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| Brian May wows audience with set of Victorian photos Queen guitarist unveils his new book, collecting 'stereographic' photography from the 19th centuryIt's not common to arrive at the British Library for an evening talk on a charming book of Victorian photographs and to be confronted by a minder roughly the size and shape of a Smeg fridge, sitting with his massive back to the platform staring impassively at the audience.That audience also seemed heavier on black t-shirts and grizzled pony tails than usual. The speaker wore a black frock coat and a halo of black curls, and explained that British Library regulations prohibited a quick blast of Radio Ga Ga. It was indeed Brian May, rock god and celebrated collector of Victorian stereo photographs and cameras.His first book, published in 2006, had the suitably rock-goddish title Bang! and was launched in a fanfare of trumpets and a flurry of smoke machines – but was actually on astrophysics, written with Chris Lintott and Sir Patrick Moore. His most recent was A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud, the published version of the thesis which he put aside for a few months to go and play in a college band: it was 30 years before he could take time out from being lead guitarist with Queen to finish it.The new book is the result of half a lifetime's collecting passion. He has been buying old photographs, and bits of equipment, since he started picking them up in junk shops for a few bob when on tour. His collection is now one of the best in the country, so large that he employs a full time curator – Elena Vidal, his co-author, who shared the bill at his British Library gig. He has lent many images to the library's beautiful current exhibition of early photographs.Not long after he abandoned his doctorate, May found a double photograph by an almost forgotten 19th century photographer called TR Williams. The two images, taken by the same camera but moved a few inches to the left for the second, created a 3D effect which the Victorians called "stereography" when seen through a special viewer – an effect that must have seemed as startling as the first moving cinema images would half a century later.Over the following decades he hunted down more Williams photographs until he had the complete set of 59 Scenes In Our Village, each backed with a little poem that May believes the photographer wrote himself. They show a village so idyllic – knife grinders flirting with white-aproned maidens standing by the rosy front doors of their thatched cottages, contented elderly women seated at their spinning wheels, reapers and gleaners in the fields – that some suggested it was a fantasy, a composite of different places. Then May and his researchers tracked down Hinton Waldrist in Oxfordshire, stuffed with cars but otherwise startlingly unchanged from the village in the pictures.As stereography became a craze, such images were sold in sets to families who also bought expensive rosewood or mahogany and brass viewers. May had to design and have manufactured a special viewer to go with his book.At the British Library, plastic glasses were handed out, the images projected in stereo onto a screen – and a farm cart that could have come straight out of Thomas Hardy, in a sun-dappled field where the last rick is being stacked, sprang to life before them. The audience members, pockets full of kit that the Victorians would have thought witchcraft or science fiction, gasped in astonishment.May read the accompanying verse: "One other rick and then the task of summer will be done / The farmer then shall count his gains and with the setting sun / The husbandmen at harvest home shall crowd the genial board / And think complacently upon the wealth their hands have stored."Add a bass line and a decent lead guitar riff, and it could be a single.• A Village Lost And Found by Brian May and Elana Vidal, is published by Francis Lincoln• The London Stereoscopic CompanyBritish LibraryHeritagePhotographyMaev Kennedyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Ship of Fools by Fintan O'Toole Terry Eagleton on the corruption and bungling that have led to Ireland's economic woesThe luck of the Irish has finally run out. Having roared away lustily for a decade or so, the Celtic Tiger has now rolled over on its back, all four paws stiffly in the air. In the late 1990s, Ireland became well-heeled for the first time in its wretched history, and in some respects even outstripped its former colonial proprietors. In this newly affluent nation of software and low taxes, bent bankers and microchip exporters, house prices in Dublin shot up by 519% between 1994 and 2006, probably the biggest such boom on the planet. It was a land of massive tax breaks and of financial regulation so light as to be invisible to the naked eye. As Ireland grew more dependent on foreign investment for its manufacturing than almost anywhere else in the world, the New York Times dubbed the country "the Wild West of European finance".Despite the fact that much of the world's Viagra is manufactured in County Cork, this extraordinary upthrust could not be sustained. Irish GDP is now shrinking faster than in any other advanced economy, and the country's gross indebtedness is larger than Japan's. House prices have fallen more rapidly than any others in Europe, and the average Irish family has lost half its