Daybook

A Maryport Quilt goes National!

2012-01-26T14:28:00.000Z

A very fine quilt,made in Maryport in Cumbria about 130 years ago, has been accepted into the Collection ofthe Quilt Museumand Gallery in York.It’s a particularly good example of what is known as the ‘Sawtooth Medallion’Style, made in red and white fabrics. The red fabric is Turkey red printed in arich and complex paisley pattern. Only quilts of exceptional interest andcondition are accepted into the collection so it is an honour that this one hasbeen accessioned.

The quilt, whichbelonged to an established Maryport family, was given to me on long loan a fewyears ago. It is in perfect condition because, as I was told: ‘Grandma alwayskept it on the best bed, covered with a sheet.’ The owner and I finally decidedthat it needed to be offered to the Museum and Gallery so that it could be keptand preserved to museum standards. I’m delighted to say that it is now ondisplay at the Museum as part of its current exhibition titled Quilts Then andNow. Full details of the Museum and opening times can be seen here: http://www.quiltersguild.org.uk/index.php?page=71

A Victorian Surivival

2012-01-26T14:14:00.003Z

Flat shot of table cover

Embroidery has outlasted silk

This Victorian table cover from a house in Cockermouth , measuring 56" square, was brought to me for advice on repair and conservation. It has a square centre medallion organised round embroidered rectangles which are enclosed in velvet borders. The rest of the patchwork is 'crazy', i.e. randomly shaped patches stitched together. Each patch is outlined in feather stitching, a very popular needlework tradition in this type of crazy patchwork. The whole textile is surrounded with yellow cording, suggesting that its likely use was as a table cover or, possibly, a decorative throw.

The fabrics are predominantly silks and velvets. The embroidery is of a good standard of workmanship and, in many case, the embroidery has outlasted the silks, which have worn away around them.

Unfortunately, it had deteriorated so far as to make any work on it impossible. On the other hand, it is clearly too interesting to simply be thrown away. One possible option would be to conserve it under glass, in which case it could be viewed but wouldn't suffer any further degradation of the fabrics. This, however, would be an expensive undertaking but enquiries are being made to see if it would be viable.

Proust (re-visited) via Hesperus Press

2011-12-29T12:03:00.001Z

If, for entirely understandable reasons, (it apparently goes on for ever; style is labyrinthine; plot, in so far as there is one, slow to virtually stationary….) you are reluctant to read even a page by Marcel Proust, but at the same time have a slightly guilty feeling that somehow as a serious reader you ought to do so, I'd like to suggest a possible way in. Hesperus Press (http://www.hesperuspress.com/catalogue/default.asp), whose motto is ‘Et remotissima prope (to bring near what is far), publish "works by illustrious authors, often unjustly neglected or simply little known in the English-speaking world.” The books are beautifully-designed little paper-backs and Proust’s Pleasures and Days, originally published in 1896 as Les Plaisirs et Les Jours, and here translated by Andrew Brown, is one of them. It is a series of sketches and short stories depicting the lives, loves, manners and motivations of an eclectic variety of characters; their amorous entanglements, idle vanities, feigned morality and, above all, their snobbery – Proust is very strong on snobbery.

The cover blurb reads: “A stunning volume of philosophical reflections, short narratives and poems", offering us “ an early glimpse into Proust’s literary genius, and revealing him as both a remarkable chronicler of metropolitan life and a compassionate recorder of the most poignant sensations and recollections.”

There is an excellent Forward by A.N. Wilson, where we learn that Proust completed these stories, poems and fragments before he was 23 years old. (One can only be awed by the knowingness, the psychological perspicacity displayed by one so young.) "What will immediately strike any reader of this volume of short stories is how surely, from the first, Proust knew his theme." And Wilson helps us to understand the literary import of Proust’s style: “The complex syntax, those long sentences with their coiling clauses that he was already practising in the Pleasures, is deployed in The Search (i.e. In Search of Lost Time ) to make us slowdown and take the time to notice the world and the richness of its interconnections.”

Of course, if you have never even dipped your toe into A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu, whether in French or in translation, that last remark won’t mean much to you, but Pleasures and and Days will give you an authentic introduction to the Proustian style and themes so that, who knows?- you may be tempted to launch forth on the great work itself!

From Pleasures and Days:

Here is the 23-year old Proust describing the bleak and lonely last days of the young Baldassare Silvande,Viscount of Sylvania:

‘ He turned his head away from the happy image of the pleasures that he had passionately loved and would never enjoy again. He looked at the harbour: a three-master was setting sail.

"It's the ship leaving for India" said Jean Galeas.

Baldassare could not make out the people standing on the deck waving their handkerchiefs, but he could guess at the thirst for the unknown that filled their eyes with longing; they still had so much to experience, to know, and to feel. The anchor was weighed, a cry went up, and the boat moved out over the sombre sea to the West, where, in a golden haze, the light mingled the small boats together with clouds and murmured irresistible and vague promises to the travellers.'

As I read those words, I was haunted by echoes of Theophile Gautiere’s poem, L’Isle Inconnu, memorably set to music by Berlioz:

Dites, la jeune belle,
Où voulez-vous aller?
La voile enfle son aile,
La brise va souffler.

L’aviron est d’ivoire,
Le pavillon de moire,
Le gouvernail d’or fin.
J’ai pour lest une orange,
Pour voile une aile d’ange,
Pour mousse un séraphin.

Dites, la jeune belle,
Où voulez-vous aller?
La voile enfle son aile,
La brise va souffler.

Est-ce dans la Baltique?
Dans la mer Pacifique?
Dans l’île de Java?
Ou bien est-ce en Norvège,
Cueillir la fleur de neige,
Ou la fleur d’Angsoka?

Dites, la jeune belle,

Où voulez-vous aller?

'Menez-moi', dit la belle,

'A la rive fidèle

Où l’on aime toujours'.
Cette rive, ma chère,
On ne la connaît guère
Au pays des amours.

Où voulez-vous aller?

La brise va souffler.

The Cracked Bell. America and the Afflictions of Liberty

2011-12-13T21:40:00.000Z

The Cracked Bell

America and the Afflictions of Liberty
by Tristram Riley-Smith

In an engrossing, eminently readable book, Tristram Riley-Smith examines all the contradictions and complexities inherent in the concept of 'liberty' and describes the ways in which America’s notion of itself as the ‘Land of the Free’ has become mythologised to such an extent that it has become 'inflated and unstable.' His background as a social anthropologist is reflected in his method of arguing from practical examples, which not only enlivens the text but provides persuasive evidence for the points he makes. He pin-points the many hypocrisies and contradictions in modern American, and no aspects of social or political attitudes and customs are left unexamined.

Riley-Smith’s book ends on an optimistic note. His final opinion is that all is not lost, that there are ‘sources of illumination’ whereby the ‘cracked bell’ can be re-cast. But I had a problem understanding how these sources of illumination can be translated into actual policies.

He says that, as an anthropologist, he is ‘sceptical about the ability of one individual to change culture.’

Yes, I’d agree there. But then, while I was reading, something from Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was hovering at the back of my mind:

“Programs of a political nature are important end products of social quality that can be effective only if the underlying structure of social values is right. The social values are right only if the individual values are right. The place to improve the world is first in one's heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there. ”

This is the dilemma: if one accepts Pirsig’s thesis, cultural change has got to begin with individuals but that takes us into the realms of education – and imagination. It’s in those areas that it seems so difficult to effect meaningful changes that would lead to social and cultural change on anything like the grand scale which our current malaise demands. I don’t have much idea of how well, or not, the American public educational system educates the majority of pupils to be critical, imaginative and informed thinkers. But I do know that the UK system as exemplified in the majority of our state-run schools is, largely, a failure in that respect. Two articles in the current issue of the London Review of Books have direct bearing on this point. They set out clearly the decline of our universities from centres of learning for its own sake into factories designed to turn out people skilled and knowledgeable only in specific areas, those areas solely validated by their practical, monetary value. This educational system is not designed to produce the sort of people likely to effect radical change in social culture.

Riley-Smith clearly sees Barack Obama as a man with the understanding and vision to help to re-cast the Cracked Bell. David Hackett Fischer, in his book, Champlain’s Dream, about the life of Samuel de Champlain, French navigator, cartographer, draughtsman, soldier, explorer, geographer, ethnologist, diplomat, and chronicler, founder of New France and Quebec City, describes the qualities which made Champlain a great leader. On his death in 1635, although his achievements were celebrated, he was mostly remembered for the manner in which he treated others and that he served purposes that were larger than himself. Champlain was a man of his time whose thinking was far removed from ours today; as Fischer says: ‘He lacked the sense of individualism and individual autonomy which is so strong in North American culture to day.’ Fischer concludes the chapter in which he describes Champlain’s final days, and explains why he was honored as a great leader, as follows:

There was nothing of equality, democracy or republicanism in Champlain’s thinking. Champlain was raised in a European world where everyone had a rank and station. Like most of his European contemporaries, he was a confirmed monarchist. More than that, he firmly believed hierarchy and hegemony were fundamental to order, which he valued in an era of violence and deep disorder.

Champlain’s ideals were distant from ours in many ways, but some of our most cherished values have grown from his. We share his belief in principled action, even if our principles are not the same. Most of us are raised to his ideal of responsibility and leadership in a large cause. We have inherited his idea of humanity even as we have transformed it in many ways. And we are dreamers too, nearly all of us.

Obama is certainly a man or principle and his writings show that he has the imagination to dream of a better way forward. But what must he do to translate principles and dreams into the policies which could begin the re-casting of the Cracked Bell?

Robert PIRSIG Zen and and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values William Morrow and Co 1984

David Hackett Fischer Champlain’s Dream Random House 2008

http://www.thecrackedbell.com/

An American Quilt in Guernsey

2011-11-22T20:43:00.001Z

It may be that only dyed-in-the-wool quilt anoraks will not be surprised when I tell you that last week I made a visit to the Channel Island of Guernsey, a not inconsiderable distance from Cumbria, just to see a quilt. Add to that the fact that I’m notoriously averse from leaving home and you’ll appreciate that there must have been a very special reason indeed for me to make the trip.

