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ce83167a-aa9d-46e1-ba78-f92017dd716a.txt
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Writing Reviews Frank Kermode examines the craft of review-writing from a practitioner’s point of view. Most reviews are written and circulated under conditions which ensure that they have a very short active life. There are deadlines, there are restrictions, normally quite severe, on their length; and when published they claim houseroom only for as long as the newspaper they are printed in - a day or a week, at most a month. Moreover, the literary status of reviews tends to be settled by their ephemerality. It is usually supposed, not only by the public but, quite often, by the writers themselves, that reviewing is work that nobody would do if there weren't some reason — shortage of cash would he cited most often, though another good reason is that you can't work all day on a novel or a ‘serious’ book of any sort - which prevents them from occupying their time with something more valuable. Yet reviewing is a skilled and multi-faceted job. It is one thing to be bright, brisk and summarily fair in the six or eight hundred words of an ordinary newspaper review, quite another to control, without looseness of argument, the six or eight thousand words sometimes allowed by international journals. And the fifteen hundred words of a leading piece in the weekly magazines present some of the problems of both short and long. Not that length is the only consideration. For one thing, the reviewer obviously needs to think about the probable audience, the weekend skimmer at one end of the scale, the person already interested enough in the subject to tackle a serious review-article at the other. Finally, a reviewer needs to know quite a bit about quite a number of things; and must be able to write prose that intelligent people can understand and enjoy. It follows almost infallibly that the reviewer will be somebody who writes other things besides reviews. The American novelist Johh Updike, who rather looks down on criticism — ‘hugging the shore’ he calls it - nevertheless enjoys some coastal reviewing in the intervals between his transoceanic novel-writing. Understandably reluctant to allow even his less ambitious voyages to go without any permanent record, he gathers together his every review, however short, into volumes with mildly self-deprecating titles. It might be thought that lesser persons should accept ephemerality as the penalty appropriate to their coastal caution, but it is hand to see why, if they can get away with it, they shouldn't be allowed to enjoy the measure of permanence, and the measure of vanity, proper to their station, especially if they believe that some of their best writing has been ‘buried’ in reviews. I admit to feeling this about my own work. My own principal occupation has been academic, and most of my ‘serious’ books are recognisably academic products, the sort of thing professors like, and are expected to do as part of their jobs. However, the English-speaking world (I think fortunately) acknowledges nothing comparable to the sharp distinction people from other cultures make between reviewing and literary study — and so with us it is quite usual for the same people to do both. The days are gone when other academics reviled reviewer-professors for unseemly self-display, or waste of academic time, or betrayal of the dignity of their institutions. And complaints from non-professors, to the effect that the professors are taking the bread out of their mouths, are also less common than they were, partly because there is so much more reviewing nowadays that practically everyone can have some, partly, no doubt, because the bread is often such a meagre ration. My own view is that these arrangements are good for both readers — since they can be fairly certain the reviewer has at least some idea what he is talking about — and professors, if only because the work helps to keep them sane. It also reminds them that they have a duty, easily neglected, to make themselves intelligible to non-professors. When talking among themselves they may feel some need to be impressively arcane, but when addressing intelligent non-professors they need to make sure they are communicating effectively. Finally, it is clear that for a variety of reasons, and despite all that can be said to dignify it, reviewing must be a secondary occupation. It is something you can only do well enough if you are also doing something else well enough.
cfae9dd4-c5b5-4778-91e9-c29127c0bae7.txt
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Citizen Kane When the film Citizen Kane finally appeared in 1941, despite the brouhaha that attended its release - delayed because of distributor’s fears of the harm William Randolph Hearst, its alleged subject, might do to them - and largely ecstatic reviews, it was not a commercial success. It was television that brought it back to the public consciousness. It is perhaps the one film, above all others, that has inspired people to become film-makers. This is all the more astonishing since it was Orson Welles’s first film. Welles always maintained that its success arose from his having no idea of what he was or wasn’t allowed to do: he just went ahead and did it. But he had an extraordinary team at his disposal, cameraman Gregg Toland, screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, and the special-effects wizard Linwood Dunn. When Welles and Mankiewicz hit on the idea of portraying a newspaper magnate who both was and wasn’t Hearst, Welles realised that he had found a perfect vehicle for himself both as director and actor, and seized his chance with the energy of a whirlwind. Dermot and Carmel Dermot thought that Carmel was rather odd that morning. Twice he had said that he might be late and not to worry if he dropped into the golf club on the way home. He had to have a natter with someone and that was the best place to have it. Twice she had nodded her head amiably and distantly as if she hadn’t really heard or understood. ‘Will you be all right? What are you going to do today?’ he had asked. She had smiled. ‘Funny you should ask that. I was just thinking that I hadn’t anything to do all day so I was going to stroll down town and look at the shops. I was thinking that it was almost a sinful thing, just idling away the day.’ Dermot had smiled back. ‘You’re entitled to enjoy yourself. And as I said, if I”m late I won’t want anything to eat. So don’t go to any trouble.’ ‘No, that’s fine.' she said. Title Race Tea boy? Do you mind, I’m a mobile lukewarm beverage resource facilitator Human nature provides the most divine of comedies. Witness a recent study which has informed the nation that job titles are a prime cause of envy and unrest at work. A survey by a leading firm of recruitment consultants found that 90% of employers and 70% of employees admit that titles create divisions among colleagues. Most shockingly, the survey found that 70% of office workers would be willing to forgo a pay rise in favour of a more ‘motivational’ or ‘professional’ job title. If our vanity is reaching such proportions that even basic greed is being overwhelmed, we are indeed in dire straits. The truth is that in these brave new days of the early twenty-first century, nobody is content to be labelled subordinate. The titles under discussion place the emphasis on ability (specialist, coordinator) but are, in fact, little more than euphemisms.
