One of my kids studied Classics at school, and I’ll never forget the moment when, deep in a textbook at the dining-room table, he suddenly said: “Dad, I get it. Tragedy is when you can see the terrible thing that’s coming but you know that nobody can do anything about it.” This is a perfect description of the Eurozone fiasco — as demonstrated by this morning’s news that the laboriously-stitched “deal” to stop a Greek default on its debt has now been upended by the Greek government’s decision to call a referendum on the deal. You don’t have to be a genius, let alone an economist, to see that the Euro project is doomed because — as many people, including Gordon Brown, pointed out at its inception — you can’t have a currency union without a political union. But because failure is unthinkable to the European political classes — this really is something that is “too big to fail”.

Anybody who doubts that Greeks are going to default just needs to read Michael Lewis’s splendid Vanity Fair piece, “Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds” (which is on a par with his terrific piece about the Irish bank meltdown). He provides a really bleak insight into Greek society, and in particular what happens to a society where corruption is endemic.

As it turned out, what the Greeks wanted to do, once the lights went out and they were alone in the dark with a pile of borrowed money, was turn their government into a piñata stuffed with fantastic sums and give as many citizens as possible a whack at it. In just the past decade the wage bill of the Greek public sector has doubled, in real terms—and that number doesn’t take into account the bribes collected by public officials. The average government job pays almost three times the average private-sector job. The national railroad has annual revenues of 100 million euros against an annual wage bill of 400 million, plus 300 million euros in other expenses. The average state railroad employee earns 65,000 euros a year. Twenty years ago a successful businessman turned minister of finance named Stefanos Manos pointed out that it would be cheaper to put all Greece’s rail passengers into taxicabs: it’s still true. “We have a railroad company which is bankrupt beyond comprehension,” Manos put it to me. “And yet there isn’t a single private company in Greece with that kind of average pay.” The Greek public-school system is the site of breathtaking inefficiency: one of the lowest-ranked systems in Europe, it nonetheless employs four times as many teachers per pupil as the highest-ranked, Finland’s. Greeks who send their children to public schools simply assume that they will need to hire private tutors to make sure they actually learn something. There are three government-owned defense companies: together they have billions of euros in debts, and mounting losses. The retirement age for Greek jobs classified as “arduous” is as early as 55 for men and 50 for women. As this is also the moment when the state begins to shovel out generous pensions, more than 600 Greek professions somehow managed to get themselves classified as arduous: hairdressers, radio announcers, waiters, musicians, and on and on and on. The Greek public health-care system spends far more on supplies than the European average—and it is not uncommon, several Greeks tell me, to see nurses and doctors leaving the job with their arms filled with paper towels and diapers and whatever else they can plunder from the supply closets.

The conviction that the Euro is “too big to fail” is at the root of the wilful blindness now rife in Brussels. It must be clear to even the meanest intelligence that the Greeks will default. The only question is when it will happen. As Lewis puts it:

The question everyone wants an answer to is: Will Greece default? There’s a school of thought that says they have no choice: the very measures the government imposes to cut costs and raise revenues will cause what is left of the productive economy to flee the country. The taxes are lower in Bulgaria, the workers more pliable in Romania. But there’s a second, more interesting question: Even if it is technically possible for these people to repay their debts, live within their means, and return to good standing inside the European Union, do they have the inner resources to do it? Or have they so lost their ability to feel connected to anything outside their small worlds that they would rather just shed themselves of the obligations? On the face of it, defaulting on their debts and walking away would seem a mad act: all Greek banks would instantly go bankrupt, the country would have no ability to pay for the many necessities it imports (oil, for instance), and the country would be punished for many years in the form of much higher interest rates, if and when it was allowed to borrow again. But the place does not behave as a collective; it lacks the monks’ instincts. It behaves as a collection of atomized particles, each of which has grown accustomed to pursuing its own interest at the expense of the common good. There’s no question that the government is resolved to at least try to re-create Greek civic life. The only question is: Can such a thing, once lost, ever be re-created?

We don’t know the answer to that question. But in a way it’s now beside the point. We need to be planning on the assumption of a default. But if it were known that the EU was planning for that contingency, then that information alone would trigger the catastrophe they are trying to avoid.

It makes Catch-22 look like a tea party. And as for Italy…

The wood in Autumn, originally uploaded by jjn1.

