In the Kingdom of the Blind Eye the Optician is King

Like many journalists Emma Jane Kirby has highlighted the plight of migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean to a largely indifferent European public.
Occasionally a small child being washed ashore might get attention. The overall statistics of deaths and drownings at the hands of unscrupulous criminals are not enough to shock us. It's only when you follow an individual story that makes it easier to relate. Once such tale is of The Optician of Lampedusa - someone who goes out fishing in a small boat and catches 47 human beings. The boat was designed for 10 people and already had 8 on board. 368 people died and the most shocking thing was that there were other boats that didn't stop.
By putting this story into book form Kirby has raised the stakes once again in terms of the role of the journalist as moral optician helping us to see more clearly. Thankfully the trade can still aspire to more than tabloid tunnel vision.

A man with two heads is very unique

Everybody is unique but some people are more unique than others. At the danger of being labelled an oxymoron I wish to pay brief homage to the totally unknown pop act that is John Greaves and Peter Blegvad. John is a bassist and pianist who has played with Henry Cow and National Health and has an unhealthy obsession with the French poet Paul Verlaine. Peter is a wordsmith and cartoonist (the Independent's Leviathan) who also doubles as a musician and has performed as part of Slapp Happy. Their two headed collaborative album Kew.Rhone is a classic and thankfully impossible to categorise. You could write a book about it - with contributions from Jonathan Coe, Carla Bley and Robert Wyatt - and you would know a great deal more about palindromes, numinosity, proverbs and even perverbs so Peter Blegvad has done just that. Like this painting 'Exhuming the First American Mastodon' by CW Peale you would get to dig (ie understand and appreciate) a little more about the author and his chum but it would still leave you with a poetically playful sense of awe and wonder at how such a beast could have lived and now go unrecognised.

Dun and Dusty

The Rural Life in the Dun Valley 1066-1900 is a bit of a specialist volume. Like the author, Margaret Baskerville, I've had to resort to illustrations from the Weald and Downland Museum in the next county as there is not a lot of material to go on. But that's the point. I think some of the source material such as receipt of tithes, probates and inventories are presented without a lot of colour or comment but nonetheless it gives a fascinating insight into how people lived. There are unexpected events (such as the Swing Riots organised by the fictitious Captain Swing of the scythe gangs) and you can imagine the lives and times of the agricultural labourers that just don't get told in our chocolate box National Trust view of rural estates. Overall it is difficult to put a swift narrative flow to such a wide period of time but the narrow geographical focus is well set in Britain's social history.

Annoyingly talented

I saw Bill Bailey on tour last year. Like everyone else I'd seen him in various guises on quiz shows and doing stand up. I knew he could play music pretty well but, even so, wasn't prepared for how prodigiously talented he was on so many instruments in so many genres. I guess his problem as a musician is that no-one will take him seriously as you expect satire all the time.
As a naturalist he has the same problem...when to drop the humour and when to just enjoy his enthusiasm for the natural environment. I don't think it really matters. I can't bear anyone who takes themselves too seriously anyway and twitchers are the worst.
Bill's Remarkable Guide to British Birds is a rubbish guide but is full of surreal little cartoons, off the wall information and anecdotes. This is how it should be. It's just a shame he is so remarkably and annoyingly talented. A bit like the Herring Gull which he describes as the "Gimlet-eyed snaffler of a million battered sausages."

No Sussex please, we're Hampshire

Timothy Mowl has produced an outstandingly researched set of volumes on historic gardens within England. Often it is most revealing what has gone as much as what is familiar. For 2016's Hampshire he has taken on one of his former students - Jane Whitaker - to help with the 'volume' of the volumes. I learned a lot about places I thought a knew a lot about already.
Just a few minor niggles as this kind of factual book brings out the anorak in me. For example Petersfield is a significant Hampshire town so to place it in Sussex in this sort of geographical review is a bit sloppy and results in missing out the modern recreation of a 17th Century-style "physic garden". Secondly I don't think that Capability Brown's work at Warnford is more than a tenuous stylistic link through contemporary knowledge and not necessarily carried out under contract by him. Thirdly there were a few too many "but they wouldn't let us look around"... in the case of Westbury it was full of patients with serious crash injuries so I'm not surprised the authors got a refusal but you can still see all you need by visiting the ruined chapel by the roadside and walking up the public footpath that goes through the grounds past the old kitchen garden walls. But I guess I'm guilty of being pernickity-picky as I have more time to find my way around these places. Illustration by the way is Mottisfont Abbey where Graham Stuart Thomas' famous rose garden goes unmentioned along with other admittedly contemporary features like a grove of gold painted upside down tree trunks.

Just looking at the pictures

I hesitate to include picture books in this blog because I've nothing useful to say about them and I can't show you any pictures because photographers and publishers get very prickly about copyright. So just a brief note of Landscape Photographer of the Year Collection 10 and the Lonely Planet's Beautiful World. Both do exactly what they say on the tin as the former are beautifully reproduced mostly British landscapes and the latter more stunning global subjects but less well photographed and reproduced. Both have a role to play but don't bother with the text and don't bother writing or reading a blog about them unless you are prepared to license pictures for non-commercial reuse.

All White

Bear with me as I tell you of Edmund de Waal's Journey Into Obsession along The White Road. On the face of it a book about the history of porcelain is not going to excite anyone outside of a geriatric antiques daytime TV game show but de Waal's obsession is altogether more poetic and, frankly, a little off the wall. What he, and clearly others, have found is the depth of passion that the art and science of the highly prized individually thrown art objects, and equally a lot of mass produced humble domestic utilitarian objects, has inspired.
It starts in China, of course, but in the middle of this road is central Europe (in Germany and France particularly) and he then travels to the mining county of Cornwall via America. Fresh research and the perspective of a minimalist potter make this pretty much his own genre. A suitable sequel to the Hare with Amber Eyes.