Oh Well

I have always liked those lines in Fleetwood Mac's 1969 hit Oh Well:

Don't ask me what I think of you
I might not give the answer that you want me to...

There's nothing quite like asking people for an opinion to get back the answer that you weren't expecting.  So, when asking selected sets of eyes for reactions to my new website, I was rather surprised by the number who replied, in effect, "Yeah, yeah, very nice, great pictures, easy to use, but ...  What's going on with that portrait in the "About" section?  Are you insane??"

Well, I didn't think I was insane.  Quirky, perhaps; a little eccentric, sometimes; annoyingly contrarian, occasionally, even a tiny bit obsessive; but not actually certifiable. I like that picture.  I like the way the Christmas cracker hat might be taken for a Simpsons-ish shock of red hair, or, I concede, an exploding head; I like the way the closed eyes, defocussed face, and rain of lights give an air of ecstatic, meditative repose to one who is quite probably merely asleep or quite drunk.  Though, again, I concede it does have some of the qualities of a death-mask.  It seemed amusingly self-deprecating, yet insightful, to me; a psychological portrait.  Others found it scary or bizarre: a psycho portrait.

The trouble is, like most photographers, I'm a bit short of decent photos of myself.  I do occasionally take "selfies" (as in, arm's length self-portraits), but these always look contrived, and do quite often make me look mad.  I'm not good at pulling expressions on demand, other than a very convincing scowl.  One of the lost but unlamented social graces, I feel, is the acquisition of a ridiculous "camera smile", something my parents' generation had perfected -- say "cheeeese!"  But, really, why have a portrait on a website at all?  I suspect it's a carry-over from that "portrait of the author" slot on a book cover -- a tiny one for the middle-aged, elderly, and troll-like, an enormous one for the young and bankably good-looking.  Who cares what I look like?

My real problem, though, is that I don't look like me.  People who have never met me but who read this blog, for example, will have a picture in their head which probably differs radically from the actual physical manifestation.  Which is fine.  If they like the blog, they probably quite like the look of the person my words conjure up in their head.  Why spoil the illusion?  I have seen pictures of John Humphrys, Sarah Montague, Mishal Husain, and Justin Webb (the BBC Radio 4 "Today" programme presenters) but that's not what any of them really look like!

Cold print is even less predictable than radio.  Who knows what voice -- what timbre, what accent, what inflections -- my words are triggering, right now, in a range of third-party brains?  I might be Stephen Fry, I might be John Lydon.  Appallingly, I might even be Will Self or Russell Brand. As it happens, my actual voice is an unlovely, Estuarine thing.  In the unlikely event that the Idiotic Hat were ever to become a broadcast programme I'd have to insist on an actor reading my words.  I'm thinking Ian McKellen, or possibly Dreda Say Mitchell, who always lifts my heart when she guests on Saturday Review.

Anyway, I'm nothing if not proactively responsive to customer demand, so I have replaced the offending psycho-portrait with this:

It somehow seemed appropriate.  That's not actually me, by the way, in case you were wondering.  I have fewer teeth, and more nose.

Actually, the really big surprise in the reaction to my website was the universal admiration for the idea of a pinboard i.e. a changing selection of pictures presented in a constant shape and number.  Am I really the first person to think of this?  As a way of keeping a webpage fresh with minimal effort it seems fairly obvious.  However, it may be that my enduring legacy to humanity could be this single, simple idea, which quite a few people have declared it their intention to steal.

The Gates of Eden

Leaving the "Garden" images to season quietly for a few years has turned out to be a good move.  As so often seems to be the case, my conscious eye has matured in the intervening period to understand more clearly what my unconscious eye saw at the time. Last year I began to copy every file that looked as if it had been made in the Valley Garden or the Old Dairy allotments into a single directory; over the weekend I finished the job and found I had just over 3000 images.  That's a lot, obviously, but many are duplicates, or very similar, or sub-standard, or just not very interesting.  There are more -- probably quite a lot more, including a substantial amount of work on 120 film -- but I only have files going back to 2005 conveniently available on a backup drive, and the oldest of these are 8 megapixel files from a Canon 350D, which have begun to look a little noisy next to their more recent 16 megapixel neighbours.  A decade's worth seemed a suitable quantity to work with.  A first pass through these 3000 candidate files for items of obvious merit quickly produced a more refined subset of just 150 selected photographs.  Perfect!

The pleasure of starting work on editing a new series, with the prospect of a new Blurb book as the immediate end result, is tempered by reminders of the disappearance of its subject matter.  For me, for many years, the Valley Garden was a place of profound personal significance.  It was where I realised that my photography depended not on finding exotic locations, but on an extended engagement with the "spirit of place".  That place might be anywhere, but it happened to be here.  I was originally led there by following the stream that runs through the Highfield campus, the subject of my first extended photographic series in the late 1990s.  The campus site was originally a brick-pit, and in a neglected corner behind the Students' Union the stream flows into a steep sided, broad-bottomed valley, which had been developed into a gated botanical garden by the Biology Department for its own purposes, but which had gradually been allowed to revert into a low-maintenance semi-wilderness.

There were the traditional raised beds, borders, cold frames and greenhouses with gravelled paths, all arranged taxonomically with neat metal labels, but these were all slowly falling apart and the livelier plants had escaped the bonds of classification and self-seeded everywhere; the groundsmen had gradually abandoned their attempts to tidy the place, so many of them having been laid off as budget cuts began to bite in the 1980s. A small hillside orchard still bore large quantities of beautiful apples each year, but nobody bothered to collect them, or even compost the windfalls.  Some of the larger greenhouses were still partly in use, but most were semi-derelict and full of the detritus of long-abandoned projects and experiments.  For a photographer with a liking for the aesthetics of patination and the patterns created when human structures are reclaimed by nature, it was a little Eden.

For years, I had the place to myself, especially in the cold months, when the stream often flooded and the valley bottom became boggy. In summer and autumn, while they were at the university Day Nursery, I would take my children there to hunt for the sweetest apples in the orchard and to wonder at the enormous, thorny umbrellas of Gunnera manicata, the giant Brazilian rhubarb.  In February a pond, concealed among tall stands of reeds and bamboo within a grove of trees, would fill with improbable numbers of mating frogs, their resonant croaking chorus audible from a distance, as they clung to each other ecstatically among glistening piles of frogspawn. It became a major part of my daily lunchtime circuit of the campus, checking out what was new and what had changed, and photographing whatever caught my eye.

