what we've got

For some, photography isn’t quite art because it simply captures reality. There is no artifice in many shots, no craft: the world comes together in a moment of specific configuration, more or less outside of an artist’s intent, and a photographer simply points the camera and – click! Art is made. Or isn’t, since the artist has very little to do. There isn’t the sheer hard work that goes in to, say, a painting or a novel. We might feel – ‘I could have done that!’ And indeed we could, if all photography means is to point and click.

Diane Arbus‘ photo ‘Identical Twins‘ shows us in a very immediate way that photography can do more than that. On one level we have a photo of two very similar girls. However, despite their clear resemblance we quickly notice differences: one girl is frowning a little while the other smiles; one pair of eyes is hooded, the other clear and open; the hands are slightly different, the hair; and so on. And as we notice those differences, we interpret those them as significant and meaningful: we might say that one child is happy; one less prim and proper than the other; one more dominant, and so on. We might then go on to think about the nature of identity, of how uniqueness triumphs uniformity. We find meaning in gaps, the differences between the two girls.

This process of finding ‘meaning in the gaps’ also lends itself to discovering the ‘art’ in photography. In this way of thinking, the similarity is not between two subjects but between the photograph and the reality it represents. The gaps are those elements where the photographer has introduced an element of creativity, artifice, illusion, call it what you will. In the above example, there are many examples. First, the photographer has assembled the two girls in a certain pose, emphasising the same hairstyle, clothes and so on. This helps us in seeing the differences – and finding the meanings – between the two subjects. It’s clearly not just a slice of life, although it might include that.

But note the junction between wall and floor: it is at an angle, higher on the left compared to the right. This is deliberate. We might interpret this as saying: what seems a balanced portrait is actually askew; although seemingly identical, our immediate perceptions are upset by the uncertainty that their differences bring; that the photograph wants to destabilise our preconceptions about what it means to be the same and yet not the same; that ultimately what seems to be a simple capturing of reality is really the product of the artist-photographer intent.

Reading photographs like this is underpinned by two central ideas. The first is that there is no such as thing as an ‘innocent’ photograph, that is, one taken without any kind of artifice or creativity. Even when taking holidays snaps we don’t just point and click: we might frame the face so the top of the head of our subject is not cut off; we’re told to put the main subject to one side to promote a sense of harmony, create some interest. The second central idea, following from the first, is that even the smallest details are often there deliberately. In ‘Identical Twins’, the slant of the junction between the wall and floor is deliberately significant, as we’ve seen.

What we have in this photo is a metaphor for the relationship between art and reality. Where two very similar images (ideas, symbols, techniques) are placed in close proximity it is likely that we will find differences between them. It is in those differences that the meaning lie. ‘Identical Twins’ (it’s title at once both plainly descriptive but, as we’ve seen, highly charged with meaning) by Diane Arbus is one of those key photographs that tell us more about the relationship between photography and reality, and between photography and art.

Postscript
If you find this image a little unsettling there are good reasons for it. Our minds are programmed to identify the human face. When we see slight discrepancies between the real and the near-real, as we might most often in Japanese ‘humanoid’ robots or ultra-realistic computer games, we enter the ‘uncanny valley’, that phase of interpretation where an image appears strange,   Here, the differences between two ‘identical’ twins remind us of that disjunct. It is also the starkness of the black and white; the unfussy background which focusses our attention; the confrontational quality implied by the pose and gaze direct to the viewer. The film director Stanley Kubrick would later use a similar image for the murdered twins in his ‘The Shining’.

[Spoilers ahead] I’ve just finished Harry Thompson‘s ‘Penguins Stopped Play‘, a book about cricket and travel, in that order. Most of you will like one and not the other of these two subjects (no prizes for guessing which). But, as with so many things that are lovingly made, intelligently crafted and passionately expressed it has a significance beyond its deceptively simple approach. In this case, it is as much about what it means to live than an account of a team of amateur cricketers who decide to play a match in every continent. This is partly because Thompson died shortly after finishing the book, at only 45.

