Temple

Architects can be remarkably insensitive about any aspect of their projects not intended to be seen from the street.  They always have been: go behind the glorious facade of any Georgian terrace in, say, Bath, and be prepared to be amazed (and not in a good way).  Costs are costs, and speculative clients will always demand that they are minimised.  Round the back is where the corners get cut.

Of course, there is a utilitarian "big barn" philosophy that says, in effect, I don't care what this thing looks like from any angle; it's a carpet superstore, for Richard Rogers' sake, not a cathedral.  But you have the aesthetic poverty of the 21st century built environment, right there.  Who cares what "ordinary" looks like? Is there anything more soulless than those clusters of steel-frame, aluminium-clad cubes that dominate light-industrial and retail "parks"?  The liveried employees grabbing a fag in the service area around the back are the true animae loci of such places -- furtive, temporary, alienated, dispensible.  There's a photo-project there for someone, but not me.

Take, for example, our campus swimming pool.  From the front, an attractive expanse of smoked glass and glazed terra cotta tile; from behind, a bleak cube of corrugated metal siding.  Well, fine; it can't be seen from the street.  But it seems not to have occurred to anyone that this giant silver-grey brick with its drainpipes would dominate the view from the "recreational space" of the Valley Garden.

Mind you, if you get really close up, sneaking around the service paths, and maybe squeezing through the odd fence, there's a curious sub-tropical ambience of heat and light created by the reflective surfaces which I, for one, find quite interesting.  Nature is encroaching on this fresh wound at the micro level -- algae and moss -- and at the macro level -- vigorous sapling growth.  Give it a decade, and the thing may have vanished like a Mayan temple swallowed by the jungles of Central America.

Obliterated

If there's one thing I will regret when I retire later this year, it's not being able to spend my lunch hour wandering around such a visually-rich environment.  Today, with a bit of alternating sunshine and rain, was perfect: after about 20 minutes I was in the zone and stumbled back into work like Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now.

Which reminds me, it's time I watched that film again...

The heads. You're looking at the heads. I, ah... Sometimes he goes too far. He's the first one to admit it...

Later

Later, on the same morning as yesterday's post, it clouded over and drizzled a fine rain.  Those are the steps on which I stood to take yesterday's photograph, several hours earlier.  The lime-stains on the new-ish buff brickwork make a nicely ironic echo of the bright shapes of the reflected glass windows in that earlier image.

Perhaps not surprisingly, these inevitable stains and discolorations, that always appear within a year or two of the completion of a new building, never figure in the architect's renderings, and yet they do give a sort of character and interest to bland expanses of brickwork.  Just wait until those railings really start to corrode, and bleed rusty red trails down the facade...

Early One Morning

The oddest places, even the most mundane corners, can be touched with a bit of magic,  first thing on a bright March morning...

Equinox

A couple of days late, maybe, but still to the point. Look, what's that strange, beckoning shape over there?

It's the gateway where days begin to be longer than nights.

Not long now, and the swifts will be here.  Time to quote Ted Hughes:

"Look! They’re back! Look!" And they’re gone
On a steep

Controlled scream of skid
Round the house-end and away under the cherries. Gone.
Suddenly flickering in sky summit, three or four together,
Gnat-whisp frail, and hover-searching, and listening

For air-chills -- are they too early? With a bowing
Power-thrust to left, then to right, then a flicker they
Tilt into a slide, a tremble for balance,
Then a lashing down disappearance

Behind elms.
They’ve made it again,
Which means the globe’s still working, the Creation’s
Still waking refreshed, our summer’s
Still all to come --
And here they are, here they are again
Erupting across yard stones
Shrapnel-scatter terror. Frog-gapers,
Speedway goggles, international mobsters...

from: Swifts

The globe's still working (we hope) ... 

