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I am not a bibliophile. I do not collect or revere books for their own sake. I am not a book collector. The fact that I own quite a number of books stretched out across a fair number of shelves is because at each an every time of acquiring those books I needed to read them, refer to them, make practical use of them. And, having bought them (or been given them), I had to keep them.
That's the oddity, because there is no real practical value is keeping hold of a book one has already read, particularly if available space starts to become an issue, unless it is to serve as reference for the future – or indeed will be worth reading again some time. But I keep them because by having been read by me they have become a part of me, and to see them lined on the shelves is to see one's past thoughts and aspirations documented. And, of course, books do furnish a room.
So what of lost books? A few years ago, when I was selling a previously property, I decided to get rid of some books (probably a couple of hundred, chiefly novels) to make the place look less cluttered, and so took them round to Oxfam. Not a day goes by when I do not bitterly regret the decision. I reasoned at the time that it would be best to keep books that I had not as yet read, and to dispose of some of those that I had. This was completely the wrong thing to have done. I could have got any copy of those unread books at any time, but the books that I had read were unique. They were my books, a part of me, because they were the physical copies that I had bought, read, shelved, and seen grow along those shelves as they were joined by other books. I had got rid of a part of myself.
Why, for instance, did I dispose of all those Alexandre Dumas novels, whose thrilling romantic adventures so engrossed me when I was a teenager? What on earth was I thinking on when I parted with a dozen or more Balzac novels, which I read obsessively in my mid-twenties, exhilarated by how a a minor character in one volume of his Comedie Humaine could because the leading character in a next, as a vast alternative world emerged from those thousands of pages? Some of those novels I dispensed with because I did not like them and felt better for having seen the back of them – Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time brings back thoughts of particular loathing (yet I read the whole sequence just to find out how much I did loathe it). Some I had read halfway through only to grow weary – Olaf Stapledon, Rex Warner, Emile Zola, assorted Thackerays. But all had been part of my reading history, and now the gaps in the shelves were gaps in the memory.
Of course I could go out and find replacement copies, but that would be all wrong. The point is the physicality of the book as object, as something with a personal history. I can tell you where I bought every copy of the books on my shelves. I can remember the circumstances in which I bought them, when and where I read them, and where my reading took me next because I had read them. Each book told not just a story, but its own story which by extension became a pat of my story.
A boom I've just finished reading in Henry Kissinger's World Order. It is a marvellously wise and knowledgeable account of the progress of history and the role of political strategy. It is a great book, and also a handsomely produced one (courtesy of Penguin Books), in which the book's design and construction are harmoniously at one with the book's grand themes and acute style. Towards the end, in a thoughtful section on the impact of the Internet on society, Kissinger has this to say about books:
The acquisition of knowledge from books provides an experience different from the Internet. Reading is relatively time-consuming; to ease the process, style is important. Because it is not possible to read all books on a given subject, much less the totality of all books, or to organize easily everything one has read, learning from books places a premium on conceptual thinking – the ability to recognize comparable data and events and project patterns into the future. And style propels the reader into a relationship with the author, or with the subject matter, by fusing substance and aesthetics.
This is as good an argument for the value of books as I have come across. Kissinger's point is that the Internet excels as a supplier of information, but it falls down – indeed probably impedes – the acquisition of knowledge, and wisdom. Books take time to read, and that expense of time encourages constructive thought and the learning of lessons. Style is essential too, because style conveys humanity (though style alone is not enough, or else I would not want to be so harsh on Anthony Powell). But time is the key. books take up time; their physical presence marks out time spent.
To manage time and learning is to earn understanding. To lose the books through which I have learned what little I know is to have thrown away time, to have shortened life a little. Of course I still have the experience of having read those books, and the memory of their loss shows the importance that they had. But they are not there, and I feel that that my bookshelves are telling lies about me, or at least not telling the whole truth.
Yet I could go out and get those Balzac novels again. They would not be the books that I read when twenty-two, but if I read them all again they would belong to the me of thirty years later. They would be taking their place again in a different part of the story. Would that be so bad? I think I should try. The Wild Ass's Skin is where to begin, if memory serves me right…
The Olympic Stadium, Berlin
This is one of the most beautiful buildings I've ever seen, and I'm trying to work out why. It's the stadium built for the Olympic Games of 1936, held in Berlin, a city that I visited for the first time a couple of weeks ago. The 1936 Games were of course Hitler's Games, engineered as a means to promote the ideals of National Socialism. The design of the stadium and the site of which it was a part was integral to that propagandist and pernicious ambition, but just as with the Games, where sport triumphed over political show, so the stadium stands as symbol of all that is fine over blind prejudice.
The Olympiastadion in 1936 (from http://www.olympic.org/Berlin-1936-summer-olympics)
The brochures and the excellent explanatory notes about the site conduct a careful balancing act between celebrating the sporting occasion while condemning some of the ideas behind it. The stadium has an interesting history. The site, at Grunewald on the outskirts of Berlin, first gained an association with sport in 1906, when the Berlin Horseracing Association commissioned Otto March to design a racecourse. This opened in 1909. Three years later work began on the construction of a stadium on the site, intended for the 1916 Olympic Games which were to be held in Berlin. The stadium opened in June 1913, and though the Games were cancelled because of the First World War, the stadium because a popular venue for sporting events, as well as political and military displays.
The cauldron
The site was further developed in the 1920s by Werner March (Otto's son) as the Deutsches Sportsforum, though the financial crisis of the late 20s put paid to developing the site entirely. When Berlin was awarded the Olympic Games of 1936 the initial plan was to the existing stadium, but Hitler demanded a complete rebuild, which was overseen by Werner March. A much larger stadium seating 100,000 would now be built on the site of the existing one (digging down into the ground to achieve greater space than one would expect viewing it from the outside), and the overall area to become the complete sporting complex, named the Reichssportfeld. Completed in 1936, the Reichssportfeld and the Olympiastadion hosted the spectacular Berlin Games in that year, an event which in its ambition, aesthetics, symbolism (the first Games to have the Olympic torch relay) and sports professionalism established the success and the still present meaning of the Olympic Games. With the stadium as the centrepiece, there was also the Olympischer Platz road leading up to the two-towered Olympic gate and the stadium beyond, the large field at the end end of the stadium overlooked by the Bell Tower, the swimming pool and an open-air amphitheatre.
Shadow of the roof on the stadium seats
The stadium was largely unaffected by the bombing of the Second World War. The Bell Tower was demolished in 1947 (to be rebuilt in the 1960s) but the substantial structures remained and the stadium was regularly used for sporting events and festivals. It was used for the 1974 World Cup and was significantly refurbished – including the addition of a roof – in time for the 2006 World Cup. Today it hosts football matches and concerts. It is an active and much-used area. But if you visit it on a cold, sunny day in February when there are no events scheduled, as I did, then you get the entire stadium more or less to yourself (there is a visitor centre, and tours are available, but otherwise you can go around the entire site and most of the stadium for yourself, unaccompanied).
The Olympic pool
I found the experience thrilling. In a large part this is because I've long best an Olympic Games history enthusiast. The idealism behind the founding of the modern Games may been been naive, and the use of the Games through history may have been frequently contentious, but the beauty of the central idea – the unification of people and the celebration of excellence through sport – trumps the failings of reality every time. You sit in the stadium and think, that's where Jesse Owens ran, that's where he and German long jumper Luz Long befriended one another (to the delight of the crowd and disgust of the Nazis), that's where Jack Lovelock won the 1,500 metres, that's where Glenn Morris won the decathlon, that's where Sohn Kee-Chung (a Korean forced to run as Japanese under the name Son Kitei) won the marathon, that's where Leni Reifenstahl filmed probably the greatest of all sports documentaries.
Riefenstahl's Olympia doesn't get shown much these days – not because of the hold its late filmmaker had over its distribution, but because the International Olympic Committee now owns the film rights, and it seems to be a bit self-conscious about the fact. If you see the film, you see why Olympism triumphed over fascism. The opening reel of Olympia is portentous stuff, with statuesque athletes in half-lit, cod-Grecian poses, that chime in well known with the Nazi aesthetic. But then the Games take over. The politics are reduced to nothing, as all we see in human physical excellence, ingeniously filmed to exhilarating effect, the literal record artfully combined with the abstract (notably the diving pool sequence). The drama of actuality has never been so ably orchestrated as it is in Riefenstahl's film.
Monumental statue opposite the Bell Tower
So you sit in the stadium, contemplating the the raw materials with which she made her film, and how art – if it is true art – always transcends the political. But it wasn't just how the Nazi showcase was trumped by sport. It was something about stadia themselves. Buildings are designed for a human purpose. Their aesthetic function is subservient to their social purpose. If they are beautiful it is because they serve people beautifully. This the Olympic Stadium demonstrates to perfection. Functionally, it is a model stadium because every seat provides an excellent view. Visually it does so through the harmonious use of shape and fine. I was just so moved by how we can build spaces for human celebration, and how the stadium (from the Colosseum to the Nou Camp) channels drama through the effective marshalling of the crowd. Here we cheer amongst our peers, Here is where we win.
