Chance conjunction of the day

The conjunction came from a song lyric and a book fragment, within not very minutes of each other.

The song lyric came first; it was playing as I worked on the text of an article about statistical testing:

She was physically forgotten,
Then she slipped into my pocket
With my car keys.
She said “You've taken me for granted
Because I pleased you...”¹

I was hungry so, when the track finished, paused the player and put aside the article for a while to get a bite to eat. Filling the gastric gap with a sandwich from my right hand, I picked up the book with my left to give my mind a brief change of scene as well. The book was an old favourite (in fact, I find that I already referenced this same line from it, earlier this year ... I'm getting repetitive) which is, to embroider the conjunction (or to suggest that am stuck in a particular past), very close to being coeval with the song:

There’s a photograph of an olive tree among the stones on my desk; when Luise left she wrote on the back of it: “I trusted you with the idea of me and you lost it”.²

It's so easy to take someone for granted and lose the idea of them ... not just a significant other, but oneself and (the thought that occurred to me in this case) those friends more removed as well.

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1. Paul Simon, "Diamonds on the soles of her shoes" on Graceland, 1986
2. Russell Hoban, The Medusa Frequency Ch.3. 1987, London: Cape. ISBN 0224024647

The kindness of strangers

In my teens, I spent a fair amount of time hiking a sparsely populated semi-arid island landscape. Agriculture, here, was a peasant economy marginally above subsistence, herds of sheep and goats scattered across sparse hillsides around tiny, isolated villages.

We would pass through these villages, stopping in their cafés for coffee or cola. Sometimes we were welcomed, surrounded by curious villagers eager for news of the outside world beyond the immediate horizon. In those, the distinctions between us (British, French, German, USAmerican) were incomprehensible; we were all, collectively and simply, “English”. In other villages we saw nobody but the café proprietor; young people in dusty khaki walking clothes and boots, carrying rucsacs, bore too much resemblance to soldiers and were best avoided on a general precautionary principle.

In the empty, rocky, soaring spaces between villages, we gradually learned never to ask directions from a local inhabitant.

When, at a fork in the unmapped and barely visible path, we asked a wandering goatherd something like “Which is the way to Melou?”, we always got a long and detailed set of directions richly supplemented by story and gesture. Alas, our genially helpful informant had (as we eventually realised) never heard of Melou, still less did he know how to get there, but didn't like to say so. This was not dishonesty; it was, on the contrary, a cultural reluctance to disappoint, a refusal to deny travellers what they requested. We would, in the early days before we understood this, often follow the instructions we were given. Trekking many kilometres of hard country in the wrong direction, before map and compass eventually convinced us of our error, we would eventually arrive in Melou tired and several hours late.

Curiously, I've now discovered a similar phenomenon in the urban landscape of England's home counties.

Coming out of a Hilton hotel at nine in the morning, I stopped at reception to ask where I could catch a bus into town. (At this point I can hear Julie Heyward, with her low opinion of buses, chortling already.) The reception manager didn't hesitate: he pointed confidently out of the door and said “go out of the hotel gate, sir, and turn left. At the junction turn left again and you'll see the bus stop”.

Outside the hotel gates I turned left; and left again at the junction. I was on a busy six lane dual carriageway, with no sign of a bus stop as far as the eye could see. Undeterred, I started walking.

As I walked, a woman emerged from an underpass, talking on her cellphone. I asked about bus stops. She paused, muttered “Hang on, Mum” into the phone, pointed back into the underpass, and said “Through there and follow the path, it's by the garage”.

On the other side of the underpass the promised path headed in the direction of town, which was encouraging. I walked for about a quarter of an hour, without seeing either a bus stop or a garage, until I met a dog walker coming the other way. To my question he replied, pointing on down the slope in the direction I was walking, “Turn left at the bottom, and just follow the path”.

At the bottom of the slope was a fork in the path. I turned left. Ten minutes walking brought me to a garage, which rekindled hope, but there was no bus stop near by. I went into the garage, where the assistant greeted my enquiry with a blank expression and the puzzled words “Bus stop?” Fair enough; she didn't know, and didn't pretend to. She disappeared briefly and returned with her manager who pointed out of the door and instructed me that I should “cross the road, turn right, keep going, you can't miss it”.

Across the road, having turned right and kept going for some time, I could no longer see the garage behind me and still hadn't found a bus stop ahead. Nor, it occurred to me, had any buses passed me.

Open clearway gradually gave way to houses, goods yards, small industrial premises. About an hour after leaving the hotel, I finally found a bus stop; the timetables inside suggested that every bus which stopped here would take me into town, so I stood and waited. Less than five minutes later, a bus arrived.

The driver gave me a very strange look, when I asked for the town centre, but took my money and issued me with a ticket. The reason for his reaction became clear when, before I'd even had time to sit down, we turned a corner and pulled into a bus station. I had arrived, having walked the whole way and then bought a ticket for the last fifty metres or so.

At the end of the day, I made my way back to the bus station. I discovered the right bus service, boarded it, purchased a ticket as far as the Hilton. Starting Google Maps on my phone, I carefully watched both the landscape outside the bus window and the little dot which showed my position as it crept between town centre and hotel. The route never touched the dual carriageway along which I had been directed by the reception manager; it followed smaller roads through residential estates. It never came within five hundred metres of the garage, nor of the underpass and the path beyond.

When I got off, I discovered that the bus stop was behind the hotel, not out of the gates at all ... starting from the gates, I would have had to turn right, right, and right again (not left and left), away from the junction (not towards and through it).

I stopped at reception and explained all of this to the reception manager. He smiled, spread his hands, shrugged expressively, and said “I don't know, sir; I never catch the bus”

Coming and going

Yesterday, JSB's Ray Girvan captured me with a sixteenth century CE poem (Dark night of the soul) and a piece of music (of the same name) which I bought before the day was over.

Today I've been listening to that music; and the music has stopped for a twentieth century poet: Sèamus Heaney, RIP.

The blue, the blue, the blue!

Unreal Nature's "Rather than presumption" post, earlier today, quotes from a Vivian Sobchack essay on Derk Jarman's film Blue:

“ ...the image is not "empty"...”

