The Real Thing

Today being Hallowe'en reminds me that I was deeply pissed off at one point over the summer. My daughter is studying English for one of her A Levels, and I discovered that one of the set books was, of all things, Dracula, by Bram Stoker. I'd already been annoyed by the triviality of some of the texts my kids have had to study as "literature", but this seemed to take the blood-sucking biscuit.

Never having read the book myself, I thought it would make sense to actually read it before driving a stake angrily through its heart. For all I knew, it might turn out be a brilliant classic, even if only in a camp, knowing way. Well, it isn't. It is possibly the dullest, most pointless book I have ever read. It is a Pile of Poo. It is an insult to our children, especially the girls, to make them study this drab thing as if it were "literature". As I say, I was deeply pissed off.

So, how has it come to this, that kids at this most wonderful stage in their intellectual development -- when their entire, freshly-minted sensibility and intelligence ought to be concentrated on a few well-chosen true classics, an experience that should shape them for life -- are being required to study trash?

In a way, I sort of feel it's my fault. Back in the mid-1970s, having taken a three-year stroll down Literary High Street (a.k.a. an English degree), I became interested in literary theory. Questions like "Who decides what counts as a classic?" and "What does the reader bring to the literary experience?" seemed worth asking. All a year's further study brought, though, was some puzzling and dispiriting half-answers. I had had every intention of embarking on an academic career, but suddenly I was not so sure. I knew what the problems were, but I didn't see any way forward; indeed, I suspected there was no way forward, and -- looking ahead -- all I could see was an inevitable crisis looming for the Humanities, and unemployment for me. I left the field to others, who were inventing increasingly sterile post-modern games to play.

My killer question at the time (my heuristic device, if you prefer that fancy talk) had been to ask: "Why is the pastime 'reading and writing books' sufficiently well-regarded to be studied at university, when stamp-collecting and mountain-climbing aren't?" Ask yourself that question, and the whole thing falls into place. Or rather, crumbles into dust, like Dracula on a sun-lounger.

At bottom, once you've cleared away the accidents of history and habit, and got bored with the sociological aspects, the problem is an argument over the existence and nature of The Real Thing. It's practically theological.

Before, let's say, 1965, there was pretty much universal agreement about where the Real Thing could be found. In most of Shakespeare, indisputably; in much of Keats, Milton and Chaucer; and in variously-sized bits of a whole pantheon of lesser writers. However, its presence in, say, Arthur Conan Doyle or John Buchan was small, and in the case of writers like Ian Fleming, homeopathic. The presence of the Real Thing was not something that could be objectively measured -- you just knew it was there, or accepted that people who knew better than you said it was there, so you went looking for it. Learning to recognise The Real Thing was the point of the exercise.

Hmm. The trouble is, once the challenge is made -- "Who says this is the Real Thing and that is not, and by what authority?" -- Pandora's Box is opened. There is no way to justify the preferences of a self-appointed aristocracy as the definition of "good taste"; you simply end up playing an upmarket game of "U and Non-U". And once "judgement" has been devalued to "opinion" (as in, "It's just your opinion that David Copperfield is better than Dracula") no-one can agree what the Real Thing is ever again, and never will. It's game over, and "literature" gets devalued to "reading matter".

This process has been going on for 30 years, and the result is that genuine rubbish like Dracula ends up as an A Level set text, because enough people think it is the sort of reading matter that 17-year-olds will find accessible. Hey, it's about vampires, and vampires are cool! It surely cannot be because they think it is any good? Can it? In the words of the Steely Dan song, "Reelin' In The Years":

You wouldn't know a diamond
If you held one in your hand
The things you think are precious
I can't understand

As it is, I'm still pretty sure I know I know what a diamond is, and what makes me angry is that something quite different is being pressed into our children's hands.

A Place to Stand

As the wind gusted and the light came and went on Sunday, I found myself walking away from the Twyford Down motorway cutting for a change, rather than towards it. This gave me a whole new set of views on that little bit of landscape. I can feel a set of pictures developing, not unlike Henri Rivière's Thirty-Six Views of the Eiffel Tower -- itself a conscious riff on Hokusai's "36 Views of Mount Fuji".






Talking of which, Rivière's Thirty-six Views book is back in print, and well worth buying if that japoniste woodblock print look is to your taste. Long an expensive rarity, it's now been republished in semi-facsimile in connection with an exhibition in San Francisco at an extremely reasonable price. Get it while you can.



Just think, 100 years ago, even the Eiffel Tower was a half-constructed novelty! I find the meeting of japoniste exoticism, the industrial-modernist "shock of the new", and traditional pictorial values in Rivière's work very sympathetic. It's a very French moment -- no wonder those Edwardian Brits escaped to Paris at the first opportunity. So poignant, to know that A War to End All Wars was shortly about to put a stop to it all.

Optics

David Hockney has this thing, explored at length in his book Secret Knowledge, about the use of optics by the Old Masters. When you look at his evidence, it's obvious that he's right. Lenses and projected images have been around for a long time, and it would be an odd artist who wasn't intrigued by them or who refused to take advantage of them.

At this time of year in northern latitudes, as the low angle of the rising sun comes later in the day and coincides with the rising of those of us lucky enough to have jobs to go to, projected images are everywhere. It makes you very aware of how photography must have been prefigured, in principle, for hundreds of years before anyone figured out how to do it.

Talking of optics and old masters, if you know the poem "Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror" by John Ashbery, and the painting by Parmigianino on which it is based, consider the poem's opening lines:

As Parmigianino did it, the right hand
Bigger than the head, thrust at the viewer
And swerving easily away, as though to protect
What it advertises. A few leaded panes, old beams,
Fur, pleated muslin, a coral ring run together
In a movement supporting the face, which swims
Toward and away like the hand
Except that it is in repose.

Now consider the painting:


Um, right hand?? It strikes me someone should have had a quiet word with Mr. Ashbery before the poem was published. Too late now.

Stage Sets

Since the start of the new academic year, I've begun doing two "old" things again: walking to work, and carrying the Panasonic LX3. These are not unconnected, obviously -- even compared to a GF1, the LX3 is so light I can forget it's round my neck, but it's right there when the bright, low autumn light transforms the scene at around 8:00 am into a stage set.





The LX3 also has a way with colour and tone in contrasty scenes that is quite special and can sometimes seem a little supernatural. The camera does have a Leica lens, of course. It's certainly not my impeccable technical mastery that is capturing that full range of tones from deep shadow to bright highlight -- I'm simply underexposing a bit, and taking my reading from the brighter part of the scene. Simple stuff.

I also like the way three different image aspect ratios can be selected by a simple twist of a switch on the lens barrel. A curiosity of the LX3 is that all three ratios are crops of the "full" image sensor: you get your 10-ish megapixel image cut out of an 11-ish megapixel sensor ( 3968 x 2232 pixels at 16:9, 3648 x 2736 pixels at 4:3, and 3776 x 2520 pixels at 3:2). The idea is that the same angle of view is maintained, with each ratio getting a much more similar overall pixel count than you'd get from a crop of a "full sensor" image. Brilliantly eccentric. You just have to wonder how they got it past the marketing guys ("Um, explain that bit about the angle to me again?").