Socialist Sorcery

I haven't written anything about the deaths last week of two of our most prominent socialist personalities, Tony Benn and Bob Crow, because I don't really have a great deal to say.  Unless you suspect some sort of co-ordinated assassination plot -- unlikely, given that the two of them were probably the Right's greatest media assets -- it merely seems one of those odd coincidences that might, at most, reinforce a belief in astrology.

As a radio listener, primarily, I always thought of Bob Crow as as a fat man with a thin man's voice, and Tony Benn as a thin man with a fat man's voice.  Profound, eh?  I did hear Tony Benn speak a few times in my days as a NALGO activist in Bristol, and shook his hand twice: he was our local MP in those days, and would often come along to address our meetings, especially in those early years of the Thatcher government, when it seemed that there was still everything to fight for.  As many have said in their Benn obituaries, he was a mesmerising, old-school orator, but one whose spell-binding effect lasted precisely until you stepped out of the meeting-hall and breathed the tobacco-free air.  His career as a politician was somewhat similar: he could move rhetorical mountains while he spoke, but diminished into a smouldering, jut-jawed sulk as soon as he stopped.

But, talking of spells and astrology, I heard Tony Benn read some extracts from his famous diaries on Radio 4 on Thursday morning, covering the early Blair years.  At one point he described exchanging gifts at Christmas, and how he'd given his wife Caroline, an academic and educational reformer, an aromatherapy kit, which struck me as an odd choice.  I was then slightly astonished to hear Benn describe, in those familiar, measured, rational cadences, how -- it being a full moon -- Caroline had gone out into the garden that night to bury half a potato, in order to charm away a wart.

Eh? Witchcraft! Who knew?  But, I must say, I felt rather fonder of the whole Benn Family Project, knowing such things had gone on in their Holland Park home, and that he felt able to share them with us.  I wonder if there was a little Blair mannekin stuck with pins somewhere in the house?  I do hope so...  It would have been a sort of Blair witch project, wouldn't it?

Timber!

Waiting at home for a British Gas engineer to call, I listened to this morning's In Our Time, Melvyn Bragg's wonderfully informative weekly series, where he chairs a discussion between three academics on a topic of interest.  This morning it was the philosopher bishop, George Berkeley, amazingly apposite to this post, which I began yesterday evening.  If a tree falls on the university campus, and no-one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?  I think I'm an unsubtle Johnsonian on this matter, i.e. don't be a bloody idiot, bish, of course it does. 

It was a monster, this time, a 40-foot conifer, crashed across and blocking a groundsmen's access track leading out of the Valley Garden.  It looked pretty recently fallen, as no-one had even trimmed the branches, never mind attempted to saw up the immense, gnarly trunk. It seems the recent biblical rains have softened the ground to the extent that many trees are in imminent danger of falling in the slightest breeze.

The thing is, trees are heavy.  I mean, really, really heavy.  This sounds obvious, but the sheer weight of timber in a mature tree is not uppermost in your mind, as you watch its branches swaying in the wind.  Trees have a curiously weightless, anti-gravity quality about them; in a storm, you could imagine them just blowing away like dandelion seeds.  It's only when one topples over that your view of its properties changes quite quickly.  It transmutes from a gracefully vertical adornment in the landscape to an inert, horizontal obstacle, a deadweight capable of crushing a car like a beer-can.

I remember vividly one night on a summer holiday in the Scottish Borders.  We were staying in a friend's cottage near Jedburgh, and had been out for most of the day.  Driving back along a narrow lane after dark, I screeched to a halt when the leafy mass of a fallen tree appeared in the headlights, blocking the road ahead.  It wasn't particularly large -- the trunk can't have been more than eight inches in diameter -- so I got out and attempted to heave it off the road.

I simply couldn't lift it; it was as if someone had bolted it to the road for a laugh.  I think the kids thought I was pretending, the way us dads do sometimes, when you know perfectly well you can toss this particular caber over the hedge quicker than you can say "call the RAC!"  At least, I think that was the reason for the hoots of laughter emanating from the car.

