Lies, lies and more damned lies!!

Brown Recluse Spider email hoax

WARNING, if, like me, you don't like spiders, there is a large picture of one practically popping out of the screen at the beginning of the post at this link... so beware

Ancient, venerable and decrepit creature that I am these days (though my 90+ Grandmother would undoubtedly and rightly laugh at such notions) I was born in the closing years of the 1960s. As a result I grew up in a world so different to that experienced by those now 30 and under, my memories of the 1970s and early 1980s seem like recollections of some kind of long past, rustic and naive era more in keeping with times centuries, rather than years past.

Take for example, 1980. I was twelve. There were two or three hours of childrens' TV programmes a day, no computer, console or other entertainment device in my home, and toys were limited to board games, Airfix models, Metal cast 'Dinky' car models and building activities such as Lego and Mechano. I passed my time drawing, reading, riding my bike or playing games like hide and seek with friends and neighbours, damming streams in the local woods, the cub scouts, or making models of spaceships with card board off cuts begged from the local paper factory.  Note that the limited amount of TV I was allowed to watch was the only activity that involved looking at a screen of any kind, and what was on it, was something neither I nor or anyone else other than TV programmers had any control over.

At that time, the only sources of information available to the average UK citizen were whatever could be gleaned from conversations with people around, a handful of national newspapers and perhaps one local newspaper, three television channels, none of which ran programming past Midnight, and whatever books happened to be available in the local library or bookshop. The ideas one was potentially exposed to in any given day were severely limited, and the means to explore them further, laborious and time consuming.

Today of course, there is no real division between contemporary civilisation in countries like the UK and the Internet, and the range of information available and indeed the sources of such, are practically infinite.

Infinite also, are the visions, viewpoints, styles and indeed the varying accuracy of the information available. To state the obvious, the problem today is not a lack of information, but the lack of reliable means of finding what you are looking for, and knowing whether it is something that can be trusted.  

There are many paths of exploration and argument along which to continue a post such as this, given the issues I have posed in the last paragraph. What I wanted to focus on is the issue of reliability, and one small aspect of an aspect of that vast and important subject.

Back in 1980, if someone wanted to pass on information to you, they could point you to a book or TV documentary, both of which would be fact checked at the very least by a reputable publisher or research team, or they might explain what they knew in a conversation or letter. There were rumours of course, but generally one was limited to one or two circulating in any given week or month.  

Today one's friends and family can and do pass on sometimes dozens of pieces of information a day, by forwarding an email or a post on various forms of social media. It might be a heartstring-plucking anecdote about some heroic survivor of extreme circumstances finally rewarded by uplifting, morally justifying happenstance, an exposee of wrong doing by our masters, or a lurid scare piece involving the danger of being the victim of the flesh melting bite of some new hybrid spider.

If it is a link, one has some opportunity to evaluate the reliability of the context of the originator of the piece, and perhaps determine whether it is a reputable news site or blog, or at least isn't hosted on www.shockysheistersunite.com. And material such as the racist anti-Muslim propaganda a women I used to chat to in a shop started to send me, stick out like a sore thumb. Much of the information circulated on any given day however, is in the form of viral emails or Facebook posts one often has no idea the origin of, and no hope of understanding how or why someone came to produce the information in the first place. One would think most of us would treat such with some healthy scepticism or suspicion and yet time and time again I see people circulating stuff like this without take basic precautions to find out how trustworthy it is.   

A recent example was a friend who shared a post on Facebook about the lurid history, repulsive composition and shocking dangers of that 1000 foot high, tentacled horror... margarine - and the angelic, all enriching qualities of the dairy alternative. Now I had no doubt there are some disadvantages of margarine compared to butter, and I had already read that certain types contain some kind of fat that increased the risk of heart disease. But I spotted two factual errors in the post from my general knowledge at a glance. A 10 second search of the post on the web immediately uncovered evidence it was a piece with some half truths and some darn right lies and was basically a viral scare piece no different in intention than the stuff circulating about flesh mutilating spiders.

I am always curious about the origins of information, and indeed trained to evaluate and investigate information in various media by way of techniques learned in my undergraduate degree in Media Studies. I often cross check newspaper articles and things I have seen on TV or the internet before I am happy to accept them as presented in good faith and reasonably accurate. Even without that sort of intellectual curiosity and paranoia, there are various resources on the web to check this kind of stuff quickly.

Here for example is a site that, even if one might treat it with as much health scepticism as any other, is a good starting point for the most notorious of the circulating viral falsehoods http://www.truthorfiction.com. And here is another http://www.hoax-slayer.com.

And here, for example is what one of them had to say about the margarine post.

I suppose in the final analysis, here I am being a bit of a know it all, but that is not my intention in writing a post like this. There is so much falsehood and deception going on at many different levels in the world today, much of it requiring considerable work to unmask and understand in its relevant context, it seems only polite and loving to me that we take the time to make a basic check of information we pass on to one another, so at least deception we do have control over is not an unthinking characteristic of what binds us together in our online communities.

 

Reflections of a Perfect Day

I went into the centre of Melbourne this afternoon. It was one of those remarkable days when it seemed hard to believe I might have the capacity to feel stress, frustration or concern. Although there were micro moments otherwise, my attitude was one mostly of acceptance. Everything seemed to flow naturally, the experiences of each passing minute seemingly possessing a fluidity and grace, as though an intricute, living mechanism of being were unfolding according to some a pre conceived blueprint, revealed to me in the living of it, for the perfect day.

I had come into the city ostensibly to buy the 5th and 6th part of the British detective series, Prime Suspect; I had been watching the earlier episodes periodically across the Christmas holidays.

I think I first became aware of the kind of day I was experiencing not long after I got off the tram at the top of Burke Street, one of two primary roads that intersect the Melbourne CBD. There is a small media store not far from there, the best in the City in my opinion. Practically the first thing I saw when I entered the store was exactly the DVDs I had been looking for, and they were on sale for peanuts.

