Your First Three Words in Turkish

Towel...

In a recent comment, I mentioned the Firesign Theatre (or, possibly, Theater).  To American readers of a certain age and inclination, the Firesign Theatre will be as familar as Monty Python.  However, very few Brits seem to know their work, even those cosmopolitan types who were familiar with, say, the Cheech and Chong recorded oeuvre.  British politicos in the 1970s tended towards the puritanical, and British stoners tended towards the horizontal.  Humour was rarely a common ground between the two camps, and a taste for left-field, post-modern, acid-tinged, surrealist political sketch comedy and soap opera was more unusual than you might think.

But some tastes are like a secret cult, whose members are always looking for new recruits.  One day in my first term at college in 1973, a new friend (now, confusingly, Professor of Islamic Archaeology in the University of Oxford)  pressed into my hands two objects, saying, in effect, "Here, I think you need to know about these".  One was a book -- Musrum, by Eric Thacker and Anthony Earnshaw (in need of a post in its own right) -- and the other was an LP album by Firesign Theatre.  I can't remember now whether it was How Can You Be In Two Places At Once, When You're Not Anywhere At All? or Waiting For the Electrician or Someone Like Him.  One or the other.  Probably the latter.  As if it matters.

Bath...

As well as being funny, Firesign's albums were pretty sophisticated for their time.  Nowadays, po-mo reflexiveness is the default setting of every jobbing standup -- it's the comedy equivalent of conceptual art -- but even today it is rare to find such acute explorations and subversions of media tropes, linguistic cliches, and political and social conventions.  If I had to characterise FT for someone who'd never heard them, I'd say it was like Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In crossed with The Goon Show, tinged with Frank Zappa and That Was The Week That Was.  Not that that would help: they would probably never had heard (or even heard of) any of those acts, either.

"Hearing" is key, though: it's very much an aural experience, with quick-change accents, scene changes and sound-effects that evoke and parody the glory days of radio.  And, as is well known, the pictures are always better on radio.  It's also very layered: some of the best jokes happen in the background, mixed behind the dialogue.  There's nothing around now that is remotely similar, as far as I know: that late sixties / early seventies mashup of politics, counterculture, and nostalgia-fuelled zaniness was a flavour all its own.  No, wait... Didn't I say that on the other side of the record?

Border...
(May I see your passport, sir?)

Museology

A couple more images from my recent Ashmolean visit.  I can't resist the surreal and comic justapositions that happen in places like the gallery of plaster casts of classical sculpture, once you have freed your eye from what you are supposed to be looking at.  The one at the top is positively Dali-esque.

They make an interesting combination with this bit of shadow-play, seen in the Hall of Armour in Schloss Ambras, near Innsbruck, in the summer:

Which in turn chimes nicely with this one, also from Innsbruck, but this time from the Tiroler Volkskunstmuseum:

As I have become rather too fond of saying, wherever you go, there you are.  Put that end-to-end with various other favourite sayings -- "to a man with a hammer everything looks like a nail" and "there are two kinds of people, those who think there are two kinds of people and those who don't" suggest themselves -- and you have come depressingly close to summing up the contents of my mind after 60 years on the planet.  There are probably a couple more nostrums in there somewhere, but I can't think what they are just now.  Ah well, any wisdom that can't be summarised onto one side of A4 is not worth knowing (ah, there goes another one!).

From a technical point of view, I think these pictures demonstrate pretty conclusively the superior low-light performance of the Fuji X-E1 (top two) over the Panasonic G3 (bottom two).  I had to work quite hard to get usable files from the Panasonic, including generous application of Noise Ninja, but the Fuji files have barely been tweaked.  Impressive.

Book Club

Christmas is coming, so here are a few book recommendations.

Eric Ravilious:  Artist & Designer / by Alan Powers (ISBN 978-1-84822-111-6)

If you like Ravilious, you will love this book.  Mind you, if you like Ravilious, you've probably already got it.  Design, binding, reproduction quality -- it's all there.  The whole span of his creative life is covered, from plates and mugs to book illustrations and prints.  Possibly the most quintessentially English artist of the 20th century (not always or necessarily a good thing), and yet another life cut tragically short by war.

A Ted Hughes Bestiary: Poems / selected by Alice Oswald (ISBN 978-0-571-30143-0)

Alice Oswald is emerging as a major figure on the British poetry scene (if you're a poetry reader, and don't know her book Dart, buy it immediately) and her selection of Hughes was bound to be an interesting one.  I find her focus on the "animal poem" theme has identified pretty much all my favourite Hughes poems, plus plenty more from collections I've never seen, and it's a real pleasure to have this well-presented volume to browse through.

Empire / by Jon Tonks (ISBN 978-1-907893-49-0)

This is another substantial and beautifully-produced book, from that very reliable photo-publisher Dewi Lewis, presenting Jon Tonks' photographic project to visit the remote island dependencies of our former empire, such as the recently-mentioned Tristan da Cunha.  A very original idea, very nicely executed in the spirit of Chris Killip and Martin Parr, now into its second edition, though copies of the first edition are still around (my own copy, as an early purchaser direct from Jon Tonks, is signed and inscribed).

[Note to self:  it's time you stopped buying your own Christmas presents.]

By the way, if you're ambivalent about using Amazon, you may not know that the Guardian has quietly launched its own online bookshop, currently selling EVERYTHING at 20% discount,which makes it even cheaper than Amazon.  I bought the Hughes Bestiary from them, and it arrived quickly, even using free second-class postage, and well packaged in one of those excellent and now universal corrugated card mailers that Amazon pioneered.  For everything but the most obscure books (and e-books for the Kindle, obviously) I may be a convert.  And, as they say, by buying books from their shop, you'll be helping to keep independent journalism alive.

Making Waves

I drove to Brighton yesterday, to deliver and sort out a few things for my daughter, back studying at Sussex University, and decided to stay overnight in a convenient hotel, get up early and have a morning wandering around with a camera.  I chose well: a fierce wind was blowing straight in from the channel, and the waves were really piling onto the beach.  I have no idea why being next to the sea on a blowy, sunshine-and-showers type of day is so exhilarating, but it is.  It's like taking a short ride in a fast machine, but standing still.

