Riding the Waves to Eternity

Windigo...

Happy Birthday Thomas Pynchon!

My first encounter with Pynchon was in 1990 when a colleague at work mentioned excitedly that Pynchon was publishing a new novel – his first since 1973′s “Gravity’s Rainbow”.  Intrigued I took the plunge and bought Vineland on its day of publication and read it with mounting pleasure but not a little bafflement – a state I came to recognise when reading his other books.

And read them all I have with the exception of Against the Day which I have never been able to finish – mainly because it is so long that any interruption is fatal and I kept getting interrupted.

Cards on the table, my favourite is Mason and Dixon which I read on its release while on holiday in the South of France.  Like all of his novels it is smart and funny but it is the one that seems to work best for my tastes, as it charts Mason and Dixon mapping America.

I still have some notes that I kept as I was reading it where I commented that “moral demarcation of the New World parallels the topographical demarcation – as much about beginnings as nascent endings; decadence of the Old Empires transported to the moral vacuum of the New?” I also pondered whether it functioned as an American ‘Midnight’s Children’ or ‘Tin Drum’ – the moral birth of a nation.

Also, references to Dr. Who and Star Trek

===

I read an article in The Guardian today in which one Benji Lanyado, for a single day, uncritically accepted every piece of unsolicited advice and recommendation served up to him by assorted algorithms on social networking and other sites. It is an entertaining piece which takes as its origin an (initially) unexamined premise that “Google has become so good at meeting our desires that we spend less time discovering new ones”.  That line is taken from this article by Ian Leslie.

Maybe I am an outlier or some other species of grumpy old curmudgeon but I have to say that my experience online is different. This might be because I am adblocked to the hilt and routinely decline to accept cookies, but also I noted long ago that most of the ‘suggestions’ I received were a long way wide of the mark.

For example the much vaunted capabilities of Amazon miss their target with me almost all of the time (Hey! you bought a Robert Wyatt cd, we recommend that you buy all of the works of Soft Machine, Caravan and why not Jethro Tull and Gentle Giant too?).  The algorithm is essentially very simplistic – buy or view one thing and the algorithm seems to assume that you absolutely must be interested in everything that Amazon considers to be similar.

Mostly this is no more relevant to what I might actually want than the ads on Spotify which bear no resemblance whatsoever to what I am listening to or have saved.  This is simultaneously irritating and refreshing.

Gormless

I have been around the internet for a long time – long enough to remember when Mosaic and Gopher were nerdy delights for the guys in the University computer suite. Memories fade but it does mean that I have been online for 20+ years.

Times have changed – I remember being mildly rebuked at work for sending an eMail to an IT contractor rather than a formal letter or a fax. The matter only came up because the contractor didn’t check his eMail very often.  This was in the mid 1990s.

I find that I still retain attitudes which I formed then in relation to advertising and spam and also what we used to call ‘netiquette’. I think I also retain some of the idealism of those days too. But also, and possibly crucially, when I first went online I was roundabout 30 and my ability to follow my nose through the fields of serendipity in search of culture and stimulation was already formed in a world in which ‘online’ and ‘offline’ were terms which had not been invented.

Where I am going with this is to react against the notion that ubiquitous interconnectedness transforms us all into a TRON-like state in which we are sucked into the programme to become entirely disconnected from what we used to call meat-space.  As it happens I don’t think we have as a species even begun to explore the possibilities of always-on interactivity and I don’t want to go down a path which reduces the internet and all its works to ‘mere’ tools.

What the likes of Facebook and Twitter do give me, just like conversations in the pub, are the recommendations and enthusiasms of friends and acquaintances, which have been one of the more consistent routes by which I have been turned onto new artists or authors, particularly as I try to maintain a large-ish circle of contacts with many and varied interests.

In fact I go out of my way not to become reliant on the social media teat for discovering new “desires”.

Looked at in another way, social media, Google and interconnectedness only give me a limited portion of “what I want” because what I want is, in the end, not reducable to information flows or the purchasing of commodities. What I want is a better understanding of myself and the universe in which I exist and that is not, in the end, an exercise in discovering facts; it is the search for a fulfilling experience of self-awareness.

Back Garden

The months have silently, imperceptively transitioned and, despite the continuing chilliness, outdoor chores have commenced.  I came home from a wander in town on Saturday to find Kirstin halfway through mowing the back lawn – a task she happily handed over to me to complete.

Compared to what it was a couple of years ago I am pleased with the way it is going though there are still a few more things to do – notably the long-desired Man-shed and a second picnic table to be located pretty much at the spot from which the adjacent photo was taken. Hopefully this should get done over the next couple of months and I can think about other things.

