Portrait of the artist to be

I always go to, and always enjoy, student shows. The level doesn't matter: degree shows, primary school shows in the local library, or anything in between. Whatever it produces, whether or not the product is to my taste, new vision is always exhilarating – as is interacting with the still fresh passion of those who have created the work.

Three times this past week, though, I went back to one of the most stimulating show I've ever seen. It's not in a big art school, it's in a further education college (for US readers, an institution spanning many functions of senior high school, community college and two year university). And I don't just mean one of the most stimulating student shows, either; it was an experience not to be found in the most spectacular big name, big national gallery exhibition. That sound hyperbolic, but I stand by it.

I have no connection to the college, I neither teach there nor know the students, so I could be relaxed and impartial, just enjoying the work for its own sake. The work itself, across the range, was without exception well worth seeing and in many cases truly superb. And, unusually, all of the college's art students from all courses were exhibiting at the same time on the same site. many rooms, on two floors, but one big show. Walking through the corridors and adjoining spaces took in a range from sixteen year olds on post GCSE courses to mature students finishing foundation degrees, from graphic design and illustration through fashion design, video production, photography, to fine art painting and sculpture. That was really the factor that finally made it so exceptional: the opportunity to see all of that variety, all of that range, that contrast between different ways of seeing and different levels of experience, in one place at one time.

Something which you'll frequently find at a student show, but rarely at the exhibition of work by established artists, is access to the development and research journals. These contain all the sketching, thinking, false turns, research, ideas, explorations, which led to and away from and around about the final piece shown on the wall. Very often, the most interesting work is that supported by the most detailed development work. I spent a lot of time at this show looking through the supporting material, again made all the more interesting for being represented at a variety of levels.

I'm tempted to mention particular names to whose work I kept returning, but that would be invidious. I couldn't possibly choose a favourite piece of work, or even a top ten. And if I did, it would be unfair to the rest who are no less talented or exciting for not corresponding to my own leanings. Instead, I've plucked out examples at random and without identifying them.

Another "great man" joins the throng

Though I always tend to think of it in a politicoeconomic context, the "great man" theory of history is a tough weed which can grow anywhere. One might think, from many accounts, that there would be no calculus without Newton, evolution without Darwin. Despite my admiration for the achievements of those figures, I doubt that their fields would have withered on the vine if they had not been born ... someone else, or several someone elses, would have come along. Leibniz, in fact did come along in the case of calculus; Russell for evolution; but even they were not necessary. The development of ideas had in each case reached the point where it was inevitable that calculus and and a theory of evolution would sooner or later emerge.

So it is in western popular music. I grew upon the myth that Elvis Presley had single handedly taken it by the throat and dragged it into a track where it wouldn't otherwise have gone. Later, the Beatles gained the same mythic status. Don Mclean dubbed Buddy Holly's death "the day the music died". I have no feelings one way or another about Presley or Holly; I enjoyed McLean's song, and was a Beatles fan in my day; but all of them rode a wave of the time rather than creating it.

Now, with the death of Michael Jackson, we repeatedly (five times in half an hour, yesterday evening) hear an American fan describe this too as "the day the music died". Not having ever been much affected by his work, I'm in no position to judge whether he was as great as everyone is saying he was; but I can see that he is already being installed as the latest "great man", and being credited with the same single handed paradigm shifting status. While rejecting that mythologising, I hope that he is remembered for his music (whatever its quality) and not for the freak show media circus around his life and lifestyle.

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• Don McLean, American Pie, 1971

Murder is murder

In the UK, there is shocked news comment at emergence into the public domain of a document suggesting that in 1944 a chemical warfare attack on Tokyo's civilian population was considered.

A chemical attack on civilians certainly is, to me, a shocking intent in principle ... but I'm bemused at the idea that its consideration was shocking in view of the subsequent nuclear attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, saturation conventional bombing of Tokyo, the "thousand bomber raids", the firebombing of Dresden, cold war ICBM targeting of Soviet Bloc cities, Eisenhower's willingness to consider an all out preëmptive nuclear attack on Russia in the early 1950s, napalm attacks on Vietnamese villages ... I do not find the willingness to do, or to consider, any of those things less shocking. To wage total war on civilian populations is shocking in itself; once it has been considered, the mechanisms are secondary.

