Alien Resurrection swimming scene: fluid motion

Watching the BBC David Attenborough documentary Natural World episode 3 Galapagos Islands: Islands of Change, I thought the swimming of these Marine Iguanas, the world's only sea-going lizards (watch from 1.10)...

Was familiar. And a quick Google search confirmed my thinking. Turns out, their motion was used as the inspiration for that of the aliens in the underwater scene in Alien Resurrection, as confirmed here (watch from 3.00):

Cool eh?

Pastel highlights

Some highlights from the Mall Galleries' 2015 Pastel Society Annual Exhibition:

Tom Walker's Still Life With Exploding Glass, which manages to take a collection of familiar still-life objects and transform them into both a spectral terrestrial landscape and a drifting celestial goody bag.

Simon Page's The Black Dog, which combines warm yellows and cosiness with unsettling aquamarine and red, strange angles and an unusual perspective to create a scene of ambiguous tension.

And finally Felicity House's Two Rooms, whose playful lines, bright sunlight and grandiose setting call to mind something like Jacques Tati's film The Illusionist, and which I badly wanted to buy.

The exhibition runs until 7 March. Take a spare few grand and a van with you.

Iraqi Art of the Everyday

The Iraqi pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale was housed in a building on the bank of the Grand Canal that is usually a rentable home base for wealthier tourists: the Ca' Dandolo luxury apartment.

The spot was chosen by Tamara Chalabi, chair of the Ruya Foundation for Contemporary Culture in Iraq, who also commissioned the curator for the event. She picked Jonathan Watkins, Director of the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, who had previously curated several large international exhibitions.

On 26 February Watkins gave a talk about his curation of the pavilion for the annual Mallowan Lecture (don't know) for the British Institute for the Study of Iraq at the British Academy in London.

Watkins decided to showcase artists still resident in Iraq, he told BISI, and whose art deals with issues of everyday life, rather than directly with conflict or politics. Everyone would know about that already, he figured.

He chose to leave much of Ca' Dandolo's furniture in place, partly so that people would feel comfortable hanging out there for hours at a time, and partly to show the everyday art in an everyday setting. He even went so far as to have a baker making and serving Iraqi tea and biscuits in the apartment kitchen for the duration of the event.

Two of the artists Watkins mentioned in his talk stood out.

First the cartoonist Abdul Raheem Yassir (whose work, now that I think about it, doesn't seem to fit with Watkins' description of being apolitical)

And second Akeel Khreef, who repurposes found detritus into useful and beautiful objects, like this table made from old bicycle parts (the tabletop is made from weaved old tires, the legs are forks and the feet are gears. I think the arches are mudguards):

The artists all visited the pavilion in Venice during the event... Not all of them returned to Iraq afterwards.

You can hear Watkins talking about his work on the pavilion here, and here you can read interviews with him and Chalabi.

Books: the power of a redesign

I recently bought a copy of David Bellos's Is That a Fish in Your Ear? I didn't set out to buy this book specifically: the Foyles in Charing Cross Road was displaying copies on one of its stair-side shelves, and it caught my eye.

The edition I bought looks like this:

Tasteful, no?

I didn't immediately decide to buy it: I looked at it, put it back down, wandered around the store some more, decided it had lodged a hook in me that wasn't going to be displaced, and then went back and tucked it beneath my arm.

I've since read the book; I thought it was quite good but would have benefited from being more concise. Of more relevance, it was only when I recorded my having read the book in Goodreads that I realised I'd seen it before (it was first published in 2011), looking like this:

Much as I like the use of an ear as a question mark, this design is not my idea of tasteful. To me, the design of the 2014 edition I bought is a like a nice check sweater, whereas the 2011 edition I didn't buy is more like a mid-90s T-shirt.

What's my point, besides that when it comes to reading material I conform sickeningly to my white middle class status and embody a shameless disregard for the old contents-by-covers adage?

Well, I'm sure its not just me who judges books by their covers. I haven't worked in the book trade, but I would think that part of the reason why book covers receive redesigns, other than because they're being put out by a new publisher and simply to keep up with current fashions, is to better target different groups of consumers?

In this age of online buying and loyalty cards, I wonder whether it's yet possible for publishers, retailers or both to keep track of the types of people buying an edition of a book, based on other purchases - Ottolenghi vs Oliver, say - and then redesign the cover for a later edition to target a different group of people? And would strongly targeting different buyers at different times be more effective than targeting all buyers simultaneously through a design that aims to appeal to all?