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England’s breakfast revolution The importance of a good breakfast is beyond dispute according to health experts, but in historical terms breakfast is a relatively new arrival in England, with descriptions of breakfast seldom featuring in medieval literature. Admittedly, there are scattered references to travellers having a meal at dawn before embarking on arduous journeys, and to the sick sitting down to breakfast for medicinal reasons, but most people went without unless they were monarchs or nobles. However, in the sixteenth century it gradually became the norm, not the exception. Some writers have attributed this to the greater availability of food. Proponents of this view have not always considered other profound social changes. For example, new patterns of employment may well offer a plausible explanation for the greater importance now attached to breakfast, as individuals were increasingly employed for a prescribed number of hours. Often this involved starting work extremely early. Thus, having a meal first thing in the morning was rooted in necessity, and was no longer associated with social status alone.
d80a5f54-27ae-42a7-89de-6cb847c2cbcf.txt
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I chose this place to live, believing I would find anonymity among those who did not care if the plaster and glass and paintwork of rented houses splintered and decayed, who were not reproached by gardens gone to seed and rotting sofas. In that hope, as in most things, I was proved wrong. People in the shops, who are living their real lives, even if you aren't, soon start to recognise you. Next door’s lull-blown roses pouring over the fence are persistent reminders that the gardens were loved once. Usually, I stay inside trying to forget that there is a summer going on out there, but tonight, I am watching the swifts flying in the transparent space between the treetops and roofs. I have cut back rosemary and lemon balm to make a space for a chair and my arms and hands are tingling with stings and scratches. It is a narrow London garden, where plants must grow tall or sprawling to survive. ‘Been doing a spot of clearing, I see.’ It’s my upstairs neighbour, Jaz, leaning out of the window, the author of several unpublished manuscripts I am sometimes called upon to dissemble about in my capacity as an English teacher. I have a copy of the latest in my possession now. ‘How's the work going, Jaz?' ‘For goodness sake. In no other profession is one called on to account for oneself a thousand times a day by every Tom, Dick or Harry.’ Her voice tails off, then rallies. ‘Tell you what, Ann, I’ve got something to drink in the fridge. I’ll bring it down.’ I don't want Jaz in the garden, and I see now, dully, that it looks mangled and bereft. The only access to this garden is through my flat and Jaz is banging on my door. ‘So, you’re on holiday now, you jammy so-and-so.’ She sprawls, in shorts and vest, on the chair while I drop a cushion onto what had once been a little lawn. ‘Cheers,’ she says in her delusion of youth, ‘I should’ve gone into teaching - a writer doesn't have holidays. Still, you know what they say, those who can, do, those who can’t, teach.' And there are those who can neither write nor teach. ‘So, what plans for the hols?’ All my postponed dread of the school year’s ending engulfs me. Empty days. Hot pavements blobbed with melting chewing gum. The walk down to the shops and back. The little park with its fountain, and loneliness sitting beside me on the bench. ‘Actually, I’m going down to Stonebridge tomorrow. I’ve been meaning to ask you if you'd feed the cats.’ My heart starts racing as I speak. ‘Of course I will,’ Jaz says. ‘If I’m around,’ knowing, as I did, that she would be. ‘So where will you stay? Some bijou B and B?’ ‘No. I’ll be staying with my oldest friend, Ruby, at the Rising Sun. We've known each other since we were eight.’ It isn’t true that I shall stay there, but then I spend my life dealing with fiction of one sort or another. ‘Going back to your roots. So what do you think of it so far? My opus?’ My silence on the subject has forced Jaz to enquire about her manuscript, The Cruelty of Red Vans, which lies half-heartedly half-read on my desk. I like the title and tell her so. I can see how red vans could be cruel, always bringing presents and mall-order goodies to other houses and delivering returned manuscripts in silly bags to hers. Something prompts me to speak honestly for once. ‘Let me give you a little tip, dear,’ I begin. ‘What?’ She is affronted. ‘Try writing about nice people for a change, pretty people who at least aspire to being good: a touch less solipsism, a bit more fiction…’ ‘Teachers!' Jaz is a mutinous schoolgirl about to snatch back a poorly marked essay. ‘I myself keep a journal, I have for years, in which I write down something good, however small or trivial, about each day.’ My words sound as prissy as my old-fashioned print dress. ‘Keep a journal! Nice people! Get a life, Ann.’ Oh, I’ve got a life. I’ve got my work, and I go out sometimes and fly home again, sitting on the tube with my nose in a book. When at last we go inside, my calm kitchen gives a moment’s reassurance, then out of the blue comes the image of my school geography teacher Miss Tarrantine, who must have been about the age I am now, closing an ancient reptilian eyelid in a monstrous wink as she tells us, ‘I’ve had my moments.' We nearly died.