Colonnade around the stadium perimeter
Another part of the thrill of the visit to the Olympiastadion is that it was empty, or virtually so. There was a handful of visitors, and a film crew that milled around the cauldron at the Marathon Gate end of the stadium for a while. Essentially I had the stadium to myself, on a clear day with perfect sunshine. The sounds of the crowds were only virtual echoes. To be in such as place which has had such political portentousness placed upon it, as well as such sporting endeavour, and to see all that reduced to silence, has a powerful effect on the emotions. That which is evil will pass, and all that will survive of it will be the good. I found the Olympiastadion to be a hopeful place.
My favourite website of the moment is the marvellous Forgotify.com. It is based on an absolutely inspired idea that also reveals a profound truth of two. Its simple premise is that there are four million songs on the music service Spotify which have been played by no one – around 20%. So Forgotify makes these neglected songs available. Simple, but brilliant.
The site (which has been created by three independent developers and is not a creation of Spotify itself) offers one un-listened-to track at a time, selected at random. There is no search or browse option – you simply have to click through what you're offered, one by one. You get the name of the recording, the album cover and the Spotify play button. Needless to say, you need to be signed up to Spotify to be able to play the music.
The offering is fascinating view of the nether world of music culture – the world's largest bargain bin display. There are traditional folk song collections, Bollywood soundtracks, classical music re-issues, world music, experimental electronica, sound effects albums, thrash metal bands shocking no one, polka selections and Christian pop. Not all of the names are obscure, however – I came across recordings by Maria Callas, Lonnie Donegan, Sarah Vaughan and Coleman Hawkins in browsing through.
Much of it is, inevitably, forgettable – recordings for which you cannot imagine the reason why they were made in the first place, save for some unfortunate combination of vanity and record company gullibility. Yet there are many gems – I'm certainly pleased to have stumbled across Bally & Power Bross's sweet guitar and some other stringed instrument on "Z Valiha na Madagaskar", the quietly explorative jazz of Marc Copland and Dieter Ilg on "Tracks", the drums of the Yoruba of Nigeria, the unearthly organ music of American composer Erling Wold on his CD "I Weep", a live recording of the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace from a sound effects album complete with comments from tourists, inventive Italian jazz drummer Zeno de Rossi's "Plunge", American old-time guitarist Smokey Joe Miller playing "An Angel from East Tennessee", or the out-and-out weirdness of the Children of NYPS singing "Lovely Italy" from the album Gosh, What a Wonderful World. To each his own!
To be selected on Forgotify, a track has to have a '0′ popularity rating on Spotify, and then never to have been played. Playing the songs will disqualify them for appearing on Forgotify thereafter, but as new recordings are being added to Spotify all the time, presumably its offspring site will continue at much the same level of 20% unplayed music.
As anyone who works in an archive or library knows, the vast majority of your institution's holdings will be accessed by no one. Most users select the same objects over and over again, and having a substantial part of your collection never used by anyone is simply the price that must be paid for making what is sought out available. No institution wants to go public with such figures, because it looks like you are storing large amounts of books, papers or whatever which are being used by no one. But they will be used by someone one day we protest, and you cannot be governed by the whims of current taste. Posterity will never forgive us.
At a guess, the average amount of the unused portion of a large library or archive (or gallery or museum) is 90-95%. Smaller collections probably gain more use per item; larger ones inevitably have to hold on to more purely for the sake of holding on to them (most lending libraries of course have disposal policies to clear away old, unused stock). What is certain is that more gets unused than gets used. So Spotify's rate of just 20% of the collection being unused is outstanding. Of course, online collections reach out to audiences without the constraints that a physical archive faces. But they show how much we want to discover, given the optimum conditions in which to do so.
For what Forgotify demonstrates so powerfully is the urge to discover, and in doing so to bring things back to life. Anyone who has done archival research can speak of the thrill of being the first person to have opened up some document since the day it was created, and to hear the voices of history speak out once more. We bring the past back to life through the simple act of reading, or listening. So Forgotify is not an argument against archives and libraries who store so much that no one ever sees, but instead a justification for having done so. There is nothing so precious as the unseen, or the unheard, because the time will come when it is seen or heard again. It is wrong to keep only that which is known. It is only through exploring the unknown that we will be able to discover anything. Forgetting is the essential counterbalance to remembering.
A sound map of the British Library Sound Archive, recorded by John Kannenberg
In all of the long and notable histories of the UK's national film archive and its national sound archive only one person – to the best of my knowledge – has worked for both institutions. Me. This is not through any great archival ability stretching across the two media. My contributions to film archiving have been more nebulous than practical, while I am now based in the British Library Sound Archive not for any expertise in sound (I have none) but because the Library wanted a moving image curator, and they had to sit me somewhere – so among the Sound Archive is where I sat, and still sit.
And although I still wear that moving image hat for the Library, and have recently taken on a news curatorial brief as well, I get involved in the world of sound, particularly radio. Just recently I've been helping to manage the early stages of a large-scale programme called Save our Sounds. This is an ambitious undertaking, which essentially is setting out to preserve the nation's sound heritage, and which is driven by the generally recognised assumption that we have fifteen years in which to preserve the sound archives we have (through digitisation), before either the media themselves deteriorate of the means to play them become unavailable. The reason for acting is that these threats will only get worse and mean that the cost of saving sounds will get all the more expensive as the years go by. So we have to start preserving now.
One of the last Black Country chainmakers, Lucy Woodall, sings the worksong 'Chainmaker lad is a masher' and talks about singing
At the same time there need to be systems in place for the capture of future sounds, and the other half of Save our Sounds is looking at direct ingest of sounds from publishers (primarily music publishers) and greatly extending the archiving of radio. Around 92% of the current output of the UK 700 or so licensed radio stations is not properly archived (if it is kept at all), a shameful situation. We've worked out how much all of this will cost, and it comes to around £40m, money which as things stand we have not got.
So, nothing like a challenge.
Nightingale song, recorded in Kent, 2008
It's a good time to be getting more interested in sounds, from the rise of services such as Spotify, SoundCloud and BBC Playlister, to BBC Four's recent fine series The Sound of Song, presented by Neil Brand, which gives us the history of how technology has determined the production and distribution of recorded song, and encourages all of us to listen that much more attentively to the sounds about us. The British Library has recognised the special case for sounds, and made their preservation one of the leading themes of its 2015-2023 strategy Living Knowledge (awful name, but good thinking behind it). There is definitely something in the air.
One of the earliest recordings of chamber music, recorded in 1905
All of which is making me think what it is that is so special about sound archives. Why keep sounds? Who do they serve? How do they function? What purpose do they serve when so many sounds are now freely or cheaply available wherever we are? How do they differ from other kinds of archives (such as film)? Why pay £40m on their preservation? Why do they matter?
Sounds matter because they resonate. Listening to them puts us in a particular place that is both the time and space in which they were recorded and that timeless space that exists within our heads. They do not distract, in the way that visual media inevitably do (that is, visual media show us the object to be looked at, but our eyes tend to wander to see things sometimes differently to the matter ostensibly in hand). To listen therefore is to concentrate.
Sounds move us, because we recognise that they are speaking to us, that a communication has been made. Sounds help us locate who we are and where we are. Sounds help to identify boundaries, yet at the same time to transcend them. A voice or a melody may belong to a particular culture and be part of the society that it helps define, yet equally such sounds may move anyone, may belong to anyone.
Sounds contain memories, associations, echoes and refractions. They transmit information which cannot be written down (musical scores notwithstanding). Sounds make us think, and in rationalising what we hear we gain extra understanding. Sounds help explain the world, while creating worlds of their own. Sounds encourage wonder, and enquiry.
Sounds are everywhere, and yet evanescent. We live in a world seemingly saturated with voice, songs, sounds natural and mechanical, yet they are lost if not recorded, and are perilously reliant for their survival on the media that contain them and the organisations in whose current interest it is that those media are kept. A recorded sound, and all that we can associate it through listening to it, can be so easily snuffed out. A wiped tape is a tragedy.
A sound archive is a beautiful idea. It is a civilised idea. Its absence would be mere oblivion.
Gull in a gale
- The Save our Sounds page has information on the programme and the British Library Sound Archive
- Over 50,000 sound recordings from the Sound Archive can be listened to at http://sounds.bl.uk
- As a first step in the programme we are conducting a survey of the UK's sound collection, whether in public or private hands, with the same of creating a UK Sound Directory. The survey runs until the end of March 2015.
Some of the results of a Google image search for 'Malevich black square 1915′
This weekend I went to the Whitechapel Gallery in London for its new exhibition, Adventures of the Black Square. This marks the 100th anniversary of Kazimir Malevich's epoch-making painting 'Black Square', which was exhibited in Petrograd at the Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0.10. The Whitechapel show celebrates a century of abstract art and its relation to society from that inaugural confrontational moment.
Malevich's painting was the cornerstone of his Suprematist ideas, which advocated an art based on geometrical forms that did not relate in anyway to the objects of life. Aside from the art theory and history, the great thing about 'Black Square' is that it annoys people. It is ultimate statement for those who believe that modern art is a con, a joke played upon the gullible and the pretentious. It doesn't say 'admire me'; instead it's a poke in the eye. It's one of those great confrontational moments in twentieth-century art, alongside John Cage's 4'33″, Andy Warhol's Empire, Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come and Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music. They represent the end of the road for their art forms – except that the road in each case still carries on.