Despite the Brighton Photo Biennial being on at the moment (what, another photo festival?), no-one else was working the seafront spectacle.  Too early in the morning, perhaps, or too conventional a subject for the more trend-conscious photographer?  Both, probably; their loss.

Unfortunately, camera lenses and salt water are not a good combination and, despite trying to stay downwind of the bigger splashes, a steady drift of seaspray* was filling the seafront air, and my lens got a good coating (as did my hair and beard).  So before heading back home after lunch I had to seek out a camera shop to get some lens cleaning fluid.  Luckily, Brighton still has at least one "proper" camera shop, in the form of Clock Tower Cameras, a genuine Aladdin's Cave of photographica.  I like to touch base in such places, have a chat with the knowledgeable staff, and spend enough money to feel I've helped to keep them in business.

* Is there anyone else in the entire world who remembers a children's TV programme from around 1960 which contained the phrase, "Seaspray?  Salty Cyril!" (I think Salty Cyril was a seafarer's ghost), the mere repetition of which would convulse me and my primary-school best friend John Boxley with hysterical laughter?  Odd, how these things stick in the memory.

Flying

As I had cause to confess recently, I am a man in whom a spiritual impulse is in a constant wrestling match with a deep skepticism.  As skepticism knows all the dirty tricks it usually wins.  However, the struggle doesn't strike me as pointless.  G.K. Chesterton's words are truer today than ever:  "When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything."  Today, once you step outside the tightly-guarded compound of rational, positivist science, you are surrounded by the babble of crystal healers, aromatherapists and a thousand other snake-oil merchants trying to monetize credulity.

Recently I was browsing through a collection of "inspirational" extracts from well-known artists, writers, and songwriters, and was struck by some common threads.  There was much of the usual nonsense about following your dream, which is just annoying, but more usefully there was an insistence on the value of actually getting down to hard labour ("Inspiration is for amateurs -- the rest of us just show up and get to work" -- Chuck Close).  In the end, all dream-chasing aside, a writer is a person who writes, a painter is a person who paints.  A successful artist is a person who makes at least a partial living from their art.

But there was another thread, of which this is exemplary:

If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery — isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you’ll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.
Charles Bukowski, Factotum

Sounds great, doesn't it?  It's the romance of the outsider, shot through with righteous self-justification (nicely hubristic, too: "He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not." Isaiah 53:3).  We've surely all had such moments, alone with the gods in our ecstatic shining nights.  No?  Well, if you haven't, you have my sympathy.  But anyone seeking to lead a life led at that pitch of self-absorption who is not also blessed with considerable talent is, as Bukowski warns, likely to die alone, cold and hungry, a burned-out, rejected and resentful never-was.  The flaming fire must cool, be transmuted into ink, and end up as meaningful words on a page.  Those laughing gods won't write your book for you, but it will amuse them to steal it from you, like rolling a drunk.

Reading the "how to" advice of those who have achieved notable artistic success always invites the skeptical question:  Sure, but how many more have failed utterly, following exactly the same formula?  Curiously, the "secret" that many succesful people seem to want to propagate, in variations on Bukowski's theme, is this: that total commitment somehow of itself invokes a positive, supportive response from the universe, in the form of life-changing coincidences, chance meetings, and unexpected opportunities.  It's like magic! Believe you can fly, and you will -- just jump!

It seems never to have occurred to them that it is more likely the other way round: that their response to the random churning of the world -- to the coincidences, chance meetings and unexpected opportunities that happen to everyone -- has been total commitment, and that it is this eye for the main chance that has made all the difference.  I suppose that to advocate the clever, even ruthless exploitation of every chance opportunity may sound rather too cold, too calculating, too businesslike, and there is something more appealing, something reassuringly quasi-religious about the idea of art as a high-stakes game of trust played with the universe.  Maybe we should split the difference and simply call it self-belief.  Self-belief does have a certain magic, teflon quality to it.

But the fact is that if you can fly, you can believe whatever you like about how you got up there.  And probably will.

Postcards from Oxford

I was in Oxford on Friday.  There's a photography festival on at the moment, and a highlight that immediately grabbed my attention in the programme is a show of the work of Finnish master Pentti Sammallahti.  As regular readers will know, I'm a fan.  There's a room of about 30 photographs in the St. John's College Kendrew Barn exhibition space, and it's well worth seeing if you're in the area.  There is also work by two other Finns in the same show, but that is pretty negligible stuff by comparison.

The most immediately striking thing about the Sammallahti photographs is how small they are.  Thirty or so frames comfortably occupy a space about the size of a large domestic room.  Even the signature panoramic images are only about 14 inches by 6 inches, which is, by contemporary exhibition standards, tiny.  But the tonal quality and control are exquisite, even behind reflective glass and some rather uneven illumination.  It's an opportunity to look and learn.

Talking of looking and learning, while I was in town I dropped in on the recently refurbished Natural History Museum, and the resolutely unrefurbished Pitt Rivers Museum.  While I was there, I made this postcard for you:

On the way to an old friend's house for lunch, I made the obligatory stop at the Ashmolean.  There, I made another postcard:

The contrast of the old and the new philosophies of museum display comes across pretty clearly, I think.  Though there's something quite contemporary, in an eco-friendly way, about the Natural History Museum's extensive use of natural light.

The contrast would have been starker if I could have been bothered to photograph in the Pitt Rivers Museum, but it's simply too dark in there.  The collection -- a large proportion of which is indistinguishable from mouldering touristic bric-a-brac -- sits in a permanent gloom, presumably to stop the stuff fading away any more than it already has. What a very strange place it is; a cross between a museum, a junk shop, and a department store.  "Charms against the evil eye?  Certainly, sir -- ground floor, third cabinet on aisle three.  Assorted throwing sticks and boomerangs?  That'll be on the first-floor balcony, over towards the far side, opposite the bows and arrows.  Have you brought a torch, sir?  It's a touch dark over there between the taller cabinets..."

