A few days ago I noticed my six-year-old eating noodles in a funny way. He was pulling them up with his teeth while trying to look fierce. I’m a little dinosaur,’ he said. He was play-acting a scene from a recent TV programme, so I quizzed him about what he remembered about dinosaurs. The answer was, not a lot.
There is a modish rush to embrace internet and computer learning, but is learning via a screen a good method? One writer tells how he tried out an interactive programme with his son. The father diligently read the words while the son fiddled with the pictures. ‘Had he spent ten minutes in front of a book, he might possibly have learned something,’ said his father.
Television, as my son and his noodles demonstrate, is an impressionistic, suggestive medium. Research about television and learning shows that learning goes on in a learning environment where dialogue is taking place with teachers or parents. It needs to be mediated. There is nothing wrong with harnessing new technology to teach our children, but there is still a big role for formal education.
By 1918, four-fifths of the film-making capacity of the world had relocated to sad Hollywood. Locals disapproved, seeing their suburb of Los Angeles infected by these new vulgarians. But in the end snobbery yielded to the true American value, success. And success is the box-office gross. Hollywood knows a good film when it sees one: one that may make a star, but must make somebody’s fortune.
In less than a century, Hollywood has grown from a toffee-nosed village to a town as famous as New York, Rome or Paris. And physically, of course, it has changed beyond recognition: a century ago, you would walk through orange groves to the village store. Yet in a way, it is still a village – parochial, with limited horizons – just a little bit of Los Angeles. For all who live and work in it, there is one topic of conversation – films: how much they have made, who is dating whom, who’s been stabbed in the back, who is ‘attached’ to which project. Those who have been successful often try to get away: to work there, but live somewhere else. Yet it is still the one place in the world to which almost everyone who is anyone in show-business (and plenty who aren’t) eventually gravitate
Photography was invented by nineteenth century artists as an art form for their own purposes. These men were seeking a lasting, literal record of their visual surroundings and they found it. The new combination of illumination, lens, shutter, and flat surface coated with chemicals sensitive to light produced images more lasting, more convincing in their reality, and more richly detailed than painters could produce manually in weeks and months of effort. This alone was enough to throw consternation into the ranks of fellow artists; and, after their first reaction of pleasure in a new kind of image, art critics rallied with the haughty charge that photography was not, and could not be, an art. The actual world in which we live had too strong a grip on photography, they said, and pictures so dependent upon mechanical means could not be called acts of man’s creative imagination.
Despite the critics, photographers knew that they had found a new art form, a new mode of expression. They used the new tools as other artists before and after them have used brush and pencil – to interpret the world, to present a vision of nature and its structure as well as the things and the people in it.
During the black-and-white era of book illustration it was axiomatic that each and every children’s book called for some form of illustration. This extended to the large category of novels for the upper reading ages, which was to suffer progressive attrition as print runs shortened. The level of activity in all areas of children’s publishing remained considerable, but it was run predominantly as a low-budget operation for most of the period and as such encouraged a fair amount of routine and mediocre work, although the finest artists seldom submitted less than their professional best. Therefore, the black-and-white archive is part junk shop, part treasure house; a wonderful place for research or for browsing, and one in which to make immediate finds or to begin to re-evaluate a fertile artistic period. The real treasures are bound to return to public display, whether enduringly – through re issues of individual titles and new publications about the artists who illustrated them – or from time to time in the form of exhibitions of original books and drawings. There are signs that, after a period of neglect, this is starting to happen and the familiar processes of stylistic rehabilitation can be seen to be at work. In due course, an enterprising publisher will doubtlessly see the potential for a series of classic children’s book illustrations from this period either in facsimile reprint, or in freshly-designed editions using the original artwork where it survives.
To escape or to explore? The spur behind Bruce Chatwin’s absurdly romantic nomadic existence has become something of a literary conundrum. Chatwin’s life and art were strewn with secrets, subtle resonances and, it must be said, lies. But he was, for all that, a brilliant and unique writer. His first book, In Patagonia, published in 1977, is an awesome exercise in imagination. A travel book that reinvented travel writing, it has the animation of a thriller, the sparkle of romantic fiction and the irrepressible insight of truly extraordinary literature.
Of course, even with this book, Chatwin cloaked fact with concoction; when sketching individuals and incidents, he would adjust, if not abandon, objective reality for the sake of a better twist to an anecdote, or a clean cut to the heart of what the book somehow seemed to suggest – that through travel it was possible to discover whole histories that had been lived out as if solely to excite and fascinate future explorers.