News from Nowhere

From the Guardian's Corrections and Clarifications column:

A review of Peggy Seeger's memoir quotes her description of her early impressions of Ewan MacColl and how they fell in love, saying he had a "hairy, fat, naked belly poking out, and was clad in ill-fitting trousers, suspenders, no shirt, a ragged jacket and a filthy lid of stovepipe hat aslant like a garbage can". The context we omitted was that MacColl was appearing in a production of The Threepenny Opera (First Time Ever, 30 December, page 5, Review).

It's Durham Book Festival time: Durham Book Festival weekend, as far as I'm concerned, as I've now been to all (both) the events I will be going to. Here's the full programme, in case you want to check up on how much I am missing. We will be in Kendal for the comics festival next weekend, which removes some options. 'Who Runs the North East?' was already sold out when we tried to book (it was scheduled for a very small room) but this may be just as well - I might have heckled, or behaved badly in some other way. Nothing else appealed at all, and the whole programme felt horribly familiar. This may just mean that I have seen an awful lot of Book Festivals pass through Durham, and it's time to take a break.

Yesterday's event was Where Does The Power Lie in The Media?, chaired (and dominated) by Ian Wylie, editor of a magazine called Northern Correspondent about which I knew little (the ticket price included a copy of the magazine, but this wasn't handed to us until we were leaving; it could usefully have been given out while we were waiting for sound checks to be completed so that we could be admitted to the venue). Possibly it was always the intention that he should be the main speaker, as he had been commissioned to write an essay, the bulk of which he proceeded to read out to us. He never really took the opportunity to pitch the Northern Correspondent, so I'll have to read my copy to find out what it's for. Other speakers were Helen Pidd, North of England editor for The Guardian (power in the media lies in London, but The Guardian is better than it was), Rachel Hamada, journalist-director for The Ferret, an in-depth investigative journalism platform for Scotland and beyond, which sounds very interesting, and Peter Barron, previously editor of The Northern Echo (local media have the potential to run important campaigns, but only if we can afford to employ journalists and pay them to investigate; I resigned because I couldn't face continuing to sack people). Any one of these had an hour's worth of material, and it was frustrating that we didn't get to explore it.

Today's session was completely different, a hands-on exploration of some materials which, if they weren't actually 'Trench Newspapers' came pretty close. Original copies of the Wipers Times (as seen on TV) are vanishingly rare, but we got to leaf through two bound volumes of reprints, one of them from 1918. The Wipers Times seems to have been exceptional in actually being printed at the front, but similar material was collected, printed and recirculated more wisely. The Anzac Book was a substantial volume compiled at Gallipoli (and including, as an example of tales told by the Turks in their opposing trenches, a story of Nasreddin Hodja: the Hodja's wife hears a cradhing in the night, and asks him what caused it? - Oh, that was my shirt falling downstairs - A shirt wouldn't make all that noise, surely? - I was wearing it at the time.). P. H. B. Lyon's slim volume Songs of Youth & War was included for local interest, as he served in the Durham Light Infantry (though I'm more interested to learn from Wikipedia that he was Wlinor Lyon's father): it includes a lyrical description of 'Folk Dancing', as practised by the gentry. This time I wouldn't have mided a little more context for what I was seeing: but it was an hour well-spent.

I don't really remember how earlier volcanic outbursts from Iceland were reported. I've been thinking that surely there was more coverage of the eruption itself, this extraordinary, fascinating, frightening thing, and less complaining about how inconvenient it is. But that's probably just the tendency to think that things were better in the past. I've seen wonderful footage of volcanoes (some of which, like this report on Surtsey and Heimaey, has ended up on YouTube), but it isn't necessarily news footage.

