Category Archives: Asides

How to take holiday snaps

Posted on by

The Guardian had a nice essay by Stuart Jeffries on the emotional power of holiday snaps and followed it with some advice from Magnum photographer Martin Parr.

Most family photo albums are a form of propaganda, where the family looks perfect and everyone is smiling: we try to create fabrications about who we are. But if you’re doing a portrait of someone, ask them not to smile. You will get a much more dignified, interesting portrait, and it won’t look like a family snap.

Don’t be scared of photographing a storm-out, crying fit or strop. The instinct is to capture people only when they are smiling around a birthday cake or at a wedding, but never during an argument or funeral. On holiday, of course photograph the daytrips and good times, but make sure you document when everything isn’t going to plan as well.

You have to overcome the feeling that it isn’t the right time to take a photograph if you want to get away from this version of the perfect, harmonious family. I would argue that the more valuable document is the honest one.

One of the things that photographs are very good at doing is showing change. So take a picture before you go on holiday and when you have just got back. Similarly you should take before-and-after shots when you redecorate your bathroom, or if you replace your car.

And

When you are away, why not record all of the food that you eat? If someone has spent a lot of time cooking a meal, or if you’re going out for a treat, photograph the food. You could make a series of each breakfast, lunch and dinner that you ate. That would be fascinating.

Photograph the caravan, guest house, tent – wherever you are staying. Think of yourself as a documentary photographer; up the ante and take yourself more seriously.

Parr thinks that we should also print our pictures, and I suspect he’s right. “We are in danger”, he says,

of having a whole generation – and this will continue into the future – that has no family albums, because people just leave them on their computer, and then suddenly they will be deleted. You have to print them and put them in an album or a box, otherwise they could be lost. And write captions. You might think you are going to remember what is happening in a picture, but you probably won’t in 10 years’ time.

Remembering Frank

Posted on by

I wrote a small tribute to Frank Kermode for today’s Observer.

Ever since Tuesday, a movie has been running on a continuous loop in my mind. In it, I am driving down Grange Road in Cambridge, passing Selwyn College’s gloomy front range and turning right into Pinehurst, the enclave of classy apartment blocks sometimes known as “life’s departure lounge” because it’s where retired dons go after they’ve downsized. I park outside the most upmarket block and ring the bell. The door opens into a discreetly carpeted foyer and the lift whooshes me upwards. Then it stops and the door opens. And there is Frank, smiling, with pipe in hand and twinkle in eye. “Come in, come in,” he says, and we settle in his booklined sitting-room with the view over Selwyn Gardens to drink, smoke and gossip. And each time this happens, I cannot believe my luck, because I spent a good deal of my earlier life in awe of the man who is now – apparently – treating me as an equal…

Something for the weekend

Posted on by

Well, actually a few things that struck me in the course of my customary haphazard reading.

  • Trapped in the Anglosphere: Thoughtful column by Martin Kettle about how the Net is increasingly making us, if not exactly Europhobic, certainly Euro-ignorant.

    This autumn we will be bombarded with news about the US midterm elections. Fair enough. These are significant elections in the world's most powerful country. But if we are to be intelligent and rounded beings we also need to be well informed about and engaged with elections in places much nearer to home, and especially those that arguably have more to tell us about the temper of the times in our part of the world – like those in Sweden next month – above all.

    But that is not going to happen as long as we are voluntarily imprisoned in the Anglosphere. Yesterday, once again, the latest generation got fewer A-levels in French, German, Russian and Spanish than the generation before. Next week, there will be fewer GCSEs in modern languages too. The trend is inexorable. We are cutting ourselves off from the world. Another New Yorker cartoon, this time by Robert Mankoff, comes irresistibly to mind. A woman is talking to a man at a cocktail party. She asks: “One question: if this is the information age, how come nobody knows anything?”

    The answer is simple. They are speaking to us from outside the Anglosphere but we no longer understand them. The internet – on which we all spend so much of our time, as Ofcom reported this week – is in danger of becoming Britain’s staycation of the mind.