My mind continues to turn over the notion of a walking trip on the Hebrides in late summer.  All things being equal I shall be more likely to do this than not, although plans may be thwarted by other stuff.  I hope not, I’ve already started planning the practicalities

Sutherland (in summer)

It’s the time of year when the mind turns to what to do in summer.

This year is a little strange because Kirstin will be away for a while with her mum and sister in Canada so the opportunity for a family holiday is diminished. So I’ve been wondering about whether I’ll have opportunity to get away for myself for a week or so.

There are two or three things that I’ve been planning to do for a while but for one reason or another have never got around to.  One is to walk the Pennine Way up from Derbyshire to Scotland and the other is to get out to the Western Isles of Scotland and wander about a bit.  Since I’m not getting any younger I really need to get cracking on getting outdoors again soon and in this instance I am toying with heading up to Harris and spending a week or so walking with a lightweight tent and a camera.

And it is the Hebrides which are calling since the Pennines would take a couple of weeks and anyway I need to regain some fitness before I contemplate them.  This means some planning and, alas, some gear aquisition.

Sutherland beach

I am not a gear fetishist and whenever I see something described as “technical” I immediately assume that it will be substantially overpriced as a matter of course. Nonetheless, as the photographs here from our trip up to Lochinver in 2010 indicate, Scottish weather can be a tad unpredictable.  It can be lovely with deep blue, wide open skies or you can have substantial volumes of the Atlantic dumped unceremoniously on your head for days on end. So gear is important.

Expect to read more about this should I actually get round to planning it properly.

At present my loose idea is to spend a week on Harris/Lewis although I haven’t entirely put ideas of Colonsay or the Inner Hebrides out of mind. My thoughts are mainly with Lewis and Harris, though, because Harris has hills.   In any event I plan to take the minimum necessary to stay clean and dry together with a couple of books, a camera (or two) and midge cream.  I have no current intention to take anything especially high-tech.

Well! what a day I’ve had of it.  First thing this morning I was picked up and taken to the airport where a jet was waiting to whisk me away to the Aegean where I dropped in on one of good old Rupe’s yachts for lunch and a quick chat about this and that.  I just had time to pop home again to make sure that I scrupulously followed the correct process in applying my quasi-legal responsibilities in deciding on his business interests.  I had barely managed to get that done when there was a knock at the front door – and do you know? there was that Rebekah Brooks stood outside in her jim-jams looking for a party.  Well what can you do? So I got one of the SPADS to park her horse and invited her in – just for a chat about this and that of course.

The next thing I know, there was some guttersnipe – an obvious oik of course – on the telly suggesting that there was something off about all of this.  The cheek of it!

A couple of things have brought about this post and its title.

The first was some disobliging comments made by Christopher Priest about the shortlist for the Clarke Award 2012. Now it so happens that I agree with the general tenor of Mr Priest’s comments. Having read back through his blog I find him to be consistent in his tone and manner as a critic and, indeed, the Clarke Awards nominees seem have got off lightly compared with some of his previous subjects.

But that is not why I have adopted the title. Mr Priest also suggested some novels which were, in his view, more deserving of shortlisting than the actual nominees. I generally ignore awards and shortlists and follow my own nose when it comes to selecting novels to read and writers to “follow” but in this case I decided to splash some cash and read a selection of the novels in question (I already owned two – Charles Stross’ Rule 34 and Ian R Macleod’s Wake Up and Dream). One of those I bought, not on the shortlist but, according to Mr Priest, deserving of being there was Simon Ings’ Dead Water.

I enjoyed Dead Water very much. It reminded me a little of Pynchon but it had a strong voice of its own and a compelling central metaphor which, eventually, gets me to my point.  Dead Water is used in two or three ways in the novel but the deep meaning describes the boundary layers between waters of different temperature, salinity and density.  Propellers straddling the boundary generate no forward motion. The layers do not mix but generate their own currents along the boundary – spontaneous motion along myriad points of contact and transition.

The second was some activity on Facebook. I am part of a (private) group there where we post links to music based around announced themes and the current exercise was to link to five pieces of music which have significance for us and state something about why. The pieces I chose were

1. Kathryn Tickell: Rothbury Hills
2. Dory Previn: Mythical Kings and Iguanas
3. Jake Thackray: The Hair of the Widow of Bridlington
4. Davy Graham: Moanin’
5. Jimi Hendrix: Drivin’ South

When I gave my reasons  – which I’m not going to elaborate much here – the common link is that in some sense they all refer to some moment of transition in my life; to some moment when I was swimming in Dead Water, paddling like crazy at a boundary.