financial assets. Unemployment has risen faster than anywhere else in Europe. By 2007, the country was €10bn in the red and a banking system massively complicit in fraud and tax evasion was just about to enter meltdown. In September last year it finally imploded, awash with billions in bad loans to property sharks. In its rise and fall, as Fintan O'Toole remarks in this superb polemic, "Ireland made Icarus look boringly stable." It had moved from being the poster child of free-market globalisation to one of the great economic basket cases of modern history.All this has been accompanied by a culture of corruption so shameless and spectacular that it makes Dublin look like Kabul. The former prime minister Charles Haughey stole €250,000 from a fund set up to pay for a liver transplant for one of his closest friends. Last year, the chairman of Anglo Irish Bank resigned when it emerged that he had €84m in loans from his own bank, a sum concealed by an annual (apparently legal) cooking of the books. As O'Toole points out, bribery, tax evasion and false evidence under oath have not simply gone unpunished; the very idea of penalising the culprits is viewed by the governing elite as unsporting or even unpatriotic.This is partly because Ireland, having in O'Toole's words "imported" its modernity from elsewhere, is in some ways a country with a first-world economy and a third-world political system. Local, cronyist and clientelist politics still thrive. The state is widely seen as "a private network of mutual obligations" rather than an impersonal body. Palms are greased, backs scratched and old pals promoted, often without much sense that this is anything other than the natural thing to do. The discrepancy between formal and informal codes in the country, between official behaviour and nods and winks, bulks large. Stretching a point or turning a blind eye is rife, in ways that would scandalise many a German or American. What may be agreeable in personal terms can prove lethal in public ones. It is the kind of thing that can happen in a country where everyone seems to have been at school with everyone else.Some of this black-market behaviour harks back to the colonial era. Indeed, as this book perceptively argues, a good many of Ireland's current troubles spring from the persistence of old ways, not the emergence of flashy new ones. The Celtic Tiger years were to some extent simply a matter of the country belatedly catching up with other modern nations. The old-style Tammany Hall politics of power and prestige, along with what O'Toole sees as an anarchic attitude in business to law and morality, were part of what caused the rot. Ethical life was traditionally the preserve of the church; but now that that has been largely undermined, there is little sense of civic or public morality to take its place. In one of its documents, the Irish Central Bank proved unable to spell the word "ethics", while other banks have had more than orthographical problems with the term.The pity of it, as Ship of Fools points out, is that the boom years were largely squandered. For a fleeting moment, the country had the resources to improve its crumbling social facilities. Instead, entranced by the possibility of tax cuts for the rich, it blew it. Perhaps its best hope now is to revert as soon as possible to third world status and qualify for a loan from the IMF.Terry Eagleton's Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate is published by Yale.IrelandBusiness and financeTerry Eagletonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Guardian book club: Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett As usual with Pratchett, this is wildly eccentric stuff, but its sense of humour makes it hard not to loveAccording to the figures in this biography of Terry Pratchett – written by his long-standing literary agent Colin Smythe – the writer has sold an astonishing 65m books since 1971. That's almost one copy for every blog and newspaper article written during the same time period lamenting the lack of talent and originality on our bestseller lists. And, of course, nothing could provide a sterner rebuff to all those complaints. Here is a man who consistently churns out top 10 books that are beautifully written, effortlessly entertaining, stupendously popular and gleefully eccentric. Indeed, eccentric is putting it mildly.We might all be convinced that the book world is manipulated by cynical marketing hacks intent on filling our brains with mindless dreck about worthless celebrities, but there's no way anyone could have planned for someone like Pratchett. Imagine trying to convince a publisher, prior to the appearance of The Colour Of Magic, that the bestselling books of the 1990s would have been about a university of daft wizards and their magic adventures in a world supported on the back of four elephants riding on the back of a giant turtle. Even now, after 20 years of Pratchett chart dominance and the global phenomenon of the Harry Potter books he so clearly influenced, the Discworld seems a mighty odd place. How to transmit to the uninitiated the importance of a set of luggage that travels on its own (multiple) tiny feet? How to convey the warm pleasure occasioned every time Death appears on the scene and starts talking inside everyone's heads IN CAPITAL LETTERS? How to explain that the librarian at the wizards' Unseen University is an orangutan who manages to