Another vehicle had by now pulled up on the other side of the tree.  Our combined efforts still failed to move it.  Across the leafy barrier I asked whether there was an alternative route, but got the Scottish version of "Well, I don't think you can't get there from here..."    Luckily, we never leave home without a set of the local Ordnance Survey maps.  In the end, the only thing to do was to go back several miles, cross the valley, map-reading by torchlight, and follow a circuitous route that eventually approached our destination from behind.

By the way, it seems Berkeley never really said the thing about the tree.  Though Johnson definitely did kick the rock.  "Thus I refute him, sir! OW!!  Damn it, Boswell, don't just stand there laughing, I think I may have broken something..."

New Rings

Consternation in the museum.  Two rings of apparently 20th century design have now shown up, both made of decorative glass in a sub-Cubist style, one possibly dated "1923".  This raises interesting questions about the provenance and purpose of all the previously recovered artefacts.  Speculation is rife.

The Head of a Dead Cat

Ah, Marcel Duchamp!  It seems he's not the messiah, but a very naughty boy.

"To a large extent, the art world today represents the institutionalization of Duchamp’s early-twentieth-century pranks. The great irony is that Duchamp intended not to extend the boundaries of art but to short-circuit the entire project of aesthetic delectation. “I threw the bottle rack and the urinal into to their faces as a challenge,” he noted contemptuously, “and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty.” Duchamp had the courage of his contempt. He gave up on art entirely and devoted himself to chess."

From: The New Criterion, Volume 32 March 2014, "But is it Art?"

The New Criterion has a pretty conservative (and, in this case, slightly misleading) take on art, but when, as increasingly does seem to be the case, the cynics and nihilists find themselves running the show and acting as gatekeepers -- deciding who gets to join the private In-Crowd party where exhibitions, book deals and funding are given away -- it's probably time for a little conservatism.

After all, you can only really go in for épater la bourgeoisie so long as you are scrupulous about keeping your own snout out of the bourgeois trough.  It's like parricidal sniping from the sidelines (such a satisfying activity when you're young): it has to stop, when you find you are the only father-figure left standing in the room.

When I was a young man, I invented (or came across) a formula that I considered very profound.  It went:

Nothing matters, therefore everything matters.  Everything matters, therefore nothing matters.

It's a delightfully ironic position, one where absurdity meets eternity, and the choice is always open between doing the right thing and staying in bed. Far out! When you're young, and life is a bewildering and exciting maze of choices, and you're standing at the entrance with your crisp, new, unclipped ticket, wondering which way to go, it's not a bad stance to take.  No hurry...

Forty years later, lost deep in the maze, and fully conscious that there really is only one way out of here, you find you're only too aware that choices have consequences, but also of the paradox that you are where you are because of the choices you have made and yet -- whatever choices you had made -- you would always have ended up here, and never there.  Perhaps it's time to sit down on a bench in the sun, fish that old mantra out of a deep pocket, and contemplate it again.

Mind you, I think Duchamp knew, or sensed, more than he was letting on.  Here's a story from Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, Paul Reps' collection of Zen teaching stories:

Sozan, a Chinese Zen master, was asked by a student: ‘What is the most valuable thing in the world?’
 The master replied: ‘The head of a dead cat.’
 ‘Why is the head of a dead cat the most valuable thing in the world?’ inquired the student.
 Sozan replied: ‘Because no one can name its price.’

As they say, if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.

Among Broken Pines

There's nothing quite like a heavy fog to add a bit of mystery to your morning walk to work, especially when you can take a detour -- a dérive, maybe -- along the edge of a covered reservoir on Southampton Common.

Yellow

It's The Real Thing

Accept no substitutes, they say.  For what?  Why, for the Real Thing!