And so, rather like my frequent musings on self-reinvention (eg this one) I am back in familiar territory. But now I have a metaphor for it that I can appropriate!

Citizen G'Kar

It isn’t the first time I have pondered “moments of transition” either.  On a couple of forums my Avatar is or was the image of Ambassador/Citizen G’Kar from Babylon 5.  G’Kar undergoes a substantial epiphany in the course of the series which was very well played out allowing for the standard tropes of TV Space Opera. In particular he opined that “The future is all around us, waiting in moments of transition to be born in moments of revelation”. Allowing for the melodrama of cod-philosophy, the only thing on which I would depart from G’Kar is that moments of transition and revelation can occur in joy as well as pain.

Where am I going with this?

Self reinvention, moments of transition, are a core part of how I understand my existence.  I do not profess any particular faith or ‘religious’ belief at all.  I do not associate universal consequence to moments of transcendence and I have no belief in an afterlife. That makes the time I have all the more precious.

There are those who have argued that someone in my position should be swept by the currents of Dead Water into a despairing nihilism. I make no apologies for seeking to journey in the opposite direction (nor for retaining an abiding interest in religion, mysticism and spirituality which swim in the same currents)

March was a month of hibernation, of sitting in the sun while working, of visiting Budapest. It was a month in which plenty happened. Except blogging.

All being well that should change shortly.

In the meantime, a favourite of mine for nearly 40 years.

In the past couple of months I have twice had the great fortune to have seen Martin Simpson play live.  The first gig was at Edinburgh Folk Club in November and the second in Glasgow as part of Celtic Connections 2012 where he was joined by Dick Gaughan and June Tabor.

Both gigs were outstanding and I wanted to get some thoughts down before I forget

I first saw Martin Simpson many years ago – I think the 17th Cambridge Folk Festival so 1981 although it may have been at the 18th. I can remember being keen to see him but coming away with mixed feelings.  On the one hand he was clearly a fine player but Cambridge Folk Festival is full of fine players many of whom I enjoyed more for one reason or another.  So, foolishly, I filed him away as ‘just another virtuoso” if that doesn’t sound too idiotic a formulation.

This stuck in my head as, over time, I began to move away from the cult of the guitar hero and to appreciate more the other traditional melody instruments in folk music as well as the value of a good song well performed irrespective of the instrumental skill of the performer.

And there the matter rested until I heard and bought his fine album “Prodigal Son” in 2007 and a sampler at much the same time as I heard some of his work with June Tabor, oddly enough from more or less the same time as I saw him in Cambridge.  At which point I suspected that I might possibly have made an error of judgement all those years ago…

at Edinburgh Folk Club

For one reason or another I didn’t get the chance to get to a gig until the EFF one last November at which I was blown away.

There were two things which really struck me: the first was that the virtuosity seemed to me to be much more in the service of the song; the second was the intensity of the performance.

His song about his Dad, “Never Any Good” (You Tube, includes interview), was powerful on record but magnificent live and I could feel the pressure building behind the eyes.  What’s more I thought the first half of the show was pretty intense but the second half was even better.

So I jumped at the chance to catch him again with Gaughan and Tabor in Glasgow, particularly since I had somehow contrived never to be in a concert hall or club at the same time as June Tabor.  And it was just as good.

Seeing June for the first time when she was accompanied by Martin and the first song was Strange Affair was something else and I was melted for the rest of her set (though not so away with it that I didn’t catch the occasional glint of mischief in her otherwise imperious eyes).

And so I fear that several trips to cd shops are now in order to catch up on what I have missed and I have added another to my mental list of people whose work I will purchase unheard and for whom tickets to see will be bought without hesitation – a list which is currently restricted to Rickie Lee Jones, Dick Gaughan, Bruce Hornsby and Half Man Half Biscuit.

And I haven’t even mentioned that the bugger is a great banjo player too…

February already and once again I start a post by apologising for not having updated for a while.  This probably means that this post will end up as a stream of consciousness thing but that may be no different to normal.

Looking back over the history of this blog and its predecessor (10 years old in August!)  there is a depressing frequency to my noting that I have posts in preparation but thereafter those posts don’t see the light of day.  These notes are all true but the reasons why the posts don’t see the light of day are either because having written them I don’t think that they’re very good or, more often, I just never get round to finishing them.  This can either be because I am distracted by other things, such as work, or because of sloth.  In the case of the immediately preceding entry I do intend to write about that but at present I am not in a position so to do.

