The United Idiotic Nations

Flags of all nations, #47

Dave's comment yesterday mentioned the international character of this blog's visitors. I use Google Analytics to track the statistics of my vistors, though I have so little faith in what it tells me that I don't look at its analysis too often. However, for what it's worth, here are my February 2010 blog visits so far (one day to go!), counted by country:

United Kingdom 780
United States 240
Sweden 92
Canada 69
Germany 63
Austria 50
Australia 48
Italy 20
France 18
Ireland 13
Mexico 13
Russia 7
Spain 4
India 4
Singapore 4
Brazil 4
Israel 4
Romania 3
Poland 3
Philippines 3
Japan 2
Lithuania 2
Lebanon 2
Belgium 2
Malaysia 2
Norway 1
Colombia 1
Denmark 1
Hungary 1
Greece 1
Hong Kong 1
Oman 1
Bulgaria 1
Iran 1
Netherlands 1
Egypt 1
Taiwan 1
Nigeria 1
Finland 1
Sri Lanka 1
Slovakia 1
South Korea 1
Portugal 1

By the standards of, say, The Online Photographer (which gets THIRTY THOUSAND visits a DAY) this is a modest haul, but I do like its geographic spread. Obviously, you can ignore most of the "oncers" -- they came looking for something else, but were disappointed. And this is a count of visits, not visitors, so many of these countries will be represented by just one or two people. But, even so, I like the picture I see.

You're all very welcome, and if I haven't got around to mentioning or inadvertently insulting your own country, language or culture yet, please be patient. It's quite a long list.

Harbinger

Harbinger (-nj-) n. One who harbinges.



I spotted and photographed one of the real harbingers of Spring's arrival today: the afternoon sunshine is finally bright enough and at the right angle through the back door to catch our shiny metal kettle in just the right way to cast a protoplasmic net of reflections over the wall. Still no frogs, though.

The Art of the Possible

Some photographers stalk their subjects like hunters. They study, they calculate, they plan. They figure out angles and elevations, times and tides; I have even read of obsessives who determine exactly where the moon will be in the sky on their chosen night, using tables, so that the composition will be exactly as they imagined it. If you are lugging a view camera and tripod around, this kind of effort is probably necessary. Or if you are someone who, God forbid, tries to earn their living with a camera. Otherwise, I imagine this approach appeals to the same sort of person who has planned and booked their summer holiday before Christmas.



Needless to say, I am not that sort of photographer. I am that other sort of obsessive, the ones who go round and round habitual circuits in the hope of bumping into something. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don't. As a method, this has something in common with beachcombing (your only plan is to turn up and see what happens) or churchgoing (ditto). Any activity carried out repetitively and hopefully, however secular in nature, tends to take on a devotional aspect; your faith is based on the experience that things change from day to day, that these changes can be revelatory, and that bearing witness to them feels somehow important.



This strange corner, for example. After the disastrous fire that destroyed a large part of our university's electronics and computer research building, a temporary home was found in what had been a "fitness centre" for an optoelectronics laboratory which needed ultra-strict levels of air purity and temperature control. Liquid nitrogen tanks and insulated ducts were lashed up in hurry, resulting in the hulking shapes you see here. I pass them every day, and every day I speculate what a planner would do. Dawn light is especially effective, but the reflective tapes (and, now that demolition has begun, the exposed silver insulation blocks) pose an exposure range problem; a planner would work out the timing, check the weather forecast, and use a tripod to take multiple exposures for blending. There's also the matter of a security fence, through which I have to pass my Panasonic LX3; a planner would arrange access, no doubt.

But the chances are, having planned it perfectly, such a person would only turn up once or twice. As it is, I just keep walking past and popping away. Sometimes I get lucky, sometimes I don't. Once in a while, I get very lucky indeed, and that's something you simply can't plan for.

A Wop Bop A Loo Bop, Koax Koax

Around this time of year, I start listening out at night for the frogs returning to our "pond". I put the word in inverted commas, because it's really an Early Learning Centre sandpit, whose lid has filled with rainwater and been so thoroughly colonised by waterplants and pondlife that I haven't the heart to clean it out. Slightly surreally, the sandpit is intact beneath the lid, and -- to the best of my memory -- some plastic dinosaurs are still posed down there, frozen in eternal flight and pursuit (think Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn).

Many years ago our kids returned home with a jar of frogspawn from a real pond, and ever since the sandpit-pond has been the ancestral swamp of generations of frogs. Every February, they return from far-flung parts to indulge in a week or two of orgiastic sex, before leaving their bubbly piles of spawn behind to fend for themselves. It must be strange, having sex on your mind for just two weeks of the year. It must leave plenty of time to concentrate on catching flies, and getting to wherever it is frogs go during the rest of the year.

Frog Frenzy in the Valley Garden pond

Our contemporary human world is so super-saturated with sex, that it's hard to imagine that there was ever a time when it wasn't. Of course, our world is not so much saturated with sex, as with a hyper-real eroticization that has about as much similarity to "sex" as Grand Theft Auto does to "street crime". Both appear to have been filtered through the over-heated imaginings of a 15-year old boy.

I can speak with authority, as I was once myself a 15-year old boy. But, unlike today, in those days (40+ years ago!) the world offered very little validation for whatever fevers were going on in our minds. Pictures of bare naked people were a resource as scarce and as carefully controlled as moon rock. We were still practically Victorians, swooning over hints and glimpses, enduring sweet agonies of arousal at the beach or swimming pool, or mesmerised by a Sunday Times colour supplement photograph. It was a simpler time to be adolescent, and in many ways a lot more fun. I remember the first few times I experienced full-frontal (but fully-clothed) contact with a girl at a dance: I fully expected to be arrested for public indecency.