I knew before reading the book that Thompson had died and I suppose I had some kind of mawkish interest in what happened to someone so young, an age I’m approaching. I found it almost impossible to pick it up and not turn to the final pages, where he writes without sentiment (but with a touching metaphor of the slip fielders lining up waiting to catch him) about his inoperable cancer. In a final chapter his wife briefly writes about his death and funeral. She hears the thunk of a cricket ball land in his coffin, dropped there by the members of the team he captained: entirely appropriate, she tells us, as she had already placed a bat in his hands.

But rather than sadness in the pages that preceded those I found a joyous affirmation of someone living as they wanted, fulfilling their passion, squeezing some of the zest from life. The death of one of the book’s many colourful characters, a beloved cricketer who passes at the batman’s crease just as he is about to score his hundred, foreshadows Thompson’s own life cut lamentably short. And inevitably, as the pages thin out and stop, we turn attention upon ourselves and our loved ones and remember, too, that our lives will end. And as we do, we remind ourselves of how we should try to make our lives as happy, loving and passionate as we can, just as Thompson appears to in this unlikely book about cricket and travel, in that order.

For me, Thompson has become one of those writers you want to call by their first name, as if you know them. Thanks, Harry.

It’s been a year since Jennie and I left England to move to Geneva Switzerland, and later to nearby France where we live now. I won’t go into the sentimental details of the ‘anniversary’ – suffice to say that there was a little reminiscing over a glass of champers last night, thinking about the year that has passed – so instead here’s a list of how French life is great and the things I miss about the UK. In no particular order…

Why I love France

Weather. It’s hotter here in the summer than the UK, there are more days filled with sunshine, and it’s relatively consistent and predictable too. Summer last year was like the feted one in 1976 in the UK, the one we think all summers should be like. Since meteo.fr is particular to my specific area, the forecast seems always to get it right. There are some indifferent days, of course, but generally it is less damp than England, less gloomy. The barbie gets more use. Conversely, when it snows, it is colder than the UK, colder but a dry cold. What this means is there is a greater range of…

Outdoor activity. In the summer you can plan days out because it’s likely you’ll get decent weather. Since we live in the countryside, more or less, we have some excellent hiking, golf, cycling, climbing, swimming… the list goes on. We have a tennis court and football ground at the end of the road. The key thing is, as the winter comes the sports only get better: when it’s snowing, we go snowboarding or snowshoeing. It’s this kind of year-round activity that is one of my most favourite things about this place.

The mountains and the water. We live in the Rhône-Alpes region, so as you might expect there are lots of mountains and there is lots of water. We live around an hour or so from some of the best Alpine locations anywhere and I can see the Salève and Jura mountain ranges from my window. We have Lakes Geneva and Annecy, which we plan to boat on soon. What’s more, we have Geneva on our doorstep, so we get to do all the city things, too – and there are the all-important opportunities for work.

Food and wine. I’ve done some independent studies* on this and, in short, food is better in my part of France than in the UK. Much better. Even local stores have local produce, lovingly laid out and presented. (There is one exception, as you’ll see.) Even the small fact that France loves whisky, as do I, seems as if it is just the right place. The aisles dedicated to cured meat and cheese found in the hypermarché should be enough to convince you of its culinary superiority; if it doesn’t, try some of the local wines from Satigny, or the Rhône, or…

Secular, liberal, republic. So far, I’ve counted the physical things, like weather and mountains. But there are political or philosophical things, too. One of the latter is the fact that France is a modern, democratic secular, liberal, republic. This generally coincides with my approach, my politics. It doesn’t mean that France is without its issues. But nor does it mean that these high ideals are completely detached from public life either. You’ll find them in bars and restaurants and in the fabric of life out here. I even found a copy of Camus’ ‘L’etranger’ at the local supermarket.

People work to live, not live to work. Shops are closed on Sunday here (some large supermarkets are open in the morning) and often closed on Monday, too. Many more close for a long lunch, between 12.00 and 14.00. It’s annoying sometimes and takes getting used to, but it illustrates how the French try to put living before working. It’s not perfect, and we’ve been affected by strikes and so on, but it’s something I can believe in (and not just because I’m lazy, either).

