RA Summer Exhibition 2026

Flat Tyre, by Gavin Turk (Sculpture | Painted bronze)

I gave up on the RA Summer Exhibition some years ago, both as a potential exhibitor and as a visitor. Despite its reputation as one of the traditional peak art-viewing experiences of the year I had never actually been to one before 2017, when on impulse I had successfully submitted a couple of my own digital prints to the show, and naturally went up to London to have a look. In the following few years I was shortlisted a couple of times, but never made it onto the actual wall again. After a few more visits it became clear that the whole thing was in a nosedive of confused priorities – I don't think this was just "sour grapes" talking – a lottery in which the standards of competence which would apply to any "open" submission anywhere else seemed to have been subordinated to the judges' desire to make the RA appear less stodgy and hidebound by "elitist" conventions of art-worthiness. I blame Grayson Perry, the main co-ordinator of the 2018 show, for starting this downhill slide. Frankly, the Summer Exhibition had become hilariously bad, and not worth the price of a train journey to London.

But this summer I was looking for a place to meet up with an old friend in London, the exhibition was in its last weeks, and it seemed like a handy venue, if only for us to have a bit of a laugh at this year's selection and a therapeutic moan about life in general over coffee. I might not think much of the Summer Exhibition, but the RA's cafe facilities are pretty reliable.

The Summer Show is enormous, filling nine huge rooms floor to ceiling with art; 1851 items, to be precise, of all sorts imaginable, but actually mainly 2D wall-hung pictures. Now, there are several things in that previous sentence worth expanding upon. Let's start with "art".

Things have clearly not improved since I decided they had become too bad to bother with. If I had to characterise the show I'd say it was a celebration now not so much of "Sunday painters" (the traditional jibe) but of sixth-form art. By this I mean work by artists whose competence in handling a medium is incommensurate with the earnest intentions motivating it. Typically, these are poorly drawn and composed scenarios, simply filled in with a paint-by-numbers indifference to any painterly properties other than colour. Feigned cack-handedness with paint is fashionable, of course, as I have noted before (see The Last Time I Saw Richard). Many competent artists have adopted this style, presumably as a democratising, dressed-down, faux-naive "spontaneity", but most of those selected from the open submission are authentic native cack-handers, the unvarnished Real Thing.

Take as a representative example these two works by comedian Harry Hill:

What is there to say about these, other than "Don't give up the day job, Harry..."? Notably, though, both have been sold. All submissions are allegedly judged anonymously, so the panel must have agreed on their merits, unaware that they were by everyone's favourite bald ex-medic comedian. All selected work is also hung without names or titles: I wonder, did the buyers know these were by a celebrity before or after looking them up in the catalogue? Or maybe Harry bought them back himself, as a nice way of supporting the RA's activities? If so, well done, Harry.

But then, what about this:

Heh, remember Spirographs? Or have you ever got carried away getting a set of dried-out biros to flow again? But this is "Entangled Bodies" by Conrad Shawcross, a Royal Academician, no less, and it has sold out its edition of fifty at £330 each. I'm not sure what "ink on paper, print" means – it does sound a bit evasive to me – but that's how this is described in the catalogue, so it must mean something. Hopefully not the dreaded and outlawed variety of "giclée", though, i.e. an original work scanned and marketed as a "print".

Or, consider this remarkable effort:

This is "Spot the Missing Letters" by James Kaye Harris, also sold, for a cool £1,200. I'll save you the trouble: the missing letters are A R T. Got it now? (No, not "rat" or "tar", fool). As Max Miller used to say, "It's all clever stuff!" And congratulations to the new owner: you can anticipate years of visual pleasure ahead gazing at this wonderfully cryptic conversation piece, and what an investment!

The man in the blue shirt is about 6' 3" tall (~190cm); 

the tiny grey painting top left ("Soft Monsters" by Yewon Lee) is 20cm square...