dd8e357e-3dca-468e-8889-843abcd08f10.txt
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Self-help books Dione Reverend was a mere editor at Random House in New York when she first saw a manuscript by an unknown pop psychologist, Dr John Gray. ‘I took one look at the title and knew it would be a number one bestseller,’ she says, chuckling, and she was right. The desperately understanding Dr Gray is now a multimillionaire and Diane Reverend has her own company. Dr Gray's slim volume on how to bridge communication gaps between the sexes is the unofficial mascot of a huge and expanding self-help industry that may, as its insiders claim, answer some of American’s myriad yearnings for betterment. It also feeds off those yearnings, creates hundreds more and - not incidentally - props up the entire world of New York publishing. As Britain is learning, the genre can fill entire polls with tomes os quackish and histrionic as their covers - but there are worse. For every self-help title published, thousands are rejected as too derivative or specialised. This is no small mercy. As a new breed of heavyweight editor-cum-ogent goes looking for the next lightweight blockbuster, prose style is the lost thing on anybody's mind. Marketability is everything. ‘How promotable is the author? What’s the ”hook’? Is it universal enough?' Ms Reverend rattles off the key questions, then admits: ‘If someone comes to me with a really catchy title, that's two thirds of the battle won. You know you can reach people.' Autobiographies There has to be a tacit understanding, a pact, between an autobiographer and reader that the truth is being told. Such at pact is, I would guess, rarely observed to the full. There are many reasons why the writer should lapse. There may be actions or thoughts which he feels it is simply too shameful to make public. There may be things he decides against putting down on paper because (as he rationalises) they are not important enough. There are also more complex and interesting reasons for surreptitiously breaking the pact. The autobiographer may decide that the ultimate goal of the work, the truth about himself, can be served by inventing stories that encapsulate the truth more neatly, more pointedly than strict adherence to the facts ever could. Or he may break the pact by deciding, from the beginning, never to adhere to it. He may call his book an autobiography simply in order to create a positive balance of credulity in the reader’s mind that will be extremely convenient for him in his storytelling, and which, in the case of his more naive readers, may not be exhausted even by the time the story ends, so that these readers will go away thinking they have read a true history, when they have read nothing but a fiction. All of which can be done in no particular spirit of cynicism. Dashiell Hammett’s detective stories Students of the detective story have explained the flourishing of this genre as an expression of the conflicts of late nineteenth and early twentieth century society. The detective story is essentially an allegory. The crime is a symbolic enactment of some innate human impulse of lust or greed, and its solution, at least in the traditional story, represents the reintegration of the personality with society, its lawless impulses quelled so that society can again function smoothly. In Hammett’s peculiar version, society is returned to its former state, but that itself is shown to be corrupt and false. The hunter and the hunted in Hammett’s tales are two aspects of the same personality. The private eye and his prey understand each other and are, in a strange way, comfortable with each other. The private eye has a foot in each camp. From the point of view of the criminal he is a bit too straight, and from that of the law a bit too seedy. He is at once a crook and a competitor. The mission of the private eye is sometimes tempered by his sense of complicity, and sometimes his punitive zeal is intensified by his anxiety about this ambiguity. SCIENCE WRITING Today’s greatest scientific essayist is Stephen Jay Gould. To discuss that art and hear his advice, I met him in an unfamiliar milieu: at the Grand Hotel (where he was staying while promoting his new book). Neither of us, it has to be said, felt much at home. As for writing a piece set in surroundings of such lifeless self-aggrandisement, Gould said: 'I couldn't do it: Trollope might but he knew the culture. And knowing the culture is central to being a successful writer. Science, for example, is a civilisation of its own. As a result, only scientists can make a good job of presenting it. If you don’t live in the community and don’t understand its rules, you are crippled from the start.' One of Gould’s axioms is: never write down to the reader. 'Make no concessions,' he says. 'You can simplify the language but must never adulterate it. Above all, you cannot simplify the argument. Once readers notice that they are being patronised, your piece is dead.'
