complacent photo-club work, would reach for the verbal stiletto, drive it between the culprit's ribs and give it a twist, Parr was simply lost for words. Um, I don't really know what to say about this... I think he was basically too kind, too English perhaps, to criticise work that he didn't like or understand.

Coincidentally, Duane Michals was receiving an Honorary Fellowship at the Royal Photographic Society during the workshop, so Martin arranged for us all to travel over to Bath to hear him speak, which surprised and pissed off a number of participants – "not what we've paid for!" – but I suspect that I, at least, derived more memorable "takeaways" from that very entertaining hour than from the entire Parr workshop. I also had my one and only ride ever on the luxurious leather seats of an upscale Jaguar (is there any other kind?) belonging to another participant.

As it turned out, I had to leave a day early, having received an urgent SOS message from my workplace – by then I was the Systems Librarian at Southampton University – so I missed out on the intensive group "critique" of my own portfolio. Which was probably just as well. I don't think Martin would have found much to connect with in what I had brought along. Um, I don't really know what to say about this... Although I do treasure the memory of Peter Goldfield's comment – he had taken a preliminary peek at our portfolios – that the person who would really like my work was Fay Godwin, and that I should keep an eye out for the new direction her photography had taken. A few years later I spotted the gorgeous little Stella Press hardback issue of Glassworks & Secret Lives in the window of another Charing Cross Road bookshop, just published, and pounced on one of the signed copies inside.

It should go without saying that Martin Parr was a very admirable man, whose photographic style and chosen subject matter have exerted an enormous influence on documentary photography, and who also dedicated his considerable energies to the generous advocacy of the work of others and of photography in general, not least through the Martin Parr Foundation that he established in Bristol. But he is also much misunderstood, as people often mistake his wry critique – highlighting those visual incongruities that can illuminate society's contradictions as well as people's pretensions and well-meaning idiocies – for a kind of cruelty. But where someone like Bruce Gilden is in-yer-face cruel, Martin Parr was more like a fearless, clear-sighted stand-up comedian. [1]

If he had a superpower, I think it was a variation of that essential delusion of the "street" photographer: that is, he believed he was invisible, and yet able to emerge at will into a disarming display of avuncular affability, once he'd spotted a likely subject. He wasn't invisible – far from it – but that belief in his ability to pop in and out of awareness is surely what enabled him to point a flash gun at drunken booze-cruisers, and causes him to look so cheerful, plodding along the seafront with his walking frame in I Am Martin Parr. Heh, they can't see me! They don't know what I'm up to. Yet...

For what it's worth, I think it will be established that his very best work was done quite early on and that he never quite developed a "late style" that is the equal of his truly ground-breaking work in The Last Resort, say, or Small World. His very early monochrome work is gathering admirers, too, since the publication of Early Works in 2019 (I see copies are already going for silly prices). In the end, as a photographer he seemed to have become the prisoner of his own signature stylistic moves. But, what moves! Few photographers have created and inhabited such a distinctive style, palette, and subject matter, used to such consistent effect. It may not appeal to you, but you know it when you see it. As my partner (not a photographer) so often exclaims when we are out and about, "Oh, look! There's a real Martin Parr!" And, for a photographer, what better tribute is there than that?

1. OK, there is a certain cruelty about the one of a woman in Bad Weather, smiling shyly at the photographer, about to get soaked by the water thrown up from a puddle by a bus approaching from behind... But OTOH it's making me laugh just thinking about it. Thanks, Martin!