Curriculum: the E-Book

OK, this is unknown territory for me. Blurb has started offering an e-book creation service, which is exciting, but it's Apple Only (for iPad, iPhone, iPod) which is annoying. Not least because I own none of those things, and therefore can't see how well it works.

I have set up the final version of Curriculum as an e-book download, at the low, low price of £3.49. If you go to my Blurb Bookstore you should be able to see it as a purchase option there.

What happens when you have bought it (I think) is that you get the option to download it. These are the instructions:

You can view your ebook on your iPad by manually transferring it to iTunes.

* Download the epub file
* Open iTunes on your computer and then drag the epub file to your iPad folder, under Devices
* Connect your iPad to your computer
* Click Sync
* On your iPad, open iBooks and you should see your book.

You may also be able to find it in an Apple bookstore somehow (via iTunes?).

Does that make sense to you Apple people? If anyone out there wants to give it a go (come on, just £3.49!!) please let me know how you get on. Does it work? Does it look good? Any hitches or gotchas? Can you see it on an Apple Mac, even if you don't have an iThingy?

I can then alert the wider (Apple using) world to this development. Thanks.

Pit Droids

Over the summer I had a bit of a clear-out of of some of our stuff, a project which is ongoing. At times this feels like trying to empty a swimming pool with a teaspoon, but the journey of a 1000 miles starts with a carrier-bag full of old bits of bubble wrap. Is bubble wrap the new string, I wonder? Just as the previous generation had a thing for string, saving it obsessively in drawers and boxes, so we seem to be incapable of throwing away protective packaging. It looks so useful.

A major delaying factor in this domestic archaeology is the discovery of buried treasure, or at least buried treasure maps. You can be merrily tossing old paperwork into a rubbish bag, when you encounter something -- a child's drawing, a letter, a scribbled note, a bill, even -- that stops you in your tracks, and causes you to make a coffee and sit for a while, lost in the past.

I was surprised to discover, for example, quite how many rejection letters I had accumulated in the period 1995-2005. I had forgotten about all those rounds of developing a project, putting together a proposal, applying for funding or an exhibition or publication, waiting for a response, and the inevitable disappointment of a rejection letter. Back to square one. In those days, in my 40s, I had the fantasy of finally escaping from my "day job", and launching a late-start career as an artist -- all it would take was hard work, a few exhibitions to establish a reputation, maybe a book or two, and I'd be part of the international art circus. Yeah, right.

A more positive moment came when, rattling through a stack of old CD-ROMs containing software that used to entertain our kids when they were small, I found our copy of Star Wars Pit Droids. My son was just the right age to be caught up in that second round of Star Wars fever that accompanied the release of the "prequel trilogy", starting with The Phantom Menace in 1999. If you didn't raise your children in the 1990s or after, you probably don't really understand the impact of brand marketing on family life. The confluence of branded products aimed at children (generally based on a film or TV series), the advent of home computing and video, and the realisation that children were an untapped market was remarkable to witness, and impossible to resist. Think Jurassic Park, Power Rangers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and, above all, Star Wars. I expect PhDs are being written right now about all this.

Most of this flood of merchandizing was bubble-packed ephemeral junk -- action figures, weapons, bits of costume and insignia, and the like -- but some was a brave attempt to slip a little developmental or even educational content into the mix. Lego got on board the Star Wars branding gravy-train very successfully, for example, and not a few ten-year-old brains will have benefitted from constructing a Lego Death Star or Millennium Falcon. Certainly, the business of shopping for Christmas and birthdays is vastly simplified when your offspring can cite exact product codes downloaded off the Web for the precise items they want, or when you can wander through the aisles of Toys'R'Us and spot when the bubble packs and boxes change to the particular branded colourway you're looking for.

But a few products launched on the back of these enthusiasms were outstanding, and Star Wars Pit Droids was one of them. If you're not familiar with the Star Wars universe (lucky you) then you need to know that a "pit droid" is a tireless, multi-tasking robotic grease-monkey, fixing up dented starships and hunting out spare parts in the breakers yards of dusty, faraway planets. The pit droids "game" is well described by Children's Software Revue:

An amazingly strong exercise in logical thinking, the program presents a series of successively more difficult puzzles all housed within graphically rich Star Wars settings. The overall goal of the game is to lead a group of robots called Pit Droids through various obstacle courses until they reach their final destination, The Podrace Arena. Kids have to figure out how to program the Droids so they'll move the right way through each puzzle. They do so by manipulating tiles that have varying functions. For instance, a red arrow makes red Droids turn a certain direction, while a 1:2 ratio tile divides a column of Droids in two directions at the ratio of- you guessed it- one to two. As players correctly navigate each puzzle, they rack up points and can open up deeper levels of the game. Why is this so engaging and educationally robust? First of all, the Droids are downright cute and pretty funny as well. Kids and adults naturally take to these creatures and want to help them reach their goal. Second, the challenge levels are designed so that each hurdle is just a little bit tougher than the last- doable, but tricky.

In a word, it is a brilliant and totally praiseworthy use of a child's brand-stimulated attention. I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that playing Pit Droids on the PC raised and reinforced my son's (admittedly already high) intelligence. Frankly, schools should be using Pit Droids to teach logic and creative lateral thinking. It's fun, too. Needless to say, I have kept our copy.

Funeral Music

A couple of times now I've started to write a post about the music that people choose, or have chosen for them, at their funerals. But I kept putting it off as the subject was a little raw, there having been a spate of deaths that were too close for comfort – six relatives, two friends, the child of two friends, two work colleagues, and two three* mentors. But it is an interesting subject, and there's no point in being stand-offish with Death. He/she/it does what he/she/it pleases.

Once upon a time, of course, this wasn't much of an issue, at least in nominally Christian Britain. The Book of Common Prayer does a poetic and workmanlike job of steering grieving relatives and friends through the grim business, and a couple of favourite hymns would give everyone something useful to do with their voice. Job done. But the exponential secularization of our culture means that people are increasingly thrown back onto their own resources at a very difficult time. It reminds me of the arguments in favour of school uniforms – the lack of choice used to mean social and cultural differences were smoothed over in a helpful way. You might have been a culture-free, violent and bigoted old sod in life, but in death you finally acquired a touch of class. The freedom to do what you like comes at a price, and a non-Christian funeral is often a confusing and unsatisfactory affair, one where the lack of purpose, belief and – above all – taste in many people's lives are mercilessly exposed.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the business of choosing music. Mawkishness and a near-universal inability to hear or understand song lyrics come to the fore, closely followed by a breathtaking lack of tact and sense of occasion. John Cleese truly (hilariously, appropriately) broke the mould with his eulogy at Graham Chapman's funeral; but the choice of the "Chinese version" of Jerusalem ("Bling me my spiel, Oh crowds unford," etc.) and "Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life" equally truly set the bar for puerile evasion of grief so low that we're still tripping over it. 