How I wish that I could persuade the rows of art lovers who have sat, stony faced, before me as I talked myself blue (!) in the face, vainly trying to put over that very point.

Audiences whom I seek to similarly persuade of the depth and passion in Yves Klein's IKB works are equally unimpressed. I show them the intense blue of the sky between tall buildings (though not as intense as that in the steep Virginian valleys where Unreal nature is written) and invite them to wonder ... for a moment their eyes show recognition of how amazing that blue is; but when they drop their eyes again they have not altered their opinion of Klein.

I have often wondered whether Jarman had Klein in mind when he chose blue for that magical rectangle in the luminous dark ... or whether both of them were, like Robert Frost in Fragmentary blue, simply responding to a shared human entrancement described by Doris Lessing:

“She had clung here and looked up and out and it had been as if her whole self had filled with a need to leave here and let herself be absorbed by that endless blue — the blue, the blue, the blue!”

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• Doris Lessing, The marriages between Zones Three, Four and Five (as narrated by the chronicles of Zone Three). 1980, London: Cape.  022401790X. [Amazon link (physical book). Amazon link (Kindle).]

Not so swinging after all

Yesterday, my fifteen year old niece asked me about the sixties (the decade, that is; not my age bracket). The sixties are, apparently, now material for history projects ... which is, I suppose, fair enough since they are more temporally distant from her than the second world war was from me when I studied it in history at the same age.

I was somewhat deflated to discover that a rich period full of event, possibility, promise and terror boils down to this: I talked politics, wore flared jeans, had long hair, sang silly songs, and am of an age with the bursar at her school...

Living in the past (3): turtle diary*

*Russell Hoban, Turtle diary. 1975, London: Cape. 0224010859.
 

I am probably not unusual in this: that I generally try to do the right thing but all too often turn out, in retrospect, to have gotten it wrong.

My continued scanning of old negatives, however, reminds me that there's one thing with which I can, in a modest way, be unequivocally satisfied: that I was once a small, insignificant and peripheral cog in an obscure corner of the large effort to constrain a rapacious international trade in exotic animals.

At that time, in the mid nineteen seventies, millions of wild tortoises were extracted (anodyne word) annually from wild habitats in Africa, Mediterranean Europe, Turkey and the southern USSR, then shipped to pet shops predominantly in northern Europe – particularly Germany and the UK.

The economics of the trade encouraged barbaric collection and shipping methods which resulted in only five percent of those millions actually arriving for sale. The remainder either died en route or arrived so damaged (broken shells, gangrenous or severed legs…) that, unsaleable, they were simply dumped.

Nor was arrival alive in the pet shop an end of it. Because customers preferred smaller, cuter tortoises, the trade emphasised those. In the wild in, for example, Morocco, a small young tortoise would not hibernate for a whole long winter as it had to do in northern Europe. It would hibernate during a cold spell, then emerge to feed during warmer intervals, replenishing nutritional stocks before returning to a another period of sleep. In a northern European home straw box, this was not an option; the small, immature tortoises favoured by pet buyers, unable to store sufficient reserves for the required time span, all too often starved to death during the long winter.

My part in the slow, painstaking efforts to change all of this was nothing spectacular, you understand; nothing that any other small cog couldn't have done, and did do, in many other places. Taking photographs to document, evidence, and publicise abuses or breaches of such laws as could at the time be brought to bear. But, as it went, I was the small cog that happened to be turned in my particular corner of the world – and I'm content with that.

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Express delivery

Last night we watched a comedy in which three friends are in an immobilised cable car with a pregnant woman when she goes into labour. The whole thing was wildly unrealistic, but we nevertheless scoffed at the utter incompetence of the characters in the face of this emergency.

After it was over, though, I started to think. The male character was completely useless ... but, truth be told, I was choosing to forget that  my own first human birth was, in terms of my own part in it, an even more inglorious occasion – happy in its outcome only through good luck.

Nineteen years old, with fellow student Jon, I dropped in on friends Karl and Hannah in their small town home. Hannah was heavily pregnant. Karl wasn’t there: Hannah, tired of his fussy worrying and pacing, had ordered him out of the flat for a night on the town with his friends to give her some peace. She welcomed us in, sat us down, and went to put a kettle on. Then she screamed. We rushed through to find her on all fours, on a wet kitchen floor, wide eyed, gasping and panting.

Wide eyed, gasping and panting ourselves, we ran around in a headless chicken manner and flapped our hands uselessly until Hannah caught her breath and called us to order. She told one of us to go out to the telephone in the square, call the midwife whose number was pinned to the kitchen door frame, then find Jon and bring him home.

I would have welcomed the chance to be out doing something and away from the centre of useless responsibility, but Jon reached the door first so I was left alone with Hannah.

Hannah, though only twenty and in her first pregnancy, took charge with natural authority. She sat me in a chair, held my hand, reassured me.

I discovered later that, at under two hours, it was an unbelievably quick and easy delivery – but at the time it seemed to go on for ever. Hannah saw me through it, patience itself most of that time though there were a couple of stressful moments when she shouted at me to “stop being a useless wanker”.

I did as I was told, breathed deeply and stopped panicking when instructed.

By the time the midwife arrived, I was holding a hastily wiped baby girl roughly the right way up and Hannah was plying me with heavily sugared coffee. Jon, who had had to visit many cafés, pubs and bars in his search for Karl, returned with him some time after that to coo in an inebriated manner over the baby.

Having seen a fair number of deliveries since then, it's easy to forget, easy to pretend to myself that I've always been where I am now. But no; I really shouldn't judge the characters in the ski lift comedy. In fact they stepped up to the plate better than I.

Living in the past*

*Jethro Tull, Living in the past, 1969, Island records [also included on Living in the past (LP), 1972]
 In the enforced rest during this recent period of illness and recuperation, I've been trying to do things which don't take a lot of movement or brain power. One of the things I have been doing in lucid spells is going through old negatives.

Scanning old negatives to disk is one of those tasks which gets endlessly put off ... it ties up equipment and time which can always be used for something more urgent and/or interesting. This last few weeks, though, I've rigged up a redundant spare laptop to a scanner and tottered through to it when I felt able.