Next to consider from that sentence (surely you haven't forgotten about the sentence?) we have "floor to ceiling". The so-called "academy hang" is a traditional feature of the Summer Exhibition, but surely one of its worst. Faced with hundreds of small-to-medium sized pictures of no particular distinction or coherence, the temptation to treat them as elements in an interior decoration scheme is clearly irresistible. But how frustrating must it be, to have your little picture selected from the thousands submitted – hooray! – only to find it hung 10 or even 20 feet above ground, and rendered invisible by the reflections of the lighting in the glass? You'd need a ladder or binoculars to get a proper look at it. Or, just as bad, to have your quietly toned etching overwhelmed, jig-sawed into a matrix of attention-grabbing shapes and colours? Come on, you Academy judges: why not break with tradition, and select fewer, better pictures, and hang them with the respect they deserve?

Although it's true that a closer examination does not do some of these pictures any favours:

Um, great stuff... And yet two of them have sold: in the middle "High Jump", a lithograph by Peter McDonald (£1,100 framed as seen plus two from the edition at £960 each) and on the right "Trees Connecting the Past to the Present" by Paul Broomhead (£500). Truly there is no accounting for taste (and I am clearly under-pricing my own work). This room was hung by artist Oona Grimes, who – now I come to look at her own work – may well have chosen these as the sort of fun pix she could enjoy playing around with.

Then, finally, there is the physical challenge of those nine enormous rooms. My phone's step recorder tells me I walked the equivalent of over five miles that day, most of which will have been inside the Royal Academy. Admittedly, I'm in my 70s and my stamina is not what it was, but that's a respectable walk at any age, and I think you can be forgiven for starting to feel "arted out" beyond the halfway stage. After that, it all becomes a bit of a blur and a literal pain in the neck, and what you mainly want is to head for a chair, a cup of coffee, and a chat. Which is what we did.

So didn't you see anything you liked, Mr. Sour-Grapes? Well, yes, I did, but it was hard to spot buried amongst all the colour-forward dross, and doubtless I overlooked many things I might have admired under better circumstances. Anything in the last couple of rooms didn't stand a chance. I didn't photograph much, but there were two works in series that caught my eye.

First, a set of mock eye-test charts by Ron Arad RA, this one a "Duchamp Eye Test", hung in a row next to Warhol, Wilde, and Picasso versions of the same familiar chart layout. TBH, it was the size and shape, the layered transparent colours, and the quasi-Japanese brush-strokes that appealed to me as much as the conceit of a quotation rendered in ever-smaller rows of letters. Clever, sure, but random letters could have worked for me just as well.

image from Opera Gallery

Then there was a set of twenty-five "Golden Puja Tanmatras" by Stephen Cox RA, made from Indian basalt and gold leaf:

I had no idea what these were all about when I came across them: I just thought they were rather attractive. But, apparently, the "Tanmatras are the fundamental sensory perceptions of humans. The five Tanmatras correspond to the five senses: hearing, touch, sight, taste, and smell. Each Tanmatra is also associated with a specific element (Mahabhuta), giving them a central role in Ayurveda philosophy and in yoga." So, there you go: make of that what you will. I confess that, at the time, I thought the ones with ears were meant to be monkeys, and rather enjoyed that misapprehension... As I say, there's no accounting for taste.

One last thing. Since (I think?) 2019 the RA's Summer Exhibition co-ordinator has been asked to declare a theme. This year it was Ryan Gander, who stated:

The 2026 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition’s theme is Interconnectedness. It will aim to explore ideas of entanglement, as well as the unexpected and fortuitous connections and associations between disparate things, no matter how abstract or illogical. Proof that, as humans, our outputs hold more commonality than separation, without us intentionally seeking it.