Inevitably, though, the tidy-minded university planners eventually turned their attention to this idyllic haven, two acres too many of messy green chaos at the heart of the campus.  In 2008 the Valley was shut, and the (admittedly hazardous) greenhouses torn down. The days of poorly-paid but dedicated "plantsmen" had gone, and the biologists had their brand new Life Sciences building; the Valley Garden was destined to become a bland park where, on a few sunny days, staff might safely eat their lunch where once the Solanaceae, Brassicaceae and other tribes had run riot.  For the rest of the year, when the stream still floods and the lawns become sodden, it would be about as interesting to the connoisseur of wabi-sabi as a plastic sandwich box.

Wabi-sabi is a Japanese aesthetic rooted in a Buddhist awareness of the imperfection, impermanence, and incompleteness of existence, a bitter-sweet acceptance that nothing is finished, nothing lasts, nothing is perfect. The qualities it values are usually said to include simplicity, roughness, asymmetry, modesty, intimacy, and the revelation of natural processes at work. It is the difference between appreciating the patina and wear on an old coin, and scrubbing it off with Brasso. A semi-derelict greenhouse with algaed window-panes inscribed by grazing snails has wabi-sabi; rows of concrete planters and picnic benches do not.  Not yet, anyway; nothing is finished, nothing lasts, nothing is perfect.

One Misty, Moisty Morning

One immediate effect of working on the new webpage has been to refocus my attention on some sets of images which I have not yet got around to completing.  In the gallery "The Garden" I describe the series as "an ongoing project photographing the Valley Garden and Old Dairy Allotments at the University of Southampton".  In actual fact, the ongoingness of this particular project is illusory, as not only have I stopped working at the university, but also both the Valley Garden and the Allotments have ceased to be.  At least, in any form that appeals to my eye.  Any photographs that I was ever going to take must therefore already exist, and describe two vanished havens of an agreeable state of benign neglect.

This does not mean that work on the series is not "ongoing", however.  It never ceases to surprise me how one can fail to see standout frames on a first pass.  This one for example.  One Monday morning in early October 2013 I parked my car around 08:15, just as the sun began to shine intensely onto the mist-shrouded allotments, behind and below the creeper-covered carpark wall.  Beyond the trees, the new, shining edifice of the Biological Sciences building gleamed softly, like a moored cruise ship.

I took just the one shot and, until today, hadn't even processed the raw image file.  But now that I have seen it, I think it's likely to be assured a place in the final sequenced series.

New Website

Laying the groundwork

I've been spending some time over the last few months developing a  new website.  As I wrote in a recent post:

I used to have a website based at the university, but it went mouldy after a bit and I had to throw it away.  Compared to writing a blog, keeping a website fresh is hard work, and rather too much like keeping a tank of fish alive.  However, maintaining a permanent presence on the web with a considered, well-organised, easy-to-navigate selection of one's best work is a sensible move.

Having spent a large part of my working life dealing with HTML, Javascript, CSS and the like, I naturally gravitated to a "knit your own website" solution.  After a few months I realised this was a time-consuming mistake.  Hand-crafted websites can look OK if -- on top of the basic coding skills -- you've got an eye for design, can create your own graphics, and understand how to make a useable user interface.  All of which boxes I like to think I can tick.  But, inevitably, they rarely look great and, crucially, they're a real pain to update.

I tried using some budget-priced website creation software, but the results were no better.  Then several people recently mentioned Squarespace as a good, affordable web-hosting service, with easy-to-assemble "wizardized" templates.  They were right.  I signed up for the free trial earlier this week, and it took me about three days to create something that looks a hundred times better than my own best previous effort, and is a thousand times easier to update.  You can see it here at mike-chisholm-photo.squarespace.com.  It's still under development, but I'm more than pleased with the advanced state it has reached so quickly.

Those previous months of work were not wasted, however.  Because I knew what I wanted to achieve, and had already done the basic organizational groundwork and prepared sets of web-ready images, the hard part was already done.  Obviously, it also helps to have a substantial body of work already edited and sorted into series and sequenced in book form, and to have recently gone through the agony of selecting your best work for an 85-picture solo exhibition.  All I needed to do was put it all together, making basic guided choices about layout, navigation, and functionality.  In the end, a photographer's website is a common sort of web application with well-understood requirements, so my needs were easily met by Squarespace.

As I explained to one of its early previewers, I see this new site as primarily a "calling card" rather than as a pizza-delivery flyer; a stable web presence to which I or others can refer interested parties, rather than a means of generating interest in its own right.  A blog like this is too volatile to act as a reference point -- who knows what dodgy or debatable topic might be uppermost at the point anyone pays a visit? -- and good photographs quickly get shoved out of sight by the accumulation of new posts.  It will be excellent to have the equivalent of a clean, well-lit and comfortably-furnished reception room in which to accommodate virtual gallery visitors.

It's also a convenient platform to point people at my Blurb books.  As soon as I get hold of a pigment-ink printer and have it satisfactorily calibrated (my current printer is dye-based, and less than archival) I also intend to start selling prints more proactively, but although it does offer "web commerce" options Squarespace is not ideal for this, being entirely US-based and, oddly, not offering PayPal as one of its accepted payment options. So, I am now also starting to look at hosting operations where selling is the primary function, and if anyone has experience -- good or bad -- with this, I'd be very pleased to hear from you.  The idea of offering a small porfolio of prints online on a site dedicated to web-based sales is attractive, but there are bound to be pitfalls.  SupaDupa, for example, looks quite good to me, but is it?

Which reminds me: thanks to those of you who responded to my call for "signature" images.  Your input has been very useful, and I'm still digesting the information you have given me.  Your prints will go in the post later today!  It's not too late to contribute, if you had meant to but not got around to it, and the "free print" offer still stands.

My card...

Shakespeare's Birthday

Not from the stars do I my judgment pluck;
And yet methinks I have astronomy,
But not to tell of good or evil luck,
Of plagues, of dearths, or seasons' quality;
Nor can I fortune to brief minutes tell,
Pointing to each his thunder, rain and wind;
Or say with princes if it shall go well
By aught predict that I in heaven find;
But from thine eyes my knowledge I derive,
And, constant stars, in them I read such art
As truth and beauty shall together thrive
If from thyself, to store thou wouldst convert:
  Or else of thee this I prognosticate,
  Thy end is truth's and beauty's doom and date.

Sonnet 14

Drawing Conclusions On The Wall

I mentioned recently that I have taken up drawing again, though I have so far been shy about sharing any examples of my work.  I'm still feeling my way towards what sort of mark-making 61-year-old me wants to make.   Am I an expressive scribbler, a mixed-media man, an advocate of pure line and volume, or perhaps even something I don't have a name for yet?  It's fun, but man do I wish I didn't have to use reading glasses, nowadays, and didn't also suffer from a touch of arthritis in my index finger.