It seems to be very popular for group visits from the sort of school that still wears caps and blazers.  Jennings and his chums couldn't get enough of a case of sub-machine guns and rifles, I noticed.  Shades of Lindsay Anderson's film If..., if anyone remembers that now.  I had thought I would still love the place, too, but -- like the curators of the Ashmolean -- my views on museums have changed since my last visit (in 1974!) and I found its taxonomic, pile-em-high approach a relic of an anthropological worldview that is as much a curio, now, as the unplayable instruments, faded costumes and blunt weapons arrayed in its glazed mahogany cabinets.

Give me a squid bottled in formaldehyde any time...

fast and bulbous...

Days at Sea

On Tuesday, I drove out to Calshot, a shingle spit which marks the very end of Southampton Water, where the estuary meets the Solent, itself a sheltered side-channel of the English Channel, allegedly the busiest waterway on the planet.  It's one of those scruffy, nook-shotten corners of our island which have surprisingly rich histories.

There's a solid, round, gun-fort there within a sixteen-sided moat, like a great stone bolt screwed into the spit; perhaps it is what keeps the Isle Of Wight attached to the mainland.  It dates, like a number of such forts along the Solent, from the time of Henry VIII, with Napoleonic Era enhancements, and continues to keep Southampton safe from the French and Spanish fleets, though [whisper it] from a quick inspection I suspect the guns are now a bluff.

But, for much of the 20th century, Calshot was synonymous with seaplanes and flying boats.  It was here that the Supermarine S.5, the seaplane predecessor of the Spitfire fighter, won the Schneider Trophy in 1929 and again in 1931.  T.E. Lawrence was billeted at the RAF base here around that time.  I remember seeing flying boats moored on the water myself when we visited on a family holiday around 1960, in the last days of the RAF presence at Calshot. The great hangars are still standing, but are now a leisure centre, one of them big enough to house a ski-slope.

Even if you have no interest in learning to sail or canoe or windsurf, it's a good spot just to hang out on the shingly beach, and watch the gigantic container ships and cruise liners making their way up Southampton Water with the tide.

But here's a curious thing that I didn't know before.  On the way back, driving through Calshot village, I happened to notice a road named "Tristan Close".  Nothing unusual there: coming up with names for the roads in a new estate must be a terrible job, and planners often resort to themes.  You know, streets named after explorers, planets, cities, musicians... A particularly notorious estate near the university is known as "The Flowers Estate".  My son's secondary school was there, on Violet Road, which I often subliminally misread as "Violent Road".  I fully expected Isolde Way to be just round the corner from Tristan Close, perhaps followed by Liebestod Lane.

But, doing some fact-checking on Calshot's history, I discovered that -- following the eruption of their volcano in 1961 (if you are my age and British, you will probably remember this) -- the inhabitants of the extremely remote South Atlantic island Tristan da Cunha were evacuated half-way round the globe to, of all places, Calshot.

They didn't like it much, not least because their arrival was followed by the extreme winter of 1962/3 and devastating outbreaks of 'flu, to which they had little or no immunity.  The local community was also, shall we say, unsupportive.  Most of the islanders agitated to be sent back, which they were, but a few families did stay on, and they formed a close-knit community around, yes, Tristan Close in Calshot.

La Nuit Anglaise

A couple more shots of Lyme Regis by night.  The fudge from this seafront shop is truly delicious, I'm told.  I don't eat sweets any more, myself, but I don't mind waiting around for those that do.

See that canted camber on the Cobb?  I'm amazed, but pleased, that the local council's Health & Safety Committee haven't put up a railing.  Instead, there's a notice which says, "Mind how you go!  Don't blame us if you fall off...", or words to that effect.

I like photographs taken at night very much, although I'm not a big fan of "night photography".  That is, photographs which appear to have been taken by daylight, but which were actually taken at night, using very long exposures.  I've never understood the point.  At night it's dark, therefore it doesn't seem unreasonable that a photograph of a nighttime scene would be dark, too.  There are exceptions, of course: it took me a while to realise that the odd atmosphere of much of Michael Kenna's most characteristic work was achieved this way.  As it involves a tripod and a lot of waiting around, however, it's not something I've ever been tempted to try.

That long-exposure technique is the perverse opposite of the cinematic "day for night" effect (called in French "la nuit américaine"), whereby a night scene is created artificially simply by filming in daylight and lowering the exposure.  Day-for-night was used a lot in classic noir movies.  When it's done badly, as it often was, you can be puzzled by the apparent brightness of the Californian sky at night, as gun-toting gumshoes creep around the shrubbery.

What I like about night photographs is the weirdness of the unreal colours that are created when film or a digital sensor encounters artificial illumination.  I also like the painterly look of hand-held shots in the dark, with their grainy, shaky resolution even at ridiculous ISO settings. "Imperfect" photography is often the most expressive photography.  Indeed, imperfections -- of focus, framing, exposure, and so on -- are often, paradoxically, what distinguish interesting work from the routine photography of record.  This picture, for example, has a surreal, trippy mystery that its daytime equivalent would struggle to achieve:

This reminds me that there is yet another half-finished project that needs some attention.  A few years ago, in the wake of a cluster of deaths -- friends, family, work colleagues, teachers and mentors -- I found myself starting a series of "dark" images.  I gave these the working title "In Darkness Let Me Dwell", after the song by Shakespeare's contemporary, composer John Dowland (a difficult piece to sing -- sorry, Sting -- but I quite like this version by soprano Ellen Hargis or this one by countertenor Andreas Scholl).  I think enough time may now have passed to revisit these pictures with fresher eyes and a different, less melancholy motivation.

Time, Waves, etc.

Back in August, while this blog was having a break, we had a week down in Dorset.  What with the intervening ten-thousand things, I'd pretty much forgotten about that.  It was not the sunniest of weeks, but we had a good time, nonetheless.  I've always enjoyed kicking along a beach on a blustery day, looking for fossils and watching the waves. It puts things in perspective; sub specie aeternitatis, as the philosophers say.  Though getting your boots flooded by an unexpected wave puts things in perspective, too.