But what is the Real Thing?  Everything is real, isn't it?  Apart from imaginary things (and a good case could be made for their reality, too).  PVC is every bit as real as hand-tanned hide.  What is meant, of course, is that real leather is better than its substitutes, because it is the thing for which they are mere surrogates.  We still assign primacy to materials and methods which were long ago superseded in the mass market.

For some, the Real Thing persists as a shadowy ideal, standing behind the ersatz approximations that we encounter in the, ah, real world.  I suppose a paper bag of plums from a market-stall does somehow feel more authentic than a plastic supermarket pre-pack, doesn't it? In the ideal world of Real Thing enthusiasts, everything would be manufactured to the standard of a Swiss watch, and delivered in a wooden box with proper dovetail joints, or perhaps wrapped in straw and waxed-paper, and packed in hand-crafted baskets or ceramic pots.

Once upon a time, of course, this ideal world was the real world inhabited by the wealthy. Nowadays, though, even the wealthy are content with the good-enough quality of mass-market goods; no-one expects the cabinet of a TV or a PC to be made of French-polished mahogany with gold-plated knobs.  That's why the Hasselblad Lunar is so risible.  I believe even the Queen helps herself to muesli from a Tupperware plastic box.  But authenticity and truth to materials are, in fact, as much matters of design and taste as vintage or tradition: so perhaps Tupperware, like the iPhone, is the Real Thing?

In the aesthetic realm, the Real Thing used to be the canon: those supreme works of the human spirit that stood, marmoreally eternal and unchallengeable, as the stern measure of everything else. In the late 20th century, we began to feel oppressed by these Nobodaddy superegos -- and rightly so -- and knocked them all over.  Free at last!

Now, there is a basic move in therapy, which is learning to say "I feel this is bad" rather than "this is bad".  It's a very simple, but very empowering shift in emphasis.  A similar, therapeutic move has happened with aesthetic judgements.  We have learned to say, "I feel this to be beautiful" rather than "this is beautiful", in the process disempowering a whole class of culture gurus, handing down their Olympian judgements.  That distinction between essence (this is) and experience (I feel) is an important part of contemporary culture.  But in a world where everyone, it seems, is compulsively sharing contradictory views on everything all the time, you could find yourself longing for culture-gurus and a fixed canon again, if only to expedite the process of finding the genuine article.

For -- reluctant as some might be to admit it -- there is a Real Thing, isn't there?  Or rather, a range of things that remain "real" for longer than most things.  Perhaps not eternally, and certainly not for everyone, but there is a cultural top drawer that holds works by Bach and Beethoven, John Coltrane and Joni Mitchell, and even the likes of Abba and AC/DC.  A "real" work of art doesn't have to be outstandingly original; in the end, everything is derivative of something else. The condition may not even last within an artistic lifetime, either: the Beatles produced the Real Thing up to but not including the White Album, and neither Lennon nor McCartney proved capable of the Real Thing separately.*

Authenticity is never a permanent condition in art, because all art has a mutable aspect, which is often overlooked:  the reception and use of works of art by audiences.  Without that, all you have is the sound of one hand clapping.  Keats was the poetic touchstone of the 19th century; now, many of us find his antiquated style  -- and not just all those thees and thous -- gets in the way.  "Verdurous glooms"?  "Blushful Hippocrene"?  Really, John?  The words haven't changed, but we have.  The volume of the applause is gradually fading.

Unless you are some sort of bloodless connoisseur, what you are seeking, in this pursuit of the Real Thing, amounts to a physiological response.  We talk of the chills, goosebumps, involuntary tears, hairs bristling, the spine tingling, a quickening of the pulse...  We know the Real Thing when we encounter it, because we feel it.  It is not the art object itself, or a property built into it by its creator, but an experience, felt when a mysterious, elusive wire joins the two poles -- work and audience -- and delivers an unmistakable, authentic jolt.  Everything else is just a way of passing the time.