I had expected the exhibition to be a set of variations on the theme of the black square, but it is far more various and interesting than that. Its aim is to show how the artworks "symbolise Modernism's utopian aspirations and breakdowns", and what you get is a journey through a hundred years of art taking on the world with a new language and both winning and losing the battle as its strategies become absorbed by the world that it seeks to reflect and confront.
So you get rooms chaotically disporting every kind of abstract and abstract-inspired image, each trying to deconstruct what it is that we see. There is lots of political art; stridently designed manifestos for movements long since past. There are photographs, sculptures, paintings animations and textiles. There is an extraordinary geographical diversity, providing an important lesson that the revolution in art was not confined to a few European names from the more well-worn art books. We do see Mondrian, Moholy-Nagy and Joseph Albers, but there were so many that were new to me – Hélio Oiticica, Lyubov Popova, Nazgol Ansarinia, Clay Ketter, Anni Albers – and I was mightily impressed at the knowledge of the curators who pulled all this material together, knowing what to find and where to find it. Weaving its way through the geography and the history is the square (black, white, red, whatever) as an occasional but insistent motif – like a placard without words, telling us to see what it alone has to say.
It's an exhibition in which film and video play a prominent part. I enjoyed watching Fernand Léger's Ballet Mécanique (1924) for what must be the umpteenth time, but the chief thrill for me was seeing Lis Rhodes' Notes from Light Music (1976), a 25-minute version of a larger work (Light Music), and a classic of avant garde film that (shame on me) I'd not heard of, let alone seen, before now. Brilliantly constructed, it presents the patterns of film strips in ever-changing hypnotic cascades of black and white lines, accompanied by the buzzing sounds you set when you run a film with an audio track through the sound heads of a Steenbeck. It was the sights and sounds of film of itself.
An attempt at recreating Malevich's 'Red Square', from Melanie Smith, 'Aztec Stadium', http://melaniesmith.net/projects/aztec_stadium/index.html
I was also delighted by a video piece Aztec Stadium (2010), by Melanie Smith, of a Mexican stadium, in which hundreds of children bore cards above their heads which if everything were synchronised properly form would some large picture. But in Smith's film nothing ever synchronised properly. The cards were askew, the composite pictures malformed, the people distracted. It showed the chaos beneath the will to create order. It is funny and thoughtful and knowing. And among the images, several of which relate to Mexican national history (to which an electric guitar plays a Mexican marching song), is a recreation of Malevich's 'Red Square' painting.
This is a show that knows what it is doing.
There are times when only abstract art will do. They are certainly times when one no longer wants a painting to portray an object, for a song to have a tune, for a film to tell a story. One simply wants the thing of itself. I have lost patience with many narrative films, or least I do not value them too highly. Instead I turn to patterns of light, finding them to be more truthful. Likewise black squares, and red squares and white squares. They represent the ultimate (the Whitechapel exhibition makes much of artists' striving towards Utopia). There is no need for further statement once they have been said.
But then the road carries on.
16mm film projector in the classroom, from mentalfloss.com
I was rather thrilled to read a piece in the Times Educational Supplement, in which Sanjay Sarma, director of digital learning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, called for teachers to stop relying on traditional teaching methods and instead use ten-minute videos. He is quoted as saying:
The way we teach today is based on lectures, which is still a factory-style system. But cognitive science and cognitive psychology tell us that students learn in a way that, frankly, isn't compatible with lectures … You can't do a 10-minute lecture in real life but you can certainly do [one] online. There's an enormous amount of literature that shows how you can tweak the learning process to make it friendlier to the student without compromising the content or the rigour … The human mind wanders and what we do is make the student feel unhappy about it. In fact, you're better off doing 10-minute lectures and then asking the students questions about what they just learned, because that transfers stuff from our short-term memory to our long-term memory. [Young people] spend hours each week consuming 10- or 20-minute titbits about physics and history or whatever on YouTube or Khan Academy. It's not 'maybe this will be the future' – it is the future. We just need to recognise it.
The reason for the thrill is that such arguments are not so far away from those which were made by the first people who put forward film as an educational tool, something which has long been a favourite subject of mine. Earnest advocates of the medium as a means through to learn often wrote about how the moving image could be more effective than the printed word in imparting messages to the mind. Here's non-fiction film producer Charles Urban writing in 1907:
The cinematograph helps the teacher to realise the difference between education and instruction. Education is a work of drawing out, rather than one of building in. It is the making of the best in a pupil by taking advantage of what is already there; to develop it, build upon it, improve upon it, and, as far as possible, make the pupil teach himself. Instruction is simply asking the audience to sit still while facts and laws are poured into the members; it is to look upon the pupil as a big receptacle into which fact after fact can be shovelled. Instruction is only a part – and a very small part – of education. The mind of the pupil is a living, thinking machine, and life and thought can best be brought into play by Cinematograph pictures which give every detail in motion of the subject under consideration. They enable the teacher to accommodate himself to the pupil. He must lead, not beckon, and aim at a mode of treatment which the pupil is able to follow. A series of living pictures imparts more knowledge, in far more interesting and effective manner, in five minutes, than does an oral lesson of an hour's duration.
I have long thought these words, taken from Urban's pioneering booklet The Cinematograph in Science, Education and Matters of State, were commendably idealistic but maybe a little too ingenuous, but it may be that he was absolutely spot on in his beliefs. Urban's short films were trained on the young mind, and would work (at least in theory) because the visual made them inherently interesting. Certainly I think Sarma would concur with that "living, thinking machine" concept.
There were others at this time who espoused similar arguments. American distributor George Kleine wrote in a 1910 film catalogue:
Education thus imparted is never likely to be forgotten, and pupils who are slow in memorizing text-book instruction absorb the same knowledge very readily and rapidly when conveyed by moving pictures, which teach as no words do.
This is a formulaic sentiment, but one grounded in an understanding of how people think. Most notably (and notoriously) Thomas Edison in 1913 was quoted as saying:
Books will soon be obsolete in the schools. Scholars will soon be instructed through the eye. It is possible to teach every branch of human knowledge with the motion picture. Our school system will be completely changed in ten years.
A number of teachers supposedly took him at his word and cast aside the blackboard for the projector screen, but though he was wrong in his prediction of a complete change in how the school system worked in ten years, by 1923 the educational film had moved out of the cinemas and into the classroom, and film was indeed making a modest but noticeable effect on how some subjects were taught.
1923 is the key date, because that is when 16mm safety film was introduced by Kodak, making the exhibition of cheaper films free of fire hazard possible in non-theatrical venues such as school classrooms. A number of businesses arose, particularly in America, which aimed to cater for this emerging market: Charles Urban's own Urban Motion Picture Industries, the American Motion Picture Corporation, Burton Holmes Laboratories, Bray Productions, Castle Films, DeVry Corporation, Ford Motion Picture Laboratories, the National Cash Register Company, the Society for Visual Education, the United States Steel Corporation, and Yale University Press Film Service, among others. There were numerous journals serving this market, including Visual Education, Educational Screen and Educational Film Magazine. There's a great survey of the extent of what was generally called 'visual education' in the 1920s written by Andrew P. Hollis that's available online, Motion Pictures for Instruction (1926) – informative and palpably enthusiastic.
At the same time there were serious studies into the efficacy of film as an educational medium. The leading study was undertaken by Frank N. Freeman of the University of Chicago, Visual Education: A Comparative Study of Motion Pictures and Other Methods of Instruction (1924). Freeman was concerned that the drive behind the educational film was coming from supply (all those film companies sensing a new market) rather than demand, or need. Freeman concluded that film could "furnish a peculiar type of content of experience" and was of real value on some occasions, when used carefully as something to augment traditional learning, rather than something that replaced it.
Freeman may have been too cautious. What film offered was not simply a different way of receiving information, but one that challenged the structure of education. What is so striking about Sanjay Sarma's comment is that reference to 'factory-style system' -learning by rote to a fixed timetable which suits the system but does not reflect how the young mind actually takes in information. We don't learn uniformly; we learn through burst of enthusiasm and realisation.
What if the Earth Stopped Spinning, from vSauce
Of course, what has not always helped the cause of the educational film has been the educational films themselves. Often dull in tone and quaint in style, the classroom film of the twentieth-century too often seemed calculated to fill the time rather than feed the mind. But with the online video explosion of the twenty-first century, the power of the medium to change how we learn is there for all (literally) to see. Have you watched vSauce? Have you spoken to a child who has watched this terrific educational science series? Millions do, of their own volition, and what is extraordinary is how much has sunk in and is then enthusiastically reported back by its viewers. It is the ten minutes that transfers to long term memory par excellence.
There are many more YouTube channels doing similar thing, among them Veritasium, Numberphile, Khan Academy and CrashCourse. They all work in much the same way: presenting knowledge and its contexts in an energetic, stylish and concise manner, emphatically visual, with personable presenters, catchy music and snazzy graphics. They look cool; you feel cool for watching them. You learn stuff.
Here is the friendly learning process that Sanjay Sarma identifies with a form of learning best suited to students themselves. The ways we have been taught traditionally have been determined not by how minds work but by the need to fill the day and instill routine. Once children were no longer working in the fields and the law of the land said that they all had to be educated, they had to be contained. They had to be kept off the streets. Now there is a kinder, more productive, more long-lasting form of education that is emerging, one that combines the the online with the classroom ('blended learning' is the term generally used) and which may in time tear down the regimented tyranny of the classroom. And I think that there were film pioneers who recognised this, because they understood popular sentiment, and it has taken too long for us to listen to them.
