User talk:Hoary

If I've posted something on your talk page, please reply there rather than here. Any new question or comment at the bottom of the page, please. If you post something here, I'll reply here.

Unblock request of Tegic

Hello Hoary. Tegic (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log), whom you have blocked, is requesting to be unblocked. The request for unblock is on hold while waiting for a comment from you. Regards, Eyesnore (talk) 03:29, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

It isn't. Some other person seems to have given up waiting for my response. (Was I away so long?) Indeed, I'm not sure that it ever was. Anyway, I responded. -- Hoary (talk) 12:01, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

Language assistance

IIRC, you seem to be able to communicate in Japanese and have interest in Japanese culture. An editor/article might benefit from your experience.[1]  little green rosetta(talk)
central scrutinizer  02:31, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for your appreciative words. Well, this then consumed a large chunk of my Thursday. -- Hoary (talk) 02:10, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Looks like everyone appreciated your input. I should have negotiated my commission up front.  little green rosetta(talk)
central scrutinizer  02:38, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Barnstar of Good Humor
	First edit summary made my day. Considering I'm in bed with stomach flu, making my day is no easy thing. Buggie111 (talk) 19:47, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

Thanks

Hallo Hoary
thanks a lot for your great job you did in unmasking that self-appointed genius of photography! I have the Rome article on my watchlist since I am roman, (although he wrote that I am one "...who doesn't seem to know what Spanish Steps are..."), and if I had followed his same strategy (and ethics), now we would have a large part of the articles about the roman churches illustrated with (beautiful and professional) pictures from the weddings of my best friends. Anyway, he is only playing dumb: he knows very well what he is doing, and why. Thanks again, and keep up the good work! Alex2006 (talk) 07:07, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

Yes, well, this person seemed to be doing half a dozen or so things, any one of which might be innocuous but the combination of which was quite undesirable. I'll refrain from giving my opinion of the Roman photograph, but will just say that if I'm to look at professional views of Rome, I'll take Alinari, Erwitt, Ciol. . . . Hoary (talk) 13:53, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

It's a pity, since his picture of the Spanish steps is really good. Above all, you can see the steps :-) In the last ten years the center became standing overcrowded with tourists: if you want to see a landmark you have to go there between 6 and 8 in the morning... This is the reason why I prefer old pictures too: when Rome was still Rome...20 years ago I found in Switzerland a travel album (paid 30 CHF :-)) with 50 Alinari pictures. It is one of my most precious books. Alex2006 (talk) 14:07, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

That Alinari album was quite a find. Congratulations. I have (somewhere!) slim albums of Berlin and (surprisingly) Oslo from around 1910 which have excellent printing (though they're not by Alinari or any company I've heard of). I suppose they're the oldest photobooks that I possess. Oddly, the prices here (Tokyo) of such old albums are generally quite low: perhaps sellers don't think of them as "photobooks" and they therefore escape the absurd inflation that's afflicted "photobooks" (or many of them) during the last decade or so. -- Hoary (talk) 14:27, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

At the moment we are all living surrounded by a series of bubbles: the photobook (and generally book) price bubble is only one of them...As system engineer I learned that when a system behaves in this way is not stable anymore: I only hope that before it finds a new stability region it will not crush down all of us (and our books :-)) Alex2006 (talk) 13:52, 31 January 2013 (UTC)

I have mixed feelings about Abebooks, because it's yet another part of Amazon and thus a monopolizing force. But I do like the way it lets you register "wants". Low-priced copies of expensive books can appear, but then you have to pounce quickly. At any time, I have dozens of wants. My own fabric-of-the-Italian-city treasure is Roberto Salvini, Il duomo di Modena (1972) -- bought in Modena, and carried to Tokyo. Not that it's at all a rarity: Abebooks tells me that one dealer would send me a copy from France for as little as $21. Now, if it instead had been put together in a couple of weeks, with overexposed photos of the photographer's friends having sex and shooting up drugs, it would be highly fashionable and copies would cost at least five times as much! -- Hoary (talk) 14:35, 31 January 2013 (UTC)

