Every Translation is Terrible

In the afterthought to the previous post, I had wondered what Google Translate would make of those first six lines of Dante's Inferno, and was impressed.  Imperfect, to be sure, but pretty sound for a freakin' machine.

So I wondered, what would it make of some equally famous lines of poetry, but lines written in a more difficult language, and of a certain inherent difficulty?  The poem that sprang to mind was Rilke's first Duino Elegy, simply because I have been grappling with Rilke, on and off, over the past couple of years.  Here are the first seven lines:

Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel
Ordnungen? und gesetzt selbst, es nähme
einer mich plötzlich ans Herz: ich verginge von seinem
stärkeren Dasein. Denn das Schöne ist nichts
als des Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch grade ertragen,
und wir bewundern es so, weil es gelassen verschmäht,
uns zu zerstören. Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich.

Again, an awful lot of people have attempted a translation of these words or, more often, a "version" i.e. a poetic rendering of a literal translation by a German speaker.  Here is my effort at a literal translation:

Who, then, if I were to cry out, would hear me from among the Orders of Angels?  And, even assuming one of them were suddenly to take me to its heart: I would die by its stronger being.  For Beauty is nothing other than the beginning of a terror which we can only just bear, and we admire it so, because it calmly disdains to destroy us.  Each and every angel is terrible.

Here is Google Translate's first attempt:

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'
Orders? and self-imposed, it would take
a me suddenly against his heart: I would be his
stronger existence. For beauty is nothing
the beginning of terror we can just barely endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains
to destroy us. Every angel is terrible.

Again, not bad, but it misses some important points of sense: for example, "gesetzt selbst" (something like "even assuming") becomes "self imposed"*, and  "I would die by/of" is crucially misunderstood as "I would be"**.  It also comes up with the comic "take a me" by mistakenly associating "einer" ("one of them") with "mich" ("me").

It seemed some of this might be to do with the disruption of word order by poetic line breaks, so I fed it a concatenated version without breaks. Curiously the only differences this made was to change "Orders" into "hierarchies" (good), and to change "I would be his stronger existence" into "I would of his stronger existence" (weird):

Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies? and self-imposed, it would take a me suddenly against his heart: I would of his stronger existence. For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror we can just barely endure, and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrible.

But definitely a 7 out of 10 for Google Translate, with a red "see me" against lines 2 and 3.

Pre-Raphaelite psycho-angel

(seen yesterday in the V & A Museum)

*A question for native German-speakers out there:  what exactly do you make of "und gesetzt selbst"?  It strikes me as the most difficult bit of the extract to translate, often passed over by translators as simply "even".

** Another: what is the difference, if any, between "vor  etwas vergehen" (the normal, expected preposition), and "von etwas vergehen"?

In A Dark Wood

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
ché la diritta via era smarrita.
Ahi quanto a dir qual era è cosa dura
esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte
che nel pensier rinova la paura!

Those are some of the most famous words ever committed to paper: the opening lines of Dante's Inferno.  Amazingly, given they were written in the early 14th century, they are immediately understandable to anyone with a bit of basic modern Italian.  Chaucer's English?  Not so much.

Longfellow did a decent translation:

Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
Which in the very thought renews the fear.

But you'll notice the "music" of the Italian has gone, as well as the rhyme scheme ("terza rima", ABA BCB CDC, etc.), which was Dante's own invention.

Many have tried to render The Inferno into English, but most have failed.

In the middle of the journey of our life
I found myself astray in a dark wood
where the straight road had been lost sight of.
How hard it is to say what it was like
(Seamus Heaney)

Oh dear, Seamus, Seamus....

Robert Pinsky's version is highly rated by some:

Midway on our life's journey, I found myself
In dark woods, the right road lost.  To tell
About those woods is hard -- so tangled and rough

And savage that thinking of it now, I feel
The old fear stirring: death is hardly more bitter.

But, in the end, Italian is a very different language from English, with many times more rhymes.  You would go mad, trying to translate the sense as well as sticking to the rhyme scheme.

Which makes me wonder whether photographs have national identities, too, even though on the face of it they don't need translating.


Addendum at 17:30:  

Thought I'd let Google Translate have a go:

In the middle of the journey of our life
I found myself in a dark wood
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
Ah, how to tell what a thing it is hard
this forest savage, rough, and stern
that in the very thought renews the fear!

 Not at all bad!   Scarily so, in fact.  I wonder if it's been pre-primed to be "Dante ready"?

BSA M20 Motorbikes

My father was a motorbike enthusiast. Here he is in 1937 in the yard of the engineering firm where he was an apprentice, Geo. W. King in Hitchin. He's sitting on what I think must be a BSA M-series, probably an M20, 499cc single-cylinder (I'm no expert, does anyone out there know)? [corrected: it's a "Red" Panther 1938 249cc OHV single Model 20]. I suspect there have been some modifications made: the tank looks non-standard, compared to other photos I've seen.

If I'm right about the model, it was good preparation for the war years, as Dad became a despatch rider in the Royal Signals, and the BSA M20 was the model used by the military.  It's a lot of bike for a 19-year old.  Don't you love the fishtail exhaust pipe?  Nice shoes, too --  Dad was a bit of dandy in his day.

Here he is again, five years later in Calcutta, outside a requisitioned house, Tivoli Park.  Still looking sharp, Doug.  Note my mother's name painted on the rear mudguard.

And here are a couple of the other guys in his section, giving a better view of the bikes.  Is it obligatory, do you think, for DRs to look ultra-cool?

Standard issue BSA WD M20, I think? Not long after this, the army decided to replace the BSAs with American-made Indian bikes, and the DRs were not happy.  Dad wrote in his memoir:

Our next surprise was the arrival of a lorry-load of timber crates all with American markings. On opening them they contained American-made Indian motor-bikes in knocked-down condition, which we were obviously supposed to assemble, and use, instead of our BSAs. They had "cow's horn" handlebars, plus foot-boards instead of foot-rests, a long hand-change gear lever, foot clutch, an immense leather saddle, sprung from the front, and coil ignition! The engine was a V-twin, and altogether we were not too happy with the idea, as on wet roads the very long wheel-base would be tricky to handle. Our worst fears were realised, and in wet weather they were very difficult to start and skidded out of control on bends unless we were very careful. We soon found out that the enormous leather saddles did not dry out during the monsoon, so we always started off with a wet seat.

It was around this time that my genes had one of several narrow war-time squeaks:

Whilst we were not using our bikes I took the chance to strip mine down for a good overhaul. I undid the bolts holding the two halves of the petrol tank together and when I took them off I found tucked up between the two halves a stick of bamboo about six inches long. One end was the large knot which formed an effective seal, the other end had been plugged with some sort of cement, from which protruded two wires - one was earthed to the bike frame and the other was supposed to be on one of the spark-plugs, but it had come adrift. Had it been connected, as I kick-started the bike it would have exploded and I would have had a lapful of burning petrol.

The British Army was not universally popular in the last days of the Raj, of course.  Having survived Dunkirk and the North African Desert, that unit of DRs had a number of very close shaves in the "friendly" environment of Calcutta.  I think they were glad to ship out to Burma.

The Lunchtime Jungle Line

Rousseau walks on trumpet paths
Safaris to the heart of all that jazz...