Even the "top shelf" magazines of the day were laughable in their innocence. A typical copy of Parade, even in the late 60s, contained nothing more wicked than some awkward, artless shots of topless girls-next-door with laquered flickup hairstyles, wearing bikini bottoms and a smirk. Even so, the pages did give off that authentic low-life whiff that was associated, in the 1950s, with teddy boys, bikers, and Soho. In those days, the barriers were both lower and much clearer: anyone could transgress, if they dared to. Most people didn't. Why, even to know about sitting in a bath to get your Levis to shrink to fit was pretty far out.* Real 1950s rock'n'roll is all about that reek of sulphur: Shakin' all over! Gene Vincent!! Little Richard!!! But it was something no respectable person could admit to liking. College types listened to trad jazz, parents listened to Perry Como, posh folk had their classical.

But, perhaps backlit by its almost total eclipse, a nascent sexiness flickered around the edges of our lives as children, as it must always have done down the ages. Girls might detain a boy in a field, and subject him to torture by kissing. Sometimes, when you were playing in the woods, you would come across a scatter of pieces of a torn-up magazine page, a lot of which were flesh-coloured. We would amuse ourselves by piecing them back together. Boys would accompany their fathers to the barbers (we used to sit on a plank put across the arms of the barber's chair) where the traditional question, "Something for the weekend, sir?" was asked, without furtiveness, and answered by a hand dipping into the Durex boxes openly displayed by the mirror. And the fashions of the 1950s and early 60s were nothing if not "gendered".

Get a room!

But then, around 1965/66, news of the so-called Moors Murders began to filter into the public consciousness, and things began to change. Children of our age had been abducted, abused, and murdered: "stranger danger" and an awareness of some truly scary transgressive behaviour entered the picture. Gradually -- tragically, in my view -- those simple pleasures of childhood like staying out all day and playing free in the streets, woods and fields, simply came to an end. The world was a scarier place than we'd thought.

Yet, at about the same time, the sexing-up of everyday life had begun. Adverts, magazines, TV programmes, books, films: all began an escalating barrage of sexualisation, that was fun at the time and solemnly endorsed by public intellectuals, but which has now, it seems, all but obliterated childhood, and made adolescence a pretty fraught experience. Sexual practices and attitudes to the body that would once have been the preserve of a secret and semi-professional minority are now commonplace. Why, surely everyone now knows what it means to speculate whether a certain presenter of BBC Radio 4's Today programme has now, or has ever had a "Prince Albert"? So why shouldn't this be the subject of jokey innuendo on popular BBC comedy programmes?**

Despite the brief heyday of feminism in the 1970s and 80s, it sometimes seems that the pornographic imaginings of 15-year old boys have been amplified, endorsed, packaged, and then sold back to the rest of us as "normal"; aspirational, even. How strange is that? And how confusing (not least for a 15-year old girl). Perhaps the time has come when we need to ask whether it has been a price worth paying. Sex is normal, fun, but a private matter between consenting grown-ups. I don't want it used to sell me cars and cornflakes.

It must be so much simpler being a frog.

Frog quest

* Although getting your legs dyed woad blue as a consequence was not at all sexy, as I can testify. I'm pretty sure that's not how the Ancient Britons did it.

** Answer (and I never thought I'd say something like this): Because my daughter is watching, you thoughtless, arrogant, grinning morons.

*** In case you're puzzled, the title of this post combines Little Richard's "Tutti Frutti" with the chorus from "The Frogs" by Aristophanes.

Half Term

It's been the half term holiday this past week and, although I no longer need to*, I've taken some time off. Someone had to get my daughter out of bed, after all. Normal service will now be resumed.

Talking of getting people out of bed, has anyone else encountered an adult walking down the street in broad daylight wearing pajamas? I saw this for the first time last summer, and presumed the woman was mental. But I have since since seen several more, and heard recently on the radio that Tesco has had to ban people from shopping who are wearing only nightclothes. What on earth is happening to this country?







* And, thank goodness ... British parents of younger children have to cover a total of around 60-70 days of school closures in the year which -- if you consider the typical annual leave entitlement from work is 25 days or fewer -- can be a considerable challenge. I have nothing but admiration for those saintly people who elect to teach our children, but the arrangement of school holidays is so last century... Reconsidering the need for those 15 days of half term breaks would be a start...

Stuff

In his blog a while ago, photographer Pradip Malde drew attention to this poem by Borges, which he says "has always conditioned my still-life work". I don't know why it came to mind today, but it seemed to go with these two photographs I took on the way in to work this morning; perhaps because that intense, washed light you get after heavy rain always seems to bring out the thing-ness of things.


Las Cosas, por Jorge Luis Borges

El bastón, las monedas, el llavero,
la dócil cerradura, las tardías
notas que no leerán los pocos días
que me quedan, los naipes y el tablero,

un libro y en sus páginas la ajada
violeta, monumento de una tarde
sin duda inolvidable y ya olvidada,
el rojo espejo occidental en que arde

una ilusoria aurora. ¡Cuántas cosas,
láminas, umbrales, atlas, copas, clavos,
nos sirven como tácitos esclavos,

ciegas y extrañamente sigilosas!
Durarán más allá de nuestro olvido;
no sabrán nunca que nos hemos ido.


Things, by Jorge Luis Borges

My walking-stick, small change, key-ring,
The docile lock and the belated
Notes my few days left will grant
No time to read, the cards, the table,

A book, in its pages, that pressed
Violet, the leavings of an afternoon
Doubtless unforgettable, forgotten,
The reddened mirror facing to the west

Where burns illusory dawn. Many things,
Files, sills, atlases, wine-glasses, nails,
Which serve us, like unspeaking slaves,

So blind and so mysteriously secret!
They’ll long outlast our oblivion;
And never know that we are gone.

translated by A. S. Kline © 2008

Mysterious Meetings

I'm a big fan of "genre fiction", thrillers in particular. Like a lot of active readers, I simply find most contemporary "literary" fiction anaemic and dull, pedestrian in its pace and stunted in its range of reference. And, worse than that, and most surprising, most of it is terribly badly written. At least, in those respects that I value. I love, for example, the idiomatic vigour achieved by writers who feel an obligation to make their dialogue crackle. Where else can you find characters who say things like, "Oh, a long time, since God's dog was a puppy" (Lee Child), or, "Most people are so dumb they need printed instructions to pound sand down a rathole" (George V. Higgins) ? Not in most of the Booker Prize shortlist, that's for sure.