e6988582-3a2b-4ef4-b3e7-9b0399f8a944.txt
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There are some activities that just will not be rushed. They take the time they take. If you are late for a meeting, you can hurry. But if you are impatient with the mayonnaise and add the oil too quickly, it curdles. If you start tugging with frustration on a tangled fishing line, the knot just becomes tighter. The mind, too, works at different speeds. Some of its functions are performed at lightning speeds; others take seconds, minutes, hours, days or even years to complete their course. Some can he speeded up - we can become quicker at solving crossword puzzles or doing mental arithmetic. But others cannot he rushed, and if they are, then they will break down, like the mayonnaise, or get tangled up, like the fishing line. 'Think fast; we need the results’ may sometimes be as absurd a notion, or at least as counterproductive, as the attempt to cram a night’s rest into half the time. We learn, think and know in a variety of ways, and these modes of the mind operate at different speeds, and are good for different mental jobs. 'He who hesitates is lost,' says one proverb. ‘Look before you leap,’ says another. And both are true. Roughly speaking, the mind possesses three different processing speeds. The first is faster than thought. Some situations demand an unselfconscious, instantaneous reaction. When my motorbike skidded on a wet road in London some years ago, my brain and my body immediately choreographed for me an intricate and effective set of movements that enabled me to keep my seat - and it was only after the action was all over that my conscious mind and my emotions started to catch up. Neither a concert pianist nor an Olympic fencer has time to figure out what to do next. There is a kind of 'intelligence' that works more rapidly than thinking. This mode of fast physical intelligence could be called our ‘wits’. (The five senses were originally known as 'the five wits'.) Then there is thought itself: the sort of intelligence which does involve figuring matters out, weighing up the pros and cons, constructing arguments and solving problems. A mechanic working out why an engine will not fire, a scientist trying to interpret an intriguing experimental result, a student wrestling with an assignment: all are employing a way of knowing that relies on reason and logic, on deliberate conscious thinking. We often call this kind of intelligence 'intellect’. Someone who is good at solving these sorts of problems we call 'bright' or 'clever'. But below this, there is another mental register that proceeds more slowly still. It is often less purposeful and clear-cut, more playful, leisurely or dreamy. In this mode we are ruminating or mulling things over; being contemplative or meditative. Perched on a seaside rock, lost in the sound and the motion of the surf, or hovering just on the brink of sleep or waking, we are in a different mental mode from the one we find ourselves in as we plan a meal or dictate a letter. This leisurely, apparently aimless, way of knowing and experiencing is just as intelligent as the other faster ones. Allowing the mind time to meander is not a luxury that can safely be cut back as life or work gets more demanding. On the contrary, thinking slowly is a vital part al the cognitive armoury. We need the tortoise mind just as much as we need the hare brain. Some kinds of everyday predicament are better, more effectively approached with a slow mind. Some mysteries can only be penetrated with a relaxed, unquesting mental attitude. Recent scientific study shows convincingly that the more patient, less deliberate modes of mind are particularly suited to making sense of situations that are intricate, shadowy or ill defined. Deliberate thinking works well when the problem is easily conceptualised. When we are trying to decide where to spend our holidays, it may well be perfectly obvious what the parameters are. But when we are not sure what needs to be taken into account, or even which questions to pose - or when the issue is too subtle to be captured by the familiar categories of conscious thought - we need recourse to the tortoise mind. If the problem is how best to manage a difficult group of people at work, or whether to give up being a manager completely and retrain as a teacher, we may be better advised to sit and ponder than to search frantically for explanations and solutions. This type of intelligence is associated with what we call creativity, or even 'wisdom'. Poets have always known the limitations of conscious, deliberate thinking, and have sought to cultivate these slower, mistier ways of knowing. Philosophers have written about the realms of the mind that lie beyond and beneath the conscious intellect. It is only recently, however, that scientists have started to explore directly the slower, less deliberate ways of knowing. The hybrid discipline of 'cognitive science' is revealing that the unconscious realms of the human mind will successfully accomplish a number of unusual, interesting and important tasks if they are given the time. They will learn patterns of a degree of subtlety which normal consciousness cannot even see, make sense out of situations that are too complex to analyse, and get to the bottom of certain difficult issues much more successfully than the questing intellect.