If I were dying of massive nuclear or chemical burns, would I consider this somehow "better" than dying of chemical poisoning? I can't imagine so. Is the cold blooded consideration of practicalities involved in poisoning me somehow worse than the equally cold blooded consideration of practicalities involved in burning me? I can't manage to think so.

Once human beings have crossed the Rubicon of considering mass murder, nothing thereafter considered by way of means is particularly surprising. Our tendency to sit wilfully oblivious amidst unimaginable cruelty and agonise over one or two of its particular modalities is sickening sentimentality.

Surfer 9

It’s nearly seven years since I last reviewed Surfer, from Golden Software. Not from neglect, but because this is the first full digit version upgrade (from 8 to 9) which Golden have released in that time. Even seven years in, however, Surfer 8 was a finely tuned tool for its purpose; upgrade to 9 makes it even more so. [more...]

EndNote X3

EndNote goes from strength to strength, its development over recent releases consistent, restrained, and impressive ... You think that a product has reached the limit of its niche, and can’t get any better; but then it quietly does. [more...]

News on Jim Putnam

Jim has provided his own update, and so this post has been taken down.

C Melodies

For anyone who knows and has enjoyed Clarissa Vincent's Juggler and Storm Petrel journals, there is now a musical exploration in the form of an "online album", C Melodies.

Sequenciotics

Click image to enlarge.

Re-sequenced

A post over at Unreal Nature includes two beautiful causative sequences: one of them, a tree transection, being a sequence in place within a single image.

In a comment to the post I question whether they are unique in their cause/effect sequencing; but they are certainly sequences in which cause/effect are far more explicit than in those with which I have been concerned so far. And they are worth your time just in themselves.

Update, 2009/06/21 at 0730: in comments to the above, Julie replies to my query with:

"In some ways, the inconclusiveness is the point in the art sequences — as compared to the scientific images where the conclusion is the point. The artistic photos are there as a beginning — the core of a snowball when you’re starting a snowman ; the scientific ones are there to (reach an) end; the nut that you get to after cracking and peeling your way down to the center."

She has good points. I have yet to make up my mind about this...

Passing the bâton

This is about sequences again (for the story so far, if you only just arrived: Just one thing after another; Just one sequence after another; Princess Summer Fall Winter Spring; Mediated By The Medium; and Snowdrifts.)

Laura Broad has been a friend of the family for more than a decade. I've taken a fair number of photographs of her over that time but, like most young adults, I'm sure she wouldn't thank me for posting them now.

I hope, though, that she will forgive me for using the sequence of nine frames below, from when she was about ten years old. It's another of my extended portrait sequences made during conversation, and I use it here for a reason.

Laura is seventeen, now, and developing her talent as an artist in her own right. A strong component in her work is photography; not the same strand as mine, I'm glad to say; she is her own person with her own directions and her own paths to tread. But, when we went to her first show yesterday, I was intrigued to see her making her own, different use of the sequential self portrait as a form of "spoken image". My quick snap here does no justice to her sequence of ten A2 size prints, but it gives the idea. (As always, click on either image set to see them at a larger scale.)

What she is doing has more in common with Duane Michals than with me (though I've no idea whether she knows his work) but I can't help a quick puff of pleasure in seeing her use the sequential image mechanism.

Talking to some of her friends who came by during the same time, I was interested to hear that she has influenced several of them in the ways that they see. One talked of experimenting with rule structured sequences of drawings and small paintings. Another described an idea for working towards a sculpture through progressively refined maquettes which, presented in chronological sequence, become part of the final work.

I'm impressed, and proud to know her.

---

Clive Scott, The spoken image : photography and language. 1999, London: Reaktion. 186189032X (pbk)

Obama in Cairo

Professor Paul Rogers on Obama's speech in Cairo:

"The Cairo speech was ground-breaking and will have a discernable effect in improving US/Arab relations. The longer-term impact will depend partly on the further development of US policy towards Israel and Palestine, and whether Iraq can continue on its uncertain transition to a greater stability. Even more significant, though, will be the developments in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the coming months. These may well be the factors that influence the longer-term impact of the Cairo speech and they raise many difficult questions for the Obama administration."

Full text here

Messages in a virtual bottle

I haven't been to Iran in quite a long time. What I'm hearing from friends (on both sides of the current political divide) there, however, is reminiscent of 1978. One similarity is the place of information and communication technologies.