 

With his hard-edged eye and his steady hand
He paints the cellar full of ferns and orchid vines
And he hangs a moon above a five-piece band...

 

And metal skin and ivory birds
Go steaming up to Rousseau's vines
They go steaming up to Brooklyn Bridge
Steaming, steaming, steaming up the jungle line

 ("The Jungle Line", by Joni Mitchell, from the album The Hissing of Summer Lawns)

Hula Hoops

I'm not sure why anyone would keep a supply of hula hoops in their office, but why not?  The spiral of leaves remaining on the tree have a certain rotary quality, too.

La Règle du Jeu

Certain memories seem so permanent, so non-negotiable, that the rest of your mind has to arrange itself around them, like water flowing around rocks.  If that famous fast-forward lifetime review really does happen when the end of life is imminent, then I expect it is made up of such moments.

For example, I recall sitting in our doctor's waiting room, somewhere around 1961 -- probably waiting to have him peer, yet again, into my eternally-aching ear -- and seeing a small, amateurishly-printed poster for a showing of a film by Jean Renoir, La Règle du Jeu.  I was proud of my reading ability, aged 7, but here were words -- clearly important words in capital letters -- I could not render. Fascinating! I suppose it must have been put up by a local society, though nothing as interesting as a film society existed in our town when I was old enough to appreciate one.

In fact, nothing as interesting as a cinema existed by then.  Incredibly, a whole New Town for 75,000 people was built around a place with a population of 7,500 without factoring in a new cinema.  There were two ancient and tiny "Old Town" fleapits, the Publix and the Astonia, but the depradations of local youths and a presumably non-existent business model meant that the Publix closed in 1961 and then the Astonia in 1969.

I never actually entered the Publix, as by its desperate final days it was only showing X-rated films to an audience of 300 seated on benches, not stalls, and on whom water dripped whenever it rained.  Allegedly the projector beam was regularly blocked by opening umbrellas.  I did see my own first X-rated films in the last days of the Astonia (1968's Girl on a Motorbike and Witchfinder General), brazening my way in with some bolder school-friends.  The staff couldn't have cared less how old we were, actually, so long as we didn't slash the seats or add to the stains on the undersized screen by hurling ice-creams.  And they weren't that bothered about that, either; it wasn't exactly a "family" cinema.  Within the year the place had closed, and it was another four years before a proper "New Town" cinema opened its doors.  Sadly, I doubt any Stevenage cinema ever did or ever will show Renoir's La Règle du Jeu.

The memory of that little poster remained, however, a hint that the world was bigger than I thought, if only I could be bothered to look and learn. My father could speak some French, and explained how to pronounce the words, and that they meant "the rules of the game".  As I gained competence in the language myself, that stubborn memory would resurface occasionally, and I would wonder why "rules" was singular ("la règle") and not plural ("les règles")?  Did the French regard rules as a singular thing, perhaps, like "the law"?  It was an early lesson in the niceties of translation.*

By some twist of fate, I have never yet seen La Règle du Jeu. I did become a devoted cinéaste in 1976/77, stuck on the remote campus of the University of East Anglia, with nothing better to do in the evening than attend every available film showing.  Happily, there were several every week. In one year I saw all those films that no-one other than film students ever sees in real life -- Last Year in Marienbad, Breathless, The 400 Blows, Closely Observed Trains, Céline and Julie Go Boating -- but never the Renoir.

So, an important memory in my life is a poster half-buried on a pinboard in a doctor's waiting room for a film I have never seen, and -- who knows? -- may never see.  And it's fairly certain that the film, were I to see it now (even if it does live up to its perpetual critics' Top Ten billing), could never match the significance of that memory.  Talk about a meaning forever deferred through an endless chain of signifiers!  Which we weren't, but it's all very French, n'est-ce pas?

*Titles are notoriously difficult to translate.  On a  German school exchange, I was delighted to learn that the spy series The Avengers was screened on German TV as Mit Schirm, Charme, und Melone ("With umbrella, charm, and a melon bowler hat").  Germans, it seemed, either didn't see the camply veiled sexuality and the ironically cocked eyebrow, or saw through it to something they took to be as archetypically British as a double-decker bus. They may, of course, have been right. I suspect James Bond film titles have always posed similar challenges of translation.  It's interesting how many early foreign-language renderings go for "007 vs. [name of villain]", as if Bond were Tintin or Giant Haystacks.

 In a perfectly German case of "it does what  it says on the tin", Woody Allen's Annie Hall was released in Germany as Der Stadtneurotiker ("the urban neurotic").   I am not entirely convinced that Grease was really released in Spain as Vaselina (¡Vaselina es la palabra!) but allegedly it is so.

Twyford Down

Looking south towards Twyford from Twyford Down

A pleasant afternoon walking on Twyford Down today, when the sinking sun and a convenient bonfire set up this classic little landscape scenario for me.  I wasn't going to say no, was I?  Those oddly flat green surfaces are greens on the outer edge of the Hockley golf course.  In summer, this walk can be hazardous.

It's a little known fact, despite the best efforts of Winchester City Council's Tourist Information department, that Keats was staying in Winchester in autumn 1819, and wrote his Ode to Autumn (you know the one, "Season of mists and mellow fruitfuness", and all that) after repeating a daily walk along the River Test out to the mediaeval hospital at St. Cross.  In other words, he walked through the water meadows that lie on the western side of St. Catherine's Hill.

I doubt a man in his terminal condition would make an attempt on the hill itself, but it's a pleasant thought, and yet another layer on the story I'm telling myself about the area.  And did those feet...

Static

Of course, the reward for staying on later at work is having all of Wednesday off , which means that I can get out and have the landscape all to myself, apart from the odd dog-walker.  In this case, St. Catherine's Hill, near Winchester.

What is missing from these images is the constant white noise from the M3 motorway passing through the cutting at Twyford Down, about 10 feet behind and 100 feet below where I am standing.  It's a constant on a busy work-day, like static on an analogue radio.

I'm not quite sure what it is about this spot that keeps drawing me back, but it has something to do with ghosts; there's another kind of static hanging around the place. It has been a busy crossroads of humanity, of course, in both space and time, for thousands of years.  People have been passing through here for generations, ever since Iron Age tribes chose to settle on the hilltop.  Those salesmen and container trucks speeding up to London are just adding the latest sedimentary layer of noise.  Perhaps I simply love the encouragement to see things sub specie aeternitatis you get up here from what feel like its resident friendly spirits.

The Nights Are Drawing In

Of course, what you forget about this staying on later at work lark, is that at this time of year it's dark when you come out to play.

It has been some time since I heard anyone say, "The nights are drawing in..."  Has that expression died out, or have we simply got better things to talk about, these days?

Chromatic Aberration a Go-Go

Yikes!  It seems my camera has been experimenting with e-peyote.  I had an inkling this image would turn out a little strange, but this is way stranger than I had thought.