So... OK, pop pickers... [cue up At the Sign Of The Swinging Cymbal]... A poll of 5000 Brits, carried out in 2006, delivered this Funeral Top Ten:

1. Goodbye My Lover - James Blunt 

2. Angels - Robbie Williams 

3. I’ve Had the Time of My Life - Jennifer Warnes and Bill Medley 

4. Wind Beneath My Wings - Bette Midler 

5. Pie Jesu - Requiem 

6. Candle in the Wind - Elton John 

7. With or Without You - U2 

8. Tears in Heaven - Eric Clapton 

9. Every Breath You Take - The Police 

10. Unchained Melody - Righteous Brothers

And here, from the same year, is the Co-Op Funeral Service's Top Ten: 

1. Wind Beneath My Wings - Bette Midler 

2. My Heart Will Go On - Celine Dion 

3. I Will Always Love You - Whitney Houston 

4. Simply The Best - Tina Turner 

5. Angels - Robbie Williams 

6. You'll Never Walk Alone - Gerry And The Pacemakers 

7. Candle In The Wind - Elton John 

8. Unchained Melody - Righteous Brothers 

9. Bridge Over Troubled Water - Simon And Garfunkel 

10. Time To Say Goodbye - Sarah Brightman

[Sound effect of skidding record player needle] 

 Good grief. I mean, honestly. You can see why – faced with a difficult choice at a difficult time – someone's family or friends might reach for some of these, but how would you like to be played out to a song about an obsessive stalker (The Police), the implication that you were the stairway to someone else's success (Bette Midler), or best remembered by your smell (James Blunt)? I doubt any of these songs have been chosen by the, um, "loved one", however. A shame, really: one's funeral is a last chance to play Desert Island Discs, isn't it? I suspect there are a lot of people (alright, men) of my age out there constantly refining their own Funeral Mix. I don't have a problem with this, provided it's a short and well-chosen list. However, I don't want to sit through both sides of anyone's P60 tape on a hard bench, however tastefully thought out.

As I posted a while back, "Box of Rain" by the Grateful Dead was played at a dear friend's memorial, and – despite the fact that I generally loathe the Grateful Dead – it was very moving. It was his choice, and all about him, and damn near rendered two hundred people helpless with sobbing. When it comes to my turn, if I think about it, I'm torn between reducing everyone to gratifying tears ("May You Never", by John Martyn, perhaps?) or posthumously kicking off a wild baccanal (free whisky all round and The Pogues?). I'll let you know.

As far as I can see, there are only two up sides to dying young. First, vastly more people are likely to turn up for your funeral, and they are far more likely to know (and care) who you actually were. Second, they're more likely to share your taste in music. The scenario of a memorial where the careful choice of music – made years earlier by the deceased party – is played to a three-quarters empty room of uncomprehending, indifferent strangers is a tragi-comic one, reminiscent of a Chekhov short story. Luckily you'll be dead.

* The mentor count went up by one after I started this post. R.I.P. Geoffrey Ford.

Biscay

The sea is always present in the Basque country. Even miles inland in the Pyrenees its influence is felt as fog and rain; the greenness of Atlantic Spain makes a remarkable contrast with the arid landscapes just a little further south.

It also affects restaurant menus: fish, fish, and more fish. Fresh sardines, squid, bacalao (salt cod), merluza (hake)... It's all good. Though I've never convinced myself to try a plate of angulas (elvers), a disconcerting popular delicacy available in bulk packs, fresh or frozen, at the supermarket ("like short spaghetti with eyes"). Unfortunately, my daughter is not keen on fish, and had to stick to duck or chicken whenever we ate out.

Lighthouse at Getaria

From Itziar

At night we would look out onto the blackness of the sea from our hilltop vantage point near Itziar, and see lines of fishing boat lights (presumably fishing for squid) arranged like streetlamps on the vasty deep.

The Basques are legendary sailors, whalers and cod-fishermen, venturing way out into the North Atlantic and Newfoundland fisheries, and crewing the ships of the Age of Exploration. But the Basque coast has a more refined history, too, of summer seaside resorts for royalty and the bon ton of Europe. Nowadays, though, it's the surfing aristocracy that turn up in the summer, as some of the wave breaks can achieve monster proportions. I, of course, have nothing but envy contempt for these waddling body fascists in their wetsuits, clutching their absurd hi-tech planks.

Zarautz

Holiday Snaps

Getaria, N. Spain

So, the summer... Where did that go? Suddenly it's October, Fresher's Week has come and gone, and I'm removing cobwebs from the wing mirrors every morning when I wipe the condensation off the car windows. I'm not bothered -- summer is not my favourite time of year.

My favourite time of year is coming up, as the days shorten and we start to roll down the solar hill, straight through Bonfire Night and on towards Christmas. Some people like spring, with its new beginnings, but, if you've been a bit of a swot and have the school year in your blood the way peasants used to have the farming seasons, the real fresh start is now. New teachers, new exercise books and that sense of chaotic communal purpose, like a ship setting out on a voyage.

Of course, if you hated school and love getting your shirt off in the sun then you probably loathe this time of year. Never mind, I expect you've had your fun in the sun, and now it's my turn. Mind, despite our all-round busy-ness, we did manage a two week holiday in the Basque Country. I love Atlantic Spain, with its mix of landscapes and climates, and find the Basques an engaging bunch.

Near Itziar, N. Spain

This year, I discovered the uniquely Basque object known as an argizaiola. There was one on the wall in our holiday let, but until I saw the collection of them in the San Sebastian museum and the penny dropped, I had assumed it was a piece of African wood carving, around which -- for whatever bizarre reason -- someone had wound a length of TV aerial cable.

These things are strange, a real bit of folk-culture weirdness. The "cable" is actually a very long, flexible candle. A Basque family may possess an argizaiola that has been passed down through many generations (some are very old indeed); it is used to represent their ancestors at a special mass, when it is placed flat on the floor of the church, and the end of the long candle is raised up vertically and lit. Yes, folks, ancestor worship in the EEC. I'd love to learn more, but most of the information is concealed behind that impenetrable barrier known as the Basque language.

This photo caused me some aggravation:



It was late at night, still very warm, and a thunderstorm was rolling through the valley. I went out on to the balcony to cool off, and thought I'd try some hand-held shots. I set the camera to ISO 1600, snapped away for a bit, then went back in for a beer. Unfortunately, I forgot I'd changed the ISO, and for several days was working at 1600 in broad daylight. I kept seeing the ludicrous shutter speeds and apertures in the display, thinking, "My, but the light is very bright down here..." Ah, well... I got some impressive depth of field, coupled with less impressive shadow noise.

Seems an odd place for a knitting party,
but check the size of that scarf...

In the Basque Country, you learn to expect the unexpected
around every corner. I have no idea who, what, why...

Break's Over, Get Back to Work!

Can you hear it, too? All over the internet, I can hear the sound of blogs and websites closing down. A sort of mix of an eery silence and doors banging shut in a vast, echoing corridor.