  • Julian Barnes on Ford Madox Ford’s love affair with Provence: Nice piece which includes this lovely quote from the autobiography of Ford’s lover, Stella Bowen:

    “It is something to do with the light, I suppose, and the airiness and bareness and frugality of life in the Midi, which induces a simplicity of thought, and a kind of whittling to the bone whatever may be the matter in hand. Sunlight reflected from red-tiled floors on to whitewashed walls, closed shutters and open windows and an air so soft that you live equally in and out of doors, suggest an experience so sweetly simple that you wonder that life ever appeared the tangled, hustling and distracting piece of nonsense you once thought it. Your mind relaxes, your thoughts spread out and take their shape, phobias disappear, and if passions become quicker, they also lose their power of deadly strangulation. Reason wins. And you are released from the necessity of owning things. There is no need to be cosy. A pot of flowers, a strip of fabric on the wall, and your room is furnished. Your comforts are the light and warmth provided by nature, and your ornaments are the orange trees outside.”

  • Christopher Caldwell on “Google versus the Pixelators” — the row that has broken out in Germany over Google StreetView.

    This week, interior minister Thomas de Maizière sided with Google. Mr de Maizière, who has a reputation for thoughtfulness on technology issues, called a summit of consumer advocates, cyber law specialists and “geo-data” services such as Google, to be held next month. He does not seem that worried about Street View specifically. Google’s images do not differ in obvious ways from postcards, he thinks. A “Lex Google” of the sort Hamburg envisions could throw out the high-tech baby with the privacy bathwater.

    Maybe so. Maybe the information Google makes available is only a streamlined version of what we had in the past. But the quantity and velocity of information can effect a qualitative change in privacy. It was in response to the camera, the penny press and other 19th-century inventions that the American jurists Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren first formulated the idea of a “right to privacy” in 1890. Something similar will be necessary with Street View.

    Technology has advanced to the point where similes (“It’s like you have a postcard of everything!”) no longer capture what is going on. Imagine if, 20 years ago, an unfamiliar person appeared on your street with a camera, and began patiently photographing everyone’s front garden. He would explain that, no, he was not an artist. He had been sent by a large American corporation to make a faithful photographic record of your street. What’s in it for the corporation? Who knows? People would be suspicious, even alarmed.

    Image-taking confounds one of the conventions on which our social order rests – the demarcation between public and private space.

  • Paul Krugman on the Bond Cultists: One of the strangest aspects of the ConDem’s fiscal policy is its manifest irrationality. It’s as if Osborne & Co are now to locked into nonsense that they have no escape. So they’re going to take us all down with them. Paul Krugman has been consistently sane about this — as here, in his latest column:

    But the apostles of austerity, sometimes referred to as “austerians”, brushed aside all attempts to do the maths. Never mind the numbers, they declared: immediate spending cuts were needed to ward off the “bond vigilantes,” investors who would pull the plug on spendthrift governments, driving up their borrowing costs and precipitating a crisis. Look at Greece, they said.

    The sceptics countered that Greece is a special case, trapped by the euro, which condemns it to years of deflation and stagnation whatever it does. The interest rates paid by major nations with their own currencies – not just the US, but Britain and Japan – showed no sign that the bond vigilantes were about to attack, or even that they existed.

    Just you wait, said the austerians: the bond vigilantes may be invisible, but they must be feared all the same.

    This was a strange argument even a few months ago, when the US government could borrow for 10 years at less than 4% interest. We were being told that it was necessary to give up on job creation, to inflict suffering on millions of workers, in order to satisfy demands that investors were not, in fact, actually making, but which austerians claimed they would make in the future.

    But the argument has become even stranger recently, as it has become clear that investors aren’t worried about deficits; they’re worried about stagnation and deflation. And they’ve been signaling that concern by driving interest rates on the debt of major economies lower, not higher. On Thursday, the rate on 10-year US bonds was only 2.58%.

    So how do austerians deal with the reality of interest rates that are plunging, not soaring? The latest fashion is to declare that there’s a bubble in the bond market: investors aren’t really concerned about economic weakness; they’re just getting carried away. It’s hard to convey the sheer audacity of this argument: first we were told that we must ignore economic fundamentals and instead obey the dictates of financial markets; now we’re being told to ignore what those markets are actually saying because they’re confused.

    It’s hard to believe that grown adults can act on such idiotic, contradictory beliefs. But they can. As Krugman puts it, “As I look at what passes for responsible economic policy these days, there’s an analogy that keeps passing through my mind. I know it’s over the top, but here it is anyway: the policy elite – central bankers, finance ministers, politicians, who pose as defenders of fiscal virtue, are acting like the priests of an ancient cult, demanding that we engage in human sacrifices to appease the anger of invisible gods.”