Really? I saw very little evidence of this in the works selected. Complex scribbles maybe, but cars on fire? A pole vaulter? Silly wordplay? I don't think so. Besides, pretty much all of the "name" artists whose work I recognised were simply showing their latest versions of the same-old same-old: that's how I was able to recognise them! Just between ourselves, whisper it, I think the judges simply picked the ones they liked, and paid little or no attention to any "theme"... Don't tell Ryan. But you do have to feel sorry for anyone who did try to interpret the idea of "interconnectedness" in a creative way and lost out to... Well, can anyone explain to me the sort of "interconnectedness" expressed by the print "Jamie Lee Curtis" on the wall above? Or of the one to its left, that crudely Simpsons-style portrait? Go on, why not have a go!

Oh, I nearly forgot. Another old friend had alerted me to a standout piece that I didn't manage to encounter myself. It was probably obscured by an admiring crowd. Here is its page on the RA website:

Genius. I'm not surprised it took two artists to come up with it. How could the RA not show it? It simply screams "Interconnectedness!" And, incredibly, it's still unsold. I mean, "One bottle of San Benedetto still water, label removed" for just £10,000? There really is no accounting for taste.

Phew, What A Scorcher!

In case it's lost on you, the title of this post is the traditional tabloid front-page splash headline to mark a couple of days of hot weather in a typically wet and mild British summer. But so far this year we have had a succession of five designated "heatwaves", and most of the UK is now officially in drought. This is distinctly not normal. If I hear another idiot say, "If this is climate change, bring it on!", I will... Well, let's not be specific. We don't want "premeditation" added to the charge sheet.

Never mind two days of "scorcher" somewhere in mid-August, it has now been too hot and too dry since May, with no end in sight. I sat my university final exams in the famously hot and dry summer of 1976 – eight (or was it nine?) three-hour papers sweltering in "subfusc" (a black suit with white tie, plus academic cap and gown) – and it was nothing like as bad as this, and all I have to do now is write the odd blog post and venture out for a walk and a bit of shopping in shorts and sandals. For the first time ever I am using sunscreen: that's how bad it is. Others have it far worse, of course: it's hard to imagine losing your entire home and belongings to a wildfire, especially in the knowledge that it was sparked by irresponsible or even deliberate behaviour.

These harshly bright and contrasty conditions are never ideal for photography and, besides, who wants to lug a camera around in such heat for essentially unrewarding results? This is where a phone comes into its own and, even on those occasions when I did actually put a camera in my bag, it was the phone I pulled out of my pocket more often than not. I think you'd be hard-pressed to tell which were taken with which, though, in this little gallery of Summer So Far photographs.

West Bexington, Dorset

Bristol Downs, green grass reduced to felted straw

Fishing on Clevedon Pier, North Somerset

Clevedon Pier

Jubilee Gardens, Belvedere Road, London

Forde Abbey, Dorset

Morcombelake, Dorset

Chesil Beach from Abbotsbury Tropical Gardens

(and, yes, the sea really was that amazing Mediterranean colour)

St. Catherine's Chapel from Abbotsbury Tropical Gardens

Thanks, but when I said it's so hot I fancy a cone...

(Abbotsbury Gardens)

Southern view from our Bristol flat's kitchen

Slightly later western view from the kitchen

(Get on with the cooking, Mike, you can't eat gaudy sunsets...)

On the early evening of 12th August we had the very rare spectacle of an almost complete solar eclipse (92.55% in Southampton). There won't be another one here for 80 years; I doubt I'll be very interested by then. TBH a  partial eclipse is a fairly underwhelming spectacle, anyway, unless you're properly set up and situated to see the solar disc being covered up without permanently damaging your eyesight, especially when it's happening low in the sky, not long before sunset. It occurred to me to wonder how many folk were walking around with impaired vision in ancient times, having gazed for far too long at the uncanny solar spectacle taking place overhead. I was also surprised by how few commentators remarked on the absurdly mind-blowing coincidence that the moon and sun are exactly the same size when observed from our planet. I mean... Wow, WTF, man?

But, as it happened, we didn't have to go far to see what was going on in a surprising and moderately spectacular fashion. In fact, we simply stepped outside the front door and gazed at the walls of the houses on the opposite side of the road, where multiple images of the sun were being pinholed and projected by the leaves on the trees behind our house.