It's hard to be sure what this means. Partly, it is simply that the action has moved on. Blog City is reverting to the muddy field it was before the circus rolled in, and now it's the turn of the neighbours in Twitter Terrace to complain about the noise. It's probably also a reaction to the fact that there are now simply too many blogs to keep track of. Who's got the time? But I think it is mainly that a generation of early adopters has finally grown weary of making content freely available while platform providers like Google and Facebook get filthy rich.

It reminds me of the situation with academic journals, where publicly-funded research is written up and published by university staff -- completely unremunerated -- in privately-owned journals which then charge truly astronomical subscription prices to the libraries of the very same institutions that employ those academics to do the research. It's a money machine!

The contradictions inherent in Web-based "intellectual property rights" are one of the hot contemporary issues. We all want everything to be freely available on the web, but we all want to be fairly recompensed for our own labour. "Information wants to be free" is a nice slogan, but only half the story. The full, original quotation goes like this:

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

Stewart Brand (Whole Earth Catalog guy) to Steve Wozniak (that other Apple guy) in 1984

Think about it. Let's say one person spends two hours writing a post, and 500 others spend five minutes reading it. Was it an experience worth, say, a negligible ten pence to them? If so, then £50 would be due to the writer. That would be a rate of £25 an hour, or perhaps more realistically £50 a day -- a modest but acceptable return on the writer's labour. Of course, in the case of the more popular blogs with 25 thousand or more readers, that translates to a rate of £2,500 per day.

But these financial transactions never take place; the writer's labour is simply tipped into the bottomless pit of free content that is the World Wide Web. Looking back, I see that I will soon have written 500 posts over the three year life of this blog. If we say that each post was worth that modest £50, then that's £25,000 I have lost down the back of the World Wide Sofa. Multiply that by the number of bloggers and web-site owners and you start to see where the mind-boggling wealth of Google and Facebook is coming from. "Bloggers of the world, unite..."

In case you are wondering, I don't think I am about to stop blogging on principle, however. At least, not until I reach that 500 mark, anyway. I have no illusions about the consequences of withdrawing my labour from the global pool of Web peonage. Google's share price would probably not be affected.

However, I remember back in the 1980s -- when some people were taking the expression "management guru" too literally, and the Way of the Flipchart was being disseminated in gnomic wisdom-tales about frogs, hot water, and the like -- I once heard someone compare leaving an organisation to removing one's hand from a bucket of water. See? It leaves no trace! You are like that hand: don't over-value your contribution to the corporate karma-count, grasshopper! Well, I was bored and decided to speak up and mention that Archimedes bloke and displacement; if nothing else, I learned that gurus don't like to be interrupted or contradicted.

But it's surely true, or truthier, that anything and everything makes a difference to something, somewhere? I am reminded of this demented but presumably correct effusion from the Angry Man of English Letters, Thomas Carlyle:

It is a mathematical fact that the casting of this pebble from my hand alters the centre of gravity of the universe.
Sartor Resartus, 1834

Quite so, Sir, quite so. But mind where you're chucking that pebble, please.

Flying Ant Day 2011

We interrrupt this blog break to bring you breaking blog news: today is Flying Ant Day in Highfield, Southampton. It's hot, quite humid, with a slight breeze and bright sunshine.

I only mention this because the previous post "Flying Ant Day" has attracted a vast number of hits. I've inspected it quite closely for unintended filth and double entendre, and can see nothing untoward. My conclusion is that an awful lot of people are interested in logging when Flying Ant Day happens. Perhaps the Chinese are betting on it this year?

Combine thousands of flying ants and a breeze with a graduation ceremony and you have an entertaining spectacle, by any standards.

Just thought you'd want to know. Now, back to that break.


Update: here are the weather conditions at the time (15:20 BST):

temp:22°
dew point: 6°
humidity: 35%
visibility: 10km
pressure: 1,009.14 mb (steady)
wind: WNW 13 kmph

Summer Break

This year, I've decided to give the blog a holiday over the summer, as of tomorrow. I should be back, Blogger and other capricious deities willing, sometime in late September. By all means comment on the existing posts, but don't expect any replies.

These three months are -- popular perception aside -- the busiest of all for us. The university financial year ends in July, so a lot of last minute spending and accounting gets done. Plus everyone expects all upgrades, improvements, building works, stock moves, etc., etc., to be finished by the start of the new session in October. Coordinating all that Stuff with people taking summer leave all over the place is always a bit fraught, and this year is no exception.

Plus the summer "vacation" is the main window of opportunity for most academic staff to do the research they're paid to do, not to mention hosting the conferences where they get to show off last year's research. And the huge numbers of overseas students start to arrive right now for their pre-Sessional English As She Is Spoke, Innit courses. If "vacation" means "emptying the place of people" then it's time we thought of another name. If it means "holiday" then we should definitely think of another name.

But my main reason for having a blog-break is that I want to use my own time to attend to a number of neglected personal projects, not least of which is getting my webpage back up and running -- it's been years since I updated it properly. Webpages are not really where the action is, these days, but it's good to have a reference site where people can see the full range of what you get up to. I also fancy doing a bit of "proper" writing.

So, have a good summer in the Northern Hemisphere, a good winter in the Southern Hemisphere, and good luck to all you people in the permanently hot bit in the middle.

Right Town, Wrong Depot

A well-known international delivery (sorry, logistics) service tried to deliver a parcel earlier this week. No-one was home. They left a card.

The card didn't say much about my options, so I tried phoning. After 15 minutes of being passed from one automated queue to another, and irritated by various pieces of soothing music, I gave up. So, I went to the website, which is pretty much where both the card and the recorded messages wanted me to go, anyway.

"Find your nearest Customer Centre" it said. Fine. I entered my postcode, and got an address in Eastleigh, a neighbouring town. I tried ringing to establish (a) whether they had my parcel, and (b) what hours they were open. Same automatic queues, same music. I gave up again and went back to the website. My options appeared to be either to schedule a re-delivery, or collect it myself from the Customer Centre. I could see my parcel had started its journey in Eastleigh, and concluded that's where it would be now. I opted to collect.

Next day, I drove over to Eastleigh, to the address given on the website. It was one of those little industrial estates, not much more than a loop of one-way road, with "units" and yards of varying sizes on either side. I drove slowly round, trying to spot the company logo. No luck. I drove round again. And again. So I parked, and walked round the one-way.

I eventually glimpsed a liveried truck through a tall hedge. I walked round the one-way again, trying to find an entrance. It was quite a run-down place -- the road and pavements were cracked and uncared for, with weeds and overgrown hedges everywhere, and beat-up, oil-stained yards behind tall fences topped with razor wire. I felt sorry for anyone who had to work there, although my photographic antennae were twitching like mad.

Eventually, I asked a guy having a fag by the roadside. He said to go round the corner, and press the buzzer by the locked gate. I did, and a woman's voice came over the speaker, asking me what I wanted.

"I want to collect my parcel," I said.
"What's your postcode?" she said. I told her.
"You've come to the wrong depot," she said. "We have two depots in Eastleigh, and you want the other one." Well, of course. She said to come in, unbuzzed the gate, met me at the door, and handed me a photocopied map. This happens all the time, she said. Oh, really? I went back to the car, and drove to the location of the other depot.

