The Pequod

Sporting Authors

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 20:34:00 +0000

They say great authors should always be capable of surprising you, and it was certainly a surprise to find one of my favourite authors, subject of a couple of thesis chapters and numerous blog posts, announcing her love of football in the Observer this weekend:

I watch for aesthetic reasons. Some are to do with real dramatic tension. There is a story, and the end is really unknown until it comes. I have worked out that I also watch as though I was watching a kinetic sculpture or abstract light show. The things I watch are all contained in quadrilaterals, concern the movement of round balls, and the shifting lines of force and energy made by the players' movements. The games I care about are snooker, tennis, and football. The rules of rugby have changed to make the movements more fluid and exciting for the TV viewer so sometimes I watch that too. But I cannot get interested in, say, motor racing or golf.

Watching Spain win Euro 2008 last night certainly had both the aesthetic and the dramatic in abundance. If England are the perennial whiners of world football, Spain are genuine underachievers, but this made it more remarkable that there was in them a certain confidence or self-belief, of a greater depth even than Germany, who were coming to this final whilst being technically an average team. There was a real sportsman's satisfaction in watching Spain set up their intricate triangles, but the fluidly "shifting lines of force" also provided a dramatic satisfaction: as they knotted and weaved the ball around German defenders, the final gave the same sense as the tying up of the loose ends of a Shakespearean sexual comedy. There would have been nothing more untidy, more unfitting, than a German win, neat and efficient though it would no doubt have been.

But in spite of the way in which yesterday's final gave me a sense of pleasure both as a fan and an aesthete, I fear I cannot help but feel snooty about A.S. Byatt's enjoyment of football. Writers should, certainly, enjoy cricket, with its slowly accumulating tension lending itself to a day spent reading (or writing) a novel in the sunshine of Lords. However, I simply cannot imagine A.S. Byatt, cultured and eloquent as she is, shouting at the television or applauding a dive that wins a last-minute penalty kick. Of course, I am entirely guilty of stereotyping, and reading Byatt's piece I am forced to recall a comparable passage from her novel, A Whistling Woman, in which Frederica (the character most analogous to Byatt herself) records her fascination with her first television, on which she watches "Tennis on green grass with white figures and the geometry of the court contained and constantly in movement in the geometry of the box."

As I am writing this immediately after watching Andy Murray beat Richard Gasquet in the fourth round of Wimbledon, I am more easily inclined to see how Byatt's love of tennis might reflect and inform her artistic interest. We have, of course, become used to "Henmania," with its temporary congregation believing that it is better to come close and lose nerve at the last, than to maintain a sense of self-belief throughout the match. Henman certainly evoked fear and pity, but they were not quite the right kind for the tragic hero they felt he was. The fear was more that we were deluding ourselves in maintaining the belief that he could reach a Wimbledon final; the pity was not for how far he had fallen, but for how far he had yet to climb to reach our annual expectations.

As Henman was ensconced in the commentary box, however, it became clearer how superficial Henmania had been. Certainly, Murray too looked to be down and out after losing the first two sets, before he began his comeback. However, there is in Murray a bloody fierceness that Henman lacked in his white costume, and it manifests itself in his ability to play brilliant tennis not just with the occasional volley, but with a sequence of five or six points that are breathtakingly audacious.

For all that Murray's tennis broke Gasquet's powerful returns, shattered his rhythm, and set the pace deliciously and relentlessly on his side, there was still a possibility of a fall lurking in the background - or, rather, later in the ticking clock. It was Henman's unconscious presence that took it from mere excitement to a total Aristotelian drama. For as the evening light began to draw in, in the back of everyone's mind was, surely, that match in 2001 against Ivanisavic, when Henman had come from a game down to win two sets through astonishing tennis, only for rain to push the game to the next day, at which point he capitulated.

Today, then, eyes flicked between the court and the umpire. Even if the players on the former were finding it hard to see visually, could the latter not see or feel the aesthetics of the event, the lines of force building and curving it towards a climax just as the curtain of night fell? Did he not realise that putting the game off until the next day, with a new crowd and fresh players' legs, would be equivalent to dropping the curtain mid-way through Lear's final speech? Luckily, the umpire (and Murray) held his nerve, and with what would have been the final game of the night the young Scot came through. Though I am sure she would have expressed it with exceptional acumen, A.S. Byatt will not have been the only one attuned to the drama of this Wimbledon act. In its greatest guises, as in the European cup final or Murray's fourth round win, the players alone must write the script.

A Walk in Pictures: Bolton Abbey

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 20:46:00 +0000

The day starts off unpromisingly, as we are woken at six by that sound of rain. I always find rain peculiar when camping, in that whilst a disincentive to emerge from the tent, this also provides peculiar proof of the success of the pitch, that the tent is waterproof and providing a defiantly simple home against all weather. There is also the less ideal fact that going to the toilet or making the morning cup of tea means getting drenched. By about eleven, it has eased off, and we drive towards Bolton Abbey, parking at the Barden Bridgecar park, where there is no charge; otherwise, parking on the estate leaves you £5.50 out of pocket. In spite of our awareness that the monies will be well-spent on the heritage of the countryside, this seems against the spirit and the art of rambling in nature.

On the other hand, this is a rich safari along well-maintained paths, through rugged and ancient woodland, following the course of the river Wharfe. Within five minutes of setting off, we have spotted our first kingfisher, which taunts us by flickering continually out of sight each time we almost reach his current perch. He is the essence of energy, a vital spark of blue; it is appropriate that kingfishers are the best sign of a healthy river, as something for which motion is such an apparent imperative can only be sustained by easy supplies of food. As if to confirm this observation, a few minutes later a heron pumps sedately overhead.

At a certain point, we turn away from the river and zig-zag our way up the contours of the valley, following the waymarked red route. Whether the red is for the danger of the precipitous drop that accrues to our left, or for the increase in cardiac activity required to climb it, I am not sure. As we move deeper into the woodland, however, the rain's earlier activities seem to have awakened something primeval; the perpetual mist seems to suck smell from the wet leaves and decaying undergrowth, and ferns surround us with their young spiral spines ready to unfurl into leaf over the coming weeks.

If the vegetation seems jurassic, it is apt that our next encounter is with one of the dinosaurs' ancestors. Ahead of us on the path, a rock stirs and lurches into motion; a common toad, unmistakable with his rough and dimpled skin, struggles his way into deeper cover (though not before I have had a chance to record the moment with a picture).

As we continue, we step from the Jurassic to the medieval. There, on the trees, peculiar "green man" masks entice us along, their porcelain eyes leading us, like Hansel, to a house made of sweets.

Or, at least, the ice cream shop. Here we pause momentarily, and I capture ducks skidding their way to the water; seen frozen in time, their landings are peculiar, like elderly gentlemen easing themselves into their seats, legs slightly ahead, wings reaching back to clutch to the air, but nevertheless landing with something of a drop and a lurch.

Crossing over the river at this point, our enticements along the path are no longer green men, but strange, fallen trees, with bronze coins inexplicably embedded in their trunks. Like uncanny growths, or perverted wishing wells, we are not sure whether they are acts of sculpture or vandalism.

Certainly, I am more excited by the discovery of one wholly-natural parasitism: this glorious fungal growth projecting from one mossy bough, the radial fans beneath them made clearly visible from this angle.

A little climb further on, and we reach our target. Seen framed through the trees as below, the abbey is a romanticist's misty, dreamy imagination set in stone, rooks circling the tops, a river beneath the abbey, and all long, long ruined.

What is Art?

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 07:59:00 +0000

~~There being no Euro 2008 on telly~~ Because I am dedicated student of culture, on Sunday night I went to a debate entitled "What is Art?" which was being run as part of my university's arts festival. The panel comprised a philosopher, two directors of modern art galleries, a theologian, and the director of Resonance FM.

I will not rehearse the debate here, which meandered largely around familiar grounds, but I just wanted to note the way in which the various definitions put forwards in relation to the question might be used to transgress the boundaries between science and art. I jotted down some of the epithets each contributor put forward in answer to the "What is Art?" issue; these included:

Accident becoming intention: the artist is never quite sure of the destiny of his or her work from the outset, and there is always the sense of the haphazard about art which is then justified as such only after it has been produced
Reproducing consciousness in others: the artwork acts as a vehicle for the imagination by which the viewer can occupy the perspective with which the artist views a particular aspect of the world
Pleasure: art is that which generates a response that transcends (note the romanticism) or stands beyond further expression or deconstructive analysis
Utility: art can have a public function, either memorialising events to be shared by the community, or by generating a sense of excitement about the potential of a region or city (something the Resonance FM representative completely overlooked when he derided the Angel of the North as worthless kitsch - hardly something that will go down well with the residents of the rejuvenated Newcastle Gateshead, a destination whose numerous cultural sites receive more visitors per capita than London)
Vision: this one, not surprisingly, was contributed by the theologian, but is probably not too far removed from the ideals of pleasure and reproducing consciousness in others

All of these examples seem fairly mainstream in aesthetic debates, although naturally no one example is capable of containing the full range of what might be, or what has been, considered as art (or, with equal applicability, literature or music). And the one thing missing from the list was ideology: art is whatever a particular culture defines as such because it suits the norms or incarnates the values that the culture wants to perpetuate. Clearly such a view is not one that curators of publically funded galleries can subscribe to. But enough Marxism; I want to focus really on the way in which each argument survives the translation across the disciplinary divide, into the sphere of scientific activity.