 No cardboard, sticky tape, or mirrors required. Unlike our eclipse craft project last time round, on holiday in Norfolk in August 1999. Happy days!

image: The National Archives, cat. ref. MFQ 1/712

Mottisfont Abbey 2006

It is often said that it can be useful to leave off evaluating your photographs until you can see them as if they had been taken by somebody else. Certainly, twenty years seems to have been long enough to do the trick.

In summer 2006 I was still tinkering with a project photographing at Mottisfont Abbey, a National Trust property near Romsey in Hampshire. I had started the project a few years earlier, concentrating on the river Test that flows through the grounds, and using an old Agfa Isolette folding camera that used 120 medium-format film. This led to my first real solo exhibition, The Colour of the Water, which was on display in the Abbey for eighteen months, March 2003 - November 2004, and then – augmented with digital photographs – to my self-published book Downward Skies.

By 2006 I had acquired a Canon EOS 350D digital camera (eight megapixels!), and had broadened my attention to the whole of the grounds at Mottisfont. I ended up making a portfolio of monochrome images that, until very recently, I had forgotten all about. Looking for something completely different, out of curiosity I opened a folder labelled "Mottisfont" on a backup drive, and was amazed to see the work of this other person, who is apparently me aged 52 years.

So here is a little gallery of a dozen of those photos taken by that stranger. They are "as found". I wouldn't choose to make them that way now – too contrasty! Do something about those blocked-up shadows and clipped highlights! – but that's the whole point. This is how he liked to do it then, and why I find them so striking now. Not a bad effort, young man, not at all bad.

Hmm, I wonder if I might be looking at next year's calendar? There are plenty more to choose where these came from... 

Everywhere I Go

Although the onset of tinnitus and partial deafness mean that I listen to music sparingly these days – "listen" in the sense of actually putting a CD into the stereo (and I'm afraid I will always think of whatever a music-playing machine is actually called as a "stereo") – I do nonetheless frequently dip into my bookmarked YouTube musical offerings and even explore their accompanying suggested playlists while I'm sitting here at my computer trying to think up fresh ways of continuing this self-imposed Reithian mission to inform, educate, and entertain. It seems that pair of cheap little desktop speakers don't rattle my hearing apparatus quite so badly.

I don't know how typical this is, but I am highly susceptible to that irritating phenomenon known as an "earworm" or, less disgustingly, "involuntary musical imagery" (INMI): songs and tunes that become an inescapable inner soundtrack, in my case sometimes lasting for days. I regularly find myself singing and humming along sotto voce to the same song, quite often finding in the process that I haven't yet got the tune or the lyrics – particularly the phrasing – quite right. For a long time I was tormented by Richard Thompson's "1952 Vincent Black Lightning", for example, but I think I've got it down now. Nonetheless, that song with its tricksy guitar accompaniment still takes up residence in my head whenever I hear it, or even when just a fragment of the lyrics flickers into consciousness. [1] Add to that the dozens of other mental musical squatters in there and it can feel like I'm a walking jukebox, but an annoying one that tends to get stuck, playing the same track over and over on repeat.

Regular readers will know that I have often mentioned the music of Jackson Browne. I wouldn't describe myself as a "fan" –  apart from the two-CD Solo Acoustic collection, I haven't bought an actual album since 1973's For Everyman – but there are individual tracks from across his entire subsequent output, mainly encountered via streaming or on YouTube, that have come to take a significant place in my personal playlist. Curiously, Jackson Browne was a dormant taste I only rediscovered as recently as 2010 (as described in the post Something Fine), and generally these "later" songs – i.e. released after 1973! – are heavy-duty numbers like "The Barricades of Heaven" or "Sky Blue and Black". When you're in the mood for lugubrious soul-searching, nobody does it quite like Jackson Browne. 

