Daily photos 14: Shadow

I've always liked modernist and brutalist architecture for the starkness of the shadows they cast, especially when there's some contrast with the surroundings. These two were taken on the stairwell outside my old office on a snowy day in 2010 and under a bridge by my old flat. Early steps as I got the hang of using an SLR and using monochrome, but looking back, I'm still quite pleased with them. Click to enlarge.

In other news, I haven't mentioned what I'm reading to pass the time. Apart from PhD chapters, plagiarised undergrad essays and book drafts for an academic publisher, I've been reading Big Novels and Tom Gauld's Department of Mind-Blowing Theories, his new collection of cartoons from New Scientist. There are some on the space between good research and splashy research that could have been inspired by conversations at my workplace, while this one also reflects my life as a literary critic with a family. 

I loved Dan Simmons' Hyperion, a space opera obsessed with the life and poetry of the short-lived poet Keats. I'd read one of the later novels in the sequence a few yeas back and thought it was OK, but the first one is epic, clever and genuinely profound. I've already mentioned Aidan Higgins' Langrishe, Go Down which is still in my mind. Jim Crace's Arcadia was very enjoyable too: a tale of masculine achievement and failure amidst the bustle of a city - richly symbolic but also an impressive piece of world-building and one with considerable sympathy for the lives of women in patriarchal societies. Now I'm 700 pages in to Trollope's The Prime Minister. I read a Trollope or two every year they're always huge and all-encompassing. This one has two plots: the travails of Prime Minister who (unlike his wife) is too honest, mentally fragile and intellectual to effectively wield power in a corrupted society and a coalition government, and the story of a woman who falls for the Wrong Man. Emily makes a mistake and clings resolutely to it for the sake of her honour; the Duke's wife, by contrast, blunders around for the best of motives and continually makes life difficult for her devoted but undemonstrative husband. 

It's a wonderful read, and there are no interminable hunting scenes for a change, but the anti-semitism is just pervasive. Ferdinand Lopez is The Wrong Man because he is probably foreign and has no family history. Trollope cleverly gets us on Lopez's side initially by putting the bigotry in the mouths of crusty old people who don't understand the modern world like Emily's father, who says that Ferdinand isn't a gentleman, doesn't sound English and may well be a 'swarthy son of Judah'. The rest of the plot is devoted to bringing us round to Mr Wharton's point of view by demonstrating that he's right. Though he may or may not be Jewish, Lopez is the son of a travelling salesman, he works in financial speculation (badly) and has no concepts of love, honour or honesty: all the tropes associated with Jews in the 19th-century. So it's one of those novels I admire for its technique and abhor for its attitudes.