Siècle des lumières

The new-look Guardian makes extensive use of images, and yesterday's centrefold was a beauty. It's a version of this satellite image, showing Europe and north Africa at night, shading into the curve of daylit Asia. The Guardian picture is brighter than the original: the supplier, Planetary Visions, explains (as the newspaper does not), that it is in fact "a simulation using a combination of daytime and nighttime satellite imagery".

I almost wrote that the picture shows Europe and north Africa in darkness - but what it really shows is how little darkness is tolerated in the European night sky. The light-smeared night of the cities is a familiar sight, a source of pleasing effects for the photographer and the poet - Clive James, for example, flying home in History and Geography:

I look down into the midnight city through the empty inkwell of the sky
And in that kit of instruments laid out across a velvet-covered table...

but it's still a shock to see how continuous the line of light is. There's a golden border along the Mediterranean, England is piebald - Scotland less so, though there is a belt of light across the south of the country. There is even a trail of light between Britain and Scandinavia, as if a border had been traced in the sea between them: it must, I suppose, mark the oil field, and I hope that the picture exaggerates its density and brilliance.

At a recent reading, I heard Afghan poet Partaw Naderi asked whether his repeated use of star images was personal or cultural: replying that these were indeed traditional themes, he added "Also, the Afghan sky is not cloudy, we see more stars there!" Despite the radiance of Tyneside, we still see more stars in the north-east than in London, where only the very brightest are visible - but in rural France last January we were lingering outside in the bitter cold to stare up at the stars, so much brighter and more numerous than at home.

"The non-thinking man's Peter Brook"

And continuing the "Illuminatus" theme, the highlight of today's Guardian is a profile of Ken Campbell. What I recognised in this article is the breathless exhilaration of trying to keep up with his talk. Here's a sample:

Just as The Great Caper was a thinly disguised autobiographical story of Ion Alexis Will (played on stage by Warren Mitchell), so The Warp was the personal saga of the poet and painter Neil Oram, who still lives on a commune near Loch Ness in Scotland. There were 18 and a half hours of theatre, two one-hour meal breaks and a half-hour beer, sausage and coffee interval at 2.35 am. The cast included an unknown Bill Nighy, an equally unknown Jim Broadbent, Turkish policemen, Chinese officials, Buckminster Fuller, clowns, fire-eaters, military art enthusiasts, a raging landlord ("I don't have any friends; just different classes of enemy") and a comic postman.

Now, compare that to my account of Ken Campbell at the Durham LitFest: yup, same voice!

ETA that the link to the LitFest website is broken because the site no longer maintains archived material.