Crediting poetry

Forget the celebrity gunge and political tittle-tattle which clogs this morning’s newspapers and read something beautiful instead — Seamus Heaney’s wonderful 1995 Nobel Lecture, Crediting Poetry.

When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation. At the time I am thinking of, such an outcome was not just beyond expectation: it was simply beyond conception. In the nineteen forties, when I was the eldest child of an ever-growing family in rural Co. Derry, we crowded together in the three rooms of a traditional thatched farmstead and lived a kind of den-life which was more or less emotionally and intellectually proofed against the outside world. It was an intimate, physical, creaturely existence in which the night sounds of the horse in the stable beyond one bedroom wall mingled with the sounds of adult conversation from the kitchen beyond the other. We took in everything that was going on, of course – rain in the trees, mice on the ceiling, a steam train rumbling along the railway line one field back from the house – but we took it in as if we were in the doze of hibernation. Ahistorical, pre-sexual, in suspension between the archaic and the modern, we were as susceptible and impressionable as the drinking water that stood in a bucket in our scullery: every time a passing train made the earth shake, the surface of that water used to ripple delicately, concentrically, and in utter silence…

As a child, Heaney was fascinated — as I was — by the radio.

I also got used to hearing short bursts of foreign languages as the dial hand swept round from BBC to Radio Eireann, from the intonations of London to those of Dublin, and even though I did not understand what was being said in those first encounters with the gutturals and sibilants of European speech, I had already begun a journey into the wideness of the world beyond. This in turn became a journey into the wideness of language, a journey where each point of arrival – whether in one’s poetry or one’s life turned out to be a stepping stone rather than a destination, and it is that journey which has brought me now to this honoured spot. And yet the platform here feels more like a space station than a stepping stone, so that is why, for once in my life, I am permitting myself the luxury of walking on air.

The lecture is full of vivid imagery which reminds one of the special skills poets have. Here, for example, is Heaney on what we want (need?) from poetry.

Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a re-tuning of the world itself. We want the surprise to be transitive like the impatient thump which unexpectedly restores the picture to the television set, or the electric shock which sets the fibrillating heart back to its proper rhythm. We want what the woman wanted in the prison queue in Leningrad, standing there blue with cold and whispering for fear, enduring the terror of Stalin’s regime and asking the poet Anna Akhmatova if she could describe it all, if her art could be equal to it.

It’s a wonderful lecture. Even better when you listen to it. (Needs RealAudio player.)

New Sony Playstation costs over $900

And that’s just for the bill of materials according to a Merrill Lynch analysis published by Engadget. A big item is the $230 allowed for the Blu-Ray drive. Drat. I had high hopes of the PS3 being a cheapish gadget that could be hacked to do useful things. What it means is that if Sony launches the product at an X-Box-level price then they will lose even more money on it than Microsoft does on its product. Gaming is a mad, mad world.

The explosion in self-portraiture

Interesting piece in the NYT about the prevalence of self-portraits on the Web.

Art historians say that the popularity of the self-portrait is unprecedented in the century-long history of the snapshot. “I think it is probably a new genre of photography,” said Guy Stricherz, the author of “Americans in Kodachrome, 1945-65” (Twin Palms, 2002), which includes snapshots culled from 500 American families. Mr. Stricherz said he reviewed more than 100,000 pictures over 17 years in compiling the book but found fewer than 100 self-portraits. These days you can find as many by clicking through a few home pages on MySpace, Friendster or similar social networking sites.

So what’s going on? Part of the answer is that digital cameras make self-portraits easy to do. Another part is that many people have a camera with them all the time now — in their mobile phones. But is there more to it than that?

Even in previous generations when cameras were cheap, they were generally reserved for special occasions. “In 1960 a person just wouldn’t take a Kodak Brownie picture of themselves,” Mr. Stricherz said. “It would have been considered too self-aggrandizing.”