There is a growing literature on the history of the educational film. For a long time all we had was Anthony Slide's pioneering Before Video: A History of the Non-Theatrical Film (1992), but recently we've had Geoff Alexander's Academic Films for the Classroom: A History (2010), Charles R. Acland and Haidee Wasson's Useful Cinema (2011) and Devin Orgeron, Marsha Orgeron and Dan Strieble's Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States (2012), and soon we will have Oliver Gaycken's Devices of Curiosity: Early Cinema and Popular Science (2015). Historical educational films themselves are getting screened more, too, particularly via the annual Orphan Film Symposium, organised by the visionary Dan Strieble.
Also worth looking out for is Arthur Edwin Krows's Motion Pictures – Not for Theaters, a rambling accounting of the early years of educational film, published over seven years (1938-1944) in Educational Film Magazine (you can read it online but you'll have to leaf through the issues individually).
Here is an alternative film history, one with all the passions, follies, inventions and dreams of the more familiar film history, but one grounded in the fervent belief that the fundamental purpose of the moving image is not too entertain, but to inform (and entertain while it is doing so). We know that it can do so very well. In places it is doing so better than ever before.
The Times Literary Supplement used to have a weekly competition which invited its readers to identify three literary quotations on a connected theme. It was difficult, and it was a small triumph if I knew one of the quotations, and an annual occurrence for me to recognise two. One day, some years ago, I recognised one of the quotations instantly, even though it had been doubtless picked as a tantalising obscurity:
'Voy wawm' said the dustman
one bright August morning -
But that was in Longbenton,
Under the trees.
It's the opening verse of 'Hymn to the Sun', by Michael Roberts, and the reason for remembering this is that when I next looked at the magazine to see who had identified all three quotations, the winner was Janet Adam Smith. As well she might be, given that she was married to Michael Roberts, but the special connection for me is that she edited The Faber Book of Children's Verse, a life-long favourite book of mine and from which I remembered Roberts' haunting poem.
The book is one that has been with me for a lifetime. Were I obliged to choose a single desert island volume and have no other book to read, The Faber Book of Children's Verse could well be it. It was my primary school text book, and I was so entranced by it that I was given my own copy (it dates from 1969, when I was eight). It was stayed with me ever since, not simply as a childhood memento, but because it had a real influence on my adult life. When I studied English Literature at university I made particular studies of eighteenth century poetry, Christopher Smart and ballad literature, all of which (though I did not consciously make the connection at the time) had seeped into my mind through reading Smith's compilation. Lifelong favourites, such as Andrew Marvell, Ben Jonson and Arthur Waley's translations of Chinese poetry, all began here for me.
More than that, it was the application of poetry to life, something to carry with you, serving as an anchor, or a way of understanding experience, that made the book so important. At the simplest level this meant lines that summed up situations, so that the wisdom that had been imparted to me at an early age only unfolded later, when I understood better what the poets were saying. Hilaire Belloc's 'The False Heart', for instance:
I said to Heart, 'How goes it?' Heart replied:
'Right as a Ribstone Pippin!' But it lied.
Or Ralph Hodgson's elliptical stanza:
Reason has moons, but moons not hers,
Lie mirror'd on her sea,
Confounding her astronomers,
But, O! delighting me.
Or the irrefutable last line of the anonymous 'The Silver Swan':
More geese than swans now live, more fools than wise.
Or John Keats's ditty 'There was a naughty boy' about a boy who runs away from home to Scotland only to find
… That lead
Was as weighty
That fourscore
Was as eighty
That a door
Was as wooden
As in England -
So he stood in
His shoes
And he wonder'd
He stood in his
Shoes and he wonder'd.
Often have I stood still and wondered and have had those lines come back to me, which seem not only to sum up some of life's disappointments but to point to the function of the poet, which must be to wonder.
Janet Adam Smith (1905-1999) was a writer, biographer (notably of John Buchan), editor and mountaineer. She edited The Faber Book of Children's Verse in 1953, following on from her husband's editing of The Faber Book of Modern Verse (another classic) in 1936. Her book compiles the poems into twenty-one sections, and the intriguing, imaginative structure that these give to the book are part of the secret of its success: Poetry, Music and Dancing; Night and Day, Seasons and Weathers; Beasts and Birds; Children; Victuals and Drink; Some People; Four Countries; Kings, Queens and Heroes; Nine Tales; Magic; Fairies, Nymphs and Gods; Witches, Charms and Spells; March and Battle; Dirges, Coronachs and Elegies; Marvels and Riddles; Voyaging and Travel; The Sea; Love; God and Heaven; Epigrams and Reflections; History and Time. There is a grand story that unfolds.
Janet Adam Smith selected not poems written for children (rather a modern phenomenon, outside nursery rhymes) but rather poems expected to appeal to children (she claimed to have tested every selection on a child, though I have my doubts about some of the tougher, quainter selections in the book). The result is a work that never talks down to children, but rather introduces them to an understanding of the world, written in terms calculated to catch the eye and please the ear. As a child, I was drawn in particular to the sections on children and animals, to the Marvels and Riddles, and to the epigrams and the reflections on history and time, perhaps because I was philosophical in my way – more likely because they were short.
When I carefully consider the curious habits of dogs
I am compelled to conclude
That man is the superior animal.
When I consider the curious habits of man
I confess, my friend, I am puzzled.
That pithy gem is 'Meditatio' by Ezra Pound, and one of the startling aspects of Smith's book is how it combines the sturdy verses of tradition ('Drake's Drum', 'Pibroch of Donuil Dhu', 'Horatius') with modern verse from Pound, Joyce, Eliot and indeed Michael Roberts. Here's Pound again, with his poem 'The Faun', which baffled the young me, yet its precise selection of words and sounds conferred a deeper understanding:
Ha! sir, I have seen you sniffing and snoozling
about among my flowers.
And what, pray, do you know about
horticulture, you capriped?
'Come, Auster, come, Apeliota,
And see the faun in our garden.
But if you move or speak
This thing will run at you
And scare itself into spasms.'
There are the expected classics, of course – 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', 'The Pied Piper of Hamelin', 'The Tyger', 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer', 'Kubla Khan' – but also imaginative surprises at every turn. So, not just W.B. Yeats's 'The Song of Wandering Aengus' but such happy jeux d'esprit as 'The Fiddler of Dooney' and 'Brown Penny'. From T.S. Eliot, not just the cat poems but 'Journey of the Magi' and quiet, observant lyrical pieces such as 'Usk' and 'New Hampshire' which tend to escape other anthologies. From John Milton the delicately rhapsodic 'Sabrina Fair' (taken from his masque Comus) and the the unMiltonic playfulness of 'The Star that Bids the Shepherd Fold' ("What hath night to do with sleep?"). Edwin Muir sits alongside Isaac Watts, Ogden Nash alongside Martial, Edgar Allan Poe alongside Taliessin.
The poetry of today melds with ancient rhymes to prove that we have always yearned to hear the same songs wrapped around the same truths. The ballad poetry that Smith selected spoke to me in particular, perhaps through the easy mixture of metre, rhyme and narrative, but also undoubtedly through the sense of half-understood mystery. 'The Great Silkie of Sule Skerrie', 'The Twa Corbies', 'Sir Patrick Spens' – what a thrill it was when I found when studying the latter at university how ballad form could teach you about film montage, as in this brilliant stanza (just imagine it as a film sequence):
Our King has written a braid letter,
And seal'd it with his hand,
And sent it to Sir Patrick Spens,
Was walking on the strand.
So poetry leads to film, demonstrating how words can not only conjure up pictures but show how pictures connect together, creating their own kind of poetry – other means by which to stand and wonder.
Part of the interest I have in The Faber Book of Children's Verse, and this edition of it, is how it breaches a time span that I recognise. It has roots in an older idea of the function of poetry for children, as something populated by cast-iron classics with more than a whiff of patriotism about them, to be learned by wrote and to be respected without question – a world from which my generation was in the process of escaping. It leavens this with good selections from the moderns (up to 1953, that is), and idiosyncratic choices from across all forms of poetry, chosen for their quick delight to the imagination. Yet they are poems chosen for children rather than poems that children would necessarily choose for themselves. Children have been fortunate in recent years in anthologies put together by understanding souls like Michael Rosen, while more recent Faber anthologies such as Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes's The School Bag, or indeed the new edition of Children's Verse edited by Matthew Sweeney, embrace more of the today while brushing away the fustiness of some of the traditional. Children do not need to know of Sir Henry Newbolt or Lord Macaulay when they can have Wallace Stevens, Emily Dickinson, Jo Shapcott or George Mackay Brown. If you are choosing an anthology for your child, give them Sweeney's, not Smith's – though better still, get them to choose it for themselves.