That’s how special The Ogier Wedding Quilt, which occasioned my visit, is. The quilt, dated 1842, is now in the collections of The Guernsey Museums and Galleries, and I was privileged to have it taken out of storage so that I could examine it. The accompanying ‘flat shot’ will give some idea of the over-all effect. Some more detailed shots show the outstanding needlework skills which created it. But this quilt is just one of many outstandingly beautiful quilts which were made in Ohio County in the early to mid C19th, some of which are documented in Ricky Clark’s book: Quilted Gardens, Floral Quilts of the Nineteenth Century. (Published in 1994 by Rutledge Hill Press) The style combines pieced blocks and trapunto, in this case alternate blocks and borders being trapunto. Infill is very finely worked stippling.

What is extraordinary about the Ogier Wedding Quilt is that, although it was made in Ohio, it is now in Guernsey. The objects of my enquiries are, precisely, to establish for whom was it made and how and when it arrived in Guernsey? I began this research in 1997 when a friend of a friend, hearing that I was interested in old quilts, told me about it. The reason it has taken me so long to get round to pursuing my research begins with the fact that between 2002 and 2006 I was working on books continuously, then on other research projects, then gardening etc. etc. Poor excuses, I know. When I know more, I’ll share it.

(Photographs courtesy of Guernsey Museums and Galleries and Robin Le Feuvre.)

The Greystoke Coverlet - a curious textile survival

2011-08-23T18:07:00.004Z

Recently an interesting-looking coverlet came up for auction at Penrith in Cumbria. The expected price range was given as between £200 and £450. Photographs in the catalogue showed it to be closely covered

in appliqué figures and a great deal of embroidered lettering. The most striking feature was a folded-down panel on which was commemorated Wellington’s victory at the Battle of Vittoria, 1813. (These panels, often commemorating significant events, were manufactured specifically for use in quilts and other textiles and were widely available. An identical panel is illustrated in two of Averil Colby’s books, Patchwork and Patchwork Quilts, in colour in the latter.) Under the panel, which had been left loose so that it could be lifted, the applique and embroidery are much brighter and in better condition than the rest of the coverlet. It shows a strange scene in which angel’s heads with wings appear above figures showing two couples, apparently flying, as they have wings attached. The men are in what may be military uniforms. On the left is a woman carrying what could be a single rose or a small bouquet followed by a row of three women with arms raised as if towards the flying couples.

Elsewhere on the coverlet other figures have embroidered captions, one of which reads Mary Queen of Scotland, although it was difficult to relate the accompanying illustration to any historical episodes concerning her. This may well be because the fabric in the figures is in many cases worn away almost completely so it’s impossible to decipher what was there originally.

At the bottom of the textile, some female figures have words embroidered under them, for example, ‘Patient woman’ and ‘Hypocrite!’ The embroidered lettering has in places also almost vanished, although it might be possible to read the words using a magnifying glass. The over-all impression somewhat suggests a page of cartoons,with quotes and comments. The embroidered lettering and the appliqué look quite crude and as if done in haste.

Altogether, this is a most intriguing and puzzling textile survival. I learned that it had come from Bushy House in Greystoke, the contents of which were being sold after the death of Adele le Bourgeois Aspel, the widow of a member of the Howard family. The Howards are a long-established Greystoke family whose seat is Greystoke Castle. It seems that many of the items to be auctioned had been found in barns and outbuildings and it could well be that the coverlet had suffered the same fate. Certainly, it is very dirty and clearly hadn’t been stored with a view to its preservation.

I went to view the textile the day before the auction and found it suitably protected by barriers and notices warning of its fragile condition. The Quilters’ Guild of the British Isle would have considered bidding for it but for the fact that the local Museum and Art Gallery, Tullie House in Carlisle, was also interested in it. In such situations, a protocol is observed between museums which means that the local museum has precedence and other museums won’t bid against them. Also, the coverlet was in need of extensive conservation work which would have been very expensive.

Of course, everyone concerned was hoping that Tullie House would win the bidding – they had set a maximum bid higher than the amount the Guild would have gone to. In that case, we would at least have known where it was, that it was being conserved and stored appropriately and, in future, the Guild might even have been able to borrow it.

But I’m sorry to have to report the dénouement to this story: the coverlet went to a private bidder for the stunning sum of £3,500! We shall probably never see it again.

Hot Chocolate!

2011-07-10T20:12:00.003Z

Alice got cold and wet when out walking the dogs! Photo taken last Spring when she was staying here.

Loudon Wainwright III Be Careful, There's a Baby in the House

2010-10-02T21:39:00.001Z

This specially for B and for R.

The Spirit of Geometry

2010-09-03T20:32:00.004Z

Burkhardt: '....the two poles of all artistic expression in Islam: the sense of rhythm and the spirit of geometry. ...'

This wall-quilt is my way of expressing this in the medium in which I most often work. As for how it is created, let's just say that it's not a technique for the faint-hearted!

View from the Grand Tier boxes!

2010-07-27T13:54:00.000Z

I'd managed to get two returned tickets as the Hall had been completely booked almost as soon as the concert was advertised. And we were lucky - got two seats bang opposite centre of the stage.

Alice does the Royal Albert Hall

2010-07-27T13:51:00.000Z

The Dr. Who concert was brilliant.

The Woman who died of Robespierre

2010-04-14T17:07:00.010Z

A few days of enforced inactivity, spent in my sitting-room-cum-study, led me to browse the shelves of a book-case filled with books which just happen to have arrived there in a recent attempt to re-organise/rationalise books from various part of the house. Some are books which have been read and even re-read, some I keep by me for purely sentimental reasons or because I refer to them from time to time, some are unfamiliar. A few days ago my eye fell on this one:

A Life of Solitude
Stanislawa Przybyszewska
A Biographical Study with Selected Letters
by Jadwig Kousack and Daniel Gerould

Please don't ask me how 'Przybyszewska' is pronounced - I have no idea! But the life-story of this gifted Polish writer is as fascinating as it is appalling. What's more, learning about her passion, amounting to an obsession, with Robespierre led me to some internet explorations and information about the French Revolution, of which my knowledge is extremely, and shamefully, meagre.
Przbyszewska's obsession with Robespierre, Danton and the French Revolution in general took root at a young age. Hilary Mantel, writing in the London Review of Books (Vol.22 No. 7 20th March 2000), says this of her:

[Stanislawa] was the maddest of all female Robespierrists (and in this matter I yield to few.) Born in 1901, daughter of a Polish writer, she was a writer of starvation and frost and died aged 34 in Danzig, where she had been living in a sort of out-house, unheated through the winter, painting her food with lysol to preserve it while thinking intensively and extensively about 'this handsome, petty lawyer, who at the age of 35 single-handedly ruled France.' Tuberculosis, morphine and starvation were adduced as the reasons for her death but she could more truthfully be diagnosed as the woman who died of Robespierre.

A major factor in, and influence on Przybyszewska's life, and largely a malign influence at that, was her father, Stanislaw Przybyszewski, a self-styled Satanist and serial philanderer. The brief Wikipaedia entry for him makes no mention of Stanislawa, whose work, ironically, has achieved a postumous recognition which his appears not to have done, despite the fact that in his life-time he was a famous figure in Polish literature and cultural life. It was her father who introduced Stanislawa to morphine, thus precipitating the addiction which was to be a contributory factor in her mental instability and a life of hardship and poverty.

At his death, the father was accorded the elaborate civic rites due to such a celebrated figure. His daughter received a pauper's funeral attended by three people.

Stanislawa Przybyszewska's most enduring work is the trilogy of plays she wrote about the French Revolution, the best known being The Danton Case, on which Andrzej Wajda's 1983 film, Danton was based.

One Star in the West

2010-03-13T18:41:00.006Z

To have got so far, alone
Almost to the seventieth stone
Is a wonder.
There was thunder

A few miles back, a storm-shaken
Hill and sea, the bridge broken
[The bright fluent burn
A bruised torrent]

But all cleared
Larks were singing
Again, the April rain ringing
Across the sewn hills,
Among the daffodils

The road winds uphill, but
A wonder will be to sit
On the stone at last -
One star in the west.

George Mackay Brown (1921 - 1996)

The Brocken Spectre 2, or A Poem for Billo, who is still away

2008-11-30T14:22:00.005Z

Against Biography

by William Bronk

We came to where the trees, if there were trees,

say, a little group of them, or a house
maybe, something there, whatever it was,

a man standing, someone, it would be clear

enough, sharp at the edges but everything else

was blurred, all running together or else

moving - sideways, back and forth- or the scale

was wrong, some of the things close by

were smaller than those set further back, so that though

we saw something, and saw it plain enough

we saw it nowhere, there wasn't any place

for it to be, or any place for us.

We wandered. Not quite aimless. Man here, though,

would live without biography: it needs

a time and place: there isn't any: who

could say, not smiling, me and my world

or so and so and his time, and stage a play

clothed properly in front of sets,

and believe that this made time and place of the world?

No, we have come too far for that belief

and saw ourselves as ghost against the real,

and time and place as ghosts; there is the real.

It is there. Where we are: nowhere. It is there.

The Brocken Spectre

2008-11-30T13:52:00.004Z

Frost at dawn, as I walked back early over the high fields with the dogs. To the west, deep banks of fog lay darkly over the sea, mist drifting along the Sea Brows, veiling the pines. To the east, the sun rose over the Skiddaw fells. Then I saw myself! A huge shadow on the sea. I waved the dogs' stick, and bright splinters of light spilled out from the moving shadow.

I've never witnessed this phenomenon before. This is the Wikipaedia account:

A Brocken spectre (German Brockengespenst), also called Brocken bow or mountain spectre is the apparently enormously magnified shadow of an observer, cast upon the upper surfaces of clouds opposite the sun. The phenomenon can appear on any misty mountainside or cloud bank, or even from an aeroplane, but the frequent fogs and low-altitude accessibility of the Brocken, a peak in the Harz Mountains in Germany, have created a local legend from which the phenomenon draws its name. The Brocken spectre was observed and described by Johann Silberschlag in 1780, and has since been recorded often in literature about the region.