Basically, I took the Itorex Pan-Focus lens out for a lunchtime walk last week, bolted onto the front of my Panasonic GF1.  It was a sunny day, and I pointed the assembly directly towards, but not at, the sun.  Those leaves belong to one of the weirdest plants on the planet (including totally bonkers things like Rafflesia): Gunnera manicata a.k.a. the Giant Brazilian Rhubarb.  Each leaf is about about four feet across, and the whole plant, including the underside of the leaf ribs, is covered with wicked spines.  Seriously strange: the first time you see one, you suspect that someone may have slipped something hallucinogenic into your drink.  They are distinctly alien-looking, especially when heavy rain has exposed their ugly, knobbly rhizomes.

But the weirdest thing is the optical distortion.  Now that's what I call chromatic aberration! I'm used to seeing a rainbow effect in the LCD viewer of a digital camera when it is pointed towards the sun, but it rarely actually appears in the final image.  Here, it looks so much like the result of some tacky filter that I'd be embarrassed ever to use the image for any serious purpose.  Wot, no starburst?

Strangest of all, though, are the "doughnut" rings scattered over the whole frame.  It must be some kind of internal reflection off the cheap glass element that sits in front of the fixed f/40 pinhole, or maybe it's a virtual image of the pinhole itself.  I have no idea -- I'm a photographer, not a physicist, I'm afraid.

Yellow lines

I had a revelation the other day.  I've been such a fool!  For years, I had misunderstood the significance of the single and double yellow lines we see painted down the side of the road in the UK.

I had thought that a single yellow line meant "No waiting or parking during the hours indicated on that sign over there", and that a double yellow line meant "No, really, you mustn't stop or park here AT ALL".

But, I've been watching what everyone else is doing and, when you think about it, it's obvious.  The clue is in the colour. One line means, "You can park here, so long as you have one indicator flashing", and two lines mean, "You can park here, so long as you have both indicators flashing".  Simple!

Facebook Status Update

Over the summer, I took a proper look at Facebook for the first time.  The executive summary:  I didn't like what I saw.

As an information-professional-in-a-research-led-university (that's what it says on my passport, honest) I have to try to keep up with "social media", for the simple reason that's how the majority of students experience the world.  True, I have this Grumpy Old Man thing going on, where I repeatedly try to persuade my colleagues that finding things a bit difficult to find is an honourable tradition in higher education.  Might even be the point of the whole thing, maybe, d'ya think?  But I know it's a lost cause.

At least the current generation don't have to memorize core texts, in the way mediaeval scholars once did.  Why, they don't even have to buy, copy out or photocopy core texts, as we 20th century students did.  The library has either bought access to e-book versions or taken the trouble to copyright-clear and digitize individual key chapters for them, then made them freely accessible via the online catalogue.  They need never get out of bed. Have smart-phone, will study.  The pill-form degree cannot be far away.

We were all caught napping by smart-phones.  Three years ago, most of us didn't understand apps, or the differences between the Apple and Android platforms (not to mention also-rans like Blackberry and Windows).  We thought it was pretty whizzy that all students were able to use our resources on their laptops in the campus wireless environment.  Why would anyone want to scrutinize data on a screen the size of a large matchbox?

Because they just do: that's how they lead their social lives, idiot.   I frequently see little groups sitting at a table sharing a coffee break, silently engaged with their texts and tweets on their phones, and busily "liking" stuff on Facebook.  The downside of all this is obvious to anyone over 40, but there has to be a massive upside, doesn't there?  Or why would smart young people spend so much time doing it?

I decided to investigate, so -- fearlessly -- I signed up for Facebook.  There seem to be three camps, where Facebook is concerned.  There are the Professional Oldies, who like to pretend that anything involving a computer is Satanic; to them, Facebook is final proof of that proposition.  Then there are the enthusiasts: "Come on in, you'll love it! You'll have 10,000 friends in no time!!"  Naturally, I'm a bit wary of them, in the same way I'm wary of Jehovah's Witnesses and exercise fanatics.  Finally, there are the Facebook Survivors: "I tried it, and barely escaped with my privacy intact..."  They pressed survival tips on me -- Dos and Don'ts, recommended settings, the phone number of a good cult-debriefer.

Having signed up, the first thing I did was to seek out genuine friends, and to "friend" them.  Hey, look at me over here, being all ironically contemporary!  Be my "friend", friend!

So.  The first thing I discovered was that most of my friends are extremely infrequent Facebook users: they were on it but not in it, so to speak.  It took weeks for some of them to notice they had a new "friending" request (that was their story, anyway).  They had not updated their own "status" for months, years even.  It seemed they had joined up, toyed with a few updates, then forgotten all about it.  It seemed they didn't get it.

But the next thing I discovered was that, as soon as they did friend me, all their other "friends" piled in, like a coachload of garrulous gatecrashers. Help!  Mind that carpet! A good many of these people were updating their status every ten minutes with the most unbelievable rubbish.  This was incredibly annoying.

The thing is (and I almost feel I should be ashamed to admit this), I do not care about the ephemera of the lives of people I do not know and will never know, much as I'd like to hear every little thing from my actual friends. I don't want to see a stranger's daughter's baby snaps, or read about that delicious meal in a Seattle restaurant, or join a campaign to save a neighbourhood shop in Belgium, or be puzzled by unfunny cartoons, or pretend to admire cute (and not so cute) pictures...  I was overwhelmed and repelled by this endless, churning tidal wave of stuff that hundreds of strangers "like" and, incredibly, therefore want to share promiscuously with the entire Facebook universe.  Argh!  My friend's "friend" is my enemy, it seems.

The Facebook Survivors helped me out, of course: unfriend people with too many chatty friends, they said, change some privacy settings, if necessary get a new identity and move house to somewhere without broadband.  As much as anything, though, I was annoyed to find that Facebook seemed to bring out my inner Professional Oldie.  I simply couldn't see the point of it. And that, of course, was exactly what I had set out to discover. I, too, didn't get it.

So, with the ending of my summer Blog Break, I did what everyone else had done: I walked away, shut the door, but left Facebook turned on and the door unlocked.  Occasionally I have a peep, but don't go in.  Like my friends, I am also now on Facebook, but not in it.

And, please, don't even think of asking to be my "friend".  A refusal often offends, as the sign over the bar used to say.

Mythic Beings From Another World

I have owned this photograph since 1962; it is roughly 14cm x 85cm in size.  Quite a few will have been printed, but I doubt many will have survived the last 50 years intact.  It shows the entire staff and pupil complement of Peartree Spring junior school, Stevenage, at the end of the academic year I joined the school, 1961/62.  Not to mention the caretaker, Mr. Jarvis, and his alsatian dog.

I remember that summer well.  There were refurbishments happening in several classrooms, so we had lessons and sat our end-of-year exams in a marquee on the playing field, with grass beneath our feet, hot sunlight filtered through white canvas, and the gentle clucking of bantam hens outside.  Those were the first exams we had ever sat  -- I still recall the light-blue type and shiny paper of the duplicated question sheets -- and just as some children feel the bounce of a ball or the heft of a bat and realise their destiny, I knew this was something I could do well.  Though to go from that humble tent to the Examination Schools at Oxford University was, in the end, an ambition pretty much on a par with getting a trial for Arsenal.