Because I chose Smith in my time, and it has been all the more special because of it. In part it is because it is an anthology of its time that was looking beyond the confines of its time. In part it is those entrancing sections (which Sweeney's edition lacks, more's the pity) that so aid discovery. It is a masterly example of the anthology, whose parts interrelate to tell a greater story. In part it is that I grew up with it and have never stopped learning from it. Smith in her introduction writes of choosing poems with "reserves of meaning", which a child might not 'understand' in terms of being able to explain such a meaning, but the poem would stay with them and experience in time would supply new understanding. "There is, too," she writes, "an active pleasure in the unknown or half-known, whether it is a word or a feeling."
In part – and maybe chiefly – it is that the book has something to say to anyone, at any time. It is an anthology whose abiding themes are time and memory. I have sometimes wondered what she thought a child was meant to think of W.B. Yeats's 'The Old Men Admiring Themselves in the Water':
I heard the old, old men say,
'Everything alters,
And one by one we drop away.'
They had hands like claws, and their knees
Were twisted like the old thorn-trees
By the waters.
I heard the old, old men say,
'All that's beautiful drifts away
Like the waters.'
They are words to have read once, to then linger in the mind, and to be returned to as time passes. It is an anthology, therefore, about the purpose of poetry and the enduring quality of childhood memories. She edited an anthology not just for a child but for a child's lifetime, and made this the book's theme as much as its function. It is a wise publication. It is one for the desert island.
I was browsing in a bookshop today, and ended up looking at Played in London: Charting the Heritage of a City at Play by Simon Inglis. It's a handsome and enticing publication about London's sporting venues, clearly the product of superb research, which is top of my must-buy list, just as soon as I have worked my way through a few of those books which were once must-buys only to become have-boughts and are now must-reads.
What particularly caught my eye about the book was when I turned to the back of the book and found a section called 'Links'. This wasn't a list of web links but instead a list of print publications, as they related to individual chapters in the book. So it was what would usually be called Bibliography, or Sources, or Further Reading. Nowadays bibliographies will often cite web links, either as a standalone section for main web sources used, or links to articles for online which are interwoven with print sources. But Inglis's book overturns the bibliography's concession to the modern by calling all its sources Links.
I think this is a beautiful innovation (what other books have done the same thing? I've no idea). It says that this is not a book based on other books, or a summation of of knowledge scattered across other locations, but that it is one among equals. There is a world of works on London's sport history of which the reader has but one part in their hands. Each helped contribute to this work, yet by following up each you will be enriched further. It encourages, even demands, that you look further, and all will be the better for it.
The hyperlink is one of the building blocks of the World World Web, of course, and one of its chief joys. Beyond its usefulness (usually) as an indication of either where more information may be found or what the source was of the information that you have just read, it marries together text and index. It makes intelligence apparent. Those who concern themselves with the building of the Web sometimes fret over how hyperlinks are not as meaningful as they might be, because they do not directly tell you what a link means. If I turn this set of words into a hyperlink, there is nothing about those words per se that tells you what the link signifies. So it is that they dream of the Semantic Web and open linked data, where everything is meaningful and conjoined.
This is a beautiful idea in itself, and I'm a great advocate of automated metadata, particularly when it comes to digital audio and video sources. There is so much intelligence that can be machine-extracted from texts – print, web and audiovisual – when we have them in digital form and when we then link them through common ontologies and thesauri to create the all-purpose, all-inclusive index.
But I'm a cataloguer at heart (and previously by profession) and there is much to be said for a human selecting sources and directing the user to the most relevant and useful of these. This is what bibliographies do. They lay out a meaningful history of how knowledge has been compiled, based on human endeavour. But to call them Links takes us beyond a sometimes rather fusty academic tradition ("just look at all the books I read to produce this one") to something that does what the Web does so well. Everything is a link in a chain – this book, this web site, this next thing that you will read, and the next. No text is an island, entire of itself; every text is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
I shall look out for other books with a Links section at the end, and adopt the practice myself from henceforth.
The Automatic Motorist (UK 1911 d. Walter Booth p.c. Kineto)
I paid a rare visit to the BFI Southbank the other day to see a programme of films entitled 'The Birth of British Sci-Fi', part of its Sci-Fi: Days of Fear and Wonder season. The six films on show ranged from 1897, with G.A. Smith's The X-Rays to A Message from Mars (1913), the first British science fiction feature film. Long believed lost, this was my main reason for going. The film was an adaptation of a popular play by Richard Ganthony, a sort of Christmas Carol-type story in which a messenger from Mars converts a miserable man, Horace Parker, into a good-hearted person. It starred the renowned comic stage actor Charles Hawtrey as Parker, and was essentially a wordless play, plodding in style and performance, with only Chrissie Bell (as Parker's fiancée) looking like someone who belonged in front of a camera.
But what made the show more than worthwhile was a film shown earlier, The Automatic Motorist (1911), directed by Walter Booth and produced by Charles Urban's Kineto company. This was an absolute delight. An automaton (robots wouldn't become true robots until the word was coined in the 1920s) gets in a car and drives a newly-wed couple into space, despite the efforts of a policeman hanging on to the back of the vehicle (and a dog hanging on to the back of him). They drive over the dome of St Paul's cathedral, then into space, passing the Moon before landing on the rings of Saturn. They they crash into Saturn, where the policeman is captured by a group of Saturnian children wielding spears. The robots drives on, taking his charges back to earth and under the sea, before they finally fall to the ground when a man with a gun takes pot shots at them.
The film is a remake of sorts of Booth's The ? Motorist, made for Robert Paul in 1906, which features an automotive trip to Saturn and a crash back down to Earth. The later film is far more sophisticated in technique, detail and wit. It has those little details – the dog determinedly attached to the policeman's behind, the hole made in Saturn, the look of wonder on the couple's faces at the scenes underwater – which turn trick into fantasy. It is a dream of film; played for laughs, but with a governing logic rather than simply a sequence of unconnected absurdities. A live-action cartoon, maybe.
Walter Booth is one of the undersung masters of early film. Someone should really champion him and undertake the research into him that his work merits. France has Georges Méliès, Spain has Segundo de Chomón, France has Emile Cohl, each much acclaimed masters of the early fantasy film. Fewer of Booth's films survive than their's, but he is no less worthy of investigation.
Advertisement for David Devant's Zauberwunder, from Bristol newspaper The Western Daily Press, 24 December 1898, in which Booth is credited as being an 'electric cartoonist'
Not enough is known about him, but he was born Walter Robert Booth in Worcester on 12 July 1896. His father, Robert Booth, was a china painter, and Walter was apprenticed as painter to the Royal Worcester Porcelain factory, where he is believed to have worked until 1890. He then pursued a career in entertainment, as a lightning cartoonist, ventriloquist and magician, joining the company of renowned magician David Devant, with which he toured the UK over 1898-1900. Devant's shows featured films produced by Robert Paul, and Booth began directing short trick films for Paul, often on the theme of magic (with himself as the magician), titles such as Upside Down; or, the Human Flies (1899) (in which the actors dance around on the ceiling), Chinese Magic (1900), The Haunted Curiosity Shop (1901), The Waif and the Wizard (1901), The Magic Sword (1901) (a particularly inventive visual treat) and The Devil in the Studio (1901), which showed off his cartooning skills.
Scrooge; or, Marley's Ghost (1901), an early trick film based on Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, made by Booth for Robert Paul
There were many magicians who incorporated films into their act at this time, several of whom found themselves putting down the top hat and wand and taking up the camera full time: Georges Méliès, Billy Bitzer (who went to to be D.W. Griffith's cinematographer), Emile and Vincent Isola, John Maskelyne, William Selig, Albert Smith (founder of Vitagraph, America's leading pre-WWI film company), Félicien Trewey, Alexander Victor and others. Erik Barnouw has written a book about the phenomenon, The Magician and the Cinema. Film was seen as the ultimate magic trick, the perfect illusion, certainly a logical stepping stone for performers who wanted to tantalise audiences with the incredible.
Walter R. Booth (probably), centre, playing the magician in Upside Down; or, the Human Flies (1899)
Booth seems to have left the stage by 1901 and to have become a full-time filmmaker with Robert Paul, before joining Charles Urban in 1906. It is with Urban, and the greater opportunities that slightly longer films and more generous budgets offered, that Booth the filmmaker came into his own. He established his own studio at his home at Neville Lodge, Woodlands, Isleworth, and with camera operator Harold Bastick made a succession of ingenious films which employed trickery and made trickery their theme. He borrowed ideas from others: The Hand of the Artist (1906), the first British animated cartoon film, was a clear imitation of J. Stuart Blackton's Humorous Phases of Funny Faces of the same year. When the Devil Drives (1907) was an adventure with the Devil as a lead character very much in the style of Georges Méliès. But equally he innovated in style and form: The Sorcerer's Scissors (1907) is a dazzling trick film in which a pair of scissors cuts out various paper figures which they come to life. A Diabolo Nightmare (1907) sees an office clerk become obsessed with the game to such a degree that it takes over his dreams, which take him and his diabolo to the bottom of the sea. Other, lost films, tantalise us with mislaid delights: The Vacuum Cleaner Nightmare (1906), The Prehistoric Man (1908), The Star Globe-trotter (1908), The Invisible Dog (1909).