Rainbows

2008-11-12T17:27:00.003Z

There was a double rainbow on the morning of my birthday.
It was very uplifting. I wondered if it was a sign - or something.
The weather was classic rainbow weather, rain falling through sun, light flashing on the streaming tiles of the houses. The light and colour on the sea were magical. Then the light and the colours faded back to slate-grey, clouds covered the sun, the sea became white-flecked and choppy.

Browning said:'The best is yet to be.' I wonder about that.

Seven Years in Tibet (revisited)

2008-11-03T21:38:00.007Z

I’ve just been re-reading this book, which I read for the first time last year. It still made a profound impression on me and I felt curious to find out more about Heinrich Herrer. As he didn't die until 2006, aged, I think, 93, there are obituaries and also plenty of biographical material about him on the Internet.

The publication of the book, in fact, brought him much acclaim both as a travel writer and mountaineer but also prompted people to investigate his past. As a very young man he had been a member of the SS but always averred that it was only because he was thereby offered the chance to become a ski instructor and trainer and that he had no political or ideological commitment to the organistation or the Nazi party.

All this has been well chewed over, especially by anti-Nazi propagandists who can get extremely worked up about people of Herrer's background. Added to that, he became a close friend of the Dalai Lama during his time in Tibet, a friendship which continued and was cemented suring the latter's exile. The fact that the Dalai Lama apparently had friends and supporters among ex-Nazis added fuel to the fire although some might think that the Dalai Lama would welcome friends of any persuasion. In the end I felt that the question of Herrer's past and suspected political leanings didn't detract from the achievement which the book represents.

When I'd finished the book, I began to think more about Peter Aufschnaiter, who is something of a shadowy figure in Herrer's narrative. (He's shown in the accompanying photo, taken while he was serving in the War.) He was Herrer's co-escapee from Derha Dun prison and his companion over the years of their escape and travels through Tibet to reach Lhasa. Resorting to the Internet again (of course), I found quite a bit of material about him. He was a very different character, more solitary and completely immersed in his work and his passionate calling as an explorer and mountaineer. For much of the time that he and Herrer were in Tibet together, Aufschnaiter lived outside Lhasa, working on various engineering projects for the government.

In 1951, Herrer left Lhasa and went straight to Nepal, whereas Aufschnaiter continued to travel around Tibet, exploring and mapping previously unknown areas and climbing. During this time he lived with local people in all the areas he visited, including with some nomadic tribes, thereby gaining a unique insight into their lives and customs. He left Tibet the following year, due to the Communist take-over, but only returned to Europe after twenty years absence.

Herrer achieved fame and recognition because of the publication of Seven Years in Tibet, in 1953, whereas Aufschnaiter published only some papers and articles during his life-time. On his death in the 70s, his friend Martin Brauen, of the Ethnological Museum, University of Zurich, compiled, collated and edited the voluminous notes and journals, and, importantly, photographs, which Aufschnaiter kept during his travels. These were published in 2002, by a small Bangkok publishing house specialising in Asian titles, under the title Peter Aufschnaiter's Eight Years in Tibet and I was able to buy it on-line.

This book is NOT the travel classic which Herrer's book is. But it IS a unique and gripping picture of life and times in Lhasa and the rest of Tibet before the Chinese invasion. It also reveals Aufschnaiter as a dedicated and passionate explorer and climber, and a meticulous recorder of all his observations and map-makings. There's a lot of technical detail about the mountains and general terrain, which can become a bit tedious for the non-explorer/mountaineer, but it's also full of fascinating observation of the people and life-styles he encounters in his travels. It's illustrated throughout by Aufschnaiter's wonderful photographs. The style and editing are rather choppy but I enjoyed it nonetheless and felt it enhanced and enlarged upon my reading of the Herrer account.

The Priory Garden

2008-10-11T19:29:00.002Z

Work in progress. David, the Man With The Pick-Axe, has cleared this south-facing border of nettles, brambles, rogue buddleias and much else. Jeanne and I have dug it out and, since this shot was taken, have spread around and dug in large quantities of donkey poo.

Sam has been ever-present, checking on progress but constantly interrupting labour by attempting to beguile us into chucking his ball around. Bren has been nothing but a pain: digging a hole in the lawn and chewing up his football so that it had to be taken away and hidden high up in the laburnum tree, which was good, as trying to climb up the tree kept him fully occupied for hours.

Savage Messiah by H.S.Ede

2008-04-30T15:52:00.005Z

‘When I face the beauty of nature, I am no longer sensitive to art, but in the town I appreciate its myriad benefits—the more I go into the woods and the fields the more distrustful I become of art and wish all civilization to the devil; the more I wander about amidst filth and sweat the better I understand art and love it; the desire for it becomes my crying need.’ Henri Gaudier-Brzeska

J.S.Ede’s book is based largely on Henri’s letters, mainly those to Sophie Brzeska but including some to family and friends, which Ede obtained from Sophie’s estate after her death in 1925. Henri and Sophie’s intense and complex relationship, begun when he was eighteen and she over twice his age, must surely rank as one of the most interesting and enigmatic in the annals of human relationships. Their symbiotic interdependence was so complete that he ‘annexed’ her name to his own and thereafter was known as Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. In their relationship, ostensibly platonic, the roles of mother-and-child/brother-and sister/loving friends were played out endlessly, yet expressed, always, in the most passionately loving terms.

Henri’s letters detail his everyday concerns and activities, intimately interwoven with his work and artistic development. He and Sophie lived together and supported each other through periods of the direst poverty and deprivation. When they were apart, most often because of illness or, in Sophie’s case, the need to earn money, for example as a governess, they constantly exchanged letters although Sophie’s to Henri seem not to have survived.

Henri was killed in the trenches at the start of the First World War. Sophie never recovered from this loss and died in an asylum in 1925.

I haven’t seen Ken Russell’s 1972 film based on Ede’s book.

The picture is of a work by Henri: Ornamental Mask. Painted bronze. 1910.

P.G.Wodehouse A Life by Robert McCrum

2008-03-26T21:33:00.011Z

How ironic that the comic genius whose writings encapsulated, indeed immortalised, a particular vision of Edwardian England was fated to be exiled from his home country and to spend the last 35 years of his life abroad.

At the onset of the Second World War, Wodehouse was living in France as a tax exile. Being profoundly uninterested in world affairs and politics, he failed to realise the danger of staying where he was until it was too late. In 1940, aged 60, he was interned, first in Belgium, then in Poland, in Upper Silesia. (His comment on this was: 'If this is Upper Silesia, I dread to think what Lower Silesia is like.')

After a year he was released and persuaded by the Nazis to make a series of broadcasts - light, witty reflections on his internment and his fellow-internees - which were aimed at his American public but, of course, broadcast in England as well, where they were not well-received. He was branded a collaborationist, even a traitor, and as a result was never able to return to England where he continued to be in bad odour politically. None of this, of course, prevented his books and plays from being hugely popular both here, in America and, indeed, worldwide.

Belatedly, at age 93 he was knighted and died, aged 95, at his home in Long Island in 1975.

There are several possible interpretations of Wodehouse's motives for making the war-time broadcasts, the most feasible being that he was 'an innocent abroad'. He was a profoundly un-political person and would probably not have understood the impact that simply making broadcasts under the aeigis of the Nazis, however apparently innocuous the content, would have had in war-time Britain. All his life, Wodehouse was obsessed, and possessed, entirely by his writing and the proof of this single-minded dedication is in his vast output in the form of novels, short stories, essays and plays.

Blue Hills, or the Romantic Myth

2008-03-15T18:56:00.006Z

Sometimes hills really ARE blue. These are not remembered, they're seen every day. You can even make a long journey to actually visit them. So, where does that leave memory and imagination? Well, if you travel to these distant hills, they don't look blue and there is nothing romantic about them. They are grey and rocky, covered in sheep and heather. But you can climb them, pant and sweat to the top-most cairn, stand and take in the panoramic view, echelons of hills and ranges stretching away endlessly to the west. Or turn to the east, and look back across the Firth to where you've come from, the blue and misty Lakeland fells standing sentinel on the horizon, mysterious and unattainable......

The Primrose Path

2008-03-13T17:27:00.003Z

Despite the recent storms and gales, I found primroses in bloom in Flimby woods today. That's early, for Cumbria. In my Cornish homeland, of course, they'll have been out in profusion for weeks now. These Northern plants are less prolific, more reticent, discreetly hiding beside the deepest, darkest paths, seen only by deer and rabbits - and by those who go searching for them. These sparse, hidden clumps are the modest evokers of all the springs I remember, primroses shining out from dark hollows, lining the edges of fields, carpeting the banks of streams. In the North, one learns to value such small living tokens of one's past.

Glenn Gould - Bach Partita No.6 (1 of 3)

2008-02-18T22:07:00.001Z

'The Idea of North' - Glenn Gould

2008-02-14T11:57:00.009Z

From "The Idea of North": an Introduction

‘When I went to the North, I had no intention of writing about or of referring to it even parenthetically in anything that I wrote. And yet, almost despite myself, I began to draw all sorts of metaphorical allusions based on what was really a very limited knowledge of the country and a very casual exposure to it. I found myself writing musical critiques, for instance, in which the - the idea of the North - began to serve as a foil for other ideas and values that seemed to me depressingly urban oriented and spiritually limited thereby.’