I recently scanned the photograph for another ex-Peartree pupil, and found that a lot more detail could be extracted than was visible to the unaided eye.  The picture must have been made onto a huge negative with a proper rotating panoramic camera, and printed -- probably contact-printed -- using a rig that could include the school's name and the date. Compared to the class photographs my children brought home from school each year -- mere colour snaps, with half the kids squinting or with eyes shut -- it is a masterpiece of assured, special-occasion photography.  The image is proudly signed by the specialist firm Ray Studios, all the way from Braintree in Essex.

It is remarkable, the way the photographer has engaged an entire school's attention and created a "moment".  Notoriously, such cameras scan across a large linear group like this at a sufficiently slow speed that, if you are minded to, you can run round the back and appear at both ends of the final image.  That may, of course, explain why Mr. Jarvis is standing with his dog at the extreme right.  Somehow, every child has been persuaded to offer a characteristic expression to the lens at just the right moment.

It's the faces, of course, that engage your attention.  1962 is a long time ago, now.  These are faces from another world, a very interesting experimental world, but one which I have described often enough before (for example, here, and here).  Boys were leaner, their ears seemed much larger and more prominent; girls were dressed with far less attention to fashion, their hair was cut into practical, rather middle-aged styles.  These are, almost without exception, the children of the aspiring working classes, moved en masse from those parts of London devastated by the War, seeking a new life and a fair deal away from the slums.  I remember a lot of Irish surnames, too: the children of the labourers who came to build a new town on a green-field site, and who decided to stay.

Ah, the names.  They stay with you for life, those names.  A few boys in this photo were in the same class as me all the way through school but, even though I have no idea of the destinies of most of this motley crew, so many other names leap back into my mind when I look at the faces, even after 50 years. These are all mythic beings from my personal creation story.

Of course, it's nothing more than a pretty good cross-section of average humanity; what you get, once you have eliminated wealth, social class, and selection by ability.  There are statistical "outliers", of course.  At least five children of exceptional intelligence, plus another twenty of university-level academic ability. A similar number of gifted athletes and players of various sports.  There are some tough kids in there, too, who went on to build themselves a local reputation as hard men (and at least two hard-hitting women, to my certain knowledge); those of us of a gentler inclination had to learn early on how to keep on their good side.  There is also a fair smattering of what are now referred to as "special needs" children (check some of those prematurely old,  leprechaun-like faces in the extract above).  The children's home situated on my street is well-represented, too. I count four black and Asian kids.  But the majority, the 80%, are just nice, ordinary people, born into an optimistic time.

Then the smug bastards all went and voted for Thatcher in the 1979 elections, bought up their council houses at knock-down prices, left or failed to support their trades unions, and generally set about trashing the place and its public services, so lovingly built by the previous generation, and bought at such a high price.

Don't you just love nice, ordinary people, eh?  Personally, I have always preferred the company of those "outliers" of whatever stripe, hard-hitting women and all.

The Hours

When my children started school, way back in the 20th century, I decided that I would go part-time (roughly 80%) so that I could collect them and be around for those post-school afternoon hours.  I had been a "latch-key kid" myself from an early age, and knew how lonely an empty house can be.

It was a good thing for many years, and I enjoyed getting to know my children better than most fathers get the chance to do.  It was obviously not really necessary once they could get home by themselves, but I enjoyed having a bit of the afternoon to myself, and I was always available as a taxi-service, homework consultant and short-order chef, if needed.  But recently it ocurred to me that, as they were now more likely to be coming home at 3 a.m. than 3 p.m., it might be worth reconsidering the arrangement.

Of course, when you earn as much as me, 20% of salary is such a mighty big chunk of the university's budget that it would have been unwise to ask to return to full-time hours; the consequences to various prestigious, capital-intensive building projects and so on could have been devastating!  Or so it seemed, when I saw the look of panic in my boss's eyes.  So I decided instead to consolidate that 20% of unpaid time into one big chunk, and take one whole day off work every week.

A whole day!  From now on, I will have the luxury of an entire Wednesday to do whatever I want, from staying in bed to ...  Well, we'll see how it goes.  Staying in bed is looking good at the moment.

 It's coming along...  No hurry...

Trickle Treat

Much as I resent the imposition of Halloween (or "Hallo, Ian!" as one of our neighbour's kids used to have it), I have no desire to be known as the grumpy old man who lectures kids on the doorstep about cultural imperialism.  No siree, Bob!

So, today is the day to get out the ceremonial trickle-treat pot, which spends most of the year leering out of the Red Cupboard.  Actually, it is known in our family as the Skanky Sweets Pot, as it has traditionally been our way of disposing of all the disgusting sweets our own kids had, wisely, decided not to eat that year.

This year, my daughter pleaded with me to buy some fresh sweets, as (despite her pose of hip anomie) she is a tender-hearted creature, who was feeling guilty about poisoning the neighbourhood children.  I maintained that this was, in large part, the point of Halloween, but could tell she would prefer not to believe her parents are utterly mad.  I checked the sell-by dates, and concluded that two or more years counted as too far gone, even for Haribos.

So, the Skanky Sweets Pot is somewhat puzzled, finding itself charged with brand new confectionery.  I don't think we'll be renaming it, though: those are some very, very cheap sweets.  Trickle treat!

Summer Time Blues

This weekend, we had the annual ritual in Britain of "putting the clocks back".  No, we hadn't hidden them anywhere (though wouldn't that be a great idea?): they had simply all been set to "British Summer Time" (i.e. GMT +1 hour) during that other great ritual, "putting the clocks forward" in March, and needed restoring to GMT. It's a hassle.  For a start, clocks tend to be mounted inaccessibly high on walls, and getting them off and back onto the wobbly nail is a hazardous procedure.  Twiddling that knurly knob on the back through eleven hourly cycles does nothing for anyone's fingertips.  And is it a superstition or a law of physics that the hands of a clock may not be turned backwards?

Worse, every digital clock in the house (and every year there are more) seems to operate differently.  Some have smugly adjusted themselves in the night.  It's uncanny -- I'm sure we have never told our kitchen radio where we live. How does it know? Perhaps it's because it is permanently tuned in to BBC Radio 4.  All the other digital clocks use utterly different, completely counter-intuitive combinations of simultaneous button presses to adjust the time.  Our bedside alarm, for example, requires the correct button on the top to be held down, while a right-hand multi-function button on the front is used to change the hour, and a left-hand button is used to change the minutes.  It couldn't be more wrong.

Some clocks are so inaccessible or so arcane that they are never changed.  There's at least one in every household.  The digital dashboard clock in our Renault, for example, is both inaccessible and arcane, and has been on Summer Time ever since we bought the car in 2005 (not to mention 7 minutes fast).  You get used to it.

The change is usually expressed and experienced in bed-hours: you either get an extra hour in bed, or lose an hour's sleep.  If you are not mathematically-inclined, it can be surprisingly hard to work out which change has which consequence (and that's why I am late for school today, sir).  The actual purpose of Summer Time is obscure: it appears to have something to do with children in Scotland, though why they need to lose an hour's sleep in spring is never explained. It may have something to do with one of those old Celtic festivals, like Samhain or Bellan Sebastihain.

