album cover of the week

Cream: Disraeli Gears

Designed by Martin Sharp who was also responsible for this classic poster of Jimi Hendrix...

Pauline Baynes's Narnia covers

I loved these books as a child. We (my older brother) had the whole set except "The voyage of the Dawn Treader" though rereading it in adulthood it seemed very familiar; the pool which turns things to gold and Eustace getting turned into a dragon in particular. I began lots of stories with finding the door or other mechanism to another world...

As a young child I didn't get the religious allegory which C. S. Lewis put in the stories (Aslan as Jesus, Eustace as Judas, etc) but understood it on an emotional level. Intellectually I (in common with Phillip Pullman) am repelled by the implication of these stories - that is that there is another "reality", a better world we can all get to if only we knew how - but they still retain their emotional appeal. As a child I hated the last book "The Last Battle" as Narnia is destroyed (the last judgement), I thought that meant that everything good and beautiful was over but rereading it as an adult it actually ends well (in Lewis's terms) as everyone is reunited in a kind of "heaven" which, guess what, looks a lot like Narnia.

Incidentally isn't Shadowlands a wonderful film, makes me cry without fail, but the message of it is quite different.

"Why love if losing hurts so much? I have no answers any more. Only the life I have lived. Twice in that life I've been given the choice: as a boy and as a man. The boy chose safety, the man chooses suffering. The pain now is part of the happiness then. That's the deal."

Pauline Baynes illustrated the first Puffin edition of the Narnia books. Which I think should be read in the order displayed here. The Magician's Nephew is a 'prequel' but it has a lot more meaning if you have already read The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe. It's the order they were written in too.

I love seeing these covers altogether like this, united by her style and the design elements, it's a great example of variations on a theme.

Everyone of a certain age remembers where they were when they heard that Kennedy had been assassinated, I was only 2 a the time so I don't, (it was John Lennon for me) but if you do, you also remember the day C.S. Lewis died too, November 22, 1963.

red and green buses at night

I remember when I was growing up in Bushey often catching the bus at night. There were several types of bus which used the same stop, among them the 306 which was green and the 142 and 258 which were red, in all other respects the buses were identical. Before an approaching bus was close enough to read the number it was difficult to determine under the street lights what colour the bus was but as soon as it was close enough the colour, green or red as appropriate, would be obvious. One day, arriving late to find a bus already at the stop, I was queuing up when I realised, not having noticed the number and unable to see it from where I was, that I didn't actually know which bus it was I was about to board. Try as I might I just couldn't determine what colour the bus was (the green 306 was no good to me) even though it was right in front of me. It wasn't until I asked someone what it was that the bus suddenly took on its "rightful" colour, having "become" red it then became impossible to recapture the original ambiguous hue.

Beauty is relative?

When I young we had a small collection of singles, for the benefit of younger readers I am talking about vinyl records. They didn't get played very often, mostly at Christmas, and were kept tucked away most of the time in a cupboard. Among them were things like: Lilly The Pink by The Scaffold, San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair) by Scott McKenzie; an EP called More Swinging Guitars; a few Beatles singles and some children's records. These included, Sparky's Magic Piano, The Little Red Engine and The House At Pooh Corner.

Most of them were the standard black vinyl but among the children's records were two which were red and one, The House At Pooh Corner, a glorious yellow. Sliding it out of its sleeve to gaze at this wondrous object was an aesthetic delight: I thought it was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen.

I later Incorporated it into an "art" work which used a number of my favourite toys and other bits of "pop art" - I was very into Pop Art in my teens - I wished I hadn't later, it was much more thrilling to get an occasional glimpse of this object, hidden away like some religious relic and inevitably the "art" work was later discarded and the record with it.

However a few years ago I decided to see what this eBay which everyone seemed to be talking about was like: the first thing I searched for was: The House At Pooh Corner, on yellow vinyl, of course. I found one but not realising that people put in bids at the last minute, I lost the auction. But all was not lost, I emailed the seller telling him what had happened and asking if he had scan of the record I might have, he did, you see it above. He also had another copy on red vinyl, which I bought. I later found a yellow one and managed this time to win the auction. And to complete the set I bought it on blue and black too. The yellow is still my favourite naturally.

Here is the point: it's because records were normally black that the yellow one seemed so beautiful. If records were yellow by default it would be the black one which was the beauty. I think of this as the set theory of beauty.

Black cabs at one time were nearly all black, so to see the occasional maroon or white one carried a similar sort of aesthetic shock. Nowadays when there is much more variety and cabs tend to be plastered with advertising too the effect has pretty much worn off, to keep its aesthetic value the exception has to stay rare or the set becomes too inclusive.