I had expected a bit of a hunt as the DVDs were quite old, but that hunt was over as it began. Mission accomplished I no longer had any kind of purpose in the City other than to be and enjoy the afternoon. So I decided to walk at a sedate pace through the centre of Melbourne and take a few photographs. I have posted a selection of them below, along with some reflections on how the scenes spoke to me within the frame as I was taking the photos, or afterwards, viewing them here at home.

First, some context. As you can see from the sun's reflection on the tip of the building on the left below, it was a bright day. It was also fairly hot, though with a light cool breeze - practically perfect weather in which to experience having a human body. There were also large numbers in the streets, many probably frantically searching for sales bargains, but their milling and jostles and "excuse mes" did not disturb me.

 

There were also street artists and musicians playing in some locations. It made me somewhat reflective of form and colour and art itself as a sensiblity or practice.

        

In that sense of calm, I felt an awareness that I do not often take photographs of people. The two below are typical of many images that seem to attract my eye - abstract shapes, angles and intersections between textures and light and form. These were the sort of photos I had started to take at the beginning of my walk through the city.

      

So I decided to try to take a few photos with people in them, or at least more than might be typical. In the end, I took a couple of dozen across the afternoon, but some still did not turn out as well as I had hoped. Some simply did not have the light to lift forms and colours from the background, or heads were turned and vehicles entered frames at the last moment, but a few were framed awkwardly or out of focus. I think it may have been because, even though I was calmer and more detached that I might usually be about such matters, I was still a little nervous about people becoming aware of being within the frame of my viewfinder and thus did not take quite enough time over each shot.

A few turned out well enough however. In the photo below I felt aware of several things - the mismatch between the two girls and the older man; that the three of them were in identicle, fixed metal chairs, but had different purposes and thoughts; that they almost appeared to be in some kind of waiting room even though they were sitting reasonably at ease - there is no reason to sit at this spot, other than to rest or take in the shopping mall surroundings.

This scene charmed me; I wished I could hear what the muslim gentleman was saying to his elder fellow citizen. Also the curve of the older man's back and his stance seems to me to suggest as though he had been purposely popped into the frame, exactly as needed, to be the right kind of audience for the words he was listening to.

And this lady below, seemed so out of sorts with those surrounding her, the camera was almost drawn to her, as if by some unseen gravity affecting my hand and the tilt of my head. She was just lingering, thinking, worrying perhaps, though whether about the past or future, who knows.

When I took this photo right in the centre of town, I was aware of experiencing the taller building in a different way that I usually do. I find that older buidings like the art deco structure on the left are far more generous to me as a human being with feelings and aesthetic needs. There are shapes and shadows and lines, and pleasing relationships between them for my eye to find and absorb. The tower block is very much about itself and its mission and has so much less to give me. Yet, even seen through the lattice of the somewhat tacky Christmas decorations, it had gained a more palatable and humane sense of form and colour.

I look a few photos like the one below. I find sometimes that objects that are fairly mundane on their own (I do not personally find expensive cars like this in any way beautiful as some do) can gain an asethetic in the frame when they work with like colours elsewhere - as the yellow of the background does with the yellow of the car here. When I saw this I thought about how the car, being a often moving object was constantly creating opportunities for such sense reasonance with the colours or forms of its surrounding - it all depended whether there was a witness to view the vehicle at the right angle and at the right time to appreciate this.

 

   

When I saw this, I was reminded of a photoshop image. Sometimes when you have been working with electronic image editing software, as I have a lot recently, I have found that you can start to see reality as though it might be composited. This photo was a little like that; it was as though an omni potent artist, responsble for creating the centre of Melbourne that day had taken a break, and forgotten to fill in the rough gray area above the shop hoarding.

When taking photographs of opportunity I often find a kind of tension between taking the photo rapidly enough to capture a unique moment and taking enough time to capture that moment properly. In this case, although without it being a movie sequence you cannot quite get the sense of it - I had been trying to photograph a little girl in the distance standing on top of a little bronze sculpture of a dog with her arms in the air, as though just having climbed an inanimate canine mount Everest. I missed the shot, trying to get the focus, but immediately saw this gentleman, reclined. As I took the shot, the bucket he is looking at (you may need to click on the photo to enlarge it and see this), kind of magically sailed across the scene, driven by the wind.

These are among the last photographs I took. The first below I simply liked for the composition and colour, it does not really seem to invoke a narrative or intellectual response. The second seemed rather ironic - the proper, stately gentleman of means towering about an image of a child without.

 

 

 

I finished the afternoon by wandering in to a second hand bookshop and in keeping with the rest of the day, made a quite fortuitous discovery. On the shelves I found four mostly early 1970s anthologies, including the first publication of early science fiction stories by Jack Dann. Jack is the American Science Fiction writer I am currently writing a book about, and I had been looking for some of these stories for quite a while.

 

 

It was a day of a certain magic. An unlikely day. A day that made it feel to me as though grey, unyielding and hard edged notions of a cosmos made only of random particles and empty space are only for the the unlucky and the stubborn.

Four documentary gems of the 1970s

Perhaps, like me, you have spent quite a few hours at some point in your life patrolling the channels of a cable or satellite service. This week I was reminded of such heady, care free days, quite different from my current TV free existence, when encountering a row of TVs with an identical satellite feed on display in the Boxing day sales.

Whenever I think of this medium I am reminded of Bruce Springsteen's song "57 Channels (And Nothin' On) ". It is a cliché to invoke that idea of course, though a cliché that never seems to lose its freshness in truth; not only can it be hard to find anything worth watching, it can be difficult to settle on which mediocre choice among many that aren't quite what you want to see. It is, I found, quite possible to spend an entire evening watching successive fragments of programmes from seconds to minutes duration, without ever really seeing anything - as though the televisual equivalent of a no hope gambler constantly playing small stakes bets in the hope of a big win.