Of course, the main objection to genre fiction is that "life is not like that". To which the best response is, "What, you mean, it's not composed of words, 300 pages long, and bound between illustrated covers? I guess you're right. But fiction is exactly like that." There's something oddly adolescent about a concern, regarding any artform, that it does not accurately reflect life. Well, duh. I refer you (once more) to the post containing my favourite Picasso anecdote.

That understood, however, it is very pleasing when real life does approach the condition of a thriller. I came across an example recently, following up some references to the Lithuanian/French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (OK, I don't just read thrillers). It appears Levinas -- having spent WW2 interned as a prisoner of war -- had a post-war meeting with a mysterious character, known only as "Monsieur Chouchani", which deeply influenced his thinking. I have lifted this account from the Wikipedia article:

In 1945 Levinas closest friend, Dr. Henri Nerson a Jewish obstetrician, told him about an outstanding and quite bizarre individual he came to know during the years of the War in the area of Vichy. The man was so unusual that even his real name was not known. He used to be called Chouchani but this was more of a nickname than his true one. His external appearance was quite unpleasant, some say even repugnant. However, according to Nerson his knowledge was phenomenal. Nerson, who was known for his sober way to apprehend people and situations, was clearly in a state of excitement as if he would have become an adept of some sect. He strongly recommended to Levinas to meet Chouchani, but for two years Levinas refused. After all Levinas was quite suspicious as to what this "clochard" looking man could contribute to him. Finally in 1947 Levinas agreed to meet Chouchani. We know very little about the meeting itself. But there exists a myth. The myth suggests that they met for an entire night, and in the morning Levinas said to Nerson as he was about to leave: "I can not tell what he knows, all I can say is that all that I know, he knows". Be the accuracy of this myth as it may, one fact remains undisputable. From then on, Levinas became interested in the study of Talmud to a point where most of his free time, he would devote to studying it.

What a cracking setup for an upmarket thriller, eh? I wonder what Levinas' weapon of choice would be? Probably something small but elegant, and easily concealed -- a switchblade, or a spring-loaded cosh? And how much punishment could he take in the cellar of the wicked Nazi Dr. Heidegger? Just imagine the potential for a truly surprising (and philosophically challenging) "reveal" towards the end.



An even more intriguing mysterious meeting, though, is the one between the aforesaid Heidegger (philosopher-king of existentialism and Nazi academic careerist) and the Romanian, German-speaking Jewish poet Paul Celan, who spent the war in forced labour camps and whose family was exterminated by the Nazis and their Romanian collaborators. Celan is notorious for the obscurity of his poems, the most famous of which, "Todesfuge" (Death Fugue), has nonetheless become an anthology piece, and is regarded as perhaps the definitive artistic response to the Holocaust. Heidegger is also known for the difficulty of his writings, but has become even more notorious in recent times (and, to some, discredited as a philosopher) following the revelation of his Nazi Party membership and persecution of Jewish colleagues subsequent to his appointment as Rector of Freiburg University in 1933.

Accounts vary about the meeting between the two. If you're not familiar with the protagonists, then its poignancy and mystery may elude you. It took place in 1967 at Heidegger's secluded Black Forest mountain chalet in Todtnauberg, but no-one knows what actually happened there. Celan wrote a typically elliptical poem about the occasion, "Todtnauberg", which gives little away.

It is known that Celan was an admirer of Heidegger's philosophical work, but was baffled by Heidegger's post-war failure to account for his actions during the Nazi period. It is also know that Heidegger admired Celan's poetry, and that the encounter was at his invitation, following a lecture by Celan at Freiburg. Imagine: a Jewish holocaust survivor, a world-class poet writing in the language of his oppressors, meets in secret a first-order academic existentialist philosopher, who had been a Nazi and remained in Germany throughout the war, as an approved university administrator who gave some philosophical underpinning to National Socialist ideas. You can bet they didn't talk about football. Some think Celan had expected to receive some sort of apology from the philosopher, but was disappointed. Some think Heidegger had expected to be lionized by the poet, but was also disappointed.

A bit of a damp squib, then; or, perhaps, a last hope extinguished. But this is where thrillers differ usefully from life, and from the typical literary novel. What Celan should have done, of course, once he had disarmed Heidegger, was to handcuff him to a radiator. Then sprinkle the petrol he had discovered in an outhouse during his previous night's reconnaissance all over the chalet. Then threaten to set fire to the place unless he got a crystal-clear, uncharacteristically unambiguous written statement of apology ("And none of that cryptic Dasein shit, matey"). And then maybe set fire to the place, anyway.

A far more satisfying ending, perhaps. But, as the critics of genre fiction say, life is not like that. In real life, it was Celan who committed suicide three years later in 1970, aged 50, and Heidegger who died of natural causes at the age of 87 in 1976.

Art of the Book

I don't know whether any of my US readers live anywhere near, but I thought I'd mention that I have a couple of my books in an exhibition at Gallery 210 at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. The exhibition is called Art of the Book : journals then and now, and runs from February 11th to May 8th 2010.

In case you get the idea that I'm turning into some kind of international superstar, let me disabuse you: the only reason I have any work in the exhibition is that it was co-curated by my colleague Linda Newington of the Winchester School of Art Library, who was kind enough to ask whether I would like to show any work.



I must admit that, these days, I'm quite ambivalent in my view of the "artist's book". For a while, I thought my destiny lay in that direction -- it's an obvious match with my skills and inclinations. It's even in my genes (if you're of a Lamarckian persuasion) -- my paternal grandfather, great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather were all bookbinders or "pocket book makers"; Grandad C. ended up working at the famous Temple Press of J.M. Dent & Sons in Letchworth, makers of "Everyman" classics.