It's been an ideal task for the circumstances. There's about two minutes concentration needed, threading a strip of six negatives into the scanner, then clicking the necessary things in PaintshopPro (or whatever vehicle you happen to use for scanner import). After that, computer and scanner are left alone to do their stuff ... about 25 mins for the high resolution scans I'm doing ... and if I happen to be curled up in a fœtal ball when it finishes, well, it'll just wait until I next surface. After that it's another minute or so of clicking to save the results. Then start again with the next strip.

Seven strips to a sheet ... so if I'm feeling really focused, I can get on with something else in the 25 minute gaps and do a whole sheet in a day ... if I'm completely zonked, then a single strip or nothing at all.

Then there is the periodic business of moving the resulting files off the spare laptop onto my main machine, numbering them, adding them to the archive, tagging them ... all of which can also be done in bits and pieces of time, when I feel up to it.

At no time is there any need for real thinking, or scope for tragic errors ... if I make mistakes, the negatives are still there and I can always do it again.

To be honest, most of them are boring – either to me, who took them, or I realise that they would be to anyone else. The younger me was, I am discovering, very internal – or, perhaps I should say, even more internal than I am now. I look at some pictures and I remember the passion that made me, in pursuit of an idea, photograph this pale grey blur against that even paler grey texture ... but in the resulting photograph there is nothing intrinsically of any visual interest to me or to anyone else.

Roll after roll of film from a walking trip with my brother in France, forty years ago (see “What is lost and gained”, 26 Feb this year) record (with a very few exceptions) not the experience, or the land, or the people, or even my brother, but my obsession at the time with the use of poured concrete in architecture and civil engineering design.

Nevertheless, as my wise friend Luís said to me only this morning, “Even if they contain material you are not necessarily keen on now, all photographs carry some history in them and may be useful to someone” ... so I scan them, file them, and shall keep them.

The point of all this, however, is that every now and then I'm coming across pictures that amuse me, or awaken moments of memory, or just strike me as good and worth resurrecting. Some excite me. Some I look at and wonder why I didn't pursue their line further than I did.

Luís also said to me quite recently, again about these old negatives: “As you look at them, they will start to tell you stories”. He's quite right. As I work through the largely random order of these sheets, I am finding stories ... and, in particular, stories (usually, though not always, heartening ones) which I hadn't heard before about myself. I am hearing new, revelatory stories about my relationships with my brothers, with my ex wife, with a small piece of woodland, with photography as a medium.

Passing for human[ist]

Despite zero belief in, and considerable reservations about, this season's story, I quote from an excellent Maundy Thursday sermon by Simon Taylor:

“...I was speaking with a friend of a friend, a retired priest ... “You need to cultivate the skin of a rhinoceros”, he told me. I think it was possibly the worst piece of advice I was ever given as a parish priest.

[… … …]

All of our ministry is [...] founded in being truly human. To be good ministers, we need to be good human beings. And this is where it gets hard, for so much of what we do as human beings and as ministers, is designed to hide our humanity. We are too good at wearing armour that protects us, but that distorts us at the same time.

[… … …]

The first piece of armour to refuse is that of the thick skin.”

Belief or lack of it has nothing to do with recognising the stark truth of that “so much of what we do as human beings ... is designed to hide our humanity”. Amen.

Work

“He did not work for money, anyway; his work was a way of thinking, a way of life.”*

I just ran across the above sentence in one of my "timeslips" rereadings, and felt the delight of something perfect.
Of course one needs to be paid, in order to live; but living is the point.

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• Philip Halvorsen, fictional character, in: Theodore Sturgeon, The [widget] the [wadget] and Boff,1955, Garden City NY: Doubleday.

Timeslips (sideways)

I have been sending out emails inviting people I know to participate in a survey organised by Elsie, a teenager who is researching a project on “what makes a novel a classic?”*

Replies have been rolling in from generous people who have given Elsie their time and thought. One of them is from Dirk Dusharme, who continued in a vein which (while not primarily concerned with SF) fits well with my “Timeslips” opener of yesterday:

It's funny though. Just this last week I was thinking I should go back and reread some of my favorite childhood books.

I was thinking Robinson Crusoe, Les Miserables, Kidnapped (which I remember really liking), Black Stallion (I read all of them), Dr. Doolittle (read all of them as well). So many....

And I don't know if you ever came across this series as a kid Danny Dunn and the.... Time machine, Homework machine, etc. They were all kind of technology things. Danny was a boy genius, his dad a rocket scientist, and Danny would get into some sort of mischief involving his latest invention. Kind of a nerdy Hardy Boys thing. Read all of them as well. I basically hid in the library as a kid... better than the real world.

[… … …]

...the first SF book I read that really captivated me [was] Andre Norton's Moon of Three Rings. It was like nothing I had ever read before [… … …] at some level, making me realize that characters in books could be very real and relatable. And that was important.

I never encountered the Black Stallion or Danny Dunn books, but I loved all of the others in that list. I have a surreal image of Dirk in a library in California, me in a library in South Australia, both devouring the same Dr Dolittle book at the same time (perhaps Doctor Dolittle in the moon, since that qualifies as a science fiction with its space travel by giant moth...)

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*If you want to take part yourself, feel free – Elsie would, I know, appreciate it. Click here.

• Hugh Lofting, Doctor Dolittle in the Moon. 1929, London: Jonathan Cape. 

Timeslips (1)

This is, functionally and organically, an extension of my first Vie Hebdomadaires post, “The puzzle that is me”, from 30 July. Perhaps extension isn't the right word; ‘descendent’ or ‘inheritor’ might be better. It's likely to be quite short; partly because I have only as long as it takes me to eat a bowl of soup, and partly because I don't yet know exactly where it is heading. It will have to be the first fragment of a self exploration in progress.

I said, back then in July, that a particular science fiction novel read in my early teens “changed me fundamentally and shaped my whole subsequent life”. To a more diffuse but equally real extent, that is also true of the whole gamut of science fiction which I read between roughly thirteen and sixteen. While this is a fact of which I've been generally aware for some time, over the past three months I've been thinking about it consciously and explicitly.

In second hand bookshops, charity stalls, digital reissues and the always excellent Marx Books, I've been deliberately looking out for copies of those titles and authors which I can retrieve from memory. Not according to a grand strategy; each quest is triggered by a chance association from another book read, by a day to day experience, by a remark in conversation.