Seatown

Charmouth

The end of the Cobb, Lyme Regis

It was interesting to discover that the association of the Cobb at Lyme Regis with the film of The French Lieutenant's Woman has finally faded.  Absolutely nobody was doing a Meryl Streep selfie out at its windblown end.  You'd probably struggle to find anyone who'd heard of the book's author, John Fowles, either, despite his long residence in the town.  I certainly struggled to explain to my daughter why, long ago in the 1970s, his novels were thought to be quite significant.  Time does its inexorable work.

The most striking thing about the Cobb is the level of real danger it represents to the unwary.  Not only is there no parapet or railing to prevent you falling off into the sea, and not only does it also slope laterally quite severely, so that you have to counter gravity's attempt to steer you into the harbour as you walk along, but there are solid trip hazards all along its length in the shape of mooring rings and bollards.  To venture out to the very end, on a dark and windy night without a torch, as we did, is idiotic indeed, but fun.

Lovely on the Water

If Austria has a problem with a superabundance of natural beauty (see previous post) then the area immediately around Southampton docks might be said to have the opposite problem.  Hundreds of years of shaping and reshaping the waterfront for the convenience of docking, boarding, lading and unlading large ships has pretty much eliminated any natural anything.  It's a man-made space with all the architectural splendour of a multi-storey carpark.

And yet, Southampton Water itself has the silvery, ever-changing mystery of all large estuaries.  It is continually polluted, not least by the Fawley refinery, but twice a day the sea reaches in via the Solent, and pulls out much of the crap we put in.  Two splendid rivers, the Test and the Itchen, constantly feed fresh water into the brackish mix, too; it's not (yet) toxic enough to act as a barrier to salmon making their way from the sea up the Test each autumn, though numbers are dwindling.  I remember, 30 years ago, joining a small crowd watching salmon leaping a weir on the Test in Romsey, one every 30 seconds or so.  I don't think anyone much bothers to turn up now, and the sandbags which used to protect the fish from the stonework have been allowed to rot away.

I went for a walk on Friday along the western shore of Southampton Water, just down from the tide-mill at Eling, where the New Forest leans into the estuary.  Although not spectacular, the view of container-ships being serviced by giant cranes and a constant stream of specialised vehicles is quite engrossing.  The water is only about 500 metres across at this point, and from amongst the trees you can clearly hear amplified supervisory voices booming across from the docks, punctuated by the echoing boom of empty containers being dropped or bashed like gongs.

The Dressing Up Box

Austria, without doubt, is a country blessed with abundant natural beauty, to the extent that it must be a real problem for anyone concerned with representation.  Frankly, I'd hate to be an Austrian photographer.  Surrounded by all that "senseless beauty", whaddaya gonna do?

Nordkette viewed from the Muttereralm

So, I found that one of the most interesting and ironically self-aware displays in the Tiroler Volkskunstmuseum in Innsbruck is a reconstruction of a early 20th century photographer's studio, where real Tyroleans could dress up in folksy Tracht as fantasy "Tyroleans", just like grandma, to be photographed against painted Alpine backdrops.

The fantasy...

The naked truth...

The Scots will be familiar with this dilemma of identity, though in their case in more interesting patterns and colourways.  Doubtless there is a similar display in an Inverness museum.  If there isn't, there should be.

Of course, the truth lies within.  The camera may lie about your appearance, but it knows what goes on in your soul.  Amusingly, inside the bellows of an 8x10 view camera within the Volkskunstmuseum photographer's studio, someone has placed this pair, lit by an eerie red glow:

Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity...

Choices

I have led a reasonably productive creative life, but I still have quite a few long-postponed, half-abandoned, or never-started projects -- some photographic, some not -- and now that I've got the time I intend to get on with a few of them.  But the problem, as always, is where to start?

I've generally found that the expression "to sort things out" taken literally is the best way to, well, get things sorted.  Few things are as daunting as a large disordered heap.  I'm not a tidy person by nature, so large disordered heaps are my customary environment. But, if I need to break a log-jam and get on with something, I've found that the simple act of putting like with like is a quick way of reducing a large pile to a number of smaller, more manageable piles, and is at the same time a process that is both clarifying and empowering.  It's a way of thinking that requires little thought.

One project I've been cumulating over the years has involved photographing the allotment next to the university car-park and also the so-called Valley Garden, once the university's Botanic Garden.   Curiously, these two green spaces have parallelled each other, entropically, if that's the right word for the human imposition of order balanced against the more chaotic processes of the natural world.  Our garden, for example, shows a high degree of entropy when compared to our neighbours' clipped and tended gardens.  We like it that way; it's also a lot less work.

When I arrived at the university 30 years ago, the Botanic Garden was a delightful secret.  Hidden away in a forgotten corner of the campus, it was in an advanced state of abandonment.  A couple of greenhouses were still in use, but several others were in the process of falling down, winter by winter.  The grounds of the slope-sided valley site -- a couple of acres, or thereabouts -- had once been planted systematically, to illustrate plant taxonomy and to provide specimens, but had been running riot for years.  Badgers and foxes had made it their home. Through the bottom of the valley runs a stream, and it had eroded its bed into a deep channel, exposing the gravels and clays that sustained the former brickpit on the site, and requiring rickety, improvised footbridges to cross.  Most delightful of all were an abandoned apple orchard, where I would take my children on lunchtime rambles when they were at the university day nursery, and a pond where frogs would gather in great numbers to spawn in February.

I used to visit the place daily -- it was a veritable temple of wabi-sabi -- but a few years ago a decision was made to close the valley, clear out its tumbledown greenhouses and jungle of vegetation, and turn it into a nice, safe, park-like space where staff could spend their lunch hours.  In retrospect, I think it must have been around then that I decided the University and I might need to part company.

By contrast, the small allotment adjacent to the car-park was once a showcase of gardening know-how, where a few green-fingered vegetable growers kept nature at bay, but with that improvisatory, low-tech light touch that distinguishes those whose instincts and sympathies are in the right place.  I think the idea of an "allotment" is fairly universal: it's a space where small plots of land are rented out by the local authority for non-commercial gardening and vegetable growing.  It's a way of enjoying the benefits of small-holding without owning any land, particularly within cities and suburbs.  However, a few years ago the university bought the land, and a steady decline set in: right now, the former allotments are little more than than a bumpy, weed-covered field.  Doubtless, it will become a car-park in due course.

