Hallo the list,
I just received my StandScan, which is a box very similar to the ScanBox,
but which vaunts better lighting. Physically, StandScan is just about the same
as the ScanBox, but the connection for the battery, plus the presenced of an
on/off switch, immediately, gives the feeling of something better thought out.
There is also a cable to plug in at the mains, but this being round pinned, i
will have to look out an adapter before I can comment on the brightness of the
lighting whilst on manins power. The hole for the camera to see through is
larger than that of the SB and is, therefore, a little easier to position the
phone, even without my handy markers for the phone. It is midday here, though I
did use the lights that are built into the StandScan, wantying to ascertain how
well, using the lights in all conditions, just how well the things works. So, a
little later, I will try it out in twilight and then darkness.
For now, I am impressed. Below is half of a page of a newspaper. I just
folded the whole newspaper in half and then in half again to make it fit into
the box. I sort of flattened it a bit, but not much, and I didn't hold it while
the shot was taken, so the section of the page was not entirely flat. I mention
this because it, obviously, affects the outcome. Nevertheless, I am delighted
with the results. I very rarely get good results when trying to read bits of
newspapers and since the appearance of the Newspaper App, I am only doing it to
demonstrate the StandScan and Prizmo.
If you want to know more about this little toy, please free to ask, on or
off list.But, probably, it will be better to wait until i have tried it out in
less godd lighting conditions.
Happy for now, Sandy.
she met Ted Hughes in 1956, the life of the pushy Amez4~ girl btornirlg with
poetic ambition but also fixed on marriage and babies was more than two thirds
over. Admittedly, the startling incantatory tirades for which she is best known
were not written until the last few months of her life, and it seems that the
events of those months were somehow necessary to their excavation.
But The Bell]ar (1963), the novel that first appeared just before her death,
belongs to a younger self: it teUsthe story of Plath's previous breakdown and
suicide attempt during her time at Smith College, Massachusetts, two years
before she met Hughes. Of course the marriage is fascinating, but that is
partly because of who Plath was when it began, a story that too easily
disappears in the fascination of who she became when it ended.
Andrew Wilson does not disturb more s~/~ and uncect~ i~]f~ttla.
Her search for identify becomes ours as we move between the iournals, letters
and stories she submitted to magazines during school and college Gears. Trying
things out on paper ecame her way of thinking about the world; she made no
distinction between her quest for experience and her vocation as a writer. The
question of women and wild oats obsessed her. So did Nietzsche and his ideas
about "voluntary death" and, later, Dostoevsky and his dochfne of the double.
Good grades came easily but Plath was determined to learn from life as well as
books. From the age of 14, she was boy-mad yet consistently baffling to them.
"I think I made you up inside my head" is the repeated line in the vilianelle
from which Wilson takes his title, and it becomes startlingly apt as boyfriend
after boyfriend is wheeled on, only to reveal his insufficiency for the role in
which Hath has cast him. Men were damned ff they did and damned if they didn't
- envied for their sexual nee am, despised for not sharing it.
She seems never to have stepped out with one without fixing on another.
"Fusion and violation of actual circumstance," scribbled her mother Aurelia
Plath on the typescript of "The Disquieting Muses", a poem that portrays a
monster mother pushing her daughter into ballet and piano lessons. Wilson
defends the "emotional truth" of the poem in that instance, but he goes on to
make the same non-point in his discussion of The Bell]ar, which has always been
read as closely autobiographical. Wilson nitpieks - this one didn't in fact
take her ~
rginily, that one didn't kill herself, e good shrink was out of her depth, the
bad lover meant well. All of which could be made of consuming interest if fed
back into a discussion of the novel but the notion that literary biography
might shine a light on the mystery of artistic creation is ovedooked in
Wilson's zeal to establish that Plath messed with the facts in her fiction.
W iison's coup is to have tracked down Richard Sassoon, the lover who preceded
ttughes mid escaped both from Plath and, until now. from her biographers. But
Sassoon remains elusive. He refused to be interviewed, Concerts with M( .gele
An unflinching memoir by an Auschwitz .survivor captures the terrible absurdity
of the death camps, finds Keith Lowe Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death by
Otto Dov Kulka l 4,4 PP, ALLEN LANE, ~7 £ 12.99 (PLUS £ 135 P&P) 0a44 87 ( 1515
(RRP £ 14.99, EBOOK £9,99) ~ F or much of the past 70 years, Otto Dov Kulka has
been leading something of a double life. As a professor of history in Jerusalem
he is known for writing dispassionately about Nazism and the genocide of the
Jews. But as a survivor of the concentration camps at Theresienstadt and
Auschwitz, he 'also has a deeply personal relationship with the Holocaust.
For decades he has kept these two sides of himself scrupulously separate. Now,
for the fast time, he has turned his academic eye inward to explore as
unflinchingly as possible the ways in which his childhood encounter with
Auschwitz has affected him. Lamtscal~es oJ'the Metropolis of Death makes for
deeply disturbing but ultimately very rew~ding reading, and is unlike any
Holocaust memoir I have ever come across.
Kulka's experience of what he has come to call the "Meh'opolis ~ of Death" was
not like that of the vast majorib" of Jews who passed thrnugh its ghtes. When
he arrived at Auschwitz he did not have to undergo the infmnous "selection" at
the station, which separated those who were fit for work from those destined
immediately for the gas chambers. He did not have his head shaved, or his
clothes and belongings confiscated, and he was not separated from his family.
In fact, he ext~;rienced none of the things that seem to make up the "uniform
language" of other survivors' memoirs.
He and his mother were part of a unique transport of Jews from Tberesienstadt
who were housed together, . in, a specially,, desigmated Fmmly Camp , and
allowed to continue some semblance of normal life. He attended a makeshift
school, where he and his friends put on plays and concerts, some of which were
aitended by camp dignitaries like ,losef Mengele. They were all aware that this
w-as highly unusual, and could not understand why they should have been singled
out'For such special treatment (it turned out that they were being kept as a
sho~piece iust in case the Red Cross should visit).
Their good Fortune did not last long. In March 1944. exactly six months 'after
their arrival, the entire t~eOUp was rounded up and taken to gas chmnbers.
There were no selections, and no possibility of e~cape - they were simply
disposed o en masse. Their place was then taken by a new group, which was again
to be granted the same privileges and the same freedoms but only until their
six months had, in turn, come to an end.
Kulka and his mother survived the first ctdling by a twist of fate: they both
happened to be in the
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