If there is any reliable refuge for the channel surfer, they might need to be a lover of documentaries; there is usually a factual presentation somewhere on the Discovery, National Geographic or History Channels, or something of that ilk, far more engaging than most of the fare to be found elsewhere.

Not that all these productions, informative though they may be, have the same calibre. More than a few possess a kind of monotone slickness, educating with the stunning creativity of a glossy paper printed, well designed textbook, leaving them far closer to well organised content than innovative transmission of knowledge. Others take the form of a mystery presented at the beginning, with the promise of answers revealed leading the viewer, carrot on stick like, through material stretched out near breaking point across an hour of endless talking heads saying nothing specific and replays of special effects shots that probably gobbled the majority of the production budget.

The gems, probably much like any other form, seem to be those that have something about the style, content or execution that that is genuinely creative, in this case inspiring curiousity not just about the subject matter, but about learning and discovery of knowledge itself.

I realised when reflecting on this, that I have a benchmark I am always comparing these programmes to. It is that of documentaries I saw as a child, mostly on the BBC in the 1970s and 1980s, and so I thought I would share a few examples among many of the fine documentary productions of that era. In this case, to help narrow the field, I have chosen those with a historical bent.

 

The Ascent of Man (1973)

The Ascent of Man (1973)  Episode 4: The Hidden Structure

The Ascent of Man was written and presented by a Polish historian of science, Jacob Bronowski, who fronts camera with a kind of grandfatherly aura of wisdom, offering a "personal view" of the development of human technology and scientific enquiry. It is shot and edited with a sense of dramatic narrative and intrigue, but also an eye for the wonder and beauty of technological processes in action.

The episode I have selected to showcase, one of 13, is a good example of this. It begins with an sequence of fire transforming substances that you cannot at first identify. Later in the episode is a sequence about the ritual and scientific aspects of the traditional smithing of a Japanese Katana, that somehow transmits the contradiction of loving, almost spiritual attention producing an artefact of death.

Bronowski died about a year after the series was broadcast.

 

Connections (1978)

James Burke : Connections, Episode 2, "Death In The Morning", 1 of 5

Like, The Ascent of Man, Connections depends upon the presentation style and scholarship of a single, seemingly all knowing gentleman of the academic establishment. James Burke's quite original concept was to trace technological developments, often from antiquity, through a series of inventions across history, each dependent in some way on that previous, until ultimately reaching the final link in the chain - a common place or significant technology familiar to contemporary audiences.

What I found intriguing about this series was not what was then an original concept (I had no idea this was the case at the time), but the way the series and individual episodes expose the viewer to many different strands of technological and historical knowledge. It gives a taste of many things and thus suggests how many things there are to be discovered.

The episode I have chosen to showcase takes us from the standardisation of money in antiquity to... believe it or not the atomic bomb.

There was a second and third series broadcast in 1994 and  1997 respectively and Burke has made numerous other documentaries. I also mention the book of Connections in my Researching Fictional Realities page on this website.

 

In Search of the Dark Ages (1979)

In Search of Arthur (1979),  Michael Wood

Michael Wood is an expert on Dark Ages Britain, and thus in some respects of an ilk to Bronowski and Burke, though younger at the time of shooting than either. He brought to his presentation however, less of a sense of high brow authority, and more of an infectious enthusiasm for the subject matter.  The series, broadcast in 1979 included programmes on Offa, Boadicea, King Arthur and Alfred the Great,  A second series covered William the Conqueror, Ethelred the Unready, Athelstan and Eric Bloodaxe.

Wood, like Burke, survived to make many other documentaries, including an episode of Great Railway Journeys.

The clip above is the first part of a Youtube fragmentation of the programme on King Arthur... because everyone likes that tale (not that you will find much evidence of the Hollywood version here).

 

Living in the Past (1978)

The final example is a quite different animal from the previous three. It was, or is claimed to be, the first ever reality TV show. It was light years different however, from the kind of reality TV as sensationalist melodrama we are used to seing today.  Six couples and two children spent a year living on a reconstructed Iron Age settlement, attempting to live only with the means and materials available to people of that era. Their activities necessarily included farming with Iron Age methods and manufacturing things they needed within the limits of technological advanced at that time.

The cameras were only permitted on site two days a week. I won't comment on this, I think it speaks for itself.

I could not find the actual show, but the link above is to a later documentary which revisited the participants and includes clips of the original broadcast.

There are many good (and bad) documentaries to be found at this link, including some of the above. I have no idea if this or the clips above are legal, but there they are if you want to sample them.

 

 

If you don't like it, you can go to hell!

Article in The Independent of London on petition to deport UK TV presenter, Piers Morgan

America would be no worse off, in my view, if the entire CNN operation were to vanish in a puff of smoke one day and be replaced with cat-chase-mouse cartoon programming. It has little to recommend it as an accurate and informative source of domestic or world affairs, other than being much the same as other mainstream US channels, but somewhat less worse than the extreme fractured fairytales and deliberate falsehoods typically served up by Fox News.

Whether it was ever a broadcaster with an journalistic integrity higher in sum than it is now, I am unsure, but certainly, gone are the days of Peter Arnett reporting from inside Bagdad during in the first Gulf War. These days he would be wearing a flak jacket and embedded with the troops, with all the vast insight that is likely to bring about what is actually going on beyond the rumbling wheels of a convoy of armoured humvees.

CNN however, and US viewers, probably do have something to gain from having a presenter like Piers Morgan, who is no better or worse than the average UK TV journalist, but broadcasting in the US, does at least come with less local baggage and the potential of offering a different viewpoint and approach on some matters.

In the case of Morgan's comments to Gun Owners of America executive director, Larry Pratt, while certainly less than polite, he seems to me to have been merely stating the obvious to someone who is advocating more unexamined lunacy as a solution to a dire and tragic issue, that has of late had domestic and international eyes weeping and heart's heavy with sadness.

As a result over 63,000 Americans have signed a petition suggesting he should be slung out of the country because he has affronted the part of the US consitution that really matters - the right to bear arms.