Well, I see that we have more in common than the fight against commercial spammers in wikipedia. :-) I have about 50 wants too, but for a strange rule, the best occasions appear always in the night or when I am on vacation. I use also often on vialibri, but there the wants have a price :-) . It is also true that not always important books must be a rarity: For example, there are a couple of German photo books about Rome appeared in the fifties, which are (still) cheap, but are priceless, since they describe a disappeared world... If you like an "esthetic" image of the city, a nice book is "Roma ancora" by Giancarlo Gasponi. Appeared in the early eighties, I think that it is still in print. Alex2006 (talk) 16:20, 31 January 2013 (UTC)

Mm, when I look at the front cover of Roma ancora, sorry but I'm not inspired to investigate further. If it were instead in B/W, it would be much more appealing. It's not that I'm against color: far from it. But there's something about color that turns into kitsch certain genres of photography that are acceptable (if not exciting) as long as they are in B/W. I remember that when Mrs Hoary and I were in Venice, the city was of course marvelous but most of the photobooks of it were terribly dispiriting. We were not at all tempted by the best-sellers by Fulvio Roiter et al, and instead bought B/W photobooks by Giuseppe Bruno and (of Italy in general) by Elio Ciol. (Actually both of these books now look staid to me, and I'm sure there are more interesting alternatives. I wonder what Arif Aşçı would make of Venice.) Who are these Germans? I thought of Peter Cornelius (whose work I've only seen in the occasional jpeg), but I'm not aware of any book on Rome. -- Hoary (talk) 02:11, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

Telepathy :-) Actually I wanted to write that for me the only problem with Gasponi is that his pictures are not B/W, but then I renounced... I don't like Reuter too: it's just "fotografia di consumo su carta patinata" :-) Yes, I know Aşçı: my wife is Istanbullu, and in Turkey he is a celebrity. We saw an exhibition about him in Rome last year. If you like Aşçı, then I am sure that you like Ara Güler too! My brother is a passionate photographer, and when he visited Istanbul with us for the first time last September, I presented him with a book of Güler.
These German books about Rome are photojournalism books: not much architecture, above all people. I have to look when I am in Rome. Anyway, I remember that the publisher of one of them is Laterna Magica Verlag, a German house specialized in photobooks. Alex2006 (talk) 08:11, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

Aşçı seems unknown here in Japan, other than for the fact that Higashikawa's overseas photographer award went to him last year. I thought that the award might lead to some Japanese publication, but unfortunately Japanese photobook buyers seem to have a limited appetite for this kind of photography, and whether for this or for other reasons there's been no publication that I've heard of. ¶ I saw a new book of older work by Güler and the best parts of it were good; but some was like Izis at his less exciting, and the book was expensive. Do you have a particular recommendation among Güler's books? ¶ You're making the German books sound more interesting. One book I'd like to see is Bruno Barbey's The Italians = Les Italiens. Surely a fair quantity were printed, but the used copies that I notice are priced high. -- Hoary (talk) 08:46, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

If you like Barbey, you will enjoy my German books about Rome, which are a spaccato of the roman life in the fifties, and are also not pricey at all. My books of Güler (rigorously Turkish edition, since I stole them from my father-in-law :-)) are at home in Istanbul (yes, I like to commute :-)). The book which I presented is "Ara Guler's Istanbul: 40 Years of Photographs", (I bought the Italian edition by Electa) and is a florilegium of his Istanbul pictures, most of them from the fifties and sixties, a few ones (the least interesting) from the eighties. The book bears also the name of another author, a certain Pamuk :-), but it is only a marketing gag. Ohran only wrote the (short) introduction, maybe as a dankeschön for the fact that Güler's photos illustrate (badly) his book about Istanbul. BTW, if you like also reading, you shouldn't miss it. For me it is Pamuk's best work! Alex2006 (talk) 15:28, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