communicate impossibly complex concepts using only the word "ook"? More easy to convey is the obvious appeal of these books. I hadn't read a Discworld novel for a long time before picking up Unseen Academicals, but it didn't take long for a sense of cosy familiarity to envelop me. Pratchett's world may make a point of defying all laws of physics and logic, but it adheres strictly to the rules of human nature. As in Blandings Castle, Nero Wolfe's Brownstone and other literary visions of Elysium, the Discworld is a place where pie is paramount. Pages after glorious pages are taken up with rapturous descriptions of meat and pastry products, not to mention the pleasures of blow-out feasting and determined over-indulgence in the bottle. Indeed, the book takes its entire premise from a threat to the wizard's belt-loosening lifestyle. The wonderfully weird plot catalyst is a decree stating that if the wizards don't take part in a game of football they will lose a considerable chunk of their food budget.Football in the fictional city of Ankh-Morpork starts off as a violent street battle and Pratchett revels in descriptions of petty thuggery and grand insults relating to soft heads and hard axes. Even so, another attraction of Pratchett's storytelling is how safe it all seems. There's some risk of accident here (for instance, nobody inside the chaotic magical rooms of the university has "tidied up much and lived to tell the tale"), but there's no chance that the good guys will lose. No one gets properly hurt – except bullies, who are roundly and satisfyingly humiliated and outwitted by plucky little guys. So, plotwise, Unseen Academicals is hardly radical. Just as the good guys are bound to win, the outcome of the football match is never in doubt and nor is that of a tacked-on love story. But that's all part of the easy pleasure too. It's unashamedly silly and straightforward, and it's the fun of the ride that keeps you going rather than any worry about where it is taking you. The fun and the humour – which provides the last and best explanation for Pratchett's popularity. Because he is damn funny – though many of the jokes consist of the you-have-to-be-there type that can't easily be conveyed in a blogpost. He's a master of the unexpected turnaround, the absurd outcome, the comical character and the slow-burning, long-running gag. A few one-liners should give a flavour though. A lingering kiss is compared to "a tennis ball being sucked through the strings of a racket". Dr Hix, the Head of the University Department of Post Mortem Communications, tries to spread "darkness and despondency throughout the world by the means of amateur dramatics". The local tyrant, whose presence makes nearly everyone quake with fear, has a cup on his desk bearing the legend: "To The World's Greatest Boss".And even though he makes light of everything, Pratchett still has plenty of interesting things to say. He's defended fantasy in the past on the grounds that it: "isn't just about wizards and wands. It's about seeing the world from new directions". Certainly that rings true here. There are telling descriptions of the pleasures and pains of football fandom, for example – as well as sharp stabs at the corruption that makes so much of the modern game unpalatable. There are also effective send-ups of the absurdity of celebrity culture and provocative ideas about the failures of democracy. Meanwhile, it's hard not to see reflections of Pratchett's well-publicised struggle with Alzheimer's in one character's struggle to open doors within his mind and unlock knowledge placed mysteriously outside his grasp. That the book should remain so joyous in spite of this dark strand is testament to Pratchett's unique talent. A talent which, on the evidence of Unseen Academicals and dozens of bestsellers before, we really shouldn't take for granted.Terry PratchettScience fiction, fantasy and horrorSam Jordisonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
S.C. first lady's memoir to be released next month South Carolina first lady Jenny Sanford's memoir about dealing with Gov. Mark Sanford's affair will be published next month instead ... rssfeeds.usatoday.com |
A grave issue | Open thread Edgar Allan Poe's mysterious memorial toaster has failed to appear, but on whose grave would you leave tribute, and what?For the first time in 60 years, the mysterious "Poe toaster", who every year on the birthday of Edgar Allan Poe leaves roses and a bottle of good cognac on the grave of the great American writer, has failed to appear – sparking concern and speculation that some macabre fate has befallen the unknown tribute-payer.The custom of tending the graves of dead celebrities is not uncommon – many left-leaning folk make a pilgrimage to Highgate cemetery, for example, to lay flowers at the memorial of Karl Marx, while Doors fans pay their respects to the grave of Jim Morrison in Paris, to name but two. The Poe toaster has become an institution in Baltimore, however, in part due to the picturesque and well-chosen nature of the posthumous gift (presumably because Poe was noted for being fond of his liquor).So, inspired by the Poe toaster's example, which historical figure or defunct celebrity would you – or do you – leave a graveside tribute to? And, pray, what form might your token to their departed soul take?Edgar Allan PoeClassicsPop and rockguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |