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THIS IS NOT ABOUT RAIN DEFICITS

~ Posted by Robert Butler, May 22nd 2012

There's been a shortage of water in Britain for some time and earlier this year the water companies ran a poster campaign: "WE ARE IN DROUGHT". We blogged about this saying "This is not a drought" and "A drain is not a drought". Seven weeks on, that's been confirmed. The Daily Telegraph headlines a story: "This is not a drought." The sub-heading runs: "Environment chiefs consider redefining 'really blunt word' drought."

Our argument was not with the figures, but the framing. A tremendous amount of water is lost through leaks (3.3 billion litres a day). Plenty of water gets used in inessential ways: having to curtail the use of the ornamental fountain in the garden does not amount to a drought. Nor does it feel remotely appropriate to apply the same term to describe what we're experiencing in south-east England and what others are experiencing in the Sahel region of West Africa.

Still, the posters went up on the buses and, soon after, it rained and rained and rained. Now there were flood warnings as well as drought warnings. Eventually the water chiefs recognised there was only so much cognitive dissonance the public could handle. The Telegraph reports that the Environment Agency is going to tailor its messages to distinguish between types of "deficits in rainfall" such as long-term dry spells, groundwater shortage and an economic drought (when there's not enough water to meet the public's needs).

Well, that's a start, but this isn't really about rain. It's about the way we consume water and the way we waste it. As Hugo Rifkind wrote in the Spectator last month, "We don’t mean 'drought'. What we mean is 'pisspoor management of the water supply'."

Robert Butler is online editor of Intelligent Life

DRAWING PAXMAN INTO THE LIGHT

~ Posted by Robert Butler, May 21st 2012

Among the performances from witnesses at the Leveson Inquiry—and Hugh Grant, Steve Coogan, Rupert Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks have given compelling ones—the appearance of Jeremy Paxman on Wednesday afternoon could be the most dramatically perfect. The session threatens to take on a symbolic significance.

One of the visible signs of the shift in power between politicians and the media over the last 30 years has been the rise of the abrasive interviewer, and the most disdainful interrogator on British television is Paxman ("a kind of folk hero", in the words of the poet Tom Paulin). "Newsnight", the BBC2 programme he presents, starts at 10.30pm and this late slot gives Paxman the leeway to roll his eyes, snort with disbelief and once famously ask the same question 12 times. In recent years, disdain has sometimes shaded into torpor: he can look as if doesn't know how he has found himself, this late in the day, at the same gathering as his studio guests. 

The tone of the inquiry is the opposite: on Wednesday afternoon, Paxman will face questions that are patient, courteous and bordering on the bland. He won't be able, a few minutes in, to swivel away on his chair, saying "We'll have to leave it there". Papers will be shuffled, water sipped, pauses taken. Minutes will slip by while the witness is given time to find the right tab in the right bundle. He will be allowed to finish his sentences and asked if he has anything to add. Instead of the underlying tone of the questions being "Why is this lying bastard lying to me?", he will be calmly asked, "Is it fair to summarise your position in this way?" or "I wonder, Mr Paxman, if you could help us out with this at all." A strange sight, seeing Paxman in daylight.

Robert Butler is online editor of Intelligent Life

TRUTH TELLERS IN "THE BRIDGE"

~ Posted by Robert Butler, May 18th 2012

By 11pm tomorrow, the million viewers who have followed "The Bridge" on BBC4 will know who has committed the fiendishly sophisticated murders that started—for the viewer, at least—with a dead body on a bridge that connects Denmark with Sweden. "The Bridge" is the latest foreign-language crime series, after "The Killing" (1 and 2), "Spiral" and "Borgen", to have won a devoted British audience. In this case it's two foreign languages, as the characters speak Danish and Swedish, and only one set of subtitles. The opening premise—the dead body lies across the border between the two countries—compels the two police forces to work together and the series' most notable aspect is the characterisation of the Danish female detective, Saga.

As Rebecca Willis blogged two weeks ago, Saga—an icy blonde in leather trousers—has Aspergers and, early on, her unexpectedly frank reactions left some viewers uneasy as to whether we were laughing at her or with her. But as the series has developed, Saga's take on events, which looked as if it might be merely an eye-catching character detail, has become a strand of the main theme.