When I see this kind of thing - and this is nothing to do with gun control specifically - I wonder how many Americans are aware of how they appear to the rest of the world.

Whether it is The President, American state officials, politicians. pundits or radio personalities, the standard response the world sees to even the slightest criticism of US practice or policy, is that it is an attack on the American way... a personal attack on who they are, not what they do and if you don't like it, you can go to hell. At times, it may as well be the mechanical response of denial issued by a totalitarian regime that considers outsiders to have no business interfering with their flower-arranging, cuddly local paradise.

But the US is not a totalitarian regime, however corrupt its political and corporate systems might be, and there are some remarkable freedoms and channels of opportunity there, not available to people in many parts of the world. And so this kind of response is not unlikely to come across to an overseas observer as pretty much identical to what you might expect from a bully or control freak when someone stands up to them. And if it might seem that way to more than a few citizens of countries where the US is at least implicitly supported as a 'western' nation, it would likely be far worse in parts of the world that have had their governments overthrown in the past, or the delight of US troops as liberators who never seem to go home and let folks get on with cleaning up the mess they have made.

Deporting a man for speaking his mind is the favoured course of action for 63,000+ individuals with an obsession with weapons unnecessary outside of a warzone, and indistinguishable from genuine, thinking constitutional idealists... apparently, but the very fact such an irate and childish response can gather such support so quickly, threatens to suggest to an outsider how much growing up the country as a whole has to do, if this is the extreme.

And really, doesn't it have to, for the sake of the world?

Not to recognise that the US does take a lead in world affairs, that is does have immense resources, talent and capability, that it can and could achieve immensely positive things, would in my view be as short sighted, irate and infantile as a witch hunt petition based on a very selective and antiquated reading of the constitution itself. The trouble is we keep seeing this kind of mad stuff coming out of America, that dwarfs any lunacy transmitted from other 'Western' nations, and sometimes it just makes it so hard to actually take the country and its people with the seriousness we should do.

Merry Christmas to All!

Nativity scene from Ben Hur (1959)

Merry Christmas to all!

An excerpt from the opening scenes of the 1959 film version of Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ.

Jules Verne and Ripples in the pond of the imagination

A Nautilus Shell. The Nautilus as a species depending on your viewpoint, either emerged in the Late Triassic era, approximately 200 million years ago, or was created somewhat more recently by more supernatural means. It is one of the oldest creatures to evolve and still have like living descendents in current times.



A model of 'Nautilus', Robert Fulton's 1800 submarine that inspired Jules Verne to imagine an improved version as depicted in his novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1870),   

 

An early illustration of The Nautilus in Jules Verne's novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, by Alphonse de Neuville and (1835-1885) Édouard Riou (1833-1900)

 

USS Nautilus SSN-571

The Nautilus design from the 1954 Disney film of the novel, as reconstructed in small scale in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: Submarine Voyage, a former attraction at Walt Disney World Resort. This is one of numerous designs inspired by Jules Verne's original description in his 1870 novel 20,000 Leagues under the sea, over the past 150 years.

Alex, my housemate currently absent in Tasmania, recently sent me a link to a site called The Vernian Era  that I wanted to share. The site, created by Jules Verne enthusiast, Michael Crisafulli, includes a catalogue of drawings and illustrations of 'the Nautilus', the advanced submarine constructed by Captain Nemo, in Jules Verne's early science fiction novel, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

The site originally started as a collection of illustrations of the craft that had been primarily been created for reprints of the novel or films versions over the past 150 years. Many were acquired through direct contact with the artist. With time, other artists and Verne enthusiasts found the site and its popularity grew. Further searches by Crisafulli added more contemporary designs to the archive, and as more and more were added, he noticed that some new entries appeared to develop, echo or "cross pollinate" from designs he had previously published. Some of these developments were informed or influenced by visits to the site.

It was thus transformed from a kind of passive historical catalogue, into a living online record of the development of an implicit creative community of media professionals and enthusiasts, producing ever evolving visions of the craft.

In Crisafulli's commentary, accompanying each design of the submarine, he offers the opinions of himself and others on the various ways that some variations echo or build upon previous designs, or depart from them, including best estimations of Verne's original concept. He also discusses the rationale behind the designs, the circumstances of their genesis and any mass medium in which they appeared.

This could be seen, in a sense, as a fairy innocuous site apparently only of interest to enthusiasts, but I found, as my housemate suggested when he sent it to me, that it might have quite a range of powerful conceptual and philosophical dimensions and pose some interesting questions about creativity, the imagination and even notions of reality and experience. There were so many possible avenues of enquiry I found, after musing on this for a couple of days, that I realised writing a post that addressed them all with a reasonable degree of justice, could easily turn into a small thesis.

So I decided to limit my exploration in this post to one question, out of at least a dozen or so possible candidates, with a view to exploring some of the other issues in further posts, mostly likely using other examples from around the web to ensure variety and the introduction of other website gems I have found or others have recommended to me.

My chosen line of enquiry is:  Can something imagined by a writer and expressed through words ever be authentic or definitive?

The Nautilus is described in the original text of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, but prose descriptions can never create definitive representations of what is in the writer's imagination. Indeed, unless the writer draws or models something they are describing in their stories in considerable detail (and they may well get engineering or other aspects details wrong in a real world sense if they lack technical expertise), it seems unlikely most writers even have a precise image of what they are describing in their minds. Very few human beings have the capacity to imagine something with that level of precision.

Also, writers typically do not attempt to imagine intricate visions of every scene, character and object prior to describing them. They don't even need to; a good writer will probably have developed far more detail about a scene or object in their mind than ever reaches the page, but they know that they only need to offer a few key details to invoke an image in the readers mind, leaving the rest up to the reader's imagination.

Indeed, if you look at the original description of the Nautilis, Verne leaves considerable license to the reader for interpreting the finer details of his creation.