‘Admittedly, it's a question of attitude, and I'm not sure that my own quasiallegorical attitude towards the North is the proper way to make use of it or even an accurate way in which to define it. Nevertheless, I'm by no means alone in this reaction to the North; there are very few people who make contact with it and emerge entirely unscathed. Something really does happen to most people who go into the North - they become at least aware of the creative opportunity which the physical fact of the country represents and - quite often, I think - come to measure their own work and life against that rather staggering creative possibility:they become, in effect, philosophers. ‘

Samuel Beckett on Proust (1931)

2008-01-03T20:44:00.001Z

"There is no escape from yesterday because yesterday has deformed us, or been deformed by us. The word is of no importance. Deformation has taken place. Yesterday is not a milestone which has been passed, but a daystone on the beaten track of the years, and irremediably part of us, within us, heavy and dangerous. We are not merely more weary because of yesterday, we are other, no longer what we were before the calamity of yesterday." (P13)

"The aspirations of yesterday were valid for yesterday's ego, not for today's. We are disappointed at the nullity of what we were pleased to call attainment. But what is attainment? The identification of the subject with the object of his desire. The subject has died - and perhaps many times - on the way. (P13f)

"Voluntary memory (Proust repeats it ad nauseam) is of no value as an instrument of evocation, and provides an image as far removed from the real as the myth of our imagination or the caricature furnished by direct perception. There is only one real impression and one adequate mode of evocation. Over neither have we the least control." (P14)

"But involuntary memory is an unruly magician and will not be importuned. It chooses its own time and place for the performance of its miracle. I do not know how many times this miracle recurs in Proust. I think twelve or thirteen times. But the first - the famous episode of the madeleine steeped in tea - would justify the assertion that his entire book is a monument to involuntary memory and the epic of its action. The whole of Proust's world comes out of a teacup....."(P34)

On Page 54, quoting Proust: 'How can we have the courage to wish to live, how can we make a movement to preserve ourselves from death, in a world where love is provoked by a lie and consists solely in the need of having one's suffering appeased by whatever being has made us suffer.?' (Proust, of course, is at this point dwelling on his painful and labyrinthine relationship with Albertine.)

Beckett comments: "Surely in the whole of literature there is no study of that desert of loneliness and recrimination that men call love posed and developed with such diabolical unscurpulousness." On Page 64, quoting Proust: 'One lies all one's life long, and above all to that stranger whose contempt would cause the most pain - oneself.'

A Suitcase

2007-12-30T18:08:00.000Z

From Nobody’s Home
Essays by Dubravka Ugresic

A Suitcase
‘There are authors who have penned marvellous pages on exile. They unwittingly polish the subject, and in doing so give exile the glow of a romantic rebellion against the demands of everyday life, a rejection of home and homeland for the thrill of personal freedom. The people who have written these pages overlook the banalities; Walter Benjamin killed himself because he wasn't able to get his papers stamped; everything might have turned out differently had that anonymous clerk stamped Benjamin's passport. But in myths, including ones about exile, everyone is inclined to forget the anonymous bureaucrats. And this is how the bold face of clerkish triviality, shored up by both the author’s, and the reader's, romantic expectations, becomes the face of cruel Destiny.’

‘Literature tends to show the romantic side of exile. In reality, people live in exile submerged in trauma. The image of exile suggests a rebellious fragmentation, but also a servile obedience to the process of acquiring a new home. The only way those in exile are able to leave it behind is not to leave it behind at all, but to live it as a permanent state, to turn their waiting room into a cheery ideology of life, and to embrace the schizophrenia of exile as the norm of normalcy, revering only one god: the suitcase!’

‘The most intimate side of exile is tied to luggage. As I write these lines I am surrounded by a dozen kinds: bags, suitcases (with and without wheels), costly valises, cheap duffels, all purchased in various cities. I look at them fondly: they are my only true companions, witnesses to my wanderings. The suitcases travel, go across borders, move in and move out with me……..’

Gorse

2007-12-08T11:51:00.000Z

'When gorse be out of bloom, love be out of season.' Cornish folk saying.

Gorse in bloom on Maryport Sea Brows 6th December 2007

Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams

2007-11-29T17:17:00.000Z

Raymond Roussel (1877–1933)

Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams by Mark Ford.

French poet, novelist, playwright, musician, chess-player, neurasthenic and drug addict. In addition, he was immensely wealthy, although most of his wealth was dissipated in trying to bring attention to his writing.

Little known today, yet Roussel's novels, poems and plays profoundly influenced certain groups within C20th French literature, including the Surrealists and Oulipo. In the 1950s his work excited the interest of young American poets such as John Ashbery (who had lived in Paris for over five years where he was known as ‘that crazy American who’s interested in Roussel') and Kenneth Koch. His influence is apparent in some of the poems of Ashbery and Koch written in the mid-1950s. In the 1970s I was using one of Koch's books, Rose, Where did You get that Rose, while teaching English to 'less able' adolescents. It was a gift to a teacher and a winner with the kids every time. Now I understand better how Koch came to write in the way that he did.

Ashbery has written the Introduction to Mark Ford’s book, outlining the processes by which Roussel’s work became more widely known in the 1960s. Michel Foucault’s first book, published in 1963, was a study of Roussel. Alain Robbe Grillet and Michel Butor, creators of the nouvel roman, acknowledged their debt to him.

The following quotes on the subject of Raymond Roussel will give some indication of his standing and influence among his contemporaries and some who came later:

"A formidable poetic apparatus" -Marcel Proust

"Raymond Roussel belongs to the most important French literature of the beginning of the century" -Alain Robbe-Grillet

"Genius in its pure state" - Jean Cocteau

"Creator of authentic myths - Michel Leiris

"A great poet" - Marcel Duchamp

"The President of the Republic of Dreams" - Louis Aragon

"The greatest mesmerist of modern times" - André Breton

"The plays are among the strangest and most enchanting in modern literature"- John Ashbery

"My fame will outshine that of Victor Hugo or Napoleon"- Raymond Roussel

The only words written by Roussel that I have read are those quoted in Mark Ford's book but I was so intrigued by him that I'm inspired to track some of his books down to read. There's plenty of information about Roussel on Websites, for example:

http://www.centerforbookculture.org/context/no10/winkfield.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Roussel

Arts and Crafts of Islam

2007-09-27T11:05:00.002Z

Islamic Arts and Crafts
A World of Inspiration

By Way of Explanation

Artists and craftsmen, from modest hobbyists to textile artists and fine artists, seek and find inspiration all around them. They look to the past as well as to the present; to the natural world and to traditional design sources as well as to their own experiences and perceptions. The talk I give to fellow-quilters and needleworkers grew from my love affair with the inexhaustible treasury of patterns and designs found on the architecture and artefacts of the Islamic world. They range from the miraculous complexity of the patterns seen, for example, in the decoration of the Alhambra in Granada, to the richness and variety of the carpets of the Middle East. They encompass delicately patterned ceramics, glasswork, intricately woven textiles, leather work, as well as the calligraphy and arabesque decorative style which were developed to art forms of themselves. What follows offers no more than the briefest outline of the background to the phenomenon which is Islamic art.

'The Very Summit of Perfection

'Islamic art derives from the marriage of wisdom and craftsmanship'- Owen Jones

'The Alhambra is at the very summit of perfection of Moorish art; every principle which we can derive from the study of the ornamental art of any other people is not only ever present here, but was by the Moors more universally and truly obeyed. We find in the Alhambra the speaking art of the Egyptians, the natural grace and refinement of the Greeks, the geometrical combinations of the Romans, the Byzantines and the Arabs. The Moorish ornament wanted but one charm, which was the peculiar feature of the Egyptian ornament: symbolism.' So says
Owen Jones in his classic book The Grammar of Ornament.

In his Forward to Titus Burkhardt's book Art of Islam. Language and Meaning. Sayyed Hossein Nadr, says this: 'Islamic art was at last revealed to be what it really is, namely the earthly crystallisation of the spirit of the Islamic revelation as well as a reflection on the heavenly realities of earth…….. with the help of which of the Moslem makes his journey through the terrestrial environment and beyond……………..'

It helps to understand a little about the history of the spread of Islam, which began early in the seventh century. One of the great achievements of the Prophet Mahommed, the founder of Islam, was to convert and unite diverse Arab tribes and inspire them, in their turn, to convert surrounding peoples. The early converts were essentially nomadic, desert-dwelling peoples, yet so successful were they that by 641 Egypt had been converted, after which the 'Moors' as they came to be known swept, across North Africa and Spain. The geographical limit of their conquests was Tours in France, which they reached in 732. The Moorish architecture which survives in these places, of which the Alhambra in Grenada is the outstanding example, are monuments to the great days of the mighty Islamic empire. It is very largely these buildings and the elaborate, stylised decoration seen on them, which have inspired and influenced Western artists ever since.

A Sense of Unity

Quoting, again, from Sayyed Hossein Nadr's Forward to Titus Burkhardt's book, he says that [Islamic art] 'contains a unique unity of form which maintains itself over centuries'. Thus, the many patterns and designs which to Western eyes are characteristically Islamic occur in a bewildering number of places and forms and yet are still identifiably Islamic in style. How has it come about that we see and recognise this style all over such a vast geographical area, and in places like France and Spain which today are predominantly Christian countries? This is because Islamic art is unique in being at once complex and various, and at the same time having an underlying unity which makes it instantly recognisable in style and content.

This sense of unity stems from the fact that very early in the history of Islamic art a distinct architectural style and a complete set of motifs became associated with the ideas and faith which generated them. By contrast, diversity rather than uniformity was characteristic of the art of Christendom, each of its various stages being distinct, so that Carolingian, Byzantine and Renaissance styles are all quite different. Islamic art on the other hand, is characterised by uniformity both in time and space. Islamic artists did not seek innovation in the way that, say, the Renaissance artists did. They remained faithful to time honoured models and conventions, exploring ways of further enriching and reinventing the art through subtle variations and adaptations.

This is not, of course, to suggest that there are no discernible variations and trends in Islamic art forms. Contact with the vast range of established cultures which were assimilated as the Islamic empire expanded had a profound effect on the buildings and artefacts created after the conquest. Nonetheless, despite the fact that the Islamic world was spread over vast geographical areas and that its converts were drawn from the great diversity of the races of man, from very early on a remarkable uniformity is evident; the differences are of nuance and emphasis rather than being fundamental; they are variations on unchanging themes.