So maybe it was then that I made my decision to go.  The university has made its choices, and I have made mine.  "It's not uni, it's me..."  Anyway.  Whatever.  The fact is I have been photographing these two complementary places for some years.  It seemed that a "quick win" book project might emerge if I engaged in a bit of sorting magic.  Just put like with like.

Now, I organise my files primarily by camera, then by month and year (e.g. "Fuji_X100\Aug14\DSF0123.RAF"), which might seem a bit perverse, but it suits me.  Given the nature of my photography, I'm far more likely to remember the camera I used to take a particular photograph, and the time of year it was taken, than to remember the year itself.  I also resist the pre-categorisation that insists, "This image is a landscape, this one an abstract, etc."  To build a themed project I create a new folder, then browse the monthly folders of RAW files under each camera, copying target images into the new project folder.  It's labour-intensive, but serves a useful secondary purpose of refreshing my awareness of all the images sitting unused in my backfiles, and the relationships between them.

However, when I had finished this initial rough-cut selection last night, and had resorted the resulting folder by date, and finally sat back to see what I had, I discovered there were over 1,500 image files in the folder.  Which was a surprise.  Even allowing for 70% duplication and duds, that means there's a whole new level of selection needs to be applied, before I've got down to the fifty or so pictures that will define a new series or book.

So much for a quick win.  But at least I've got the time to do the work, now, and I'm pretty sure I won't be adding any more photographs of value from either of those particular two sites.

Speech! Speech!

I'm aware that many of you reading this blog may not be terribly interested in the big change I have recently made in my life; that is, to take early retirement.  Some may even resent the fact that I am in position to do so.  Well, tough.  The fact is that, despite showing early promise as a slacker, I have dedicated over thirty continuous years to public service in a back-room, technical-managerial capacity, and the prospect of a substantial, index-linked pension was always a major motivator in getting me out of bed in the morning.  That, and the example of my parents, subsisting into old age on state benefits alone.

So, before I drop the subject, I thought I'd share with you my parting words for my ex-colleagues.  In the bad old days, retirees would be required to undergo that dreaded rite of passage, the Leaving Ceremony.   I think, like public executions, the intention was to discourage others from following suit until or unless absolutely unavoidable.  Thankfully, we now live in more enlightened times, and I was able to leave the building quietly, unencumbered by the University's famously useless engraved crystal bowl.  Instead, I sent everyone an email, with this attachment -- the speech I would have given on the retirement scaffold:

The problem with retirement is that, by the time it happens, there are few people left who can remember the retiree when he or she was actually quite good at their job, or why on earth we employed them in the first place.  Their former bosses and most co-workers will have retired or moved on, and their sad fate is to become that curious grey-haired figure with an unknown past who seems unable to remember anybody’s name.

I am very conscious of belonging to a species passing into extinction.  Born in 1954, the year food-rationing ended, I grew up in an all-too-brief post-War utopia where excellent state education was a national priority.  For the first time, children from “ordinary” families at state schools could aspire to progress to the top of the educational ladder.  In my case, I eventually found myself at Oxford University studying English, an achievement which required some effort from me in passing exams, but did not cost my parents a single penny.  I had a full maintenance grant, and in the vacations was able to "sign on" to collect Supplementary Benefit (a.k.a. The Dole).  It gets worse.  After graduating, I was awarded full grants for two further periods of postgraduate study.  Unimaginable now, but perfectly normal in the 1970s.

In those days universities did not regard themselves as being in the business of equipping graduates for the world of work.  Indeed, they did not see themselves as being in any business, as such, at all.  Higher education was a take-it-or-leave-it proposition, reserved for an “academic” minority.  So, facing the grim reality of finding employment in the late 1970s, I chanced to see an advert for a trainee post at the University of Bristol library.  They chose me simply because I was able to read the cyrillic alphabet: they had a massive cataloguing backlog of Russian books.  All cataloguers were expected to be linguists, then, with two modern European languages as a minimum.  Imagine: at my very ordinary state school, we had routinely studied Latin, French and either German or Spanish, and in the Sixth Form could choose Russian rather than endure "General Studies".  Again, this was typical, then, but how things have changed: my own children, at their Southampton state schools, only had the opportunity to study one language, badly taught.

Having realised that I liked working in an academic library -- where else could you meet such strange and interesting people? -- I decided to qualify professionally, at University College, London.  UCL, in those days, was obsessed by indexing and classification.  We studied every classification scheme in depth, researching multiple essays on each, with the requirement that all students would choose two subjects of interest and criss-cross London visiting specialist libraries, to compare how cataloguing, classification and indexing were handled in each.  It was a lot of work.  I think there were seventeen assessed essays: a number that had recently gone down from twenty-one.  The plus side was getting to know some grand libraries, like the British Museum Reading Room, and some obscure ones, like the Royal Geographical Society, which in the late 1970s was still an Edwardian gentleman’s club for explorers.

It is hard to imagine now, but in those days there were no personal computers, no internet, no mobile phones.  Documents and memos were all typed by hand.  To distribute a memo you either produced carbon copies, had it photocopied, or clipped a circulation list to it; it could take weeks for a widely-circulated item to land on your desk.  Catalogue cards were originated as a hand-written draft of a "body" text, checked by a senior cataloguer, passed to the typing pool for typing up, checked again, and duplicated.  Then, the individual headings were typed on the cards, checked yet again, and finally filed into the catalogue drawers by cataloguers.  The accuracy of the filing would, of course, be checked.  As in all offices at the time, a lot of the work going on involved inspecting the work of others, and manually producing and filing documents.  It was a slower-paced, more deliberate world, where changes happened gradually after lengthy consideration, and where the human effort involved was a major factor.