Extract from The Airship Destroyer (1909)
Booth's best-known work is in then topical field of the invasion fantasy. Paranoia over immigration and terrorism (some news stories never change) combined with worries caused by the invention of the aeroplane – in particular, Louis Blériot's feat in crossing the Channel in 1909 made England seem very vulnerable to invasion. What good was it having a navy if someone could simply fly over the top of it? William Le Queux's anti-German novel The Invasion of 1910 and Guy du Maurier's play An Englishman's Home (1909) are the two best-known serious examples of the genre, while P.G. Wodehouse spoofed the ideas with his comic novel The Swoop!, or How Clarence Saved England.
Booth's invasion films are closer to Wodehouse than du Maurier. They are not spoofs of the genre, and can be viewed as exciting adventures (which is how undoubtedly they were viewed by many at the time), but they have a homely, English quality, which accentuates the absurdity and suggests that Booth had his tongue in his cheek when making the films. The two that survive today are The Airship Destroyer (1909) and The Aerial Submarine (1910), though Booth also made The Aerial Anarchists (1911), a film sadly lost. In all three films the homeland is threatened by foreigners flying in futuristic contraptions. Aerial anarchy hangs over homely English places, and unassuming heroes who might on some other afternoon be happiest playing a game of tennis in the garden take to the skies in their flying machines to tackle this dastardly intrusion of misapplied modern technology. There is a quaint realism to the films, with their country lane backgrounds, that contrasts interestingly with the science-fantasies of Méliès which take place in a never-never world of the stage. Charles Urban was primarily a non-fiction film producer, and the films Booth made for him often had a topical edge, connecting the fantastical to the concerns of the day.
Booth continued with Urban to 1915, making many films now lost, including some in Kinemacolor. He also made films for the experimental 3D colour process Kinoplastikon (whose story I must tell some day). He went on to produce advertising films, and then we lose sight of him. He was married, to Sarah Grace, and had at least two children, Sydney Robert and Elizabeth Grace. He died in 1938. There are descendants somewhere, because I remember meeting one of them, introduced to me by the late Denis Gifford some twenty years ago. Denis's acquaintance helped inform his biographical entry on Booth for Who's Who of Victorian Cinema, which is still the best account of Booth that we have, brief as it is.
Someone should take him on as a topic. There are the references to his magic act in newspaper archives; there is some family history information available from genealogy sources; there is a marvellously inventive set of films that are prime examples of what fun early cinema can be. There is a distinctive artistry to those films. They find the fantastical amid the ordinary and make us delight in the plausibility of absurdity. It is magic translated to the screen.
- Denis Gifford's short biography of Booth is on the Who's Who of Victorian Cinema site
- Films from the BFI's Sci-Fi – Days of Fear and Wonder can be found on the BFI Player (some films free, some need payment)
- There are several references to Booth the touring magician on the British Newspaper Archive (payment site)
- A number of films booth made for Robert Paul are available on the BFI DVD R.W. Paul: The Collected Films 1895-1908
An American family watching television c.1958, via Wikimedia Commons
I've written before about my website Picturegoing, which is progressively gathering evidence of people viewing pictures. It started off by covering cinemagoing, as recorded in diaries, oral histories, memoirs, news reports, novels, poems. pictures and so on – any form of evidence that records directly, or indirectly, the personal experience of viewing pictures.
But what do I mean by viewing pictures? I'm not entirely sure, and the Picturegoing site is a way of finding out. My roots are in cinema history, but I've become increasingly uncertain as to what history that actually represents, once you set aside the idea of cinema as art and think more of the experience of the audience (or the individual viewer). Cinema histories often look back into the pre-history of the medium to optical toys, magic lanterns, panoramas and other such devices of the nineteenth century and before. Sometimes such studies extend their range into television, and latterly into online video, and the growth of different platforms on which to experience the moving image has confused the history. What is cinema in an age of widescreen TVs? What is television when I can catch-up on programmes on my phone? What has changed in the switch from watching a film amid a crowd in a cinema and watching that same film amid a crowd on a train via a tablet?
This is the theme of a really interesting and thought-provoking book that I've been reading recently, In Broad Daylight: Movies and Spectators After the Cinema, by Gabriele Pedullà. His subject is how the understanding of moving images is determined by the conditions in which they are experienced, asking how films are changing in the new environment of plasma screens and smartphones. In particular he investigates the degree to which classical cinephilia has been a creation of special circumstances i.e. viewing the subject on a large screen, as part of a crowd, within a darkened space – what he labels the Dark Cube.
It's a fascinating and scholarly journey that he takes us on, with excursions into film theory, architectural history (particularly that of Roman architect Vitruvius and then the Italian Renaissance and the construction of enclosed spaces for dramatic performances), and theories of spectatorship. Yet what I found most interesting about it was the author's uncertainty about this new world of multi-platform viewing. He writes as someone who has never viewed a film on a tablet in his life. He alludes vaguely to 'video players', and lumps them with television, the device which started the process of undermining the special qualities of the cinema experience. His real theme is loss – the loss of a particular way of experiencing motion pictures, and the cinephilia that it engendered. It is nostalgia. It regrets the retreat of what is past; it does not much like the present, even while it purports to explain it.
The history of viewing pictures is one where the image is constant but the circumstances change. Images projected onto a surface have had a public appeal going back centuries, even millennia. They became commodified, distributed and shared on a massive scale through cinema, where for a time people sat in a theatre to experience what was on the screen because there had been a tradition of building theatres for entertainments. Then they moved to the home, because that is where the heart is. Now they have moved to the individual, because we think all the more for ourselves and find ourselves on the move. As Pedullà notes, "movies change first of all because spectators change". Only the viewing, and the viewer, are constant.
So what Picturegoing is trying to document is the experience of viewing pictures. But are they always moving pictures? Here I'm not sure. I included magic lanterns and other 'pre-cinema' projections in Picturegoing a while ago, which are usually (though not always) still. What is so important about motion, especially is what goes on in the head of the viewer is filled with motion, as one gets in this typical response to a magical lantern projection, from Harriet Martineau, recalling an exhibition of the Phantasmagoria in the early 1800s:
When I was four or five years old, we were taken to a lecture of Mr. Drummond's, for the sake, no doubt, of the pretty shows we were to see, — the chief of which was the Phantasmagoria of which we had heard, as a fine sort of magic-lantern. I did not like the darkness, to begin with; and when Minerva appeared, in a red dress, at first extremely small, and then approaching, till her owl seemed coming directly upon me, it was so like my nightmare dreams that I shrieked aloud. I remember my own shriek. A pretty lady who sat next us, took me on her lap, and let me hide my face in her bosom, and held me fast. How intensely I loved her, without at all knowing who she was!
The motion that matters is that which forms in the mind, not that which has been produced mechanically or electronically on the screen. If that's the case, then why don't I include looking at photographs, book illustrations, or paintings? Just what is the viewing experience?
I don't know as yet, and I'm using Picturegoing to try and find out. I've begun with cinema, and I've added magic lanterns and video streaming into theatres. I've now introduced television. Initially this was with some qualms, because the move from public to private space seemed so dramatic a shift, but not so if you consider the mind rather than the place. At any rate, I kicked things off with Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle's sublime creation Nigel Molesworth, and his priceless observations on family viewing of television in the early 1950s:
Gosh super! we hav something to contend with which no other generation have ever had before i.e. the television cheers cheers cheers. Everybody know wot a t.v. is it is a square box with a screen. You switch on and o hapen, then just when you have given up hope and are going off to buzz conkers a great booming voice sa, 'That's an interesting point, postelthwaite. Wot does higginbottom feel? Higginbottom? ect. ect.' It may be an interesting point but i could not care less and just go away agane when a ghastley face suddenly appere. It is worse than a squished tomato but it hold me in hypnotic trance and it is the same with molesworth 2, tho he always look dopey like that. We sit and watch more and more ghastley faces with out mouths open and even forget to chew the buble gum we are the slaves of the machine.
This captures the peculiarly hypnotic effect of television, its ability to capture the attention through simply being, better than almost any piece of writing I know. I've followed it up with experiences of watching Neighbours in the 1980s, the Basil Brush Show in the 1970s, and the Baird televisor in 1926. I have a good list of memoir and documentary reports to quote from, but I'm keen to hear from anyone who might know of telling texts on the experience of watching television, particularly if they come from outside the UK or the USA. I prefer texts that relate to the physical experience i.e. those that show some awareness of time, place and condition, though this is not always so easy, since television encourages a focus on the screen to the exclusion of all else (not that TV is exclusive in this, of course) and because we're TV reviewers these days. But knowing what Downton Abbey was like last night, or what Upstairs Downstairs was like forty years ago, is not of any use to me. What is was like to watch Downton Abbey or Upstairs Downstairs, or TV news, adverts, children's TV, natural history programmes, sport, or whatever – that is what is important. What the mind experiences has to be anchored within the context of the day-to-day. That is picturegoing.


text:
I don't agree with this therapy. Will my reputation suffer?
Q. My practice is providing a therapy I don't agree with. I'm concerned about what clients will think. Will this hurt my reputation? Should I quit?
It depends on how accepted the therapy is by the profession in general, says Veterinary Economics Editorial Advisory Board member Dr. Craig Woloshyn, owner of Sun Dog Veterinary Consulting in Custer, S.D. "If the therapy is so substandard that it endangers patients or prevents them from getting normal medical care, that's a problem," he says. However, if it's something you personally don't find useful but is accepted and used by other practitioners, you don't need to worry.