Naturally, I've been looking with interest at what other people are up to these days.  It seems that after decades of neglect by many artists -- who have generally preferred the conceptual approach to anything as hands-on as paper and pencil -- drawing seems to be having a bit of a revival (hey, call me Mr. Zeitgeist...).   Though the conceptualists have inevitably complicated the picture:  "So why shouldn't pouring a cup of tea over a magazine count as drawing?  Do you have a problem with my practice?"

I found a really useful compendium of contemporary approaches to drawing, Walk the Line : the Art of Drawing, compiled by Marc Valli and Ana Ibarra (Laurence King, 2013).  Its 300 or so pages cover the range from the sublime to the ridiculous, with the balance tipping a little towards the latter; the reach:grasp ratio of so many young artists seems truly lamentable to me. *  The urge to have something to say clearly overwhelms the urge to acquire the means to show, not tell.  However, I'm always on the alert for that Hendrix Moment, so I don't rush to judgement (30 seconds or so usually does the trick, though).

But, to save you the trouble of finding a copy, you can get a decent sense of the wild variety of "practice" and competence out there by checking out the Drawing Room's Drawing Biennial 2015.  All the works are on A4 paper, and donated by invited artists as a fund-raiser, which may explain the variable standard, but there are some BIG NAMES in there (Kapoor, Emin, Creed, etc.), and you can bid to buy any of the works on show until 30th April (minimum bid £250).  Inexplicably, nearly all of the few items I rated highly are so far marked "no bid".  Not entirely incidentally, did you know Tracey Emin is now Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy?  No, seriously.  I really, really don't know what to make of that.  Is it them, or is it me?  If it's me, I am beyond beyond help.

Of course, the best part of this renewed enthusiasm is browsing the online catalogues of art materials suppliers, and getting up to speed with all the new pencils (yes, there are new pencils), erasers (did you know you can get battery-driven erasers?), papers, sketchbooks, pencil cases...  It's all way cheaper than camera gear, and somehow more enticing, and much less like researching a new toaster.  But then I've always been a fool for stationery porn.

Woman reading, by José Sobral de Almada Negreiros

* "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, / Or what's a heaven for?" (Robert Browning, Andrea del Sarto -- one of the greatest poems by one of the greatest poets, and quite relevant to this post).

Home From The Hills

As you will have realised, the last few posts were automatically scheduled to be published while I was away -- if not actually off-grid then barely hanging on to it -- with the assistance of my loyal in-house robot.  It will take a while to catch up with your comments and emails, but thanks in advance, especially to those of you who have responded to my slightly grandiose request for "signature" images!

It is a curious thing, but the availability of mobile phone and internet access declines dramatically as you head west in our country.  It wouldn't surprise me to hear that something similar happens as you head north.  Or east.  It reminds me of those illustrations of relativistic space-time involving a rubber sheet and a heavy ball, London and the south-east being the heavy ball. Even in a lively, happening place like Bristol (Bristol is Brighton's crustie cousin) signals are poor.  In my partner's sister's house, the best place to use a phone is an upstairs bedroom; the front half of a front bedroom, to be precise.  As for mid-Wales... Well, the signal is not only confined to certain ley-line convergences, but profoundly affected by the weather.  We had three bars one day, nothing at all for the next two.  Then -- ping! -- the phone in my pocket suddenly revived with a five bar signal, announcing the arrival of a mini-flood of emails.  There is clearly scope for a new profession in such regions:  the phone dowser.

We visit mid-Wales every year around this time, and have done so for the last 35 years.  Here is our home for the last week:

We tend to find a rentable property we like, and book it every year until it goes off the market, generally because it's been sold, or because some lucky person has taken up permanent residence there.  It's strange, how quickly an annual weekly visit can give you an illusion of ownership.  This particular house is one we've been using for the past five years, and the aristocratic sense of familiarity as you enter and dump your bags into a recently-swept hall is all part of the pleasure.* It's a well-appointed barn conversion in a beautiful, isolated hilltop setting, making use of an eco-friendly heat-exchange system for hot water and underfloor heating, which involves mysterious convoluted pipes buried in the hillside.

Landscape photography is all about repeatedly showing up somewhere until something interesting happens, usually involving the light, the weather, and the time of day.  This can involve unpleasant experiences like getting up very early, camping out, or getting cold and wet; often all of the above.  This may explain why habitual landscapists like to push all the Photoshop sliders up to 11: it's a sort of compensatory hyperbole.  No, really, it looked exactly like that -- you just had to be there!

But when you have a west-facing bedroom balcony looking out over a patchwork Radnorshire valley shading into hill-country, you can simply open a curtain to check out the progress of the dawn and, if the mist and sunlight are doing good things, lean out of an open window and snap away. Then get back into bed.  No need to exaggerate.  Later on, just around the time you might be opening a bottle of red, you generally also get a royal-box view of an unspeakably lurid sunset, nature's own way of pushing the sliders up to 11.

Wednesday Morning 3 A.M.  6 A.M.

*  Think of the sun and moon in Coleridge's Ancient Mariner: "... and every where the blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest, and their native country and their own natural home, which they enter unannounced, as lords that are certainly expected and yet there is a silent joy at their arrival."
 

Unsolicited Testimonial: VistaPrint Photobooks

I've mentioned VistaPrint before: it's the print service that looks like a scam but isn't (someone suggested I should offer this to VistaPrint as a slogan).  I'm a fan.  For a modest price they do excellent and reliable reproduction of photographs in small runs of postcards, greetings cards, and calendars, and quite often there are promotional free offers. You simply upload your images, and they do the rest.  I use them several times a year and have never been anything less than satisfied with the end result, and I'm a fussy bastard when it comes to my own work.

VistaPrint are now offering photobooks, and they are good.  In absolute terms of print and binding quality, I'd even say they are as good as Blurb.  That's seriously good.  Of course, you don't get any of the shop-front or marketing opportunity you get with a full print-on-demand service like Blurb, or the ability to choose multiple formats or to convert your book into a PDF or an e-book.  That's Blurb's USP, and Vistaprint offers no challenge there.

VistaPrint thinks of itself as a producer of discount business cards and stationery.  In pure business terms, this is probably very wise; I expect their turnover is many times that of a niche concern like Blurb.  Their relentess free offers and mailshots can feel like spamming, though, and there is a bland, MOR look to a lot of their pre-designed templates, no doubt carefully matched to their intended clients (I always use the blank ones, myself).  But in these new photobooks they have a five star product which they're marketing in a two star way.  You need to look past the presentation.