Perhaps I'm just disproportionately irritated by the refusal of radio and TV even to try to pronounce Eyafjallajökull. The Grauniad, being the Grauniad, can't make up its mind how to spell it, either, but I have more sympathy there. Not that I can pronounce Eyafjallajökull myself, either - I was hoping to learn from the radio. But the BBc has resources I don't have: these are broadcasters who pronounce the names of Sri Lankan cricketers, for crying out loud, with aplomb if not with precision, surely they must be able to do better than "the Icelandic volcano"? Set some researchers onto it! There's something dismissive about the formula "the Icelandic volcano", as if we really can't be expected to concern ourselves with such trivia as what those northern barbarians call their geography. As if Iceland had only one volcano! But then of course they're stymied when they want to report the concern that the eruption of Eyafjallajökull may be followed by a larger one from Katla - because to name Katla would be to admit that these places do have names, we're just afraid to use them. So Katla becomes "another Icelandic volcano". As janni says: "I picture it off in the corner, muttering, 'You want a volcano you can pronounce? I'll give you a volcano you can pronounce ...'"

So thank goodness for the internet which brings us our news: that same post of janni's has some fine links. People are posting photos to Flickr: this set has some great ones. Via makinglight, the Boston Globe's Big Picture collects some more amazing images: I particularly like the one of the farmers working to dust-proof the barn in time for lambing, while the barn door frames a view of the plume of ash rising serenely from the volcano. But there are some dramatic night-time views, too: the National Geographic answers my question: why is there so often lightning in these pictures?

Against this degree of upheaval and risk, the inconvenience of the flight ban is secondary. Which is easy to say, since I've not been personally inconvenienced. It crops up in unexpected places: an author friend reports back from the London Book Fair that it was "very odd this year. Like a ghost town." She had a day's schedule of meetings booked, but only her French editor actually got there. Sad tales of rose-growers in Kenya say something about the madness of the market economy. And the Poet Laureate has written a poem.

I came to the Today programme this morning halfway through an item about a family who had managed to make their way home from holiday - I suspect in Spain, though I missed that. Since they couldn't fly (and, as I say, I only heard half the story) they had hired a car. They'd clearly been unlucky: French railways were on strike, they said, and the main road through the Pyrenees was closed, they'd had to find their own way through. But it had been a revelation: France is a big country, they said, when you're driving through it, much bigger than it seems when you're floating above it. And it would be pleasant to drive through, if you were on holiday and could take your time... Well, yes. I wonder if they will, next year?

The Guardian television review on July 27th began:

Remember supergroups? Like Cream - with Eric Clapton, Ginger Rogers and Jack Bruce. Well The Nightmares Next Door (Channel 4) is a bit like that - super-reality TV

Ah, yes, Cream: the band whose drummer did it in high heels, and backwards.

(Thanks to the miracle of the internet, Ginger Baker has been reinstated in the on-line text of this review).

ETA that by a pleasing piece of synchronicity, Neil Gaiman has been discussing the merits of the press's practice of removing evidence of past errors. He is forgiving towards those who try to obliterate past errors:

It's definitely a good thing that online journalism is capable of revising itself to agree with reality, although it's going to puzzle the hell out of all the people in the future who click on the links to the BBC page and are unable to discover what they're meant to be outraged about.

but some of his readers disagree.

In fairness to the Guardian, they do run a (very entertaining) Corrections and Clarifications column, and corrections are frequently appended to the online report, rather than insinuated into the text, as happened here.

A joyful piece in the Guardian* about Davy Graham: joyful not only because it's good to hear that the man is still alive, and still making music (and on his own terms, however bizarre), but also because the writer is so careful about his subject's fragility. I found this particularly delicious:

I have met Graham once before, at the Camden flat at the end of 2004, after months of trying to track him down. Still handsome and elegant at 64, he was gracious if rather eccentric ... A trip to a nearby pub ended in disaster, when hearing Roll With It by Oasis on the pub stereo induced a panic attack in Graham. We returned to his flat, and for the rest of the evening he stood in the middle of his bedroom and played the mandolin with his eyes closed, smiling in beatific concentration.

and ask only, which of these men do you think is in control of the situation?


*It occurs to me that if I were taking this tagging business seriously, I could tag all the posts which arise from items in the Guardian - or perhaps it would be easier to tag those which don't?