The most compelling reason for this is that Islamic art is essentially and always, sacred art, an expression of a deeply spiritual sensibility. Indeed, it is often argued that the universal appeal of this art derives precisely from its religious roots. There are elaborate theories about the spiritual significance of just about every manifestation of Islamic art, including studies of the cosmological significance of the geometrical properties of buildings and decorative patterns. If, while marvelling both at the technical skill and the aesthetic beauty of this art, we remember this, we may perhaps come a little closer to an understanding of the phenomenon of Islamic art and its creators.

There are three distinct strands to Islamic decorative art and design: the formal geometrical patterns, exemplifying the mathematical genius of the Arabs, and graceful, flowing stylisation of objects from the natural world - what has come to be called 'arabesque' style. However, more important than either of these is the calligraphy which, while it can be viewed as an expression of the arabesque style, was elevated to an art form in itself. As well as reflecting the aesthetic genius of the Arabs, their unique script was also an important influence in the establishment of the early Islamic empire. David Rice, in his book, Islamic Art, maintains that the adoption of the Arabic script was the main factor which made the art of the Islamic world into a distinctive style.

The Spirit of Geometry

'The circle, and its centre, are the point at which all Islamic geometric patterns begin. The circle symbolically represents one God, eternity, without beginning and without end. The circle is the most beautiful parent of all polygons, both containing and underlying them. '

Interlacement is a familiar element in the decorative art of many cultures - the Celts, Romans and Greeks all used it extensively. But the awesome mathematical complexity characteristic of Islamic art excels all and has fascinated and beguiled artists and craftsmen of all creeds and all cultures down the ages. Many theories have been advanced to explain these inspiring manifestations of Islamic decorative art, including the idea that Moorish artists and decorators were led to develop elaborate geometrical designs because, dating from about 690, representational paintings and decorations were banned in mosques. However, the history and practise of representational art is not so simple. Strictly speaking, the ban applied only to the image of the divinity because such images could become objects of idolatry. Also, God was inimitable and human figures could be seen as an attempt to represent God. The ban was, and is, interpreted differently by different ethnic groups, some branches of Islam applying the ban more rigidly than others: the Sunni Arabs, for example, frowned on representation of ANY living being.

Whatever the impetus for the development of this unique, mathematically-based decoration, it has been described as ‘the most intellectually satisfying form of surface decoration for it is an extremely direct expression of the Divine Unity underlying the inexhaustible variety of the world.’ Interlacement, generally constituted from a single, unbroken line which turns endlessy back on itself, reflects the unity underlying all things. So although the Arab conquerors would no doubt have seen and perhaps assimilated previous examples of this decorative device, for example in pavement mosaics in temples and churches, they applied to it their own particular mathematical genius to produce altogether more sophisticated and complex creations. As for the liturgical purpose of this geometrical art, it has been suggested that it reflects no IDEAS but enhances a quality of contemplative emptiness which frees the mind from mental ‘fixations’. It has, in other words, a sort of spiritual economy and could, perhaps, be related to yoga practises, where the idea is to still the mind and body.

Post Script

In applying some of the patterns to needlework, I’ve focused on designs and patterns from those elements of Islamic design which readily lend themselves to translation into pieced patterns, such as stars and other polygons appearing on decorative tiles, screens, stonework and carpets. Examples of the arabesque style have of course often been interpreted in appliqué work, embroidery and quilting.

Bibliography

Titus Burkhardt: The Art of Islam. Language and Meaning
A.F.Calvert. The Alhambra. 1904

Keith Critchlow:Islamic Patterns 1976

David Rice. Islamic Art 1965

Going Down South

2007-09-25T20:38:00.000Z

On a trip down to Cheshire, to talk to Cranford Quilters, I found I was staying overnight within spitting distance of the famous Jodrell Bank observatory. It makes an excitingly space-age impact as it looms out of the autumnal landscape, at first appearing strange and obtrusive. But after a few hours, walking in the surrounding lanes, viewing it from different angles, it acquires a mysterious elegance and, eventually, comes to seem a completely appropriate part of the scene.

This part of rural Cheshire is very much Manchester commuting country - going on foot in the lanes is hazardous as high-spec cars race along at speed bearing the well-heeled business persons home to their newly-built country mansions.

But not all the local residents are like this: I was staying with people who live in an eighteenth century farmhouse with surrounding fields which are run as a smalholding - they produce all their own meat (from pigs, lambs, a few beef cattle) fruit and vegetables. Being offered this sort of food reminds me of what we miss most of the time, unless we go to a local farmers' market.

Cranford Quilters is a very friendly and active group and we had a stimulating evening, with some good Show and Tell and me giving my Islamic Arts and Crafts talk and showing quilts inspired by the Moorish patterns I'm so fascinated by. Altogether, despite the hair-raising drive down the M6 - unrelenting torrential rain, bumper-to-bumper commercial traffic, road works causing tail-backs three miles long - I had a great time and felt that the visit more than justified the journey. Anyway, by contrast, the return drive was a doddle, with the Motorway behaving as it should in fine, dry conditions.

Francis Ponge (1899-1988)

2007-09-21T11:04:00.000Z

Francis Ponge French essayist/poet, who often combined the two forms to create a sort of prose poetry.

Quoting from Wikipaedia:
‘In his most famous work, Le parti pris des choses (Often translated The Voice of Things), he meticulously described common things such as oranges, potatoes and cigarettes in a poetic voice, but with a personal style and paragraph form (prose poem) much like an essay. These poems owe much to the work of the French Renaissance poet Remy Belleau. Ponge avoided appeals to emotion and symbolism, and instead sought to minutely recreate the world of experience of everyday objects. His work is often associated with the philosophy of Phenomenology.
He described his own works as "a description-definition-literary artwork" which avoided both the drabness of a dictionary and the inadequacy of poetry.’

Only one of his works could be discovered on the shelves here: Le Grand Recueil (subtitle Pieces). It is the original Gallimard edition of 1961 and has a soft, foxed paper cover. It is printed on equally soft, thick pages, some of which remain uncut. Sorry to say, my rusty French is no longer up to translating without recourse to a dictionary. Even worse, the On-line French dictionary claims that many of the words in the following ‘Symphonie Pastorale’ do not exist!

Symphonie Pastorale
Aux deux tiers de la hauteur du volet gauche de la fenetre, un nid de chants d’oiseaux, une pelote de cris d’oiseaux, une pelote de pepiments, une glande gargouillante cridoisogene,
Tandis qu’un lamellibranche la barre en tracers,
(Le tout envelope du floconnement adipeux d’un ciel nuageux)
Et que la borborygme des crapauds fait le bruit des entrailles,
Le coucou bat regulierement comme le bruit du coeur dans le lointoin.

Fortunately, http://www.kalin.lm.com/ponge.html has some examples of Ponge’s writings in translation:

Rhetoric
I assume we are talking about saving a few young men from suicide. I have in mind those who commit suicide out of disgust, because they find that others own too large a share of them. To them one should say: at least let the minority within you have the right to speak. Be poets. They will answer: but it is especially there, it is always there that I feel others within me; when I try to express myself, I am unable to do so. Words are readymade and express themselves: they do not express me. Once again I find myself suffocating. At that moment, teaching the art of resisting words becomes useful, the art of saying only what one wants to say, the art of doing them violence, of forcing them to submit. In short... Found a rhetoric, or rather, teach everyone the art of founding his own rhetoric. This saves those few, those rare individuals who must be saved: those who are aware, and who are troubled and disgusted by the others within the, those individuals who make the mind progress, and who are, strictly speaking, capable of changing the reality of things.

the pleasures of the door
Kings do not touch doors.
They do not know that happiness: to push before them with kindness or rudeness one of these great familiar panels, to turn around towards it to put it back in place - to hold it in one's arms.
... The happiness of grabbing by the porcelain knot of its belly one of these huge single obstacles; this quick grappling by which, for a moment, progress is hindered, as the eye opens and the entire body fits into its new environment.
With a friendly hand he holds it a while longer before pushing it back decidedly thus shutting himself in - of which, he, by the click of the powerful and well-oiled spring, is pleasantly assured.

On the above website I also find some words of Ponge translated by Peter Riley. http://www.kalin.lm.com/water.html

The Poetry of William Bronk (1918 - 1999)

2007-09-14T16:04:00.000Z

Some stanzas from The Force of Desire by William Bronk. (1979)
The slow, slow light in the winter sky
this very early morning assures us the world
is not the actual world. Never was.

The longing for God, in its intensity,
shares and suggests the power and intensity
of God's longing. And it is - but not for us.

The morning door is open to the outer world;
the pleasure of edges, clear shapes and names.
Its air is the sharp pain of your seperateness.

In human nature we look not for ourselves
But for what is there. We may be a clue
Though it is not certain. We know about false leads.

Truth has many forms which are not its form
if it has one. What has a form of its own
or, having, is only it? There is truth.

If our day-lives mattered at all, no
matter that we dream; but they don’t and the dream
is the life as if it mattered, as we dream it may.

There are some writings about Bronk's poetry here:
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/bronk/poetry.htm

Vol.I The Unknown Matisse/ Vol II Matisse. The Master.

2007-09-01T16:33:00.000Z

The Unknown Matisse, Volume I of Hilary Spurling's biography covers his early years, from his birth in 1869 to 1908. When it was published in 1998, fellow biographer Michael Holroyd declared that she had done for Matisse 'what George Painter famously did for Proust in the 1950s.' The comprehensive way in which Spurling places Matisse in the context of his contemporaries makes this a book for art historians as much as for the general reader. Despite that, it's also a real 'page-turner', since the story of his life is told in such a lively and engaging manner that it's very hard to put down.
Matisse. The Master,Volume II, describes his life once he became recognised. It is significant that the book is dedicated to Matisse's wife, Amélie, whose own life would make a fascinating study for its own sake. She was his mainstay and helpmeet through the early years of struggle and poverty; once he became famous, and affluent, her role was taken over by others and she went into the sort of 'decline' in which she was constantly ill with unspecified problems - very reminiscent of what happened to, say, Alice James, the sister of the more famous Henry and William. It was not an uncommon fate for gifted and intelligent women in the C19 who could find way to break outof the stereotypical view of their roles in life as wives, mothers or, as often was the case, spinsterhood which trapped them in the parental home as carers.