Before you get on the plane (or not, as the case might be) to leave it all behind, there are some downsides, at least as far as I’m concerned…

What I miss about England

Family and friends. You have to leave your family and friends behind. That is, unless you can take them with you. I’m working on the latter. You get more popular when you live in a nice place and I try to convert every member of my family who comes through the door to move out here. France isn’t a million miles away, either, and it’s only a short plane flight to go to the UK. We all do a lot of social networking stuff, too.

Newspapers. The quality of newspapers here is very high. Le Monde, Le Figaro and even the free or cheap newspapers like 20 Minutes focus on more on news, not just gossip. But since I’m still learning French, I can’t read them effortlessly, which is how I like to read a newspaper, especially at weekends. The French Paper is quite good but it doesn’t have the frequency or sheer heft of a good old weekend broadsheet, stuffed with magazines and reviews.

Marks and Spencer. There’s plenty of good shopping out here, but there’s nothing like a Marks and Sparks. It’s the corduroy, you see – the cardigan. There is one in Geneva but it sells only clothes for women and food. However, I can order online, and it’s fairly cheap at around £5 to ship to France, so all is not lost.

Curry. Despite an ongoing fervent search, I still haven’t found a convincing curry house. The curry in Geneva, even in what appear ‘authentic’ places, is adapted (read ‘made innocuously bland’) to a Swiss and French taste in the places I’ve been. It’s just as well my wife Jennie is a great cook. On a related note, you can get Marmite and baked beans (other staples) but they are often horribly expensive.

Language. It’s hard sometimes to know that everyone around you doesn’t understand what you might want to say, that you are divided by a language, even if you might share common interests and beliefs. The answer is to learn French. If you’re like me, you might find this tough. But when you get a moment of breakthrough – perhaps you listen to the radio, and understand what is being said, at least in part – it is completely rewarding and worthwhile.

I can’t say I miss UK culture – music, tv, movies – because we get them all here. Without them it would be difficult, I think. And I can’t say we’re completely immersed in French culture, either. Some of it, especially some of the pop music and comedy shows, I’m happy to leave aside for now.

If you think these lists amount to my succumbing to the temptation (common in other ex-pats, I’ve found) to criticize their home country when they leave it, then think again: I love the UK and always will. A move away from home can mean that you love it just the same, not less. I’ll be supporting England in the football World Cup. It’s just that I now have another couple of teams to shout for, too – France and Switzerland. Addition doesn’t mean dilution.

But the biggest thing I’ll take, though, is not necessarily to be found in either the UK or France and is this: we feel good because we took ourselves from our relative comfort zones and tried something new and challenging; that we developed a new confidence and broader outlook that comes with the huge upheaval of moving to a country with a different language and culture; that we’ve not just sat and thought it would be nice to move, but actually gone and done it.

It’s not that people don’t do this kind of thing every day, or that it’s particularly unusual or daring or brave. We’re none of those things. It’s just that it is unusual for us, a challenge, something that has allowed us to be different from ourselves and one we’re lucky to say has worked out wonderfully. And who could not love an area like Haute-savoie when it has the motto: ‘In tartiflette we trust!‘ This is a place I’m happy to call ‘home’.

*I mean I’ve eaten in both France and England quite a lot.

My wife Jennie recently told me a anecdote about a stint working as a waitress in Canada, a period in which she made ends meet whilst she studied. In the restaurant, there used to be a box passed around into which the patrons could drop their tip, hidden from the rest of the group. One tip would reappear with wearying familiarity and that tip would be a scrap of paper upon which was written: don’t eat the yellow snow.

