Sir!

One of my son Tom's excellent linocuts

I subscribe to the TLS (the Times Literary Supplement), a weekly review of what books are appearing at the heavyweight end of publishing, and "winner of the 2024 Niche Market Newspaper of the Year Award and proudly niche since 1902" (no, really). When it comes to "niche", nobody does it better than the TLS.

Somewhere around 1980 my weekly reading matter shifted from the NME (the New Musical Express) to the TLS, coinciding with the years when my accidental but somehow predestined career in university libraries seemed to be taking off at the same time as my interest in what was hip and happening in the world of pop and rock was declining: a process that used to be called "growing up", I suppose. Other serious-minded review papers have survived into the present day, and I've been a reader of most of them at one time or another, but I enjoy the breadth and depth of coverage in the TLS – much broader than just "literature", in the narrow sense – and find its mix of political stances more stimulating than reading a weekly like, say, The New Statesman that acts more as an echo-chamber for my own views.

One of the highlights of reading the TLS is following the slow-form spats that break out on the Letters to the Editor page, generally of the form "your review of my / that book is stupid" vs. "oh, no it's not", repeated and refined over many weekly issues. When former editor Stig Abell had the paper redesigned in 2019, one of his innovations was to drop the long-standing newspaper tradition of addressing the recipient of a letter to the editor as "Sir" (not "Dear Sir", just "Sir", which seems always to read as an exclamatory, lapel-grabbing "Sir!" from the Grub-Street era). These changes provoked a number of letters, for and against, including this one:

November 29 2019 (issue 6087) 

One change in the redesign which must be applauded, but may well go unnoticed by many, is the decision to put photo credits where they belong: on the same page as the photo, rather than in an up-front car crash at the bottom of page 2. Thank you, this was long overdue! But would it be too much to ask to have them horizontally under the actual photograph in question, rather than dropped vertically into the bottom of the margin? Clean design is one thing, a recurring twist of the neck another.

I see you’ve also finally done away with the stuffy address, “Sir” on the Letters page. Again, long overdue.

Mike Chisholm, Southampton.

Evidently, the calibre of the letter-writers matches that of the TLS's contributors. This is not the Daily Mail or the comments section of some online rag: no green-ink rantings, posturings, or trollings here!

However...

As anyone who has subscribed to a journal or newspaper will know, sometimes you can get seriously behind in your reading, and the oppressive stack of unwrapped, unread issues starts to accumulate. Until this week I was about a dozen issues of the TLS behind, but a few nights of binge-reading and article-skipping and I was within sight of the latest issue. Did I really want to know about the rise of Chinese tech firm Huawei, or the lives of scientist Roger Penrose or that Bill Gates bloke? (Actually, yes...). But then I read this contribution in the Letters to the Editor:

February 21 2025 (issue 6360)

In her appreciation of an exhibition of Tirzah Garwood’s work (Arts, February 14), Francesca Wade more than once calls the prints on display woodcuts. Actually these are wood engravings, and a very different matter. Woodcuts are relief prints, in which the raised areas of the block are inked to form the printed image. The more precise wood engraving uses the intaglio method, in which the incised lines hold the ink and form the image, while the raised or untouched areas, having been wiped before printing, remain white. Wood engraving was quite a craze among British artists in the early twentieth century, and many well-known figures,including Eric Gill, Graham Sutherland and Garwood’s husband, Eric Ravilious, were wood engravers of note.

Robin Blake, London N1

What the effing fuck? This is utter bollocks. I was outraged! Yes, wood engraving is a different technique to the woodcut, but the rest of that letter is complete nonsense on wobbly stilts. Wood engravings are absolutely not printed like metal intaglio plates: they are relief prints, simply a more refined and durable version of the cruder woodcut. Why on earth had the TLS published a letter from some know-all pontificating on a matter about which they clearly knew nothing? I could feel a letter to the editor coming on, even though it would have to arrive quite a few issues too late to deliver a truly effective slap of my rhetorical glove across this Besserwisser's infuriating Backpfeifengesicht. Sorry, but sometimes recourse to German is necessary.