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In those days the council houses stretched all over the western side of the city: row after row of huddled, dingy dwellings in orange half-brick or pale white stucco. In summer the chemicals from the May and Baker factory two miles away came and hung round the doors and gardens with an indescribable smell of sulphur, and the most common sight in that part of Norwich early in the morning was a paperboy wrinkling his nose in disgust as he negotiated somebody’s front path. Most of this early life I’ve forgotten. But there is a memory of sitting, or perhaps balancing, at any rate precariously, on some vantage point near an upstairs window, and looking at the houses as they faded away into the distance. Later on there are other phantoms - faces that I can't put names to, my mother, ironing towels in the back room of a house that I don’t think was ours, snow falling over the turrets of the great mansion at Earlham. That my mother should intrude into these early memories is no surprise. I remember her as a small, precise and nearly always angry woman, the source of whose anger I never quite understood, and consequently couldn’t do anything to appease. Even as a child, though, accompanying her to the small shops in Bunnett Square or on longer excursions into the city, I’m sure that I had some notion of the oddity of her personality. She was, for instance, quite the most solitary person I have ever known, as alone in a room full of people as on a moor. To this solitariness was added a fanatic adhesion to a kind of propriety uncommon on the West Earlham estate, which occasionally broke out in furious spring-cleanings or handwashings and instructions to ‘behave proper’. As a moral code this was completely beyond my comprehension: even now I’m not sure that I understand it. To particularise, it meant not straying into neighbours’ gardens or jeopardising their rose bushes as you walked down the street; it meant sitting for long half-hours in a silent dining room, with your hands folded across your chest, listening to radio programmes that my mother liked; it meant - oh, a hundred proscriptions and prohibitions. In time other figures emerged onto these stern early scenes. For all her solitariness, my mother wasn't without her cronies. There was Mrs Buddery, who was fixated on the Royal Family, Mrs Winall, who said exactly nothing, except for grunts supporting the main speaker, and Mrs Laband - livelier than the others, and of whom they vaguely disapproved. It was only later that I comprehended what poor company this trio was, they formed a depressed and depressing sisterhood, a little dribble of inconsequent talk about bad legs, the cold weather and the perils of ingrate children, a category in which I nearly always felt myself included. Looking back, it was as if a giant paperweight, composed of the West Earlham houses, my mother and her cronies, the obligation to ‘behave proper’, lay across my shoulders, and that it was my duty immediately to grow up and start the work of prising it free. This was easier said than done. Growing up in West Earlham at this time followed a well-regulated pattern. Until you were five you simply sat at home and got under your parents feet (I can remember awful aimless days, when I must have been about four, playing on a rug in the front room while my mother sat frostily in an armchair). Then, the September after your fifth birthday, you were packed off to Avenue Road infants school half a mile away in the direction of the city. The lucky few had a mother with a rickety bike and a child seat - these were extraordinary contraptions in cast-iron with improvised safety-straps. As far as I recall, my mother consigned me to the care of other children in the street for this journey. If I remember anything about these early years it's the summer holidays, those days when you caught occasional glimpses of the world that existed outside West Earlham: a vague old man who lived next door to Mrs Buddery and told stories about his time in the Merchant Navy; a charity fete, once, held at a house far away in Christchurch Road, where a motherly woman doled out lemonade and tried to get me interested in something called the League of Pity - a kind of junior charity, I think - only for my mother, to whom subsequent application was made, to dismiss the scheme on the grounds that its organisers were ‘only after your money’. Mercenary motives were a familiar theme of my mother’s conversation, and politicians my mother held in the deepest contempt of all. If she thought of the House of Commons - and I am not sure if her mind was capable of such an unprecedented leap of the imagination - it was as a kind of opulent post office where plutocrats ripped open letters stuffed with five pound notes sent in by a credulous public. No doubt I exaggerate. No doubt I ignore her virtues and magnify her frailties. But there was precious little milk of human kindness in my mother, it had all been sucked out of her, sucked out and thrown away. To do my mother justice she wasn’t unconscious of her role as the guardian of my education. On Sundays occasionally, she would take me - in my ‘good clothes' - on the 85 bus to the Norwich Castle Museum. Here, hand-in-hand, suspicious, but mindful of the free admission, we would parade through roomfuls of paintings by the Norwich School of Artists. My mother wasn’t, it must be known, altogether averse to this recreation, and eventually almost got to have opinions on the various subjects presented for her edification. I can remember her stopping once in front of a fine study of a Roman soldier in full battle gear to remark, ‘Well, I wouldn’t like to meet him on a dark night!’ I recall this as a solitary instance of my mother attempting to make a joke.