I discovered an interesting thing this week, though, that I hadn't known before.  Apparently the general cultural relaxation that occurred around 1968 found temporal expression, too.  It seems Harold Wilson and his cabinet were hanging out (probably sharing a reefer or two, the way everyone did in 1968), and someone said, "You know what? I cannot be arsed to change the clocks back again this year, man! It's, like, such a hassle!"  And Harold said, "Yeah, you know what would be, like really, really cool?  We should pass a law saying, hey, people, no-one ever has to change the clocks back ever again, ever!  Like, NEVER!!"  And everyone round the table said, "Wow!", and that's exactly what they did.

Apparently the "experiment" with so-called British Standard Time (i.e. permanent summer time) lasted from 27th October 1968 to 31st October 1971.  I was amazed.  Back then, it seems, even the government felt free to play with your mind!  It made me think: how had that affected my own adolescence, given I was aged 14 in 1968?  Had it been like, for example, life within the Arctic Circle, with six months of permanent daylight followed by six months of permanent darkness?  Was that why I had developed the urge to stay up all night and to stay in bed all day?  Might it not after all have been my own moral failing, as alleged by my parents, but the fault of the government?

Now, if you had to point at a single recent span of time when British culture (or, at least, popular culture) seemed most galvanised, creative, and vividly alive, might you not point at the years 1968 to 1972?  No?  Well, perhaps you're right, and it only seems that way if you did happen to be 14 in 1968.  But wouldn't it be something if -- just as the ability (nay, right!) to sign on the dole and learn to play the guitar was said to be one of the stimuli behind Punk -- a slightly weird government experiment with time gave us the heyday of British rock?

Big Bottom

One of my favourite weekly reads is the NB column on the back page of the TLS, written by "J.C."  This week's issue (26/10/12) continues an ongoing thread about the word "asshole", and British "arse" versus American "ass".  The TLS is a very learned periodical, as you can tell.

Something very disturbing emerged, though, which I thought I should share.  J.C. wrote:

We also asked if the noxious dumb asshole of vulgar insult could be related to the endearing dumb ass of farm and field.  Bottom from A Midsummer Night's Dream, after all, combines the two.  He has the head of an ass and, for a name, the synonym of an ass.
    Or so you might think.  Alastair Fowler, an authority on Renaissance matters and a regular contributor to these columns, writes to say that in the 1590s, "your arse could be your bum, butt, cheeks, croup, prat, rump, seat, stern, tail, toute, backside, buttocks, hurdies or fundament; but before about 1794 it was not your bottom".  So, Professor Fowler, is it the case that puerile giggling at Bottom for his funny name is to see a joke where Shakespeare intended none?  That's correct.  In his latest book, Literary Names: Personal names in English Literature, Fowler writes, "We must give up the notion of Bottom with his arse where his head should be".  The name, he insists, refers to "the spool or nucleus a weaver's thread is wound on".

Whaat?  Say it ain't so!  Personally, I do not give a kick up the hurdies what Alastair Fowler thinks, it simply CANNOT BE TRUE.

The famous Harley Granville-Barker production of 1914

Meanings do change, of course. I was always fond of this early example of product placement in Antony and Cleopatra, spoken by Cleo's waspish handmaiden Charmian:

O excellent! I love Long Life better than figs!

You could have imagined the advertising campaign, but its time is past.  Long Life, I should say for younger and overseas visitors, was a particularly awful beer brewed by Ind Coope in the 60s and 70s ("The only beer brewed specially for the can!  It never varies!" was their proud boast).

But, look, WS wasn't exactly above a bum joke, or a knob joke (see "Will" in various sonnets), or any other kind of crowd-pleaser.  One of my favourite examples is this exchange from Measure for Measure:

ESCALUS:  Come you hither to me, Master tapster. What's your name, Master tapster?
POMPEY:   Pompey.
ESCALUS:  What else?
POMPEY:   Bum, sir.
ESCALUS:  Troth, and your bum is the greatest thing about you.

Oh, Will, Will, you tart... You might as well write the stage direction, "Ride laughter; wait two beats; riposte" before Escalus' final line there.  It's practically a Carry On film joke.

Mind you, if Fowler is right about "bottom" (and he surely isn't) it wouldn't be the first time a well-wrought work of art has acquired new innuendos and inadvertent humour with the passage of time, and changes in usage.  Sticking with Shakespeare, I can remember the hilarity at finding buried yoof and drug culture references in the texts we studied.  When Rosalind, speaking the epilogue the end of As You Like It says, "If it be true that good wine needs no bush, 'tis true that a good play needs no epilogue", it is unlikely WS knew that 500 years later "bush" would become a synonym for "marijuana", causing much nudging at the back of the class.

Usually, it's the other way round (no, not "good bush needs no wine", fool).  There are scholars (from the "Get A Life" school of criticism) who are convinced every other word in Shakespeare is a pun on or synonym for various genital components and sex acts.  I remember vividly, as an innocent lad of 17, taking down a copy of Shakespeare's Bawdy by Eric Partridge from a shelf in our local public library.  I remember it, because a wad of pornographic photographs fell from between its pages, showing real genital components and various sex acts.  There was something slightly cosmic about the contrast between the inky smut-quest on the book's pages, and the lusty reality of that dubious free gift.

That's the Blue Corner.  In the Red Corner we have Thomas Bowdler, who gave his name to the process of "Bowdlerization" (i.e. removing the naughty bits from texts, to spare the blushes and corruption of the impressionable) by producing his Family Shakspeare "in which nothing is added to the original text, but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family".  One of these days I must get hold of a copy, and see what rib-tickling surname Pompey gets to announce in Measure for Measure.

Amusingly, but apocryphally I suspect, some prudish Victorian other than Bowdler is said to have changed this line from Cymbeline:

IMOGEN [reads]: "Thy mistress, Pisanio, hath played the strumpet in my bed"

to "Thy mistress, Pisanio, hath played the trumpet in my bed", which, if anything, is worse, if you are minded to look for double-entendre.

Meanwhile, back in Measure for Measure:

MISTRESS OVERDONE:  Thus, what with the war, what with the sweat, what with the gallows and what with poverty, I am custom-shrunk.
[Enter POMPEY, for it is he]
How now! what's the news with you?
POMPEY:  Yonder man is carried to prison.
MISTRESS OVERDONE:  Well; what has he done?
POMPEY:  A woman.
MISTRESS OVERDONE:  But what's his offence?
POMPEY: Groping for trouts in a peculiar river.
MISTRESS OVERDONE:  What, is there a maid with child by him?
POMPEY:  No, but there's a woman with maid by him.

Every word is plain as day, except one: "peculiar".  It used to mean "belonging exclusively to one person",and now it means "unusual, strange, odd".  Both work, but only the first was intended.  Fundamentally peculiar business, language, at bottom.

Now Then, Now Then, As It Happens

International visitors to this blog, of whom I glad to say there are quite a few, will not recognise the allusion in the title of this post.  British readers over the age of 40 will.  Where to begin?

Back in the Dreamtime of British pop, when the Rolling Stones and the Beatles were still one-minute wonders, it was decreed that there should be a TV programme dedicated to the "hit parade", and that it should be broadcast unto the nation at tea-time on Thursday nights. And the BBC laboured mightily, and it was so.  Lo!  And they called this programme Top of the Pops.  And it was good sort of OK.