I was spared the trouble, though, when I came to the Letters page a couple of issues on:

March 7 2025 (issue 6362)

Woodcuts involve different tools and techniques from wood engravings, as Robin Blake points out in his letter (February 21), in response to the review of the exhibition of work by Tirzah Garwood. He is, however, incorrect about how wood engravings are made and printed. Unlike woodcuts, they are engraved on the end-grain of box or other dense wood. Ink is then rolled over the block, as Blake says. The block is not then wiped, as he states: the reverse is true. The block is printed so that the incised lines and cleared areas appear white, while the uncut areas retain the black ink, or whatever colour the engraver chooses. The technique was perfected by Thomas Bewick in the late eighteenth century, was used for commercial illustration in the nineteenth century, and then was revived in the twentieth century for prints and book illustrations. The eighty-seventh annual exhibition of the Society of Wood Engravers is currently touring the country.

Merlin Waterson, Saxthorpe, Norfolk

Well, that was a lot gentler than my letter would have been. But should I find that Robin Blake or anyone else continues to peddle this disinformation in later issues when I get around to reading them – some people can't bear to be wrong – battle will have been joined, with however many exchanges of weekly rhetorical blows it may take for Truth to prevail. After all, some of us do actually know what we're talking about, when it comes to printmaking, and have the inky fingers to prove it.

Three wood engravings by Clare Leighton in our dining room

(rescued from a dismembered copy of 'The Farmer's Year')

Impossible? No: Eschatological!

I'm sure you know the (in)famous work of art by Damien Hirst, "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living", even if you hadn't realised it goes by that title. It's the one with a very large shark in an even larger glass case of formaldehyde. However, if that title is meant to encapsulate the meaning of the work (and it probably isn't, he's such a big tease) then I'd suggest that a banana duct-taped to the wall would do the job just as well and at considerably less cost; I bet Damien is kicking himself over that one. By the same token "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living" would be a better title for that (in)famously banana-based artwork, "Comedian". Ah, those cheeky-boy artists, how they do mock us... And how their bank managers must love their monetisation of concept-driven cock-snooking (snook-cocking?).

But, whatever anyone thinks about either actual "work", I'm interested in that title. You could leave out the word "physical" as redundant, actually, and be left with a snappier, more readily grasped expression of a certain paradoxical state of mind: the impossibility of death in the mind of someone living. Now, obviously, most of us, most of the time, don't think about death: what would be the point? It's also true that, until our mortality impresses itself upon us forcefully, most of us do not experience ourselves as a time-limited proposition: not immortal as such, but just sort of here, now, chugging along, with no end in sight. But that blithe indifference is not what that title invokes; for me, anyway.

I'm very prone to an experience that I'm sure most self-aware people have from time to time, almost as a sort of satori. You don't have to have fasted for 40 days, dropped acid, or drunk ayahuasca to be taken unawares, to be struck, suddenly and with the force of revelation, by how laughably, self-evidently absurd it is, that you – I – can exist, and yet will at some point cease to exist, when the meat-and-bone machine that sustains your – my – individual, particular consciousness stops working, and begins its irreversible breakdown into its constituent elements. At such a revelatory moment, it seems impossible to reconcile both propositions in the same brain. How can "I" be the single focal point of all this, and yet be destined to vanish? It doesn't make any sense! But then normal service is resumed, and you're just sort of here, now, chugging along, with things to do, places to go, bills to pay.