ed82fbd4-36f7-4a18-94fb-0bd732171931.txt
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Photography Over the past one and a half centuries, photography has been used to record all aspects of human life and activity. During this relatively short history, the medium has expanded its capabilities in the recording of time and space, thus allowing human vision to be able to view the fleeting moment or to visualise both the vast and the minuscule. It has brought us images from remote areas of the world, distant parts of the solar system, as well as the social complexities and crises of modern life. Indeed, the photographic medium has provided one of the most important and influential means of expressing the human condition. Nonetheless, the recording of events by means of the visual image has a much longer history. The earliest creations of pictorial recording go as far back as the Upper Palaeolithic period of about 35,000 years ago. And although we cannot be sure of the exact purposes of the early cave paintings - whether they record the ‘actual’ events of hunting, whether they functioned as sympathetic magic to encourage the increase of animals for hunting, whether they had a role as religious icons, or if they were made simply to enliven and brighten domestic activities - pictorial images seem to be inextricably linked to human culture as we understand it. Throughout the history of visual representation, questions have been raised concerning the supposed accuracy (or otherwise) of the visual image, as well as its status in society. The popular notion that ‘seeing is believing’ had always afforded special status to the visual image. So when the technology was invented, in the form of photography, the social and cultural impact was immense. In the mid-nineteenth century, the invention of photography appeared to offer the promise of ‘automatically’ providing a truthful visual record. It was seen not only as the culmination of Western visual representation but, quite simply, the camera, functioning in much the same way as the human eye, was regarded as a machine which could provide a fixed image. And this image was considered to be a very close approximation to that which we actually see. The chemical fixing of the image enabled the capture of what might be considered a natural phenomenon: the camera image. At the same time, the photographic image was held to be an achievement of sophisticated culture and produced the type of image that artists had struggled throughout the centuries to acquire the manual, visual and conceptual skills to create. It may seem a further irony that, because of the cameras perceived realism in its ability to replicate visual perception, it was assumed that all peoples would ‘naturally’ be able to understand photographs. This gave rise to the question of whether photography constituted a ‘universal language’. For example, in 1933 this view had been expressed in a series of radio broadcasts by photographer August Sander: ‘Even the most isolated Bushman could understand a photograph of the heavens — whether it showed the sun and moon or the constellations.’ However, in the face of the rapid increase in global communications which characterised the latter part of the twentieth century, we do at least need to ask to what extent the photographic image can penetrate through cultural differences in understanding. Or is photography as bound by cultural conventions as any other form of communication, such as language? Is it possible that our familiarity with the photographic image has bred our current contempt for the intricacies and subtle methods that characterise the medium’s ability to transmit its vivid impressions of ‘reality’? Photography is regarded quite naturally as offering such convincing forms of pictorial evidence that this process of communication often seems to render the medium totally transparent, blurring the distinction between our perception of the environment and its photographic representations. It is the most natural thing in the world for someone to open their wallet and produce a photograph saying ‘this is my grandson’. Ever since its invention in 1839, the technology of photography and the attitudes towards the medium by its practitioners have changed radically. This may partly be attributed to photography gradually moving into what might be termed ‘mythic time’ - its initial role as a nineteenth-century record-keeper has now moved beyond the human scale and photographic images, once immediate and close to photographer and subject alike, have now passed out of living memory. The passage of time has transformed the photograph from a memory aid into an historical document, one which often reveals as much (if not more) about the individuals and society which produced the image as it does about its subject. I hope to show that the camera is not merely a mute, passive chronicler of events, and that photography does not just passively reflect culture, but can provide the vision and impetus that promote social and political change and development. For example, it is difficult to imagine the cultural changes of the Italian Renaissance of the fifteenth century without recognising the central role of the development of perspective in bringing about new visual means of representation. Similarly, photography has made a major contribution to the bringing about of the media culture that characterises our own era, while at the same time it has assumed the ironic role of bringing the harsh realities of the world to the coffee-table.