    Yep. I’m reminded of a recent New Yorker cartoon which shows two bloated capitalists sitting in their club smoking cigars. “I really approve of the way the government is mismanaging the economy”, says one.

  • John Sutherland on Frank Kermode: Terrific tribute by one literary critic to another. Also very good at explaining why Frank was such a seminal and original scholar:

    He himself liked to complain, ruefully, that “there are no Kermodians”. FR Leavis had his servile Leavisites, Paul de Man had his “Yale School”, Christopher Ricks (with whom Kermode boxed and coxed) had his Ricksians. Frank Kermode stood alone.

    The fact is, he didn’t want disciples: any more than Tiger Woods, when he was at the top of his game, wanted them. The analogy is apt. Kermode loved sport – more particularly the virtuosic skill displayed by sporting competition at its highest level. It was a thing of beauty to him. So too, when it was done best, was literary criticism a thing of beauty. It wasn’t a pit-stop job on books, with wrenches and tyre-irons; it was Ayrton Senna.

    When asked, as guileless undergraduates sometimes did, what was the point of studying all these dusty texts, he would fall back on the sport-game analogy. After three years in my department, he would promise, you will play like a master. If, that is, you have the right stuff. If not, try somewhere else.

    The literature he himself liked best to play against, and master, was complex. He had little time, for example, for Thomas Hardy. Why? Because he felt Hardy gave up his meanings too easily. The modern poet Kermode most respected was Wallace Stevens – never a writer who yields to the reader without a struggle. Once at Edinburgh in the 1960s (I was there), he mischievously asked the audience if they wanted his easy or his difficult lecture on Stevens. We stuffily opted for “difficult” and tried, desperately, to keep the bamboozledom off our faces over the next hour. Kermode was hard to keep up with in those days.

    When, at University College London, Kermode was given a whole department to play with, he created a syllabus which was the curricular embodiment of his belief in the primacy of the difficult.

    • Frank Kermode

    Posted on by

    Frank Kermode died yesterday. He was the most erudite man I’ve ever known, and the best company. He had a lovely sense of humour and a smile that — literally — seemed to twinkle. He first came into my life as a distant presence — as General Editor of the Fontana Modern Masters series, ideal material for an autodidact like me. It was only in the 1990s that I got to know him in person, for it turned out that we had a good friend in common.

    From that time onwards, I have nothing but nice memories: of calling on him in his comfortable, elegant, book-lined Pinehurst flat on my way home, and being entertained therein with strong liquor, cigars and gossip; of the way he always came to greet one as the lift door opened onto his landing; of his annual declaration that this year’s new book would be his last; of his willingness to come to lunch or dinner at insanely short notice; of being his guest at great and small occasions in his college (King’s); of his culinary diffidence; of serving as one of his informal IT-support people (the other was my friend Quentin) in his early days on email (he was an early Mac user); of his wonderfully ironic detachment about the vicissitudes of academic politics; and of the paradoxical way he combined supreme self-confidence in his own judgement with a bemused amusement at his elevated status in society.

    This paradox was beautifully captured in the title of his autobiography — Not Entitled, of which my inscribed copy is a treasured possession. Frank felt that he was always, somehow, an outsider. One evening I was his guest at a lavish feast in King’s — the one where they put out the College’s amazing collection of silver and gold plate. Around us at the table were seated various examples of Establishment and academic worthiness and success. Frank was wearing the medal that came with his Knighthood, and was being treated by other guests with the deference that his eminence warranted. “Surely”, I said to him, “you must have got over that feeling of non-entitlement by now?” He shook his head. “It’s not something you get over”, he replied.

    LATER: Quentin has some nice memories too, including this:

    I remember his surprised embarrassment when I discovered, after dismantling his computer, that the reason he could no longer push a CD into the CD-drive was that on some distant past occasion he had pushed a 5.25″ floppy disk into the same slot.

    I remember discussing Tolkien with him after seeing the first Lord of the Rings film, and he said that W.H. Auden had once asked him, “Don’t you think Tolkien is a wonderful writer?” To which he replied that no, he didn’t really think so. “I respect you for saying that”, said Auden, “but I’ll never trust your opinion again.”