This existential flip-flop must have been troubling susceptible people for a very long time, and it's no surprise that the idea of an "afterlife" seems to have been a constant of human culture. It makes sense: the experience of being alive is so intense, so important, so all-encompassing, that the thought of it abruptly coming to an end is like... Well, it's not like a dead shark in a tank of formaldehyde. You can easily imagine the speculations of some Ice Age proto-philosopher: the dead must have gone somewhere, mustn't they, and I suppose I'll be going there, too, sooner or later: I wonder what it's like? On cue, the imagination kicks in to fill the vacuum with pleasant and not so pleasant picturings, which are then seized upon by the tribal elders, who have in turn been struck, suddenly and with the force of revelation, by the realisation that these lurid imaginings can be systematised into a really effective carrot-and-stick means of policing the behaviour of "their" tribe. In other words, a religion. Do right, or else: see what lies in store for you in the unseen realm that lies beyond this rocky road... [1]

However, despite our propensity for picking up Wordsworthian intimations of immortality, I'm fairly sure that most thinking people in 2025 are at the very least agnostic, and in the main entirely atheist, with no belief in any afterlife at all, no matter what they are obliged to pretend to believe by their particular society's thought police. Surely most sane people anticipate death as a full and final personal extinction, albeit with varying degrees of equanimity, and don't tremble before elaborate Boschian eschatological fantasies in which rival post-mortem destinations await us, supervised by benign angels and malevolent demons respectively.

Doubtless, it has been very convenient for a very long time for our rulers to maintain, embroider, and inculcate such supernatural fictions, primarily to scare the bejesus out of a benighted but potentially unruly peasantry, but also to reinforce the idea of a Great Chain of Being, with kings and nobles occupying their rightful place just below the angels, but most of us just one shit-spattered step up from the farmyard. Still, by uneven fits and starts, those days have been coming to an end and – short of the resumption of visits by winged ambassadors from the Great Beyond – will never return. Although how far civil order is best maintained by the internalised surveillance of imaginary beings or by the brutality of real ones is debatable, of course.

But: just for fun, let's just imagine that it is true, that after death some portion of your essential self finds itself freed from its meat-and-bone prison and embarks on a fresh, wholly unexpected adventure. To echo that Ice Age sage: I wonder where we would find ourselves, and what it would be like?

Well, for a start, unless the hereafter is constituted as a vast theme park, divided into discrete culturally-appropriate comfort zones, heavenly havens, and happy hunting grounds, the billions who died before us and have already arrived there must surely have been surprised and not a little baffled by what they found. After all, the place has to accommodate everybody who has lived or will ever live. It must, by definition, be non-denominational, culturally neutral, very capacious indeed (unless "personal essences" are very small), and absolutely the last word in future-proofing, design-wise, although I suppose periodic makeovers are not out of the question.

One immediately thinks of some ultra-anodyne version of an airport departure lounge. But that's a meat-and-bones vision: no matter how long you'll be hanging around there (eternity? until your next incarnation is called?) you probably won't be needing a snack, somewhere to sit down, or even a toilet, thankfully (I mean, just imagine the queues). Besides, is this accommodation exclusively for sentient beings from planet Earth – welcome, crows! – or must it accommodate those from every other consciousness hotspot in the universe? Maybe it's a dizzyingly complex multi-dimensional arrangement of virtual spaces? There also needs to be an inter-being, pan-galactic lingua franca, perhaps some sort of telepathic common understanding.

I'm bored... I liked being a crow.
Me, too... I was a trilobite. Been here a long time.
Not what we was led to expect, is it?
Nah... Oh, hang on, they've finally called my incarnation destination, see you later!
Not if I see you first! Heh... Have a good one!

So, picking what we might call a passing-cluster at random let's take, say, the Battle of Maldon, a Saxons vs. Vikings fixture that took place in August 991. A lot of personal essences will have been set free that day, with on the one side a pagan vision of What Happens Next, and on the other a crudely Christian take.

Now, Ragnar the Berserker has overdone the fly agaric, and charges straight onto the spear of Aethelgar, but not without first cleaving Aethelgar's skull in two with his axe: a man-on-man score draw. Ragnar has led a Good Life, by berserker standards, cleaving, biting, stabbing, and generally unleashing painful death on whatever opponents his masters pointed him at. Kill, Ragnar, kill! So, dying in battle with his weapon in hand, he knows exactly what to expect. Break out the Carlsberg! Bring on the Ikea meatballs, and then the blonde one from Abba!