The first broadcast, on New Year's Day 1964, featured the Rolling Stones ("I Wanna Be Your Man"), Dusty Springfield ("I Only Want to Be with You"), the Dave Clark Five ("Glad All Over"), the Hollies ("Stay"), the Swinging Blue Jeans ("Hippy Hippy Shake"), oh, and the Beatles ("I Want to Hold Your Hand"), that week's number one hit.  Not a bad week.

So.  That pop chart show ran for 40 years, and was presented by an assortment of strange men, the strangest of whom was an ex-wrestler and dancehall manager turned DJ called Jimmy Savile, famous for dyeing his wig-like hair a different colour each week, smoking large cigars, and for his oddly mannered delivery of various catchphrases that were a gift to impressionists, as it 'appens, guys'n'gals.  His self-branding was tedious and shallow, but as authentically British as a Kiss-Me-Quick cowboy hat, and he went on to become a national institution, presenting "family" TV programmes and running marathons to raise money for charity.

His charitable efforts had a particular focus on hospitals caring for children and the vulnerable, inside which institutions -- remarkably -- it has recently emerged that he had been given private rooms and a full set of keys.  Eh?  To anyone with a real interest in pop and rock he was nothing but a self-promoting parasite, but he was tolerated and encouraged by the Establishment, because the British like to think they like eccentrics, because charity fund-raising is the ticket-price of "honours", and because since 1964 the old folks have felt continually anxious about not being down with the kids.  He was knighted in 1990, as it 'appens (oh, stop it).

Well, it seems Sir Jimmy was being rather more down with the kids than anyone had thought.  In recent weeks, a year after his death, a wave of hysteria (nay, a "tsunami of filth", according to Lord Patten) has broken over the British media, as the long-standing rumours about Savile's dodgy sexuality have finally been confirmed, and the finger-pointing has begun.  How could this happen??  How come no-one guessed that this creepy guy who sought, and was granted, private rooms and unrestricted, unsupervised access in children's hospitals was -- of all things -- a paedophile!

Who knew? Well, quite a few people knew, of course, in the most direct and upsetting way possible.  The trouble was, no-one wanted to believe them when they said what they knew.  Or, more culpably, knowing what they were told to be true, people in positions of authority chose to turn a blind eye.  Worse still, it seems they spiked various attempts to expose him.

Why? Ongoing investigations may reveal the details and the extent of the cover-up and perhaps uncover some other very prominent figures, but the invulnerability of powerful people -- all right, powerful men -- to retribution for their illicit sexual activities is hardly news.  That people  -- all right, men -- are dowright bad when led primarily by their genitalia is also old news. If you're feeling strong, this article by Nick Davies reveals the extent of child abuse in Britain.  It's pretty shocking.

Now, taboos exist on a spectrum which is constantly shifting.  Morality, legality and reality are rarely in alignment.  Consider that in England homosexual activity was illegal until 1967. In establishment and entertainment circles, an awful lot of blind eyes must have been turned to an awful lot of sexual activity which was, simply, illegal.  Humanely, most of the time, of course.  How unfair, how humiliating, for friends or colleagues to be forced to hide their emotional life "in the closet"!  But then one reads of drugged guardsmen being raped as entertainment at show-biz parties in the 1920s, and the humanity of it seems to diminish.  A blind eye tends not to judge the relative morality of what it chooses not to see.

There is a difference, where sex is concerned, between illegal behaviour, behaviour which is "frowned upon", and agreeably naughty behaviour, but you could be forgiven for thinking that difference is negotiable, especially if you are turned on by transgression. Did you know that the age of consent in Germany and Italy is 14, and in Spain is 13?  Surprised?  I am.  But, knowing that, it is not hard to imagine how, back in the ferment of moral change of the 60s and 70s, a decent person might have been tempted not to to expose -- or even to protect -- a powerful, predatory celebrity for acts which might, for all anyone knew, be legal in few years.  You wouldn't want to look foolish, or to lose your job over something which, it would be easy to persuade yourself, was a purely private matter.

The key word, of course, is "consent".  Feminists have fought a long battle to establish that "no always means no".  A tough fight indeed, given that men have always been encouraged to regard "no" as simply a bargaining position.  Check out those songs in the first TOTP broadcast:  I wanna be your man, I wanna hold your hand, please, won't you stay?  I only want to be with you!  They are all pleas for a change of heart, romance as negotiation.  Do you recall any Top 10 songs that went, "Oh, all right then. Never mind. Sorry!"?

But tweak those lyrics just a little, and suddenly the spectre of Jimmy Savile and his ugly like is conjured:  I'm gonna be your man, I'm going to hold your hand, you are going to stay...  Add a locked room, a feeling of helplessness and confusion, and a powerful, famous, implacable man, and you have a nightmare, where "consent" is a word without meaning.  As it happens.

At moments like this, someone usually wheels out these words of Lord Macaulay:  "We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodic fits of morality".  This time, not so much.  This time, it's "Dig him up, scatter his ashes to the four winds, erase his name from the book of life". Perhaps some other words of Macaulay may be more appropriate to the way the wind seems to be blowing:

"The highest proof of virtue is to possess boundless power without abusing it."

The question is, can anyone now in possession of power even remember what virtue is?

Whatever Happened to Donkey Jackets?

As autumn starts to bite my thoughts always turn, with pleasure, to coats.  I have always loved wearing a winter coat, and it is a mystery to me why today's kids prefer to walk the icy streets at 3 a.m. dressed for a Californian beach party.  No doubt my grandfather felt the same about my failure to wear suitable headgear whenever leaving the house; he wore his flat cap when gardening or even, according to a snapshot I have somewhere, sitting in a seaside deckchair with an ice-cream.  If the trend continues, in a couple of generations Brits will be walking the streets in swimwear at all hours in all weathers.

But, coats!  Part of the joy of the return of the colder weather is the knowledge that now is the time to get a favourite coat off the peg where it has hung all summer, to be surprised by the weight of its heft across your shoulders, and to rediscover the odds and ends that got left in its pockets somewhere back in March. Amongst (many) other things, I keep a Leatherman multitool and a blindingly-bright LCD mini-torch in my winter coat, and it is great to finger their familiar contours again.  Not to mention the conkers, pebbles, and escaped medicinal lozenges with their protective coating of pocket lint, reminders of last winter's bouts of colds and flus.  Ah, you Fisherman's Friends and Strepsils!

This week I found myself remembering the coats of my youth, checking them off in my mind like old girlfriends.  Of course, we used to have proper winters back then, cold dark nights after the pubs had closed, hanging around the recreation ground swings, seventeen going on seven, so it would have been madness not to have worn a coat.  Besides, where would you put your tobacco tin and copy of A Confederate General From Big Sur otherwise?  Let's see, there were several cheap unlined duffel coats, a green fishtail parka with a bright red lining and a cheap zip that never quite worked, an impossibly heavy army surplus greatcoat, but above all I remembered a series of donkey jackets.

Donkey jackets are great.  Originally designed as workwear for manual labourers, they are everything a coat should be: warm, cheap, shapeless, capacious, easily buttoned with cold-numbed fingers, with big pockets and a decent collar to turn up against the wind and rain.  A really echt donkey jacket had PVC shoulder panels bearing the name of the local council or a building firm: my Dad had one with "FORD DAGENHAM" stencilled across the back. You could have any colour, so long as it was black or very dark blue.  Thinking about it, I realised that everything I now feel about coats had its origin in those donkey jackets I wore well into the 1980s.