No doubt suffering from l’esprit de l’escalier I suggested that my tip would be a perhaps more serious, even pompous one: ‘stop being offended’. I think, like irony and innocence (which are another matter), that being offended has become a real blight on the relationships in our everyday and cultural life and at its worst threatens one of humanity’s greatest achievements, free speech. Or rather, as the writer Philip Pullman reminds us with his pithy, eloquent and beautifully pitched response, you don’t have the right to live without taking offence:

Just as we have the right to publish our thoughts and feelings – and we do, now that we blog, and Tweet and share so keenly – we are equally subject to those thoughts and feelings being criticised, from which offence might arise. We show our strength through our reaction to criticism, where it falls on the right side of a law that embraces free speech.

It seems self-evident to think that our tastes in literature and our interpretation of texts is grounded in our unique selves. The meaning and effect we find in reading is the sum of our parts, or even more so, created and sustained through an unprecedented and never-to-be-repeated configuration of our individual personality, experiences and background.

I remember hearing as a child that each snowflake had a unique design, and later seeing that most wonderfully demonstrated in those unforgettable photos of microscopically-enhanced individual snowflakes, their geometric, symmetrical details organised into mind-boggingly endless possibilities. And then being told – you’re as unique as that snowflake, beautiful and individual.

Thinking more broadly, such beliefs are probably sustained through a necessity of considering ourselves as individuals, a sign of how far our ego protects us by identifying us as special amongst a morass of different, sometimes competing, external forces, including other people. Whatever the reason, it’s permeated our culture for some time, and we may remember finding it illustrated in the snowflake example from our shared cultural heritage.*

You might reasonably think that as a unique snowflake (leaving the beauty aside) that there would be very little consensus when it comes to interpretation. Following this through, as individuals, we experience meaning and effect as relative to our persona. Extended logically, we should all generate different interpretations, have different tastes, given that we have uniquely individual lives.

But we are not beautiful and unique snowflakes (at least when it comes to interpretation of literary texts).

Some time ago, the literary critic and theorist Stanley Fish ran some experiments with his class to see the extent to which they agreed on details of the texts they read. (His experiment and results can be read in his work, Interpreting the Variorum and the brilliantly titled, Is There a Text in this Class?). What he found, in brief, was that there was a large degree of consensus within what became known as ‘interpretative communities‘. These communities shared common ideas, backgrounds, experiences: they might, for example, have taken a class on Romantic Poets before they read Blake; or their economic and social circumstances may have been similar; they may also be aware of the authorial intent (although the usefulness of this is another matter). Fish’s work is quite old now, but it’s still relevant, and highly influential.

Despite the division of people into communities, his work shows us that our interpretations and tastes are largely a product of the social groups in which we sit – our ‘uniqueness’ does not, at least in these terms, extend to an indivisible relativistic singular – a person, a ‘unique and beautiful snowflake’. This helps explain why some books become classics, or even that some are published at all – because an agent or publisher will decide what they think the market will like. That market is just another interpretative community. What is more, those books, when published, are no less subject to the writer’s own contract with his or her interpretative community; ideas, inspiration and so on are a product too of the community in which the writer belongs (the notion of intertextuality is useful here).

It doesn’t mean that our take on books and our reading is not valuable, not least to ourselves. Rather, it means that your reading in a broader sense is a product of the interpretative communities – for there will be more than one – in which you reside. Reading (and writing), far from being a solitary endeavour, might be more social than we first think.

* In this case I mean, a Western one; I suspect but don’t know for sure if this idea exists elsewhere in quite the same way.

Watched the news lately, picked up a newspaper? Then it’s likely you’ll be at least tempted into being afraid, if not downright hide-behind-the-sofa, peek-from-under-the-cushion terrified.

Here’s what you do to overcome the fear in the media. The first is listen to Doug Stanhope. He seems to know something about fear (the audio is not suitable for work so put your headphones on).

When you’re done with Doug read this analysis of how fear works by Tom Engelhardt, along with some statistical analysis (especially if you’re American – I’m not – but the principle applies elsewhere, too).

And if you’re still a little unconvinced, then watch Adam Curtis’ superb dissection of the ways that governments and organisations use fear to try to control me and you, in his documentary The Power of Nightmares.

And by then – well, you may have stopped worrying and learn to love the calm.