However, when I've been feeling the need for a little light musical snack lately, I've been playing this engaging short video on YouTube of Bonnie Raitt and long-time Browne sideman David Lindley rehearsing "Everywhere I Go", a bouncy, reggae-style number they were recording for a Jackson Browne tribute album. Watch the video, and I suspect you'll be humming it for days, too, everywhere you go. Yes, it seems there's always room for one more rent-free tenant in my involuntary musical lodging-house. Plus, if my own "INMI" experience is anything to go by, parts of the tune and phrasing are trickier to get right than you might think. Damn, I've started to hum it again already. People say I must be a fool...

1. Fun fact: Vincent Motorcycles were made in a workshop on what would become the expanded grounds of my secondary school, Alleyne's Grammar in Stevenage. In my day the Vincent workshop was long gone, but directly opposite the school across the "bowling green" was the motorcycle shop owned by George Brown, a record-holding bike racer and an ex-Vincent mechanic.

M.H.G.A.

Sometimes it can take half a century for the penny to drop. A curiously antique expression, that, dating back to the cash-only days of coin-operated telephone boxes and arcade machines and public-lavatory cubicles [1] when our enormous pre-decimal pennies would sometimes lodge in the mechanism, before finally crashing into the cash reservoir. Anyway, I was sitting quietly in the kitchen, when for some reason the opening lines of the second book of Milton's Paradise Lost, memorised when studying it for A-level and never forgotten, popped into my mind:

High on a Throne of Royal State, which far
Outshon the wealth of Ormus and of Ind,
Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand
Showrs on her Kings Barbaric Pearl & Gold,
Satan exalted sat, by merit rais'd
To that bad eminence...

Wonderful resonant stuff. But, figuratively speaking, I suddenly felt a penny which had been stuck in my mental mechanisms since around 1972 roll loose and drop: Hey, I wonder if "Ormus" is "Hormuz", of recent Strait of Hormuz media notoriety? And it turns out that, yes, it is.

Now, even if I had diligently read and inwardly digested the notes in our classroom edition of the text, I doubt that the information that Ormus refers to a once wealthy island kingdom in what is now known as the Persian Gulf would have meant anything to me whatsoever. Paradise Lost is packed with similar classical and Biblical allusions that may, I suppose, have been common currency among a small fraction of the educated elite of 17th century England, but which, without already having scaled an intimidating preparatory mountain of background reading, could never have fallen within the comfort zone of the typical 17-year-old Brit in the 1970s. You'd read the note, get the general idea, and carry on to the next annotated stumbling block. Or, more likely, let the music of the verse carry you on past. I'm not sure "Ormus" would actually have meant that much to Milton, either; it's really just a way of saying, "Cor blimey, check the bling on that imaginary throne!". I also doubt whether you'd score any lit crit points at all for grounding Milton's rhetorical splendour in mere fact. Sadly, geographical pedantry counts for little in literary circles (although if you fancy a taste, try this. Thanks, Professor Yaffle...).

There's a problem there, obviously. So many of our English poetical touchstones are "intertextual", in the academic jargon. That is, works that quote, parody, refer, or allude to other works, although rarely explicitly, and often by nothing more than a name-drop, or even a simple choice of vocabulary. That strange adjective "wine-dark", for example, only ever points in one intertextual direction. But if you're not intimately familiar with the Greek and Latin "classics", the Bible, or a whole heap of mythologies, nor equipped with the linguistic and bibliographical tools to make yourself familiar (not to mention the time or even desire), then it's a massive KEEP OUT sign. Which, of course, it always was. Like Samuel Pepys slipping into Latin and macaronic code when recording his sordid sexual adventures in his diaries, it was a way of defining and flattering your intended audience of "equals" and at the same time excluding any other literate person who might come across your efforts. As the lead prosecutor in the Lady Chatterley trial put it in 1960 (!): is this book something "you would even wish your wife or servants to read?" Quite right, sir! After all, at least Catullus had the decency to write his filth in Latin.