Back in ye pre-digital age I taught myself some basic book-binding techniques, and produced some micro-run editions of hand-made books. I was a big fan of the leporello -- the concertina book -- usually bound in hard covers made using rigid foam board covered in cloth or paper. When photo-quality inkjet printing and desktop publishing software arrived, I began a serious bookmaking addiction. And when Blurb and all the other web-based "print on demand" services started up, I was first in the queue. For me, photography and books go together like ... well, think of two things you like that go really well together.

Now, I love the idea of books that exist solely because a creatively-inclined person has willed them into being: there need be no story to tell, no axe to grind, no news to bring. But a key part of the motivation behind many contemporary artist's books is a curious desire to subvert the book form as such. Hence, endless "books" which are all about not being books.

I can see why people can get caught up in this po-mo lite obsession, but, to me, subverting the book form has about as much point and purpose as subverting the functioning of the kidney. The codex book is a thing of functional beauty, refined over 1000 years until, at its best, it is as close as you'll get to a "degree zero" experience: a transparent medium which does its discreet best not to be the message. Frankly, that is precisely the point that the typical "look at me!" artist's book ends up underlining: books are brilliant, until they get in the way. To read a paperback novel which is too thick, too tightly bound, with too narrow gutters, no margins and an unreadable typeface is not a useful and enlightening experience of subversion, it's just bloody annoying.

For that reason, my own books have become purposefully plain and conventional in recent years, to better serve my photography. I suspect they will look a little unambitious in the context of an artist's books exhibition. What, no pop-ups?

But I remember showing one of my more baroque early efforts -- involving transparent and semi-opaque overlay pages with text, adventurous typography, coloured papers and unconventional layouts -- to an admired photographer at a workshop. His face darkened, as he handled this object. "Mike," he said, "You're going to have to make your mind up, whether you're a photographer or a book artist. I don't think you can be both -- the values are too different." It didn't take me very long to make my mind up.

Paricutin to Quicksand

Today is my 56th birthday, and it seems like I'm now finally into the countdown (or perhaps the holding pattern) for my 60th. When I turned 50, it was like cresting a rise above a valley, in which a village called "Sixty" was visible, but still far off downhill. But now I feel like I'm pounding unstoppably down the slope, with a good view of the sort of village "Sixty" is going to turn out to be. Oh, well. Sixty is the new fifty, they say (but, if so, I really don't understand what they're teaching them at school these days).

I have already described my best ever birthday in the post "When Were You Happiest?", and that would be hard to improve on. Ah, too much, too soon! But I must admit I was never that big on birthdays. I had an aversion to parties when I was small, though I did get the hang of it once alcohol and girls came into the picture. But even then it never occurred to me to have one of my own (what, throw up on our carpet?). I also never seemed to experience that ecstasy of entitlement that descends on some children on their birthday. "It's my birthday today!" Oh, really? Get over yourself, kid.

But birthday presents were always special. In those far-off days when there was less money splashing around, a birthday present really meant something. I still remember many of them, and in particular I remember my eighth birthday, when my parents gave me two volumes of a 16 volume illustrated encyclopaedia: a sort of tentative down payment on a lifetime of bookishness. "Face it, the boy's weird, might as well make a virtue out of it..."

It would be hard to overestimate the impact of those volumes on me. I read them from cover to cover, repeatedly. I gazed at the illustrations, intensely. Above all, I was entranced by the covers. In 1962, full colour illustrations were still a bit of a novelty: full colour image-wrapped glossy covers were totally new in Britain. I'd never see anything as lush, as smooth, as pleasingly sophisticated as those covers. Each volume had a different coloured spine, which harmonised beautifully with an elaborate trompe l'oeuil painting of a collection of objects (tickets, postcards, dolls, beads, even a potato), apparently pinned to a wall or dangling from strings, or sitting in 3D space, and each cover was unique to each volume. Needless to say, I wanted them all! And, in due course, a Christmas and another birthday later, I did have all sixteen.

Today, I had the strong urge to see those pictures again, but realised I couldn't even recall the name of the encyclopaedia. Now, if you work with books, you'll know how frustrating it is trying to help someone who desperately wants something, can see it in their mind's eye, but can't put useful words to it. "It's a big book, it has a very green cover with strange gold lettering" just doesn't help. So, as it's my birthday, I thought I'd set aside an hour of quality time, and help myself.

All I knew was that it was a multi-volume illustrated children's encyclopaedia, published around 1962, with really great covers. I searched the British Library catalogue, the COPAC catalogue, and did some Google searches. Eventually, my professional sixth sense started to twinkle around an American item that kept cropping up, "The Golden Book Encyclopedia". It wasn't the right title, but I recalled that "my" encyclopaedia did have a distinctly North American flavour -- although it had been Anglicized, the boys in the pictures had oddly square crewcuts and unobtainable striped t-shirts. As soon as I found a listing of the volumes and saw the title of volume 12 -- "From Paricutin to Quicksand" -- I knew I had hit paydirt.

How could I forget? That volume started with the appallingly disconcerting tale of a volcano springing up virtually underfoot in a campesino's field in Mexico, and ended with the nightmarish porridge-like substance into which characters in 1950s and 60s TV series regularly sank (it seemed that the rule was, "If in doubt, have the Lone Ranger fall into some quicksand"). Hey, no-one said that acquiring all the knowledge in the world would be comforting.

All that remained was to identify the title of the British edition (which was certainly not "The Golden Book Encyclopedia"), and then find some pictures of the covers. Just a little more triangulation, and I had it: it was "The Junior World Encyclopaedia", of course! Armed with the title, I could find and lift a couple of cover images from the Web. Unsurprisingly, it turned out the American and British editions shared the same cover illustrations.*


So, a nice birthday present to myself: finally to rediscover the source of so much instruction and pleasure, forty-eight years ago. My next quest is to find out who painted those covers.