I remember recently reading a sniffy article on the use of lyrics from an Amy Winehouse song, ‘Love is a Losing Game’ as a way of introducing accessible and commonplace ‘poetry’ to novices, undergraduates in this case, embarking upon a close reading of poetry for an exam. Untypically outmoded for The Guardian, it suggested that these lyrics would compare unfavourably with the other poets on the syllabus, including Walter Raleigh.

Have you heard her lyrics? – I thought. Have you reckoned at their poetry? Her lyrics are not always as good as ‘Love is a Losing Game’ – in some cases, they are better. In ‘Back to Black’ we find in its lyrics many of the elements of poetry clearly identifiable, employed with sophistication – and they’re beautifully effective, too. Here are the lyrics in full, and then I’ll do a quick close reading of some of the most salient bits as I see them:

Back to Black – Amy Winehouse

He left no time to regret
Kept his dick wet
With his same old safe bet
Me and my head high
And my tears dry
Get on without my guy
You went back to what you knew
So far removed from all that we went through
And I tread a troubled track
My odds are stacked
I’ll go back to black

We only said good-bye with words
I died a hundred times
You go back to her
And I go back to…

I go back to…
us

I love you much
It’s not enough
You love blow and I love puff
And life is like a pipe
And I’m a tiny penny rolling up the walls inside

We only said goodbye with words
I died a hundred times
You go back to her
And I go back to (x2)

Black
Black
Black
Black
Black
Black
Black
I go back to…
I go back to…

We only said good-bye with words
I died a hundred times
You go back to her
And I go back to…

We only said good-bye with words
I died a hundred times
You go back to her
And I go back to black

First of all, there are local instances of poetic language. In the second verse/stanza we find: ‘And I tread a troubled track’. The repeated use of the sounds ‘tr…’ at the beginning of more or less successive words is a sound equivalent of the steps she takes, an aural approximation of her path of recurring steps, one after the other, that lead her ‘back to black’. (Important for the undergraduate, it’s called ‘alliteration’ and along with assonance – the repetition of vowel sounds, often at the beginning of works – and a technique best used sparingly.)

What precisely does ‘black’ mean in this song? An advanced paper might argue whether this is an example of metonym or metaphor (do we literally go back to ‘black’?) but we understand that ‘black’ represents or stands in for depression, bleakness and unhappiness. And widening the poem’s use of poetic language, we find that Winehouse rhymes ‘black’ with ‘back’ in that recurrent motif, suggestive of the monotony, inevitability even, of her return to darkness as a result of the loss of her lover. The verbal nearness of ‘back’ and ‘black’ echo the tired movement from happiness to sadness as he returns to his ‘old safe bet’.

But this is not just a poem, it’s a lyric, and just as theatre loses some of its power when not performed, so this song is diminished when read solely as poetry divorced from its music. (If you can use Spotify, the link is at the bottom). When Winehouse sings: ‘And I’m a tiny penny rolling up the walls inside’ much of the power is lost without its vocal incarnation, her intonation reminiscent of the path a penny might take as it rolls around the sides of the pipe, like a water drop gradually slipping down a drain, or one of those circus motorcyclists that trace an ever decreasing circle around a turning wall as they brake and slowly come to a halt. In another example, present in the doleful repetition of the single word ‘black’ several times in the middle eight, perhaps more obvious in the way it achieves its effect, but no less powerful for it.

I’m not the first to discuss the matter and the whole idea that song lyrics represent some of our most vibrant poetry is an oldie, and a goodie. I could have written this for a number of songs – the lyrics to Elvis Costello’s ‘Beyond Belief’ are astonishing, and I’m a fan of Midlake’s lyrics on their new album, too. No doubt you’ve your own examples. Which all goes to show – we’re lucky in our post-modern age that we are not limited by the genre and perceived seriousness of the artform when we consider what is, and what isn’t, art – and poetry.

Link via Spotify: Amy Winehouse – Back To Black

Raymond Carver never liked being called a literary minimalist but he was one, at least under the editorial knife of his sometime editor, Gordon Lish. Beginners, Carver’s posthumous collection of the unedited stories that were first published as What We Talk About When We Talk About Love in a heavily edited form in 1981, goes some way to renegotiating that label.