If accident becoming intention defines an artwork, does this not also describe Alexander Fleming's petri dishes, left unintentionally on a windowsill but leading to the understood phenomena of antibiotics? If art is the reproduction of consciousness in others, might this not also be the effect of scientific writing, the conventions of which should allow any other scientist to step into the shoes of his predecessor and see the world - albeit within an emotionally neutral framework - as if through his eyes when he conducted the original experiment? Certain scientific writing, such as The Origin of Species, has a clear aesthetic quality, able to generate pleasure in its reader through rhetorical means; but I suspect that the moment when the most dispassionate paper generates new knowledge is not unlike the moment in literature or art when you recognise what you had always known to be true in the world, but never quite so succinctly or elegantly expressed. The ideals of vision and utility pretty much speak for themselves.

I suspect that the most viewed images (artwork?) of the last couple of weeks were not paintings or photographs in a gallery in London, but those astonishing shots captured by the Phoenix lander on Mars, some 35 million miles away. What is so remarkable is the self-consciousness of the shots: here is little Earthbound me, looking at an image taken by a man-made machine, which is looking at itself (or at least its leg), on another world. The pictures are a medium for the mind, vicariously transporting me imaginatively so that I can feel what it must be like to fly (there's transcendence again) beyond Earthly limits, to plant my foot on another world. I am not sure that cognitively, my response to these images is far removed from that which I might have standing before a Picasso. Science might in and of itself possess aesthetic qualities, as a recently-published book entitled The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments implies.

On the other hand, bringing art and science into uncanny proximity encourages me also to note a contrast that might provide my own epithet to use in response to the question "What is Art?" With apologies to Heidegger, I would suggest there is between art and science a general difference between being and becoming.

As I have suggested above, science has many of the same agendas as art, though the methods and tones in which the enterprise is couched seem superficially different. However, the test of success for the process of science is a test of ends, of being; the test of a successful piece of art is one of bringing that art into being, of means floating independently of specific ends. There is no such thing as art, but art describes the process of creating the artefacts which might be given such a name.

The ideal scientific experiment will be replicable numerous times, with no unexpected deviation from the predictions of the model or formula. The model or formula may initially be revealed by accidents like Fleming's mould, but once that process has become known science aims to remove any possibility of the accident happening again; the test of scientific knowlege is its predictive quality: that the same conditions will produce the same state in comparable situations.

Art, however, is a process rather than an end, the becoming about of that entity that might (or might not) be named art once the process is complete. One of the panelists (the one for whom art was defined by its pleasure-giving capacity) noted that he played the accordion very badly, but that he enjoyed the experience of making music, even if his listeners found his results unbearable. Musical notation might be said to be like scientific writing, in the sense that it is a formal recording system that enables anyone able to read the system to reproduce the original product. Except, of course, the whole point of musicality is that there is no such direct correspondance. The accordion player may not be able to reproduce the notes with perfect fidelity, but this does not necessarily mean that the process of reproduction is - for him - unmusical; it is a process of becoming, of discovering a connection between the self and the music that is not definitively posited or founded in the score. One might make a similar point about literary language, in which the creative word floats freely of their author (even if, contra Barthes, the author is not quite dead), such that freshly creative interpretations of the same material are possible, even encouraged.

For the scientist, however, the failure to reach the anticipated end when he conducts an experiment signifies either a failure in the hypothesis, or in the methodology he is repeating, or that conditions not present in that original moment have had an unanticipated effect; such "errors" can, of course, turn out to be very purposive in leading science down new paths. However, the fact that if the second experiment fails to produce the same state of being as the first this must lead to further experiments means that the reproduction is not self-contained, containing within itself its end or purpose.

By contrast, for the accordian player, the fact that he fails to reproduce the notes with the fidelity intended by the composer is essentially irrelevant to his or her personal enjoyment and investment in the process (or becoming) of reaching that end (or being); he or she may want to reproduce the notes more accurately in the future, but the process itself will remain satisfying because it is one of new creation personal to him. Indeed, if the player reaches professional standard, the test of his ability will not be whether he can reproduce the musical consciousness of the composer by translating the score through the medium of the instrument, but the degree to which he or she is also mediating, that is to say, translating and interpreting the music in a newly productive deviation from the original intention.

So what implication does this contrast between being and becoming of science and art have on the question "What is Art?" Essentially, I think, it is to signify that the question what is art can not be grounded in any intrinsic quality of the artefact; nor can it be left ungrounded by talking romantically about metaphysical pleasure that cannot be referred to the mind of the creator or receiver; nor is the idea of utility particularly workable, given that econometrics cannot predict the social value of Guernica as opposed to the latest Damien Hurst installation.

Rather than a top-down approach to the question, by which the art is produced and we then must try to categorise it, the contrast between being and becoming operates in a bottom-up direction: art is whatever is produced with a sense of artistry, or art is the process of generating the thing that has the potential to be named "art." Though a tautology - or hermeneutic circle - it is a feasible definition because it refocuses attention not on the receivers of art but on the producers. The links that bind a viewer to art (or whatever is classified as "art") are potentially unrelated to any quality inherent in the artefact, perhaps intruding through ideology or preconceptions of what good art must do; on my model, there is a very definite connection between the artist and the production (art does not just spring from thin air), and any response to "What is Art?" must attend to the materialities (whether the cognitive processes in the mind of the artist, the nature of the medium being worked) that relate the artist to his creation, not those that flicker between a creation and a viewer.

Additionally, in spite of my contrast between science and art, this does not exclude the former from the potential of the latter: the child's process of discovering that a prism can split light into the rainbow may be treated as the artistic one of the child becoming conscious of a world otherwise hidden; likewise the process of the scientist discovery when something does not happen as expected might also be classed as art under my definition, no matter what the formal properties of the final result. If Fleming's experience of the growth of mould catalysed, for him, a comparable sense of personal growth, the process was artistic, regardless of the aesthetic qualities inherent (or not) in the green goo at the end of that becoming. On the other hand, not all science may be experienced with this cognitive way in the person conducting the experiment, whereas all art, or all science that is art, must be.

Disliking Leica

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 08:07:00 +0000

Anyone who has a hobby or interest involving technology has to have a pinnacle product, the example that is simply the best that it can possibly be so that once you own one, you can only ever look down upon the rest of your field. If you are a motoring enthusiast, for example, then it is pretty hard to beat a Rolls Royce Phantom or a Bugatti Veyron. Or if you are into home audio it is probably the Kharma range of hand crafted speakers. For photographers, there is only really one flag at the top, and it bears the name Hasselblad.

But even if you are a professional, the whole point about these products is that you cannot simply buy one. It is not just the cost, but the exclusivity: when there are only 300 Veyrons in the world, you cannot just pop down to your local showroom and slap a cheque on the table. Further, these things matter not so much for what they are, but for what they represent about your psychological investment in your hobby, and there is a sense in which owning one without being able fully to appreciate it devalues both your field and the product itself. So there is no point in using a Kharma speaker if you do not have ears attuned and trained to the nuances of the sound in produces. And even if I had the £15, 000 or so to buy the latest Hasselblad H3DII, it would be hard to enjoy using it. I would always be conscious that with my limited photography skills and repertoire of techniques, it would be equivalent to me owning a Veyron but only ever driving it at 30 miles per hour. Great engineering deserves great and appreciative users.

So for most of us ordinary folk who are neither lottery winners, nor experts in our field, we have to lower our ideals to a more realistic level. It may not be possible to own a Kharma speaker, but if you put a Bang and Olufsen in your living room, you will notice the quality immediately, and people will still draw a breath when they see that you have one. You may not get on the waiting list for a Bugatti Veyron, but buy a Ferrari Maranello and you will still turn heads in the street.

And, for we photographers, if the Hasselblad is a niche product there is one legendary brand of cameras that most of us do lust after. This is the camera beloved of the Magnum photographer and its founder, Henri Cartier-Bresson, the camera used to document the human world over the last half century, most notably today used by the great Sebastiao Salgado. This is, of course, the Leica.
There is an air of mystique surrounding the Leica. With its quirky, 1950s looks, it seems to refuse the advance of technology, implying instead that someone back then discovered the alchemical secret of the ideal camera, and hence the Leica has no need to be incessantly developed and upgraded like a Nikon or Canon. As a rangefinder, the Leica has no mirror, and its shutter instead produces a legendary whisper, barely interrupting what Bresson termed the "decisive moment" when the photo is captured. And, unlike a professional SLR, the Leica is small, unobtrusive and subtle, which is why Bresson found it ideal for his candid photography.