It works in a similar way to Blurb:  you download their free book-making software, you design your book, you upload it to their website, make some choices about binding and paper quality, put a copy in your trolley and buy it.  It's kept online in your account, so you can buy more copies later. The Vistaprint Photo Books software has a less "bookish" user interface than Blurb's BookSmart, and it's a little opaque to use.  It seems to lack pre-packaged "wizardized" features like page numbers, running titles, and so on, but they may well be in there somewhere.  For example, it took me a while to figure out how the image resizing and positioning facility worked, but -- once discovered -- I realised it's actually better than the BookSmart version.

What makes this a useful alternative to Blurb is the sheer quality of the standard offering.  The basic, no-extra-charge binding is real cloth-covered boards with a choice of colours.  You can even pay a little extra for "real leather" -- I haven't tested the veracity of this claim, as I prefer cloth.  Same with the paper: the default choice is a thick, semi-gloss paper that is rather like Blurb's "premium" paper. The choice of sizes is nice, too: for example, a 21cm square book is a quietly impressive, hand-friendly size.

If you were looking to impress someone with a one-off portfolio, gift, or book dummy that is a pleasure to handle, I'd suggest having a look at Vistaprint.

[NOTE:  I am away from home until 18th April.  If you comment, please be patient!]

Signatures

One of the "projects" I'm working on at the moment is a new website.  I used to have a website based at the university, but it went mouldy after a bit and I had to throw it away.  Compared to writing a blog, keeping a website fresh is hard work, and rather too much like keeping a tank of fish alive (see Reasons to be Cheerful).  However, maintaining a permanent presence on the web with a considered, well-organised, easy-to-navigate selection of one's best work is a sensible move.  Especially if you want to sell some pictures and get more exhibition invitations, which I do.

Which is where you may be able to help.  I'm thinking of signing up with one of those e-commerce operations that enable people to browse and buy your stuff online, but first I need to decide what my "stuff" is.  As an artist-photographer I'm sure of my ground: if people don't like what I do, they can sling their hook.  But there's no point in trying to sell people stuff they don't want to buy.  If I wanted to put together an attractive portfolio of, say, just a dozen prints, which would they be?  My work is quite diverse: for example, my "rings", my landscape photography, and my studies of architectural surfaces could easily be the work of three different people.  I also realise I am not always the best judge of the attractiveness of my own output.  My first, hastily-assembled exhibition at Innsbruck in 2009, for example, sold dozens of pictures; my second -- carefully-chosen and printed by me in 2014 -- sold none at all.  Hmmm.  There's a lesson there, but what?

Since 2008 there have been around 2,000 images posted on this blog, about 250 of which are "portfolio quality", and these include 25 which are as good as anything you'll see anywhere.  Yes, I know -- I'm that good!  But even the most prolific and well-known photographers have just a few "signature" images, the ones which immediately pop into your mind when their names are mentioned, and often, it seems, these are not (or are no longer) their personal favourites.  In fact, there is really often only one: Cartier Bresson produced many astounding photographs, but will never escape the gravitational pull of Derrière la Gare Saint-Lazare.  Ditto Don McCullin and his Shell-shocked US marine, William Klein and Gun 1, New York, 1955, or Alec Soth and Charles, Vasa, Minnesota 2002.  Unfair, but that's how it is.

So, here's where you come in. I'm assuming you've been a regular visitor here for some while, with a consuming interest in photography.  I'm assuming you're photo-literate enough to recognise names like Cartier-Bresson, McCullin, Klein, and Soth.  I'm assuming you have a certain level of regard for my photography.  I'm assuming that probably defines a subset of about ten of you...  Now, here is the question: is there a single image of mine which you would regard as a "signature" image?  Not my "best", or "prettiest", or "most challenging", or "most representative", but the one that immediately pops into your mind.

If so, don't put your response in a comment, please, but email me using one of the addresses in the "Profile" on the right *.  If you can find that photo and identify it by the date of the post that would be excellent.  Even better, in most browsers you can get the actual filename by hovering your mouse over the image, as it's the last element in the URL chain.  For example, the image below is "DSCF1917b.jpg".  Or perhaps a flip through the various books in my Blurb Bookstore would help?  A book title and page number would be great.  Otherwise, a description of the image as it appears in your mind would be fine.  Or, failing that, is there a relatively narrow "genre" within my output that regularly hits the spot for you?

What's in it for you?  Well, if we can agree what photograph we're talking about, and you are prepared to share your address with me, I'll send you a signed A4 print of that picture, shipped anywhere in the world, free of charge.  You can tell I'm not expecting a great many replies...

* Isn't it strange how taboos about "speaking the name of the devil" or one's own "true" name have been made literal by the web?  We don't "speak" our addresses or names out loud, for fear of attracting the attention of the very real devils that lurk out there, waiting to troll, spam or dump malware on us.  Welcome to the new Middle Ages...

[NOTE:  I am away from home until 18th April.  If you comment, please be patient!]

Unsolicited Testimonial: Evernote

I'm not really in the app demographic, either temperamentally or age-wise.  Although I am far from being a technophobe, I think I first really started to feel my age around the time everyone started going on about "Web 2.0", and it became mandatory for programs and services to have cutesy-wootsy names.  And, although I don't necessarily regard social media as the first ominous symptoms of an imminent decline into e-dystopia,  it's true I have found myself dusting off those old Situationist tracts, just to remind myself what the "society of the spectacle" might look like, if and when it were to arrive.

However, I imagine that you, like me, have a voracious visual appetite.  Most days, I expect you see something on the Web that, in an an earlier age, you might have snipped out of a magazine and filed away or pasted into a scrapbook, simply because you liked it, or because it sparked some useful visual train of thought.  It has always been easy enough to copy and save images from the Web (though I'm always amazed how many people never do "right click" on an image) but it's not really the same.  The point about a scrapbook is that you can browse it at your leisure, and bring to mind things and visual cues you had forgotten all about.

A couple of years ago I came across the Evernote app, and in particular the Evernote Web Clipper.  There are other similar tools, but this is the one I have come to like, and find most useful (and at least it's not called "Snoofle", or something equally silly).  Essentially, Evernote offers "cloud" storage for your notes, clippings and images, and like Kindle or Dropbox (that other indispensible tool for those of us with multiple "home" locations, or who need to share files with other data nomads) will synchronize your files across multiple devices (work computer, home computer, iPad, Android or iOS phone, etc.) so that you can browse through, add to, or edit your cloud scrapbook at any time, and see the updated results seamlessly on all your other various bits of kit.  Very handy!