Then came computers.  I won't bore you with the detail, but my career has spanned the history of library automation.  At Bristol we trained to use the new-fangled green-screen SWALCAP ("South Western Academic Libraries Automation Project") system.  I was on the design team that produced the cataloguing module of SWALCAP's integrated system, Libertas.  The first "microcomputer" in this Library landed on my desk: an Amstrad PC1640 with 640K of RAM and no hard drive.  On it, I taught myself to program with GW-BASIC.  We developed the first Southampton "online public access catalogue" in the late 1980s, and introduced the Urica library management system in 1991 and the Unicorn/Symphony system in 1997.  I recall attending the first course for Library staff on using HTML, where we were instructed never to use images on our webpages, because of the resource implications.  And so on.  We are now in a much faster world, where change happens rapidly and unevenly, and where the human factor is easily overlooked.  I suppose it’s the price of trying to squeeze the entire world into a hand-held device.

I was not supposed to be here for 30 years.  On appointment, I was told that they expected that I would move on after 5 years, and so did I.  I was young, and vaguely ambitious.  But then my partner joined me in Southampton, we had two children, I decided to go part-time, and…  Somehow another 25 years passed.  But I have no regrets on that score; I have always seen myself as the Chief Engineer, wielding an oily rag down in the engine room, rather than standing up on the bridge wearing a smart officer’s hat.

My recent exercise in identifying the poor souls who have, over the years, been chained to a bench in my department was enlightening.  So many names…  I have to confess I needed prompting to remember some of them (“Ah, the goth girl with the boots…”).  But, on the other hand, so many of you are still here, if working in different roles.  Having started out as a very “hands on” manager, full of opinions about the best way to do things, I have learned to back off, and let people get on with their work. I now believe the best manager is a “light touch” manager (that’s my excuse, anyway – sorry about the appraisals…).  But I am very proud of the outstanding staff I have recruited, trained and managed over the years, and perhaps my most notable achievement at Southampton has been getting them all regraded (upwards!), twice, wearing my union-activist hat.

However, my world is increasingly the old world.  Some of you will have been born "digital-native"; few of you will have been born into a home without a telephone, a television, or a refrigerator.  Many of you will have had your educational aspirations constrained by the changes in the nature and funding of education since the 1990s; few of you will have had the glorious free ride that I enjoyed.  Some of you will also have a very different view of the purpose of the institution in which we are working, not just because so much has changed, but also perhaps as a result of the sustained challenge to the very idea of a university from government: higher education as an end in itself now seems a hopelessly old-fashioned, even elitist idea.  As I say, I belong to a species passing into extinction, and have decided to go before I stop being a problem-solver and become the problem.

I wish you all well, and trust that you will do your best to make this library -- and any library you work in – a special place, worth the investment of 30 years of anybody’s life.  Let me remind you of Ranganathan’s deceptively simple Five Laws of Library Science, established in 1931:

1. Books are for use.
2. Every reader their book.
3. Every book its reader.
4. Save the time of the reader.
5. The library is a growing organism.

Change “book” to “resource”, and it seems that, perhaps, not that much has changed, after all.  Though I will never concede that “readers” have become “customers”, I’m afraid… I’ll get my coat…

Obviously, this is not the bitter-and-twisted parting shot all of us will have composed and refined over the years, and filed in the drawer marked "to be opened in the event of my untimely dismissal" -- we name the guilty parties! -- and is a model of benevolence.  But then I have enjoyed my work  -- the day-job that became a career -- and draw satisfaction from the knowledge that my contribution has "made a difference", as they say.

But, now, the real work begins.  Finally...  I only hope I still have time to do it.

 My coat (and an idiotic hat)

You've Got To Laugh

I am now into my first weeks of retirement, and I can report that, so far, it feels just like a holiday.  Not in the fun sense of enjoying yet another day away from humdrum reality, but in the more unsettling sense that -- in the background, like the rumble of traffic -- the uneasy prospect of an inevitable return to work is lurking.  The fact that I need never return to work has simply not yet sunk in: this still feels like a temporary respite.

After 30 years or more of wage-slavery, this is hardly surprising: I still dream about taking exams, after all, and the last exam I sat was in 1980.  Who knows, maybe work will now take the place of exams in my subconscious, and I will awake from anxiety dreams at 3 a.m., only to experience the profound relief that, no, I really don't have to give a presentation tomorrow on the migration of metadata standards from AACR2 to RDA, for which I have not done a stroke of preparation.  Phew.

On the subject of anxiety, I recently had a day in hospital (a first serious brush with Old Man's Stuff -- don't ask) and spent much of the time lying around in a post-anaesthetic haze, idly listening to the conversations and exchanges going on around me.  It began to dawn on me that the British have a problem with humour.

We're famous for it, of course.  Ah, you British, with your sense of humour!  It's a coping mechanism, obviously.  It's no accident that our strongest comic traditions come out of the pressure-points of industrial working-class life -- places like Liverpool, London, Newcastle, and Glasgow.  An acute sense of the absurd expressed as blunt ironies; anger, outrage and frustration sublimated into laughter; a love of wordplay, shot through with the edgy, proletarian pleasures of double-entendre and "dumb insolence": these are the hallmarks of our humour.  Max Miller used to ask his audience:  "Listen, I've got two books of jokes here: do you want the White Book or the Blue Book?"  They always chose the blue*.

It can be confusing for foreigners.  I ran into problems with this myself in Austria.  At every turn, it seemed, I managed to offend somebody, quite unintentionally, generally by assuming that it was understood that, in pursuit of a humorous moment, one might often say the complete opposite of what one actually meant, or might even appear to insult someone as a form of friendly inclusivity.  I dread to think what they would have made of an Australian.  At any rate, several people there are no longer replying to my texts or emails.

But, in hospital, I began to feel a little like a foreigner myself.  The formulaic banter of people under stress began to drive me crazy.  Is it possible, I wondered, for an Englishman confronted by a form which asks "Sex?" not to respond, "Yes, please!"?  Or, if asked by a nurse, "Would you like anything else?", not to reply, in an apparently hard-wired reflex, "Well, it depends what else you are offering!"?  It was like sharing a ward with several shop-worn avatars of Benny Hill.  Even doctors -- pressed for time and exhausted by long hours -- in order to extract the simplest information had to endure their patients' anxious attempts to lighten the mood, serially, all without themselves resorting to sarcasm or physical violence.  I don't think I could do that.

