What Camera did Irving Penn use?

There is a good old apocryphal story about the author Ernest Hemingway and the photographer Irving Penn.

Ernest Hemingway to Irving Penn:
“Your photos are really good. What camera do you use?”
Irving Penn to Ernest Hemingway:
“Your novels are excellent. What typewriter do you use?”

The problem with the story is of course that it does not give the important information, which camera did Penn actually use? Luckily, the National Portrait Gallery in London can inform us that he used Rolleiflex, Deardorff V8 and Hasselblad. And certainly a bunch of others during his long life.

Ernest Hemingway used a Corona #3 typewriter when he want to Europe in 1921. Thanks to this blog for finding references about this in Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, 1969, New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons. He is also supposed to have used a Royal Arrow, Underwood and Halda. Three of his typewriters allegedly still are at the Hemingway villa Finca Vigia in Cojimar Cuba.

A similar story is told about the Venetian painter Giovanni Bellini (c. 1430 – 1516) who is supposed to have asked Albrecht Dürer (1471 - 1528) for the brush by which Dürer managed to paint so realistic beards. Dürer gave him a perfectly ordinary brush; it was his own skill that made the beards lifelike. 

The Corona typewriter in this picture was probably not used by Hemingway.

Staggering Happiness

There is a rumour... (Actually, no, there isn't. But there could be. And perhaps soon will be, if people read out this blog to each other in a mumbling voices.) Anyhow...

There is a rumour that a team of zoologists from the university of Cuxhaven have found a new species of cockroach in South Eastern Sawarak on the border to Indonesia. The exterior aspect of the cockroach is somewhat unusual, but what is stunning is its mind.

Several tests of the hormones in this tiny animal, showed that it was the happiest thing ever identified. The structure and concentration of the chemicals showed that it was far happier than even a grown up human can ever aspire to become. It was happier than a winning football team and even happier than hundreds of dolphins playing with red plastic balls.

Naturally, the researchers felt bad about destroying such intense happiness, and none of them wanted to harm the cockroach in any way. Consequently, the cockroach gained the privilege to walk around in their morning cherry jam and eat as much as it wanted.

This is the first known example of an animal having developed a call for envy and compassion as self defence.

Fighting Islamisation - a Strangely Consequent Approach

My brother-in-law, Bob, was really upset the other day. He discovered that their new neighbours were Muslims.

"This needs to be stopped!" he said. "They move here, to a nice Christian neighbourhood..."
"Well, the couple across the street are atheists."
"Yes, but I'm sure they do not mean it. If they had to choose, I'm sure they would be Christians."
"Your next-door neighbours on the other side are also atheists, actually. And the Smiths further down the street. And the Joneses further up are Hindus."
"Yes, yes, but they are not Muslims. And that is the point. We non-Muslims need to stick together."
"Because you have zero confidence in Muslims?"
"Stop right there! I have little confidence in Muslims. Not zero. Zero is a concept we Westerners imported from the Muslim world eight hundred years ago. It is a Muslim idea, and we do not need it."
"We do not need the number zero? What about typing the year you were born, 1970?"
"That can easily be done with good Christian numerals: MXMCLPRSPQRX or something like that."
"Are you feeling well? I could get you a brandy."
"Never will I drink that disgusting Muslim drink."
"What? Muslims do not drink alcohol."
"True, but the chemical process of distillation is something we Westerners learnt from the Muslims during the middle ages. I will never drink any distilled drinks again."
"You need to sit down. Help yourself to some fruit, if you want to."
"Don't you have any non-Muslim fruits?"
"What?"
"Look in the bowl. Full of Muslim propaganda! Peaches, apricots, oranges..."
"... which we all got from the Muslims. I get the idea. A glass of water then? Or a cup of water, in case we learnt how to make glass from the Muslim world."
"A cup will be fine, thanks."
"Good. Lemon with that?"
"Lemon!"
"Sorry, probably something we got from the Muslims, right?"
"Absolutely. Like artichokes, aubergines, saffron and spinach."
"Well, I was not about to offer you any slice of spinach in your water."
"Fine!"