    Alan MacFarlane has done a wonderful extended interview with Frank which seems to me to capture exactly everything that was special about him.

    Confusions

    Posted on by

    From a comment on BoingBoing’s piece criticising Chris Anderson’s “Is the web really dead?” meme. Of interest to me because one of the chapter-headings of my upcoming book is “The Net is not the Web”. I’ve had lots of comments from colleagues along the lines of “Surely nobody confuses the two”. Well, they do; and the more politically influential they are, the more they are likely to blur the distinction.

    What I read on holiday

    Posted on by

    My friend Nicci has a lovely blog post with this title. It begins:

    Every summer we travel to Sweden. Luckily, we go by ferry and car – luckily, because then we can take as many books as we want. And we take lots of them, dozens and dozens: books we know we’re going to read and books we think we're going to read and books we might possibly read or dip into and a few reference books, who knows why?, and some poetry books so we can learn poetry by heart, and then there are the books we want other people to read because we love them so much and the just-in-case books which we are pretty certain we won't have time to read, but what if a day suddenly has more hours in it, or if we break a leg and spend all our time lying in bed…. In fact, I blame it on Sean [Sean French, her husband and co-author of the Nicci French books]: usually only six or so of the books are my choice, and the rest are his. He is tremendously ambitious: he always takes several classics that are hundreds of densely-typed pages long. I remember that the first holiday we ever went on together was a walking week in the Provence, and he carried the new, heavy (unopened) translation of War and Peace in his rucksack, from hotel to hotel.

    As it happens, the weight of books was much on my mind when we were heading for Provence this year. As usual, we agonised about whether this would be the year that we drove down to the South of France rather than enduring the indignities of RyanAir, but in the end decided that we had to fly because of various external deadlines and exigencies. Which meant that we were immediately faced with the fierce weight restrictions — 10 kg — imposed on cabin baggage by the world’s least-favourite but most-used airline.

    Believe me, 10 kg doesn’t leave much leeway if you have to take a serious camera and a laptop, so I spent the week before we left avoiding bookshops. But one recently-published volume really intrigued me — Peter Mandelson’s memoirs. The problem was: it was big and heavy.

    In the end, I hit on a solution: I have an iPod Touch for which there’s a Kindle App, so I bought the eBook version of the book from the Amazon Kindle store. This was a first for me, in that although I use eBooks a lot (I always carry an electronic copy of Ulysses with me, for example), they’re DRM-free, and in general I’m pretty hostile to the intellectual-property regimes implicit in the eBook business. But I thought that, in this particular case, the experiment was worth trying.

    Mandelson’s memoirs are a revelation. Firstly, they’re surprisingly readable. Most politicians can’t write (which was one of the reasons Obama’s memoir came as such a lovely surprise). But Mandelson’s memoirs have an engaging, candid style in which he comes over as an interesting and rather engaging man: a political obsessive, of course, but an intriguing character — the kind who would make an excellent dinner-guest. The book also suggests a more sensitive and insecure person than his public carapace might indicate — which reminded me of a general principle that all journalists should have engraved on their hearts: whenever you encounter a media stereotype, it’s likely to be completely misleading.

    Secondly, although — like all political memoirs — they are self-serving to a degree, my conclusion is the same as that reached by my former Observer colleague, Robert Harris, namely that Mandelson was very shabbily treated by Blair and Campbell. But the most striking thing of all is the picture that emerges of Gordon Brown as an emotionally crippled, obsessive, almost psychotic personality. People have always said that Brown should never have been Prime Minister. I’ve come away from Mandelson’s book thinking that he should never have been Chancellor either. All of which makes the final act of the story — in which the Brown who has for a decade been attacking and undermining Mandelson begs him to come back to help out — truly extraordinary.

    The Kindle App is very neat btw. Once you buy a book, it becomes available on any Apple iDevice that you happen to own. And if you’re on a WiFi network, it checks to see if you’ve been reading the book on another device and, if you have, whether you want to jump to where you left off on the other machine.

    When talking to Bill Thompson about this last Saturday, he made an interesting point, namely that the reading experience provided by the Kindle App is better than that provided by the actual Kindle device marketed by Amazon. The reason? With the device, you turn the page by pressing a button, whereas on the App you just stroke the page — so, as Bill put it, “you engage with the text and not with the device”. Not possessing a Kindle, I can’t attest to this, but it’s an intriguing thought.