However, it's easy to exaggerate the ease of past generations with the "classics", and the idea that Latin and to a lesser extent Greek formed a lingua franca and shared culture between educated European elites. For example, in the famous encounter between Patrick Leigh Fermor and the captured German general, Heinrich Kreipe. If you don't know the story, Leigh Fermor had just kidnapped Kreipe on Crete in a Special Operations raid during WW2, and the general was understandably not best pleased by this change of fortune. At some point, gazing upon the landscape from Mount Ida, Kreipe muttered the opening lines of Horace's ode 1.9:

Vides ut alta stet nive candidum
Soracte nec iam sustineant onus…

Leigh Fermor heard him, and supplied the rest of the first stanza:

Silvae laborantes geluque
Flumina constiterint acuto.

[Do you see how Mount Soracte stands, white with deep snow, the struggling trees can now no longer bear their burden, and the rivers have been frozen by sharp frost?]

Although, if my experience in a German classroom is anything to go by, they may each have been rather startled by the other's pronunciation of the Latin. However, as Leigh Fermor noted in his memoir, Abducting A General: "For five minutes the war had evaporated without a trace". 

Which all sounds very impressively erudite, but this was schoolboy stuff for privately-educated men of that generation, forced on pain of punishment to memorise poems, such as that very Horatian ode. If necessary, it was literally beaten into them, and Leigh Fermor was far from the obedient scholarly type (although it seems he did take a Loeb edition of Horace – i.e. a pocket-sized volume with parallel translations and notes aimed at the "amateur" reader – on his famous tramps across pre-war Europe). I suppose the modern-day equivalent would be if some special forces captain were to hear a captured officer mutter "How many roads must a man walk down..." and offer the rest of the first verse of Blowin' in the Wind. Just before waterboarding the poor devil for information, obviously. Gentlemanly conduct towards opponents hors de combat being one of the many civilised things we have abandoned since 1944.

Which brings us back neatly to the Strait of Hormuz, which is no longer just a curious footnote to a 17th century epic poem that attempts to "justify the ways of God to men", but the centrepiece of a 21st century attempt to justify the ways of a loose-cannon American president to... Well, it's not exactly clear who to, is it? But, what's that you say, Satan?

... Farewell happy fields
Where joy for ever dwells: hail horrours, hail
Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang'd by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less than he
Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th' Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav'n.
Paradise Lost, Book 1

So I think the takeaway message I'm hearing is let's "Make Hell Great Again", right?

The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God,

and at liberty when he wrote of Devils & Hell is because he was

a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it.

(William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven & Hell)

1. Hence that other antique euphemism for a visit to any toilet, "to spend a penny".

Happy Place

Swanage, probably summer 1959

Before she died in 1977, my grandmother gave me her extraordinary stash of family photographs. And I do mean extraordinary: they filled a canvas holdall, stuffed in like a ransom demand paid in bundles of used banknotes. They range in size and quality from professional photos of weddings, soldiers, and family groupings – often card-mounted or made into postcards – to casual snaps of people on the beach or at home (actually, usually standing outside their home, where the light was more suitable for those old slow film stocks). Intermittently over the years I've been sorting them out, putting the best ones into archival envelopes, and putting the rest into rough groups, according to who figures in them. Certain faces turn up so frequently that they have become familiar, even though I have no idea who they are, so one of the larger groups is made up of people I can't identify: presumably relatives, in-laws, or friends of my grandmother of varying degrees of closeness.

Whenever I have a sort through them, there always seem to be pictures I've overlooked, or whose significance has only belatedly dawned on me. Looking through them recently, I came across this tiny print, presumably a "contact" print from a camera using half-frame 127 film (the image is 4.5 cm x 2.5 cm). It must have been taken by my father, and shows me playing with a toy boat on the beach at Swanage, Dorset, where we took our family summer holidays for many years. I must have been around four or five years old.