The Libraries of Thought and Imagination

2007-08-30T19:48:00.000Z

An anthology of books and bookshelves. Edited by Alec Finlay, who says this in his Introduction:It is the use we make of them, not only in reading but in the reassuring and inpsiring presence that they have, that books discover their full meaning.'
The topics covered in the short pieces which make up the content of this book are so eclectic that it would be impossible to make anything approaching a summary. They are a celebration and an exploration of everything books can mean and be, both as physical objects and as sources of information and inspiration.
It is a book to live with, to dip into, to ponder, to return to time and again, always finding something which strikes you anew. What's more, each article, poem or chapter ends with a Bibliography, thus pointing the reader to yet more possibilities. If you just followed up on a small percentage of the references, you'd be kept in reading matter for years.

Like all the books in the Pocketbook series, the book itself is compact, stylish and beautifully produced with a sturdy card cover - and illustrated throughout with atmospheric photographs.

Published by Pocketbooks, Morning Star Publications, Polygon. 2001Available fromhttp://www.splshop.org.uk/index.cfm?cfid=999017&cftoken=15790270

Der Abschied from Das Lied von der Erde by Gustav Mahler

2007-08-27T19:25:00.001Z

A poem for Billo, who has gone away

2007-08-27T19:18:00.000Z

The Farewell

Farewell in the Mountain
Bid each other farewell in the mountain
Closing wooden gate at dusk
Spring grass green again next year
Will the honoured friend return?
Wang Wei

Bren's progress

2007-08-24T17:45:00.000Z

Bren's registered kennel name, Skelrah Eid, was chosen by the breeders; apparently they spent a holiday in Norway last year and decided to call all the puppies in the litter after Norwegian waterfalls! Six day in, and Bren is doing fine. He's a remarkably calm and phlegmatic little beast, although he enjoys a romp with Sam and is very sociable with people and dogs he meets when out and about. I keep trying to get a good picture of him, but he's so densely black that it's hard to see his features - unlike Sam, who is delightfully photogenic! So much so, that as soon as I produce the camera he goes into 'posing' mode, waiting patiently until he hears a click.
In the second photo, Bren has nabbed the chew and Sam is waiting until he gets bored and drops it - Sam, of course, has his own chew, but the point of the game is to compete for possession of the SAME chew. Whereas Bren's tactic is to jump up and try to snatch it from Sam, Sam prefers the waiting game.

Introducing Skelrah Eid (Aka Bren (Brendon)

2007-08-21T17:48:00.001Z

The newest addition to the family, Bren, is ten weeks old. He's distantly related to Sam and was bred at a farm in the south of Cumbria. Although he only arrived yesterday, he's settled in amazingly well and is already Sam's new best friend. Puppies leaving their mums and siblings for the first time usually tend to protest loudly on their first night away; Bren took it all in his stride and not a sound was heard all night - actually, he was probably too exhausted by the day's excitement to protest. He has made his first appearance on the Sea Brows, to general admiration.

The Age of Illusion

2007-08-17T19:44:00.000Z

The Age of Illusion. England in the Twenties and Thirties, by Ronald Blythe (1963). Another recent find in a second-hand book-shop, from the author most famously known as the writer of Akenfield, Portrait of an English Village (1969), a portrait of agricultural life in Suffolk from the turn of the century to the 1960s.

Did you know (I didn’t) the whole story of how the Unknown Soldier came to be laid to rest in Westminster Abbey? Or the amorous adventures of the Vicar of Stiffkey? (I’d heard of him, vaguely, but didn’t know the story – fascinating stuff worthy of space in any red-top….) Or exactly how the Jarrow march came into existence and what happened to it? (My father had told me about seeing the marchers arrive in London – he was, apparently, one of a not particularly welcoming, or large, crowd of onlookers who watched as the marchers wearily trooped to the soup kitchen arranged for them in Garrick Street.) By selecting fifteen topics, people and events, and giving the personal stories AND the politics behind each one, Blythe conveys the atmosphere of the times he’s writing about and gives a more convincing feeling of what it was like to be there, of what really happened, than many a more academic and objective account. There are chapters on, among other things, T.E.Lawrence, Mrs. Wallis, Amy Johnson, The Brighton Trunk Murders.

I particularly enjoyed an absolutely riveting account of the great body-line bowling controversy which began in Adelaide on Saturday, 13th January, 1933, at the third Test between the MCCV and Australia. The controversy spread to ‘every anglicized acre of the world’, and was ‘compulsory conversation wherever the English met’, but Blythe ends this chapter by quietly reminding us that, during what he calls this ‘three weeks’ wonder’, Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of the Reich and Captain Goring took control of the police in Berlin, and over more than half of Germany besides. As he says, the public obsession with the body-line bowling controversy could be compared to Drake’s game of bowls……..

Blythe’s style is jaunty, even racy, and carries the reader along at a great pace. Altogether, he’s entertaining as well as being informative. Call it ‘history lite’, if you will, but I enjoyed every word of it – I’m re-reading some of the chapters and savouring them all the more.

(The picture shows Ronald Blythe with Rex Pyke. In Peter Hall's 1974 film Akenfield, the director used the residents of East Anglian villages to act in stories of rural life. Thirty years after the release of this unusual film, a 2006 documentary saw the original producer/editor gather together crew, including Sir Peter Hall, author Ronald Blythe and members of the local 'cast' to see how life has changed for those featured and to recall the making of the production. )

2007-08-04T12:38:00.001Z

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBhfgaNd83s

The Curtain

2007-07-30T19:15:00.000Z

The Curtain by Milan Kundera (2005)

‘…human life as such is a defeat. All we can do in the face of that ineluctable defeat called life is to try to understand it. That – that is the raison d’etre of the art of the novel.’

Described as An Essay in Seven Parts, this book is Kundera’s personal view of the history and value of the novel in Western civilization. ‘The curtain’ is the ready-made perception of the world which we all inherit – a pre-interpreted world. It is the function of the novelist to tear down this curtain to reveal to us something which we didn’t know. For anyone who reads as many novels as I do this book is salutary.

A novel which glorifies the conventional or the hackneyed ‘excludes itself from the history of the novel.’ Only by tearing through the curtain of pre-interpretation can a novel be worthy of its name – ‘It is the identifying sign of the art of the novel.’

‘For life is short, reading is long, and literature is in the process of killing itself off through an insane proliferation. Every novelist, starting with his own work, should eliminate whatever is secondary, lay out for himself and everyone else the ethic of the essential.’

‘It [the novel] refuses to exist as an illustration of a historical era, as description of society, as defense of an ideology, and instead puts itself exclusively at the service of what only the novel can say.’

Darkness and Day (1951)

2007-07-23T20:07:00.000Z

Darkness and Day by Ivy Compton Burnett. (1884-1969)

Reading Ivy Compton Burnett is not easy. This is the first of her books which I’ve actually succeeded in getting right through. But persistence paid off and, finally, I think I see the point of ICB. There is no other writer remotely like her, either in style or in content. The ‘story’, in so far as there is one, is conveyed almost entirely through dialogue, and you have to read very carefully to pick up the multifarious threads and cross-currents of conversation. Once you get rid of the idea that this is meant to represent ‘real life’ in any literal sense, you begin to appreciate the razor-like skill with which she conveys the ghastly entanglements of bourgeois family life, at the same time revealing its inherent humour and melodrama.

The New York Herald Tribune said: "Her specialty is a kind of surgical operation upon family life. Through her, we see it startlingly stripped of its more amiable pretensions. Parents and children, servants and masters, engage in a queer kind of verbal warfare bristling with innuendo and even with a candor that slashes to the quick. Her revelation of character ... [is] built upon a searching yet serene anlysis of the egotisms, envies, irascibilities that are part of domestic intercourse. By reason of her accurate avoidance of all pretense or idealism, her people actually become ... almost heroic, and vividly if bitterly funny."

Raymond Mortimer, reviewing Darkness and Day in the Sunday Times, wrote:
"Everyone in it [Darkness and Day] is either protecting himself from the truth or unearthing it. 'What we ought to be is not what we are.' If all the characters blaze with wit, this is in order to illuminate the most unlovely recesses of the human heart; in none of the fashionable prophets of despair do we find a blacker view of human nature. Yet here the reader is exhilarated — by the author's iron courage and by her austere diction, which can rise to poetic grandeur ..."

Opinion on Ivy Compton Burnett’s work has been divided, some claiming that she is a literary genius, others that she is unreadably pretentious.

"The most original novelist now writing in English", said V.S Pritchett, and Philip Toynbee commented: "Miss Compton-Burnett is totally unlike any other novelist. Wit and melodrama have never been so combined before, and the combination is a brilliant success.... She is a unique figure in modern English literature."
—
On the other hand, John o' London's Weekly, reviewing More Women Than Men described it as: "Pompous falsity ... a pinnacle of unreality", and reviewing Men and Wives, the New Statesman said:
"There is something rather cruel, rather horrible in Miss Burnett's talent."

There’s a wealth of information about ICB on the Internet – you could start with Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_Compton-Burnett

Slightly Foxed

2007-07-22T19:11:00.000Z

The problem I have with Slightly Foxed, 'The Real Reader's Quarterly', is that I want to read ALL the books reviewed therein because all the writers make their book selections sound unmissable. Visit the Slightly Foxed website for full details: p://www.foxedquarterly.com/?page=home
In this issue, I particularly enjoyed Sue Gee's piece about Kathleen Hale, one of my favourite children's authors. The review of James Hamilton-Paterson's Griefwork (see my previous Blog on this book) by Tim Longville was as lively in tone and as original and perceptive in comment as I'd expect from him.

The Twilight of American Culture

2007-06-30T19:05:00.000Z

The Twilight of American Culture by Morris Berman. (2000)

Reviews of Berman's books, including this one, have not been unconditionally favourable. But it got me thinking and I'll follow by reading its sequel, published in 2006, Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire.

