Thursday 5 August, 2021
Twilight in Norfolk
In a way, this is an extraordinary photograph. It’s a 2-second handheld exposure taken on Brancaster Staithe with an iPhone 11, after sunset. And although I have a pretty steady hand, it isn’t 2-second steady. So some heavy-duty computational processing went into making this image as sharp as it is.
Quote of the Day
”The difference between an author and a horse is that the horse doesn’t understand the horse-dealer’s language.”
Max Frisch
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Crosby, Stills and Nash | Teach Your Children | Live
I know I’ve posted this before but I love it and it just popped up on a playlist and I’m on holidays with some of my kids, so it seems appropriate. Not that there’s anything I can teach them :-)
Long Read of the Day
John Banville on Graham Greene
Pure delight of a review essay in The Nation.
Sample:
Greene chafed under the privilege into which he was born. His family may have been top dogs, but from his earliest days Graham was firmly on the side of the underdog. His parents’ people were moneyed, with business interests including brewing, which involved the slave trade: An ancestor, Benjamin Greene, ran a business on the island of St. Kitts in the West Indies that was worked by 225 slaves. Greene’s parents were first cousins, and both had tainted genes. Charles Greene’s father suffered from what Graham judged to be manic depression, like himself, and his maternal grandfather, an Anglican priest, was also mentally ill. The latter labored under a burden of guilt—presumably he had Doubts—and according to Graham, “when his bishop refused his request to be defrocked, he proceeded to put the matter into effect himself in a field,” doffing his frock and standing naked before his goggle-eyed parishioners. Perhaps understandably, the Reverend Greene became an unmentionable in the family, so that his grandson assumed he was dead (though in fact he lived until 1924) and must have posed “a living menace” to his daughter and her family. Out of such stuff are novelists made, and a “Catholic novelist” in particular.