Furthermore, with the rise of online bookselling, would it be possible to use a browser's browsing history to show them the version of several simultaneously published editions that they would be most likely to buy?

Maybe this already happens? Google, if you're reading this, do point me in the direction of a relevant book design blog, old chap...

Kafka in a nutshell

This passage from a London Review of Books review by Rikva Galchen of Reiner Stach's three-part biography of Franz Kafka gives some insight into the origins of the writer's particular concerns (she's detailing documented occurrences in Kafka's life):

"Here he is reading a letter from the tax office asking about capital contributions to the First Prague Asbestos Works, here he is writing back explaining that the factory had ceased to exist five years earlier, and here he is receiving another letter asking what his reply meant as no record could be found of the referenced original letter, and then here he is a few months later receiving a third letter threatening him with charges and a fine if he persists in not accounting for the capital accumulation on the First Prague Asbestos Works."

Book review: Bookmarks - Various (1974)

Bought at the Waterloo Bridge second-hand book market

Twenty eight writers talk about the books that influenced them (in 1974). Most of them mention having started off with Treasure Island; one or two mention it in order to say they've not read it. Shakespeare is mentioned only positively; Dickens, Chaucer and Hardy get more of a mixed reception. Two people I hadn't heard of, Ivy Compton-Burnett and the Greek poet Cavafy, are praised by many. Also mostly praised are many I had heard of: Proust, Conrad, Lawrence, Austen, Waugh, Plato, Freud. I should have read Bookmarks with a memo pad in hand to note down authors and books, but as it is I take away the general reminder to keep reading, broadly and well. And the knowledge that nobody agrees on everyone. Except Shakespeare and Proust in French.

Book review: Kokoro - Natsume Soseki (1914). Or: The frustration of poor editions

The Peter Owen (2007) edition of Kokoro, very kindly lent to me by a friend. 

In Damian Flanagan's introduction to the 2007 Peter Owen edition of Kokoro, by Natsume Soseki - translated by Edwin McClellen - he refers to Kokoro as a masterpiece and warns the reader to brace themselves for a roller-coaster ride. I read the introduction after reading the translation of the novel that follows, and my first thought on beginning the introduction was that there could be few more inappropriate metaphors for the novel than that of the roller coaster, with its implied ups and downs and changes of pace. Not that the novel is without drama or the power to move, but I remembered no such dramatic swings.

However, shortly afterwards it became clear that Flanagan's introduction, unhelpfully, was based on a different translation of Kokoro to that which it precedes. Flanagan refers to quantities of analysis of Kokoro "beyond imagining", including two "ferocious" debates about a couple of short passages in the novel. One of these he says is located in the first paragraph: we are told that the narrator refers to the central character as "sensei" because he cannot bear to use a cold letter of the alphabet to represent his name, the significance of which becomes clear later. But the first paragraph of the translation that follows includes no mention of a single letter, nor the word "cold". We are simply told that the use of "sensei" is found "more natural" than use of a name.

Furthermore, the second of the two debates apparently revolved around a sentence that I can't find in the Peter Owen translation - nor can I find any sentence that distantly approximates it.

Perhaps even more crucially, Flanagan also says that the opening of the novel is "imbued with a striking homoeroticism", and quotes two parts in support of this.

First he says: "When they first meet the narrator writes, "Sensei had just taken his clothes off while I was exposing my wet body to the wind"".

In the translation that follows, this is rendered as: "Sensei had just taken his clothes off and was about to go for a swim when I first laid eyes on him in the tea house. I had already had my swim, and was letting the wind blow gently on my wet body."

And second he says (quoting the novel to begin with): ""It is a step towards love. As a preliminary to embracing the opposite sex, you have moved towards somebody of your own sex like me. [...]Because I am a man I simply cannot give you the kind of satisfaction you are looking for." That word "satisfy" is a key word in Kokoro, occurring with startling frequency."

In the translation that follows Flanagan's afterword, we are given: "But it was a step in your life towards love. The friendship that you sought in me is in reality a preparation for the love that you will seek in a woman. [...] But being the kind of man that I am, I cannot help you to rid your heart of that feeling of want."

Hardly as satisfactory.

In the final sentence of his introduction, Flanagan says that some critics of Kokoro "miss the point entirely", and that far from being about the end of the Meiji era, it is about a man who is prepared to give up his heart in order to transfer it forever into the breast of another man. Having been deprived by Peter Owen of the translation that Flanagan refers to in that very edition, I can't help but feel that I might have missed the point myself.