Because Carver didn’t like the term, it doesn’t mean the stories are any better now that Beginners restores them to their original, less-minimalist state. As you might expect, comparing the new volume with the old we find that some stories are better, some remain largely the same, but some are worse without the would-be villainous hand of Lish.

I hesitate to say Carver didn’t solely produce his own best work. It goes against many of those conventions we hold dear about genius, creativity and authorship in general and about what we – and I, as a scholar of Carver’s work* – believe and trust in particular. Such a claim is best demonstrated through example, so I’m going to do that here.

Much has been said about Carver and Lish and the overall different effect of reading both versions, but I’m going to show how it works in detail through a close comparative reading of the opening passages of a less well celebrated story. In What We Talk About… (WWTA) it is called ‘I Could See the Smallest Things’; in Beginners (B) it is called ‘Want to See Something?’

Here’s the opening from WWTA:

I was in bed when I heard the gate. I listened carefully. I didn’t hear anything else. But I heard that. I tried to wake Cliff. He was passed out. So I got up and went to the window. A big moon was laid over the mountains that went around the city. It was a white moon and covered with scars. Any damn fool could imagine a face there.

And here’s the opening from B:

I was in bed when I heard the gate unlatch. I listened carefully. I didn’t hear anything else. But I had heard that. I tried to wake cliff, but he was passed out. So I got up and went to the window. A big moon hung over the mountains that surrounded the city. It was a white moon and covered with scars, easy enough to imagine a face there – eye sockets, nose, even the lips.

I’m going to go through it, picking up the most significant changes. Here’s the first line again:

I was in bed when I heard the gate. (WWTA)

I was in bed when I heard the gate unlatch. (B)

The minimalist enterprise was concerned with paring down sentences by removing words, phrases and so on. This is a good example of that in action. In the minimalist version, the word ‘unlatch’ is removed. The effect is to remove certainty and introduce ambiguity: we know the gate has made a sound but we don’t know why. In some cases, this is preferable and you might argue that knowing the gate had become unlatched is more sinister and troubling than simply hearing the gate. Typically, though, minimalist writers won’t tell you want to think and you can see that even a single word can reveal a specific and clear meaning. This example shows how the minimalist aesthetic invites the reader to participate in the interpretation of the story because there is a paucity of detail: something is missing, so the reader must provide it.

Moving on. Here’s the next significant difference between the texts:

I tried to wake Cliff. He was passed out. (WWTA)

I tried to wake cliff, but he was passed out. (B)

This example illustrates how small changes in the text affect the ways in which the rhythm of reading works. In the minimalist example from WWTA, the causative ‘but’ is removed and the sentence is divided. It creates a stopping effect, slows the reading down, and in the context of this passage (and story) underscores the feeling of sudden wakefulness or nervous attention. There’s no smooth transition to support from her partner; Cliff (his name itself suggestive of large immovability) remains defiantly unaware of her ordeal. How the story is read, the pace and flow of the text, helps with the minimalist effect.

Here’s the next line:

A big moon was laid over the mountains that went around the city (WWTA)

A big moon hung over the mountains that surrounded the city (B)

The minimalist technique depended upon inference, elision and ambiguity, so giving the reader too clear a didactic nod would undermine this approach. Typically you find this working in the absence of any kind of interior monologue or access to feelings in many minimalist stories (and in particular, those of Hemingway). Here the effect is the same but more subtle. I like to think that minimalists often describe scenes with the kind of objectivity you find in a photograph. In the example above, the moon was ‘big’ and was ‘laid’ over the mountains that ‘went around’ the city. All of this is detached observation without much of a hint at evaluation.