Oddly enough two months ago I came across that very same book by Pamuk, on offer for mere pennies at some branch of Book Off. I bought it, stuffed it into my suitcase, and I suppose I must have unpacked it and put it somewhere but I've no idea where. Must look. I do remember that the paperback was so cheaply produced that the dot-dot-dot-dot photographs seemed expendable. The next time you're in Istanbul, sorry I mean İstanbul, do please jot down some details of the German books. Incidentally, if you enjoy literate books (text only, no photos) about complex cities of a similar longitude, I warmly recommend Tomas Venclova's Vilnius: A Personal History; there are Polish, English and Lithuanian versions; perhaps other languages too, but according to WorldCat not Italian. (In Italian there is his Cinquantuno poesie e una lettera. He's primarily a poet, but I regret to say that all I've read by him are his three books about Vilnius.) -- Hoary (talk) 07:44, 2 February 2013 (UTC)

The quality of the paper is awful also in the italian edition, barely sufficient to read the text... Yes, next time that I will be in Rome (my books about Rome are in Rome, those in Istanbul (per WP:COMMONNAME :-)) in Istanbul (practical, isn't it?) I promise that I will note authors and editors. P.S. I hope that during the weekend you survived your Auto-da-fé. :-) Alex2006 (talk) 14:16, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for your concern. No, a stake has not yet been driven through my heart, and thus I continue to roam Wikipedia, spreading gloom, rats, and plagues. I've even accumulated one more trophy. -- Hoary (talk) 00:32, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard#Harassment of User:Dmitri1999 for having contributed content to the site.

Heads up. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 15:14, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for informing me of this. -- Hoary (talk) 00:45, 4 February 2013 (UTC)

Variety speak

Nice. Drmies (talk) 16:36, 3 February 2013 (UTC)

As a tenured Dutch inclusionist deletionist (or so I am reliably informed), you'll surely appreciate the curious charm of this kind of prose. I had to do more work on it; the result is intermittently still in what to me is a foreign language, but at least it's so flagged here and there, and conceivably some interested person can bring it closer to the conventionally encyclopedic. ¶ Meanwhile, I've been ruminating on the idea that a book might ruminate on the idea that sacred church music and non-sacred secular music about love can come from the same place if you subscribe to the belief that God is Love and Love is God. (This opuscule has few reviews; one among them is perhaps unintentionally revealing.) I have a love of websurfing during my breakfast; if I were able to say that I had a god of websurfing then I'd be able to say almost anything, e.g. that a Netherlandish Dutch person and a non-Dutch Belgian person came from the same place. Uh-oh, I'd better stop thinking, before my brain explodes. -- Hoary (talk) 00:45, 4 February 2013 (UTC)

Have you been snooping on my Facebook page, where I recently notified the world that my daughter said at school that I was from Belgium? Of all places? That is one hell/heaven of a review. But I really came here to show you this: note that I'm an equal-opportunity offender and will spare no one, not even a wild-haired Dutchman. Drmies (talk) 01:17, 9 February 2013 (UTC)

Wow, that edit is like, radical, man. I suddenly realize that I need a new grindstone for my machete. ¶ Faced with a list of (claimed) exhibitions, one can demand evidence. Several times, e.g. here, I've even supplied it. Or anyway I did for most of the entries, but I burned out before completing the job for the solo exhibitions, let alone the group exhibitions. (I'd also intended to amplify the article about the man; but although I still have the highest regard for his photography, I needed a long break from the article.) ¶ Facebook? An acquaintance once insisted that the only way she could send me a file was via Facebook, so I faked an identity in order to join. I got the file, looked around a bit, didn't understand anything, forgot my name and password. Then every month or so I -- the real me, not the fake -- would get emails saying that this or that dimly/not remembered person wanted to be my fwend. (Thank you, would-be fwends, for telling Facebook my address. Not.) These days they all go straight into trash. (Meanwhile, I get similar but more solemnly phrased messages from something called Linkedin, which I infer is Facebook for people who like to wear suits. They go into trash too.) ¶ So your daughter outed you as a covert Belgian operative, eh? Good for her! (Ha ha, you artistic Belgians, you once had a monopoly on beer worth drinking, but alas no more.) -- Hoary (talk) 01:55, 9 February 2013 (UTC)

Block User:Yeepsi

Sorry for interrupt, User:Yeepsi did undo the previous revision, especially New Wave music, but Yeepsi put initial letters changed to small letter, new wave.

Please block Yeepsi with no expiry set (indefinite).

P.S. If somebody needs unblock, just don't unblock.