I was a voracious reader at that time. Though many of the books concerned are, I now discover, quite slim, I nevertheless cannot any longer devour six or seven of them in a day. It's perhaps fortunate, then, that I can't remember enough bibliographic details to track down more than a few of them. Some I remember clearly and can go straight to them in a catalogue; Geoffrey Hoyle's October the first is too late was one such. Others I can find by following trails of breadcrumbs backward ... I could remember neither author nor title for Frederik Pohl's A plague of pythons, for instance, but searching online for a combination of things I did remember (coronets, mind control, science fiction novel, hoaxer, etc) brought them up fairly quickly. For some I have to rely on the black arts of which Ray Girvan is master; he has located several titles which defeated me completely, from almost no clues at all, and is currently chasing another for me.

There are several things that particularly interest me about delving back into what I read at a formative time in my life. The most obvious and superficial is finding out what it was, exactly, that so strongly influenced me – and why. There is also a historical fascination in looking back to how things were then. Even more interesting, though, is to discover what I was like then: to see what sort of teenager I must have been for this fiction to have precisely that effect upon my developing psyche. It's a fascinating voyage of self discovery.

I have to pick up my stylus and walk, now. A lecture hall full of eager (or perhaps somnolent) students awaits me. Rather than stow this and continue it later, this seems like a good point to break and post. I'll be back, in other (no doubt equally fragmentary) posts, to follow some of the threads I've started to gather here.

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• Fred Hoyle, October the first is too late. 1966, London: Heinemann.
• Frederik Pohl, A plague of pythons. 1966, London: Gollancz.

Easy Ryder

I've always liked and admired SophieRyder's work – both artistically and polemically (she is one of the few who successfully pull off that combination without selling one of them short).

And children are usually intrigued by her playfully tactile incorporation of recognisable industrial detritus into organic forms (for instance, her frequent use of chain to represent spinal structure).

Seeing this child (click for a larger view) nestle so happily and naturally into The minotaur and the hare, though, is a new thing to me – seeming to simultaneously enrich, clarify and validate Ryder's vision.

Pollyanna is alive and well...

At some point in the recent weeks when I have been too rushed to write very much here, my friend Pauline mentioned a programme on PBS in which Shawn Achor “pitches happiness as an advantage and as a personal responsibility”. She was taking up his challenge in this respect by “trying one of his suggested strategies ... writing down 3 things that I am grateful for, every day for 21 days”. She commented that by the eighth day it was helping her to confront bad news.

It's an exercise I've heard advocated many times, and it always seems a worthwhile one – but this time, being short of time to write anything discretionary of any length, I gave it a try.

The main problem was choosing just three things from the gamut available in in a day. In the end I settled on picking a quiet moment (sometimes at the end of the day, sometimes at its beginning, sometimes in between), picking up stylus and tablet, and quickly jotting down the first three that came to mind. This didn't produce a very profound list (often, after jotting my three, I would think of a dozen things for which I was far more grateful), but it enabled me to stick to the task without getting bogged down ... and besides: who, in the end, is qualified to say which gratitudes are or are not more and/or less valuable?

Having today between asked by another friend how I manage to always remain so imbecilically cheerful all the time, I thought I would dig out the results.

Below the fold is my list. Well, not the whole list, but close ... there ought to be 69 items, but some related to identifiable people who might not want the items recorded here ... so you'll find only sixty. Rather than presenting them three by three, one day after another, as I wrote them, I have randomised them (using the RAND() function in a spreadsheet, if you're interested) to emphasise that there is no hierarchy of gratitude: each is a self contained grace in and of itself.

I've never used a fold in the Growlery before, by the way, even though I like them a lot and think that they are a great idea. They were not available in the old style Blogger editor, which in every other respect I referred to the new one. Now that Blogger (in other words, Google) has forced me to use the horrible new editor by simply removing the old one, I might as well make use of this one positive aspect (there you are ... in true Pollyanna style, I find it possible to be grateful for the fold even as a beef about the editor!) Expect to see more folds, from now on.

Finding Helen

I'm too much a scientist to give a moment's credence to the idea that coincidences have any significance; but human enough, at the same time, to enjoy (even as I dismiss it) the superstitious illusion that they might. A coincidence takes at least two components. This one has three: a place, an object, a book title.

I was last in this place, this city of absurd architecture, forty years ago give or take a week or so. I had come to visit a friend, but the hitching had been too slow to arrive at a time when I might still have reasonably knocked on the door. No lights were on, so I wandered down to the beach and curled up on shingle amidst the suck and blow scraping sound of surf beneath a jetty.

A coincidence also requires at least some element of unlikelihood, though this is subjective. Being in a place I have been before would, of course, score nothing at all for improbability; perhaps, though, the nearness to a four decade anniversary can be said to count.

The friend was Helen; I had known her since I was fifteen, though the friendship was maintained mostly through letters (our families were both peripatetic). Real meetings like this were infrequent though always natural and easy. It began as that preciously rare thing, at least for me (a boy at an all boys school): a friendship with a girl which didn't, at some level if only in subconscious and unrequited fantasy, involve any sexual dimension. Now, five years later, we were both students in different places a long way apart; this visit was one of the occasional renewals in person.

Next morning, when the sun had been up for a decent interval, I knocked at the door and, of course, both Helen and her parents scolded me for not having woken them. I spent a carefree few days there, then hitched out again. I saw Helen again, after that, but not here. She met a fellow student whom she would spend the vacations; I liked him, and he made me welcome in their home just as her parents had. Eventually she married, and so did I. She moved, and so did I. We lost touch. When I tried to find her again, through her parents, they too had moved and the trail had gone cold.

Now, forty years on, I sleep not on the shingle but in a comfortable hotel room. I shall, later in the day, catch an onward connection.

Wandering through the snaggle of little streets which make up what is a cross between hippy quarter and trendy tourist trap, I drift on impulse into a large premises containing a mix of small dealers on the scale from junk to antiques. A number of the displays contain significantly overpriced old cameras, which interest me, so I stop to look a them through their glass cases.