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CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Simon Costello knew that the purchase of the house in Pembroke Square had been a mistake within a year of his and Lois's moving in. A possession which can only be afforded by the exercise of stringent and calculated economy is best not afforded at all. But at the time it had seemed a sensible, as well as a desirable, move. He had had a run of successful cases and they were coming in with reassuring regularity. Lois had returned to her job at the advertising agency within two months of the birth of the twins, and had been given a rise which took her salary to thirty-five thousand. It was Lois who had argued the more strongly for a move, but he had put up little resistance to arguments which at the time had seemed compelling: the flat wasn’t really suitable for a family, they needed more room, a garden, separate accommodation for an au pair. All these, of course, could have been achieved in a suburb or in a less fashionable part of London than Pembroke Square, but Lois was ambitious for more than additional space. Mornington Mansions had never been an acceptable address for an up-and-coming young barrister and a successful businesswoman. She never said it without a sense that even speaking the words subtly diminished her standing, socially and economically. Lois had decided that a necessary economy was for one of them to travel by public transport. Her firm was on the other side of London; obviously Simon must be the one to economise. The overcrowded tube journey, stayed in a mood of envious resentment, had become an unproductive thirty minutes of brooding on present discontents. He would recall his grandfather’s house in Hampstead where he had stayed as a boy, the smell of dinner from the kitchen, his grandmother’s insistence that the returning breadwinner, tired from his exhausting day in court, should be given peace, a little gentle cosseting, and relief from every petty domestic anxiety. She had been a 'lawyer's wife', indefatigable in legal good causes, elegantly present at all lawyers' functions, apparently content with the sphere of life which she had made her own. Well, that world had passed for ever. Lois had made it plain before their marriage that her career was as important as his. It hardly needed saying, this was, after all, a modern marriage. The job was important to her and important to them both. The house, the au pair, their whole standard of living depended on two salaries. And now what they were precariously achieving could be destroyed by that self-righteous, interfering Venetia. Venetia must have come straight from the court to their offices and she had been in a dangerous mood. Something or someone had upset her. But the word 'upset' was too weak, too bland for the intensity of furious disgust with which she had confronted him. Someone had driven her to the limit of her endurance. He cursed himself. If he hadn't been in his room, if he'd only left a minute earlier, the encounter wouldn't have taken place, she would have had the night to think it over, to consider what, if anything, she ought to do. Probably nothing. The morning might have brought sense. He remembered every word of her angry accusations. 'I defended Brian Cartwright today. Successfully. He told me that when you were his counsel four years ago you knew before trial that he had bribed three of the jury. You did nothing. You went on with the case. Is that true?' 'He’s lying. It isn't true.’ 'He also said that he passed over some shares in his company to your fiancée. Also before trial. Is that true?’ 'I tell you, he's lying. None of its true.’ The denial had been as instinctive as an arm raised to ward off a blow and had sounded unconvincing even to his own ears. His whole action had been one of guilt. The first cold horror draining his face was succeeded by a hot flush, bringing back shameful memories of his headmaster's study, of the terror of the inevitable punishment. He had made himself look into her eyes and had seen the look of contemptuous disbelief. If only he'd had some warning. He knew now what he should have said: 'Cartwright told me after the trial but I didn't believe him. I don't believe him now. That man will say anything to make himself important.’ But he had told a more direct, more dangerous lie, and she had known that it was a lie. Even so, why the anger, why the disgust? What was that old misdemeanour to do with her? Who had sent Venetia Aldridge to be guardian of the conscience of their legal practice? Or of his, come to that? Was her own conscience so clear, her behaviour in court always immaculate? Was she justified in destroying his career? And it would be destruction. He wasn't sure what exactly she could do, how far she was prepared to go, but if this got about, even as a rumour, he was done for.
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I have never begun a novel with more misgiving. If I call it a novel it is only because I don’t know what else to call it. I have little story to tell and I end neither with a death or a marriage. Instead I leave my reader in the air. This book consists of my recollections of a man with whom I was thrown into close contact only at long intervals, and I have little knowledge of what happened to him in between. I suppose that by the exercise of invention I could fill the gaps plausibly enough and so make my narrative more coherent; but I have no wish to do that. I only want to set down what I know. To save embarrassment to people still living I have given to the persons who play a part in this story names of my own contriving, and I have in other ways taken pains to make sure that no one should recognise them. The man I am writing about is not famous. It may be that he never will be. It may be that when his life at last comes to an end he will leave no more trace of his sojourn on earth than a stone thrown into a river leaves on the surface of the water. Then my book, if it is read at all, will be read only for what intrinsic interest it may possess. But it may be that the way of life that he has chosen for himself and the peculiar strength and sweetness of his character may have an ever-growing influence over his fellow men so that, long after his death perhaps, it may be realised that there lived in this age a very remarkable creature. Then it will be quite clear of whom I write in this book and those who want to know at least a little about his early life may find in it something to their purpose. I think my book, within its acknowledged limitations, will be a useful source of information to my friend's biographers. I do not pretend that the conversations I have recorded can be regarded as verbatim reports. I never kept notes of what was said on this or the other occasions, but I have a good memory for what concerns me, and though I have put these conversations in my own words they faithfully represent, I believe, what was said. I remarked a little while back that I have invented nothing but I have taken the liberty that historians have taken to put into the mouths of the persons of my narrative speeches that I did not myself hear and could not possibly have heard. I have done this for the same reasons that the historians have, to give liveliness and verisimilitude to scenes that would have been ineffective if they had been merely recounted. I want to be read and I think I am justified in doing what I can to make my book readable. The intelligent reader will easily see for himself where I have used this artifice, and he is at perfect liberty to reject it. Another reason that has caused me to embark upon this work with apprehension is that the persons I have chiefly to deal with are of another culture. It is very difficult to know people and I don’t think one can ever really know any but one’s own countrymen. For men and women are not only themselves; they are also the region in which they were born, the city apartment or the farm in which they learnt to walk, the games they played as children, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed and the poets they read. It is all these things that have made them what they are, and these are the things that you cant come to know by hearsay, you can only know them if you have lived them. You can only know if you are them. And because you cannot know persons of a nation foreign to you except from observation, it is difficult to give them credibility in the pages of a book. I have never attempted to deal with any but my own countrymen, and if I have ventured to do otherwise in short stories it is because in them you can treat your characters more summarily. You give the reader broad indications and leave him to fill in the details. In this book, I do not pretend that my characters are as they would see themselves; they are seen, as is my main character, through my own eyes.