The Web Clipper is a plugin for your web browser that enables you to send images (or any selected text, or even an entire webpage) to your Evernote stash, simply by right-clicking in the time-honoured way.  Although I do sometimes use Evernote as a convenient notebook, it is the Web Clipper that I use most.  I have built a browsable, sortable file of annotated images that I can flip through in idle moments on my phone.  I like to pick a particularly stunning image to display full screen on my phone or iPad, just so it's there to look at.

There's really no better way to improve your own image-making than by studying pictures which you like and which, by accident or by design, are better than yours.

[NOTE:  I am away from home until 18th April.  If you comment, please be patient!]

Film Fun

There have been various online kerfuffles recently, where some film users have felt their feathers to have been too roughly ruffled.  For what it's worth, here are my thoughts on the matter of film photography, and its self-styled Defenders of the Faith.

I'm not talking about devotees of the view camera, bless 'em. They are playing a different game in a different league to the rest of us.  As an instinctive contrarian and closet elitist, I've often contemplated joining them, to be honest.  What could be more gratifying to a member of the Awkward Squad than wielding one of those hefty mahogany and brass contraptions, with its tilts, swings and rises, upside-down and wrong-way-round ground glass image, two-shot sheet-film holders, and mandatory rock-solid tripod?  Well, lots of things, and I'm far too lazy and impatient to work at such a glacial pace, even given the stellar gains in image quality.  Besides, a view camera is potentially OCD on stilts, and I have enough trouble remembering to check what aperture I'm using, or whether I've forgotten to reset the exposure compensation dial.  But, hats off to the wearers of the dark cloth!

I'm not even talking about any remaining hold-out medium-format users out there.  I loved rollfilm: my Mamiya C330f and my Fuji GS645S were probably my favourite cameras.  The former is now sold, but I may ask to have the latter placed on my funeral pyre.  Done right, medium-format images have a tonal range and luminosity that is simply beautiful and only matched by, well, pretty much every serious digital camera currently available.  Will you tell them, or will I?

No, I'm talking about the guys who insist on using 35mm film, and behave as if it were the ne plus ultra of photographic quality.  It is inexplicable to me.  A lot of these people don't even process or print their own stuff.  I spent a decade or more processing and printing my own 35mm and medium-format film, and the day I discovered digital was Liberation Day.  Need I refer you to my venerable post, Tears In the Stop Bath?

There seem to be three main 35mm camps.  First, there are the "Lomographers", fashion-conscious types who pursue a lo-fi aesthetic for its own sake.  At its worst this is a cooler-than-thou analogue version of Instagram; at its best it's a celebration of the quirky, the accidental, and the fun.  This makes perfect sense.  It simultaneously makes a virtue of the essential imperfections of 35mm film and cocks a snook at gearheads.  Anyone looking to 35mm film for anything better than snapshot quality is looking in the wrong place, and treating it as a fun format seems right to me.

Which brings me to the second main camp, the Leica Mystics.  These people look so persistently in the wrong place for the wrong things that, once again, I'm put in mind of the parable of Mullah Nasruddin looking for his lost keys under a convenient streetlamp.  Now, I have to admit, I have never so much as picked up a Leica, so I may be missing the point entirely.  But, as far as I know, a Leica is simply a very well-made 35mm rangefinder camera, with a limited but superb range of interchangeable lenses (or "glass", as Leica Mystics tend to call lenses).  It has no advantage, technically, over any other functioning 35mm camera -- including a cardboard throwaway pre-loaded with film -- other than the quality of its components and assembly.

Those who know about such things talk about a "Leica glow".  This has nothing to do with the sense of well-being induced by having that much money to spend on a camera, but is an alleged mysterious property of Leica lenses.  Well, maybe so.  Other mysterious lenses are available.  But the Leica legend was really built on two things:  first, unobtrusiveness, and second, indestructability.  In the kind of situations associated with Leica users of legend -- primarily war and conflict reportage, and so-called "street" photography -- these were clearly good properties to possess.  "Quality" was never the issue: any photograph at all taken under fire is a remarkable achievement, and an excellent photograph is some kind of miracle.  To attribute such miraculousness to a particular brand of camera is, well, to be looking in the wrong place.  Hardly any serious photojournalists use film in 2015, and if anything standards have gone up, not down.

The third group are the most mystifying.  Photographers who simply believe that film has an esssentially distinctive "look" which is, in some indefinable, possibly moral way, superior to digital imaging, but whose own primary activity seems not to be making actual photographs but popping up on blogs and forums to make witless cracks about the indefinable, possibly moral superiority of film.  Let's call them Film Trolls (Trolls of Film? Heh...).  What can you say to such people?  Other than, "Please shut up now, guys, you're just making yourselves look ridiculous!  Why not go out and shoot a few rolls, while you still can?"

[NOTE:  I am away from home until 18th April.  If you comment, please be patient!]

The Tide Is High

The Itchen, looking towards Northam Bridge

Pretty much every time in the last 30 years when I have taken the train to London I have noticed this view, which suddenly opens out -- after the St. Mary's Stadium, after the Hell's Angels' clubhouse -- where the railway line runs close alongside the shore of the river Itchen's tidal estuary.  Early in the morning, with the sun glancing off the pewter-coloured expanse of water and the glistening mud studded with marine debris, it's a brief reminder of the otherness of Southampton, glimpsed before the train glides on into the rolling green Hampshire uplands around Winchester.  Not exactly Venice, but not just fields and woods, either.

Every time I see it I resolve to go down there, and walk along the path that runs next to the railway, but somehow never got around to it. In March, finally, I did make it down there, only to choose a day that was overcast and misty, with spits of rain in the wind, and a time when the estuary was still quite full.  Oh well.  Another time, another tide.

The Itchen, looking towards Horseshoe Bridge

Posts of Few Words #5

Hit me with your rhythm, sticks...

An Appeal

"Odd, from the back she looks perfectly normal..."

I'm in a campaigning mood, so this is an appeal to the BBC, particularly those with responsibility for talk radio, with regard to a number of important matters.

