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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