Whether you regard this as a spiritual or a material experience is a matter of inclination.  When you sit among a rapt, wet-faced audience as King Lear soars to its conclusion -- "Never, never, never, never, never!" -- I doubt it matters much whether half the audience are right, and half wrong, about why this is happening to them.  Similarly with a good joke: no amount of analysis will make it any funnier, or enable you to come up with another one.  No doubt if the right area of the brain could be identified and stimulated, the same experience would be triggered.  But that would be a simulacrum**, not the real Real Thing.

That leaves the important question of how necessary it is to educate this response.  Is it OK to leave kids happily swilling Coke and only Coke into middle age (the Real Thing, allegedly), or should we attempt to broaden their horizons, in a world that also includes teas, coffees, beers, fine wines and single malt whiskies?  Are these "acquired tastes" more satisfying? Another time...

* IMHO. Not even "Imagine"?  Not really...

** I'm aware that this word has a technical use in deconstruction which is relevant to these reflections -- see Baudrillard and Deleuze --but we don't care about them any more, do we?  "So bad it's good" / "So unreal it's hyperreal" is fun, but you and I, we've been through that, and this is not our  fate.  So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.

Sunshine?

Two sunny early spring days in a row...  It's a bit intoxicating, after such a dismal winter.  Never mind the brimstone butterflies in the garden, and the platoons of ladybirds emerging from the eaves of our house: I spotted the first shirtless men in the garden of our nearest pub, showing off their tattooed "sleeves".  Weird.  You could see the goosebumps even through the ink...  Careful, guys:  cast not a clout 'til May (or, more likely, June) be out, and even then do keep a vest on, please.  I blame that Vladimir Putin.

Shades of Grey

Sometimes, when the light is dull and the contrasts are subtle, as was the case yesterday, monochrome does it best.

Working mainly with colour, as most of us do nowadays, it's easy to forget the importance of pure tone.  It used to be what photography was all about.  A wise photographer once said to me that no-one should be allowed to use colour until they have mastered black and white.  You might say it is the equivalent of drawing in relation to painting -- splashing colours about is fun, but leads nowhere very interesting without the underlying disciplines of line, shape, volume, tone, and balance.

A Game of Doubles

Dodging the rain on campus on Monday, my sub-conscious mind must have registered the various doublings between and within these two quick shots, separated by about four hours (both with Fuji X100).  Or maybe I was just in an uphill kind of mood that day, and coincidence played its habitual part, who can say?

That was a truly stonking rainbow, though, which I have actually toned down a little: one of the guys on the path pulled out his mobile to photograph it himself shortly thereafter.  I would have liked to have isolated the Nuffield and the sculpture-with-no-name with the rainbow, but that's the price of not having a zoom (or not carrying two cameras).

A good thing about the X100 is that, having a less prominent "snout" than most cameras with an APS-C sensor (never mind one fitted with an f/2 lens), it slips neatly and safely away beneath your coat during rain showers, without snagging on inner pockets and linings.  I can imagine it would be a good, discreet camera to have on holiday walkabouts.  Its retro looks give it a usefully harmless, touristy appearance, too, quite different from putting a bulbous, stealth-bomber-black DSLR up to your eye.

Mind you, I suppose from now on anyone not using their phone to take a picture is going to be pretty conspicuous, anyway.  Though not as conspicuous as those twits who use their iPad as a camera.  How unreflectingly, un-selfconsciously idiotic do you have to be, to do that in a public place?  It's kind of magnificent, in an annoying sort of way.

Culture Club

I once had a teacher who was a very cultivated man, in a conservative sort of way.  Having himself gone from a state grammar school to Cambridge, where he became a disciple of F.R. Leavis and earned a Ph.D. in German literature, his commitment to state education was such that he dedicated his life to secondary school language teaching in a New Town, just a few miles -- geographically -- from his own home town.  Culturally, the distance from his historic market-town to the brash new council estates of Stevenage was rather greater than those few miles, and from Cambridge, just 25 miles away by road or rail, the cultural mileage was astronomical.

