The Sundays

Douglas Adams called it the long, dark teatime of the soul. I do a lot of work on myself to enjoy Sundays, mostly in the form of actual work. Today it's some legalese and another spelling check. I went for a run in the very early a.m., weaving between kids on their way home and drunks doing the chicken walk, one clutching the side of his face as blood trickled down his elbow. (Stepping between pools of vomit in London is a fitness exercise all in itself.) And shortly I'll get into the tiny, teeny revisions: spell check, some crabbed sentences and tracking down a scene that continues to appear twice, like a ghost in a photograph.

The NYT has a great article on Laurie Anderson's Homeland album. Her working method now features some guy named Lou Reed:

When Ms. Anderson finally began assembling the album, she faced an overwhelming amount of data. "I was staring at like a million sound files, trying to fit together pieces from different songs, different years," she said. "I thought I was going to lose my mind. I was going to give up, and I was kind of crying about it every day. Lou got a little sick of hearing this. So he finally said, "Listen, I'm going to sit with you until you finish it.' " And Mr. Reed did, sitting on the studio couch and helping her make ruthless, don't-look-back decisions.

Commentators are annoyed by NYT commentator David Brooks' comments on the Rolling Stone article on General McChrystal. Brooks has interpreted the magazine's reporting of the Afghanistan commander's statements as a symptom of a 'culture of exposure':

By putting the kvetching in the magazine, the reporter essentially took run-of-the-mill complaining and turned it into a direct challenge to presidential authority... the exposure ethos, with its relentless emphasis on destroying privacy and exposing impurities, has chased good people from public life, undermined public faith in institutions and elevated the trivial over the important.

I listen to Brooks and fellow columnist Mark Shields' PBS broadcast every Saturday and always enjoy it. I doubt I'd agree with any of Brooks' politics (he leans towards the neocon) but I'm always interested in what he says. Ditto Rolling Stone, the ultimate wannabee magazine: even its writers who were there write as if they weren't and desperately wish they had been.

The new kid

On Friday I folded and joined the 21st century. My latest compact camera is a Canon Ixus 100 15, which is a model or two shy of the latest available, and it's a honey - very small, not too many features and a simple interface.

Behind the Canon are the two 35mm compacts I've been travelling with - my beloved Olympus XA and my Rollei 35T, which is a more complex relationship. The Rollei is really a small (imitation) Leica, with a louder, less satisfying shutter but it's too bulky to carry around conveniently, especially with the current fashion for narrow jeans and slim jackets. The XA's a honey: fully auto, smoother around the edges, lovely lens, quiet, thumb wheel film advance. Back home in storage are my Minox 35GT and my Olympus Pen half-frame (along with my Nikon FE). The Pen has the best lens of the four compacts and its rudimentary functions (all manual, no meter, no rangefinder) have forced me to take some great photos: set the exposure according to the grid that used to feature on the inside of a 35mm film packet; set the distance - 6' on the click wheel, easily estimated on the basis of your height; and get in close, paying attention to the light and so on. The shutter is very quiet and its dinky appearance threatens no-one. So, a great portrait camera.

The Minox compact is less fun to use, more fiddly, ugly feel to the shutter, and a tricky lens than can catch the light and distort images. But because it's lighter and smaller I found myself using it more often. This demonstrates another rule: the best camera is the one that you have on you. Which is why I now take so many photos on my phone - and even that's set at low res. (I used it to take the blurry pic above.) Now sharing images has become more of a priority, so I've gone digital. Hello connector cords, battery charging, etc.

Old habits die hard. I'm shooting using the Canon's optical viewfinder with the viewer turned off because I like the accidents of parallax and I don't want to review images while I'm taking them - although nowadays, obviously, the camera is the viewer for most people. The Canon has a 3x optical zoom but I never use it. I am a firm believer in Werner Herzog's adage that if you want to get close, then get close. I switched off the flash - good for parties, but after years of shooting film it seems wrong to use flash for fill during anything approaching daylight. And I racked down the image default from 8mb to 2mb, which gives me a staggering 7,000-odd image capacity on the 4 gig SD card, a faster response. I don't plan to ever print images from this camera - but I'm sure that will change. At full resolution the depth of detail is amazing, and I'm enjoying the different feel of digital. I like it in movies, so it's time to enjoy it in stills.