Except I couldn't find it, either. The instructions on the map were very like those instructions you get for a rented cottage: "Drive out of town until you see the burned-out phone box, turn left, then after a mile and a half take the unmarked track on the right, until you see the giant wicker man, etc." I had got to the right street without problem, and found a place to park. It was right next to the railway, and on the face of it was a simple residential street of terraced houses. But behind the houses was an alternative universe, a warren of alleyways, fences, yards, workshops and warehouses that made the previous place look utopian in its cleanliness and workmanlike simplicity.

Again, I wandered around looking for the elusive company colours. Again, I asked a man with a fag. Again, I ended up pressing a buzzer on an anonymous gate in a wire-mesh fence.

After a bit, a frail-looking security man with a clipboard and some bits of uniform appeared. He tried to raise some attention from the parcel depot for me, but nothing happened. In the end, he let me through the gate, saying, "See that building over there with the plants growing out of the roof? Go over there and press the buzzer next to the door round the side."

I found a peculiar situation developing there. Various drivers, clearly wearing the uniform of the company in question, were unable to gain admittance to their own depot, and were shouting through the glass door at a woman inside. Something about new codes on the door. The woman looked drunk or stoned to me -- she was swaying slightly, and had that look of vague concern that wasted people affect when they haven't a clue why everyone is shouting at them. The drivers were unphased, however; they clearly expected obstacles to be put in their way, and were taking a resigned pleasure in having their expectations fulfilled. An intoxicated receptionist and changed entry codes was par for the course. Typical, innit?

Anyway. I eventually got my parcel, after a wait of about 20 minutes in a grubby lobby with a couple of chairs that looked like they'd been rescued from a skip. The whole thing was a very depressing experience: what I'd imagined as a 30 minute round trip took me 2 hours. But what was particularly striking was the contrast between the chirpy, "can do!" optimism of the company website, and the dreary, "couldn't give a toss!" inefficiency of the operation on the ground.

Now, I'm still close enough to my roots to understand the bitter truth of that Soviet-era joke: they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work. My uncles' stories of the goings-on in a car-manufacturing plant and the print room of a newspaper in the 1960s were both hilarious and jaw-dropping (mandatory "snooze shifts" and the like). The sheer bloody-minded unco-operativeness of the British worker has been truly heroic in its scope. Although it never did quite match the awe-inspiring incompetence of the British manager. But, put the two together, and you have the industry that gave the world the Austin Allegro. Makes you proud, doesn't it?

But I also know that pretending to work is demoralising. It's like staying in bed all day; it starts out well, but ends in a headache and a depressing feeling of aimlessness. No-one wants to waste their life, of course, but if a job is pointless enough and badly-paid enough, it can seem preferable. It has a certain self-harming dignity, like a hunger strike. But I admit I thought that world had passed away, and that service industries like "logistics" were run by a flip-chart corporatism that requires ant-like subservience, backed up by the very real threat of unemployment. Surely surly blokes with their feet up in a back room, contemplating the finer points of Sam Fox and Linda Lusardi all morning over serial cups of tea, would never nowadays get through their annual appraisal?

It was a salutary glimpse of a world that could easily have been mine. A little less brain power, a little more "attitude" and less tolerance for school, and I would have been a poorly-qualified school leaver in 1970, just in time for the collapse of the 1960s job boom. A life of limited expectations would have awaited me, with alternating stretches of McJobs and unemployment, in a world that seems to have increasingly little use for young men and none at all for old ones. I discovered recently that one of my primary school chums who had gone to secondary modern school ended up emigrating to South Africa in the 1970s. That was one answer, I suppose.

It also reminded me that my father had been made redundant in 1972, when the engineering factory he had worked in since 1946 was closed down. I was "too busy being free" to notice, at the time, or to think much about what this meant for him. But I realise, to my amazement and shame, that he was younger then than I am now. He never really worked again.

But I guess I would have paid more attention if I, too, had wanted a job making useful things out of steel, but could only get minimum-wage work stacking parcels in a warehouse, forced to wear some corporate polo shirt, like the disposable footman of a multinational overlord.

Kronstadt!

Woke up this mornin' (dum dah, dah dum)... Began to suspect I was dead...

Dead, or transported back in time to around 1973. It was weird. The radio came on, and in place of the Today Programme's bickering politicos and harumphing presenters, some guy was telling me all about Kronstadt and the NEP. "Lenin vsegda s nami!" (Lenin is always with us), someone sang. WTF?? Maybe there had been a revolution. Whatever, it was still time to get up.

It turned out that BBC journalists were on strike, over cuts and job losses at the World Service. The Today Programme finally came on at 7:00, hustled through the ethereal picket lines by a crew of scab journos (Sarah Montague, you disappoint me; Justin Webb, well, I might have known). But my head had well and truly been returned to a previous epoch, when the word "Kronstadt!" signalled a lively discussion, possibly ending in a fist-fight.

I have mentioned my political past a few times before (e.g. Turning Up) but rarely has it seemed quite so long ago as it did this morning. The early history of the Soviet Union once seemed rather like the Big Bang -- it was thought to be crucial to understand the sub-atomic political manoeuverings and betrayals of that time, to stand any chance of understanding the subsequent history of the universe. In March 1921, were the sailors of Kronstadt deluded counter-revolutionaries or heroes of anarchism and freedom from Bolshevik oppression? Was Trotsky a ruthless, murdering oppressor or a clear-eyed revolutionary strategist? Revolutionary politics could often seem like a series of complex, overlapping blood feuds. Or a long-running soap opera.

Nobody cares much now. It's all sitting in the archives somewhere -- all the books, magazines, newspapers, flyers, posters, handouts, minutes, membership lists -- and is gradually acquiring the status of the once-urgent theological disputes of the Middle Ages. History. In retrospect, it is hilarious, and a little tragic, that so many bright young people once wasted so much time trying to turn the crank of a machine that had already had all its fuel stolen (the last of it chucked about as Molotovs in Paris 1968).

Where are they now, our old comrades? A very few have kept the faith, patiently awaiting a change in the political weather. Some have disappeared without trace. Most, like me, have ended up as middle-ranking public servants with self-limited careers, propping up local trades union branches, and eternally skeptical of "management". But some are now household names: prominent academics, journalists, broadcasters, politicians and lawyers, including a former Director of Public Prosecutions, senior members of the Labour Party, and a current Coalition minister. The Establishment, in a word.

I wonder, did any of them wake up this morning, too, and have a flashback to the days when they sat in the proverbial smoke-filled rooms, plotting the downfall of capitalism? And I wonder if any of them then crossed the picket lines at the BBC, too busy and too senior, now, to lose a day's work to "workerist tokenism"?

Special Offer!

OK, people, here's the deal.

For a limited time (more than a week, less than a month, something like that) I am making available a smaller, 8"x10" version of the Curriculum book, which is "invitation only"; that is, it is not yet publicly-available on the Blurb site, and the only way anyone can see (or buy) it is via the link on this blog. It is offered at cost price i.e. I have added no profit (for me) to the price. You get it at the same price I get it.