First, young women with childish voices.  A lisp may have a certain cute-factor when deployed by an 8-year old. Even then, it is a pretty emetic, Shirley Temple kind of cute.  I listen to a lot of radio, and I'm hearing more and more young women speaking in a distinctly child-like manner, using a high, breathy register, and an over-distinct, mannered pronunciation, up to and including lisped sibilants.  So many of the younger female guests on, say, BBC Radio 4 Today sound about twelve.  It's the speech equivalent of one of those dreadful semi-military overcoats that royal girl-children were buttoned into in the 1940s, or white ankle socks.  Sometimes, it can sound as if the BBC has been overrun by the progeny of Violet Elizabeth Bott (you know, "I'll thcream and thcream until I'm thick!").

It's clearly a fashionable thing, and I'm not sure why this has come about.  Perhaps it's a reaction to hyper-masculine young male laddishness.  Perhaps it's an offshoot of that faux-naive, croaky-feeble singing voice that you hear everywhere now (yes, you, Laura Marling).  Or  -- whisper it -- maybe kawaii, the dreaded Japanese Cult of Cute, has finally taken ineradicable root on these shores, like knot-weed? But, wherever it's coming from, it's up to you, BBC, to put a stop to it.  Insist on grown-ups, please.  Get Mishal Husain to give them a severe talking-to.

Second, tutting.  There's been an outbreak of tutting and lip-smacking, as a form of aural punctuation.  Weather-forecast presenters do it, magazine-programme presenters do it.  Even certain Today and World at One regulars have started doing it.  [smack!].  Radio is an intimate medium, and these noises are intrusive, unpleasant to listen to, and give an air of smugness to everything ("Tut! There, wasn't that clever?").  There are a number of reasons Paddy O'Connell is not my favourite radio presenter, and this is one of them.

Next:  the use of So at the beginning of every response to a question by academics.  So I'm finding it very annoying.  So I don't understand why they think it helps.  So get Melvyn Bragg on the case; In Our Time would be a very good place to start.

Also, now the election is in full swing, could we start a Radio 4 "glottal stop jar" for middle-class politicians, starting with Ed Balls?  A pound for every ludicrously misplaced "ʔ" would soon sort it out.  Let Alan Johnson be the judge, as an appropriate punishment for not running for leadership of the Labour Party.

And finally, Robert Peston...  Why, BBC, why?

Thank you for your attention.

Posts of Few Words #4

If you go down to the woods today...  There's always something Arthur Rackham-esque about hedgerows and woodland, and something about the fidelity to line and tone of a camera seems well-suited to capturing it.  It's tempting to say that his characteristic blend of the uncanny and an ambivalent innocence is very English, but it's probably more true to say it's very Northern European -- something to do with wolves and witches, babes in the woods, and dodgy woodcutters.

Certainly, other illustrators of folk and fairy tales have shown a similar feeling for those earthy tones and twisted shapes -- Swede John Bauer and Russian Ivan Bilibin, for example -- but Rackham did always seem somehow to invest his tangled roots and malevolent dwarves with a greater sense of character.

Posts of Few Words #3

IKEA!  What a maze... There are poor wanderers in there who have been lost for days, living off frozen köttbullar (the famous IKEA meatballs).  I believe köttbullar is simply Swedish for "spherical processed meat product"; odd, that they don't give them an IKEA-style name (PÜKI, perhaps, or PLOPS).

I read somewhere that people have started arranging IKEA hide-and-seek games, which sounds like madness to me.  I have always thought that hide-and-seek sets up two of the loneliest experiences in a child's life: as the seeker, left alone at the start of the game with everyone else hiding, and as the last hider, who fears he or she may never be found!

IKEA blue

IKEA pink

Posts of Few Words #2

Over the next few weeks I'm likely to be putting up a series of these picture posts, as I'm quite busy with a number of real-life projects that are eating into my blogging time.  Odd, how time seems in short supply now that, in theory, I've got plenty of it, but there you are.  Words take time and consideration, but the pictures just happen.  Maybe a little too easily, sometimes, but that's something I'm aware of and working on.  Another project!

I must admit I'm never quite comfortable with that word, "project".  It always falls somewhere slightly odd inside the triangle defined by schoolwork ("I've got to finish my GCSE project by Friday"), celeb-speak ("Lady Gaga is developing several projects at this time"), and mighty works ("The pyramidical project proceeds apace, Your Pharaonic Fabulousness!").  It's hard to think of an alternative, though, so it will have to do.  Places to go, people to see, projects to develop!

Banks of the Test, Mottisfont Abbey

Bull Drove, Winchester

North slope, St. Catherine's Hill

Three-Square Story

Horseshoe Bridge, Southampton

Burgess Road, Southampton

Lordswood Road, Southampton

Here's One I Made Earlier

Here in Britain this Friday morning we had our first solar eclipse since 1999.  Exciting!  Cue media hysteria!  However, it turned out to be a bit of a damp squib down on the South Coast -- only 80-odd percent of eclipse, and 110% cloud cover.  The morning started gloomy, and it merely got a bit darker around 09:30.  I couldn't even see where the sun was in the sky; though I did have to turn a light on in the kitchen to make a cup of coffee. Spooky!

At the time of the previous eclipse in summer 1999 we were on holiday in Norfolk.  Our son was eight, and our daughter five -- perfect ages for a bit of home-made science magic.  So, with the aid of a couple of kitchen stools, a mirror, a piece of white card and some sticky tape we rigged up an eclipse viewing station in the garden of our cottage.  It worked!

I really enjoyed that aspect of being a father -- the endless improvised making of props and playthings with scissors and tape, whether it be an elaborate crawl-through tunnel of cardboard boxes or a carefully painted and fitted Power Rangers mask made from robust watercolour paper.  It's a bit like being a primary school teacher with a class of two.  Or perhaps more like home-schooling, where the only lesson is always Art & Craft.  Putting up the occasional shelf or redecorating the bathroom just doesn't hit the same spot.

Something of that same spirit must have animated those early pre-astronomers who worked out the basic solar, lunar, and stellar patterns.  I mean, for thousands of years you couldn't just look up in a calendar how long it was until spring, never mind when the next eclipse was due.  In fact, it must have taken a while for someone to first figure out that there were regular cycles involved, and then even longer for someone to be bothered to work out exactly what they were.  One of my earliest blog posts (Bloody Elves!, a good post, too) was a tribute to those odd souls who could be bothered to do the observational spadework that eventually meant that the rest of us could just look it up with confidence (at least, those who can be bothered to make even that minimal effort).

I imagine a field somewhere, where someone -- a minor princeling, perhaps, someone not entirely cut out for warfare, much derided, but oddly driven -- has decided to lay out a stick for each day that passes, perhaps aligning each stick with the point on the horizon where the sun rose that day.  He has a sense that there is a pattern, but what?  After a couple of years, rapidly running out of field, it strikes him that if he lays them in a circle, he only needs to do the job once.  Bingo!