So, naturally, I thought I might buy myself one, for old time's sake.

"What's a donkey jacket?", asked the guy in the surplus store.  "A what jacket?", said the girls in Milletts and Oswald Bailey.  I got the impression they thought I was taking the piss, like someone asking for a left-handed spanner (or, for that matter, like the time I wandered into El Vino's on Fleet Street, asking for a bottle of Pisco, but that's another story).  "Is that like a pea-jacket?", or "Oh, you mean a reefer jacket!", were other responses I got, before giving up my quest.

I suppose I hadn't noticed, but it seems no-one wears donkey jackets any more, not even dustmen. Perhaps the supply of donk, or whatever they were made out of, ran out.  When did that happen?


Addendum at 17:30:
My friend Gerry pointed me at this atrocity.  I am speechless. A donkey jacket from Burberry...  Costing £850...  With a WAIST!  Next thing you know, they'll be selling shiny pink Doc Martens boots!  (What's that you say, Sooty?)

Back Numbers

I'm currently wrestling with a photo-book project, probably now titled "Elevation", though it was called "The Catoptric Theatre" for quite a while, until I realised this was (a) pretentious and (b) unpronounceable.  I did learn a lot about 17th century Jesuit magician Athanasius Kircher ("the last man who knew everything") along the way, not to mention how to entertain your colleagues by putting a cat inside a mirrored box.  I had fun tracing the crucial quote in the original Latin of Kircher's assistant Gaspar Schott's great work Magia Universalis (Würzburg, 1657), despite Gaspar using the word "cattus" for cat, rather than "feles".  All useless knowledge now, but I suppose it might help me win an upmarket pub quiz one day.

This two steps forward, one step back process is what a project of this sort is all about --  trying things out, rejecting anything that doesn't feel right, and generally groping towards a satisfactory whole.  The thing that always happens, is that gaps appear.  Wouldn't it be great, you think, if that picture I took in October 2007 had actually been in focus / properly exposed / as good as I remember it?  Inevitably, trawls through the back files ensue, and along the way gems like these two get uncovered -- never even processed from RAW before, somehow overlooked, probably because they didn't quite match whatever it was I thought I was doing back then.

Pentti Sammallahti may have a way with dogs, but you must admit I'm pretty good with vapour trails...

Boredom

It may only be the result of having outlived the tedium of Sundays in the 1950s and 60s but, somehow, I seem to have been handed a belief that boredom is character-building; an experience to be overcome by direct engagement, not evaded.  An odd belief, really, and clearly not one based on encounters with pub bores.  A truly dreadful example used to haunt our local in Bristol, whom we dubbed "Red Alert" -- as soon as he was spotted, all eye contact ceased, and any seating space at every table mysteriously vanished.

Of course, true boredom is in rather short supply, these days.  There's a big difference between the princely ennui of today's kids, fed up with the shrink-wrapped sameness of their diet and diversions, and the kind of soul-sapping dullness which makes setting fire to a neighbour's cat or tattooing one's own knuckles with a pin and a biro seem like fun things to do.

Whenever my kids claimed they were bored, I would bore them further by telling them about mandatory Sunday visits to grandparents, where children were not so much "seen and not heard" as ignored and invisible.  On dark winter afternoons, I would slip into the pitch-dark vestibule between their back door,  broom-cupboard, and living-room door (known as "The Passage") and spin round until I had lost all sense of direction.  After the excitement of the sense of total disorientation had worn off, I would attempt to work out -- using all available sensory clues -- which of the three possible exits was which; hoping to escape into the rain, and maybe count the spiders in the outside toilet, rather than get a faceful of broom or, worse, stagger dizzily back into the stifling heat and dullness of the ancestral hearth.  If nothing else, it prepared me for the ordeal of the colour darkroom.

Oddly, over the summer I found I was bored with photography.  At first, I thought I was just bored with my own work.  It happens.  Perhaps I'd been repeating myself?  Maybe what had once seemed a useful focus -- to be confined by daily work routine and family responsibilities to a few narrow geographic and temporal opportunities -- had begun to feel more like a self-imposed prison than the "freedom of restraint"?  After all, there are no nappies to change now, or school lunches to pack, and within a short 18 months there may well be no university campus walls or windows to anatomize any more, either, as I hope to retire at 60.  The prison door swings open...  I did begin to wonder whether I was getting prematurely "demob happy". As I have said before, the borderline separating "project" from "obsessive-compulsive behaviour" is easily crossed.

But then I noticed that everyone seems to be getting bored with photography.  Contemporary photography has become boring.  Sure, there are some good new photographers out there, but their work is not compelling or even that new.  So much of it is a retread of work done in the previous 30 years. In the end, there are too many photographers, too many photographs, and not enough world.  It seems that most of the books that have grabbed my attention in recent times contain work by artists whose signature images were made a decade or two ago.

"Disenchantment" is probably a better word than "boredom".  So much work that is getting the attention at the moment seems a bit too easily won, and doesn't open any doors into the future.  So, do let me know if you've seen anything genuinely exciting recently.

Yawn...  One of the better spreads from the book I'm working on

Count No Account

Over the summer I read the much-praised biography of poet Edward Thomas by Matthew Hollis, Now All Roads Lead to France.  To be honest, I find biographies heavy going, and this was no exception.  The true facts of most lives are dull: given a choice, "print the legend" is always my preference.  Thomas was clearly an unhappy man and, by modern lights, an irresponsible husband and parent; it is not particularly edifying or entertaining to read about his narcissistic self-tormenting.  Having followed his endless dithering about whether or not to enlist at the outbreak of WW1, it came as no surprise to learn that he found a sort of happiness within the disciplines of army life, once he had actually joined up.

More often than not, the true facts of "famous" lives have a series of narrow near misses with legend.  For example, I learned the extraordinary fact that both Edward Thomas and Wilfred Owen were at the Artists Rifles' Hare Hall training camp, Gidea Park, in 1915, and that Thomas may well have instructed Owen in map-reading, but it seems neither realised or recognised that the other was also a poet.  So close!

I have always enjoyed the fact that the Artists Rifles existed.  As a military unit, it has a certain Terry Pratchett-esque improbability about it. But for a jaw-dropping fact, how about this: according to Hollis, among its grizzled veterans the Artists Rifles can boast Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne.  No kidding.  Can you even begin to imagine?  It gives a whole new dimension to Ernest Thesiger's alleged response, when asked how his military service in France during WW1 had been: "Oh, my dear!  The noise!  And the people!"

I was curious about this -- I really couldn't imagine Swinburne snapping to attention with a smart salute -- so did a little research.  I read that the Artists Rifles was one of several volunteer regiments set up around 1859, in the alarm following "the Orsini Affair".  This was not the first time I had seen a reference to Orsini, but had never bothered to follow it up before. You could spend your life following up such things (though there are worse ways of spending a life).  It turns out that in 1858/59 there was a genuine fear that France might invade Britain, following the attempted assassination of Napoleon III by one Felice Orsini, an Italian nationalist who, it seemed, had the backing of English radicals, and had thrown bombs at the Emperor more-or-less stamped "Made in Birmingham".  Curiously, Swinburne was "rusticated" as an undergraduate from Oxford University for publicly supporting Orsini's action.