There are large numbers of old amateur folding bellows type portable cameras designed for 6cm roll film, though none of them is the fondly remembered childhood "sixteen on" Dalmeyer which might (despite the inflated price tags) make me consider buying. There are a couple of Ensigns: one in moderate condition and one, inexplicably more expensive, badly battered, corroded, decrepit. There are numerous Kodak Bantams, Brownies and Bullets, Ferrania and Ilford equivalents in Bakelite and plastic, Agfas and Arguses ... and, incongruously in their midst, a single spruce looking SLR: a Praktica LTL.

On that last visit here, forty years ago, Helen asked me to help her buy a camera. She needed one for her course, wanted it to be good enough to continue usefully into her subsequent career, but didn't know enough to make a confident choice alone. She liked my own Pentax Spotmatic, but couldn't afford to buy one of her own. The compromise we found was a Praktica LTL, which she carried home with an unrestrained delight that made my heart glow.

That the only SLR (indeed the only modern styled and technologically sophisticated camera of any kind) amid the dozens of older and simpler examples should be this particular make and model is, I think, as sufficiently unlikely to qualify as a component of coincidence.

Though aware, in the filing cabinet at the back of my consciousness, of the four decades old connection, it's not been on my mind and I have given it no thought nor attention. Looking at the LTL sitting there behind the glass of its case, amidst the worn and dusty relics, in perfect "as new" condition as if straight from the shop back in the summer of 1972, I suddenly feel the connection move from filing cabinet to heart.

The third element of today's coincidence is that this morning, before breakfast, I started reading a Colin Greenland novel. I am half way through it, and will finish it before the day is out. What is unlikely about reading a Colin Greenland novel? Nothing in itself, but I have only read one before: Other voices, from whose title I ripped off the heading for my blog roll on the left of this page. Despite being so deeply impressed by it that I have reread it at least a dozen times, and have for the past twenty something years been meaning to explore his other work, today is the first time that I have started another. And the one upon which I happened to alight when I bought it, picking from an Amazon list a week or more ago, is called Finding Helen.

The coincidence lies purely in the title, not the content, of the novel (though it's a powerful and engrossing novel; I recommend it).

Greenland's Helen is a petty, vindictive, malicious, self obsessed, narcissistic, life devouring monster. Mine was the opposite of all those things: warm, generous, funny, gentle, unselfish, with a ready smile for the joys of others and an impish grin always ready to break out at any of life's peaks or troughs.

Greenland's protagonist is a broken reed, abandoning his present life in pursuit of an illusory past. That's not me, either; I have no intention of chasing off on a fool's errand to track down and locate someone I used to know, half a lifetime ago when we were both different people.

And yet, through this three segmented coincidence, "finding Helen" is exactly what I have, inadvertently, done. She's been stored away too long in that dry filing cabinet; I'm very pleased to have found her, and to have her vivacity back in living mind where it can warm my world.

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• Colin Greenland, Other voices. 1989: Unwin Paperbacks. 0044403097 (pbk)
• Colin Greenland, Finding Helen. 2002, London: Black Swan. 0552770809 (pbk.). [Amazon Kindle link]

More books, and the darker side of solitude

[this is a copy of my sixth post as a guest of Vie hebdomadaires]

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As will be obvious from my first post in this series, books (and fictions in particular) are important to me … to a very real extent, I am what I read. Today’s helping has no particular theme except that it brings another ragbag of book related ramblings.
Before moving on, let me share an unsolicited testimonial. After some time trying to acquire a digital copy of Zenna Henderson‘s The anything box (another of my teen influences) I found a reasonably priced copy (as opposed to many high-priced copies which I’d seen) courtesy of second hand dealer Marx Books in Lubbock, Texas. The words “courtesy of” are particularly appropriate here: John Marx, the proprietor, sent a personal email acknowledging my $5 order. Mr Marks is (unlike me) a real life Cliff Janeway and it shows. Impressed by book, despatch time, service and communication, I went back today for three more books (the site is very efficient, with an excellent search system to find exactly the book you want) … and received yet another personal email before the invoice, detailing exactly the condition of each book in my order and giving me the chance to cancel if I wasn’t happy with what I heard. I shall certainly be using Marx Books again
When I sang the praises of solitude, yesterday, in this series, I casually said that “Though I wouldn’t choose it, I could probably cope with solitude as a permanent state if I had to”. I was, of course, writing from the comfortable position of having that choice. I am, it has to be admitted, lucky enough to be able to play at solitude, and I have no doubt that I would see it in a very different light if it was enforced upon me. Even in wilderness, I am always a tourist – safe in the knowledge that can return to the safe bustle of city streets or tamed rural agricultural countryside whenever I like.
The difference is well depicted in a fictional setting by Ursula K Le Guin‘s Threshold (aka The beginning place), where solitude is used as a walkabout style metaphor for coming of age. The two young protagonists, both fleeing the constraints of home, seek solitude of different kinds in a timeless land which they discover on the other side of the “threshold” of the title. That solitude allows them to flourish and grow, though each resents the other’s presence. When the place makes demands of them, they find themselves adrift within it and without choice, at which point they not only must find strength in their togetherness but find the return to society their most desired goal.
What has prompted me to this line of thought is discussion of another book entirely: a novel which explores courage and endurance in the face of enforced solitude of a very different and claustrophobic kind.
One of the pleasures of blogging is the diversity of feedback, and especially that which comes as a surprise. Today I received two such despatches from the real. The first was from photographer Judith Acland, who tells me that she is starting Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable creatures on my recommendation. The second, from Jasmine Golledge, was a report from the middle of Emma Donoghue‘s novel Room, read on the basis of my post about it last year: “I’ve been unable to put down the book Room. I’m on page 277 already. Brilliantly written, compelling, heart wrenching – fantastic. Several parts have moved me to tears already, and it isn’t that often that a novel is able to do that. …. So far, excellent recommendation!”
That interim judgment was encouraging. It’s always a nerve wracking business, recommending a book and then waiting to see whether my opinion is shared by the person who has taken my enthusiasm on trust. And a recommendation placed out on the web in full public view is a hostage to fortune. I read Room on my brother’s recommendation, and was glad I had. My mother, who also read it on his recommendation, felt that it was exploitative: the novelist turning a profit on the real suffering of women such as Elisabeth Fritzl, Natascha Kampusch or Jaycee Dugard (a point of view which I can understand and respect). My partner, an English literature specialist with whom I usually share a great deal of common ground in reading matter who read it on my recommendation, left her copy behind in a Croatian hotel room by accident but without subsequent regret.
Jasmine, however, to my relief, wrote again later to confirm her approval. And since she did so in words which so perfectly encapsulate my own reactions, I’ll end by just quoting them instead of finding my own:

“One of the things I loved about this book was the way it drew me in immediately, and I didn’t spot any obvious plot devices that jolt you out of the story and make you aware that you are reading. ( You know the type … where the hardened detective goes home to his lonely house and begins ruminating on his old happy married life before his wife was murdered and he turned to drink, all the while stroking a kitten he rescued from a mine-shaft…).
It was beautifully written, the story flowed naturally and, I felt, didn’t give into the “they escape, the bad guy gets punished, all live happily ever after” tale that most people want. It showed, in very simple but devastating ways, the continued impact in small ways that most people wouldn’t even consider. Jack has to unlearn almost everything he thought about the world, the very nature of reality. The worst and most brutal aspects of humanity, and also the very best. His mother is a hero, and yet attempted suicide at a time he needed her most. The nuances of the ongoing difficulties and complexities of that relationship, and what the boy will grow up having to adjust to and live with, is more disturbing and terrifying than the idea that a man could capture and imprison a woman for so many years.
We hear those sorts of stories on the news all the time, we cry, we’re shocked, we get angry, and we maybe rant about how the abuser should be hung drawn and quartered or locked up for life. We argue about what kind of monster could do this to another human being, are they just evil, or did something in society or their own childhood make them that way, how did society/the police/the government not see what has happening and stop it. Then we mentally sigh and say, “well, they’re free now, and the bad guy has been punished” – and we move on with our lives. End of story. This novel blows that comforting allusion out of the water. It’s what I feel makes it shocking and disturbing, and yet also what I like about it. It challenged me to think about the minute ways the impact would continue to spread, like ripples on a pond.”

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• Tracy Chevalier, Remarkable creatures. 2009, London: Harper Collins. 9780007178377.
• Emma Donoghue, Room. 2010, London: Picador. 9780330519021 (pbk)
• Zenna Henderson, The anything box. 1966, London: Gollancz.
• Ursula K Le Guin, Threshold. 1982, London: Granada, 0586054073 (pbk)

Solitude standing

[this is a copy of my fifth post as a guest of Vie hebdomadaires]

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As I mentioned in passing, a couple of days ago, I have tendency to be solitary.

Not that I don’t like people; I do, very much; but I also like time alone. Though I wouldn’t choose it, I could probably cope with solitude as a permanent state if I had to; I certainly have never minded a couple of months at a stretch, when they came along. Mostly, though, as an ideal, I take it little and often: short spells, a few minutes or a few days, amid the hurleyburley.

You don’t have to head for the wilderness to get solitude. You can get solitude in the heart of a city, if you want to. A couple of weeks ago, I was shown a place of bosky solitude which I had never suspected, just behind a thriving arts centre which I have visited frequently. As someone who (from active choice) spends much of his life travelling, I get my most frequent doses of solitude in that suspension which occurs between one place and another, even on a crowded train. Nevertheless, wilderness does have its appeal and I particularly love that special kind of solitude which arises from knowing that no other human being likely to appear. I have an especial weakness for islands; and this little group of three islands, wilderness surrounded by sea which in turn is enfolded by wilderness mainland, is one of my treasured favourite spots. No, I have no intention of telling you where they are.

Neither solitude nor wilderness need, these days, necessarily require an absence of communications links. Much wilderness is now suffused with one or another sort of radio signal into which you can tap in if you wish; dealing with that is simply a matter of using the “off” switch, or even leaving the equipment at home. Sometimes I sit in my wilderness solitude and use email; sometimes I don’t; it depends. This particular island wilderness, though, has only the last gasp level of comms access, the satellite phone of which I shall not make use unless there is an emergency. Trying to use a system like WordPress over a satphone is, in any case, a silly idea: slow, clunky, error prone, apt to go off somewhere else just as you finish so that you have to start again … nothing could be more calculated to destroy the very state of mind which a wilderness island promotes. So, this post (I do, you see, have a small Android device with me on which to write) will have to wait until tomorrow’s return to the madding crowd before it can be uploaded.

I also have an MP3 player, and will sometimes use that too (with ear buds, to avoid any sound pollution of the place itself). But not today. As the sun set, somewhere just out of sight from my rocky shoreline spot, I privately listened only inside my head to Judith Durham singing, from the biomemory bank, Catch the wind.

-Felix

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Never mind the quality, feel the width

[this is a copy of my third post as guest of Vie hebdomadaires]
image source: Radio Times

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I mentioned in my first Vie Hebdomadaires post on Monday that I learn valuable lessons from occasional differences of opinion with Ray Girvan, amongst our frequent agreement … and so it is this first Olympic Games week. I wouldn’t go so far as Ray does in his 29 July post in my opinion of “sport, and any celebration of it” but I do have concerns.

I don’t have any poor opinions at all of sport in principle. My own personal preference has always been for other physical activities (walking, climbing, cycling, even for a time in my mid teens, cross country running … usually solitary, which probably says more about me than anything else) but I am happy for other people who enjoy more organised or team oriented ones. I can even enjoy watching them, even if others around me find my enjoyment strange.

I can enjoy watching anyone do anything well, and celebrate their doing of it. I can enjoy beauty, and expression whether beautiful or not, wherever I find them. I don’t ever tend to initiate the watching of sport but today, for example, when my partner was watching the athletics, I enjoyed many parts of it in exactly the way that I would enjoy an act of modern dance. When I spend an afternoon with my step son and his family, and a game of soccer is on the television, I enjoy that in the same way that I would enjoy a ballet (he, like almost everyone else know, finds that equivalence hilarious … but it stays with me).

What I can’t manage to do, in either of those examples, is manage to care in the slightest who wins.