I went to the kitchen to get a cup of water without lemon or spinach. When I came back, Bob was busy tearing my nephew's pocket calculator apart with a penknife.

"Bob, what are you doing?!"
"Look at that! Sine, cosine, tangent, all Muslim inventions. I will remove the buttons from this sinful gadget."
"No, you will not. That sinful gadget is not yours."

I pulled the calculator from him and looked at it.

"You removed the division sign. Do you want to imply that we learnt division from the Muslims?"
"No. We Westerners have always been able to divide, as have all civilisations, I guess."
"And?"
"It is the slash to separate numerator and denominator that is a Muslim idea. We cannot have that, can we?"

I sighed and switched on the radio to get some music to calm down with. Bob immediately started to scream and covered his ears.

"Switch it off! Switch it off!"
"What now?"
"It is the Beatles!"
"And the Beatles were Muslims?"
"No, but they play guitars. Guitars are measly Muslim instruments that were brought to Europe through Spain in the middle ages."

I switched channels.

"And what about Johann Sebastian Bach's incredibly Christian Mass in B-minor? I can hardly think of any more Christian piece of music."
"This is nothing to joke about." Bob rushed up and switched it off. "The violin has its roots in the Muslim instrument rebab. I refuse to listen to that Islamic noise. No symphony orchestras when I'm around, please!"

When he rushed up, he dropped the cup of water on his shirt. I offered to lend him a dry shirt of mine, but he pointed out that cotton was brought to the West by Muslims. I offered to go to the pharmacy around the corner, to buy him some sedatives, but he pointed out that pharmacies were a Muslim invention.

"Bob," I finally cried. "You are mad. You are nuts. There is no reason in anything you say. You should be locked up in an asylum."
"Yes," he answered. "Yes. Yes and No."
"What?"
"Yes, I am mad. And I am proud of it. There have been mad people around in the West since the beginning of time. It is a good old Christian state of mind. However, the idea that one should take care of the mad people in asylums, that is an invention from the Muslim world, just like other hospitals, so I absolutely refuse to be treated in an asylum."

Ehm

I forgot what I wanted to write now.

Do you remember what you wanted to read? If so, please write it down on a piece of paper and read it out with a loud and clear voice.

No computers, please

There is a New York Times blog about a coffee shop where they do not allow computers. Or e-Book readers.

The logic of the coffee shop may have something to it. They want a rapid turnover of clients so they get rapid turnover of money. If people have too nice a time, playing computer games or reading long novels, they can stay for ever and take up place for paying customers.

However, why stop at electronic devices? They should prevent anyone from having too fun. No paper books. No newspapers. And something that is even more time consuming than reading is of course: friends. There should be no talking allowed. No chatting. No laughing. Preferably no drinking or eating either.

That would really make people leave quickly.

The World is not Boolean

Being agnostic does not always mean that you do not know. It often means that you know that you do not know. That means that you have more information than someone who considers himself informed.

I just read this in a booklet about evolution:

Mutations can be:

• harmful
• beneficial or
• neutral

That is a good example of an informed statement that is blatantly false. The general idea is of course right, and it is something to keep in mind if you want to learn about evolution.

However, there are not exactly three possible labels for each mutation. We cannot take a particular mutation and classify it as "harmful" and nothing else or definitely "beneficial". And we rarely can claim it to be absolutely "neutral".

Unless you define what those terms mean, the statement has hardly any information value at all. Beneficial for what? For the individual? For the group? In the current environment? In any environment? When the individual is young or when he grows old? For males or females?

Sickle-cell anaemia is caused by a mutation that also happens to make the person immune to malaria. Is that "beneficial" or "harmful"? Both. If you live on Greenland, it is a bad mutation, but if you move to Congo, that same mutation can help you.