* To discover the association with Golden Books was particularly satisfying, as it was a direct connection with another book I had tracked down for myself, some years ago, before the internet made such quests relatively trivial. In our Junior School library we had a wonderful (illustrated, image-wrapped) book, which showed how to make your own American indian stuff -- from teepees to peace pipes, from totem poles to beaded mocassins. To cut to the chase, after a considerable paperchase (hard to imagine now, but in 1984 you couldn't just try random keyword searches, even for a book title) it turned out to be the British edition of "The Golden Book of Indian Crafts and Lore" by W. Ben Hunt.

In A Silent Way

A bizarre thing happened this week. I was listening to the BBC Radio 3 Breakfast programme on the car radio on the way in to work on Tuesday, when a very nice piece of Baroque music came on, just as I was approaching the campus. I anticipated with pleasure a "car park moment" -- you know, when a piece of music is so good that you stay in the parked car to hear it to the end, and to find out what it was. I keep a little notebook in my coat pocket for just such times. I've had some of my most treasured musical experiences sitting in a car park.

Anyway, the piece finished, and -- instead of Rob Cowan filling me in on the details -- there was an unusually long silence, even for Radio 3, and then a further piece of what sounded like the same composer and performers. Then, when that finished, there was another silence, and then another track of what seemed to be the very same album. Then another. And another.

By this time it occurred to me that maybe good old Rob had died, slumped over the console, and nobody had noticed. But there was nothing I could do for him, and I was late for work, so I got out, and walked to the office, deeply puzzled.

Later on, I looked up the playlist and, sure enough, there were seven tracks of Buxtehude in a row, occupying about 45 minutes of airtime. Extraordinary. I had to go to the "Listen Again" facility, to see whether I could hear Rob Cowan say, "And now for some Buxtehude, which ... arrgh!" It would be like the start of a Dorothy L. Sayers thriller.

But after some scanning backwards and forwards, it emerged -- disappointingly -- that there had merely been a technical fault. No dagger in the back, no poisoned cup of coffee. Ah, well.


Here's another little sequence from this week:

Square Story

Twyford Down


University Campus, Southampton

University Campus, Southampton

Old Winchester Hill

University Campus, Southampton

... The End.

The Radio

Do existential questions trouble you? Do you lie awake in the small hours worrying about the nature of existence and the consequences of death? I used to when I was a kid, but not now. Or perhaps I should say not yet. It's hard to know whether this is a sign of enlightenment, contentment, or simply that I have become an Alfred E. Neuman tribute act ("What-- me worry?").

This may partly be because I have looked Death in the eye on several occasions. Not boldly, but sheepishly, as each time it was due to my own stupidity. Most memorably, aged sixteen, I was walking along a rocky peninsula called Punta de n'Amer in Majorca, head down, dazed and dazzled by the heat and lost in my own thoughts, when I nearly stepped straight over a cliff. I still recall the shock of gazing between my feet at the waves lapping jagged rocks seventy feet below. I particularly recall the dramatic change in the ambient acoustic: one second it was all shrill insects, up close and intimate like tinnitus, the next it was the vast echoing antechamber of a painful death, narrowly avoided. A true "Musée des Beaux Arts" moment: out to sea a fishing boat was chugging by, and one can imagine the fishermen remarking (to paraphrase Auden) "something idiotic, a boy walking over a cliff", then sailing on...

But then, who knows how many other times a chunk of suspiciously yellow ice has fallen from an airliner and crashed harmlessly into a nearby bush, or how often Death (in Terry Pratchett mode) has murmured, "HMM, NICE TRY... BUT LATER!" and passed on? Even setting aside world-historical conspiracies and ironies -- say, being ordered to walk repeatedly across muddy fields into machine-gun fire, surviving against all odds, and then dying of the flu in 1918 -- the line between existence and non-existence is always very fine indeed, and easily crossed when your mind is on other things.

Of course, as an intelligent, questioning person, you'll be aware that "the problem of consciousness" is one of the big issues that troubles the sleep of philosophers of a materialist bent. That is, if everything is just a stack of atoms then what the hell am I doing here in the middle of it all? It's the ultimate tease. After grappling with the question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" comes the stinger: "Yes, all right, but why me?" Wrestling with the literal self-evidence of that one can be an experience of such overwhelming paradox as to approach a religious ecstasy. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, it's very difficult to imagine the world carrying on without you at the centre of it. What would be the point, after all?

I had an interesting experience some years ago. At 8:45 am on Friday the 28th of November 1997, on the Victoria Line of the London Underground at Brixton station, to be precise. I had spent the night at my friend Andy's house, and was on my way to attend a course on Unix and shell scripting. I got on the tube at Brixton, which was packed with people travelling into central London to work -- standing room only, which can be an intimate and challenging experience for us shorter folk.

For some reason, the train did not start up, and then the motor was killed by the driver. A silence descended upon the carriage. The few conversations died, and everyone sat or stood, packed close, in an expectant hush. It being late November, everyone was wearing cold-weather gear, and a sort of swishing sound was generated as people's coats rubbed together as they shifted their stance, or simply breathed in and out. The muffled cymbals escaping from a few personal stereo headphones added a complex rhythmic top note. Multiplied and blended together in a confined space, the sound became like the soughing of wind through a forest, or the urgent whispering of many small voices in a language I couldn't quite understand.

After this had gone on for a few minutes, I was suffused by a great sense of peace and warmth. This enforced, silent mass hug of strangers had somehow resonated with my slightly hung-over consciousness, and I became acutely aware of the proximity of many other centres of consciousness, just like mine, each one occupying a separate, enclosed, hot space about the volume of a small loaf of bread. To hear that multi-layered whispering was to eavesdrop on the inwardness of these other beings, and it induced a feeling of deep happiness. It reminded me of that blissful point in falling asleep, when I was a child, when I would finally yield to the distant voices calling me to play.