"In the end, don't be concerned about your reputation as much as your own comfort with the level of care in your practice," Dr. Woloshyn says. "If you don't embrace your practice's standards, it'll eventually color your judgment and affect your own patient care." If you find the general level of medicine in your clinic disturbing, then it's indeed time for you to go. And when you do, be sure during future job interviews to ask about practices' philosophy of medical care.
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How To Keep Your Cool If The Heat Goes Out
Amidst the picturesque surprise snowstorm last Sunday evening…
…we woke up to a 58 degree house. Brr. What the heck? Turns out we had run out of oil.
And no oil = no heat. Eeks! The eight inches of gorgeous white powder outside meant no oil delivery for at least 48 hours, so we had to do our best to keep the house as warm as possible so the pipes wouldn't freeze and burst. Because that would be baaad.
Thank goodness we have a gas fireplace in the den (which independently runs off of Propane) so we fired that baby up…
…and got to work taking a few additional precautions to keep the pipes from bursting:
Tip #1: Close all the doors that lead to rooms without plumbing. The fireplace in the den was warming up the house ever so slightly, and by closing the doors to rooms without pipes, and leaving the doors to the bathrooms open, the heat was being directed into the areas that needed it most (while the bedrooms took one for the team by forgoing the heat for a bit).
Tip #2: Open the doors under the sink in the kitchen and the bathroom. By exposing the plumbing it will stay a few degrees warmer than if the vanity and cabinet doors are kept closed.
Tip #3: Run some water ever so slightly to keep it moving. If your house gets down to below 50 degrees, you may want to run the water to keep it moving which will make it harder for the pipes to freeze. Luckily our house stayed warmer thanks to the fireplace, but we were prepared to turn the faucets on for a steady drizzle in our bathtub and sinks if the temps dropped a few more degrees.
Of course with the doors to the bedrooms closed, our master quickly got fuh-fuh-freezing. And since the only source of heat was in the den, we were forced to whip out our air mattress and sleep in there until our oil delivery. It was kind of fun… like a mini camping adventure at home. But it was really nice to be back in our warm and cozy bed again 48 hours later.
Have any of you ever lost electricity or heat for an extended period of time? Any other tips and tricks to throw out?
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49 Comments
We ran out of oil twice in the past month. It was a landlord issue. All I can say is thank heavens for electric blankets. We were super warm in our cold bedroom!
Yes we simply lit a small fire in a tea kettle with old newspapers and Kingsford charcoal left over from the summer time cookouts. This kept the house warmer until the oil delivery man came and heat was restored. God Bless.
My family lived in an old farmhouse for 10 YEARS that didn't have central heat or A/C. Or cable. My parents are adventurous, to say the least. It was all wood-burning stove and gas fireplaces for us, with occassional electric heaters when it got super-cold. To this day, a regular heat pump does nothing to warm my toes — there's nothing as warm as a wood fireplace!
I haven't, but my mother has. Her house is very old, and has a lot of drafts from old windows. Get's cold quick. Her pipes froze this winter. She had no water for a couple days, luckily grandmother lives close by, but never the less, very frustrating. She actually called out the plumbers who had to crawl under the house, while it was 10 degrees outside, and the poor guy had to lay under there while holding something against the pipes to warm it up. Mom said he was under there about an hour!! Ouch. Can we say frostbite. Anyway, good to hear you stayed warm, and had some fun while doing so! At the moment, I am having fun reading all of your archives. If you don't mind, I am going to steal your paint colors. Love them. My kitchen is becoming gentle tide. Now if only I can find such a good deal on some SS appliances. :) Here's to hoping.
two winters ago an ice storm took down a bunch of trees and power lines – leaving us without power (and heat!) for almost a week. by the 2nd or 3rd day our apt was too cold for us and our pets to stay in it so we packed up and moved ourselves, 2 dogs, and 2 cats to a hotel. it is very difficult to find a hotel that will allow you to bring pets! before we left the house we made sure all of the faucets were slightly on to keep the water running and prevent the pipes from bursting. we also put a lot of our cold food outside since our fridge wasn't on. Even though it was cold in our house, it wasn't cold enough to keep the food from going bad. When the electricity/heat finally turned back on, we went back home only to discover that someone had taken all of the food off of our back porch! oh-well, they probably needed it more than we did…
as a side note, we keep our house at about 62* all winter so sadly 58* doesn't sound that cold to me :-P gas heat is expensive!
We had the same issue, only our heat is gas and the igniter died. Fortunately, our guy was able to come that afternoon but in the meantime:
I retreated to our third-floor bedroom and sealed myself in there with a space heater.
I kept a winter coat, hat, and gloves by the door for when I needed to go into the rest of the house.
I did loads upon loads of laundry I'd been slacking on — I'm actually kind of glad the heat died. It gave me an excuse to do it.
well, I am from Nova Scotia, and we are king of the ice storms which bring down power lines and knock out electricity often. We had a big snowstorm in November 2004 which knocked out power for a few days. I got prepared by keeping a basket of candles, matches, flashlights, batteries, battery-operated radio and wipes in a basket in the front hall closet. Like you, when we ran out of oil, we had a propane fireplace to warm up, but NEVER let your gas tank run out!! We would cook on the BBQ, keep drinks and food cold in the snow and break out the board games to play by candle light….kinda fun for a few days….
There's been a huge oil shortage in Europe. Russia has been cutting back on who they've been supplying this winter. We are lucky that Germany is high on the list for getting oil, unlike many smaller countries.
It's made us hugely aware of our consumption, even in our tiny tiny place of 480 square feet.
Where I grew up in the US, it was often -50. Dang! Your 58 degrees sounds so cozy… which I know it still totally WAS NOT!
We lost power here in Richmond during the snow for 2 nights and the house was freezing. (We've had worse–once it was 4 nights, years ago during an ice storm…!) My husband was ready to go to a hotel. We have 2 little kids now so thankfully we were able to stay at my parents' house. I always panic about the pipes freezing and bursting–this time a friend told us we need to turn our water off and drain the pipes so they don't burst and flood the house. Then I asked our irrigation guy (who winterizes our sprinklers and is familiar with our water pipe situation), and our neighbor who grew up in Vermont. They both said we didn't need to worry about it unless it was very very cold for an extended period of time. The next time we have a plumber come out I'm going to ask him and also make sure I absolutely know how to turn off the water if I had to (something which I know anyway…) I did know about letting the faucets drip like you mentioned, but your other suggestions were helpful too, thanks!
Use caution with this one…but you could turn on your oven and open the oven door.
We have radiant hot water heat. I heard the boiler go out at 8pm when it was negative 8 degrees outside. The replacement part wouldn't arrive for at least 36 hours. Thanks to our type of heat, we didn't even feel much of a temperature drop until 24 hours later. For once I was grateful for the slow warm up/cool down.
we live in the country and things havent changed here in a hundred years…including the transformers to the main electric lines into our town. sooo, when the wind blows, the power goes out…for everyone. so we cant even go to a neighbors house for heat, a.c, water, dinner…
many people have backup generators (no electric is a frequent occurence, sometimes for days). We FINALLY got one last week, but it still needs to be hooked up to the house.
Anyway, in the summer we sleep on the screen porch to try to keep cool, and in the winter we turn on the gas fireplace and strategically close doors. Did you know you can heat up your food on the gas fireplace? just be careful! Also, we have LOTS of extra candles, and many permantently affixed canndle sconces in the rooms we need to see in. It's actually kinda nice if it's not too cold/hot. We always end up playing board games and eating whatever we can find that doesnt need cooking! Luckily our pipes have never frozen (knock on wood!) but we have had plenty of spoiled food in the freezer.
There was an ice storm here in rural Nebraska in December of 2006. My youngest child was only two weeks old, so we packed a few belongings and moved into Grandma's house in town where they still had power. My husband was busy getting water to the cattle and stopping by our house to run a kerosene heater in our basement to keep the pipes from freezing. We were lucky because we only lost power for two days. Many others were out of power for weeks! It's not fun to lose power with a newborn, so we invested in a permanent propane heater. We use it in the winter to create more heat in the basement. We can use it for cooking if needed. We also have an emergency tote that I re-stock throughout the year that we keep in our basement that included bottled water, some non-perishable foods, activities for the kids and so on. The tote doubles as a 'tornado' kit, too. Gotta love Nebraska's unpredictable weather!
Before my husband fixed the furnace, we had to live in a house that was at a steady 50 for a couple of months. It was pretty wretched.
The key to staying warm? Layer up the clothing and spend a lot of time cuddling with the dog!
During a ice storm this past Jan we lost power for awhile. Luckly we have a wood burning fireplace so we managed to keep it pretty warm in the house. We did all the tips that you listed as well as running our ceiling fans to keep the warm air pushed down since we live in a 2 story house.
We turn the gas burners on the stove on and prop the carbon monoxide detector up near by. It keeps the house semi-comfortably warm.
Hehe… hmmm maybe I'm loosing it but we probably weren't running the ceiling fans during that time (no electricity and all), that is one of our tips for keeping the rooms warm though. haha!