One could go out on a limb here, and say that each and every mutation has some beneficial and some harmful value. Sometimes, it is almost entirely beneficial and sometimes almost entirely harmful, but most of the time somewhere in between.

There are admittedly "neutral" mutations. Those are mutations that have absolutely no effect whatsoever.

The point, however, is that we have a tendency to put absolute labels on things, and think using those labels. Was the war in Iraq "good" or "bad"? Is the lady in the at the news stand down the street "nice" or "nasty"? Are state subsidies to collapsing banks "good" or "bad"?

The answer to all those questions, if one thinks about it, is "neither". Or "both". A bit of this and a bit of that.

This does not mean that it does not matter. It matters a lot, when you are leader of a country and a major bank collapses. You have to choose: either you save the bank or not. Just do not think that the decision will be "right" or "wrong". It will be mostly right or mostly wrong. It may help some people long term, and harm other people short term. The decision will be partly good and partly wrong. The task is to figure out which decision is more good and less bad.

But if you describe the world in absolute terms, you describe a world that does not exist.

Poor white South Africans

An acquaintance of mine had seen a television program that clearly was based on Finbarr O’Reilly's photos. The program had apparently been biased in a way to tell the story of the current horrible situation of the poor whites in South Africa, ignoring the situation of poor blacks.

What the program did not mention was that there always have been some poor white people in SA, just like one of the comments says below the NYT article: "The emergence of Afrikaner nationalism, over 100 years ago, was tied, in part, to a desire to lift poor white Afrikaners out of poverty." There have of course been many other poor Europeans in Africa, notably Portuguese in Angola and Mozambique.

The implicit statement of the television program, that black majority rule makes loads of white poor for the first time in Southern Africa's history, is clearly wrong.

But as a white European, it is not easy to find any acceptable reaction to O'Reilly's pictures. One has to sympathise with the poor whites, of course, as one should sympathise with poor people of all colours in all countries. On the other hand, it feels very awkward to pick out this particular group, when there are plenty of poor blacks in South Africa and plenty of other poor people in Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Andorra, Angola and so on all the way to the United States and Zimbabwe.


Food is handed out to residents in Coronation Park. Photo: Finbarr O’Reilly

Karlfeldt vs Dickens vs Eliot - three learned men

In the poem Sång efter skördeanden the Swedish poet Erik Axel Karlfeldt, describes how Fridolin "talar med bönder på böndernas sätt men med lärde män på latin" - "speaks with peasants in peasants' ways but with learned men in Latin".

It is a very useful expression in Swedish. The problem is to find an equivalent English saying that describes the ability to change language and style according to whom you speak with.

The best thing I found so far is originally from Charles Dickens' Our Mutual Friend:

‘For I aint, you must know,’ said Betty, ‘much of a hand at reading writing-hand, though I can read my Bible and most print. And I do love a newspaper. You mightn’t think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices.’

The last sentence, He do the Police in different voices, was taken up by T. S. Eliot, who used it as the working title of The Waste Land.

Unfortunately, that phrase is a far cry from Karlfeldt's lines, at least for my purpose to describe someone who is able to adapt his language to the situation. If anyone has any better proposal, feel free to post it.

We are completely cut off, but it does not really matter

Strange that the current eruption of the volcano of Eyjafjallajökull is not more noticeable than it is. All air traffic in Northern Europe is cancelled. And yet, we do not really care. We communicate with family and friends and foes that are thousands of kilometres away as easily as we always do using the internet, even if hardly any physical transport can take place.

Diagnosed psychopaths

In my (fictitious) sister's company, all management went to a psycho-therapy training. Part of the training was a so called ppt test, which unfortunately showed that all managers without exception had psychopathic tendencies. They were therefore all dismissed and sent for urgent treatment.

The company could of course not work without management, so the shareholder's board were in a hurry to employ new managers. To speed up the process, they borrowed the ppt test to quickly identify candidates with the kind of psychological profile they considered desirable.