Born in the 1950s, ours was the first "new town native" generation to pass through a school which had, in one form or another, existed on its site by the Great North Road since 1558, catering to the educational needs of the sons of the gentry of rural north Hertfordshire.  Like the "old town" -- actually little more than a village -- which had been engulfed by the New Town, the school found itself the bewildered victim of a hostile takeover.

Clever boys from homes with zero "cultural capital" were clearly a challenge to the teaching staff, most of whom were heavily invested in what we might call Establishment Culture.  They played in amateur string quartets, were the backbone of local sports teams and dramatic societies, and served on committees and ran youth clubs.  Quite a few were evangelical Christians or Labour Party activists.

Seen from their vantage point, the poverty of our legacy was very real.  Our homes were book-free zones, and by 1970 the New Town was a cultural wasteland, with no theatre, no concert hall, no cinema, no gallery, no museum, no nothin', other than a library, a swimming-pool, a bowling-alley, and a dance-hall.  Our teachers tried to engage us in "improving" pursuits.  The problem was, we weren't listening.

School magazine 1966

(Po-Mo avant la lettre...)

Why?  Because we were also the first generation to have grown up during the supernova phase of pop culture.  Nothing at school -- particularly lo-fi activities like school plays, debating societies, magazines, and orchestras -- could compete with the extra-mural excitements of the years 1963-72.  Pop culture roared in to fill the cultural vacuum at home.  Girls, guitars, drink, drugs, clothes, revolution, alternative lifestyles -- these were the things we aspired to.  The most active engagements between staff and pupils that I recall were disputes over hair length.  School was a rite of passage, but we did not intend to emerge as little gents-in-waiting.

Disaffection was our thing.  It was a badge of pride not to be asked to become a "prefect".  I and my friends passed through that school without touching the sides: we rarely joined in or contributed to the broader life of the school. We were taken aside and told as much, fairly regularly.*  We took what was on offer, sceptically, but gave little back, on principle, as if we were in the army or a prison.  We served our time, then shook its dust from our fancy zip-sided boots.  I should probably say I regret this attitude now, but I don't.

My very cultivated teacher tried his best to rescue those of us who came into his care in the sixth form, but it was an uphill task.  Once, he took us on a theatre visit to Cambridge; I remember his amazement, when he treated us to a meal afterwards, that some of us had never eaten in a restaurant before.  Lessons were shot through with invaluable throwaway clues:  how else would I have known that Emma was regarded by some as the greatest novel, or that Beethoven's late quartets were a pinnacle of human achievement?  His teaching style was eccentric, easily mocked, but highly effective.  His unfeigned anger that not one of us had troubled to find a German equivalent for "Ker-blam!" in a translation exercise was seared onto our adolescent brains.  But I'll also never forget the time he awarded me A++ for an essay on Gottfried Benn's poetry.  If my German is any good, it is entirely due to his teaching.

Scholars of German embarked for France

(Ingelheim Exchange trip, 1971)

However, in a final act of disaffection, I chose to study English, not German, and at the "other" university, having grudgingly allowed myself to be talked out of applying to art school.  I, like most, never returned to discuss any of this, though I rehearsed the angry conversation often enough in my head.  That teacher died unexpectedly in the 1980s, and I am rather older now than he was then.  It is odd to think that, despite this age advantage and my broad cultural activity over the years, I have not and will never have the depth of engagement with official "museum culture" that he had.  I am unlikely ever to find the time, or inclination, to listen to Wagner's Ring or even to read Emma.  Though I have listened to the late Beethoven quartets; I find I am able to sense, but will probably never grasp, the loftiness of the achievement.

Life has changed, radically, since the 1960s. Schools have changed, too.  My German A-level group of six boys -- just six! -- seems to have taken place in a long-ago and far-away Golden Age of privilege.  My own children went to local sixth-form factories where hundreds of students study popular subjects in each year. German, it goes without saying, is no longer taught in most state secondary schools.