Whilst for under £100 you can today pick up a used Nikon F4 body, among the best 35mm SLRs ever produced, a Leica M4 body, often viewed as the best of Leica's legendary M series cameras, will set you back £1000. It is a price tag just exceptional enough to retain its air of exclusivity, but tantalisingly within reach to make it a realistic dream.

So it is with great sadness that I read that the Leica brand has not withstood the transition to digital. Michael Kamber is a top photojournalist, who used a Leica M8 - the first digital incarnation of the M series - in his recent assignment in Iraq. This was the sort of assignment to make any photojournalist reach almost automatically for a Leica. War reporting demands a camera able to take reliable shots almost instantaneously, to be unobtrusive in socially sensitive situations, and to be rugged enough to withstand harsh environmental conditions. In spite of the admirable record of the 35mm Leicas over the past half century, however, the latest digital Leica appears to have failed in all three respects, according to Kamber's report: the camera at times failed to start; its memory card slot is difficult to access, making it hard to swap cards when a soldier is threatening to search the photographer; non-recessed or flimsy buttons kept switching as the bumped against his flak jacket; it had severe issues with exposure and white balance; it performed poorly in low light.

Although damning, the review appeared quite objective, as the sample photographs (and their comparisons with a Canon 1D) showed evident deficits. I am not sure quite how to describe my response to the article. If I say it was as if a religious believer had stopped believing in God, that probably overstresses my sensibility, but there was certainly a sense that the reliable star towards which I was unconsciously aiming my photographic learning curve had suddenly become unstable, veering uncertainly. Although usually one buys a better camera to facilitate one's photography, the inverse was true for the Leica: I knew that when my photography became good enough, I could justify owning one. Of course, the Leica M4 has not suddenly become a bad camera just because its latest variant appears deficient. That, I guess, remains the gold standard (to the Hasellblad's platinum). But it is a gold now tarnished; or, perhaps a better metaphor, it is as if the bloodline of the great cameras, and their great users, has become bastardised.

Recycling Plastics

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 08:17:00 +0000

The cynic in me would argue that it is not coincidental that kerbside plastic and cardboard recycling was finally implemented in the constituency in which I live just two weeks before the local council elections. But the environmentalist in me thinks "so what," if it has a beneficial effect on the waste problem.

Over the three years we have been living the our present house, we three (girlfriend, housemate and I) have tried hard to limit our waste. The most significant step is having a compost heap, but we also rigorously washed bottles and cans for kerbside collection, and hoarded cardboard for recycling at the tip whenever we happened to be passing (for the latter is self-defeating if you are going to make a special 10 mile round trip).

We prided ourselves on the fact that our weekly waste amounted to about one large pedal bin sack a week; we also bemoaned the fact that of that waste, possibly three quarters was comprised of recyclable plastic, such as milk cartons. (Yes, ideally we would get our milk in glass bottles, but rather than the milkman we choose to get ours from the local organic farm in plastic ones - sourcing locally in plastic bottles is probably better than sourcing milk that could have come from any distance, even if its container is environmentally better.) This stacks up with the average statistics: nationally, plastic makes up 11% of household waste, and of this 40% is plastic bottles. Unfortunately for us, though, our local council did not offer any recycling of plastics, even at the central waste disposal sites.

So when plastic kerbside recycling arrived, we were pretty pleased. And, lo and behold, our throwaway waste was cut dramatically, probably averaging a little more than one plastic carrier bag per week (though we obviously try not to use these when shopping, its better to reuse the ones that are pressed upon you than it is to buy new bin liners).

However, the environmental sceptic in me wonders whether our pride ought to be deflated a little. Consulting my recycling bible, I discover that there are seven types of recyclable plastics:

PET (Polythylene Teraphthalate - try saying that with your mouth full!). A strong plastic designed for containing high-pressure liquids; used for bottled soft drinks, cooking oil bottles, oven ready trays.
HDPE (Hi Density Polyethylene). Used for plastic milk bottles and washing up liquid.
PVC (Polyvinyl Chloride). A hard plastic, used for plastic pipes, outdoor furniture, bottled water and shrink wrap.
LDPE (Low Density Polethylene). A softer plastic used for carrier bags and bin liners.
PP (Polyproylene). Used for bottle caps and margarine tubs.
PS (Polystyrene). Used for foam trays, protective packaging, vending cups.
Other.

These are denoted by the little symbol impressed or printed on to the item.

The problem is, unlike glass or cans there is no way of automatically separating different types of plastics, whilst individual items might contain two or more types of plastic. This makes recycling at best time and labour expensive, and at worst means that separating and recycling the individual components demands more energy than their initial production. Finally, even if recycling of plastic were more feasible, the whole appeal of plastic is that it is cheap to produce from the outset, so recycling may be self-defeating if the market becomes over-saturated with supply.

Although on balance it remains a good thing that recycling of plastics is available to every household, the case of plastics ultimately reinforces the validity of that mantra: reduce, reuse, recycle. Recycling should be seen as the last step, a salve for the symptoms rather than the cure for the condition of the over-consuming Western world. The best thing to do is to cut down packaging from the outset, by buying food products with little or no packaging - does it really make a difference to the quality of those bananas or apples if they are shrink wrapped? I suspect not. Secondly - and still at the imaginary supermarket - if you do buy loose items but put them in those small plastic food bags, try to re-use these for your sandwiches or food storage; rinse them through, and substitute them for your usual clingfilm or tin foil. Only after the bag is falling apart should you think about placing it in the green bin.

Wrap reported in 2008 that compared to the previous year, "The weight of plastic bottles being collected for recycling in the UK has increased by 68% with 92% of local authorities offering collection facilities." This is a good thing. But it will be a drop in the ocean if the use of plastics continues to increase at the point of origin. Between 1995 and 2002, for example, my book informs me that sales of plastic drink bottles almost doubled, whilst recycling proportionately fell.

Creating Valid HTML With Flash Widgets

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 08:48:00 +0000

For those of you who are anal about creating Valid HTML, embedding widgets that use Flash can be a pain, as the third-party creations do not necessarily pay attention to W3C guidelines. Although widgets can add functionality and a fresh feel to your pages, sadly they are sometimes not well-coded. This is the case for the Goodreads widget which appears in the left sidebar. Given the literary nature of this site, its quite nice for readers to know where my literary tastes of the moment are heading. However, the widget does not validate, because it uses the <embed> attribute, which has been deprecated since HTML 1.0.

Happily, without too much effort, and reference to one website, I have been able to rework the Goodreads widget to ensure that the pages on which it appears validate correctly, replacing <embed> with <object>.

The old version appears on the Goodreads website like this:

<div style="margin:0px;">
<embed width="190" height="300" src="http://www.goodreads.com/images/widget/widget2.swf" quality="high" wmode="transparent" flashvars="id=222222&shelf=read&title=Ishmael's bookshelf: read&sort=date_added&order=d&params=amazon,associateid,dest_site,amazon">
</embed>
</div>
<div style="margin:0px;">
<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/user/show/987180" target="_blank"> <img alt="Widget_logo" border="0" height="32" src="http://www.goodreads.com/images/widget/widget_logo.gif" title="my goodreads profile" width="190" /></a>
</div>

Where "id=222222" will be replaced by your own unique reference number, and "associateid" by your Amazon Associate's identification, allowing you to cash in on any click throughs to Amazon via the widget. The following alternative seems to work fine, although for a reason I don't understand it eliminates the pleasant bevelled margins (something I can live without).

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://www.goodreads.com/images/widget/widget2.swf" width="190" height="300">
<param name="movie" value="http://www.goodreads.com/images/widget/widget2.swf" />
<param name="quality" value="high" />
<param name="FlashVars" value="id=222222&shelf=read&title=Recently Read&sort=date_read&order=d&params=amazon,associateid,dest_site,amazon" />
</object>

<div style="margin: 0px;">
<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/user/show/987180" target="_blank"><img alt="Widget_logo" src="http://www.goodreads.com/images/widget/widget_logo.gif" title="my goodreads profile" width="190" border="0" height="32" /></a>
</div>

Substitute your own id number and Associates ID (if applicable), and hey presto, clean and valid HTML and a snazzy widget. To compensate for the margin problem, you can replace <div style="margin: 0px;"> with <div style="margin: 2px;">, or whatever margin you prefer.

Postgraduate Diary: The Best Laid Plans of PhD Students

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Sat, 31 May 2008 20:05:00 +0000

I like to think that I am a fairly well-organised person. I try to be punctual for meetings; I take a dull pleasure in establishing arcane filing systems for my emails; I synchronise my online calendar with my phone to ensure I never miss an important appointment or birthday. I hope that something of this aspect of my personality shows in my prose, as I also delight in correcting every last stop and comma, and perversely enjoy conforming to the rigours of MLA style.

But, as is evidenced by the scores of poets and writers institutionalised in literary history, writing is a schizophrenic activity. The impulsive Byron can produce some of the most perfectly contrived metrics in English verse; conversely, the scrupulous yours truly finds his writing refuses to stay trim. One morning I awake bursting with inspiration; the next, mind and page are a literal blank. Sleepless nights and restless dreams give rise to expansive Xanadu's of prose; hours of attention in the library yield nothing. Reconciling my writing personality with my more fastidious one has been a challenge for me, in my PhD years, as the months since Christmas (and since my distant previous entry in my Postgraduate Diary) have evidenced sharply.