An HDR image produced by an iPhone4 with the ProHDR app.

One implication of what’s happening to British universities is that the thrust of the Browne Report (and of government policy) is to marginalise the Arts and Humanities.  This is, IMHO, not only stupid and myopic, but also dangerous, because one of the functions of the humanities (as Martha Nussbaum has pointed out) is to enhance our capacity to empathise with others.  It’s also such a contrast with what happened after the end of the Second World War, especially in the US under the GI Bill, as veterans went to university and studied whatever they fancied.  

And then I remembered Auden’s poem “Under which lyre”… (which he subtitled “A reactionary tract for the times”)

Encamped upon the college plain
Raw veterans already train
As freshman forces;
Instructors with sarcastic tongue
Shepherd the battle-weary young
     Through basic courses.

Among bewildering appliances
For mastering the arts and sciences
     They stroll or run,
And nerves that steeled themselves to slaughter
Are shot to pieces by the shorter
Poems of Donne.

“He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.”

John McCarthy

Guess what thudded through my letterbox today. All 627 pages of Walter Isaacson’s Biography of Steve Jobs.

That takes care of the next two days.

Like many photographers, I’m obsessed by sharpness, by which I generally mean accurate focussing. I hate pictures in which the prime subject isn’t sharply in focus — which is one of the reasons I was fed up with this picture I took last Saturday of David Sainsbury, who has been elected Chancellor of Cambridge University in succession to Prince Phillip. It could — should — have been such an interesting picture. The light was lovely, and the juxtaposition of the man with the Senate House over which he will soon be presiding would have been perfect — if he’d been in focus. But I was using a Leica M8 while clumsily holding a gown and a bag and I blew it. (Of course you could quite reasonably object that if I’d been using a simple, auto-focussing point-and-shoot camera I’d have got the picture, and you’d be right, but my attachment to obsolete technology runs deep).

On the other hand, accurate focussing isn’t everything. One of my favourite books is An Inner Silence: The Portraits of Henri Cartier-Bresson. It has some truly wonderful, insightful portraits, but by my reckoning in at least 10 per cent the subjects are slightly out of focus. And yet in most of those cases it doesn’t really matter. So perhaps my obsessiveness with sharpness is a symptom not of aesthetic sensibility but of nerdish perfectionism.

“From today, painting is dead” is an aphorism often attributed to Paul Delaroche, a 19th century French painter, upon seeing the first Daguerreotypes (though Wikipedia maintains there is no compelling evidence that he actually said it). But the phrase came to mind as I looked at the first pictures from the Lytro lightfield camera, which goes on sale next year. Based on some discoveries made by a Stanford student, Ren Ng, the camera turns the normal process of compose-focus-shoot on its head. Instead you just point the Lytro at whatever you want to photograph, and then you can retrospectively focus in on any part of the image. As the New York Times explains: “With Lytro’s camera, you can focus on any point in an image taken with a Lytro after you’ve shot the picture. When viewing a Lytro photograph on your computer, you can simply click your mouse on any point in the image and that area will come into focus. Change the focal point from the flower to the child holding the flower. Make the background blurry and the foreground clear. Do the opposite — you can change the focal point as many times as you like.”

The company behind the technology calls this “focussing after the fact”.

Since you’ll capture the color, intensity, and direction of all the light, you can experience the first major light field capability – focusing after the fact. Focus and re-focus, anywhere in the picture. You can refocus your pictures at anytime, after the fact.

And focusing after the fact, means no auto-focus motor. No auto-focus motor means no shutter delay. So, capture the moment you meant to capture not the one a shutter-delayed camera captured for you.

It’s intriguing and counterintuitive — as some of the examples provided on the site demonstrate. And of course the magic won’t work on paper, so if Lytro pics are to be exhibited in all their counter-intuitive glory they’ll have to be displayed on computer monitors. Still, it’s an interesting development.

The camera comes in two flavours, depending on the amount of onboard storage you want. The 8GB model holds 350 pictures and costs $399, while the 16GB model holds 750 and costs $499. The devices start shipping in “early 2012”.

Oh — and they only work with Apple machines. For now.

The first love song to a robot?

Standing out, originally uploaded by jjn1.

Test shot of a 90mm Summicron f2 lens.