Saga has no side. She won't intimidate a witness in the interview room. She won't give false hope to a mother whose child has gone missing. She introduces a man who comes to her apartment as, "This is Anton. We have sex". As with Alceste in "The Misanthrope", who scorns la politesse of the 17th-century French salon, or Cordelia in "King Lear", who loves her father according to her bond, the absence of social niceties throws the lies and evasions of others into stark relief.

In "The Bridge", the murders are perpetrated by the "Truth Terrorist", who claims to have plotted these crimes to highlight social injustices—from homelessness to child labour. He deliberately sets out to expose certain types of hypocrisy in society. More subtly, Saga exposes others.

Robert Butler is online editor of Intelligent Life

A NARROW VIEW OF CORSETS

~ Posted by Kassia St Clair, May 17th 2012

Our most popular piece on the website at the moment is "The Shapes We're In".  Our deputy editor Isabel Lloyd wrote that women often favour clothes of a particular decade. “Ask any woman which decade suits her and odds are, she’ll have an answer ready”, she says. “A lifetime of staring glumly at changing-room mirrors, however painful, does give you a clear picture of your own proportions.” Isabel discussed this with women who regularly wear clothes from different eras—actresses from the Royal Shakespeare Company. One of the surprises that emerged was the attitude to corsets.

As the corset seems such an embodiment of pre-suffrage restriction, I had expected our actresses to hate them. Yet here’s Cecilia relishing every minute of it. Another actress I spoke to, Isla Blair, also had good things to say about them. Isla (“short, into my 60s; I’d have been good in the fin de siècle because I have a curvy bust and small waist”) wears them in period plays not just because they help her achieve the historically correct, upright posture, but because they make her feel supported. “You get less tired in one—in fact I asked a dressmaker I know to make me a slightly softer version of an Edwardian corset, which I wear under certain of my real clothes."

It is one of the tenacious clichés in fashion history that the corset worn by Victorian women mirrored the legal and social limitations imposed upon them. It’s an idea that retains traction in spite of the best efforts of at least two historians—D. Kunzle and J. Russ—who hashed the point out in 1977 over three consecutive issues of the historical journal Signs. In fact, corsetry wasn't restricted to women in the Victorian era, wasn't necessarily restrictive unless it was tight-laced, and wasn't unpopular with the women who wore them.

It was moralistic Victorian (male) doctors who first made the case against corsets, drawing those dramatic hourglass diagrams of the interiors of women’s bodies with all the organs squished out of place. That only happened if women laced their corsets very tightly over a long period of time and from a young age, which most didn't. The two historians made it clear that while the corset makes a neat metaphor for the wider social restriction of women in Victorian society, it isn't an entirely accurate one.

Kassia St Clair is editorial assistant at Intelligent Life. Her posts for the Editors' Blog include Popcorn goes posh and Shopping online turns deja vu

TWO MURDOCH BOOKS IN ONE

~ Posted by Robert Butler, May 16th 2012
 
Hard to think of a better example of two books squeezed into one than "Dial M for Murdoch", published last month, a fascinating account of the hacking scandal and the cover-up at News International. The book has two authors—the Independent's Martin Hickman and the Labour MP Tom Watson—and both make appearances in the book, where each is referred to in the third person. But there's a big difference: Hickman is an observer and Watson is a main character.
 
For most of the book, the tone is what you would expect: good clear reporting, the facts—shocking as they are—presented in a reasonably detached fashion. But every now and then, "Tom Watson" makes an appearance in the story and the tone can suddenly veer off. We hear about some of his thought processes as if he were a character in a novel and this leads, inevitably in this context, to moments of bathos. We learn for instance that Watson "watched every episode of the American detective series 'The Wire' and decided to follow the advice of one of its characters". (This was the moment the detective Lester Freamon, played by Clarke Peters, repeated Deepthroat's line: "Follow the money.") The quality of the information changes too. We get the little details that thriller writers like to use to locate characters. "At 10am the next day, as he drank black coffee at the Fire Station in Waterloo, Tom Watson was called by Ed Miliband's office..."
 