There is an old chestnut, frequently quoted at me when I was a spotty, skinny, uncoördinated schoolboy suffering joylessly through a game of Rugby: “it’s not the winning that matters but the taking part”. I could buy that … but, alas, it is almost always spoken in hypocrisy. Sometimes the hypocrisy is a vehicle for comfort and kindness; sometimes not; but I have very rarely heard it said in sincerity. For many players of games (not all; I’ve watched youngsters turn out all season, in all weathers, week in and week out, to play soccer or rugby despite winning not a single match), as in so many areas of life, winning matters very much. For most spectators, it matters even more.

More worrying than the individual desire to win, though, are the outbreaks of mob “chimpiness” (for which word I am again indebted to Ray) which surround sporting events: Quatermass and the Pit style spasms of our biological heritage. At the crudest and most obvious level, it emerges as football terrace violence. More insidiously, but just as definitely, it can be seen in the bean counting which is going on in Britain (and most other countries) at the moment: not honouring the achievements of the participants, but totting up how many medals “we” have won.

It goes way beyond the sports themselves, too. The arts are, by and large, less afflicted by this mass effect – but not once sports have raised the temperature. Despite many detailed reservations and relativist economic concerns, I could enjoyed the Olympic opening ceremony too: as a superbly well designed and executed piece of spectacular theatre put on by a huge cast of committed volunteers. But … so much of the commentary was not around the performance itself but concentrated on whether or not “we” had trumped the equivalent effort four years ago in Beijing.

-Felix

The puzzle that is me

[this is a copy of my first post as guest of Vie hebdomadaires]

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When I was about thirteen years old, I read a novel which changed me fundamentally and shaped my whole subsequent life.

Given a dramatically hyperbolic statement like that, you’d expect me to have strong and detailed memories of it, wouldn’t you? Yet until quite recently I remembered only four partial sentences (not even verbatim, at that; just as paraphrase) which accounted for its influence on me, and one visual image constructed from text of which not one word remained. Title and author lost without trace. There were insufficient details in accessible memory even to attempt a Google search. I mentioned all of this to Ray Girvan (last week’s Vie hebdomadaires incumbent), in passing, during a walk and talk. The conversation pulled out of my memory a few details which I hadn’t previously known were there, and a few days later Ray sent me not only title and author but the link to an online copy of the text so that I could reread it.

Bear with me; the link to this week, this day, will (I hope) emerge.

The book in question was Eight keys to Eden. It’s what is usually labelled “SF” … I really don’t much like such labels, but they do simplify discussion so I’ll grudgingly let this one in for now. And the reason it affected me so? It presented me, in a way which made sudden epiphanic sense to my thirteen year old mind, with the idea of critical thinking. The eight keys of the title refer to eight progressive steps in the development of thinking, of which only seven are given in the book – discovery of the eighth being, in a sense, the “next level” discovery of which the book is about. I won’t bore you with the full list (some of which are a bit dodgy anyway, I now see with adult eyes) but here are the first three which, in retrospect, were my launchpad:

1. Accept the statement of Eminent Authority without basis, without question.

2. Disagree with the statement without basis, out of general contrariness.

3. Perhaps the statement is true, but what if it isn’t? How then to account for the phenomenon?

It’s clear enough to see how this fits with the development of the early teen years.

I was emerging from my childhood, in which I automatically accepted what I was told by adults (the Eminent Authorities of my world at the time): Key 1. I was entering that phase where rebelliousness made me automatically reject anything an adult said, on general bolshie principle: Key 2. What the third stage, Key 3, offered me was a way to dignify my rejection (and also the all too frequent experience of discovering that I was wrong) with something more defensible, more philosophically grounded. I have no doubt that my parents and teachers found it even more exasperating to have me stroke my chin and say “hmmm … let’s examine that statement, shall we?” than the “who says?” which had gone before … and it was, to be honest, an egotistical act: but it also, nevertheless, triggered a real step forward in my development.

I’ll skip the others apart from this one, Key 6, which would sink down to sit as a slow burner in my subconscious and later emerge with particular relevance to my drift into statistics and, later still, research:

6. What if the statement were reversible, that which is considered effect is really cause?

So far, so good … but that conversation with Ray, and my rediscovery of Eight keys to Eden, was some time ago, now. I wouldn’t call on it as part of this, a “weekly life” series of posts, if it hadn’t a current relevance.

Though I’ve always been aware that I was a science fiction junkie in my teens, I’d not until recently connected that fact with either my own present state or my “laissez faire, laissez aller” belief, as an educator, in encouraging every student to embrace even the mistaken as part of a route to critical evaluation. Today, as it happens, has seen a stage completion in both processes (which turn out to have been the same process) in two parts.

The first part involved interweaving conversations with several people, including Ray again. Ray and I agree over much, but our occasional disagreements are what spur me to think. The second part was a serendipitous result of having been frenetically busy over the past month: my reading of fiction (vital to me as a way to unwind and maintain my balance) was mainly in very short fragments (sometimes as short as thirty seconds at a time) using an iPod hosted eReader app, supplemented (when at home) by parallel reading on paper of M K Joseph‘s The time of Achamoth (lent to me by Ray; see his post on it) and China Miéville‘s eight hundred and something page tome Perdido Street Station.

Of the conversations, I’ll mention only two strands as examples. With Ray, I discussed our shared tendency at a point in our development to wallow in (using Ray’s words) “ Von Däniken style mysteries, ley lines, Lethbridge pendulums, dubious ‘unlocking your inner powers’ books, Colin Wilson’s more flaky output, etc.” I personally feel that I came to no harm from that phase; it opened my mind to possibilities, and then provided me with plenty of opportunities to hone my critical faculties. I think the same is probably true of Ray, too, though he looks upon it with more scepticism – a good balance and mirror for my own assumptions. The second strand involves discussion of critical constructivist process with my two brothers (both of them also involved in education, though in divergent fields), kicked off by discussion of a paper in Pedagogy about close reading (or lack of it) by students.