I have made these copies available on standard paper, from the softcover at £17.95 to the imagewrap hardcover at £24.95. When the book goes public, I will be selling it as a softcover and an imagewrap hardcover, on premium paper only, with a little profit for me added on, at a price of £23.50 and £30.00 respectively. I can't figure out just yet how to give you the choice to upgrade to premium paper: it's worth the increase in price, as it gives a noticeable improvement in image quality. When I do, I'll turn it on.

If you are surprised by these prices, remember that "print on demand" is publishing for fun, but not for profit; it's "pretend publishing", if you like. Bulk discounts are available from Blurb, but any crazy optimist who buys 100 or more copies of their own book (which will probably sell ten copies, max) simply in order to reduce the cover price by a few pounds is in need of professional help (either from an accountant or a psychotherapist, probably both).

Anyway, here it is: [link removed]

Now do the right thing. Or don't; I really don't mind, as I make nothing either way.

Note that the new book is not an exact, reduced facsimile of the original 13"x11" version. It contains the same pictures and texts in the same sequence, but some of them -- which could be rendered quite small on the large 13"x11" pages -- would have become unintelligible at 8"x10", so I have enlarged them. This has affected the flow of the sequence, so some other relative sizes have been changed, too, so that this version now has its own, slightly different dynamic. I doubt anyone but me would ever notice or care about this.

[And, no, I won't be signing copies of this version. Sorry.]

Curriculum: Final Version

Here is the final version of the Curriculum book, as submitted to Photography Book Now 2011.

It's hardly a crowd-pleaser, but it's something I'm happy to stand behind as my best effort. I think it's coherent, rhythmic, pleasingly varied, and above all good to look at. Some of the photographs, if I say so myself, are amongst my best work to date.

What more do you want? Yes, I know, a cheaper version... It's coming, soon.

[original Blurb BookShow replaced with current public version]

Thanks to those of you who commented, on and off blog. You wouldn't expect me to agree with or act upon everything suggested by everyone, but it really is an enormous help to have ideas and criticisms to bounce off. As my work colleagues would probably attest, I am not someone who thrives on consensus, but I do love having good people to argue with.

I have already picked up one comment on Blurb. It says, "Outstanding work! Every single shot is brilliantly composed and all together a masterwork. Congratulations". No, really! I swear I have no idea who this person is, and no money has changed hands. However, having seen the list of this year's judges, I know that there's no question of coming even within a mile of the "winners". But, as we all know, it's the taking part that matters...

Not to mention the usefulness of a deadline -- any deadline -- in actually getting things done, instead of daydreaming about them. Not that I have ever had anything against daydreaming; it's something in which I have World Class expertise.

All Growed Up & Saving China

I was surprised to discover this morning that my daughter is reading Kafka. On her own time, that is, not as part of a course or anything. Well, she is 17 and, as she reminds us from time time, she is our daughter. All the same, I was impressed. The Trial is a long way from Harry Potter. At least, I assume it is, as I've never read any J.K. Rowling (no disrespect, J.K., I've never read any Jane Austen, either). How quickly they grow up and develop a taste for the stronger flavours in life.

Of course, I was her age myself when I first read Kafka, and I've already written about the way getting older has changed my appreciation of his writing (The Next Village). As someone once said, I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now. Actually, I think a lot of us were older then; we seemed to be so much more independent and anxious to fly the nest than kids seem to be today. I read somewhere that the average age, these days, for a young man to leave home is 34. Thirty four!

Earlier this week, she went to Nottingham on the train, meeting her brother halfway in Oxford, as they wanted to catch the Death Cab for Cutie tour (a pop group, m'lud). Apart from catching various trains and buses, and finding a venue in a strange town in time to pick up tickets and eat, this also involved booking and staying in a hotel. This all caused me some anxiety, as I realised that neither of them really knew what they were doing.

I am often appalled, for example, at their geographical ignorance -- despite having spent time in both places many times, neither of them can tell the difference between Norfolk and Dorset. It seemed inevitable to me that they'd stand on the wrong platform and end up in Glasgow. They didn't, of course. But in my anxious Kafkan dreams they are still tiny tots, not young adults, lost and in danger in dark streets, and I awake at 3 a.m. in a panic. I'm told this is a permanent and incurable condition for parents.

But I also think of the many narrow scrapes I survived at their age, mainly out of misplaced confidence and boundless ignorance, and how sweet life is when you first taste your independence. I'm pleased they're shifting up a gear. And as I watch them driving away, slightly too fast around the corner, I think of the days just a decade or so ago, when we would be on holiday and the big adventure was taking them to odd little cinemas in Lyme Regis or Swaffham to see the latest Disney summer blockbuster.

I'm not down on Disney, the way some people are. Indeed, I think there was a period in the 1990s when Disney animations took quite a progressive turn. Pocahontas, for example, is stuffed with equal-opps, green, and anti-imperialist messages, not to mention a slightly tripped-out earth mysticism, and was clearly made by indian-friendly hippies. Best of all, Disney made the wonderful Recess cartoon series, one of the best and wisest things that has ever appeared on TV. And any parent who has numbed their arse sitting through interminable kids' films will have welcomed that thread of adult-oriented humour that Disney (and later Pixar) always carefully stitches through the fabric of its products.

In particular, I think of Mushu, the fast-talking ancestral guardian lizard (dragon, DRAGON!) voiced by Eddie Murphy in Mulan -- still my favourite -- watching as Mulan single-handedly saves the Empire and the Emperor from the invading Huns.

"My little baby's all growed up, and... and... (gulp) savin' China!"

Well, readin' Kafka, at any rate. Which will do for now.

Wasting My Time

I'm not normally a violent man; that is to say, one who reacts to setbacks and frustrations by lashing out physically. But if I could find a way to get next to one (or preferably a whole roomful) of those utter shits who distribute viruses and malware over the Web I would cheerfully beat them to a pulp with an iron bar. Care to join me? No jury in the land would convict us. We'd be public heroes.

At around 5:00 this afternoon, it became apparent that my daughter had acquired a particularly evil piece of malware, merely by visiting an innocuous-looking website. She hadn't downloaded anything, she had merely looked at some maps of Seattle. Masquerading as anti-virus software, the malware then blocked every attempt to run any legitimate program, including the installed anti-malware and anti-virus programs. It was like having your path blocked repeatedly by some grinning bully.

The only remedy I could think of was to restart the laptop in "safe mode", use System Restore to roll back to a "restore point" dated before today, and then update and run a full scan with anti-malware software (I use Malwarebytes). After an eternity of multiple attempts (ever tried getting a Windows Vista laptop into safe mode?) and protracted waits, it seemed to have worked by 9:30 pm.