Aethelgar, by contrast, is conflicted, and not at all sure what outcome to expect: it might even go to penalties, or VAR. He has a vague recollection of something called Purgatory. Aethelgar has been an obedient foot-soldier, carrying his top-of-the-range spear along to many battles. But whenever he asks himself the question, Who would Jesus stab in the guts?, he has doubts. Christianity is big on those doubts: will I, won't I make it to Heaven, or will I, won't I suffer eternal damnation in the burning mosh pit of Hell? I mean, when it says, "Thou shalt not stab people in the guts", does that mean ever, or just when you've not been explicitly ordered to do so? One for the theologians, that, and way above Aethelgar's pay-grade as spearman, first class.

Both warriors, of course, are in for the surprise of their life, so to speak. Which will be a huge disappointment for Ragnar, and an enormous relief for Aethelgar. Where the hell are we? Good question...

Ding dong! Welcome to What Happens Next! Please collect your Next Life voucher from the registration desk. You are 10¹⁰⁰⁰ᵗʰ in the queue... 

Assuming, that is, that the hereafter is not just an enormous recycling scheme for consciousness, and briefly experienced by each individual as unpleasantly like being drunk. What's so unpleasant about being drunk, you ask? Well, as Douglas Adams put it, just ask a glass of water. 

1. As an interlude, you may enjoy this post from 2010, Caedmon's Dream Part II, concerning the Anglo-Saxon conversion to Christianity. No, really, it's fun, and not entirely irrelevant, if you've ever wondered where that thing about life being like a sparrow flying through a brightly-lit feasting-hall came from.

Enkindling

The Enkindled Spring

This spring as it comes bursts up in bonfires green,

Wild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled bushes,

Thorn-blossom lifting in wreaths of smoke between

Where the wood fumes up and the watery, flickering rushes.

I am amazed at this spring, this conflagration

Of green fires lit on the soil of the earth, this blaze

Of growing, and sparks that puff in wild gyration,

Faces of people streaming across my gaze.

And I, what fountain of fire am I among

This leaping combustion of spring? My spirit is tossed

About like a shadow buffeted in the throng

Of flames, a shadow that's gone astray, and is lost.

D.H. Lawrence

Three Square

So, in the end I did succumb to the temptation to buy a copy of the Topaz Gigapixel "uprezzing" software, which has inevitably caused me to delve back into the furthest reaches of my backfiles, not only for items to enlarge beyond their native size, but also to see what I might have overlooked or ignored from those earliest days of digicams; whether because the files were too small to bother with, or because my processing skills were not up to much 25 years ago, and I was unable to rescue many "good but technically challenging" photos.

I was still primarily using film back then, but from the late 1990s I had started to use a series of "digicams", starting with a 1 (one!) megapixel Fujifilm "FinePix" camera, eventually hitting my digital stride during 2002-5 with a 3 MP Olympus C3030z and then a 5 MP C5050z. That last was the camera that finally caused me to abandon film altogether. I had already given up working in an improvised darkroom at home – never my favourite thing, and inquisitive small children and trays of chemical solutions don't mix well – and the expense of paying a lab to process, proof, and print colour-negative film was no longer justifiable once I had acquired a suitable inkjet printer. I could make 20 x 15 cm (8" x 6") prints on A4 sheets at my own convenience: small, but better than any lab print and costing just a few pence to produce – essentially a tiny fraction of the price of inks and paper – and perfectly feasible to do at the same time as making an evening meal for those inquisitive small children.

I'm not going to review Gigapixel, other than to say that the resizing of files seems essentially seamless, especially if kept within modest bounds. Even just to be able to take a three megapixel image (cropped to a 13 cm square like those in my self-published book The Revenants) and double it to a 26 cm square is quite an exciting prospect: although to take it to the six-times max of 78 cm (2' 6") seems more than a little OTT to me. So here are a few of the finds among those overlooked pictures, all taken in 2003 with the 3 MP Olympus digicam. I've cropped them all square, in the spirit of The Revenants, and as was my usual practice at the time.