The mountain of new cultural products grows annually ever larger**, obscuring and distorting the venerable artefacts of earlier, quieter ages buried beneath deep archaeological layers.  Who has the time to dig, to re-evaluate, to re-frame the old?  What the contemporary world needs now, more urgently than ever, is adequate contemporary responses.  The nagging feeling that Schubert ought to deserve more attention than, say, Joni Mitchell is part of the baggage we left behind on the long trail from there to here, along with the prefects' badges and school ties.  That reflex deference to the canon is the soft-power arm of an older, pre-democratic world.

And yet -- and I hesitate to say this -- some might point to the decline of languages in our state schools, and see a direct link with the discarding of the old, the difficult, and the canonical in favour of newer, more straightforward work, untested by time, which is easier to understand, and easier to teach by a new generation of teachers with rather less cultural hinterland.

Perhaps that's why that nagging feeling about Schubert & Co. never quite goes away.  And for that, I'm never sure whether to blame or thank my one-time teacher.

Dare any call Permissiveness
An educational success?
Saner those class-rooms which I sat in,
Compelled to study Greek and Latin.

Though I suspect the term is crap,
If there is a Generation Gap,
Who is to blame? Those, old or young
Who will not learn their Mother-Tongue.

from W.H. Auden, Doggerel by a Senior Citizen

The Anxiety of Influence...

* I particularly enjoyed being asked to shave more regularly, by the Head of Sixth Form, because of the bad example it set the younger boys.

** In the UK alone, about 150,000 new books are published each year.  If only 0.1% are worthwhile, that's still another 150 British books you'll never get around to reading.  Not to mention those published in the USA, France, Germany, Spain, Latin America...

Caedmon's Hymn, Part IV (finally)

[The capacious Idiotic Hat sofa has many lost posts stuffed between and beneath its threadbare cushions.  I recently found this one down there, which I will publish now, if only for the sake of completeness.  If you have never read Parts I, II, and III, start here].

I thought it would be worth saying a few muddled words about Anglo-Saxon poetry, and to present Caedmon's Hymn itself. Feel free to simply check out the pictures and head off to another lecture blog.

I don't know about you, but -- despite a lifetime of poetry reading and a few years of intensive (OK, fairly casual) study -- I've never quite got the hang of "prosody", that poet's rule-book full of exotic names for the 57 varieties of "tum ti tum", not least because the point always seems to have been to break the rules at the first opportunity. It all seems a bit of a tease.

I can spot a sonnet easily enough, and an iambic pentameter feels like a favourite old coat, but don't look at me if you want to know about "villanelles" or "sestinas" (no, these are not models of Ford family saloon). I admit that I'm more of a wine drinker, as it were, than a wine taster, when it comes to poems. However, I think there are four things that need to be known about Anglo-Saxon poems:

1. They are composed in Old English. Obvious, but important. Old English is an inflected language, and a lot of the work done by prepositions and word order in Modern English is done by case endings. This means word order can be altered and jumbled for effect, although not as severely as in Latin poetry, in which the aim seems to have been to cut up and reassemble the words in the order most calculated to baffle the reader.

2. The surviving texts are written versions of an oral tradition. Oral poetry is different.  It is a communal experience, it has to be memorable, its effects have to enter the brain via the ears rather than the eyes, and its subtleties reside in the skill and ingenuity of the teller. If one wanted to be condescending, one could compare oral poetry to bedtime stories: familiar tales told over and over again, with variations and innovations gradually getting introduced, if only to stop the teller dying of boredom. So-called "kennings" are symptomatic: little poetic coinages that ring changes on common themes, but which are entirely formulaic: "whale road", "whale way", "sail road", "swan shop", "seal bath" and "fish toilet" would all be kennings for "the sea".  The sea comes up a lot in Anglo-Saxon poems.