Over the vacation, I attended a workshop on planning for completion. This explored the practical timetable of submitting titles choosing examiners and getting the thesis printed and bound, and also the intellectual planning required for writing up, honing abstracts and proof reading. Duly, after the workshop, I poured procrastination into the coloured bars of an Excel project planner.

I would devote March to the four conference papers I was giving that month; April and June would be focused on writing the Introduction and Conclusion chapters; three months at the end would be set aside for proof reading; and the three months between Christmas and March would provide ample time for me to write a brief chapter on The Matrix, the final part of my thesis's body.

But over the months since Christmas, that brief chapter became greedy. It swallowed contextual thinking on philosophy and religious allegory; gulped down postmodernism; fatted itself on phenomenology; and then it demanded more. More on the history of Artificial Intelligences in cinema. More on postmodern simulacra. More on representations of Cartesian deceiving demons in fiction.

By March - when I had to break off to write my conference papers - that simple, final chapter had become a confabulatory hydra, chattering about Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and about disincarnate intelligences in early science fiction, and about androids in Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and about replicants in Ridley Scott's adaptation of the former, Blade Runner, and about how these different texts (the first two from 1968, the latter from 1982) illustrated the move to postmodern grounds for science fiction which The Matrix then occupies, and about how postmodernism has been conceptualised by Frederic Jameson as the product of late capitalist logic. By April, when I had beaten it into a shape suitable for showing to my supervisor, the beast was 30 000 words long, and I had not even started on The Matrix.

My carefully laid plans thus became horribly corrupted. But - and here is the thing that is both frustrating and thrilling about writing and research - the mutant that unexpectedly now constitutes a third of my 100 000 word limit has made the overall project far stronger. The fact that I was not able to predict I would cover this ground from the outset implies that I have inadvertently uncovered cultural connections and currents that will, because so unexpected, probably lend my research some originality. And, on reflection, it only took three months to write; that is to say, a third of my word count took one twelfth of my three years. Why, writing must be almost becoming easy.

Nevertheless, it is only with hindsight that I can be so positive. The last few months have been a dark and agonising period in my research career. Things now, though, are looking up. When I finally got around to it, the chapter on The Matrix only took three weeks to write, probably because the time away made me realise just how redundant many of my notes were, and to construct an argument based on just a couple of premises. The body of my thesis, though punctuated with "xxx" that mark gaps I have to fill, is now generally complete. I can even afford to take five days off, on a camping trip which I delight in planning to the last detail...except the weather.

The Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Fri, 23 May 2008 08:45:00 +0000

On July 1st, 2007, a much-trumpeted new environmental directive came into force in the UK and across the European Union: Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment, ironically abbreviated to WEEE. The European Commission claim the legislation ensures that:

Producers will be responsible for taking back and recycling electrical and electronic equipment. This will provide incentives to design electrical and electronic equipment in an environmentally more efficient way, which takes waste management aspects fully into account. Consumers will be able to return their equipment free of charge.

So when our digital set-top box gave up its thirst for power and refused to give in to all bullying at the end of my screwdriver, and when two of my Xbox controllers became so clogged with dust that they no longer functioned, I assumed that it would be possible to recycle these in accordance with WEEE procedures.

Because we still had the receipt for the Freeview box, my first thought was to return it to the retailer, Tesco. I visited their website to check whether our local store has such facilities, at which point I started to suspect that the WEEE legislation is not so robust as is made out. Explaining their compliance with a benchmark piece of environmental legislation, the UK's biggest retailer devotes a mere small paragraph on their corporate website:

2007/08 finally sees the implementation of the WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment) Directive in the UK. In support of this, Tesco has continued to play an active role in the development of the Distributor Take Back Scheme. This will provide a mechanism for retailers who do not wish or are unable to provide WEEE returns facilities in their stores to fund the provision of facilities at upgraded local authority civic amenity sites. We believe this arrangement will provide the most sustainable and effective solution for customers.

I am not sure that the most effective solution for customers - who presumably go to Tesco stores on a near weekly basis - is for the retailer to pass on responsibility to local councils with their distributed waste disposal sites.

With my nose now sniffing the air of waste (or WEEE!), I investigated further. Directed to the UK implementation of the legislation, The Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Regulations 2006, I found that - contrary to my earlier belief - it is not a requirement of either producers, retailers or distributors to provide like-for-like or instore recycling schemes. Rather, the legislation can be complied with if the retailer signs up to one of 37 approved "Producer Compliance Schemes."

One such scheme involves providing financial support for upgrading local council waste disposal sites, which is precisely what Tesco have done. However, the problem with the legislation is the lack of transparency. To register with a compliance scheme retailers must pay a registration fee and inform the scheme of the total of electronic equipment they place in the market each year. There will obviously be a tendency to underestimate this data. However, will this be picked up at the point of recycling by the public bodies now made responsible for the trade waste? The "financing of the costs of the collection, treatment, recovery and environmentally sound disposal of WEEE from private households" is determined by a formula: "The amount of the relevant WEEE" - seriously, it's hard not to laugh - "for which each producer shall be responsible shall be calculated in relation to each of the categories of EEE" through the formula (A / B) x C.

A is the amount of tonnes of EEE that has been put onto the market by that producer over the particular period (remember, this amount is estimated by the producers themselves). B is the total that has been put onto the market by all producers in the same period. Thus the division ensures that a large retailer like Tescos will contribute the appropriate ratio of total waste as compared to an individual small shop. C is the multiplier for the amount of EEE deposited at a collection facility, with a consequent cost of disposal and recycling.

The thing to note here is that for financing local authority recycling schemes, the formula applies only to the amount of waste that consumers themselves actively take to be recycled. Thus whilst the legislation also requires retailers to mark EEE products with a crossed-out wheelie bin, the retailer is not under obligation to make clear how precisely to recycle the product (though under Section 17 they are obliged to provide information on the different constituent materials in the product), nor to explain to consumers how they are complying with WEEE capabilities through third parties.

It is therefore entirely contrary to Tesco's financial interests to direct me from their corporate website to the specific council site at which I can recycle my old set-top box. My waste would add a small chunk to the "C" half of the equation. Rather, I have to take the initiative and work out my nearest capable site through Recycle More, and to transport it there myself (with the added cost of carbon emissions from my car journey).

In the case of my WEEE, when I did get to our nearest council facility, I could not see any signs of the added investment one would expect. In contrast to the neat skips for garden waste, cardboard, paper etc., the WEEE section is apparently just an undesignated pile in the corner: TVs piled on fridges, digital set top boxes mixed with desktop monitors, all items with different disposal requirements and hazardous materials. Where the money actually goes remains to be seen beneath the pile of rubbish.

Incidentally, don't think I am picking on Tesco. At best, Asda have precisely the same policy. At worst, Morrisons and Sainsbury's do not appear to have any information on their websites or in their corporate responsibility reports. By contrast to all these four, the Currys group seem to have an excellent policy, offering free in-store recycling when you buy a replacement product from them, even if the old one was not sold by Currys. Their home delivery service will also collect old large kitchen appliances, such as fridges, as new ones are dropped off.

So what, then, is the solution for a piece of legislation that should have tightened the knot tying producers to the waste of products they promote, but which instead has at its centre a major loophole? Because of the formula, retailers will underestimate the amount of goods they will sell; more significantly, it is not in their interests to increase the waste deposited at council sites because this will be reflected in the "C" aspect of the equation, and so they do not actively advertise the scheme. The answer is to turn the formula around. The moment individual consumers take it upon themselves to recycle more, the more this will increase the burden on companies, encouraging them perhaps to take recycling schemes in house (as Currys have done) and certainly to look at the amount and nature of electricals waste they produce. Is it really worth promoting that shaver with a battery, over the simple plastic one? Is it counterproductive to encourage people to upgrade their computers every six months?

As ever, though, the real issue is one of the chicken and the egg. Local councils or government will not want to invest in encouraging individual recycling, for example through kerbside collections, when the companies should be paying for it under the legislative framework. On the other hand, retailers will not want to make themselves financially liable for the full mass of their WEEE, when they can paper over their corporate responsibility by claiming to be assisting councils (but not consumers) on their glossy websites.

The Act of Reading

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Tue, 06 May 2008 12:27:00 +0000

The act of reading has to be one of the most uncomfortable activities devised in the name of leisure. Consider what is asked of the reader, when presented with a book. Here we have a device that dictates its own position with absolute authority. It is to be held not more than fifty centimetres from the face, else it will truculently dissolve its meanings to an inky smudge. The arms must therefore lock themselves at right angles to the body, neither moving forwards nor wavering, lest the print give up its contract with the eyes that are desperately trained on a sliver of word at a time.

