Mark Fisher reviews 'Dead Iraqis'

"Please abandon your realist expectations," says a talking train in one of the stories collected here. Ellis Sharp demands that we set aside a whole set of expectations, not only about realism, but also about political fiction and English literature. The techniques that Sharp employs in these stories -- jump-cuts between different ontological spaces, words becoming worlds, facts bleeding into fictions -- are familiar enough from postmodernist fiction. What makes Sharp unique is his application of these to British politics. The closest comparison that leaps to mind is Iain Sinclair -- Sharp has something of the same feel for English place -- yet Sharp's writing has none of the opaque hermeticism of Sinclair's. Even at its most playful, its least constrained by narrative, its most densely allusive, Sharp's writing has an openness, a lightness and a lucidity that Sinclair's work often lacks.

Now read on.

Again

La confession

Dans me

Happy Days

floral

Shadows and light

Farid and his team have developed a number of digital forensic tools used to determine whether digital photos have been manipulated, and his research is often used by law enforcement officials and in legal proceedings. The tools can measure statistical inconsistencies in the underlying image pixels, improbable lighting and shadow, physically impossible perspective distortion, and other artifacts introduced by photo manipulators. The play of light and shadow was fundamental in the Oswald photo analysis.

“The human brain, while remarkable in many aspects, also has its weaknesses,” says Farid. “The visual system can be quite inept at making judgments regarding 3-D geometry, lighting, and shadows.”

At a casual glance, the lighting and shadows in the Oswald photo appear to many to be incongruous with the outdoor lighting. To determine if this was the case, Farid constructed a 3-D model of Oswald’s head and portions of the backyard scene, from which he was able to determine that a single light source, the sun, could explain all of the shadows in the photo.

“It is highly improbable that anyone could have created such a perfect forgery with the technology available in 1963,” said Farid. With no evidence of tampering, he concluded that the incriminating photo was authentic.