It then occured to me that perhaps some apparently irrational acts of heroism in situations like the trenches of the First World War might have had a simple, rational cause.  Anything -- anything -- up to and including spontaneously leaping over a revetment and running across No Man's Land to single-handedly storm a machine-gun post, would be better than continuing to share a dugout with several dozen British men nervously jesting and joshing away the discomforts and indignities of war.  Enough! Stop! Not everything has to be funny, all the time, just because there's nothing you can do about it!  Which may, of course, be the exact opposite of what I mean.

* "Blue" humour, in English slang, is risqué or "off-colour" humour, generally of a sexual nature.

Raising Our Sails

The Solent at Hill Head

"The winds of grace are always blowing, it is for us to raise our sails higher"

I recently watched a DVD published by the ECM label about the jazz* woodwind player and band leader Charles Lloyd, Arrows into Infinity. By any standards, Lloyd has had a remarkable career, starting out in Howlin' Wolf's backing band and progressing to his current status as an internationally-respected musician, with a million-selling album along the way, Forest Flower (released in 1966, and featuring a very young Keith Jarrett), which opened the door to sharing the bill with the likes of Hendrix and the Grateful Dead.  There was also a decade of silence, recovering from heroin-addiction, and discovering and following his spiritual path at Big Sur.

Lloyd is a major figure in that cerebral, spiritually-oriented, improvisatory lineage that includes John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and Billy Higgins, one which seems to predispose musicians to an open-minded collaborative approach with players from other traditions and genres.  His is an interesting story that crosses the paths of many interesting people, which makes for an engaging film.  If you get a chance to see it, do.

The words at the head of this post (adapted from the 19th century guru Ramakrishna) are quoted by Lloyd towards the end, and I found them inspiring enough to scribble down as I watched. It was fun, over the weekend, to watch wind-surfers on the Solent putting these words into prosaic practice, catching the blustery tail end of Hurricane Bertha.  Some raised their sail so high they were practically blown away.

Equally inspiring is Charles Lloyd's apparently endless selection of idiotic hats.  Why do musicians like to wear "characterful" hats, even indoors?  They surely can't all be bald.

And with that profound thought, we raise our own sails, and head off for our summer blog break.  See you later, probably some time in September.  I hope you have a good summer.

*  What an inadequate word "jazz" is to cover the range of musics that get lumped together under that label.  It's like describing Paul Simon or David Bowie as a pop musician.  Unfortunately, I don't think any other word works, either.

Word War Won?

Fed up with the War To End All Wars yet?  Unfortunately, the commemorative frenzy won't be over by Christmas.  Four more years!  Such a senseless waste of human life, turned into a senseless waste of media air-time...  Have we already had Trench-Foot Challenge ("celebrities stand in a water-filled trench all night for a week, and are then forced to run across a booby-trapped ploughed field") or Bully Beef Masterchef?  I must have missed those.  Radio 4's 1914: Day by Day, presented by historian Margaret MacMillan, has been an honourable exception.

One of the best (as in, most authentically moving) WW1-related things I've seen this year I came across by accident.  I heard a short piece of music that I liked one morning on BBC Radio 3, and the presenter attributed it to one F.S. Kelly, who had studied at Balliol College, Oxford, won a gold medal at the 1908 Olympics, and quickly gained recognition as a composer of talent.  Tragically, however, Kelly was killed in France, like so many other young men of promise in that generation.  Naturally, I followed this up, and in the process discovered that the Balliol College War Memorial Book, published in two volumes in 1924, is available online at, of all places, Flickr.

To browse through these volumes is to get a real glimpse of the bloody swathe that the Great War cut through an entire generation. From just one Oxford college, around 300 men died.  Some of them were barely-formed boys, with little more to be said about them than "He was clever; he won a place at Balliol; he joined the army; he died".  But some were destined to be the shapers of the future, for example Raymond Asquith.  It is particularly moving to read in one place so many contemporary accounts of ordinary and not-so-ordinary untimely deaths in war, using the language and emotional range of the time, and written while the grief was still raw.

Kelly's page is here.  Remarkably, he was present at the death of Rupert Brooke at Skyros en route to Gallipoli (not from wounds, but from an infected mosquito bite).  In that last heyday of the old, rigidly class-bound Britain, it seems such young men of talent and similar background found themselves thrown together wherever they went.  As someone once said, "life is just one damn Balliol man after another".

A corner of a field in France...

Grab

We all have a list of words that make us react irrationally when they are used, as we see it, improperly.  For all I know, "improperly" may be high on yours.  I have carefully avoided using "inappropriately" here, which I'm aware is a word that is beginning to irk many. One word which is heading to the top of my list is "grab".

"To grab", of course, is a perfectly decent, venerable and useful word.  It has a primary meaning of "to grasp or seize suddenly and roughly". It also has a figurative sense, as in "to obtain or get (something) quickly or opportunistically", and it is here the trouble starts.  People have long been grabbing something to eat before doing something else, or grabbing an opportunity to speak to someone.  The use of "grab" lends a feeling of vigour and spontaneity to what is generally a fairly mundane act.  To a large extent, that is the whole point of figurative language in everyday use.

But increasingly "grab" is becoming a synonym for "to get", "to buy", or "to take advantage of".  Every day, I am urged by advertisers to grab some of this Great Deal or some of that Amazing Bargain as it goes by, as if shopping were a slightly hysterical, competitive game for the street-wise and sharp-elbowed, and not simply a question of forking over the required amount of cash.  I'm sure if you did actually "grab" his latest pizza offering, Mr. Domino would call the police pretty sharpish.

But then I'm 60 years old, and still wince whenever the youngster in front of me in the queue asks the nice lady behind the coffee counter "Er, can I get a latte to go?"  No "please", no "thank you", no hint of a smile.  Just wrong in so many ways...  Of course you can have a latte, kid, but the nice lady will have to get it for you, and then only if you ask her politely.  And no grabbing!