Then, of course, the train started up again with a jolt, and it was over. But the feeling stayed with me, and a record of it still sits in a corner of the notes on Unix shell-scripting I made later on and still use to this day. I smile any time I thumb past that page. I felt I had been given a privileged glimpse, a massive hint about the true nature of our lives. That, or I had taken one more giant step towards a career as a gibbering derelict.

But what? The problem with such glimpses and hints is that unless you are a collector or connoisseur of such fragments -- let's say, a poet -- you need either to construct something useful out of them or to ignore them. Most people's lives are littered with abandoned insights. As Winston Churchill said of his struggles with mathematics:

I had a feeling once about Mathematics, that I saw it all—depth beyond depth was revealed to me -- the Byss and the Abyss. I saw -- as one might see the transit of Venus or even the Lord Mayor's Show -- a quantity passing through infinity and changing its sign from plus to minus. I saw exactly how it happened and why the tergiversation was inevitable: and how the one step involved all the others. It was like politics. But it was after dinner and I let it go.

And we homespun philosophers and secular mystics lack training and context. We're like those jaw-droppingly bad contestants on the X Factor whose self-delusion is teflon-coated kevlar: non-stick and bullet-proof. To have one's own Theory of Everything is to flirt with derangement (or burning at the stake -- do you know the book "The Cheese and the Worms", by Carlo Ginzburg?).

But I'm beyond help. So...

The simplest, most obvious insight was a reinforcement of something we have all always known, but all always seem to forget: that the mutual recognition of the reality and authenticity of each other's consciousness is the bedrock of human society. But this is tricky territory, and quickly leads to an unhelpful sentimentality: "We must love one another or die", yadda yadda*. As if there were a choice; as the man said, no-one here gets out alive. Speculation about how to live is fun and worthwhile -- plenty of evidence, plenty of chances to experiment. Speculation about what life is, and what it means to die is pretty futile, but somehow seems one of our most important tasks (apart from getting on with one's life and postponing the dying bit as long as possible).

However -- and here we enter the territory of derangement -- I also had the suspicion of a theory that -- somehow, maybe, perhaps -- we have evolved as biological receiver sets for a signal which is "out there" but which cannot manifest itself other than through a suitable receiver. Rather like a broadcast radio programme: so long as the set is on ("alive") the signal gets received and interpreted by our circuitry as self-awareness. But, turn it off ("die") and it doesn't. On or off, on or off: it's on a toggle switch; but crucially the broadcast signal is always there and always the same, though our individual receivers may handle it differently.

For whatever reasons, making use of this signal has proved useful to us, and has given us a real evolutionary edge. The signal probably, in itself, means nothing. But then electricity doesn't mean anything, either, but here I am, using it to communicate with you.

Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to The Radio... Thought for the Day: We must love one another, then die, perhaps.

[Cue up "Don't Fear the Reaper" by Blue Öyster Cult, fade to "Calling All Angels" by Jane Siberry]

And now, the weather...




* The words come from Auden's poem "September 1, 1939". Auden himself quickly recognised the problem when, reading the poem shortly after its publication, he pondered that line:

"I said to myself: 'That's a damned lie! We must die anyway.' So, in the next edition, I altered it to 'We must love one another and die.' This didn't seem to do either, so I cut the stanza. Still no good. The whole poem, I realized, was infected with an incurable dishonesty—and must be scrapped."

Foggy Dew

This week we had fog on several days which started out very dense, just hovering above freezing point, and then lasted throughout the day as a luminous veil over everything.



For some reason this always reminds me of a hangover, something to which I have become increasingly prone as I get older. These days, I drink alcohol infrequently and in small measures, but always seem to pay a disproportionate penalty the next day. When I was a young man I drank frequently and in large measures, and paid no penalty at all. This makes me reflect that young people are, in effect, a separate species.



For example, yesterday the Guardian gave away a little pamphlet of the poems of John Keats. Reading them now -- forty years after I first read and fell under their spell -- I was struck by the narrowness of their world view: these are the poems of a very young man. It's almost embarrassing, to read so much constructed on so little. "The Eve of St. Agnes", for example. The beadsman is a cartoon of an old man. His fingers were numb? I'd say his fingers were more likely burning with the agony of arthritis, young 'un! He walked bare-footed through the freezing chapel? What is this -- Scooby Doo?



It's no wonder so many folk songs begin with the words, "Come all ye young men, and listen to me..." Once, the old had useful things to say about press gangs, the dangerous attractions of fairy princesses, and a mysterious substance called "foggy dew" often found at the scene of the crime. Remarkably, very few of them begin with the words, "Shut it, grandad, and listen to me" (or "Roll over Beethoven", effectively the same sentiment).

Oh well, famously, youth is wasted on the young. Some of them, anyway.

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charact'ry,
Hold like rich garners the full ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love!--then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

John Keats

Eric Kennington

Here are two more favourite pictures. These are both pastel sketches by Eric Kennington from WW1. Kennington worked as a war artist in both World Wars, but his First War work is (in my opinion) far superior to the rather formulaic, slightly sentimental portraits of airmen, Home Guards, and the like he did in the Second. He had fought on the Western Front, was wounded, and then returned as an official war artist in 1917. Like the poets of that war, he used skills learned in the studios of bohemian Chelsea to describe and delineate Hell.

Raider with a Cosh, 1917

If you have read the fiction of Andy McNab you will recognise this man. Here is someone who has discovered his capacity for stealth and sudden, improvised violence, refined it into an artform, and put himself, temporarily, at the service of officers who fear and despise him. Look at those hands. Look at the bayoneted rifle shrouded in sacking, and that home-made club. But also look at the frown of concentration in that face clenched around a cigarette.

The Duke of Wellington's words (alleged to have been said before Waterloo) spring to mind: "This army is composed of the scum of the earth. I don't know what effect these men will have on the enemy, but by God they terrify me!"