Those were the end days of the Shah's brutal SAVAK maintained régime. The revolution which was to usher in the equally brutal successor régime made shrewd samizdat style use of audio tape cassettes (passed from hand to hand and easily copied) to spread propaganda – including addresses by the Ayatollah Khomeini, then in exile in Paris.

Technology has moved on dramatically in the last 31 years, and those in Iran today tell me that as protest grows on the streets their ability to send SMS text messages and emails is being interdicted, while web access is unpredctable. It's possible that this is purely a result of the system being swamped at a time of intense traffic; it's also possible that the system fully understands how SMS, email and web can be used in the same way as audio cassettes.

Historically, success in revolutionary times has a general tendency to go to those who provide information rather than those who constrain it. De Gaulle, for instance, frustrated a 1961 coup for instance, by providing free transistor radios to conscripts in Algeria so that he could speak directly to them. If the Iranian powers that be really are squeezing communications, it suggests desperation.

Addition, 10:09: Having followed Unreal Nature's recommendation to Andrew Sullivan's blog, I see that Twitter appears to be functioning – and in similar use. Neither I nor those with whom I am in regular contact tend to be regular Twitter users, so this passed me by ... but it's another channel to make repressive authority nervous.

Fairies, intentional and otherwise

I've muttered about intentionality before, but here it is again. In opening a recent Photo.Net thread, Fred Goldsmith asked about "our consciousness of taking photos". I replied that both conscious intent and instinctive response were inevitable components in the taking of any photograph, however planned or unexpected. While I still think that, I'm realising as I ponder over it that perhaps things are less simple.

This morning I've been struggling to deal with an unprecedented response to a Today picture, yesterday's Today 090613. Thinking about the various comments and questions has made me think about how the Today pictures happen, and what they represent. My header blurb on the archive says "it's not photography, as such: it's a series of fragmentary moments which stuck to me", but I've only just started to think seriously about what that glib throwaway description means.

Today photographs are, very explicitly, not photographs that I set out to take. They are snapshots: pictures which just happened to present themselves to me. I haven't ever thought it through in those words, before, but that's the truth of it. Yesterday's Today 090613 is a particularly clear example of this, and its genesis is illustrative.

We, my partner and I, were in town together (I never, ever, go with conscious intent to take photographs in company; its an inherently antisocial activity; I do it alone.) I had only a small pocket digital compact with me (a Today machine; for a deliberate photography outing it would be an SLR). We were on a mission to buy the new vacuum cleaner which, at last, after several years of hesitation, she had finally agreed that we needed (I certainly would not combine deliberate intent to photograph with an afternoon of cost and feature comparisons destined to culminate in the carrying home of a large box).

As we proceeded up the high street in a northerly direction, between the T J Hughes and Argos stores, we passed The Shop Formerly Known As Weirdy Nook, now refurbished and reopened as Bewitched. This is a shop which combines a variety of Indian prints and other neohippy fashions with a range of merchandise from inexpensive jewellery to household ornaments – most of it pure tat, but with the occasional pearl hiding amongst it. So, we stopped to see what the refurbishment and reopening had wrought.

Inside were, amongst other things, a range of small figurines depicting winged fairies. These were not the usual childlike fairies, nor the Ramboesque "kick ass" fairies of Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl stories, but a new (to me, at any rate) variety: post pubescent fairies, all female, in preRaphaelite mood and various states of undress. It immediately struck me that these were close cousins of the fantasy women on old SF paper back covers such as Podkayne of Mars. A vague idea (conscious intentionality enters the picture here) drifted into my head of extending the intermittent "lurid covers" discussion between Dr C, JSBlog, Unreal Nature, and myself. So, the interior being small, crowded, and lit to evoke a grotto, I wandered outside to see if there was an example in the window.

I found my example (that's it, on the left) – a mild and decorous one, compared to those inside, but it illustrates the point.

Because I was photographing through glass, I had to jiggle about a bit to get a view which both made my point and simultaneously avoided reflections. In the process, I was confronted with the image which became Today 090613 and, without any conscious intent of which I am aware, my shutter finger twitched.

Does the conscious intent to record the photograph shown here transfer to the other one which appeared as Today 090613? Or Not? Does it invalidate or support my assertion that conscious intent always plays some part in the making of a photograph? I'm not, immediately, sure. I wonder what Fred Goldsmith would say.

Patterns in crime

Arguments over whether social sciences can truly be described as ‘science’ are perennial; they have been around much longer than I have, and no doubt will run and run long after I’m gone. What is not in doubt is that they are now at least as dependent on scientific computing methods and resources as their physical science counterparts – one project ... author comments: ‘I really can’t stress enough that the project might have ended if we hadn’t been given access to... the NGS.’^[1]

We will never approach the vision of Isaac Asimov^[2], whose ‘psychohistorian’, Hari Seldon made detailed predictions over millennia with an accuracy and precision approaching those of orbital mechanics. The data involved is too chaotic for even a remote approximation to that. Hypotheses can, however, be generated that are testable within bounds useful and valuable in budgetary and policy planning terms – and even an indicative pattern of association, with no hypothesised explanation, can improve the effectiveness of resource targeting. [more]

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Image: Visualising individuals’ movement through time and space (from Malleson, 2008^[13]; GeoTime® software used courtesy of Oculus Info Inc. All GeoTime rights reserved.)

Flow

Luke Palmer, aka AcerOne, wrote yesterday: "...working together is a fundamental graffiti ethos ... Talking thing over ... discussing styles, composition, colours, shading, 3D ... you learn ... produce new art. I think the ‘flow’ of graffiti art is born of people just doing graffiti..."

He's right ... but not, in my opinion, just about graffiti. I don't see a lot of difference between one type of artist and another, nor between artist and scientist or anyone else who feels impelled to do something (anything) by an inner urge.

Unreal Nature recently drew ("The Russian Sense Of Blueness") on one of Nabokov's essay series “The art of translation”, from the archives of The new republic. I haven't read that for many years (so long, in fact, that I had completely forgotten it) so was glad to have it brought back to me. Additionally, it happened by chance that the title of that post pulled at me in a particular way.

I am, and have always been, a complete failure at learning foreign languages; an embarrassment in a family which otherwise shows aptitude in that area, and a definite disadvantage in life. Oh, I can scratch along. I can rapidly accumulate fistfuls of nouns, verbs and adjectives that permit survival level communication; I can decode written expository text, given a good dictionary and a grammar book; but I cannot converse, never mind create. Nabokov, who despite his "thin" English (his word, in the essay) managed to write sublime and luminous prose in his second language which I could never dream of producing in my own native tongue, is a wonder to me – as are my Italian students who display a deep understanding of Alice in Wonderland or Joyce's Ulysses.

So when, at one point in the distant past, I spent a lengthy period of intensive time in close contact with a particular group of Russians, communication was a hard fought business. Their English was the same sort of utilitarian grab bag of essential words as my Russian, and with the same lack of grace. Both they and I had similarly poor (but not necessarily coëxtensive) scratched together collections of French, German, Arabic and Tigrinya words. Every simple exchange of nonessential conversation became a philosophical and linguistic adventure. And one of the things I learned, to my everlasting wonder, was that "blue" meant different things to them and to me. In particular, they saw different blues as at least two different colours and not, as I did, variants on one.

A couple of days after Unreal Nature's post, a Polish friend gave me a copy of Cosmos and Pornografia by Witold Gombrowicz.

I say "by Witold Gombrowicz", but of course these are English translations – because I cannot read Polish. My admiration for Stanislav Lem (also Polish) is also based entirely on English translations. I did, as a teenager with dictionaries in hand, battle my way through some Dante, Proust, Chaucer, and so on, in the original; but in some ways (and Nabokov makes clear why), I get closer to the truth of the original when I don't understand the words at all than when I seek to decode them: the rhythms and sounds come through more truly than the content – I listen to the songs of Sevara Nazarkhan in the same spirit.

I knew nothing of Gombrowicz when I started reading (the English translation of) Cosmos. I read it at face value, and was captured by the play with language: not just the language of words, but of gesture, physical juxtaposition, visual symbol, and so on. He reminds me (in translation) of Flan O'Brien's The third policeman.

Whose language am I reading, when I read a translation? The translator's, of course. And yet, discussing Cosmos with Agnieszka who gave it to me and who herself knows it in her native Polish, I find that my impression of that play is the same as hers. I will never know whether the play I am hearing is the same as the play she hears, but I do know that we both hear play.

Over the past few months, Agnieszka has also been discussing T S Eliot (particularly "Gerontion") with me – in English, my language and also Eliot's but not hers. I have learnt a tremendous amount in the process: and have gradually realised that reading in a second language is giving her a new set of insights generated by the process of crossing the language barrier itself.

This may seem irrelevant to visual imagery, but it is not. Different cultures accrue different visual associations. Moreover, the process of crossing into another mind is as radical in its way as (perhaps even more so than) crossing into another language.

When I posted the Today 090607 image (shown here on the left) used as an example by Jim Putnam (see "Catch as catch can"), I received an email response from painter Gayle Reynolds: "I found a whole robin's egg in my new garden two days ago and this looks just like it." Then Unreal nature's Julie Heyward posted an "equivalent": a fractured blue eggshell on grey stone. Both responses taught me a great deal about what I had and had not seen; but together they taught me much more than twice as much.

When I was fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, I joined camera clubs. They were, to be honest, inhabited by people I would now find tedious ... but also very kind and generous in sharing with me what they knew. I learned a lot of craft from them, as well as what I did not want to do or be, and I am grateful to them. Now, many years on, what Luke calls "flow" is, though not under that label, vital to my continued growth. The flow is not limited to one area of endeavour, nor to one kind of interaction. Agnieszka, J S Bach, Elisabeth Louise Vigée-le-Brun, Dr C, Gayle, Jim, Julie, Luke, Ray Girvan, Ivor McGillivray, Sevara Nazarkhan, W Eugene Smith, Chris Waller: my interaction with them, and with many others, is in some cases face to face, in others virtual, or both, and in many zones of life from mathematics or science through business to the arts (often all at once). With every book I read or image I see or song I hear, the interaction is only one way – but no less part of the "flow", and no less so if it is either not in the original or not in a language I can read transparently.

The "flow" has not been limited to the local since writing was invented. It has never been limited to one direction or one modality. But, with time, it gets ever richer and more multi threaded.

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• T S Eliot, "Gerontion" in Collected poems, 1909-1962: London : Faber, 1963 (2002 printing). 0571105483 (pbk.)
• Witold Gombrowicz, Cosmos and Pornografia: two novels. (Trans: Eric Mosbacher & Alistair Hamilton)1985, New York: Grove Press. 0802151590.
• Vladimir Nabokov, "The art of translation" in The new republic,
• Flann O'Brien, The third policeman. 1967: London, MacGibbon & Kee (hbk).
  Most recent edition (at time of writing) – 2007, London: Harper Perennial. [978]0007247172 (pbk.)

Catch as catch can

This is slightly adapted from a comment left earlier this morning on TTMF's "Extended moments" post, which took Unreal Nature's "Catch and release" as a starting point and used my Today 090607 as an illustration.

Jim (at TTMF) is writing about the back story which grows in the viewer's or reader's or listener's mind, using the unknown spaces around what an artefact or its author provide.

I'm delighted and flattered to see an image of mine used as illustration; I'm also (artistically, intellectually, philosophically) extended by seeing my own artefact through other eyes. I, of course, know what it was that I photographed (and, in fact, assumed that the viewer would immediately know too), but have had many emails in which the sender did not know what it was, chose to see it in a particular way, or knew (but differently from me) what it was. I was pleased that Jim didn't know what the object in the hole was ... and I won't spoil anyone's extended back story potential by naming it.

One of the most powerful "author is dead" aspects of a text (taking "text" to include anything from musical score to photograph, film, sculpture, whatever) is that the "writer" (photographer, musician...) may (though may not) know exactly what the back story is, while the "reader" (viewer, listener...) certainly cannot. In that diffence lies one facet of the magic which art offers.

But on a brighter note...

Ray Girvan has sorted out my XML problems to allow my "other voices" more space – they are now down the left hand side of this space.

A dour Monday morning

With more than 90% of the results in, I'm ashamed to have woken this morning into a country which has elected two BNP members to the European Parliament.

Only 35% of us bothered to vote. The BNP got 6.5% of those. Either of those percentages is enough to generate what TTMF dubs "a dour mood". (Updated final figures, Tuesday 9th June: 34.5% and 6.2% respectively.)

Holocaust n+1

With D-Day commemorations, discussions of the swastika (on JSBlog and here), it's timely to be reminded by Thinking Through my Fingers that the holocaust in which Nazism killed six million Jews is one among many, and that we continue to tolerate them still (TTMF's word is "endure", but I personally think "tolerate" is more to the point – perhaps "condone" would be even more honest, and on occasion "encourage" or "invite").

Even within that one holocaust, we rightly remember the Jewish genocide but tolerate forgetfulness of the "other half" – millions of Communists, the disabled, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Romani, Slavs, socialists, trades unionists...