    Cracking the U.S. Cyber Command logo

    Posted on by

    This is lovely.

    A security researcher said on Thursday he was the first to crack the code embedded in the seal of the U.S. Cyber Command (Cybercom), the group responsible for protecting the country’s military networks from attack.

    Sean-Paul Correll, a threat researcher with antivirus vendor Panda Security, said that the characters visible in a gold ring on Cybercom’s official seal represent the MD5 hash of the group’s mission statement.* MD5 is a 128-bit cryptographic hash most often used to verify file integrity.

    A representative of Cybercom confirmed that Correll had it right. “Mr. Correll is correct…it’s a MD5 hash,” said Lt. Commander Steve Curry of the U.S. Navy, in an e-mail.

    * Footnote: According to Wikipedia, the aforementioned ‘mission’ statement reads: “USCYBERCOM plans, coordinates, integrates, synchronizes and conducts activities to: direct the operations and defense of specified Department of Defense information networks and; prepare to, and when directed, conduct full spectrum military cyberspace operations in order to enable actions in all domains, ensure US/Allied freedom of action in cyberspace and deny the same to our adversaries.”

    Something for the weekend

    Posted on by

    “Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London”, said Samuel Johnson. “No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.”

    Much the same might be said about the Web. Here, for example, is a brief list of remarkable things I encountered on it today.

  • The Pope wears Prada by Colm Toibin. A masterful review essay in the London Review of Books on the attempts by the Catholic hierarchy to lay the blame for clerical child abuse at the door of male homosexuality.
  • Liquidator by Neal Ascherson. Also in the LRB. Lovely review of Adam Sisman’s biography of Hugh Trevor-Roper. Having earlier read (and been repelled by) T-R’s Letters from Oxford, I had assumed I could give the biography a miss. But Ascherson’s extensive and balanced review makes me want to revise that decision. Sigh: no rest for the wicked.
  • Letting Go by Atul Gawande, an extraordinary New Yorker essay on the futility (and inhumanity) that results from contemporary medicine’s inability to help people face up to incurable, terminable illness. I’ve seen quite a lot of this stuff at close range in my time, and this is one of the most illuminating and insightful pieces I’ve read on the subject. Gawande is a surgeon who writes like an angel. “The Cost Conundrum”, his New Yorker essay on the absurdities of the American approach to health care had a significant impact on the way Obama’s crowd approached the health issue.
  • After the Crackdown by John Lee Anderson is a long, cogent and exceedingly depressing essay on Iran and the West’s difficulties in dealing with that complex and intriguing society.
  • “Painkiller Deathstreak” by Nicolson Baker. An extraordinary piece (alas, available only to subscribers to print or digital editions of the New Yorker, so maybe it’s unfair to include it here) about what happens when a gifted and observant writer spends a month of his life playing computer games. I’ve often blanched at the arrogance of adults denouncing ‘mindless’ computer games which (a) they’ve never tried to play, and (b) are actually far too complex for them to master. The result is a chasm between the shared cultural experience of entire generations — and total ignorance on the part of adults. The kids who understand and play games have better things to do than to delineate the contours of this exotic subculture for the benefit of their elders. So it was an extraordinarily good idea to get a sophisticated, observant, articulate writer to have a go. Here’s a sample:

    To begin with, you must master the controller. On the Xbox 360 controller, which looks like a catamaran, there are seventeen possible points of contact. In order to run, crouch, aim, fire, pause, leap, speak, stab, grab, kick, dismember, unlock, climb, crawl, parry, roll, or resuscitate a fallen comrade, you must press or nudge or woggle these various buttons singly or in combination, performing tiny feats of exactitude that are different for each game. It’s a little like playing “Blue Rondo à la Turk” on the clarinet, then switching to the tenor sax, then the oboe, then back to the clarinet.

    • And it’s not even the weekend yet.

    Life’s work

    Posted on by

    In one of those delicious juxtapositions that happen only once or twice in a decade, today’s Guardian carries an affectionate obit by Ian Aitken of Andrew Roth, the Jewish refugee from McCarthyism whose volumes of Parliamentary Profiles became the undisputed authority on the careers, lives and foibles of British MPs, alongside an obituary of one of those former MPs — Andrew Gorst — written by… you guessed it… Andrew Roth.