Of course, the frustration was compounded by having to roll back to a restore point. Every piece of software on the computer is now jostling to be first in the queue to be updated. Windows alone wanted to download and install 43 updates. It's not as if I'd back-dated the computer to 1995. If there's one thing that annoys me almost as much as evil, bullying, pointless malware it's the high-handedly casual attitude of software companies -- from Microsoft down -- to rolling out software updates, now that we're all connected to the internet.*

Barely a day goes by without some "important" updates to something downloading themselves, at length, which then require the computer to be restarted, and then install themselves, at length. It took Windows 7 forty minutes to download a Service Pack onto my laptop last week, which then took another forty minutes to install. I'd only turned the thing on to check my email! I have learned not to anger Windows by pulling the power plug on its interminable updates, though: the last time I did this a computer was rendered completely unusable.

I think it was Heidegger who said that "the modern world is revealed at the horizon of machines that are out-of-order". What did he know? The modern world is revealed at the horizon of machines that promise to be useful but just waste our bloody time.

Can anyone out there understand or explain the mentality of the writers and distributors of computer viruses? How anyone can devote so much intelligence and ingenuity to causing so much random, purposeless harm to ordinary people is beyond me.


* Run a close third by smug Apple Mac users who never get viruses. Don't go there, just don't...

July Is Too Green

A sultry, overcast July day -- not much fun to be walking around in, but just the thing if subtle gradations of tone are your thing.






I'm never quite sure whether or not I feel like a counterfeiter when I go down the digital monochrome route, but ten minutes mucking about with the controls on Photoshop certainly beats an afternoon breathing noxious fumes in a darkroom. Besides, July is way too green for my taste.

Back in the world of colour, I saw this today:



I'm not sure who's meant to see it, or how, but it's the thought that counts, I suppose. As that witty fellow David Malki puts it in one of his Wondermark cartoons, "Free Tibet! (plus $8.95 shipping and handling)".

War Music

There are many books in our house. They fill shelves, boxes, trunks, even drawers, and accumulate in temporary piles that can stabilise into quasi-objects of furniture for months. Occasionally, when I need to find one particular book, whereabouts unknown, the quest can become archaeological in its scope.

Today, I was looking for my copy of Heart of Darkness -- I have no idea where that has gone -- and while I was delving in a large cardboard box where I thought it might be buried I came across Christopher Logue's War Music. I instantly forgot about Conrad, and sat down to read Logue.

Over the years, I have had a lot of enthusiasms, some of which last a few weeks and fizzle out completely, while others move between the front and back of my awareness on some mysterious long-term rhythm. I lack that essential single-mindedness that marks the scholar, and am prepared to concede when I am bored with something. Most of these interests have involved the acquisition of a book or two, naturally, so a search like today's becomes a revisiting of old enthusiasms. The puzzling thing is how easy it is to forget about things that have held one's attention completely. War Music is a good example.

Christopher Logue has had a distinguished literary career, but is best known to most Brits over 40 as the man responsible for the "True Stories" and "Pseuds Corner" sections of the satirical magazine Private Eye. Somewhere back in the 1980s I was browsing the poetry shelf in a bookshop and the spine of War Music caught my attention. I hadn't known Logue was a poet, so expected something amusing. I began to read, and was immediately spell-bound.

Logue has been working on his "adaptation" of Homer's Iliad, on and off, for the last 50 years, since being asked to consider it in 1959. Since 1981, he's been publishing chunks as individual books (War Music, Kings, The Husbands, All Day Permanent Red, Cold Calls) with a cumulation of the first three also under the title War Music. It is simply magnificent, some of the most engaging writing I have ever come across.

He has brought off the difficult trick of making this ancient, familiar story of capricious gods and bloodthirsty heroes simultaneously fresh in a contemporary way and yet pleasingly strange, using anachronisms, quotations, and anything else that comes to hand. He was warned, early on, that "The Greeks are not humanistic, not Christian, not sentimental. Please try to understand that. They are musical". By Zeus, did he ever listen to that advice. This is not poetry about the pity of war.

It's hard to give the flavour of such a massive, narrative undertaking without quoting at length: his writing is something like a collaboration between Ted Hughes and John Milton. How about this:

Nine days.
And on the next, Ajax,
Grim underneath his tan as Rommel after 'Alamein,
Summoned the army to the common sand,
Raised his five-acre voice ...


or:

Starred sky. Calm sky.
Only the water's luminosity
Marks the land's end.

A light is moving down the beach.
It wavers. Comes towards the fleet.
The hulls like upturned glasses made of jet.

Is it a god?

No details

Yet.

Now we can hear a drum.


or:

There is a kind of ocean wave
Whose origin remains obscure.
Such waves are solitary, and appear
Just off the cliff-line of Antarctica
Lifting the ocean's face into the wind,
Moistening the wind that pulls, and pulls them on,
Until their height (as trees), their width
(As continents), pace that wind north for 7,000 miles.


or:

Patroclus fought like dreaming:
His head thrown back, his mouth -- wide as a shrieking mask --
Sucked at the air to nourish his infuriated mind
And seemed to draw the Trojans onto him,
To lock them round his waist, red water, washed against his chest,
To lay their tired necks against his sword like birds.


It's gripping stuff, often brutal and lyrical in the same breath, and you'll enjoy it all the more if you know the stories of the Trojan War, and a little of the conventions of epic poetry.

But where the hell is my copy of Heart of Darkness?

The Writing Paper on the Shore

I'm currently reading Robert Macfarlane's The Wild Places, after having it recommended by any number of people. It's very unwise to comment on a book you're only halfway through, but I wanted to explain out loud to myself something that's been puzzling me. The thing is, I'm finding it a very annoying book.

At first, I didn't notice my annoyance. What I did notice, is that Mr. Macfarlane is a talented writer, with a gift for an unusual turn of phrase. He notices things, and finds witty and memorable ways of expressing them.

Then it started to snow -- light flakes ticking down through the air, settling on every upturned surface. A flake fell on the dark cloth of my jacket, and melted into it, like a ghost passing through a wall.

Perfect -- who hasn't seen that, but who ever thought of such a nice way of expressing it?

But what I then started to notice was that it was precisely these nice turns of phrase that were annoying me. There were so many of them, and they were interrupting the flow of my reading by constantly attracting attention to themselves. Also, too many of them either didn't stand up to scrutiny, or contributed nothing to the business at hand.

Consider that extract above. Ticking snow? It sounds alright, but is that "ticking" as in the quiet, regular noise made by a watch, or as in the jerky, down-and-up movement of a tickmark? Do light flakes of snow ever actually do either of those things? Not that I've noticed, though the suggestion of the inaudible noise of thousands of light impacts might work, I suppose. But perhaps not so much if you're also going to wonder, a few paragraphs later, "how so much motion could provoke so little sound".

And what about that ghost? Beyond being a striking visual image, what actual literary work is that comparison doing? Are we being primed for an encounter with the uncanny, or some other kind of vanishing trick? No. Unless going to sleep in an improvised shelter in a deep wood is either of those things. It is merely something shiny mined out of a writer's notebook.

This clever but purposeless noticing of similarities seems to be an end, for Macfarlane, not any sort of means. At a loch shore he sees "foam, the creamy colour of writing paper"; but this is presumably not foam with the smooth texture or flexibility or thinness or any other property of writing paper. It's true, that scummy foam that gathers on shorelines has a very particular colour, but why compare it to writing paper? As it happens, the colour "blue" is my immediate association with writing paper, but that may say more about me than beach foam.