Compare this with the same ‘big’ moon that ‘hung’ over mountains that ‘surrounded’ the city. Both the terms ‘hung’ and ‘surrounded’ are evaluative and don’t sit with their feet inside the hard-minimalist camp (to coin a phrase). For example, the word ‘surrounded’ suggests a kind of siege, which is analogous to how she feels being trapped in her room while. In this case this single word, even though it’s not hard-minimalism, works well to be evocative without overdoing it. (And if you think that’s reading too much into it, then you’re not reading carefully enough – this is what good writers do in general and minimalist ones in particular.) Similarly, the omission of detail in the moon’s face in the first example is typical of the way that minimalist pared back the detail of their writing to hint at more than they told the reader outright.

Now, we know that nothing – including a photograph – is purely innocent, so we might like to say these aspire to this detached, objective condition at such times. But the effect, paradoxically, is very far from detachment. This is the case because often it’s the accumulation of small details working together that create the minimalist approach and its effect. And working together, the ambiguity of being non-specific about which way the gate is opening; the staccato reading of longer sentences divided into smaller, single-clause barbs; and the taming of evaluative adjectives such as ‘hung’ and ‘surrounded’ all work together to pare back the interpretative clues readers have at their disposal, and which invite the reader to find much more in the story than the words printed on the page.

When thinking about the inevitable question about which story (and approach) was better, it depends on how you like your literature. In a crude metaphor, if you’re the kind of person who likes loose ends at the end of the film, who doesn’t enjoy being spoon-fed or manipulated into a precise way of reading a film, if you like the film to make you think a bit, then you might like and appreciate the kind of minimalist writing that made – and sustains – Carver’s acclaim, in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.

Recently, we’ve become increasingly interested in working in collaboration (following ideas such as ‘collective journalism’ or ‘crowd sourcing‘) but we’re not accustomed to thinking of our most prized writing as being written by what we might pejoratively call a ‘committee’. In many other cases, we still adhere to an outmoded version of creativity springing from an individual mind, perhaps more or less troubled and tossed upon the whimsy of genius, sat in isolation, wrestling with no one other than his or her muse. But as this example illustrates, in a stark harsh light, how far this myth fails to capture the reality of writing, and how writers and editors may work together to create more than the sum of their individual talents.

*I’ve written a PhD on literary minimalism, of which Carver occupies a third (alongside Ernest Hemingway and Frederick Bartheleme). You can read the introduction here.

To me, snowshoeing represents the ideal that you’ll step where others – those with boots on, namely – would fear to tread. And there’s nothing like deep, crisp, undisturbed snow to go wandering in. So, we picked up some snowshoes and off we went to a local area called La Croisette, which is on the Saléve range. The video below shows it better than I could tell you.

We loved it and it’s something we’ll continue to do before the snow melts and the tracks turn dry and golden once more in the summer. But for now – get the gaiters on, fix the snowshoes and “On y va!”

When Don Draper, head of ‘Creative’ in the advertising firm at the centre of the hit TV series ‘Mad Men, rolls his eyes when someone tells him that ‘sex sells’ we know advertising is failing. When he suggests to a client that ‘If you don’t like the conversation, change the topic’ we know that PR is replacing it.

The reason why Draper is so successful and highly esteemed is that he recognises the importance of public relations. What he sells is the brand, the entire set of practices and beliefs that underpins the product, whether it be toothpaste, a bra, or an airline. Advertising is visual; public relations is verbal. The image of the woman draped across a car won’t sell anything; but the conversation, and the aspiration that is carried upon it, just might.

It’s no coincidence that Don Draper used to be a car salesman. That racket was the embodiment of an early, ‘hard’ approach to advertising: drown the client in details; appeal to base impulses; pressurise through conformity, and so on. There’s an example in the show where Draper’s creative team want to sell a Kodak carousel on its technical innovations; for Draper, it’s more about the memories that the projector helps relive. In ‘The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR’, Al and Laura Ries tell us: “The harder the sell the harder the prospect resists the sales message.” Hard selling didn’t work anymore for Draper in the car dealership; and now it won’t work for him at Sterling Cooper.

Advertising was then, PR is now. Only the ‘now’ of Mad Men is the early 1960s. As a result, Don Draper’s trajectory from car salesman to head of Creative at an advertising firm represents the beginnings of the movement from advertising to PR as the preferred approach to persuading the client.