It's pretty clear that the novelty of the WYSIWYG screen on the digicam – postage-stamp sized though it was – took me in the direction of close-ups and pattern finding, a refreshing change after years of using various medium-format film cameras for my "serious" work. In the main the quality of these really very small image files is surprisingly good: those Olympus engineers certainly knew what they were doing. Their main shortcomings are a tendency to blow out highlights (though that may well have been my inexperience, too) and for any small specular highlights, like those on sparkling ice, to be rendered as tiny squares: inevitable, really, given the low pixel count of a three megapixel sensor. I've already enlarged and printed a few using Gigapixel, and I'm very pleased with them.

Go Large

I recently had cause to invoke Oscar Wilde's exculpatory quip concerning the artist Whistler's apparent self-contradiction: "consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative". In other words, it's OK, at least as far as OW was concerned, to say one thing but to do quite another. Which is not necessarily hypocritical so long as it's, um, imaginative.

So, look, if you have any memory at all of what I wrote in the previous post, then let's just say that this week I've been being imaginative. Here's the thing:

When I was singing the praises of the Fuji X20 a few posts ago (In and Around the Lake) I showed a 100% detail of this photograph (i.e. the area within the red box):

My intention was merely to flag up the sheer quality of that camera's image files, derived as they are from a mere 12 megapixel 2/3" sensor. But there was something about that crop... It simply grew on me as an image in its own right. Now, the whole of a 12 megapixel image file like this will print nicely at 300 "dots per inch", giving an image roughly 34 x 25.5 cm, although I'd usually prefer to print it rather smaller and at a higher resolution. So the portion within that red box is actually very small, about 10.4 x 5.6 cm at 300 dpi, and not really much use, unless you were into making bubble-gum cards.

Now, I'm sure I can't be the only one who has thought, when scrutinising an image at 100% (so-called "pixel peeping") and seen a perfect but tiny extract like this appear on their screen: now that would make a very nice picture, but what a shame it's so unprintably small... In fact, I quite often find that there is something compelling about the unexpected combinations of colours and shapes that swim into view when passing that virtual loupe over an image.

There are several obvious responses to this problem, of course. First: sure, very nice, but forget about it, it really is too small to print. Second: if you like that sort of compressed view, then why not use a telephoto lens, the longer the better? Third, of course, there's the resort to a camera which makes very large files; overkill, for most purposes, and a problem when it comes to storage, but out of which even a tiny crop is still of a printable size. And, finally: why not use some "up-rezzing" software, which can enlarge an image quite dramatically by re-interpreting its not-enough pixels into lots more pixels, and is allegedly quite effective these days?

The only one of these approaches that had ever appealed to me was the use of a telephoto lens. It seemed honest, in a "truth to materials" sort of way; no cheating, just optics. Cheating? Well, having grown up, photographically, in the days of film, the art-aristocratic attitude that a cropped image verges on fakery is ingrained and hard to shake. Hence my adventures with a Canon Zoom and a Panasonic TZ70, for example; fun, but requiring a lot of post-processing to get anything resembling a printable result. I do actually own a couple of decent telephoto lenses, but their sheer bulk does not really suit my "smart casual" approach to photography. Tripod? Bag of heavy lenses? No thanks.

However, I have a friend from my university days, now semi-retired from a medical career, who lives up in Scotland, near Inverness, and who in recent years has taken up the hobby of bird photography. Of necessity, therefore, he has a high degree of familiarity with all of the strategies mentioned above for extracting a small item of interest from a much larger context. I'm by no stretch a bird photographer, but in return for some photos he'd sent me, I sent him this tighter crop of a shot of a coot I'd taken last month (also with the Fuji X20, as it happens), saying it would only print at 20 x 13 cm, but why not? It makes a nice little picture. To which he replied: why don't I enlarge it for you using my Topaz Gigapixel software? To which I replied, Hmm... Thanks, but there's actually something else I'd much rather try...