Signaller Off Duty, 1916

This, by contrast, is someone captured in a moment of escape. My father was a despatch rider in the Royal Signals in WW2, and he became a specialist in the art of "getting your head down", that is, grabbing opportunities for sleep when they presented themselves. Signals units were very mobile, and despatch riders especially so. After riding a motorbike or driving a truck for several days in stressful conditions, getting "forty winks" under a table somewhere was a necessity. The matching skill, of course, is to wake instantly at a pre-determined time, ready to go.

Kennington, at his best, has a way of capturing the inwardness and the mystery of "ordinary" male faces that is compelling. Most war art is either grandiose or merely expressive of the artist's own reaction to war ("It's horrible!"). These sketches and some of Kennington's more considered work (for example, the painting "Gassed and Wounded", or the wonderful series of prints "Making Soldiers") seem to express something of the experience of the men pictured: they are portraits of men in uniform, rather than sketches of objects known as "soldiers". Remarkably, that is quite an unusual accomplishment.

Apparently, one of my grandfather's favourite jokes was this:

Boy: What's a soldier for, Dad?
Dad: To 'ang things on, son.

He had been an infantry sergeant in WW1, so would have known. One of my father's was this:

Private 1: That General Montgomery spoke to me the other day, you know!
Private 2: Cor, really? What did he say?
Private 1: He said, "Get out of my fuckin' way, soldier!"

A Change in the Weather

Somewhere a key was turned, and the freeze has begun to unlock. It seemed to happen on Wednesday. I drove our son up to Oxford in the morning, and it was Winter Wonderland all the way from Winchester: although the main roads were clear, there was an unbroken white blanket of snow from horizon to horizon. The trees were particularly pretty, their branches traced out in snow against the dark of the woodland interior like a photographic negative. Then as I drove back in the afternoon the rain started, and it all began to turn into grey slush.








Talking of frozen wastes, I saw a report that some of Frank Hurley's abandoned camera kit may have been found in the Antarctic. Hurley was a remarkable photographer, an Australian and an adventurer in that classic "Edwardian" mould, who was a member of Shackleton's staggeringly heroic expedition of 1914-16.

After they abandoned the debilitated Endurance, Shackleton ordered the crew members to pare their personal possessions down to two pounds each. Hurley had to leave his precious cameras behind, but Shackleton allowed him to keep a selection of photographs and motion-picture footage. Stripped to the waist, Hurley dove into the icy waters to retrieve his treasured images from the sinking wreck of the ship. Together, Shackleton and Hurley chose 120 glass plates to keep and smashed about 400; Shackleton feared that Hurley would endanger himself to return for them later. Hurley sealed the plates in metal tins with improvised solder, along with prints he had developed on board the ship. Hurley documented the remainder of their odyssey with only a handheld Vest Pocket Kodak camera and three rolls of film.
PBS/Nova, Shackleton's Antarctic Adventure

A lot of Hurley's work is available on the web, and repays viewing. That it was taken in such extreme conditions with a glass-plate view camera on a heavy wooden tripod beggars belief. You can buy scans of images from his albums from the Australian National Library -- here's one I couldn't resist:



The caption reads:

"This photograph, taken by the light of the midnight sun, shows the bows of the Discovery wending a way through floes and brash ice off the coast of Kemp Land, Antarctica"

Self-evidently, it was taken from the top of one of Discovery's masts with a wide angle lens. On a glass-plate view camera by a man in an extra-thick woollen jumper and three pairs of socks. Talk about "f/8 and be there"...

Such Watch!

It's a strange experience, living at the epicentre of a language that has gone global. "English" may be the vernacular evolved by the inhabitants of the British Isles (the mongrel offspring of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, Norman French and goodness knows what else, which squeezed out the various Celtic languages like a cuckoo chick settling into a nest) but there are now many Englishes spoken and written around the world, largely by people who have never seen our green and pleasant land, and who couldn't care less about distinguishing a dale from a dingle, or a dell, or a bottom, or a glen, or a vale, or a valley. And it's a well-established fact that even visiting alien species tend to speak their own insistent variety of English, too: "ex-ter-min-ate! EX-TER-MIN-ATE!!". Never mind global, that's universal.

Faced with this viral phenomenon, it's hard not to feel proprietorial. It's almost impossible, when travelling abroad and asked "Do you speak English?" not to reply "I am English!" (to which a suitable riposte would be, "I'll take that as a 'probably', then"). But, just as we have slipped down the international league of players of our other global export, football, so we have started to lose control and influence over our own language. Ovid, no doubt, would have ground his teeth to hear Latin abused as the lingua franca of mediaeval Europe; so now must we native-born English speakers grind ours, as "our" English takes over the world.

Of course I accept, linguistically, that the rule is that usage trumps prescription. In the end, if all the speakers of dodgy Englishes out there -- the ones who spell "lose" as "loose", or confuse their "their", their "there", and their "they're" -- agree to agree on their ignorance, then in the long run there's nothing to be done about it. But, but... If nothing else, some of us have invested a lot of time and care into getting it right, and it's annoying to see such a precious tool handled so carelessly.

My father was a mild-mannered man, but he would be enraged if he ever caught me abusing a tool -- for example, levering the lid off a tin of paint with a chisel. I have inherited a similar flashpoint with regard to linguistic abuses. But where my father had only me and a handful of apprentices to provoke his ire, I have the entire freakin' internet. Increasingly, I wonder whether it's time simply to stop caring about it. What does it matter if, for whatever modish reasons, people -- English people -- have suddenly started saying "I'm bored of maths" rather than "I'm bored with or by maths"? It's wrong, but in due course it will become right. And, in 50 years, some pedant will be fuming about the new fashion for saying "I'm bored at maths."