Quote: ' ‘One of the things I hope to demonstrate in the pages that follow is that our much-vaunted American energy is …..shadow rather than substance. It is not merely that the swirl of activity masks a core of emptiness, but that we are playing out a new version of cultural decline as described by Oswald Spengler in his 1918-22 The Decline of the West. Every civilization has its twilight period, says Spengler, during which it hardens into a classical phase, preserving the form of its central Idea, but losing the content, the essential spirit. Hence, Egypticism, Byzanticism, Mandarinism. In the American case, this phase has been aptly labelled (by political scientist Benjamin Barber) “McWorld” – commercial corporate consumerism for its own sake.’

Berman is, of course, writing specifically about America, but his argument has universal relevance.

If you're interested in knowing more, I recommend looking at this Blog for Morris Berman:

http://morrisberman.blogspot.com/

Barbara Kingsolver

2007-06-23T16:56:00.000Z

Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver. Another member of my library reading group gave me this book, by a writer I'd never heard of. But I'm very glad she did - it's a remarkable book, combining Kingsolver's experience as a scientist, and her very obvious passion for the natural world, with an engaging narrative style.

Here’s a Synopsis and comment, taken from an on-line review: ‘Prodigal Summer weaves together three stories of human love within a larger tapestry of lives inhabiting the forested mountains and struggling small farms of southern Appalachia. At the heart of these intertwined narratives is a den of coyotes that have recently migrated into the region. Deanna Wolfe, a reclusive wildlife biologist, watches the forest from her outpost in an isolated mountain cabin where she is caught off-guard by Eddie Bondo, a young hunter who comes to invade her most private spaces and confound her self-assured, solitary life. On a farm several miles down the mountain, another web of lives unfolds as Lusa Maluf Landowski, a bookish city girl turned farmer's wife, finds herself unexpectedly marooned in a strange place where she must declare or lose her attachment to the land. And a few more miles down the road, a pair of elderly, feuding neighbors tend their respective farms and wrangle about God, pesticides, and the complexities of a world neither of them expected.

Kingsolver writes as well, and as convincingly, about the human characters in her narrative as she does about the natural world and the creatures who inhabit it. Her theme is the interconnectedness, both of the humans and natural world they inhabit.Over the course of one humid summer, as the urge to procreate overtakes a green and profligate countryside, these characters find connections to one another and to the flora and fauna with which they necessarily share a place. Their discoveries are embedded inside countless intimate lessons of biology, the realities of small farming, and the final, urgent truth that humans are only one part of life on earth.’

Foxglove Days

2007-06-19T19:57:00.000Z

For every elemental power

Is kindred to our hearts, and once

Acknowledged, once embraced,

Once taken to the unfetterd sense,

Once claspt into the naked life,

The union is eternal.

George Meredith

When I take Sam out in the late afternoon, the Sea Brows are deserted. I stroll quietly on a maze of paths, past disused sandstone quarries where the crows wheel in their clumsy flight and rabbits make speedy exits as we pass. These narrow paths are lined with grasses and wild flowers, this year as rich and profuse as I can remember in the twenty years I've walked them. Seas of dog-roses have colonised every ditch and every dip in the land, while stands of campion and hogweed make a pink and white patchwork, occasionally accented by blue vetch, all the way.

On the steep banks, which in May were awash with the cerulean haze of bluebells, bracken has taken over and is aggressively unfurling its fronds day by day. But the dense green of the bracken is punctuated by majestic spires of purple foxgloves, growing more profusely and richly than I can ever remember.

The paths come out on to open grassland beside the sea, where there are clumps of sea-pinks and kidney vetch. It is very quiet here. The heat has brought out the strong, pungent smell of plants and sandy soil. All you hear, at full tide, on a calm, sultry afternoon, is the sound of the sea lapping rhymthically against the sea-walls. Even the oyster-catchers and seagulls seem to have been lulled.

The Spell of the Sensuous

2007-06-18T19:52:00.000Z

The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram (1996) Subtilted: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human-World.

In his book (his only book as far as I can find out) Abram, a philospher and accomplished sleight-of-hand magician, describes the intimate relations between traditional magicians of many cultures, and the natural world which surrounds them. He then explores language and its power to 'enhance or stifle the spontaneous life of the senses.'

In the Preface he argues that 'Today we participate almost exclusively with other humans and our own human-made technologies. It is a precarious situation, given our age-old reciprocity with the many-voiced landscape. We still NEED that which is other than ourselves and our own creations.'

It is not his premise that we should renounce our modern technologies, but rather that we 'must renew our acquaintance with the sensuous world in which our techniques and technologies are rooted.'

Anyone who has lived long enough to remember a time when in our daily lives we still recognised our dependence on the natural world will be touched, and troubled, by Abram's message that 'Direct sensuous reality, in all its more-than-human mystery, remains the sole solid touchstone for an experiential world now inundated with electronically-generated vistas; only in regular contact with the tangible ground and sky can we learn how to orient and to navigate in the multiple dimensions that now claim us.'

Reading that, I was reminded of a recent survey undertaken with kids, which revealed that many of them didn't know that there was any connection between cows and milk, or that carrots grew in the earth!

Invisible Cities

2007-06-15T19:07:00.000Z

From Invisible Cities (1972) by Italo Calvino:

Kublai Khan says: I do not know when you have had time to visit all the countries you describe. It seems to me you have never moved from this garden.
Marco Polo replies thus: Everything I see and do assumes meaning in a mental space where the same calm reigns as here, the same penumbra, the same silence streaked by the rustling of leaves. At the moment when I concentrate and reflect, I find myself again, always, in this garden, at this hour of evening, in your august presence, though I continue without a moments pause, moving up a river green with crocodiles or counting the barrels of salted fish being lowered into the hold.

You could consider Invisible Cities in several ways: as a series of linked stories on a single theme, or as a sort of prose poem, or even as a continuous narrative. One reviewer suggests that this book was designed to be dipped into rather than read through, also that it is perhaps not the best of Calvino’s books to start with. I was at a disadvantage on both counts. I read it straight through at 3 in the morning about two weeks ago and have been slightly troubled, indeed haunted, by it ever since.

Gore Vidal, writing in The New York Review of Books commented: "Of all tasks, describing the contents of a book is the most difficult and in the case of a marvelous invention like Invisible Cities, perfectly irrelevant."

I fear this is true, but will try nonetheless to give sufficient of a flavour to (maybe) entice some more readers to give it a go.

Invisible Cities describes imaginary conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. The Great Khan wishes to hear reports about his vast empires, which it is beyond his ability to visit himself. Marco Polo describes his visits to a series of surreal cities in the Khan's domain, each city being characterized by a unique quality or concept and each one given a name which is evocatively feminine. Cities are categorized under headings as, for example, Cities and Memory, Cities and Signs, Cities and Names, Cities and the Dead….It is for the reader (along with Kublai Khan!) to read significance into Marco Polo's fragmented tales, to puzzle over the metaphorical sense of each narrative.

The Great Khan is old and weary but still, despite his scepticism, wants the youthful Polo to enchant and amaze him with accounts of his own domains. When even the ever-inventive Polo finally tires and says that he has told him of all the cities he knows, Kublai Khan says:
“There is one city of which you never speak.”
Marco Polo bowed his head.
“Venice” the Khan said.
Marco smiled. “What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?”

When pressed to speak directly about Venice, Marco says this:
“Memory’s images are fixed in words, are erased. Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it. Or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.”

The Brown House Garden - 2

2007-06-13T13:37:00.001Z

Hostas enjoy the cool, north-facing Well-yard, at the back of the house - and slugs and snails are foiled by growing them in pots and chimney-pots. The Early Purple Orchids in the trough seeded themselves in and have mutiplied over the years with no human intervention.

Cardiocrinum giganteum is certainly an exotic inhabitant of The Brown House Garden. It's waxy cream trumpets give off a heady perfume which fills the Well-yard on warm summer evenings. We had one plant, a few years since, which reached 9 feet, but this year it's flowering at only about four feet. The plants die after flowering, but leave off-set bulbils which, given time, will themselves flower.

The Brown House Garden - June

2007-06-13T12:48:00.000Z

Looking eastward, the wall is lower than on the other sides of the garden, where they are all about 18 feet high. Living up to her name, Maigold is a reliable May-flowerer here and goes on looking fresh and vigorous for weeks and weeks. Growing alongside is an old Rosa rugosa, skirted by catmint. All these plants do remarkably well, considering the amount of shade they get in the morning from a vast sycamore.

Here is Echium pininana 'Pink Fountain', also known as Tower of Jewels and Pride of Teneriffe. This was its first flowering here, after succumbing to winter weather for several years. A real show-stopper for visitors to the garden this year!

Earlier in the season, when it became clear that the echium really was, finally, going to flower, Tim explained some of its botanical properties to Sam, who was most interested.

Holiday Reading 4: William Sansom

2007-06-03T17:26:00.001Z

In 1951 Graham Greene’s lover and muse, Catherine Walston, gave him a copy of The Face of Innocence by William Sansom (1912 –1976) "because there is nothing else to give you". Not sure what to make of that remark. Sansom is a writer whom I’d not come across before, and so picking this book up at random I had no idea what to expect. Later, I discovered that there is very little about him on the Internet, although in his day he was highly regarded by other writers such as Eudora Welty, Henry Green and Graham Greene himself. I think he’s what it described as ‘a writers’ writer’, with a very conscious use of language, sometimes a little too clever and self-regarding, which can be a distraction to the reader. His obvious enjoyment of language leads him sometimes to make up his own verbs, which makes him quite fun to read.

The plot revolves round the relationship of two men with a woman called, portentously, Eve. She marries and deceives one of them, while using the other one, who is infatuated with her, as her confident. The big question implied in the ironical title is: whose is the face of innocence? Not Eve, surely, who is highly manipulative and whose motives ultimately remain dark. In fact, her character, central to the whole narrative, is problematical – I was never really convinced by her.