Psychologists and others who study teenagers say the digital self-portraiture is an extension of behavior typical of the young, like trying on different identities, which earlier generations might have expressed through clothing and hairstyles. “Most of what I’ve been seeing is taking place in the bedroom,” said Kathryn C. Montgomery, a professor of communication at American University, referring to teenage self-portraits. Dr. Montgomery studies the relation of teenagers to the digital media. “It’s a locus of teen life where they are forming their identities, and now it’s also a private studio where they can develop who they are.

“What better tool could they have than one that allows them to take pictures of themselves and manipulate them like never before?”

Aside from the self-indulgent teenager, however, there’s a lot of semi-serious self-portraiture going on. I looked on Flickr, for example, and found two really interesting photostreams — one by a talented (and beautiful) photography student, the other by a busy broadcaster.

Looking at these images, it suddenly occurred to me that in nearly 40 years of being a serious photographer I’ve only once ever photographed someone who appeared to be unashamedly fascinated by the resulting portraits. Most of my subjects seem to be embarrassed by their images — even when the pictures have been, qua pictures, beautiful. And I wondered if it’s significant that the sole narcissist turned out to be a major artist whom I photographed at the beginning of her career.

Hmmm…. These are deep waters, Holmes.

‘Henry’ Gates and the Model-T PC

This morning’s Observer column

Many of the PCs in people’s homes are riddled with a rich ecosystem of viruses, worms, trojans, adware and spyware which exploit flaws in Microsoft software. While most companies escape the worst of these pestilences because they employ expensive IT support staff and robust defence measures, the average home user remains hopelessly exposed. In his keynote address, Gates finally acknowledged that his company bears a large responsibility in this area – which is great news. But in the same breath he went on to say that the ‘entire computing industry’ needs to get together to build a ‘trust ecosystem’. Let us deconstruct that. The problem, it seems, is largely Microsoft’s responsibility; but it’s the industry which has to fix it.

At the same time, Microsoft announced a helpful new service for those embattled home users mentioned earlier. It’s a ‘computer health’ software package called OneCareLive, which includes antivirus programs, automatic updates, back-up prompts and live customer service. It can be installed on up to three computers in a home and will be available from June. Oh – and it costs $49 a year. Neat, eh? Snake oil salesmen, eat your hearts out…

Quote of the Day

No man can make a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he himself could only do a little.

My countryman, Edmund Burke (1729-1797). It’s why I’m boycotting the US for as long as the Bush-Cheney regime lasts, somewhat to the bafflement and chagrin of my liberal American friends. Besides, I don’t want to run the risk of being shot at close range by the Vice-President.

Mac OS becoming mainstream?

Well, by some measures anyway. BBC Online is reporting the discovery of a worm that targets Mac OS X 10.4. It spreads via files transferred in an iChat session but doesn’t seem particularly fiendish. Still, it confirms the wisdom of Bill Thompson’s advice to Mac users not to be too smug about malware.

Cultural impact of blogging

From an exchange between Kurt Andersen and Andrew Sullivan on the subject “Are Weblogs Changing Our Culture?” This is Sullivan talking:

I think over the past couple of decades, liberalism in its classic sense has been under threat. Not just from crazy theocrats abroad but from P.C. paternalism and religious-right activism at home. The formation of solid camps of thought, and the punishment of heretics, and the maintenance of orthodoxy on all sides have inhibited a free discourse in ideas. And part of the reason for that was the limit on the numbers of vehicles for expression. After all, there aren’t that many genuinely intellectual mags in this country, and the battle to influence them can be intense. But the fragmentation of media, accelerated by blogs, can break this up some and allow more complicated or unusual voices to emerge, without their having to ask permission or fight for space or suck up to people already in charge. If, say, the writers at Indegayforum had had no option but to try and get into the established gay press—which has been, until recently, extremely P.C.—it would have taken up a huge amount of time and led to enormous angst and wasted energy. Blogging circumvented that. It widens the sphere of possible voices exponentially. That’s wonderful news for the culture as a whole. And for liberalism in its deepest sense.