I spent the first five years of my life in Kilburn in London so buses and bus stops were red. When we moved to Bushey and I came across London Country Buses and there associated graphics for the first time I found them "beautiful" in this way too. I still love the map, another eBay find. There is something particularly startling about a normally red object appearing green.

Methinks it is like a weasel

Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?
Polonius: By the mass, and ’tis like a camel, indeed.
Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel.
Polonius: It is backed like a weasel.
Hamlet: Or like a whale?
Polonius: Very like a whale.

William Shakespeare: Hamlet; Act III; Scene II

I have to admit I originally called this blog: "Methinks 'tis like a weasel", but that isn't what Shakespeare actually wrote; I am reminded of Blackadder:

Edmund: Tell me Young crone, is this Putney?
Young Crone: That it be, that it be.
Edmund: "Yes it is". Not "that it be". You don't have to talk in that stupid voice to me. I'm not a tourist...

E.H Gombrich uses a similar quotation (Shakespeare not Ben Elton) in his brilliant book Art and Illusion:

Sometimes we see a cloud that is dragonish,
A vapor sometime like a bear or lion,
A tower'd citadel, a pendant rock,
A forked mountain, or blue promontory
With trees upon't, that nod unto the world,
And mock our eyes with air...

Anthony and Cleopatra

This is an example of what Gombrich called, "the beholder's share", in other words the faculty of projection. All perception is projection. We make guesses about what we are seeing: visual perception, like any other type of knowledge, is conjectural. We come up with a theory about what it is we are looking at, a doctor; a woman; Sarah....the accuracy of our guess will depend on our level of knowledge, attention and the amount of information available. A white coat and a stethoscope in the right context can make anyone a doctor, as many a con artist has shown, provided no overwhelmingly contradictory information is present; a comedy red nose or otherwise unkempt appearance might make us wonder and a hospital administrator would be able to apply more stringent tests, one would hope, than a recumbent patient.

It is the indistinct nature of clouds, fire or ink blots that allow us to mobilise our imitative faculty
there is enough information to project almost anything we can imagine, be it a weasel or the face of Elvis, yet the information is vague enough that we can ignore anything contradictory. The key word is imagine, we can only see what we already know. If you don't know what Elvis looks like you can no more recognise him in a cloud than you could in a waxworks museum or a line up. It is the fact that a great many people do know what Elvis looks like that makes him such a popular subject for pareidolia. Elvis isn't really in a cloud he is in your mind.

Comedian: I do impressions (putting on bland voice) "Good Morning, Mrs Jones". That was our postman.

Rory Bremner can only 'do' people you already know. However if you heard him do the unknown Mr. X then heard Mr. X you would probably be able to say, "Ah, that's who he was doing". Imitation, for comedic effect anyway, isn't generally intended to fool (John Culshaw's fake phone calls are an exception) but belong instead to the realm of parody. The effect a parody or any other form of representation has on your perception of the original subject is fascinating, who could hear Tony Blair without also hearing Bremner and/or Culshaw and expect him to say something like, "serious forehead".

Elvis may not be 'in' a cloud but is he 'in' a photograph? In once sense the Elvis-ness of any representation still resides in the mind of the viewer, be it a photograph, a drawing or looky-likey, the difference is that such representations are intended to 'be' Elvis. The further difference with a photograph is that there is a direct physical link between the subject and the photograph, though we have known since long before the days of photoshop that the camera can tell lies; though the lie is in the caption, real or implied, rather than the image itself. Photography, like a footprint or the Turin Shroud, is, or purports to be, an index of reality.

"Methinks it is like a weasel" was the phrase chosen by Richard Dawkins in The Blind Watchmaker to demonstrate the power of cumulative selection.

I don't know who it was first pointed out that, given enough time, a monkey bashing away at random on a typewriter could produce all the works of Shakespeare. The operative phrase is, of course, given enough time. Let us limit the task facing our monkey somewhat. Suppose that he has to produce, not the complete works of Shakespeare but just the short sentence 'Methinks it is like a weasel', and we shall make it relatively easy by giving him a typewriter with a restricted keyboard, one with just the 26 (capital) letters, and a space bar. How long will he take to write this one little sentence?

Well it turns out, longer than the universe has been in existence. But using a computer program employing cumulative selection, that is keeping any variations that resemble in anyway the target sentence, the phrase was reached in 41 generations.

Impersonation and evolution meet in the topic of Batesian and Mullerian mimicry.