Of course, one can rest the book at a table, or upon a desk, in which case all manner of props come into play, all with the sole purpose of keeping this object static. For it will insist on moving. Should you dare turn your back for an instant, pages will spontaneously leaf themselves backwards. Thus are pens, scraps of paper, food, tissues all recruited to mark the spot, such that the book over time becomes marked with an indelible debris of tomato ketchup, tea stains, snot. If you do keep attention for long enough, though, the book will become restless, transferring its weight from its right half to its left, necessitating subtle shifts in whatever tower - usually constructed from other books - you had devised to prop it at a forty-five degree angle.

Worst, though, is the trial of reading in bed. One's vision of the bedtime reader is the hairnetted housewife, herself propped by mounds of downy pillows, her dog-eared romantic novel supported by a mound of goose-feather duvet. Here she half-lies, half-sits, in perfect readerly comfort, until her husband's foot is heard on the bottom stair, from which point a scurry of activity ensures that, by the time he reaches the top, lights are off, she has been asleep for hours, and it is not only the novel's romance that has been tidily closed for this evening. But this warm vision of domestic ritual is impossible to enact in any house other than the snug double-glazed mansions of middle England. Dare to live (as does this reader) in a damp, stone cottage, for example, and night brings with it a tyranny of cold, that taunts the innocent reader with a Catch-22. For in this environment, one must choose whether to sacrifice the body to the mind, or vice versa. If one chooses to snuggle deep into the blankets and preserve the body's warmth, the arms alone can be allowed to protrude, but must do so vertically, holding the book directly above the peeking head; arms thus soon tire, and the book is cast in shadow from the anglepoise above. The alternative is to turn to the side, contorting the spine and using creased elbows as support for the rapidly leadening neck. Finally, one can satisfy the body's craving for warmth, and simply sleep, leaving the book dead on the bedside table. It is wrong to suppose that intellectuals are dedicated to the life of mind rather than body; witness the goose bumps, the back ache, the dry eye, all sustained in refusing dreams in favour of the imagination invested within this small cuboid.

Of course, all these exertions and stresses are worth it, for the worlds to which the good novel will remove the reader can dull the ache of limbs better than any pharmaceutical. The keen reader lives for those moments of total immersion, when he or she forgets that this physical world exists at all. But such moments are made more ideal by the sudden discovery - the sudden happening upon - a reading position of infinite comfort which, having been found, allows the activity to be sustained for hours. Such positions are not signposted; they are not marked in a library or known in the ergonomics of a favourite chair. They are hidden, like secrets, around the everyday house. They come upon one who, having stood to put the kettle on, finds himself standing at the kitchen window with the light cast just perfectly on the page. They are lurking on the bottom step of the stair, when one meant to go and fetch something but has suddenly thought to sit and reopen the book which distracted him from the job in the first place. There is one on that particularly mossy patch in the garden, which, when hit by the warming sun at the right moment of the day, accommodates your posterior like a King's silk cushion.

And there! There is one in Peter Vilhelm's masterful painting "Girl Reading in an Interior." She is leaning against the sharp edge of a hard-looking chair reading an open book, or perhaps a thick letter. It should be uncomfortable, but is instead the picture of comfort happened upon fortuitously. Diagonally from upper left to the floor in the centre, is cast a sunbeam. From right to left, her weight is pressed on a delicate outstretched leg, and she has found herself as featherweight as the cast of incorporeal light that her stance mirrors. She did not mean to be here. She had been en route from the imagined front of the picture - the position of the viewer - through that closed door on the left, through which surely awaited some vital task or arduous chore. But something diverted her, and she found herself suddenly in this unfurnished, anonymous corridor - far removed from her designated "reading" chair in the stately drawing room of this comfortable suburban house - totally exorcised from her body, living completely through those other consciousnesses nested deep in the words on the page.

Shell Pull Out of Renewables Project

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Fri, 02 May 2008 11:17:00 +0000

By any standard, Shell's recent decision to sell their 33% stake in the London Array offshore windfarm is a disastrous turn of policy, which has rightly been lambasted. Shell this week announced profits of £4 billion, and it is hard to see how they can justify withdrawing their investment of £0.6 billion from the £2 billion renewables project, in which they were the major partner along with Eon. Their press release explained that their decision was taken on the basis that "We constantly review our projects and investment choices in all of our businesses, focusing on capital discipline and efficiency." So not much need to read between the lines there: with oil currently running at $120 a barrel, there is more money to be made elsewhere, possibly lurking beneath melting icecaps.

But whilst Shell's retreat exposes their much-trumpeted environmental policies as a superficial marketing gimmick hiding a hard core of greed, it also indicates something inherently flawed in the government's environmental claims. At a time of credit crunch and inflationary belt-tightening, the government justifies maintaining fuel taxes at their present level on the assumption that lowering them would have a detrimental effect on the environment. In reality, the only groups that win from high fuel prices are the major companies, whose ability to affect the environment for good or ill far outweighs that of the individual consumer, who needs to get to work and the out-of-town supermarket and will almost certainly do so by car, at any cost.

Rather than falsely sustaining the high price of oil, the route to encourage individuals to choose environmentally friendly transportation methods, and to reduce the effect independent oil companies have to undermine any national commitment to renewables, is through radical change in infrastructure at the national level. Increase subsidies for public transport, provide incentives and tax breaks for people to throw out their oil burners in favour of sustainable heating, and suddenly Shell might realise that there is more to be made in serving renewables, than digging for the black gold.

A Doll's House at The Northern Stage

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Thu, 01 May 2008 07:48:00 +0000

Has ever a dramatist better exploited the discrepancy between what an audience - seeing everything - knows and what a character does, than Henrik Ibsen? Has ever a director better understood the political effect of this double vision than Erica Whyman, with her setting of A Doll's House on a semi-transparent stage? On the evidence of last night's performance at the Northern Stage, I would be prepared to make a case for both Wyman and Ibsen.

The play's problem of vision, of failing to see through the eyes of another, is given an appropriate architecture in Soutra Gilmour's set, which locates the play in the 1950s. Framed by a proscenium arch decorated in large patterned wall paper which scales the centre stage as if it is a model, the main house is constructed with semi-transparent perspex walls and - crucially - a clear postbox, and is filled with formica tables, flimsy chairs and sofas. As is Nora, every artefact is liable to replacement, and at risk of seeming dated; this family home is decorated with bought objects rather than family heirlooms to be cherished for their uniqueness, however drab their appearance.

The semi-transparent walls work with brilliant effect. We see bustle in corridors; significant people and letters arrive in the background whilst others talk unknowingly on the main stage; Torvald locks himself in his study and chats with Dr. Rank, perhaps discussing their idealised Nora who is playing a radically different character in our direct gaze. Ibsen effectively exploits the ability of the audience to see everything in a family home, whereas each individual can only see the costume presented by the other; the transparent set provides a visual corollary to this experience, the experience of theatre where life is literally an act, the actor literally the doll, the mechanisms all on show.The house takes on its own dimension of consciousness (or unconsciousness) in Whyman's production.

For an audience, especially a modern one, who knows in advance about Nora's subterfuge and her self-will, it is hard to know whether to laugh or weep with infuriation at a Torvald Helmer who is so intellectually and empathetically impoverished that he simply cannot see his world through the eyes of his wife, even as we can see right through his world on this set.

At the interval, one of my friends commented that Torvald's acting seemed a little wooden. But that is precisely the point - he has to be intellectually immobile, talking in clichés ("my most precious possession"; "I want to be the strong man") to contrast with Nora's independence. But as well as just a dramatic foil, Torval's stasismakes perhaps the most potent political point. Any hope we have that he, too, can change is delayed until after Nora slams the door behind her. That he, not Nora, ask the final question laden with potential - "something glorious?" - leaves the ending ultimately ambiguous rather than hopeful: will Torvald have it in him to strive to find realisation, or will he will have to wait, vainly, for something glorious simply to drop through the letterbox? There are no hints in Torvald's earlier performance to answer either way, which is perhaps - on reflection after the drama of Nora's exit - the most damning statement of the play. At least Nora's gender allows her to know her status as being lesser in society, and thereby provokes her to look inward upon herself as an individual; Torvald's masculinity gives him neither a broad vision of the world outside, nor a focus through which to reflect upon himself. John Kirk as Torvald plays the role with precisely the lack of fluency needed for this social puppet, with a tunnel vision engineered by his times. (Though, it should be noted, it seemed as if Kirk missed his cue a couple of times in the final act, which probably was not intended as part of his representation of this lack of fluency.)

Exemplifying this is the central Tarantella dance scene. Here choreographed with energy on the brink of vehemence, Torvald is captivated, aroused and in control as he conducts Nora's movements, but when Nora stops abruptly as Mrs. Linde enters with news of her vital conversation with Krogstad, Torvald is left bewildered by the sudden change and as he is shooed into his study by Nora. The discrepancy between his singular vision of an erotic doll-wife, and our wider vision of the symbolism behind the movements - of Nora's expression of her inner demons through the "rather too realistic" urgency of her dancing; of Mrs. Linde's return - again makes movement through the house a politicised act.

The Tarantella is a visual premonition of the final scene, when what has been subconsciously known by the audience is made overt in polemic. But even now, explicitly stated rather than implicit in motion, Torvald misreads the situation with horrible ignorance. When Nora's illegal contract is returned, rescuing Torvald from his ruin, he believes he can restore the situation in a moment, dressing his doll back in the clothes of which he has just disrobed her: "I wouldn't be a proper man if I didn't find a woman doubly attractive for being so obviously helpless."

But if Torvald is cognitively inert until the very final, preminitory words, Nora starts a Victorian, and ends a modern, even a prototypical feminist. Which is why it makes perfect sense for Wyman to transplant the play to the 1950s; as Peter Lathan observes:

the relationship between Nora and Torvald Helmer could have been patterned on the "happy home-maker" image of women pushed by the media of the '50s. Nora as the "little squirrel" in 1879 is reflected in the "squirrels and bears" of Jimmy Porter and his wife in 1956.

Like the late nineteenth century, the 1950s were a liminal period when the boundaries of politics were becoming stretched, but it was hard to balance its elastic potential against leaving the family home, proscriptive but warm, masculine but safe. When Mrs. Linde comes in from the winter cold to sit beside the fire, she is moving from insecure independence to - temporarily - comfortable conformity. Inversely, Nora leaves this setting to enter a chilly society on the brink of change. Yet because the domestic setting does, in spite of it all, work as a compromised idyll - with happy children, confidente maids, wealth - it is vital that we believe in Nora's individuality, trust that she would still be prepared to relinquish it. In this case, Nora (Tilly Gaunt) is one upon whom realisation dawns in a totally convincing way.

Nora has moments when she herself appears not dissimilar to Torvald. Having discussed Mrs. Linde's loss of her mother and her financial plight, Nora comments that Mrs. Linde is looking unwell: you ought to go to a spa, she suggests, in an naively ugly sort of affection. But if Nora displays the same lack of empathy - the ability to see through others - as Torvald, it is offset by the other dimensions and perspectives she embodies within her own fragile, effeminate frame. Like Walt Whitman revelling in his song of myself, Tilly Gaunt's Nora contains multitudes: she can be of an instant flirtatious, proud, manipulative, helpless, naive, sympathetic, girlish, maternal or gossipy. She is a doll, can wear any clothes, perform any act; her pleading with Torvald when she wants money - elegant arms extended, wrists flicking to his shoulder, skirt flying tantalisingly high as she moves - is hard even for the objective observer to resist, even though we see these actions for what they are, facile manipulations.

The trouble is that with the exception of her business loan, she has not adopted clothes of her choosing, but has had them put upon her by her gender, financial need, and social nicety: "I have been your doll wife, just as at home I was Daddy's doll child." It is this sense that Nora has always had the capacity to play any part, but this time will choose her own, that makes us have faith in that her ultimate decision is natural to her, rather than imposed by the dramatist to score a didactic point.

As she drip-feeds Mrs. Linde (and, vicariously, the audience) with information about her loan, she tells her that she dreams of seducing an elderly gentleman who will provide her with lots of money. Though Gaunt adopts a superficially gossipy tone here - it is a clichéd girlhood dream, after all - there is a darker undercurrent here. We fully believe that she could do this if she so wanted, and so when she tells Mrs. Linde that it is not the decrepit Dr. Rank who is her benefactor there is a sense that the audience themselves are not quite understanding Nora emotionally, not reading her correctly, even though we already knew in plot terms that Rank was not Nora's donor. The inevitability of the plot is in tension with the fluidity with which Nora performs and manoeuvres within and against its expectations.

Gradually, at the start of Act One, Nora peels away the layers of her secret: she took out a loan to pay for Torvald's rest cure, something he must not know about for fear of remission; the loan was from a mystery donor; she is herself paying back the loan by working, showing a financial acumen not normally associated with this Macaroon-munching spendthrift; the loan is from Krogstad. Then, from Krogstad, at the close of Act One come the damning revelations that expose her as having not been in control as she has narrated it: Krogstad will tell Helmer (so what, she impetuously replies, "then my husband will see for himself what a bad man you are"); the contract was invalid, having been signed by her father after his death. Don't you understand, he pleads, cajoles and implores, admirably caring about her as he sees in Nora the mirror of his own social downfall, you have broken the law.

When she then comes out that "then they must be very bad laws," we want to sympathise - Nora is right that the ends justified the means - but find it hard, because her rash lack of honesty does justify the trap in which she now finds herself at this, a literal end. Since Krogstad - diminuitive, harrassed - has suffered under the law having defrauded others for similarly sound motives, Nora for all her beautiful, batted eyelashes must be punished too. Society may be rigid, but it is only in representing that rigidity without any double-standards that the play can promote change. As with Torvald's rigidity, but in a different way, Krogstad's performance as a desperate but sympathetic man pleading for Nora to understand the legal nature of her plight lends some weight to Ibsen's assertion that this play is not about women's rights in particular, but human rights in general.

It is certainly not only a problem of gender, which is anyway just another costume, one Mrs. Linde, plainly dressed and fiercely motivated, has been able to cast off. It is not a problem of the errors one makes or the desires one has. It is a problem of individuality. This makes the play so powerful - just as she could have seduced Rank to attain the money, Nora could easily wheedle her way out of this hole, also. Torvald's reaction to Krogstad's first letter plays to a stereotype of the misled husband, and his joyous response to the returned contract is so self-indulgently celebratory, that we understand that, ruined or saved, Nora could adjust to accommodate herself to a new stereotype Torvald could make for himself: the deceived but forgiving husband.

But it is her refusal to do this even as she is at her most seductively potent, dressed in the bright red Capri costume of the tarentalla, that is the real glory. For all that it would resolve a plot and enact change of sorts, conforming to a type again would be to don a costume already made for her. So with Nora, it is not so much that she changes specifically, as that she accumulates potential to change in ways of her choosing. Torvald wants answers: won't she let religion guide her, what morals will she have, how can she leave her children, her sacred duty as a mother? Nora, confidently, admits that she has no answers or explanations. The difference is that when she does have answers, it will be she who supplies them. She is no longer a daddy's plaything - "I thought what Daddy thought" - she is an individual.

There are innate structural problems with Ibsen's play that the striking performances Whyman draws from her actors cannot counter. The final act is too long, and loses much of its dramatic momentum by the time of the infamous door slam. There are chronological flaws, as when Mrs. Linde leaves shortly after Krogstad to encourage him to return his letter, only to arrive at his house and find he has left for the country. Ibsen cannot quite resist the template of the "well made play" tradition with which he is working, with switches in plot being brought about artificially, through the arrival of letters at (un)fortunate moments. Tied to the demands of a plot of revelation, we are still some way from the modern drama of family crisis that we find in Eugene O'Neill or Arthur Miller, where the mere tremor of Mary's hands and encroaching fog (Long Day's Journey Into Night) or the rise and dimming of lights (Death of a Salesman) bring about revelation through an almost purely symbolic drive.

Whilst updating the play to the 1950s makes sense in historical terms as the decade of emergent second-wave feminism and political ferment - both subtexts to O'Neill's and Miller's work around that period - other historically-specific aspects lose out in the translation. The idea that one is biologically infected with the moral sins of the fathers (or mothers) seems too vehemently adhered too for a decade which would see the discovery of DNA and when the effects of social Darwinism were all too familiar through the Holocaust. Rank is hysterical that his decaying spine is suffering for the Epicureanism of his father; Nora reacts with utter horror when Krogstad tells her she is a criminal and she shoos her bewildered children violently away as if they might catch her syndrome with a mere touch; Torvald is conviced that Nora must never be allowed to see her children. These beliefs make some sense - we still implicitly feel that bad parents make for ASBO offspring - but the vehemence of Dr. Rank's, Nora's, and Torvald's reaction requires the scientific endorsement of social Darwinism and degeneration, backgrounds which had been lost by the 1950s, though absolutely intense in the late nineteenth century.

Am I Normal? Spirituality and Psychiatry

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 08:27:00 +0000

Until the BBC iPlayer was released, there would have been no point in blogging about programmes which the reader would have no chance of watching again. But the iPlayer is available, and so too is the exemplary documentary I watched last night: Am I Normal? presented by psychologist Dr. Tanya Byron.

In the hour-long film - a sensible, grown-up film without patronising background music or silly graphics - she explored the fine line between religious devotion and psychiatric disorder. Why is it that Pentecostals who speak in tongues are considered blessed, but schizophrenics who hear voices are institutionalised? Why is it that we pass by the street evangelist, thinking him to be slightly weird, but consider the grey-haired Carmelite nun, silently passing time in a convent, to be harmless?