"Here, M. Aronnax, are the several dimensions of the boat you are in. It is an elongated cylinder with conical ends. It is very like a cigar in shape, a shape already adopted in London in several constructions of the same sort. The length of this cylinder, from stem to stern, is exactly 70 meters, and its maximum breadth is eight meters. It is not built on a ratio of ten to one like your long-voyage steamers, but its lines are sufficiently long, and its curves prolonged enough, to allow the water to slide off easily, and oppose no obstacle to its passage. These two dimensions enable you to obtain by a simple calculation the surface and cubic contents of the Nautilus. Its area measures 1011.45 square meters; and its contents 1,500.2 cubic meters; that is to say, when completely immersed it displaces 1500.2 cubic meters of water, or 1500.2 metric tons."

Some of the designs on The Vernian Era site are very faithful to this description, but all add details, connective structures or design variations Verne did not describe. Indeed, Verne could not have communicated sufficent details for someone to draw or model the craft with resonably accuracry, without filling several pages with description the reader does not require to understand what he is imagining. Also - with expanding length and detail - such a description would undoubtedly reach a point where a reader would not be able to hold all the details in their mind as a coherent whole and might abandon the story in frustration. Anyone who has read the full text of Moby Dick, will know the challenges of wading through pages of information on the Whaling industry that not infrequently punctuate the narrative of the novel.

Other designs on the website depart from the original description in various ways. They may not be entirely true to the original Nautilus, yet they invoke or develop Verne's conception of the craft and perhaps even create something more effective, evocative or simply realistic from an engineering perspective. All I think, are recognisable as 'The Nautilus" or something like it, at least for anyone vaguely familiar with the book or film versions of it.

Similar issues arise when filmmakers bring books to the screen and in the process necessarily or unnecessarily depart from many different aspects of the book, usually because of the challenges of translating material that works in a literary form but may not translate so well into a primarily visual medium or for a cinema audience or because material must be condensed or simplified to be effective in a two hour presentation.

Departures from an author's literary visions can be a practical matter, such as when director George Pal's effects technicians tried to construct the Martian tripods from HG Wells' War of the Worlds for the 1953 film, and found that it was very hard to create a three legged machine that has a practical means of locomotion (tripods are very stable, but as soon as you move a leg, they become unstable and tend to fall over). It can also be a matter of creating a vision of something a writer wrote about in a different era, that might seem cumbersome or unconvincing to a contemporary audience. Verne's concept of transport to the moon via a canon, for example, would not be convincing to a modern audience who know roughly how travel to the Moon was actually achieved. Or it may be to fulfil the filmmaker's particular vision or stylistic interpretation of the source material.

Films of course also get remade, sometimes multiple times in different eras. Each film can end up re-imagining or further evolving upon the vision in a previous film, which in turn builds upon the original literary vision.

I saw an example of this recently in the remake of Total Recall. Both the 1990 and 2012 film interpret aspects of the original Phillip K Dick short story 'We Can Rememberit for You Wholesale", but the contemporary remake also reinterprets aspects of the vision and narrative departures from the original short story to be found in the 1990s version.

So, can something imagined by a writer and expressed through words ever be authentic or definitive? I don't believe so. And that in itself raises another interesting question, one of the dozen or so I could have written about in this post: does the writer really have total authority over the ideas, scenes, objects and characters they describe when so much of the fuller realisation of their visions takes place in the mind of the reader?

Images of things I happy not to see until next year

A fluff filler kinda second post for 22 December 2012. Today was the first day of my two weeks of holiday - the only holiday I typically get in each year and thus a blessed and sacred thing to me. During this time I will be writing almost full time, but also taking time out to breathe and wander out into the world and take it all in at my own pace for a change.

The following photographs are reminders of what I will not be missing for the next 15 days.

Every day, on my way to work, I see dozens of people waiting at trams stops, pausing in the street or riding either tram or trains, utterly enthralled by smart phones. When I think of my working day, it is the smart phone that is the symbol of the start and end of each 9 hours I spend away from home and thus I suppose also the symbol of my experience of what they affectionately call 'the rat race".

I have a smart phone too by the way, but it is not connected to the Internet. Thank heavens I don't get to experience the neck ache the gentleman below most probably does after doing this on a regularly basis!

Four days of the working week I travel into the city on crowded trams or trains. But every Wednesday I travel the opposite direction with far less fellow commuters, on my way to RMIT's Bundoora campus. I will sort of miss those days, because I get to sit in my own office with a half decent view, undisturbed and while I often achieve a lot professionally in my day job that day, I also find it is a time when I find the headspace to mull over my own projects.

These two below, I suspect, have the same enthusiasm for getting to work, and the same lack of rest day by day in a hectic week that those in the crowded city bound trams do. They just have sufficient space and lack of witnesses to show the world what they really feel about that idea and the toll it takes upon them :)

The photograph below is of the city office where I work four days of the week. I took this just as I left; I was one of the last to go on Friday. I have great colleagues and a job that is in many ways among the best I have had in my life, but I can say with full honesty that I am extremely happy that it will be another year altogether by the the time I get to see this sight again!

A leak in the financial wall around Wikileaks

I came across this today Freedom of the Press Foundation.

It is a relatively new initiative, founded in part to restore a means for the public to donate money to Wikileaks.

As many will know, all the major payment systems such as PayPal buckled to US state and other poltical interest group pressure and blocked the ability for people to donate funds to Wikileaks necessary for their continuing operations.

The concept of the site is that it allows you to donate to one or all of several organisations with a focus on democratic transparency and challenging excessive state secrecy, Wikileaks among them. Donors can select what proportion of the money they give is channelled to each of the four organisations currently represented. As a donor is not making a direct contribution to Wikileaks, the usual roadblocks are ineffective. Doubtless in time, state and other opponents of the Wikileaks project will press for and find some way to shut off this avenue of funding for the organisation, but for the time being it remains one of the few channels available to support the organisation finanicially without specialist knowledge or contacts.

And why would I be promoting this initiative?