Down the Town

I don't often go "down the town" these days, by which I mean the central shopping area, dominated since 2000 by the monstrous West Quay mall.  It's not just the disheartening spectacle of consumer flocking behaviour which puts me off, but also the large number of non-mall shops which have closed, due to the West Quay force-field sucking the life out of them.  There are few more depressing sights than rows of shuttered and graffiti-splattered shopfronts, where not so long ago many small retailers thrived.

I don't really have much reason to go there; it's been well over a decade since our kids required a weekly expedition to Toys'R'Us to spend their pocket money, and apart from the occasional foray to buy socks at M&S I mainly try to shop elsewhere.  If I must go "down the town", then I try to avoid the weekends, when le tout Hampshire seems to descend on the John Lewis store to buy a new fridge.

If I am in the area, however, I generally visit a favourite spot, a tiled underpass that runs beneath Portland Terrace to Bargate Street, with its cave-like entrance in the shadow of an imposing chunk of the ancient city wall.  It generally yields a few photographs; the silver birches on the adjacent grassy and litter-strewn bank are reliably photogenic.

As it happens, I've never yet photographed any of the city wall itself  -- once the very waterfront where Henry V set sail for France -- or even the castle-like Bargate, probably the only things left in central Southampton a tourist would bother to point a camera at.  I probably never will do so, either, but I really should spend more time down by the docks and Southampton Water, where the cruise liners and the gigantic container vessels come in, more like floating office blocks than ships, and where the Fawley Refinery looms on the far shore like Mordor. Soon, of course -- very soon, in fact -- I will have plenty of time to do just that.

Idiotic Hat Life Coach

It's August, and the blog break is fast approaching, so it's time for a few words from our visiting Idiotic Guru:  Lay some hard-won wisdom on us, guru!

[The Idiotic Guru speaks]
OK, listen closely now, I'm only saying this once, unless there are repeat fees, of course.  People often say to me, how is it that someone as inadequate, plebeian, short, and ugly as yourself has made it to a position of such eminence that you feel able to hand out advice to the likes of me, whose many apparent advantages have taken me nowhere in life?  Explain your secret, Idiotic Guru!

Behold, my secret is a list, which I found in a magazine on a park bench one afternoon, long ago in the past, where all good secrets are to be found. Though the real secret is that I disagree violently with every item in this checklist of well-meaning, sententious twaddle: I deliver a kick in the listicles, so to speak.  As William Blake said to me one night: The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.  At least, that's what I thought he said.  It was a very noisy pub.

Anyway, here we are, my annotated Twelve Steps To Success:

1. Stop spending time with the wrong people. Avoid anyone who makes you unhappy, wastes your time, or holds you back.  People who want to drag you down to their level are not your friends.
WRONG:  Seek out the "wrong" people, they will enrich your life, and at the very least make you look good.  Who needs dull friends?
 
2. Stop lying to yourself.  There's no need to pretend everything is OK if it isn’t.  It's pointless to pursue goals you don't believe in, only to blame someone else for your subsequent failure.
WRONG:  Self-deception is the royal road to the top.  Who cares to the top of what? You can always pretend you meant to go there, should you ever get there. If not, you know who to blame!

3. Don't ignore your own needs. In particular, don't pretend to be, or try to become, someone you’re not, just to please someone else, or to be liked.
WRONG:  I don't need to spell this out, do I?  Do you think the secret of any successful long-term relationship is "just be yourself, and insist on having things your way"?

4. Don't cling on to the past. In particular, stop beating yourself up over old mistakes.  Get over it.
WRONG: Show me a successful person who does not obsess over past mistakes, and I'll show you a trustafarian.  We learn through shame and humiliation...

5. Don't be afraid to make mistakes. Avoid the urge to perfection. "The best is the enemy of the good".
WRONG: Look no further for an explanation of the wave of mediocrity that has overwhelmed us. "Good enough" is not good enough.  Sure, make mistakes, but don't let them get into the final draft!

6. Stop trying to buy happiness.  The best things in life are not free  -- they are actually very expensive -- but they cannot be bought with money.  Try investing some time.
WRONG: Oh, please...  Invest as much time as you like in your Lada, it will still be a Lada.

7. Take care of the pennies. Notice and value the constant flow of small, ordinary things, otherwise one day you will realise -- too late! --  that was all there was ever going to be.
WRONG: Nobody ever became rich, actually or metaphorically, by penny-pinching.  Think big, or you will shrink to fit.

8. Don't be lazy.  Don't follow the path of least resistance. Don’t always take the easy way out.
WRONG: Trust John Keats: "If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all".  If you find something tough going, give it up and get out of the way.  Find your own groove!

9. Don't postpone things until you feel completely ready. It will be too late.  Nobody is ever really ready: successful people just get on with it.
WRONG:  See 8 and 5.  Stop filling the world with half-baked crap.

10. Avoid self pity and complaint.  It's tough all over. Nobody wants to know how hard it was for you to do what you did, especially if moaning about it has become your substitute for doing it.
WRONG:  A good moan in good company (see 1) is one of life's great pleasures.  Why deny yourself?

11. If at first you don't succeed, try doing it differently, but only slightly differently.  To persist in a course of action hoping for a different outcome is not the definition of neurosis, it is the definition of persistence.
WRONG:  Yet another way to bury us in unwanted gifts from untalented people.  Give it three or four radically different approaches, then give it up and try something else.  Or better still, get back in the audience.

12. Ambition and competitiveness are easily confused.  Jealousy of the achievements of others and holding grudges are poisons -- hate, anger and jealousy will hurt you, not their object.  True ambition is generous to the aspirations of others.
WRONG: A little poison can be highly stimulating... "It is not enough to succeed.  Others must fail".

And if that lot doesn't turn you into a happily successful yet ruthlessly driven narcissist, then I don't know what else I can do for you.  Stop wasting my time!  Do try not to leave a trail of pain and damage in your wake, if you can avoid it, but if you can't then read a few biographies of the people you admire, and you won't feel so bad about it.  Although you may also decide that "success" isn't really your thing after all.
[The Idiotic Guru stops speaking]

OK, Idiotic Guru, thanks for that.  I think we can all find a takeaway message in there somewhere!  Now go and visit somebody else, please.