In short, one writer is working in a different genre from the other. Watson wants us to root for the little guy and share his point of view. Two hours before questioning Rupert and James Murdoch at the Select Committee hearing, we learn that "Watson shut the door of his office in Portcullis House, put on the Doors album 'LA Woman' at full blast and paced around rehearsing questions."
 
The trouble with this is that Watson isn't the only hero in the hacking story: at the very least, there's also the Guardian's Nick Davies and the solicitors Mark Lewis and Charlotte Harris. What coffee were they drinking? What music were they putting on when they paced around their offices? Balance suggests we should be told, but it would be ridiculous if we were.

It's clear from "Dial M for Murdoch" that Watson has paid a high price for his campaign: his marriage broke up, he has felt suicidal and he has feared for his personal safety. Yet he is still a central figure in a story that is moving swiftly. One day he should write a personal book about his role in exposing this scandal. Just not yet. 

Robert Butler is online editor of Intelligent Life

TRANSLATOR IN THE SPOTLIGHT

~ Posted by Simon Willis, May 15th 2012

Last night, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize was awarded to Aharon Appelfeld's novel "Blooms of Darkness" at a ceremony in London. It was a night for the winner, but also for small publishing houses, which had published five of the six novels on the shortlist, including Appelfeld's (Umberto Eco's "The Prague Cemetery", published by Harvill Secker, an imprint of Random House, was the exception). The prize proved, yet again, how much we need these publishers. Independents have given us everything from the multimillion-selling "Millennium Trilogy" by Stieg Larsson, published by the MacLehose Press, to last night's winner, about moments of hope amid the terrors of the Holocaust, published by Alma Books.

It was also a night for translators. The prize is one of the very few occasions when authors share the spotlight and the prize-money equally with their translators, whose reward doesn't often extend beyond a tiny sum of money for their work and a small credit on a book's title page. But Appelfeld was joined on the stage by Jeffrey M. Green, who has been translating his Hebrew into English for many years, and who as well as a cheque got a chance to speak about the translator's art.

He compared translating not to writing but to acting. Translators, he said, have to find their own way to deliver somebody else's words, just as actors do on stage, where each performance of a part, like each translation of a book, will be slightly different from all the others. But he didn't stop there. Writers, too, he said, are often translators of a kind. In "Hamlet", Shakespeare gave us Danish characters speaking Elizabethan English. Appelfeld's characters are native German-speakers. Hugo, an 11-year-old boy, is saved from the Holocaust when his mother smuggles him out of the ghetto into the hands of a friend, Mariana, a prostitute who cares for the boy. Although Appelfeld himself was brought up speaking German, he refuses to write in it, regarding it as the "the language of the murderers". So his characters speak to us in Hebrew. Thanks to the part played by Jeffrey M. Green, they also speak in English.

Simon Willis is apps editor of Intelligent Life and writes Found in Translation for the magazine

MAN CITY'S GREAT ANTI-CHOKE

 ~ Posted by Tim de Lisle, May 14th 2012

A funny thing has happened with Manchester City’s last-gasp Premiership triumph. It is being seen as the start of an era, even a dynasty. Both words were tripping off the lips of their players and manager yesterday. You might expect that, in the dazed aftermath of a stupendous drama. But even the pundits seemed to agree.

There is only one thing to say to this: hang on a minute. Manchester City’s last league title came 44 years ago. The previous one was 31 years before that. One of sport’s eternal verities states that it is harder to stay at the top than it is to get there. Look what happened when City were way ahead in this season’s title race: they choked.

Luckily for them, Man United promptly did the same thing. But even when City went back to the top, and had only to beat QPR at home to wrap it all up, they managed to choke again, conceding two goals against ten men.

Look at how they did in the other tournaments this season: they crashed out of Europe, twice, to modest opponents; they lost in the third round of the FA Cup, at home, to United; they reached the Carling Cup semi-final but lost at home to Liverpool. Dynasty? What dynasty?

We are making an elementary mistake here. Because City come from Manchester (or are based there), we are assuming they will now do a United. But doing a United is a very rare thing: in the 44 years since City’s last title, only United and Liverpool have managed it.

All the other teams to taste the league title—Leeds, Forest, Villa, Blackburn, Arsenal—rose and faded. That’s the norm. And being richer than the rest seldom makes all the difference. Chelsea, so rich under Roman Abramovich and so strong under Jose Mourinho, looked like starting something big in 2006, but they have won only one league title in the past six, have just slumped to sixth, and they are looking for their eighth manager in five years. Money can’t buy me continuity.