All interesting enough, but it gets better. Sometimes historical fact and legendary truth successfully avoid that narrow near miss and collide head on, scattering bits of myth, legend and fact in all directions.  The Orsini Plot and its aftermath is one such mash-up.

For example, Orsini was sent on a secret mission to Hungary in 1854 by Mazzini (oh, look it up) but got arrested and imprisoned in Mantua.  He escaped by using a saw to cut through the bars on the cell window, then climbed out, 100 feet above ground, and slid down using a rope he had made of bedsheets. Passing himself off as a friendly peasant, he then managed to get past the Austrian guards.  Are you kidding me?  Is it possible Orsini was the inventor of the old "bedsheet rope" trope?  Swiftly followed by the old "fool the guards with a cheery wave" routine?  History does not record whether the saw was smuggled in to Orsini using a cake.

This is history as operetta, long-forgotten works with titles like "Zeppo and Floriana", set in a world that has now vanished and faded from consciousness -- 1848 and all that, Mazzini, Garibaldi, the Austrians and the French as Evil Empire -- and which only remains as forgotten names on pigeon-spattered statues in European city squares.  Believe it or not, Napoleon III was actually on his way to see Rossini's William Tell at the Paris Opera when Orsini's assassination attempt was made.

But there's more.  One of Orsini's accomplices was Count Carlo Camillo di Rudio, an aristocratic Italian nationalist and military man.  I could spin this tale out, but here's the thing in a nutshell:  after the assassination attempt, di Rudio was arrested and sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment on Devil's Island.  However, he escaped from Devil's Island and made his way, via British Guiana and London, to America, becoming Charles De Rudio on the way.  There he fought for the Union in the Civil War, becoming a 2nd Lieutenant in the 2nd US Colored Infantry. After the War he became an officer in the regular US Army, and was eventually appointed to the 7th Cavalry.  In 1876 he participated in and survived -- yes -- the Battle of the Little Big Horn.  Apparently, he was known to his fellow 7th Cavalry officers as "Count No Account" because of his habit of telling tall tales.

As they say, you couldn't make it up, could you?  Odd, isn't it, how -- in the course of a single man's life -- a Ruritanian operetta about Italian unification becomes a tense assassination drama, then an escape thriller, then a Civil War epic with a "buffalo soldiers" twist, finally followed by a minor part in Custer's Last Stand.  If nothing else, it means the use of the William Tell overture as the theme for the Lone Ranger finally makes perfect sense.

Why no-one has ever made a movie telling the story of di Rudio's extraordinary life is a mystery.  It would have to be called Count No-Account, of course.  Perhaps it just mixes up too many genres to pitch.   There is a English-language biography, however, though I suspect it is self-published:  Alien Horseman: an Italian Shavetail with Custer, by J.C. Ladenheim.

Somehow, I doubt anyone will ever to want to make a movie about Edward Thomas, though: a few good poems and a friendship with Robert Frost are no substitute for serial derring-do with bombs and knotted bedsheets, and close encounters with Custer and Crazy Horse.

Recommendations

A couple of recommendations:

I've mentioned Finnish photographer Pentti Sammallahti before.  He is without doubt the Zen master of monochrome landscape photography, and practically the only photographer I know who can use a panoramic camera without resorting to cliché, or drawing more attention to the means of production than the end product.  In fact, only the peerless Josef Koudelka comes close.

A book which is a retrospective collection of the whole range of Sammallahti's outstanding work has been published this year.  It is a multinational effort, with Finnish, French, German and English versions available.  I bought the German version, Hier weit entfernt, from Kehrer Verlag.  This was partly because it was published earliest, but also because I know how highly the Germans prize production values in book publishing (I also bought the German version of the reissue of Koudelka's classic Gypsies last year for the same reason).  It is an outstandingly beautiful book.  The English version is titled Here, Far Away, and is now available from publisher Dewi Lewis, who also knows a thing or two about photo-book production.  I haven't seen a copy, but I assume it's pretty much identical, and recommend it unreservedly: treat yourself.

I have also mentioned musician and poet Richard Skelton before.  Richard recently announced the availbility of a new recording, Verse of Birds, as well as a new edition of his astonishingly original and thought-provoking landscape-based bookwork Landings, both available directly from his Corbelstone Press.   Richard's work is austere, melancholy, uncompromisingly personal, and intensely engaged with the particularity of his local landscapes (he has recently moved to Ireland) -- the impact of human settlement, the ambient soundscape, and the cohabiting wildlife.  His products are among the most beautifully-made and elegantly-conceived I have ever seen from a small press.  Again, highly recommended.

I wish I could add a third recommendation to an e-book of some of my own recent work, but this is still very much a work in progress.  As I have often said in this blog, sequencing your work is every bit as creative and demanding as making the actual photographs. Sometimes, as has happened this time, it is only when you come to put pictures end-to-end that you realise there are gaps and loose ends that render the project incomplete or incoherent.

It's easy, of course, just to say, "Sod it!", and put the work out anyway.  Who would know or notice?  But I have the good fortune of only having myself to please, and I am not yet pleased.  Besides, given the standard of the work recommended above, who would not think, "Perhaps not just yet....".

What's That Noise?

You know how it is: somewhere in your house -- in a bag, under a pile of books, maybe in a coat pocket -- an electronic device is beeping, demanding your attention.  Is it a phone, a computer, an e-reader, or maybe a long-forgotten light-sabre?  Just where is it, and what does it want?  It's annoying.

I'm especially sensitized to this beeping since we had smoke detectors installed some years ago.  These things start to give out warning chirps as their backup batteries begin to run down, with increasing frequency and attention-getting volume, eventually leading up to a continuous hysterical bleep-fest, generally at about 3 a.m.  A neglected smoke alarm is utterly relentless and ear-shattering at close range, and won't shut up until it's fed.  I literally ripped one off the ceiling in anger one night. The wires still dangle from a ragged hole in our entrance hall: a memento of a frantic sleep-addled search for a fresh battery under extreme sonic bombardment.  As a result, a sparrow cheeping in its sleep at night can now bring me to instant full wakefulness.

Anyway, the insistent metaphorical bleep I have been hearing in recent times turned out to be this blog.  Ah yes, the blog... Hidden under a cushion since August and now in urgent need of recharging.

I hope you had a good summer. I didn't see much of it, such as it was, as I had to attend to the move of a complex library management system to a new database and operating system and then troubleshoot the inevitable consequences, which occupied most of July, August, and September.  In lieu of a holiday I've just spent the last two weeks hanging around at home, gazing at the rain, getting in the way.

So, not much photography has taken place, and no e-books have yet been completed.  I did manage to get out a few times, though, not least to my son's graduation ceremony.  Although I possess degrees from several universities, I have never been to an actual ceremony at any of them myself.  We were a skeptical, refusenik generation, and not taking part was our speciality.  But seeing the simple pride of some families -- particularly those from overseas, some of them political refugees -- in the achievement of their children was a humbling reminder of the point and purpose of higher education.  Oxford, I'm glad to say, is not yet the degree factory that some other -- ahem -- universities are becoming.