Next steps:  he puts in a bid for funding for a permanent version -- maybe some large imported stones would be nice? -- and charges the rest of the tribe fat fees for bespoke predictions from version 2.0; spring, start of the raiding season, Black Friday, and so on.  He is no longer much derided, and starts wearing an especially idiotic hat, just because he can, and begins planning a massive and profitable franchise operation:  Solar Solutions.  The rest, as they say, is history.

Many moons, many sticks...

Highfield Lane

Running up through the eastern side of Southampton Common is the main road out of town towards Winchester and ultimately to London, known along that stretch as the Avenue.  This busy thoroughfare cuts off a narrow vertical slice of the Common, which sits alongside the university campus and the residential area known as Highfield.  Because it is nowhere in particular -- a long and narrow transitional green buffer between highway and suburb -- it is actually wilder and denser than much of the main Common.  It is also more dangerous: students are advised to avoid its few, poorly-lit paths at night as, unfortunately, serious assaults happen there most years.

The road leading off the Avenue into Highfield cuts through about 200 yards of this tangled urban wilderness.  I walked over to the university earlier this week by this route, and in a steady light drizzle the emerging spring colours were subtly enhanced.  In a matter of weeks, new leaves will start to obscure and darken the woodland, and the undergrowth will become impenetrable; already, thorny loops of bramble are booby-trapping the ground.  If you do wander about in there, however, you may notice the bumps and ditches of some old foundations.  During World War 2, military huts of various sorts were built there, mainly in preparation for the D-Day landings.  After the War, these were squatted for some years by the homeless, bombed out during the Blitz, before being dismantled.

Somewhere on the Common -- perhaps on this side of the Avenue, perhaps the other -- there is also the concealed entrance to an underground bunker, which was to be the hideout for members of a so-called Auxiliary Unit of the "British Resistance", recruited from the Home Guard and trained in sabotage in anticipation of a German invasion.  Remarkably, my grandfather was a member of this very unit; we are not a Southampton family, but in 1939 he moved here to take up a job at a printing firm, and as an ex-infantryman had joined the local Home Guard at the outbreak of war.  After the war I know he showed the bunker's location to my uncle but, unsurprisingly, seventy years later he can't remember where it was.  I wonder whether anybody does?

Our Emails Now Are Ended

As those of you who contact me off-blog should know, I'm in transition away from my long-standing institutional email address, which I'd got into the habit of using for everything, simply because I acquired it back in the days when having any email address at all was a novelty and a privilege.  I do still have the use of that original email ID, thanks to the indulgence of the university, but can't rely on it indefinitely.

Before I retired I foolishly decided to transfer much of my "personal" mail into a separate location, where it would be safely archived, only to discover -- too late -- that the transfer had not worked.  So that was 20 years of choice wit'n'wisdom down the e-tubes.  But now I realise I need to clear the decks again so the remaining "personal" stuff  (still a considerable quantity) can, at some point, be transferred to my new address (or more probably dumped down a different e-drain).  Oh, well.  So I spent much of Saturday and Sunday deleting thousands of work-related emails, received and sent, which I had felt the need to keep for one reason or another.  The bulk of them dated from after 2005, when I must last have seriously purged my mailboxes, but some dated back as far as 1998.

It was a real trip down Memory Lane, an electronic repeat of the bulk dump of paper files I carried out before vacating my office.  Not, I hasten to add, in a Stasi-style attempt to evade justice, but merely in recognition of the fact that the contents of my over-stuffed filing cabinet of personal copies of various agendas, minutes, and position papers were not unique or rendered more valuable by the annotations and elaborate doodlings I had scrawled over them (though see Tom Phillips' book Merry Meetings for a different perspective).

Doodles?  I'll always have my notebooks...
(where the doodle:note ratio is quite high...)

Ah, all those half-forgotten names, the prestigious projects and the last-minute lash-ups, the pressing concerns and the coat-trailing, the mails marked "urgent" and still unread after a decade (sorry!) with their never-to-be-opened attachments, the real and imagined crises, the routine comradely banter, and the occasional flash of genuine wit or even genius...  The stuff of work, replicated a billion-billion-billion-fold across the planet, and deader even than yesterday's papers: the day before yesterday's emails...

But talk about the ten thousand things!  Just to pick one: How could I forget the sheer aggravation caused to our library -- and to me, personally -- by the soliciting, chasing, submission, processing, and recording by my staff of something as apparently straightforward as our own bloody PhD theses?  Oh, there was wailing and gnashing of teeth, but above all emails.  Lots of emails.  For example, a few years ago I was required to submit a signed and witnessed statement to a court in Massachusetts, where a multi-million dollar patent-infringement lawsuit hung on exactly when a particular PhD thesis -- embargoed for a certain period due to its commercial sensitivity -- had become available to public scrutiny on our shelves, more than a decade previously.  Lawyers can be fussy devils when they want to be -- the meter was really ticking on this one -- and there was an endless round of emails before the scope and wording of this statement was satisfactory to all parties.  And yet, ironically, it turned out that a faxed document is more acceptable to the legal mind than an email attachment.  I'd imagined flying to Boston with a notarised parchment chained to my wrist, but there was to be no expenses-paid trip to New England for me (although finding a functioning fax machine in the 21st century was an adventure in itself).

Then there were the endless changes.  Changes of library management system, changes of operating system, changes in programming language, changes in bibliographic standards, changes in network protocols, changes in platform and delivery of services, changes to the ownership, personnel, practices and geographical location of library automation "partners", and the constant updates, patches, service packs, changes to changes to ch-ch-ch-changes, version 16.3.4.1.14 succeeding 16.3.4.4.1.12a (which we had never implemented, anyway)...  I suddenly remembered why it was I had felt it was time to retire.  I was really, really tired of all that.

Over the years, I have taken to email as a medium.  I enjoy its to-and-fro, its immediacy, and its informality.  Where others preferred a perfunctory, all-business tone -- often mispelling wrods on prupose, I suspect -- I cultivated an email "voice" which, in a way, was a twenty year dry run for this blog.  However, I realise my attempts at witty, wordy, oblique, perspective-restoring replies may often have been exasperating, particularly for anyone trying to whip up some serious attention to a serious issue.  I was tempted to keep a representative sample, but a "selected emails" doesn't really have the same cachet as a "collected correspondence", especially when the subject is yet another go-round on the strange smell emanating from the basement.