So – to cut to the chase – I now have several up-rezzed (rezzed-up?) versions of my little X20 image crop, courtesy of my bird-watching friend, the largest of which is an extraordinary 60 cm wide, and very nearly acceptable to my admittedly fastidious eye. I'm completely sold, however, when I print it at a more modest 32 cm, which sits nicely on an A3 sheet, looks "tighter" at 580 dpi, and is a lot more photographic in feel. This is after all, I have to remind myself, in origin a 10 cm snip from a 12 MP compact camera. I'm impressed.

Yes, that's a bottle of Pschitt on the pschelf...

So is this the start of a new "project"? Will I invest in a copy of Gigapixel, or something similar? That all rather depends on whether my venerable HP desktop can handle it. Any new space- and processing-hungry software will probably have to live on my laptop, instead, which would be a little too reminiscent of shuttling files back and forth between computers on a flash-stick when I was using the terrible Lumen software that came with the ill-fated Light L16. But it could be worth it; we'll see. After all, there are a lot of interesting little pictures buried deep within my backfiles waiting to be excavated... 

Meteorological Spring

Enough with the words for once: let's have a little break from my baseless bloviation and shameless over-sharing. So-called "meteorological spring" has arrived, so here are some very recent photographs, mainly from the iPhone plus a few from the Fuji X20, taken during a couple of those much-anticipated late February blasts of intense raking sunshine, revelations of warm colours, clear air, and long shadows that lift everyone's spirits after weeks of dull skies and rain.

First the X20:

Now the iPhone 12 mini [1]:

OK, so just a few more words...

These photos are all "just" twelve megapixel files, printable at 10" x 13.5" uncropped at 300 dpi. But surely that is plenty for most purposes? Apple's iPhones have been 12 MP cameras pretty much all along, and still are, really, despite the hype. In a world of ever-bigger sensor sizes I am increasingly of the view that – unless you truly intend to make huge, table-sized prints, or need to crop out the tiny bit of the image area that you really want – there is no point in filling whatever storage you have with the very large image files that result from a sensor any bigger than, say, 16 MP, or 24 MP at the most.

Indeed, some of the best photographs I've ever taken, printed, framed, exhibited, and actually sold were made using my 10 MP Panasonic LX3. [2] But, of course, virtually no gearhead with money to spare is going to buy a 12 or 16 MP camera when 40-plus megapixels are on offer – even though "bigger is better" surely stopped being true for most of us even before 24 MP became the norm not so long ago – and therefore no-one is going to be manufacturing them any longer, either. Sooner or later, we'll all be stuck with thousands of massive files that will clog up our storage for no purpose at all.

But if you think that the tiny sensor-plus-lens combo in your phone is really capable of producing 40 or more megapixels of quality data, just like a full-size camera, then I happen to have a bridge in London you may be interested in buying.

True, as a small, compact, older man, I suppose I am drawn to small, compact, older cameras with their small, compact files. Let the big guys haul their "full-frame" dumbbells around: I'm sure they've got an upcoming solo exhibition in a major gallery that needs to be filled with table-sized prints, or at least wish they did. But, when out walking on a lovely day, who wants to be burdened with anything bulkier than a pocket-sized hardback or, even better, the phone you'd probably be taking out with you anyway?

Anyone know who this is? Some NSFW Hindu deity?

(in Southampton's Hollybrook Cemetery)

1. The iPhone photos were made with the ProCamera app, which gives "raw" files as well as a choice of HEIF or JPEGs, and has a brilliantly intuitive touch-screen "focus and exposure" device, as well as various other useful features I can't be bothered to explore.

2. In fact, some of the best-received images at my first solo exhibition in 2009 in Innsbruck were made with a five MP camera, the Olympus C-5050z. So much so that this particular subset subsequently went on to be shown in Innichen / San Candido in northern Italy in 2010 (see my book The Revenants, made in 2006). Clearly, size really isn't everything...