Byron - an atheist herself - was open-minded about the value of religious belief for some people (statistically, patients with a spiritual background are more likely to recover from psychiatric syndromes than are atheists). But she was quite prepared to damn the cult of faith healing, which lacks any substantial evidence base and which may raise false hope for patients with severe medical conditions best treated by mainstream physical interventions. She was respectful in pressing the values and beliefs of atheists (Matthew Parris) and believers (Jeremy Vine) alike. She witnessed an evangelical song meeting, noting the same symptoms of crowd arousal - raised arms, physical proximity - as occur at football matches and rock concerts. She was intrigued by a trained psychiatrist who treated patients by exorcising the dead child spirits by whom they were possessed, seemingly (though no hard data is available) with results akin to those achieved by therapies such as CBT. Byron examined the neuroscience of talking in tongues (neurotheology). This has shown how the neurological system that regulates semantic language does shut down when people are being "possessed" as mediums for the "spirit," proving that they are not deliberate fakes, though it does not (cannot) prove either way the mechanism by which the synaptic action happens in the first place, whether supernaturally Holy or a self-induced behaviour.

This serious and sensitive look at what could have been a greatly divisive issue ought to be well-received by religious believers, atheists and scientists. It did not make grand claims to prove or disprove the existence of God, or to castigate religion as anti-science (though this was implicitly there in the background, in the consistent lack of an evidence base for alternative therapies and faith healing). Rather, it stuck to its remit to expose the conventions by which "normal" is determined, and it concluded with some force that what we classify as psychologically normal - and the normal therapies deployed to treat psychiatric disorders - are generally socially-constructed ideologies.

Because of this, many of the conventions and methods between treatments may be comparable at root. I noted that the psychiatrist-exorcist asked many questions of his patient whilst rhetorically planting ideas; a similar sort of approach is used by mainstream therapy or even by the Eliza chatbot (the latter, a simple artificial intelligence programme, is peculiarly effective at helping interlocutors to express their anxieties). It seems that treating patients with psychological problems may be done effectively through talking with God, inner demons, keyboards, doctors or priests. The challenge science and religion must meet now is to confront the evidence: even if normal and mad are arbitrary categories, there must be one form of treatment that is most effective, for most people, most of the time. One suspects the scientists may be very prepared to explore this. The priests, less so. But with the likes of Tanya Byron moderating, there may be hopes for a start.

Back to Kubrick's Future: Revisiting 2001: A Space Odyssey

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 08:00:00 +0000

Because the broad remit of my research allows such things, since Christmas I have gone beyond the infinite universe of books to write on science fiction film, with my current focus being Stanley Kubrick's 1968 masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Watching this in 2008, and reading about its reception at the time, is a slightly bemusing experience.

As Jerome Agel's contemporary edited collection, The Making of Kubrick's 2001 reports, critics at the time were less than complementary about Kubrick's ten million dollar baby (the contrast with the universal acclaim for Grand Theft Auto IV released today could not be more striking). Some excerpts from the more damning reviews:

You could see it a dozen times and still not understand it. But then, you didn't really expect to understand a movie that took $10.5 million and four years to make, did you?

The guesses of Messrs. Kubrick and Clarke must be as good as ours.

Were 2001 cut in half it would be a pithy and potent film, with an impact that might resolve the "enigma" of its point and preclude our wondering why exactly Mr. Kubrick has brought us to outer space in the year 2001...We hope he sticks to his cameras and stays down to earth - for that is where his triumph remains.

Granted: 2001 is the head flick of all time. Note the faintly resinous spoor of the audience, the people fighting at intermission to get those 50-cent chocolate bars, the spaced-out few who contemplate the curtain for long minutes after the movie ends.

The tedium is the message.

That last piece of pithy genius is from Joseph Gelmis, but in a second review, having watched the film again, he acknowledges one of the problems reviewers of the film at the time faced:

When a film of such extraordinary originality as Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey comes along it upsets the members of the critical establishment because it exists outside their framework of apprehending and describing movies. They are threatened. Their most polished puns and witticisms are useless because the conventional standards don't apply. They need an innocent eye, an inconditioned reflex and a flexible vocabulary. With one exception (The New Yorker's Penelope Gilliatt), the daily and weekly reviewers offhandedly dismissed the film as a disappointment or found it an ambitious failure.

Gelmis's first review in Newsday (April 4, 1968) classified it precisely in these terms. However, his second review admired the fact that it "uncompromisingly demands acceptance on its own unique terms." Unfortunately, as Gelmis noted, such a refusal to buckle to the audience's demands for simple plot and exegesis meant that its stark originality did not make sense except on a second or third viewing.

But this is precisely why I am so surprised by all the negative reviews from 1968. Because, in 2008, one can only ever watch 2001 for the first time having already seen it many times before. This is to say that anyone who has ever played Frontier Elite to the soundtrack of the Blue Danube Waltz, or seen adverts for the Apple Macintosh, or watched Star Wars or Star Trek or last year's science fiction hit Sunshine has already experienced Kubrick's vision. It is hard to overemphasise how odd seeing 2001 retrospectively is; its visual coinage has been in the cinematic economy for four decades now, and numerous shots first witnessed in 1968 set off echoes in the head today. It is therefore impossible to read the contemporary reviews objectively, without a sense of historical irony: unless, like Gelmis, they were prepared to watch it a second time, they would all be proved wrong.

However, before one gets too heady with schadenfreude, one is brought down to earth with a bump. Kubrick's aesthetics may have survived in the cinematic medium, but the vision of science has not been realised by 2008 in reality. At the time, that famous dissolve in which the spinning bone morphs into a rotating space satellite signified the compression of technological development. A year before man actually did land on the moon, space travel and intelligent computers must have seemed a mere frame in history in the future. Looking back today, we are reminded that 2001 did not see the rise of artificial intelligence nor space exploration.

Indeed, a year earlier we'd all been terrified by millennium bugs infecting cranky dumb machines. That AI has failed to come to fruition as Kubrick and Clarke anticipated can be seen not as endorsing the fact that the human mind is so advanced no machine can match it, but that the human mind is so limited that it never can invent a machine to match it. For the twenty-first-century spectator of 2001, perhaps the most profound message is that Clarke and Kubrick, writing in the heyday of the space race and the Eliza chatbot, wrongly judged the acceleration of scientific development. In the twenty-first century the chronology of history and the future-time of the novel have switched places. Thus HAL becomes not so much the potential nightmare we want to avoid, but more symbolises the dream we may not ever realise, due to our own limited knowledge in comparison with that represented in his omniscient but fictional mind.

A similarly depressing story is told by 2001's vision of space travel. Famously, this is presented as being entirely mundane. It involves talk about freeze dried sandwiches ("What's that? Chicken?" "Something like that. Tastes the same anyway."), inane birthday greetings from mum and dad, lounging on sun beds. However, as we know from the Columbia disaster, space remains a risky and colossally expensive business. It is the specialist enterprise of big government, not space tourists (though Virgin Galactic may be seeking to change that).

Space science today is mundane, but in a significantly different way to that which Kubrick imagined. Until it was taken over by images of galaxies colliding - admittedly a pretty exciting firework, though not of our making - the BBC space section was reporting news of the Galileo satellite launch. Space is going to give us better sat nav so that we don't get stranded down country lanes on the way to the Dog and Duck. In comparison, the grand voyages to Jupiter and beyond the infinite seem - in the finite historical timeframe that separates 1968, 2001 and 2008 - a sorry world away.

Please Help Me Redesign the Pequod

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 12:51:00 +0000

The Pequod underwent a serious refurbishment in July 2007, and I am generally pleased with it. However, I spent this weekend doing a bit of spring cleaning, changing the look of the highlights sidebar down the left, and cleaning up the right-hand navigation column. This now bundles all the RSS, save, print and share facilities together above the search box, and includes a direct commenting feature. I have also increased the line spacing and changed the font of the main text, to improve legibility.

The reasons for the slight change were twofold.

Firstly, though hits across the site overall are quite good, there seem to be few people who actually browse across all the sections. Some visit the photoblog, but not the blog or essays. Others read one essay, but do not explore the poetry. I suspect much of the reason is to do with the quality of the content, which is by no means exemplary or captivating. Nevertheless, I hope the rejigged sidebar will draw more visitors to explore content across the site.

Secondly, I know from tracking the "came from" option that many users download the essays to their hard disks, or email them to friends. This suggests that they are being read seriously, and used. However, I get very little feedback on them. By putting a comments box on page in the right sidebar rather than at a central comments page, I hope to facilitate more immediate responses to my work (which is, after all, a key reason for putting it online).

However, I am considering one other change that may be more dramatic. I like the three column layout because it places the text at the centre, improving legibility and making a direct connection between the horizontal navigation bar at the top (allowing me to dispense with individual page titles). But which order should the sidebars be in? There seems to be quite a debate about whether a navigation sidebar should go on the left or right of the page. One theory runs that since the eye scans from left to right, items on which you place the greatest emphasis should go on the left. On the other hand, since the dominant text on each page of a three column layout is clearly in the centre, the eye may skip over the left sidebar and concentrate on everything from the centre to the right margin.

On The Pequod, given my first point above the most important sidebar element is the cross-promoted content i.e. the latest blog and photoblog post, and featured writing. This currently resides in the left sidebar. Should it move to the right, with the navigation switching to the left? Happily, a quick change of the CSS stylesheet allows me to see this in action, though I am not the best judge of the content. So what do you think? Compare the layout of the blog you are reading to the test page, and please let me know your considered comments.