Besides, I always have in the back of my mind the (bad) example set by a senior member of staff at one of the branch libraries at the university where I started my career, who -- in response to a letter from the manager of a local bookshop, explaining a problem with the supply of a certain book -- wrote that he had "no interest in the exculpatory whinings of a jumped-up shop-boy".  Luckily, this was in the pre-email days, when such a letter had to be typed up and filed and could be spotted and quietly modified by a wise secretary (who might keep it nonetheless, perhaps for blackmail purposes, or perhaps merely to show to junior professionals like me, for amusement and instruction).

I'm sure there must have been many times when I did hit "send" too soon, with no mediating secretary to save me from myself.  I do know I once accidentally broadcast confidential details of a competitive system tender from a particularly annoying supplier to an entire email list of British university systems support librarians, none of whom would afterwards believe it was an accident.  Which it was.

So, better now to hit "delete" a few thousand times, and say goodbye to all that...

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.

Except that all those emails will probably still be hanging around on or in some cloud somewhere, and cluttering up cyberspace until the last syllable of recorded time.

[Note: the new email address is in my "Profile", above right.]

Half Full

Many years ago, when I was young and open to new ways and ideas, and trying to escape the limitations of my small-town swot-cum-stoner mentality, I met a few people whose ideas were so far out I thought they must be faking it.  One guy -- a tall, lugubrious northerner whose chest-length dark hair seemed to weigh his upper body down into a permanent stoop of resignation inside the heavy dark overcoat he wore in all weathers -- was the first anti-humanist I had ever encountered.  Not in the sense that he had problems with humanist philosophy, but that he thought humans were the problem, and extinction of our species was the planet's best hope. No, really?  Far out!

My friend was a straw in the wind, it turned out.  In certain parts of the academy, and in particular within that strange penumbra of academically-tinged thinking on the Web that is the haunt of the recovering but still-unemployed humanities postgraduate, an oppressive orthodoxy of pessimism has taken hold, a sort of intellectual End Times mindset.  For a while, this stuff seemed compelling.  But, I don't know about you, now I'm really bored with the dull droning sound that this sombre hive produces, and I still tend to think they're faking it.

There is a serious contemporary problem of disillusion, of course: the steady stripping away by science of the handy illusions and delusions that have, for most of us, in large part defined our humanity, can be experienced as a bleakness.  If not god, if not transcendence, if not spirit, if not art, then what?  Attempts to rationalise consciousness -- most recently as a heuristic, integrating information-processing device -- strike directly at the "soul" and the "self" and the deep values of moral behaviour in ways that can be profoundly upsetting, but don't offer anything to put in their place.  Humanism itself comes to seem like a mere comfort break on the journey away from superstition to nihilism.

Some sad cases, not themselves scientists, revel in this bleakness.  Humanism is dismissed by them with a sneer.  They enjoy the oh, so superior sense that -- you poor sentimental fools! -- it's all in vain.  Life is a meaningless text, onto which we merely project whatever grids of meaning we have inherited, created, or had imposed on us.  It is a tale told by an idiot, so to speak, full of sound and fury, signifying ... Well, nothing.  The ultimate revenge of these nerds of nothingness, these nihilism wonks -- many of whom have found a congenial home in higher education -- is to take our brightest and best children and fill them with this grey poison of relativism and cultural pessimism.

This often goes hand in hand with a rejection of "Enlightenment" values, generally understood as a set of beliefs about the autonomy of the individual and the importance of human rights, with an underpinning conviction that cumulative progress through rational enquiry will free humanity from the chains of superstition and political oppression, and the scourges of disease and hunger.  Hah!  As if!  Don't you know we're all doomed?

This toxic stuff is seeping into the wider culture.  Take this quote from an article in a recent weekend's Guardian Review by voguish novelist Tom McCarthy:

Careful not to fall back on some naive escapist fantasy (of individual self-expression, or the transcendent human spirit, or art-as-redemption and so forth -- in other words, the very fantasies to which a conservative view of fiction still clings), De Certeau is nonetheless groping his way towards some kind of resistance to or rupture of the machine's logic.
(James Joyce Would be Working for Google, 7/3/2015)

Whoah...  Watch out for those naive escapist conservative fantasies, dude!  He goes on:

We could quite easily dismiss these thoughts as French bollocks, brush them aside and pen great tales of authenticity and individual affirmation, even as the sands in which we'd need to bury our heads in order to do so are being blown away.  Alternatively, we could explore, with trepidation and with melancholy joy, this ultra-paradoxical and zombie-like condition, this non-life-restoring resurrection that, if De Certeau is correct, is writing's true and only lot, its afterlife.

Blimey, what is the point?  Hand me that razor-blade, when you've finished with it, mate.

Now, I'm no philosopher.  The problem is, neither are most writers or humanities scholars.  Sure, they've read some French bollocks Bourdieu and some Foucault and some Deleuze and maybe some Benjamin and some Bakhtin, mainly in translation, but they have no sense of the traditions and arguments in and against which such marginal, provocative figures are writing.  Also, so much academic writing is scholastic in impulse, in the mediaeval sense that it merely looks for interesting, approved and publishable wriggle-room within the confines of the thoughts of certain acknowledged authorities.  Who these are, of course, is largely a matter of fashion.  Who now admits to reading even Althusser, Adorno, Goldmann, or Lukács?  No doubt Deleuze is already curling the lip of some black-clad 20-year old.

As I say, I'm bored with this pessimism, however smart.  Life is not meaningless, except as defined by someone playing linguistic games, obsessed by the meaning of "meaning", or by someone with an oedipal grudge against organised religion, and a minimal grasp of what religion is and does.  Your life may have no "meaning", but it is not futile.  All of the universe has followed a clear and compelling logic of behaviour -- "laws" -- that, however improbably, has resulted in me and you, right here, right now.  You exist!  I exist!  Is that not utterly bizarre?  Is that not exciting enough?

Yes, consciousness is fragmentary, and yes, we have plural, largely constructed identities, and yes, we're mortal, and yes, there is almost certainly no continuance of existence after death, at least in any form we would recognise, but...  When was it ever any different?  Why let the too-clever sweet nothings of a few academic doom-mongers poison your life at the well?

But then I'm still just a small-town swot-cum-stoner at heart.  In the end, life is simply so much nicer than the alternative.  Its very absurdity is a deep source of joy.  I tried, I really did, but I just couldn't convince myself otherwise.  Besides, pessimism breeds passivity -- what's the point? -- and if we're ever going to get out the various messes we're in as a species, rather than simply extinguish ourselves, we're going to need all the optimism and activism we can muster.

Ditch, post, tree, copse, wood