The majority of the press on Wikileaks in recent times has focused on one of its members, Julian Assange, in particular the allegations of rape levelled at him. Coverage, prior and since the allegations, has typically taken the form of numerous and varied character assassinations of Assange, with little valuable or rational analysis of the cause he promotes. Any student of the media will know this is standard mainstream practice for dealing with individuals with alternative ideas or who challenge the status quo. The rape allegations are of course is an unresolved matter, but many often forget that Assange is a figurehead for an organisation and a movement involving many others and supported by millions more.

The ultimate goal of Wikileaks is to support the democratic process by giving the public in parts of the world where internet access is free or relatively free, access to the information that state, corporate and other actors frequently hide from the wider population, either in the name of security or to avoid answering difficult questions about their motives and means of operation where profit is involved.

I have seen many arguments about the potential dangers of the information Wikileaks has released, but not a single one that in my opinion holds up to any kind of rational and evidence based scrutiny. No one has so far some forward with any empirical evidence that the information so far released has been of any danger to anyone other than the reputations and credibility of those seeking to keep it a secret. What the leaks have revealed time and time again, is that governments and organisations are saying one thing and doing another, or are involved in nefarious chicanery, dodgey deals and outright fraud or worse.

There is probably a case for the integrity of some secrets to be maintained, but surely a tiny percentage of what is increasingly kept from public scrutiny, particularly since 9/11. Until we can trust our state representatives and other actors to behave responsbly in our collective interests and not their own, or that of their sponsors, organisations and projects like wikileaks are essential. Without them we are in the dark and taking on trust what we are told by those who too often cannot be trusted.

I will be donating a small sum to Wikileaks, if you have an interest in truth and democracy, and the means to spare a small sum for this purpose, I would encourage you to do the same.

Kmart and Life After People

I went to Kmart this evening and spent some time wandering through the aisles.

My current manager gave me a Coles-Myer group gift voucher as a Christmas-come-thank-you-for-the-past-few-month's work type of thing. It was a thoughtful gesture and I assumed his intention was that I would choose a gift that I might enjoy.

In the end Kmart seemed like the only store to seek out a suitable choice. The voucher was good in Myers, a Melbourne department store with bewildering range of stock, but a scary place to be this time of year, particularly on a Friday before Christmas. Then there is Coles, a supermarket where I would only buy groceries I would have bought anyway, and some liquor stores stocked with a drug I felt no need for. All that remained from the stores in the Coles-Myer empire was Target or Kmart and there is no Target near where I live, while there is a Kmart.

You probably know what to expect in the average suburban Kmart if you know the name: Toys, clothes, household items, airport books and top 100 dvds. Apart from the books, some metal and ceramic homewear items and components of some of the goods, pretty much everything in the store is made out of cheap plastic. Aisle after aisle after aisle of cheap soon to be broken plastic; an Aladdin's cave of transient treasures with a rapidly approaching used by date.

And that means that pretty much everything in the store is made from polymers synthesised from cheap oil.

It's a strange experience wandering around a place like that when you look at it that way. All those shapes and colours giving the illusion of variety and choice, but most made from the same black, viscous liquid extracted from deep below the earth. The same black liquid whose abundance has been the driving force of consumer culture and economic prosperity in alluent nations these past few decades. The same liquid and the same economic system creating the pollution that is warming the planet and some say ultimately threatening the life of the species.

I realised as I wandered past all those artificial things I did not need or want (well, I already had pretty much everything in the store I might need) that I was a kind of present day time traveller. I was looking at a living museum of a way of life that will eventually, when the oil reserves are drained, become a strange and questionable wonder in memory or recorded history. Something grandparents might speak of to their grandchildren, living in more frugal or hopefully more sensible times. Or, if the darkest woes of global warming are true, I was witnessing an emporium of human stupidity at its height.

And I realised something else. I was free to choose anything I wanted from those shelves - even if my voucher did not cover it, there was nothing in the store I could not afford to buy if I really wanted to - but there was something I was not free to choose - a world with a more sensible attitude to its resources.

That is the the thing about our consumer culture and our economic system - you can buy anything you want except the thing we all need most. Not my words, by the way, but it doesn't have to be 100% original to be 100% pertinent.

It was close to an hour before I found something I might enjoy. Ironically enough it was a TV series on DVD called Life After People. It is a History Channel production; 10 or so episodes explore what might happen to the material remains of our civlisation were we to vanish and leave only animals and plants to inherit the Earth.

It wasn't just a hobbit that went there and back again, Tolkien did it too

Article on how Tolkien pulled a George Lucas on The Hobbit

I didn't know this, but it seems the Tolkien made adjustments to The Hobbit decades after completion. It was to better reflect the world of Middle Earth and his vision of the characters as had evolved by the time he had written The Lord of the Rings. Gollum in particular it seems, became a far more menacing creature and the ring the thing of ultimate corrupting influence we know today.

Even to a half aware Tolkien reader, this may not come as a startling surprise. The tone of The Lord of the Rings, written after the Second World War had ravaged the world, is very different. You can even see it in the Fellowship of the Ring itself, where earlier chapters written prior to the war are far more boyuant and childlike than those penned years later, after the war had come to and end.

That a writer might revise an epic fabric of imagination this way would also be of little surprise to anyone who has worked on a novel or series of novels over an extended period of time. It takes many years for ideas to fully develop and you do not ever know what you are really dealing with, or how it might fully be realised, until it is complete. How much more so when dealing with a series of sequels that were penned so many years after the original tale?

I write, or am continuing to draft, in the very much unfinished articles in 'The Writing Process"  page on this website about the concept of 'scaffolds of creation'. That sometimes you write entire sequences, passages or even an entire vision of a piece, only to find that it is only the crucible and the cradle that creates the reaction and supports construction of the final vision a reader gets to see.

That Tolkien wrote over such an extended period of time, and had pauses in which his unconcious had time to perculate and simmer the broth that become his mastepiece is very much to our advantage.