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Surviving in a Foreign Land I have been welcomed warmly. It’s a sociable and well-provisioned base camp in a very, very isolated place. At any one time, there are some forty odd souls - scientists, students, weathermen, satellite trackers — in a close-knit community where everyone mucks in. My school French is proving adequate - just — to communicate, but not to chat or banter. I miss the nuances, and my phrasebook is useless at breakfast. There is no practical problem for me in this, but initially there was a problem of self-confidence. I found myself slightly dreading mealtimes. I would hang back, worried about which table to choose terrified at the silence which fell when I spoke, anxious in a way I cannot remember since the first weeks of school. I still grin inanely, or panic when people talk to me. I suspect the cause of this occasional depression is nothing to do with loss of company or communication, it’s because I’ve lost the social predominance which my own gift of the gab has always afforded me. Elliot When I first met Elliot, I was just a young author like any other and he took no notice of me. He never forgot a face though, and when I ran across him here or there he shook hands with me cordially, but showed no desire to further our acquaintance; and if I saw him at the opera, say, he being with a person of high rank, he was inclined not to catch sight of me. But then I happened to make a somewhat startling success as a playwright, and presently I became aware that Elliot regarded me with a warmer feeling. One day, I received a note from him asking me to lunch and I conceived the notion that he was trying me out. But from then on, since my success had brought me many new friends, I began to see him more frequently. Alfred Hitchcock The film director Alfred Hitchcock always insisted that he didn't care about the subject matter of his films, or indeed about the acting, but that he did care about the photography and the soundtrack and all the technical ingredients. For Hitchcock, it wasn’t a message that stirred the audience, nor was it a great performance, he believed that people are aroused by pure film, irrespective of their cultural background. Therefore, if a picture is designed correctly, in terms of its emotional impact, the Japanese audience should scream at the same moment as the Indian audience. Hitchcock’s self-appraisal was always precise, rational, deceptively unanswerable, he was a man of reason and a craftsman of genius who liked to hear an audience scream. He didn’t deal in speculation, abstraction or intellectual allusion, and his assessment of his own screen characters was not exploratory. He set his sights on film, pure film, and the most dispassionate, mathematically calculable beauty of what a strip of film can be made to do to an audience.
fb520d71-9676-41b0-a11c-403c4cdaca84.txt
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CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Clutter Sometimes it seems that no matter how many possessions you have, you never feel secure. While it is reasonable to have a basic nesting instinct and create a home which meets your needs, there is a point where the motivation for acquiring things gets out of control. Modern advertising is moreover deliberately designed to play on our insecurities.If you don’t have one of these you will be a lesser human being is one of the consistent underlying messages we receive. To discover just how much you are influenced, I challenge you to try not to read any advertising billboards next time you go down the street. These multi-million dollar messages relentlessly condition us in very persuasive ways without our ever realising it. We are bombarded by them - television, radio, newspapers, magazines, posters, tee shirts, the internet, you name it - all encouraging us to buy, buy, buy. Caves Research establishments and university departments around the world have invested years of research time in all aspects of caves, mainly their origins, their hydrology and their biology. Caves constitute a small but rather mysterious component of the natural environment - as such they arouse our curiosity and challenge our desire for knowledge, and consequently have had a considerable amount of research effort devoted to them. Furthermore, because of their presence as natural phenomena, they have had a long history of study, which has been intensified in those parts of the world where caves have had a direct effect on our way of life. However, the physical agility required to visit many caves means that cave research has been less in the hands of the learned professors than in most other scientific fields. Indeed there is a considerable, perhaps unique, overlap between the professional, scientific study of caves and the amateur studies carried out by those who mainly visit caves for sport. Weather Watch Countless observant people without any instruments other than their own senses originally laid the foundations of meteorology, which has progressed since the 17th century into the highly technical science of today. Satellites and electronic instruments relay endless weather information to us with the minimum of delay, computers solve in minutes abstruse mathematical sums at a speed beyond the capability of the human brain. Meteorological theory is peppered with long words which have little meaning to the non-professional. It sometimes seems there is no room left for simple weather wisdom, but nothing could be further from the truth. Human experience is still the vital ingredient which translates computed data into weather forecasts. Human observations can still provide unusual evidence which is of great help to professionals who are trying to unravel the mysteries of the atmosphere.