The Terror of Photography

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 08:10:00 +0000

Poor Phil Smith. There he was at the turn-on of the Ipswich Christmas lights, wielding his swanky SLR camera, when he was hauled out of the crowd by a police officer. Demanding to see his licence - he neither had nor needed one - the police officer then used stop and search powers, ordered all the pictures to be deleted, and instructed Mr. Smith not to take any more. Perhaps if Mr. Smith, like the rest of the crowd, had been using mobile phones or pocket cameras, he would have been all right. The trouble was, he looked a bit too professional for the policeman's liking. He may even have been a terrorist.

In reality, as the BBC's report explains, it was the policeman - a special constable - who was entirely in the wrong, as the Suffolk Police later admitted. Nevertheless, the incident does indicate the problems of photographing in public, in a general era of paranoia about bombs and paedophiles. Take this advertisement from the Metropolitan Police, which warns "Thousands of people take photos every day. What if one of them seems odd? Terrorists use surveillance to help plan attacks, taking photos and making notes about security measures like the location of CCTV cameras. If you see someone doing that, we need to know. Let experienced officers decide what action to take."

Now I have taken thousands of photos, and I am - hands up - a fanatic...when it comes to photography. But if one of my photos seems odd, it is due to my creative limitations rather than my designs as a terrorist. But I can quite easily imagine a situation in which I take a photo of a public building (which will invariably include CCTV cameras) and then - like any good photographer - keep a record of weather conditions, location and the like, for future reference on my photoblog. Observed to be doing this, everyman is a potential Smith, if he happens to wield his camera at the wrong time or to look a bit weird - and don't we all, squatting and peering with one eye shut through the viewfinder?

Recognising the current state of affairs, MP Austin Mitchell, a keen photographer and chair of the Parliamentary All-Party Photography Group, has now tabled a motion in the House of Commons, calling on the Home Office to educate police about what powers they do have to prevent photographers, and to educate photographers about their rights.

The law, as it stands, says that "you are fine unless you're taking picture of something inherently private" (Solicitor Hanna Basha). Photographers have every right to take photographs in public places, although - quite rightly - there are restrictions around certain public and military buildings, and under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000, police officers may randomly stop someone without suspicion if the area is considered a likely target for attack (hardly likely in the case of the Ipswich Christmas lights, unless you consider ex-Eastender Letitia Dean a political target). Nonetheless, this (surely?) does not mean that they have the right to order the deletion of images if they are subsequently found to be entirely appropriate. It certainly does not mean that serious photographers need a licence to work in public places. Nor does it mean that they require the written permission of everyone they photograph (imagine the hassle shooting the London Marathon!).

If you are a keen photographer, or just a concerned citizen of a liberal democracy, I urge you to write to your MP asking them to support the motion, or at the very least to sign the petition on the Downing Street website. I have just done this, although living in the countryside the greatest danger to my photography comes from the cow rather than the policeman.

Teletext Extra (or Teletext Less)

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 12:37:00 +0000

Environmental sensitivity is increasingly being deployed as a tool for commercial promotion.

Today, Tesco announce their intention to start adding "carbon labels" to 70 000 of its own-brand products, allowing shoppers to compare carbon costs across similar products, much as they currently do with salt content or price. This is, of course, a commendable plan, although it is one that will work only if low-carbon alternatives (which often means locally grown) are available. Given the regular absence of their Local Choice milk from the shelves in our area, this may not work well in practice; sticking a label on a packet is a little like adding a sticking plaster to the massive carbon wound that is the current food chain system. And it is, of course, a label that shouts as much about Tesco as a family friendly brand as it does about a real committment to the environment. Given Tesco's recent profits hit 2.8 billion, there is always more that can be done at root. Nevertheless, they must get marks for trying.

But if I am somewhat cynical about Tesco's commercial motivations whilst pleased about the plan in environmental principle, I am left utterly angered by the recent service that has stealithly crept up the wires overnight to find its way into my television. I'm talking about Teletext Extra, "a new service for Freeview, combining a sophisticated Electronic Programme Guide (EPG) and a new improved Teletext service." New it may be, but improved?

Rather than enhancing the usability of the Freeview TV guide, the updated system is hard to navigate, slow and - on our small screen - virtually unreadable. Its sole purpose seems to be commercial: the bottom third of the screen is now taken over by advertisements for Sky, Virgin and - that's right - sex channels. Worst of all, though, is that the service intended to sell goods has completely failed to realise that environmental sensitivity will inform commercial success.

Every time you turn the digital box on, the new service shouts that it MUST BE ALLOWED TO DOWNLOAD THE NEW GUIDE (or, if you really, really don't want to, you can press menu to exit, and wait for about 30 seconds before the black curtain to television-watching is raised). I am in trouble, it seems, because I turn the box off at the plug once I've finished watching. This was never a problem for the old software on the Freeview box, which happily remembered its previous settings. Teletext Extra, though, tells me in no uncertain terms that I MUST LEAVE THE BOX ON STANDBY OVERNIGHT. DO NOT TURN OFF AT THE WALL.

What utter and absolute ignorance of all the current logic within the electronics industry, which seems - slowly but incessantly - to be switching on to the fact that consumers want (and the planet needs) electronic devices that turn off when not needed, and draw radically reduced power when running. Though a complete ban on standby options may be impractical, the government's 2006 Energy Review is set to pressurise makers from above to be sensible about this (and their 2007 Consultation on the Promotion of Energy End-Use Efficiency recommends that all public procurement of electrical devices draw upon a list of the most energy efficient systems, including those which minimise or eliminate power on standby).

So how, given this climate of public opinion and government consultation, was it determined that the Freeview service - which will be the most popular way to receive television following the 2012 switch off - should now run autocratically on such an energy inefficient piece of software? Whilst the first fault must lie with the makers, the government and OFCOM also should have been monitoring and influencing the development of a service that is nationally widespread.

I am not the only one to have complained to Teletext Extra about this. Others have deluged the service with complaints about software glitches. Happily, though, whether you are concerned about the environmental implications of millions of boxes being left on overnight, or simply do not like the poorly designed system, there is a solution, and it is possible to go back to the old, functional guide.

Riverdance

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 14:28:00 +0000

What is it about a beached boat that attracts so much attention? Why do I learn of one man who has spent a week in penitential observance, standing from 9.00 to 3.00 in the bitter cold, before dashing to the nearby petrol station - the shop of which is now doing an incredible trade - for tea and a toilet?

The grounded Riverdance certainly stands out, a wart on the skin of a beach otherwise unblemished for several hundred yards out to sea, and for several miles up and down the coast. It is the incongruity of its 6000 tons just waiting there that fascinates. The tempting metaphor, is, of course, to describe it as a beached whale. And it is a hard image to resist: it is whale-like, with the curved hump of keel presented to the shore giving it, from this angle, a strangely organic quality. There are no radar masts or portholes to mark it as machine, just a bulk of ruddy steel, fringed by green around the Plimsoll line, speckled with tendrils of weed. Indeed, the only thing to break this animal analogy are its propellers and rudder silhouetted against the sky.

Although they are stuck fast now, it is possible to imagine the struggle of rudders, flapping from side to side like aimless fins, to hear screws slapping the air between cresting waves, as the captain battles against grounding; then the engines' roar turning to a churn, and an ominous grind of sand. In fact, it is this, too, that seems out of place: the timing is all wrong. For those who come to watch it now, it is hard to reconcile the immobile hulk of it all with the violence of the night in which it stationed itself there: gales, high seas, a mayday dashed off through static bursts, the relief of floodlights and flares, decisions taken, a boat abandoned, lifeboats and chattering helicopters. Even on a day like this, with knives in the north wind, the boat seems too stolidly resistant to have ever suffered drama, to have carried cargoes of fear rather than to have attracted merely prurient spectators.

Though it is not the ship alone which draws vistors. Prevented from getting closer to the ship than 200 metres, the exclusion zone that rings it paradoxically generates excitement. The round-the-clock presence of security guards and bemused contractors advertises it as loudly as the neon lights on Blackpool's sea front herald the fairground and the arcade. "It's official," they flouresce in their yellow jackets, "it's an event, a danger, a problem, a puzzle. Something could change at any moment. Watch and see!" Nothing will happen, of course, at least not with the drama the officaldom proclaims and the watchers expect. With its own, slow but incessant grace, all that is happening is a...tilt. Having grounded at a five degree list, the vessel has now tipped through over ninety degrees, toppled by the weight of its superstructure, now half-buried beneath the sand.

It is nice to imagine that it could be sucked completely away, a slow-motion magical trick performed by the cape of quicksand. It would then become the mirror to the shipwreck that lies a few yards from it, the Abana, sunk in 1894 in a similar winter storm. Just a few ribs of black wood - charred black by salt water rather than fire - poke the sand at low tide. But whereas the Abana can be left peacefully to rot, the Riverdance cannot be allowed to just vanish. In a fluke of global positioning, it is settling over a major sewage pipe, so as of writing the current plan is to break it up in situ, before this curiosity becomes an environmental catastrophe.