3. Alliteration is the poetic glue, rather than rhyme. As such, it is particularly sticky, but does lack that wonderful ability of rhyme to construct anticipatory structures. When you hear the words "There was a young man from Caracas", you know exactly what sort of ride you're in for.

4. The Anglo-Saxon poetic line is implicitly broken into two halves, and is often printed with a break (or "caesura") between them, though this never appears in the manuscripts. I have no idea how anyone knows this, but I do like the effect. It reminds me of the "call and response" structure of that slightly demented poem "Jubilate Agno" by Christopher Smart.

Oh, and one other thing. No-one really knows whether the twenty-one surviving and suspiciously similar versions of Caedmon's Hymn are an authentically transmitted "text", or whether someone rendered Bede's Latin version of the original back into Old English when they translated the "Ecclesiasical History" back in the 9th century.  A case of "Anglo-Saxon whispers", perhaps.  Bede himself has some wise words to say on translation, talking about his own Latin version of the Hymn:

"This is the sense, but not the words in order as he sang them in his sleep; for verses, though never so well composed, cannot be literally translated out of one language into another, without losing much of their beauty and loftiness."

Amen to that, Brother Bede.

Anyway,  next up, please give a big mead-hall welcome to Caedmon the Cowherd!  Take it away, Caedmon!

[Applause and foot-stomping]

Nu sculon herigean   heofonrices Weard
Now must we praise / heaven-kingdom's Guardian
Meotodes meahte   and his modgeþanc
the Measurer's might / and his mind-plans
weorc Wuldor-Fæder   swa he wundra gehwæs
the work of the Glory-Father, / when he of wonders of every one
ece Drihten   or onstealde
eternal Lord  / the beginning established
He ærest sceop   ielda bearnum
He first created / for men's sons
heofon to hrofe   halig Scyppend
heaven as a roof / holy Creator
ða middangeard   moncynnes Weard
then middle-earth / mankind's Guardian
ece Drihten   æfter teode
eternal Lord / afterwards made
firum foldan   Frea ælmihtig.
for men earth, / Master almighty.

[Silence, broken by the sound of various swineherds breaking wind]

Um, is that it, Caedmon? No monsters, no swordplay, no seafaring?  I suppose that's what they call modern poetry, eh?  Come on, someone, let's have a proper song!  What about "Big Bad Berghild from Bermondsey"?  All together now...

First Steps

A couple of initial images with the Fuji X100, taken during a rather overcast lunch-hour yesterday.  They seem quite promising: Fuji seems to like those Arthur Rackham-esque colours that predominate at this time of year, and which I find deeply attractive.

Those triangles in the twisted tape are very nice, I think, like a gingham tablecloth.  Nothing to do with the camera, of course.

Luckily, the "raw" files from the X100 are of sufficient vintage to be included in the latest version of Adobe Camera Raw that can be used with Photoshop Elements 10.  At first, I thought I was going to have to convert them to DNG files using the Adobe converter, but was relieved to discover this wouldn't be necessary.  Conversion to DNG, whilst very useful, is a dishearteningly slow process.  At least, it is on my more-than-vintage Windows XP PC.

I like this one.  I suppose the main attraction of a camera with a fixed focal-length lens like the X100 is "foot zooming".  That is, walking around a subject to find interesting angles that match the focal length (in this case, the equivalent of a moderately wide 35mm lens, in old 35mm money) rather than lazily composing with a zoom, rooted to the spot.  This is also its disadvantage, of course.  It's always frustrating to walk away, thinking, "No, can't be done with this lens..."  The superiority of prime lenses is much exaggerated: I love the flexibility of a zoom covering a moderate range either side of "normal".  One of these cameras fitted with the equivalent of a modest 35-70mm lens would be quite something.

One of the (many) correspondents who prefer to contact me via email pointed me at the blog of Martin Storz, who has been using an X100 to good effect for a while.  Some nice work, there.