Walking over some pitted rock, he notices that "in the bottom of each hole was a pebble or rock that fitted the hole snugly, like the head of a countersunk screw". And? Hmm, perhaps if you were to unscrew them, Scotland would fall off the earth? No? What then? You start to feel like a sulky teenager out for a walk with a parent determined to share with you every little associative aperçu that floats through their mind. You want to reply, "So what? I didn't want to come here anyway. I'm cold and wet. Please shut up!".

But, he can also be concise and purposeful. Sheltering from a storm on Coruisk in the Scottish Highlands, he writes, "The darkness beyond the glass was absolute and featureless. Except for the noises of the wind and rain, our hut might have been hurtling through deep space". Nothing pointless about that.



When I was a student, the most useful piece of advice I received -- after handing in yet another essay spinning theories and conjectural connections out of some author's work -- was this: "This is all fascinating, and quite possibly true. But you have given no indication that any literary means were used to achieve it". That made me think, I can tell you. The reverse is also true. That is, if you want to use "fine writing" as your medium, you need to use literary means to achieve your ends. "Look, isn't this like that?" or "Listen, I'm doing proper writing!" are just the start.

Perhaps I expect too much. Perhaps this book is just another victim of the decline of the in-house publisher's editor. So I'll reserve judgement until I've walked a few more miles in his shoes. That's assuming I can rein in my irritation at being required, every ten yards, to stop and admire the contents of his Moleskine notebook.

A Revised Curriculum

After many weeks of tinkering, some major changes of heart, and at least one lucky last minute discovery of a forgotten image (it always pays to go back through your files), I've drawn a tentative line under the "first final draft" of this latest book. Here it is, for your constructive comments. The "full screen" version of the preview (last button on the right) seems to work best. Some of the text is still too small to read, but it's all about the pictures.

CURRICULUM

By Mike Chisholm

I intend to enter it for the Photography Book Now competition (I know, I know...) which is why it's in this large, expensive, deluxe version. If you can afford it and want one, you can buy direct from Blurb, or contact me and I'll buy and send you one, signed and inscribed ("For [your name here]: il miglior fabbro", whatever you want). Otherwise, I intend to follow up with a standard 8"x10" version at some point. Of course, some of your comments may cause me to review some of my decisions, so this may not yet be the "final final draft" ... N.B. if anyone out there has an iPad, I'd be curious to know how the preview looks -- Blurb claim to have optimized the BookShow software for iPad viewing. I'm beginning to resent the special treatment you Apple people are getting... First Tom Phillips' Humument app, and now the new Faber multimedia version of the Waste Land...

The Inner Slacker Speaks

There have been fewer photographs on this blog recently. Occasionally, I find my need to get out and take photographs declines, and the last month has been such a time. It doesn't usually last long, but such fallow periods are usually the result of a temporary victory of my Inner Slacker over my Inner Puritan and his work ethic.

Photography, as an art medium, has a core problem of being thought to be too easy. Let's be honest, photography is easy. The difference in the level of skill, time, and dedication that is required to practice, say, watercolour painting to the same level of representational adequacy as even the crudest snapshot is enormous. Photography removes those elements -- let's call them "investment" -- from the equation. It's a low-investment medium. People tend not to value low-investment activities, however, and so artists using photography -- wanting their work to be valued -- generally go in one of three compensatory directions.

Some make photography difficult. For example, the investment in exposing large-format film, processing individual sheets by hand, and printing the images out onto hand-coated paper using various complex (and hazardous) "alternative processes" is quite large. But this is "technical" investment. The core process -- letting light in through a hole to expose a light-sensitive medium -- is still the same in its essential simplicity. And concentrating on process, and using recalcitrant mechanisms like tilts, shifts, and tripods, can -- shall we say? -- remove the photographer's attention from the image-making. Difficult photos are not necessarily good photos.

Some make a virtue of that simplicity. Photography is a good match for certain art-philosophical concerns about agency, intention, craft and "conception vs. execution". Skill and talent have had a bad time in the contemporary art world (what, you hadn't noticed?) and using a camera in "idiot" mode neatly sidesteps such embarrassments. "Look", the artist can say, "I am curating, not creating, these mechanically-made images, which do not have any undesirable ideological or aesthetic agenda imposed on them from within my brain. There is no craft fetishism here! They are simply the world as it is". If you are so inclined (and can afford a good lawyer) you can take this a logical step further, and "appropriate" photographs made by other people. Yes, we're looking at you, Richard Prince.

Others rely on subject matter. The kit may be simple to operate, but it can be used in situations that are intimidating or inaccessible to most people. For example, approaching (or confronting) complete strangers is astonishingly hard to do, especially if they are hostile, and/or armed and unpredictable. Placing oneself in a landscape and waiting for the right combination of light and weather requires planning, persistence and patience. Even carefully composing and lighting a portrait or still-life is beyond the capacity of 99.9% of camera owners. The work of "subject" photographers has an obvious "wow" factor. At its best, you have documentary work like that of Sebastiao Salgado or insightful explorations of landscape like Richard Misrach's; at its worst, you have the exquisitely dull, self-described "fine art" landscape photography of any number of calendar-art photographers.

I don't consciously do any of these, but have to say that, for me, the low-investment factor of photography is a big attraction. Not for any ideological reasons, but because I have tried a number of high-investment media, and know that I am too lazy to achieve anything worthwhile in them. I suffer from an urge to make pictures, have a reasonable degree of picture-making talent, but am totally lacking in application. Take etching, for example. I love the look and feel of intaglio prints, and some while ago decided to learn how it was done.

First, you must prepare a plate. The simple technique I was shown involved cutting, polishing, bevelling and degreasing a zinc plate, then heating it and applying a waxy coating or "ground" to the plate. You then make your drawing using any tools that can make marks through the ground to expose the metal. When you have finished, the plate is immersed in an acid bath, to etch away the exposed areas of plate ...

No, I'm sorry, I've already lost interest, and so have you, I can tell. It can take weeks to finish a decent plate. Suffice it to say I only ever managed to make four or five etchings in total. The end result (depending on your skill at both drawing and making the prints) can be very seductive -- check out the work of Leonard Baskin, a frequent collaborator with Ted Hughes -- but it can equally well be very dull, as such a complex and time-consuming procedure encourages a conservative approach. Spontaneous it ain't.

Like most people with a persuasive Inner Slacker, I'm a great one for trying things, and dropping them. Over the years I have made drawings, painted, etched, made lithographs and linocuts, but still couldn't fill a halfway decent portfolio with my work. But, since starting to photograph seriously around 1995, something clicked, and damned if I don't find I have now exhibited locally and internationally, self-published a dozen or more books, and have made enough coherent bodies of work to rival the output of all but the most prolific artists. How did that happen?

Sometimes my Inner Puritan worries that making photographs in this low-investment style isn't difficult enough to warrant the embarrassing attention-seeking that "art" entails. That's OK, counters my Inner Slacker, we don't want that much attention anyway. Otherwise, how can we take the odd month off? Relax...