Another of sport’s eternal verities states that you have to take it day by day, game by game—“don’t get ahead of yourself”, as the pros say. We are getting way ahead of ourselves here. It could be the start of an era, but as yet there is no way of telling. If City win two trophies next season, let that conversation begin.

For now, instead of gazing dimly into crystal balls, let’s just say this: after scoring two goals in stoppage time on the final day, City fully deserve their title. It was one of the great anti-chokes.

 Tim de Lisle is editor of Intelligent Life

WRITERS IN THEIR OWN HAND

~ Posted by Emma Hogan, May 11th 2012

“Writing Britain”, which opens today at the British Library, traces how writers from Chaucer to Zadie Smith have used the British landscape—from its rolling dales and hills to its inner-city tower blocks—in their work. With over 100 items from the library itself, and others on loan from America or other parts of Britain, it is not lacking in jewels. There is a delicately-wrought manuscript of "The Canterbury Tales", an original illustration from Tolkein's "The Hobbit", a psychedelic cartoon of "Alice in Wonderland" by Ralph Steadman and the wonderfully pulp-like cover of Alan Sillitoe's "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning". 

But the real gems are the manuscripts. Looking at these exhibits—from Laurie Lee's draft of "Cider with Rosie" written on the back of a BBC script to a list by W.H. Auden of his favourite names of lead mines in Derbyshire—another theme emerges, which brings these authors even closer: their handwriting. The only manuscripts on display by Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot show them writing in clear, straight, evenly spaced copperplate, Eliot's few markings and changes as coolly confident as the progress of "Middlemarch". Looking at the handwriting of these two women, they suddenly seem unshakable, and you can understand how they took on the whole host of male Victorian writers.

In contrast, Coleridge's notebook from his 1802 tour of the Lake District is as ragged as the mountains he writes about—his swerving D's and P's slipping and sliding off the page. So too with William Blake: his tiny, spidery handwriting fills the notebook he carried with him, "London" and "Tyger, Tyger" crammed on two opposite pages in a pencil so delicate it seems as if one smudge would obliterate it.

Some of these writers wrote in a hand that seems startling. Katherine Mansfield, whose spiky short stories made the equally edgy Virginia Woolf declare that her work "was the only writing I have ever been jealous of", writes in a soft, flowery script, with florid G's and L's. Stella Gibbons, whose "Cold Comfort Farm" parodies doom-laden Edwardian country novels writes in a well-spaced child-like way—the irony and mischief which made her famous seemingly absent from her handwriting. Similarly, Daphne du Maurier's early pencil notes for her windswept "Rebecca"—used as evidence when du Maurier was unsuccessfully sued for plagiarism—has the rigid neatness of the schoolroom.

And yet often it is what they didn't end up saying which is just as illuminating. J.G. Ballard's manuscript for the opening page of "Kingdom Come" shows his black biro script covered in red and blue revisions and indecisions—crossing out most of the text apart from the one, inspired, first sentence: "The suburbs dream of violence." With the advent of typewriters and computers, these criss-crossing changes can be seen even more clearly. Seamus Heaney crosses through his typed lines of poetry making subtle changes with a red pen: "glen" becomes "arbour", and "haven" becomes "harbour". What's deleted takes us as close to the workings of their minds as what remains.

Emma Hogan wrote the Notes on a Voice on Charles Dickens and  T.S. Eliot. Her posts for the Editors' Blog include Another Top 40 for Dickens and From here to New Hampshire. She tweets as @erahogan

LEONARDO HAS THE BEST APP

~ Posted by Simon Willis, May 10th 2012

More and more galleries are producing apps for their exhibitions. Some are modest, like the one for the Lucian Freud show at the National Portrait Gallery, which doesn't go beyond the exhibition itself. Others have bells and whistles. For its Abstract Expressionist exhibition in 2010, MoMA in New York produced an app with videos, interactive maps and audio commentary on the paintings. The problem was that artists like Barnett Newman and Jackson Pollock made very big pictures, and the scale is lost on screen. The other problem is that if you're looking at a dark painting by Rothko on an iPad, you also see your own face reflected back at you.