It's also as well to remember that D-Day had nothing to do with the holocaust. History draws patterns over the mess and chaos of the past, attempting to give it meaning and dignity which was never there at the time. D-Day was about winning a total industrial war between great and declining powers, and deciding who would own the biggest pot when it ended, not about righting wrongs. Nobody made much mention of the holocaust while it was happening; only afterwards, when the newsreels and photographs of the camps provided a post hoc moral face for it all ... just as weapons of mass destruction were used to dress up a politicoeconomic invasion of Iraq in advance, and previously disregarded human rights hurriedly rushed out into the limelight after the WMD failed to materialise.

And even as we dressed in the clothes of holocaust horror, in 1945, we were not sufficiently horrified to do anything much by way of helping the survivors. The Communists, the disabled, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Romani, Slavs, socialists, trades unionists were just as reviled as before the war (though several of those groups had, through resistance action under allied direction, played significant rôles in the winning of it), while our refusal to let most of the Jews go anywhere at all led to the sixty year (and counting) smash up which is the middle east.

We will really have made some progress since 1945 when, and only when, we take an international action purely on humanitarian grounds, for no other reason than that it is the right thing to do and human suffering will thereby be reduced. It has never happened yet; I live in hope, though I'm not holding my breath.

British Chiropractors Association vs. Simon Singh

Today I received an email from Greg Parker (scientist, inventor, astronomer, university professor, businessman, not necessarily in that or any other particular order) urging me to sign a petition. "Rarely do I feel moved to support anything along these lines - but this one I feel is a very clear exception."

The petition is in support of Simon Singh, whom the British Chiropractors Association (BCA) sued for libel after he wrote a critical article ("Beware the spinal trap") in The Guardian in April last year.

I'll say, at this point, in case I seem to be undermining Singh's appeal, that I did sign the petition. Furthermore, I am only writing this post because I want to play a small part in further publicising that petition.

I am cautious about signing petitions; I want to know exactly what the background is, and to what exactly I am signing up. In this case, I wanted to know exactly what had been said in the original article. I am well disposed towards Simon Singh, and also disposed to support individuals sued by bodies, but this isn't about my personal sympathies.

If I sign just because I like someone (in this case someone I have never met), or on the basis of unverified third hand information, it doesn't really serve truth or justice in any way. It certainly isn't scientific, science being (and this is after all Singh's and his supporters' central point) evidence based. I frequently discover, on investigation of a petition that seems reasonable, that I really don't agree with it at all.

I don't believe that you should follow me in signing the petition until you, too, have satisfied yourself that you agree with it. Because it's a libel case, the original article is not easily available – it has been withdrawn from The Guardian's web site, in particular. I spent some considerable time schlepping fruitlessly around looking in obvious places for a copy. There are copies out there, though. Here are some links which work at the time of writing:

1. An exact copy (apart from addition of an explanatory header) of the original Guardian web page, posted by Svetlana Pertsovich
2. A copy of the text itself, at the Confessions of a quackbuster blog.
3. An annotated version of the text at Gimpy's blog.

Be aware that those are all posted by supporters of Simon Singh. The web is even more able to mutate material than is print, as well as more able to protect against censorship. But, for myself, I'm satisfied that they are honest reproductions of the original.

I've more to say, but it's not perhaps appropriate to place it in this post. I urge you to read the article and then consider the petition.

MapleSim

Working down through a series of guinea pigs, the youngest and least experienced who could still produce a functioning model with useful visualised output was an eight year old who in ten minutes demonstrated an impressive five jointed creation which she calls ‘a wiggly waggly dancer thing’. [more...]