I wish Dad had used a camera more: he had a real eye for a composition. For me, this is a perfect image of contented absorption on a perfect summer's day in a very special place. So, naturally, I have scanned it, and removed as many of the blemishes acquired over sixty-seven years as I could. The dark, sock-like staining on my legs is curious, especially knowing our casual way with seaside sewage, even today, but it's probably only wet sand... 

If I ever have to think of a "happy place", my mind still goes back to Swanage; in fact, to a particular much-anticipated event. We always stayed in the same hotel, Ivy Glen on Ulwell Road, run by a Mrs. Murtagh. On our first morning we would walk down the road towards the sea with our towels and beach gear, and at a certain point Swanage Bay would come into view, sparkling in that magic random dance of sunlight on waves. It was always a moment of pure happiness.

Pure happiness is hard to come by, even for a five-year-old boy, and somehow the memory of it becomes more potent, more concentrated over the years. For me, the sparkle of sun on waves seen from a high viewpoint – whether actually or conjured inwardly – is now what we literary types call an "objective correlative", a "show, don't tell" experience that, in my case, always and anywhere evokes the simple joy of the first day of a seaside summer holiday.

Talking of which... We will shortly be meeting up for a holiday near Lyme Regis with our grown-up children, who I hope will have acquired some similar moments of pure happiness of their own, that they can invoke in times of need. I don't anticipate having an actual blog break this year, but posts will be infrequent for the next month or so. I'm hoping I may even find time to read a few of the books sitting in my "unread" pile(s).

Apparently, it's a dying art, reading, with unpredictable consequences for the mental processes of future generations. I read (on a screen, I'm afraid...) that even students at top universities are starting to complain about being required to read entire books, rather than extracts, and some are even losing the ability to comprehend complex literary texts without what amounts to remedial help. Way back in 1962, in his book The Gutenberg Galaxy, Marshall McLuhan predicted that we would become a post-literate society, and argued that even then electronic media like TV were taking over from the printed word. It seems he may have been right, if a little premature.

Talking of which... I have to say I'm still angry with Amazon for bricking my perfectly decent Kindle. You, too, may have received this message in April, if you've had one for a while:

Thank you for being a longtime Kindle customer. We're glad our devices have served you well for as long as they have. Starting May 20, 2026 — 14 to 18 years after their initial launches — we are discontinuing support for Kindle devices released in 2012 or earlier. Here's what this means for you:

* You can continue to read books already downloaded on these devices, but you will not be able to purchase, borrow, or download additional books on them after that date.

* If you deregister or factory reset these devices, you will not be able to re- register or use these devices in any way.

Affected devices include Kindle 1st and 2nd Generation, Kindle DX and DX Graphite, Kindle Keyboard, Kindle 4, Kindle Touch, Kindle 5, and Kindle Paperwhite 1st Generation.

What? You're offering twenty percent off a new one as compensation? Well, forget about it, Amazon. A free one, maybe. Besides, the Kindle app on a tablet is much better than any actual Kindle, anyway.

It's one of the more annoying phenomena of modern life, I think, when you discover that some digital item you had purchased in good faith, whether hardware or software, turns out to have been merely rented all along. For a perfectly functional device to be turned into landfill at the whim of the supplier is simply infuriating. See also the "subscription model" and software updates that merely add unwanted new features and remove others you had come to depend on, not to mention constant emails from company X, Y, or Z declaring changes – sometimes trivial, sometimes not – to the contractual terms you had originally signed up for. I believe the gaming world – somewhere I have never been – is in uproar about Sony's decision to stop selling their game products in a physical format, for example, and – worse, I think – to stop access on their consoles to items like films that users had previously legitimately bought from Sony and kept in their "library". In photography, a particularly egregious case of a manufacturer simply walking away from a promising product – an expensive one, to boot, sold on an enticing but unfulfilled prospectus – would be the sad saga of the Light L16 camera, a potentially brilliant and innovative device tied to some of the worst software I've ever grappled with.