It even gives me hope for my own grand Atlantis Epic, of which the Devil's PA is the first volume. It has been 16 years since I first started work on material out of which would evolve the rather ambitious animal and story with a 15,000 year arc it is today.

I could either be a hopeless procrastinator who will never finish, or a fellow who justs needs to take his time to realise a vision with the fullest justice he can muster to its potential.

I prefer option B, but I no more know if I will procrastinate myself into eternity than what exactly I will end up, and how close to the current vision it will be, when the final chapter is penned:)

Why your Etch A Sketch is an intellectual concept

By Etcha (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons

 

Ever had that experience when you are talking with someone and they use a word you have never heard before, and somehow you just can't quite bring yourself to pause the conversation to ask what the hell it means?

"So, do you think the "Bla" is pertinent in Glotsky-Shockivic's work during his spotted purple period?

"Ah huh, perhaps," head nodding, trying appear casual and entirely at home, while hoping the conversation will move on to something "bla" doesn't apply to... or the fellow who is obviously so at home with "bla", will experience a sudden need to interrupt the conversation with a bathroom break, during which you can hastily consult a dictionary. 

I try to admit when I encounter a word in conversation that I don't know. No one can know every word in the English language; its just going to happen sometimes and what's wrong with admitting you don't know everything? But there are occasions, at least I have found, when you are in discourse with someone whose ego you own is rubbing up against, and the honesty policy might just slip a little...

I was mulling on this because I realised that there is a word I can only remember encountering twice in my life, at least in a situation where I was likely to learn what it meant without asking what it meant.

Palimpsest.

Some will know exactly what this means. I learnt its meaning because a lecturer in literary theory introduced it as a concept in his lecture on postmodernism way back in the early 90's, when I was studying such things. And in the same period I read Umberto Eco's novel The Name of the Rose, which begins with a claim that the book is "A palimpsest of the novel by Umberto Eco". I would like this to be a fairly short post, so I can go and cook my dinner, so I will not try and interpret here what Eco might have been on about.

For those who don't know what it means; the literal meaning harks back to a time when manuscript pages were written on vellum or some other heavy organic medium, and it was passible to scrape an original text away and begin anew with the words of another text. Below is an example.

In more modern times there are also examples - those kids drawing toys, where a film of plastic is drawn upon with a plastic stylus, and the film adheres to the pliable inky and sticky medium below to create an image - one that can be erased by lifting a cardboard slider that seperates the film from the material below. After a while the film starts to curl with all the impressions of previous drawings. Or there is of course, just a plain old Etch A Sketch (as above), which with time starts to leave lines and dots in areas frequently drawn  upon.

The key concept for its use in the intellectual or artistic world, is that a palimpsest is something created upon a not quite perfect canvas, one begun a new with an superficially fresh space or almost tabla rasa, but one in which traces, indentations or echoes of the original work might remain - as did traces of the original manuscript when vellum was refurbished. A palimpsest is new work that sits over the faintest echoes of one that has come before. It can and has been applied to concept of experience or memory, which builds constantly on old experiences with new ones, but does not ever quite erase the original recollections.

I am not going to elucidate much further about the concept of a palimpsest, but there are entire art events or exhibitions that have been based upon the concept, and you can talk about it, and its shades of meaning and possiblity for as long as you like without quite exhausting the well of speculation - the second time it popped up, myself and several others got a good 45 minutes out of it before something happened to interrupt our collective investigation. And you can of course youself investigate further into the often palimpsest-like domain of the Internet.

But let me leave you with a thought.

A palimpsest is perhaps one of the most anceint experiences human beings might have had of a medium in which one's own life and actions were impressed upon those of others who had come before. A palimpsest was among the first experiences we had of a kind of 'written' history.

Sand and mud can both form a medium which can, with the sucessive passing of wanderers or travellers become palimpsests. Each traveller makes new footprints, but is always aware of the passage of those who have taken the same road before.

A palimpsest is, in a sense, an artwork and a form of historical experience that must be older than the dawn of art and history - even oral history - itself.

By Júlio Reis (User:Tintazul) (Original File) [CC-BY-SA-2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons

Gamer Pride

A lot of what I have, and will continue to write about in this space is perception and visions of reality. It is even, I guess, implicit in the title of the blog “Facts and Fictions”.

Some of the posts are dramatisations, in a few paragraphs of prose, of my experience of thinking about familiar things in different or sometimes unorthodox ways. Not only do I find this sort of thing interesting and hopefully others might too, but I think presenting alternative or unusual visions of the world is a fairly core function of a writer, and there are times when I at least roughly resemble one of those.

But all this hefty introspection, speculation and deconstruction can make for some rather involved and furrow browed posts. And I’m sure too many of them is no better than any other excess in life. So for a change, I thought I would relate a simple anecdote that might say something about perception with little more brevity than has hitherto been typical.  

*

A few years back I met a fellow at a writing group. Chatting after the end of the meeting, I told him with a certain degree of pride and enthusiasm that I was a gamer, ie, was interested in the world of video games and enjoyed playing them.  The subject never came up again.

We got on pretty well and lived down the road from one another and over the next few months we met up and chatted two or three times. Our conversations covered a range of topics but included women – mainly because he was dating a lot at the time - and, in one of our later conversations, my marriages.

From time to time I noticed him looking a little surprised or puzzled about what I had to say when we spoke about such things. Finally, he said to me:

“You know, you’re the straightest gay man I have come across.”

“Why did you think I was gay?”

“Because you told me you were, when we first met.”

And so it transpired, when I said I was a gam-er, he thought I said gay-man and thus he had spent several months in a reality, on that count at least, somewhat different from mine. 

The touch of art and the art of touch

Helen Keller at her graduation from Radcliffe College in 1904

There are famous artists whose work just has to be seen before you perish, famous musicians whose symphonies and songs you just have to hear at some point in your life to fully experience the scope of human creativity... At least, so we are told. There are even famous chefs, who might not have the same creative kudos as those whose work appeals to our eyes and our ears, but who enjoy a not insignificant share of the the limelight for what their dishes can do to our tastebuds... if, that is, you can afford to eat at their restaurants, pull off their recipes or get over their bombastic behaviour in the reality TV kitchen.