Anyway, let me pick up on something that I wrote almost a year ago on 5 March 2011 when I wrote that:

It is too soon to put something together reflecting on twenty seven and a half years working for the Government, I need a period of reflection to distill some of that and in any event, as I said to a few people last night, I don’t like to leave burning boats behind me.

A couple of times over the year people have asked me if I regret having left working for Government and my answer has always been an unequivocal “no”.  I do not mean this in a disparaging way towards Government: partly it is because after 27.5 years I was ready for a break and partly also because, as I wrote in that post, there is a need periodically to reinvent oneself.

I think that in the past year I have done some reinvention.  In purely practical terms I haven’t been dancing for several months and that was a surprisingly easy decision to make.  Less happily I haven’t played my guitar much of late except on a care and maintenance basis of keeping my fingers ticking over.

Of course what is not surprising is that in stripping back some surface detail I find a familiar sub-stratum which is like recognising an old friend across a crowded room.  I don’t often identify it “out loud” though and writing about it on a blog may, or may not be a sensible thing.  It boils down, though, to a persistent feeling of being an outsider even when I am in the middle of things.

This detachment is something I recognised long ago and which I occasionally make efforts to counteract when it is necessary so to do.  In the past I was occasionally upset to be characterised as aloof or arrogant when I didn’t believe I was being either of those things – I just found participation in some things quite difficult.  It can still be very uncomfortable – I find it difficult on many occasions to make small-talk and am generally comfortable with silence even though I recognise that people around me are not.  I often walk away from situations where everyone else is clearly having a great time because it just doesn’t grab me and I would prefer to be somewhere else – usually at home.

So part of my ‘reinvention’ involves consciously acknowledging this trait and going with the flow, mostly, or putting it to oneside and gritting my teeth when the situation demands I do otherwise.

I don’t want this too sound self-indulgent; I have been and am very fortunate in where life has taken me and it would be daft not to recognise that.  I do think, though, that we are not around for very long in the great scheme of things and part of appreciating life lies in self-knowledge because that is the key to being true to yourself in your interactions with other people.

Which is a long way around to saying that I am currently truer to myself than when I was working in Government, at least latterly.  And that is a good thing.

A quicky.

I have been silent as I have been away on business.  I am going to say no more because I never know who is reading this but suffice to say it was the first time that I have bumped knuckles and said “respect” to someone – actually several people – without feeling like an ass.

There will come a point where I will write more because aspects of the trip impacted on me really quite profoundly and was the sort of experience for which blogging – at leat this blog – was meant.  Sorry to be vague and allusive.  Watch this space.

So, 2012 then.  Frankly, I’m still struggling to cope with the fact that we are into the second decade of the 21st Century.

living in the past

The first eight days have been a bit dull to be honest, so dull that I effectively went back to work before the holiday period was done.  The dreadful weather didn’t help of course and working seemed a decent way to stave off cabin fever.

Still, I did have a minor triumph today in knocking down the price of our cable/broadband package while upgrading the service we receive (hello 30Meg broadband, hello HD TV) although on reflection it was so easy that I now wonder what more I could have got had I been more argumentative and awkward.

Just for once it paid to read junk mail: I normally put it straight into the bin but on this occasion I checked the deal being offered to new customers of my existing provider and realised that it was better than the one I have and considerably cheaper.  Virgin Media customer services didn’t even bother to argue, hence my wondering about what else might have been on offer.

out t'back

I got the first roll of film back that I ran through a Contax 139Q that I picked up from eBay.  I’m quite pleased with the shots although I am trying to work out if there is a slight tendency towards over-exposure .

In stark contrast to last year, we have had little snow this winter but the shot to the left, which started of as a colour pic., was taken on the day that we had some.   Although the colour original looks overexposed on the scan it didn’t take much to bring up some detail and contrast in Lightroom so the apparent over-exposure may be an artefact of the scanning process.

I ran a comparison of the suggested metre readings from all of my cameras a couple of weeks ago and most were in agreement with each other.  Although the 139 did seem to give a marginally different reading to the Canons, which have recently been serviced and calibrated, it wasn’t by much (maybe 1/3 stop) and seemed to tally with the reading from my Leica digital.

I am well aware that it is the photographer not the camera that makes the shots but it does help to know how the camera is likely to react in any given circumstance.  All that being so, I am so enjoying the journey back to film that I am toying with investing in a scanner to copy my old negatives and slides to digital files.