Word: talbot
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...19th century hero of this seafaring novel finally completes a laborious journey from England to New South Wales. In transit, Edmund Talbot grows weary of "this seemingly endless voyage"; safely ashore at Sydney Cove, he marvels that he has been at sea for nearly a year. In fact, the trip has taken much longer than that. William Golding first shoved Talbot off dry land in Rites of Passage (1980), which went on to win the Booker Prize, Britain's most coveted award for fiction. After receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983, the author got back to Talbot...
That is too harsh, although this final leg sometimes displays the enervation of a long haul. When last seen, Talbot was in a severely damaged and leaky old warship. Now the weather turns ornery. Talbot mentions this to his new friend, the ship's first lieutenant Charles Summers, and receives a scary response: "You have seen nothing yet, Edmund. There is something at the back of this wind...
...changes are only half the story. Talbot himself continues to undergo mutations. He is no longer the haughty young gentleman, secure in the protection of an influential godfather, who set out to take his place on the staff of the Governor of Australia. Talbot has become aware of suffering -- his own and that of his fellow passengers, the crew and the poor emigrants huddled "forrard" in the heaving ship...
...cave drawings at Lascaux or on the first drumbeat. But photography has a birthdate of sorts, 1839, the year it was ushered loudly into the world in a clamor of patents and the claims of two separate inventors, Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre in France and William Henry Fox Talbot in England. For that reason 1989 is being marked as a sesquicentennial -- 150 years in which photographers have remade the world in their own images...
...through the calendar, museums in the U.S. and abroad will be mounting shows that will attempt to map the many lines drawn by what Talbot boasted was "the pencil of nature." The first, and one of the most ambitious, is at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston until April 30 (stops in Canberra, Australia, and London follow). Curated chiefly by the collector Daniel Wolfe, "The Art of Photography: 1839-1989" is a thorough but not a definitive history -- one version of the story, splendidly but narrowly focused upon questions of style through the work of just 85 major figures...