Obsessing about the fussy details of obsolete local practices -- which is what it amounts to -- is a sure sign of a culture in decline. In 1776, I'm pretty sure George III and George Washington were not quarrelling over the preferred spelling of "favour" or "sabre", or whether you are said to "rule" or "head up" a country. No, rather more was at stake -- though the French, those perennial bad losers, would probably insist there was a linguistic angle, too. It will be an indicator of the irreversible decline of the United States when pedants start attempting to recapture American metaphors and usages which have escaped into the global wild and gone feral ("Step up to the plate", anybody? Hey, what's the beef? And where is the beef, anyway? Is it on the plate? Oh, I see, that's a whole different ball game...).

One of the wonderful (and insidious) things about English as a language is its hospitality to the delightfully incorrect and unwittingly innovative usages of non-native speakers. We love it when you talk unclean. Why, just listening to the radio news today I heard a French official talking in wonderfully articulate English (in a discussion of the clearance of the Sangatte refugee camp) who referred to people sleeping "under the rain". Why would anyone bother to correct him? It's perfectly sensible, and almost poetic. In the same slot an Afghan refugee, interviewed and asked how many times the police had arrested him at Sangatte, replied "four many".* Again, who wouldn't let it go? Iit may not be "English", but it is English-based communication.

This last example reminds me of a favourite bit of dialogue in the film Casablanca, where the Leuchtags are showing off their new language skills:

Mr. Leuchtag: Liebchen-- sweetnessheart, what watch?
Mrs. Leuchtag: Ten watch.
Mr. Leuchtag: Such watch?
Carl: Hm. You will get along beautiful in America, mm-hmm.

It helps if you speak German, of course, in which language the words for "watch" and "hour" are the same... Heh. Well, I thought it was funny, anyway, as did, presumably, the scriptwriters. "Hey," as Chico Marx would say, "Hey, what's a matter for you?"


* The reference to Sangatte in the news betrays the long gestation of this post, begun way back on 10/10/09...

Reynardine

Beyond the back wall of our postage-stamp-sized back garden lies a mysterious expanse of trees and brambles known to our family as The Wild Place. In reality, it is an unused corner of a municipal cemetery, cut off on three sides by back walls and fences, and thus unvisited from one year to the next by humans, apart from the odd explorer seeking a non-existent shortcut. I'm sure that in the days of my childhood, when we kids roamed far and wide building camps and climbing trees, it would have been a favoured place for playing, but its lack of central heating and complete absence of electrical outlets or internet cabling means it is utterly silent these days. That suits me just fine.



The Wild Place is perfect for wildlife, of course. Even though we are close to the centre of town a wide variety of birds are regular visitors -- the hard winter has brought in this week our very first Redwings and Fieldfares. In the past I have been able to watch a buzzard sitting casually on a branch not 20 yards from my bedroom window and tearing up a pigeon for lunch, mobbed by coup-counting crows and magpies. Even the occasional deer makes its way into this cul-de-sac; a few years ago I spotted one peering forlornly over our back wall as I was doing the washing up.

But the lords of the Wild Place are the foxes. At night, their shrieking can chill your blood, as they pad up and down on the back wall. During the day, they can usually be seen sunning themselves amongst the brambles. Today I spotted these two, napping in the winter sun in a snow-free corner beneath an oak tree.



Cute, eh? It's a tribute to the lens (Canon EF 70-300 f/4 IS) that a hand-held shot taken through the unwashed double-glazing of our loft extension should come out so well.

Red

I overlooked this one from New Year's Day: as the red glow intensified, looking away from the setting sun, it picked out a red ribbon and a single red berry in a thorn tree. Strange.

Space Salmon

Now, if they looked as convincing as this, I could understand how the ancients managed to agree on the names of those various random alignments of stars we call "constellations". As it is, this fat salmon surging through space is nothing more than an equally random grouping of cracks and tiny bubbles embedded in the ice of the Staff Club pool.

I'm very attracted to those moments when the universe appears to speak -- or at least to clear its throat -- but then falls back into its protracted silent sulk again. It's a species of what theologians call the numinous (go on, look it up for yourself, I'm in bed with a cold, watching the snow fly past my window). In the end, the inescapable mystery is that there is a pulse, a systole and diastole, of meaning and meaninglessness that has led us, as a species, to propose various spiritual and philosophical palliative syntheses to that headache-inducing dialectic. But our true genius as a species, however, has been to invent Paracetamol to make such headaches go away. I think I'm due for my next dose in about 20 minutes.

Repeats

It's fairly obvious, I suppose, that if you photograph your familiar surroundings on a daily basis you will eventually find yourself standing -- at the same time of year, in the same place -- in front of something you've photographed several times before, even if that something is fairly unusual. This for example:



For a brief window of time around the new year, we are treated to the spectacle of a two-tone plume of steam billowing from the chimneys of the university heating plant. The conditions have to be just right: cold enough to cause the water vapour to be visible, clear and bright enough for the light to pick the plume out against a blue sky, and -- most crucially -- the alignment of the rising sun with the narrow alley between two Engineering buildings has to be perfect. As far as I know, this conjunction has no astrological or religious significance. It looks like this:



The other dependable seasonal phenomenon is the repeated freezing, thawing and refreezing of the pool outside the Staff Club:






Students cannot resist trying to stand on the ice, so it reliably gets broken and refrozen into strange shapes, and air bubbles get trapped in the ice. Luckily, the water is too shallow to have much of a mishap in, unless you insist on lying down.

New Year

A New Year's Day walk and photograph is a custom I have kept to for many years now. Yesterday afternoon we went to St. Catherine's Hill near Winchester, but decided to cross over the motorway (which was laid through an open chalk wound slashed into the ancient and historic downlands in the 1990s) to Twyford Down.

It was an exhilarating, frosty day for a walk, with a clear even light, even though the sun was already beginning to set. As it got lower in the sky, however, the sun took on a particularly red radiance, and cast a weird glow onto the flinty, frozen fields. A fox made its way across the ploughed ruts shortly before this photograph was taken.

New Year's Day 2010, Twyford Down