I have absolutely no helpful tips or tricks, just a story of how silly we were our first winter in our house. The electric heater would come on, but no hot air came out of the vents. Thankfully we had a gas heater we would run in the evenings after work and turn off before we went to bed. Every morning it would be somewhere around 58 and we'd say, "We gotta call the repairmen today!" And then after getting to work we wouldn't think about it again until that night when we came home to our freezing house. This went on for at least 2 or 3 weeks. Oscar our dachshund would lay on his side on the floor in front of the wall mounted gas heater until he was almost hot to the touch. It was hilarious and yet scary, so we'd poke him to make sure he was still conscious. Eventually we did remember to call the repairmen who came and made everything work.
When I was a kid, we moved into a new construction house and didn't have gas, electricity OR running water for a month and a half during the dead of winter while the lines were being ran. We had a wood burning fireplace, so used it all the time. We did like you said – kept the doors all closed. We also had to hang blankets over hallways to block that air. It was an adventure, to say the least! (Imagine using those terrible camping toilets during that time of year!)
All I can say is long live electric blankets!! A few years ago when I was in college in North Carolina, we had a huge ice storm and most of the town was without power or heat for a few days. We were lucky and were only without for about a day, but we had tons of friends camping out in our living room for several days – not an ideal situation, but pretty fun nonetheless!
Thats funny, we keep our thermo set at 55 degrees all winter. But keeping an electric space heater handy to keep rooms or pipes hot is a must. We had our pipes freeze here in indy when it dropped to -13 but no breaks. phew!
This is kind of an opposite problem–we were without power for 9 days after a hurricane when we lived in Florida. Florida in August with no AC is HOT. And everything in our apartment was moist from the humidity. Cold showers. Yuck. We found one restaurant that had power, and we went there every night.
During one of the ice storms here in Memphis I was without power for 7 days so no thermostat to the gas heat. I used my "McGyver" skills and was able to fill our cast iron claw foot tub with hot water (since the hot water heater was still heating). I lived in the bathroom most of the weekend where the heat radiated from the tub. I carried my Yorkie like a papoose under many layers of clothes. She was perfectly comfortable and kept me warm too. I did all the other things you mentioned too. Good memory, but wouldn't want to do it again.
I live in the California mountains and we lose electricity at least a few days each winter, last year for five days straight. We heat with wood though our hot water heater and gas cookstove has an electric starter,ugh. As our power blew out last year and we realized the implications we all panicked! My husband came to our rescue quickly and fired up our gas generator, not for hot water or cooking but the INTERNET!! We were all on our computers/laptops within 5 minutes. Disaster avoided!
We live in a 100 year old farmhouse in the NC mountains that we renovated to be a seasonal retreat (spring, summer, & autumn). That was a superb plan until we decided to sell our house in suburbia and live in the farmhouse year round. We resort to being pioneers in the winter. Almost daily, we have to protect pipes from freezing (the drip method) and I can only use my washing machine when outdoor temps are above freezing. This has been a particularly cold winter and we've decided to take the old house to the next level – as in more insulation and an addition. Hooray for new construction. Winter camping is fun, but not for the entire season.
Glad to hear YHL weathered the snow storm without any frozen pipes. Your advice is excellent.
Well our last place gave us the pleasure of losing heat, frozen water lines, and frozen sewer lines! Yikes that was two tough winters in a row! Our pilot light would constantly blow out due to birds building nests and we would wake up very chilly. One winter our water lines froze. Then, the next winter the sewer line froze. I realized this after getting out of the shower and stepping onto a flooded bathroom floor! Exciting times out in the country, but problem solved…we moved!
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Israir, Lufthansa Technik in deal to tune up planes at Ben-Gurion airport
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Growing Lemon Grass Successfully
What is the ideal condition for growing lemon grass? Sun exposure, type of soil, etc...
It grows like a weed here, so I guess it likes hot and humid. I have it in fun sun and full wind, in clay soil (amended w/ some compost initially). They require no care (other than occasional watering), and stay pest free. These were started from grocery store stalks.
If experience here (zone 10) is any guide, your main problem will be nursing it through winter. Our winter cold does not actually kill it, but its growth stops and it can sometimes rot at the base. I doubt you will get year-round lemongrass supplies in z9 unless you keep it in some sort of glassed enclosure, or maybe in a warm courtyard.
We grow a lot in south ga. Well drained soil slightly raised especially in winter is a must. Fertilize with 10-10-10 or composte in the spring. During dormancy it doesn't like wet feet at all so rake out any mulch in the winter. In the spring just before new shoots emerge we burn the old growth back. You might even get lucky and have a flower stalk or two pop up.We've been growing it for three decades and last year was our first time we had flower stalks. You can also grow it in pots, but it will need to be divided when it gets full and root bound.
Maybe you can wash out the mold with cold water and let it dry a bit them root them in water. The important thing is that they have to have a clump at the bottom to root.
I have started mine and they are growing like crazy.
The reason it burns out in sothern CAl, perhaps because it is too dry. Lemon grass is can tolerate heat and loves humidity.Maybe you shoul water them more often. Lemon grass leaves have very low moisture content and can tolerate heat. If you can grow ornamental grass you can then grow lemon grass too.
If you want lemon grass, you need to tap into the local Asian gardening community. (Thai especially) Trust me......someone is growing lemon grass.
No local Asians..........try the local gardeners from India. Both cultures use the plant but for different purposes.
I know this is an old post, but I wanted to mention that I bought a small clump of lemon grass at the nursery this spring and it turns out, it is not the kind that you find in Asian cooking, but another kind. I think this one is edible, too, but wasn't what I was looking for.
I stopped at the local Asian grocer and bought several stalks of the lemon grass they had and it didn't have any roots on it. When I got it home, I trimmed the looser leaves from the stalks and then stuck them in about an inch of water in a small bucket and left them under the shade of the fig tree out front. In about 4-5 days, the stalks started to sprout roots and are anxious to get those roots into some soil, so I will now pot them up and see which ones do the best.
noss - You probably got the kind that makes the best lemon grass tea. the stalks can be used for cooking but it does not have the tender center of the larger variety so you have to smash the bulb up to cook with it. After you are done cooking fish it out and discard the fibrous stalk.
I have both kinds here in San Diego and they are pretty much plant it and forget it. The only thing they absolutely need is well drained soil. They will grow in full sun or bright shade and are indifferent to watering. You can water it like the rest of your garden or ignore it. It's quite drought tolerant.
Hi all,
Searching for info on growing lemongrass and found this thread. For those interested, I puchased a small plant from richters herbs, and now need to grow it successfully.
What I would like is to have a small plot in the garden in summer, and then take some indoors to nurse over the winter and reintroduce into the garden the next summer.
Can anyone guide me in this? When to bring indoors, how to take to begin propogating - also when to put outdoors, how to harvest, etc.
Thanks all!
Mine has been growing in a pot for going on 3 years now. It lives outside on my porch during summer but must come inside for the winter. it comes in when night temps go below 60. I have divided it once or twice. If it starts getting too bushy, just give it a haircut, removing up to half the leaves. Every fall, I take a few stalks, cut them up and store in the freezer for tea or for cooking. A simple tea of lemongrass and fresh ginger is delicious.
When I lived in SoCal, I was able to get clumps of lemon grass to winter over. It would lose some top growth if there was a frost, but it would sprout again when the weather warmed. Like many on this thread, I got my starts from an Asian grocery & rooted them.
I've been considering trying to grow it here, and was surprised to find seed in a local garden store. Livingston Seed sells it.
kvenkat - when you bring it indoors, do you place it by the window or store it in the basement? How do you treat it during winter?
I'm interested in trying to overwinter this plant outdoors and will experiment with some of my plants that I have growing outdoors. Maybe burying the roots 6 inches below in winter can help. I do wonder though.
Use lemongrass to flavour chicken or pork. Just smash tthe stuff and marinate the meat with it. It works best with garlic, lime or lemon, a bit of sugar for sweetness, add some chili and also if you want to try it out, with a little bit of fish sauce, but that's optional.
Ianna, sorry for the late reply, I don't poke my nose in here all that often.
During the winter, I treat my lemongrass like my other houseplants. It sits by a large window which gets western sun. I water once a week and give it a haircut when it needs it. I don't recall any pest problems with it inside but giving it a good dose or two of insecticidal soap or neem before bringing it in for the winter is a good idea. Once it warms up in spring, it goes back outside, gradually.


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a wjosnarian crop of my recent posting.. thanks wjos including an all new straighter horizon ... thanks dug )
Michael Mehl, djgr, Nasos Zovoilis, and 1 other people added this photo to their favorites.
I just figured the horizon was due to good Margaret river wine...
Yet another beautiful shot ...
you are just toooo nice tereeeez
wine was definitely an ongoing issue down there for me
its a gorgeous part of the world, but some of the wine is simply out of this world !!
... cullen... heystbury... and my new fave woodland !!!!
Magic soft tones there Rob ....or is it the red wine effect....?
Now I have to stop tilting my head! bewdyful (out)crop mate...& still a fave...love the though of all that wine...rivers of it...
thanks mick more thank likely the grog mate
and thanks for that doug, cases of it anyway ! ))
wine and blue sunsets...
I say yes to such combination:)
Another stunning shot, love the lighting of the foreground
wow, a dramatic seascape there!
Beautiful subtle light and great detail in the foreground…lovely colors too


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