Oh, and talking of which... The day after Microsoft announced a one-year extension to the "extended security updates" for Windows 10 users like me (hooray!) they sent out an alarming and incomprehensible notification about the expiry of something called a "Secure Boot Certificate", with dire warnings about vulnerability to malware until the issue is sorted out between you and your computer's original manufacturer. What? HOW DO I EVEN DO THAT, FFS?? My "OEM" doesn't even recognise my ancient PC's serial number as valid...

Oh, and our landline phone has just gone dead... So now I have to negotiate the British Telecom bots on a hot day to find a way through their endless misdirection to find a human to talk to. In the end, I'm not sure I care enough. These days all the landline brings us is scammers ("Hello, this is bank security calling..."), and shortly all copper wire landlines will be shut down by BT anyway. Did I say how annoying it is when a perfectly functional device is turned into landfill at the whim of the supplier?

Definitely time for a holiday. But first, I think I'd better conjure up my Happy Place and try to achieve some degree of serenity in the face of the Ten Thousand Things.

Swanage, by Graham Sutherland

Let's All Laugh At AI (While We Still Can)

I read this in a piece linked on Arts & Letters Daily, a conversation between three writers on "AI and the future of writing": 

Several companies right now, including xAI and OpenAI, have advertised that they are seeking very high-level writers to work for them. The job ads are absurd: you must have a National Book Award or a National Book Critics Circle Award, or you must be a best-selling author, or have been reviewed in The New York Times. And then the job appears to be that they give you two answers to a question, and you tell the LLM which is the better answer. I was just reading a piece by one of the people who had done this, and he said he was given instructions—this was OpenAI, I believe—that anytime ChatGPT used three exclamation points, he had to tell it that this was bad writing. But over and over, there would be a kind of binary where it would ask him which was the better sentence, and often the better sentence was the one with the three exclamation points. Yet he had to mark it as bad.

Meghan O'Rourke in Yale Review, AI and the Future of Writing

If that's true, it's one of the funnier things I've read this week. Hi, thanks for coming in, Mr. Shakespeare! Now, Will, if you would: on a scale of 1 (illiterate nonsense) to 10 (wish I'd written that!), please assess these alternative versions of some greetings-card sentiments our AI has come up with...

Although I think that this, as an actual first-hand experience, is even funnier. I was curious about the origin of the expression "truer words were never spoken", which has the feel of one of those quotes that has become a stock response, so I entered it into Google. It seems that Google's "AI Overview" couldn't resist butting in, and appeared to be taking it as some sort of compliment. Or was it even attempting a little cringeworthy repartee?

If you can't read the screen-grab, it  says, "I appreciate the sentiment! When someone cuts through the noise and articulates a point perfectly, there's not much left to say. What exactly are we agreeing with today?" For some reason, the second sentence is highlighted.

Hey, stay in your lane, AI! When I want your opinion, I'll ask for it... And spare me any attempts at matey banter, OK?

Parrot's Disturbing Dream

Parrot's Disturbing Dream

This succession of heatwaves (or, at least, what passes on these islands for a heatwave) has kept me indoors rather more than usual, so a lot of digital tinkering has been going on. I've been having some fun with this one, for example, which is based on my photo of a statue of Aristotle encountered in 2017 in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, on my way to the wonderfully old-school Galerie de Paléontologie et d’Anatomie Comparée, and which I have been playing around with intermittently ever since (e.g. see the 2018 post He is the Eggman).

The surprisingly beach-ready Aristotle has now lost the egg he was originally contemplating, and is surrounded by various avian specimens from museums in Bristol, Berlin, Paris, Hamburg, and London. That peculiar disturbance in his lap is now occupied by a tiny owl. Which makes a lot more sense.

But now I need to brave the heat and walk a hot mile to the shops to get us something to eat this evening, and to find an 80th birthday card for my sister (how did that happen?). Food will be easy enough, but "welcome to your 9th decade" cards? I may have to get an 8th birthday card and customise it... Hmm, if it had one of those "I AM 8!!" button badges attached, that could be fun...

Margate, Summer 1947