The advent of eReaders, which make books very cheap to reissue, has had a similar effect to CDs and downloads in music: stuff which I read long ago, long out of print and unobtainable, emerges again into daylight. These digital reissues are, admittedly, of variable quality; the best are perfect, but many, like Gateway’s Kindle edition of Clifford D Simak’s Time is the simplest thing, are littered with OCR errors; they are, nevertheless, a goldmine of renewed easy access to otherwise lost material. Time is the simplest thing is also SF, as is The time of Achamoth, and the two have a common thread: travel denied to the human body (interstellar and temporal, respectively) are achieved by projection of the mind. Transfer of minds (from embodied brain to digital backing store) is also central to Iain M Banks‘ latest “Culture” novel, Surface detail. All of these have been in my fractured reading across that crowded month

Perdido Street, by chance, I started reading just as the overstuffed month began. I would normally have read it in a couple of days, but in the circumstances it took the full month and I only finished it this morning – just as I have the comparative leisure to start synthesising all of this. Perdido Street is not science fiction in the same sense as the others; its steam punk physical science is not just speculative, it is impossible in this universe … but I would classify it as SF nevertheless. It shares with Time is the simplest thing and Surface detail a common theme (amongst the many intertwined strands in each): what it means to be human.

And that, in a funny sort of way, is what has gradually trickled into my mind today: what it means to be human, and more specifically the question of what it means to be me. Because what has today suddenly become clear to me, after reading several science fictions from my early teens and several new ones as well, is that it’s not exactly what I read that decided what I am but the fact that I read it. Mark Clifton, Clifford D Simak, John Wyndham, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke, and all the rest, rattled around in my head along with, ground and winnowed by, the heavier and more abrasive likes of Durrell’s Alexandria quartet and C P Snow’s Strangers and brothers sequence, Joyce’s Ulysses (another tome of similar size to Perdido Street Station) … and the result of the whole chance mélange, on this August day, decades down the line, is me.

With which I will end. If you’ve followed me this far through the rambling and incoherent maze (the title of this post, by the way, comes from a Simon and Garfunkel song – S&G lyrics also having been an important part of the mix), thank you. Good night.

- Felix

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• Ian M Banks, Surface detail. 2010, London: Orbit. 9781841498959 (pbk). [Amazon link] Also Kindle edition, 2010, London: Hachette [Amazon link]
• Mark Clifton, Eight Keys to Eden. 1962, London: Victor Gollancz. (originally a book club edition 1960, Garden City NY: Doubleday. Also 1982, Norfolk VA: Donning. 0898652588. Available as electronic text from The Gutenberg Project.)
• Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria quartet. 1968, London: Faber. [Amazon link to 2005 paperback edition] [Amazon link to Kindle edition]
• M K Joseph, The time of Achamoth. 1977, Auckland NZ: Collins. 0002223023 (hbk.).
• James Joyce, Ulysses. 1922,London: Egoist Press. [Amazon link to 2010 paperback edition]
• Karen Manarin, Reading Value: Student Choice in Reading Strategies. Pedagogy, 2012. 12(2): p. 281-297. (Abstract available here.)
• China Miéville Perdido Street Station. 2011, London: Pan. 9780330534239 (pbk.) [Amazon link] (original publication 2001, London: Macmillan). Kindle edition [Amazon link]
• Clifford D Simak, Time is the simplest thing. 2011London : Gateway [Amazon link]. (Original publication 1961, Garden City NY: Doubleday)
• C P Snow. I’ll not take up the space necessary to list the whole Strangers and brothers sequence of eleven novels, but here is an Amazon search link.

Joining the tragic dots

As readers of The Growlery have noticed, I have been absent for just a heartbeat under four weeks now. Nothing to worry about; just the result of my having, yet again, overstretched and ended up for a while with too few hours in day or days in the week to keep every plate in the air. Thanks to all those who sent solicitous enquiries ... and apologies for the lateness or absence of responses. Apologies, too, to all those friends whose emails have gone unanswered, achievements unnoticed, birthdays and anniversaries unacknowledged...

Ploughing through the backlog, one of the highlights which I discovered that I had missed was a paper in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery, coauthored by my long suffering friend (and fellow Melanie Safka fan) Barbara Claire. Barbara is a member of the Violence Prevention Research Program at UC Davis' Medical Center, which consistently does excellent work on causes of and contributory factors in violence related injury. She also manages to be president (also publisher and webmaster) of a historical society, a prime mover in a museum, rescuer of dogs in need, Charles Dickens enthusiast ... Amongst these and many other calls on her time, she finds time to heroically and single handedly sustain our friendship across the decades despite my abysmal failings as a correspondent. (Thank you, Barbara: I don't deserve you, but I'm so very glad you're still there.)

Anyway ... to return to the point: this research paper, which I have just belatedly read.

The paper is both instructive and depressing reading. One of the things which has occupied my excess time over the past month or so has been data collection and analysis for a group of charities dealing with a society thrown into a state of effective civil war. Injuries confronting overstretched (often overwhelmed) medical facilities in such a situation invariably include a very high proportion of what militaryspeak likes to call "collateral damage" casualties. Despite experience with that fact, and back of my mind knowledge that bystanders do get involved in criminal exchanges (the high profile cases of Jessica Crichlow and Thusha Kamaleswaran in London come to mind ), I have never really gotten around to joining up the dots between one context and the other. Reading this paper in its entirety gave me a great deal to think about; but it was a single background paragraph that suddenly made the emotional link.

“Stray bullet shootings contribute to a sense of insecurity and fear in affected communities. Children may be sent to stay with friends or relatives in lower risk neighborhoods after school and may be required to remain indoors after dark (and during the day, unless with an adult). They are taught to avoid crowds and people talking loudly, run when they see weapons, drop to the ground when they hear gunfire while outside, and take cover away from windows if indoors – in the bathtub, if possible. Adults become hypervigilant. They, too, stay indoors, during the day and at night. They may run errands in the morning or on weekends, when gunfire is less common.”

That could have been written about many communities recognised as being in fully blown civil war, including my focus of the last month. It could have been written about Beirut in the last quarter of the twentieth century, Bosnia after the break up of Jugoslavia, or Syria now. It could have been written about Belfast during the worst days of "The Troubles".

But it isn't. It's describing communities within a western liberal democracy assumed to be at peace, where the study nevertheless found that “stray bullet deaths accounted for 45% of all firearm homicides among children aged 10 years or younger”. It's left me very thoughtful.

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• Garen J Wintemute, Barbara E Claire, et al., "Epidemiology and clinical aspects of stray bullet shootings in the United States" in The Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery, July 2012. 73(1): p. 215-223. [copy of the paper available here]