Because I'm in the UK, I will probably be reduced to nerdily carrying around a copy of my rights. The authorities here are hysterical about public photography which has become the new excuse for stopping people and collecting data that will never be analysed or useful. When I was living in East London around the City I would see the same scene four or five times a day: a skinny art student armed with an antique 35mm SLR or a non-English speaking tourist with a video cam standing patiently as a policeman, a trainee policeman or a community policeman took a note of their "details." People do have the right to snap things that are in plain view: buildings, monuments, clouds in the sky. From official UK police statement:

Stop and Search

Section 44 gives officers no specific powers in relation to photography and there is no provision in law for the confiscation of equipment or the destruction of images, either digital or on film.

On the rare occasion where an officer suspects that an individual is taking photographs as part of target reconnaissance for terrorist purposes, then they should be treated as a terrorist suspect and dealt with under Section 43 of the Act. This would ensure that the legal power exists to seize equipment and recover images taken. Section 58A Counter Terrorism Act 2008 provides powers to cover instances where photographs are being taken of police officers who are, or who have been, employed at the front line of counter terrorism operations.

These scenarios will be exceptionally rare events and do not cover instances of photography by rail enthusiasts, tourists or the media.

However the reality at street level is different. Take photos and you will be stopped and asked patronising questions, usually by someone new to the uniform. (Update: just like this...)

One last thing

Ms Fing

A notebook page from Electric. I was sitting up in bed late one night writing the novel ("lemonade" was later changed to "soda") and paused to sketch the cat ignoring me from the corner of the bed. She liked to perch there so she could be as far away from me as possible while I was writing. This only made me like her more.

Alex Kasman from the Department of Mathematics at the College of Charleston in South Carolina has reviewed Electric as part of MathFiction, a blog in which he collects information about significant references to mathematics in fiction. Even if he hadn't reviewed my novel I would still consider this approach to literature to be a very cool idea: a different way of slicing the data.

Film studies

Nothing in something particular

So try not to see something in particular; try not to achieve anything special. You already have everything in your own pure quality. If you understand this fact, there is no fear. There may be some difficulty, of course, but there is no fear.

-- Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (Weatherhill, 1970)

The Manuscript I Never Finish

'You look different,' she said.
'But I still look like me, right?'
'Kind of.' She tilted her head. 'It’s remarkable, actually, how much difference it makes. You look like you, but you’re not you. You know?'
'I don’t like that idea.'
'It’s only temporary,' she said. 'You’ll be back to your old self soon enough.'

Since finishing my last ms I've gone back to the Manuscript I Never Finish. In the old days this would have been a hairy box of notes and papers but now it's a hairy box of notes and papers and many, many computer files, all carefully dated. The more experimental a work becomes, the more you fall back on traditional methods to keep track of the parts.

I think a lot of novelists have a work they keep coming back to. This one is hard to catch because it's quite light, but as I work on it, it becomes darker and I have to pull back to recapture that original "feel." Normally I don't worry about tone because tone seems naturally born of structure and story, like tin cans tied to the car's bumper. But this one goes back and forth, and it doesn't help that there's a major surreal element that I lose track of.

Pray that I never finish it. Possibly I already have and I just like going back to the narrative between novels and shoving bits of it around to see what happens. I like the madness of this. Al Pacino starred in a film called The Local Stigmatic that famously never seemed to be finished - a quick click on imbd.com tells me that it's now out on DVD. Stanley Kubrick was always working on Napoleon. I envy people who have the confidence that the world will wait for them no matter how long they take. I've never had believed that. I'm outcome oriented so something that never comes to an end is a meditation.