But that is only three senses. We have a couple more don't we. Isn't the story of art a little complete without the tale of the other two senses... the ones that remain in the shadow of the popular trio and the usual suspects.

Who then are the celebrated artists whose work just has to be smelt or touched in a mortal lifetime? Surely a symphony could be produced in aroma, or an exquisite landscape of surfaces and textures fashioned by a creative heart and an imaginative mind? Why should such artwork not change your life and generate meaning and perspective because of what you have felt against your skin or encountered headily within your nose?

Imagine, for example, an art lover declaring "It felt amazing, I just had to go back and touch it again and again, each time I just found more and more!"

Let's put aside smell for the time being. I want to concentrate on touch, you will see why a little later. Why is art that only has its full or intended meaning transmitted by the sensations discovered by the finger tips, not better known or regarded?

Some thoughts, if not some conclusions:

Firstly, there is surely a bias of the senses at play here. So much input about the world reaches us through sight and sound that touch perhaps seems like a poor cousin, even though it is the only way we can actually encounter matter in its present and actual form. And perhaps also touch feeds mostly into our unconscious; it is only a few quick fragmentary sensations that add the final impressions to a thing we have already seen as we approach, heard if it makes any kind of sound and I suppose, probably apprehended with our nose.

Then there is sequence or context:  A piece of music unfolds in time and unless you reedit a recording, it retains its coherency, harmony and rhythm no matter how many times you play it. An artwork created to appeal to our sense of touch might be experienced from a number of different directions and thus offer a jumble of disconnected sensations without context if not encounter in the sequence the artist intended. And though some art might seem like a meaningless jumble of colours and shapes, you can study and meditate upon it, and all but the most stubborn will fail to find some impression or meaning in the relationship between the different elements. A paint for example is a map of shape and colour, who extent and totality we cannot mistake, especially if its boundaries are inidicated by a frame.

Then there is the taboo of touch: The number one thing one can never do with visual art, is ever touch it. It is precious, removed from grubby fingers and unworthy fingers, and its surfaces only known to the artist, the owner and the expert.

And what of the issue of mass reproduction? Art can be enjoyed by millions in a photographic or digital reproduction. The original, as Peter Berger argued, might have a kind of presence, but we can still know the majority of its beauty and genius without ever needing to encounter the actual molecules the camera records. And music is easily mass produced and distibuted in the form of  recording, or through notation reproduced by another skilled musician or singer. In a digital age, image and melody do not need to occupy space and can travel across the world in an email or glimpse of a web page.

Human technology does not yet have a means to cheaply reproduce something material, something that can be encounter in space and known through touch. Digital printers might, I suppose, reproduce some form of tactile art, but such technology is exclusive and expensive, and not likely in our present era to be available to more than a few. Only when full sensory virtual reality is achieved, might touch become a mass sensation and an aesthetic enjoyed by millions.

Thinking thus, It seems almost impossible for art made to be touched to be more than a limited if not fanciful endeavour.

But perhaps that is not the end of the story of tactile art. 

We forget don't we? They are only a few precentage points of our population, but they have no less a need or curiousity about art in all the forms they can apprehend it.

Indeed, there are people for whom an art object can only be experienced by touch or perhaps by the sounds it makes by intention or otherwise or the faint odour of the compounds of which it is composed. I am talking of course about those human beings with reduced or absent sight.

And in there is, in actual fact, a field of art that caters to their desires. Take the Sensing Sculpture Exhibition at Wolverhampton City Art Gallery as an example. Here a link that explores more about its genesis.

And in this article more aspects of the subject are explored.

There are many more examples, and in recent years, institutes, programs, conventions and systems have been developed to assist in making art accessible to the blind.

There are even touch artists. Here, is one such example I came across in only a limited search of the web : I suspect if I dig deeper I would find quite a few more.

And what of context and coherency?

Consider these quotes from Helen Keller, an American woman who was among the first born deaf and blind to be contacted in believe a human being lay within the darkness and silence. Who was subsequently fully socialised and educated and who went on to engage and contribute to society more fully than most of us could hope to in a life time:

“My fingers cannot, of course, get the impression of a large whole at a glance; but I feel the parts and my mind puts them together. I move around my house, touching object after object in order, before I can form an idea of the entire house... It is not a complete conception, but a collection of object-impressions which, as they come to me, are disconnected and isolated. But my mind is full of associations, sensations, theories, and with them it constructs the house. The process reminds me of the building of Solomon’s temple, where was neither saw, nor hammer, nor any tool heard while the stones were being laid one upon the other.”

“Touch cannot bridge distance,-it is fit only for the contact of surfaces,-but thought leaps the chasm. For this reason I am able to use words descriptive of objects distant from my senses. I have felt the rondure of the infant’s tender form. I can apply this perception to the landscape and to the far-off hills.”

 “...From philosophy I learn that we see only shadows and know only in part, and that all things change; but the mind, the unconquerable mind, compasses all truth, embraces the universe as it is, converts the shadows to realities...though with my hand I grasp only a small part of the universe, with my spirit I see the whole, and in my thought I can compass the beneficent laws by which it is governed.” 

A work of art apprehended only through touch could of course be encounterd over time to build up the impression of a scene with context, meaning and purpose, though I suppose the sighted would have to experience it blindfolded or in darkness. And surely there are ways of guiding experience and providing context or a coherent sequence of sensations in an artwork meant to be touched: Could not velvet, sand, uneven surfaces and fluid arranged in sequence transmit an impression of the experience of a person's day or state of mind? Could not one place the sequence of textures within a channel or edged setting, and teach a convention of encountering each from left to right or vice versa?

Perhaps in the end, the only limitation on tactile art, is that of our imagination and our curiosity, and when exactly did that ever have a well defined end or final limitation?