Belling the cat

In comments to his "Cross purposes" post on the swastika's wilderness years, Ray Girvan and I agreed that continued vilification serves to bolster its potency as a symbol for the neofascist far right.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing, though. I can well see why those of my parents' generation (both inside and outside Germany) felt, in the late 1940s, the need to suppress a symbol around which might accrete resurgence of an ideology which had so recently been survived at such cost. The aftermath of total war does not provide ideal conditions for the flowering of reason and nuance (see JSBlog's post "Law and the Potter mythos", discussing Aaron Schwabach on "a society which has made imperfect laws in the confused aftermath of a war").
The generation which followed was mine. We had no memory of Nazism, but our formative years were spent in its shadow. We were the babyboomers who, despite our rebellions in many ways, carried the fears forward. I certainly, despite my intellectual recognition of the case for defusing the symbol through rehabilitation, feel reluctance to have anything to do with it.
The Nazi swastika was probably the first massively successful global logo branding exercise, and we are still living with that fact.
The result is a common phenomenon both socially and physically: a pressure cooker whose lid nobody dares touch. Efforts against coastal erosion can sometimes generate a spit of land which defies and distorts currents for miles around, leading to a choice between sacrificing a community upon it or continuing to subsidise destruction of others ... until eventually it becomes impossible to maintain. (Shooting off at a tangent: Joanne Harris's novel The coastliners is built on much the same idea: theft of a sand beach, and associated tourism driven prosperity, from one community by another, by construction of a harbour component.) The present dire situation of Isra'elis and Palestinians is the direct result, years down the line, of pragmatic spur of the moment decisions made in the after math of the same war which gave us swastika fear. Some buildings which utilise highly tensioned support components are very difficult to demolish safely.
Temporary action against the swastika as Nazi symbol, at a time of postwar turmoil, has built up exactly that sort of head of steam. If I am reluctant to have anything to do with the swastika, I shouldn't be surprised that politicians have no wish to destroy their careers by messing with it. To dismantle the taboo would be the sensible thing to do; but nobody wants to be the one who bells the cat.

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Joanne Harris, Coastliners. 2003, London: Black Swan. 0552998850 (pbk.)

Schwabach, A., Harry Potter and the Unforgivable Curses: Norm-formation, Inconsistency, and the Rule of Law in the Wizarding World. Roger Williams University Law Review, 2006. 11(2): p. 309.

Art Spiegelman, A.M. Spiegelman, and A.M. Spiegelman II, Maus : a survivor's tale. 2003, London: Penguin. 0141014081 (pbk)

What's in a name.

I collect evocative names.

Unreal Nature's mention (Adolf Fudge) of some choice examples gives me a thin excuse to drop some of my all time favourites (all of them ex students):

• Bonnie Bees
• Trevor Cheese
• Bob Down
• Alexander Napoleon Leach
• Penny Mint
• Edna Rockett

If any of those people are reading this, be assured that I am not mocking: your names have brought unalloyed delight, and I treasure them.

Long ago, at a school where there were many child victims of parental pretention, I knew:

• Valkyrie Smith
• Truth Verity

Then, of course, there was...

Judging a sardine by its can (third visit)

In a series of posts on judging books by their covers, culminating in "Covering anatomy", we (Dr C, Growlery, JSBlog, Unreal Nature) have concentrated on the luridly and explicitly sexual. There are, though, other ways in which a cover can give, or be received as, a false message.

The cover on the left is that of the first Kate Atkinson book I read. And the the first she wrote, for that matter, but I'm looking at it from the reader's viewpoint, here.

I had seen it often enough on the shelves in bookshops, but it had never invited me inside. I can't give any valid reason for this: only a thoroughly unjustified reflex prejudice which said to me: "Jokily lightweight and vacuous middle class chick lit". Luckily, a scathing lecture from someone with a more open mind athan mine made me buy the book, open the cover, and read. I've never looked back, but nor have I forgotten the prejudice which might have cut me off from discovery. Book covers are, as Unreal Nature commented a couple of weeks ago, packaging designed to "bait the hook" and catch a buyer. The designer can't know the prejudice of every potential mark; the best s/he can do is make broad judgements about what might attract the largest possible group of consumers and at least avoid alienating as many as possible of the rest.

I'm not proud of the prejudice which might have kept me from Kate Atkinson; whether it's better or worse than the assumptions which shape covers like those we have been discussing thus far, I don't know.

The big crab contest

In a world of serious causes for concern I was delighted to end this day, "the first of flaming June", by discovering The Big Crab Contest.

I was equally uplifted by the participants, the entries, and the prize categories.

Only one piece of information remains to be provided: which entry won which prize? Of particular importance is which entries won the seventh and eighth prizes in the list? And, in these times of concern for probity in public life, did the same entry win both the fourth and the seventh?

Stop reading this blog and go to the The Big Crab Contest instead: it's the place to be. While you're there, be sure to leave a comment for the artists!

Maple 13

Things are moving fast at MapleSoft, these days. Since review of release 11, two years ago, there have been two major upgrades to Maple accompanied by versions 1 and 2 of the new MapleSim... [more...]