The app for "Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomist", which is on at the Queen's Gallery in London, is the best yet. You get illustrated mini-essays about every stage and aspect of Leonardo's career as an anatomist, each one ending with a video from a curator, historian or surgeon. You get animated comparisons with modern anatomical understanding, which occasionally show where Leonardo went wrong, but more often show how right he was.

But the real reason to download the app, of course, is the complete drawings, which, because of their scale and intricacy, work very well on screen. The pages of Leonardo's notebooks weren't that large, so you're not seeing them hugely reduced. The beauty of the drawings is in the detail, and on the iPad you can zoom in on every joint, nerve and tendon. On one sheet alone there are five separate studies of the muscles of the shoulder and arm, each drawing showing something different: the system of bones; the way the muscles attach to the bones; the muscles from the neck to the tip of the thumb, from two different angles; the shoulder with its largest muscle removed to show the smaller muscles underneath. It's all meticulously captured.

You can get close in the gallery too, but what you can't do is read Leonardo's notes, written in his famous mirror writing. On the iPad, the notes are reversed and translated in situ on each page, telling you what is shown, how it works or how it's best dissected, but also giving an insight into why he draws a hand, foot or heart in the way he does. "When you have drawn the bones of the hand," he wrote, "and wish to draw on this the muscles which are joined with these bones, make threads instead of muscles. I say threads and not lines in order that one should know what muscle goes below or above another muscle, which cannot be done with simple lines." Here is Leonardo using his art to make his science as clear as possible.

His mastery of the line extends to the one-liner. Next to a drawing of the lungs he wrote: "Dust does damage." Next to a drawing of a man's heart he wrote: "The heart is placed exactly in the middle between the brain and testicles."

"Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomist" is on at the Queen's Gallery in London until October 7th. The iPad app costs £9.95

Simon Willis is apps editor of Intelligent Life. His recent posts for the Editors' Blog include Scanning the planet's crust, I'm with Michael Berkeley and Solitude builds like electricity

THE ART OF THE FAIR

~ Posted by Hazel Sheffield, May 9th 2012

Where in New York would you put a very big tent? As Frieze’s co-founder Amanda Sharp said, “The true story is that I opened Google Maps and looked for big green spaces.” The one she found was on an island that nestles under the hulking Robert Kennedy Bridge between Manhattan and Queens. Once home to a mental asylum and public burial ground, Randall’s Island is now best known for its parkland, tennis academy and athletics track.  

For a tent, the New York-based architects SO-IL created a snaking marquee whose curves follow the contours of the island. Tumbleweed rolled around in the grass outside the tent (installed by Latifa Echakhch) to heighten our sense of the wild. The festive tone was struck by artist Joel Kyack, who had worked in booths at state country fairs as a child. He manned a game truck, inviting people to roll a ball into the lips of a yawning mouth.

This will be the 10th year of Frieze in London, and demand from New York's gallery owners for something similar persuaded Frieze's founders to try their first one here: of the 180 galleries participating from 30 nations, 60 are American. But the location also provides a powerful new context for the art. In the "Frame" section, reserved for galleries less than six years old, Night Gallery from Los Angeles showcased a nightmarish bedroom installation concocted of black tape, video and mirrors by Samara Golden called "Bad Brains", a reminder that Randall’s Island still houses a psychiatric ward. 

Going round, there were plenty of fun moments too: a huge plaster nose protruded into the aisle; a blue plastic Disney dwarf grinned at us from one of the nooks; up close, a wall of chicken wire by the Romanian cartoonist Dan Perjovschi turned into a mesh of tiny drawings of people. 

Every taste was catered for: we dipped crisps into a French horn filled with guacamole and, in the bends of the marquee, where hip Manhattan restaurants and cafés like The Fat Radish and Intelligentsia Coffee opened out onto the grass, we picked at red beet and quinoa salads and took in the Manhattan skyline. We were a few short miles from the air-conditioned galleries of Madison Avenue, but it felt, triumphantly, like a day at the fair.

Hazel Sheffield lives in New York, where she is the Fulbright Alistair Cooke Scholar at Columbia University. Her posts on the Editors' Blog include Obama breaks into song and Art and Kraftwerk in New York