With the recently released 14th version, EndNote continues its highly successful trick of evolving as an information manager without compromising its core rôle as a bibliographic reference handler. There is new material in several areas, major additions have been made from a functional viewpoint, and a signpost erected to future expansion potential.[More]
One eleven year old boy to another:
"The next thing to work on, fishface, is your tail."
Don't ask me what it means; it just made me laugh.
Thanks, once again, to Watoosa at Conscience pudding for recommending another winner: 100 Cupboards.
The mechanism of the story (twelve year old protagonist* Henry York discovers a wall full of cupboards leading to other space/time loci) links to many other fictions from which Through the looking glass, Changing planes, Ancient shores and Monsters Inc are only a snapshot. Why didn't I didn't include CS Lewis's Narnia Chronicles in the comparison examples above? It is, admittedly, the first that springs to mind (and Watoosa made use of it). But, to my mind, the fresh, new and engrossing story in 100 Cupboards sits more comfortably alongside contemporary (and adult*) equivalents.
There are the classic oppositions of good and evil (reminiscent not only of Narnia but, as Watoosa also says, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings – and, of course, many another tale). Among too many notable facets to mention, the evil to be opposed is not an abstract or a neatly packaged bogey but something always potentially present, requiring resistance day to day. Henry learns this through vivid lessons which hint at our own world's genocides and show the difficulty of always behaving heroically (do you save yourself and one within reach, or make a principled but doomed stand?) But don't make the mistake of thinking it's gloomy: though unafraid of darkness, the book has a bright warm heart.
I started 100 Cupboards on a bus journey, last Wednesday morning, and I finished it on another the same afternoon. In between, though only half way through, I ordered the first sequel (Dandelion fire) which arrived today and which I look forward to starting when it rises to the top of the "waiting to be read" pile ( probably some time next week). I have no doubt that I shall shortly thereafter be ordering the third book, The chestnut king.
(An aside ... Henry's parents are unsympathetic characters. They share some characteristics with me ... but hey, I can laugh at myself :-)
* Preachy and teacher-ish footnote: I've said this before, but it bears repeating. Some people won't read children's literature, making the assumption that it is beneath them. If you are one of those people, then you'll never discover the joys of 100 Cupboards or of many other richly and imaginatively rewarding fictions which leave much adult literature in the shade. You may not agree with me about this book, and that's perfectly OK; but if you don't even try it, just because it is written for an age group which is better equipped with open minded imagination than yours or mine ... then I urge you to think again. Your choice, but I believe that you are impoverishing yourself (or, as TTMF put it a couple of days ago, in a different context, "I reserve the right to think you're daft").
“Such operations are far from new ... developed in the context of the “war on terror” during the George W Bush administration, their use has been greatly expanded under Barack Obama. ... ... ... At the same time ... ... ...there is concern over the level of congressional oversight of such operations and a risk that the dividing line between espionage and regular military operations is being blurred...”
Another self indulgent piece of nostalgia. For this you can blame Pauline Laybourn, of Minneapolis[1].
Back awhile I recorded rediscovery of my first ever camera, a Six-20 Brownie 620C Box[2], a milestone which at age eight set me on the road to where (and what, and who) I now am.
Now we fast forward four or five years to 1965 ... I am twelve, pushing thirteen, and I have moved on to a 120 folding wartime Dallmeyer[3] which has dramatically extended my visual range, technical knowledge, and ambition. It has also introduced me to the economic advantages of packing more photographs onto a single roll of film ... where the Brownie gave me eight shots for a week's pocket money, the Dallmeyer yields sixteen (albeit at half the size). Since one pocket money per month has to go on chemicals and printing paper, this is a big deal ... instead of less than one picture a day I wallow in the luxury of almost two!
I have, by now, become a prolific consumer of used photographic magazines. Mostly ten year old copies of Popular Photography, cadged from the attics of amused strangers, but also the occasional Amateur Photographer only a month or so out of date. And every photographic book I can find in any available library. Although I am now at an age where the Amateur Photographer's frequent two piece swimsuit "portraits" occupy a significant part of my attention, I am nevertheless soaking up text and theoretical knowledge like a sponge. And one of the things I have learned from this reading (and some diligent arithmetic) is that a 35mm camera would (even after allowing for more photographic paper) push me up into the three and a half images a day league. Better still, I could perhaps buy 35mm film in bulk and cut it down myself to refill cassettes, cutting costs to allow a giddy seven or eight pictures a day[4].
There are problems, of course. I learn, without realising it, the capitalist lesson that one must invest in order to profit. To enable that three and a half image habit, I will first have to fund the purchase of the 35mm camera. And saving that sort of money will mean stashing away pocket money and buying no film, chemicals or paper at all for ... ummm [scribbles frantically on envelopes] an insupportably long time. If I compromise, and just cut down on the purchases to save part of my pocket money, the purchase disappears into a remote future beyond the conception of my twelve year old self.
Nevertheless, I continue to dream and to calculate. What I really want is a Leica ... the tool (I know this from all that reading) of all my heroes: Henri Cartier Bresson, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, W Eugene Smith, Eve Arnold, Willard Morgan, Chim Seymour ... but that is out of the question. By the time I save up for a Leica at four shillings[5] a week, I'll be drawing my pension. We are on the move, as a family, so a Saturday job (which might deliver the Leica by middle age) is not feasible So it's time to drop my sights a little ... which is where the Halina 35X comes in.
Even the Halina is beyond my reach, in fact. Dropping to five pictures a week and saving the balance of my pocket money, I could hope to buy it somewhere around my sixteenth birthday. But that is at least close enough to build dreams upon, if not to realise them.
Snapping back to the present day, in 2010, now. It would be nice to say that the Halina 35X pictured here is the one which I saved for and achieved ... but it wouldn't be true. (My first 35mm camera came to me just over a year later, and it wasn't a Halina[6] ... but that's another story.) No. The Halina became the first camera I didn't buy. The one shown here I have just bought second hand on a market stall for €2, which is what has prompted this post.
The fact that I never bought the Halina back then in 1965 didn't, however, stop it playing a huge part in my life. For a year I harassed innocent (and astonishingly patient) camera shop managers and assistants with outlandish questions. A columnist in Popular Photography advocated loading bulk film not into standard cassettes but specialised Leitz or Contax cassettes which, when the camera back was closed, would open to allow unimpeded low friction film transit through the light trap. These cassettes only opened in certain cameras (primarily Leitz or Contax, but also a few other expensive marques) which had the necessary modification to the film chamber. At the first opportunity, I was down into the nearest camera shop to ask a bemused assistant whether the Halina 35X was equipped to accept Leitz or Contax cassettes? (Answer: no.) I read of the first crude automatic exposure systems, and how dangerous it was to rely upon them rather than upon the photographer's own experience. Would the Halina 35X, I asked the long suffering manager of the same shop, hamper me in this way? (Answer: at twelve pounds and ten shillings it didn't even have a light meter, never mind automation.)
For just over a year I lived in a hazily glamorous professional future fantasy where I roamed the world (still dressed, curiously, in shorts and a school uniform) delivering back astonishing photoreportage to grateful editors (sometimes at Magnum, sometimes at Life magazine) ... all taken with my trusty and beloved Halina 35X.
And now, four and a half decades on, I finally possess one.
These footnotes are dedicated to my favourite critic, who has been deprived of this particular exasperation for some time; but, alas, they contain none of her beloved "tingly" ISBN numbers.
[1] Pauline keeps pressing me to put this sort of thing out in the public domain ... that's my story, anyway, and I'm sticking to it.
[2] Also follow up posts with new photographs taken using the Brownie since it returned to me last year.
[3] Sadly, I am unable to find any trace of my Dallmeyer in either print or web sources. There are similar examples, the closest being the Dallmeyer Dual which had a closely matching specification though it differed greatly in several structural details.
[4] Once I eventually had my first 35mm camera (see note [6] below) I did indeed start mainlining on bulk film purchased in thirty metre rolls. Later I discovered the joys of short dated or date expired stock which was cheaper still and showed no drop in quality. And sometimes my father, through various acquaintances concerned with replenishment of military reconnaissance stores, augmented my supply with date expired hundred metre tins.
[5] Four shillings, in 1965, was one fifth of a British pound or 48 US cents.
[6] It was a beautiful Russian built copy of my dream Leica, the Zorki 6, infinitely superior to the Halina and bought not out of my savings but through the boundless generosity of my parents who, I now realise, could ill afford it at the time.
A while back, I mentioned that I have the unique pleasure and opportunity of seeing the developmental workbooks of County Dublin artist Sue Bamford, growing in something approaching real time.
I always, given the opportunity by any artist, make a beeline for these; they reveal a deep and rich hinterland behind the finished works, a mental and spiritual analogue of the iceberg's 90% below the waterline. This is where experimental thinking is done, development of craft piloted, ideas grown. To have a window onto their evolution as it happens, though, rather than just a snapshot at one point, is even better*. My access to Sue's notebooks is a constant delight now stretching over two and a half years, and a cumulative one since every page, each offering a new view or aspect of the world, remains available for backward reference in the light of new additions.
I can't record every astonishment and wonder (it would be a full time job, and demand a blog all of its own), nor even all of my particular highlights. Sometimes, however, a particular fragment sings to me in a uniquely unexpectedly way on a perfect resonance frequency ... I don't mention most of those, either, lost as I am in the moment, but I do always think that I would like to.
Recently, happening across an entry labelled simply "black gesso, acrylic & pen on cardboard", I asked permission to publicly post and write about it. That permission being given, here it is at top left; click on it for a larger view. The interaction of materials, line, colour and texture is wonderful to see. Drawn from rocks at Loughshinny, it has since led to a larger piece of work from which the title of this post is taken.
* One of the many fringe benefits of teaching is seeing this development of process. Not just in art but in any subject. Perhaps I'll talk more of that another time ... but for now I'm concerned with the specific joys of seeing inside a mature artist, which is a much rarer opportunity.
Today is Hiroshima Day.
I won't bore you, this year, with my reasons for mentioning it. You can, if you so wish, look back at last year's post. Or...
At the end of last year, just before Christmas, street artist AcerOne paid tribute to a homeless man on his "patch": a human acknowledgement that too few people make.
In today's post, "A bear lived here", he adds another, physical world, memorial ... and records a poem, I'm no con, written by someone for whom he obviously felt great respect, admiration and affection. "It is" (writes AcerOne) " a beautiful example of how Bear viewed the injustices he faced in his everyday life and a perfect reflection of the charming fella I spoke to that day - amusing, thoughtful, intelligent and tragic." Make sure you stay long enough to find it.
There are a lot of amazing people in the world; and a lot of broken ones. The first group are too often missed, the second too often ignored. They can very often be the same people.
Somehow, I missed Ray Girvan's "Strandbeest" post, nearly seven weeks ago. My loss (now rectified) ... Theo Jensen's Strandbeest is a beautiful, graceful creation, a wind powered robot centipede which strides across the beach on compressed air. Just for the joy of it, take a look at Jensen's own site and then move on to these YouTube videos.
Watching Strandbeest, my immediate thought was how profoundly different it is from Boston Dynamics' brutally noisy Big Dog.
I've just finished what is, for me, an unusual thing: reading a book over a period of a month. I usually read fast and intensely, but something about Ursula, under made me read each separate small component, stop, think about it, and continue later. The structure of the book, I feel, encourages this: it is one of those fictions where a top level story acts as a container within which are played out a string of other stories.
The outer container, in this case, is a rescue drama: the Ursula of the title is three years old, and during a family picnic in the Michigan countryside she falls down a mine shaft. While her mother (Annie) waits beside the hole which has swallowed her daughter, the father (Justin) drives away to call for help. Hours go by, as the elements of a rescue attempt are assembled1.
The mother, left alone to worry by the shaft, tries to keep her mind from dwelling on immediate fears by thinking of the miracle of life. From this flows, for the reader, a pair of story streams reflecting the genetic lines which led to Ursula's birth. On Justine's side, the story starts two millennia before, with unexpected birth of a child to a previously barren Chinese alchemist in his old age. In Annie's history a deaf mute woman in south western Finland, who expects never to marry, meets a deaf mute trader...
Down through the centuries, we see how each birth in the twin chains of heredity which led to Annie and Justin almost never happened. At intervals, we also see the smaller chains within their own lives which make their meeting, and Ursula's birth, unlikely in their turn. And within that, a string of "might have been" happenstance decides whether or not Ursula will survives her fall and the cold hours which follow2.
Annie and Justin know almost nothing of their ancestries. Like the ropes on which the rescuers descend into the darkness of the mineshaft towards where they hope Ursula will be, these strands of story snake down unseen through time to where she now hangs in the balance.
Ursula, under3 is (in my opinion) superb story telling at its best. And beautifully written; I could take examples from anywhere, but here is just one sentence:
“ "She's my grandchild," he says, and he heads out into the morning, which is pale lavender and pierced with scattered birdcalls.”
Strongly and enthusiastically recommended.
1. As an aside ... I started reading Ursula, under on the same day that I read Unreal nature's "Miss Perception" post4. Never having called an emergency service in the US, I was interested in the difference which that post showed in US and European practice. This book synchronously provided me with a longer, more details ed look at those differences – many of which arise not only from different sociopolitical philosophies but also from differences of geography: what works in small geographies is different from what works in large ones.
2. Also during the time when I was reading Ursula, under, I chanced to have a conversation with JSBlog's Ray Girvan. Both of our fathers were unlikely survivors of the second world war; but, as Ray pointed out, once doesn't need to look at large and dramatic events to find many points in any of our lives when we might have met fatal mischance. Childhood illness which could have been worse, the moment when we almost, but not quite, stepped off the kerb in front of a bus. Only later did I connect that conversation with this book. The blunt fact is that every one of us is a statistically improbable event; this commonplace is at the same time both logically trivial and emotionally powerful.
3. The title, if you are wondering, is taken from the "U" entry in Ursula's favourite alphabet picture book. On page 1 is "Annie, All About", followed by "Betsy, Beneath the Bridge", "Camilla, Collecting"; and so on, page 21 being "Ursula, Under [the kitchen table]".
4. Placement of this aside in a footnote will, by the by, exasperate Unreal nature's Julie Heyward...
A chance synchronicity ... on Tuesday, Jim Putnam's TTMF mentioned one of Edward Hicks’ sixty plus (the exact number escapes my memory at the moment) paintings in his Peaceable kingdom series. This morning, I went to a lecture on biblical imagery, and up popped a Hicks Peaceable kingdom painting – exactly the same one, in fact (this one, in the Worcester Museum of Art).
Hicks was a Quaker. I may not share his beliefs, either religious or sociopolitical, but I do have to admire them in their own terms and time. I can say the same of today's lecturer; her interpretation of the subject is one I cannot, and will never, share; but to hear the honesty, conviction and passion in her treatment of it was a real pleasure.
Looking gloomily around the world, as Jim does, there are more places than I can count where it would be nice to see the leopard lying down with the kid.
A lifetime ago, I was horrified to see another Quaker die because his beliefs made him play the part of the kid while the leopard remained an irremediably obligate carnivore. I would say that he chose to die rather than betray his beliefs; he would no doubt have said that he chose to live by them and the other did not. Sometimes the kid wins this sort of confrontation, but usually not; Ghandi won in a larger sense though not in the smaller one most of us would value more. I lack the courage to be a kid, but it's what we really need.