During World War II, Sansom, like Henry Green, was a fireman with the National Fire Service, combatting infernos created by German bombing attacks on England – in fact he may have been a colleague in the service. This experience became one of the major themes of his early works, such as Fireman Flower, and Other Stories. His descriptions of London and London life, in novels and stories set there, became one of the hallmarks of his work.

There’s a good review here:
http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/christopherpriest/sanrev.htm

Holiday Reading 3: Heinrich Herrer.

2007-06-02T20:41:00.000Z

Seven Years In Tibet by Heinrich Harrer is a fascinating read.
(There's a 1997 film which received mixed reviews. ) The book tells the story of how Austrians Heinrich Harrer and Peter Aufschnaiter were imprisoned as enemy aliens by the British while part of a German expedition to Nanga Parat in the Himalayas, in present-day Pakistan, in summer 1939. Harrer and Aufschnaiter escaped and made it across the border into Tibet in 1944, crossing the treacherous high plateau, surviving conditions of the utmost severity. Shortly after arriving in Tibet, they were ordered to return to India but were able to disguise themselves, and make their way to Lhasa. Harrer became a tutor and close friend of the Dalai Lama, who was then still a boy of fourteen. The first part of the book, recounting the perilous journey across Tibet, is an adventure story to thrill any would-be explorer, while Harrer's observation of Lhasa at that time, seen from his Westerner's viewpoint, is a unique record of life in the Forbidden City before the Chinese Communist invasion of 1950.

For an excellent review of the book see http://theopencritic.com/?p=3

Harrer, who remained friends with the Dalai Lama for the rest of his life, died aged 93 in 2006.

For a succinct account of Harrer's life, see the Guardian obituary:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,1682226,00.html

Holiday Reading 2:Rumer Godden

2007-06-02T20:04:00.000Z

Why, I wondered, had I never read Kingfishers Catch Fire? Still it was good to have such a treat in reserve. The other books of Godden's which I've read - and she wrote 60 all told - are The River and Black Narcissus, both of which were made into films. (I saw the latter when it came out in 1947, when I was ten years old - taken to the cinema by my father - and can remember the colours and atmosphere of it to this day.)
Kingfishers Catch Fire, published in 1953, is a fictionalised acount of the period she spent living frugally in a cottage in Kashmir; she depicts herself as a free spirit who for various reasons is hard up, but in real life she was grimly trying to write to earn money in order to repay the debts which accrued in the collapse of her marriage.

The story gives a convincing picture of the way of life and characters of a particular place and time, without in any way glamourising them or presenting an 'idyll' - although only a Kashmiri would be able to tell us how 'true' it is!

During her time in Kashmir, as well as writing books, Godden set up, and taught in, a school and practised herbal medicine. The family survived an apparent poisoning attempt by two servants, all of which is incorporated into the novel.

Holiday Reading I: Helen Waddell

2007-06-02T19:45:00.000Z

Every room in the holiday cottage was lined with book-cases containing the over-flow, from his own house, of the owner's book collection. As retired teacher of history, there was a huge selection of books about history and historical figures. But literature was also, obviously, a major interest and so browsing the shelves passed a considerable amount of the time spent 'on holiday'. There were lot of book I'd read in the past - some long forgotten and re-discovered with great pleasure:HelenWaddell's Peter Abelard, which enjoyed considerable success when it was published in 1933, was one such.

As soon as I laid eyes on it, I remembered that it had been given to me to read by my father when I was 16 – perhaps, in his oblique way, he was trying to help me to understand some of the complexities of love and sex which are so puzzling to the young! Re-reading it now, at a distance of 53 years, the thing which most impressed me was how skilfulfully Waddell, scholar and academic that she was, incorporates into the story its theological and political ramifications. I seem to recall, though, that in my first reading of the book, for understandable reasons, this aspect of it impinged much less than the doomed love between Abelard and Heloise.

The following, to be added to my List of Books I Must Read, is a selection from many books dealing with Abelard himself and with Abelard and Heloise’s love story.

Michael T. Clanchy Abelard: A Medieval Life, Blackwell Pub., 1997 Marenbon, The Philosophy of Peter Abelard, Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Constant J. Mews, The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard. Perceptions of Dialogue in Twelfth-Century France, St. Martin Press, 1999 (paperback, Palgrave, 2001).
Constant J. Mews, Abelard and Heloise, Oxford University Press (Great Medieval Thinkers), 2005.

There's also a good summary of the story of Heloise and Abelard here:

http://classiclit.about.com/cs/articles/a/aa_abelard.htm

Margaret Ogilvy by Her Son, J.M. Barrie

2007-05-14T12:27:00.000Z

This little book, picked up in a local second-hand bookshop, is Barrie's adulatory account of his mother's life and his relationship with her, published after her death in 1896. It's a fairly maudlin read, but tells us much about Barrie's early emotional life. J. M. Barrie was born in the village of Kirriemuir, in Forfarshire (now Angus), the son of a handloom weaver. His mother, Margaret Ogilvy was the daughter of a stonemason. The couple had ten children, of whom Barrie was the ninth. Jamie, as he was called, heard tales of pirates from his mother, who read her children adventure stories in the evenings. Barrie's father Barrie rarely makes any appearance in his autobiographical works, and in this book is only mentioned at the very end.

Before her marriage, Margaret Ogilvy belonged to a religious sect called the Auld Lichts, or Old Lights, and many of the stories concerning it inspired Barrie's later work. When Barrie was seven, his brother David died in a skating accident. David had been the mother's favourite child, and his death plunged her into the depression from which she never fully recovered. Apparently, her only comfort was in the thought that David would never grow up and leave her and it is suggested by some that this thinking may have inspired Barrie's creation of Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up. Barrie tried to comfort his mother and gain her affection by dressing up in the dead boy's clothes, but for a period after David's death she took little interest in him or anything else.

This book memorialises the obsessive relationship which over time grew up between them, a relationship which remained a strong influence throughout Barrie's life.

Being Blonde

2007-05-14T12:16:00.000Z

This is posted by special request of one who doubts my blondness! This is me with my maternal grandfather in 1939, in the garden of 32, Burnell Avenue, Welling, Kent.

A Secret Place

2007-05-11T15:49:00.000Z

A small corner of West Cumbria is a se cret wilderness. At a guess, it's no more than about ten square acres of woodland lying between the villages of Broughton Moor in the north and Flimby in the south. Despite being bounded on two sides by villages from which there is easy access, very few people seem to use it and you can go there most times of day and never meet a soul, except, maybe, the odd dog-walker. The woodland belongs to the Lowther Estate, based in Penrith, and until a couple of years ago little notice appeared to have been taken of it for years. What remained of the old paths were wildly overgrown and the plantings of conifers had become dense and impenetrable. A recent programme of clearing and felling has left tracts of open land, encouraging the growth of many plants which appreciate a little more light.

An early morning walk in Flimby Woods on a fine early summer morning is a glimpse of all that is most wonderful - and threatened - in the English countryside. The wood is a haven to many woodland plants, to red squirrels and deer. But this idyllic scene has a secret: here be ghosts. For hundreds of years, this woodland was part of the great mining area of the West Cumbria coast, with big centres at Maryport, Workington and Maryport. The relics and ruins of its undustrial past are all around:the great blackened walls of the engine house which once pulled rail trucks up and down to the coastal depot; the mine-shafts, only recently fenced in; the little gravel quarries which provided the gravel for the rail tracks.

Flimby Woods hold twenty years-worth of memories for me: Bruno the yellow labrador flinging himself into every muddy pond and pool, including the big one still known as 'Bruie's Pool'; the Springer spaniels racing through the undergrowth in pursuit of rabbits - or anything that moved; Charlie, the elder Springer, wagging frantically as he proudly 'retrieved' a duck's egg, carried so gently in his mouth - then dropping it; the German pointer, Hunter, pointing out to me, very quietly and discreetly, the baby owl trapped by a wing in some undergrowth and needing rescue; Hunter pulling me over on an icy Christmas morning when I broke my wrist and was lucky to be rescued by a fellow-dog-walker; looking for primroses every spring in remote places.

The pictures show the woods on 9th May 2007. Sam is the latest in a long line of dogs enjoying the freedom and fun of a little wilderness - as do I.

Taking Life Easy

2007-05-06T15:18:00.000Z

Sam couchant on a clump of Campanula portenschlagiana. It's a stury plant, which happily spreads and self-seeds; it'll have cerulean blue flowers soon - IF we can get a look at them!

The Brown House Garden, May Day 2007

2007-05-06T15:00:00.000Z

Gravelled paths make a winding walk between raised beds bounded by low sandstone walls. There are few brightly-coloured flowers in The Brown House Garden, although in June some of the roses will make quite a show. There are only 'old' roses - i.e. those dating from before about 1920. They are usually not long-lasting, and flower only once, but their beauty and scent far outweigh these disavantages.

The picture on the right shows the bright chrome-yellow heads of Euphorbia polychroma, which is quite unusually brilliant in the context of this garden. Behind it is a clump of almost black-flowered hellebores which until last week, when the hellebores faded, made the most remarkable colour combination. Mostly, it's the contrast between multifarious greens and the variety of textures and shapes which make the biggest impact in this small walled garden.

The Re-enchantment of Art

2007-05-05T19:16:00.000Z

Suzi Gablik's book Has Modernism Failed (1984) described an enervated contemporary art scene. She depicted the post-modernist art world as one in which the revolutionary impetus of modern art had degenerated into a market-driven form of parody and calculated indifference.

In The Re-Enchantment of Art (1991) she puts forward the more optimistic idea that there is indeed hope for the future, but it depends on the spiritual and ethical renewal of our culture, including 'a revitalized sense of community, an enlarged ecological perspective, and greater access to the mythic and archetypal underpinnings of spiritual life. '

Re-reading this in 2007, one has to wonder how much progress has been made towards this 'spiritual and ethical renewal of our culture.'

Brocklebank Banchor

2007-04-23T19:07:00.000Z

After the death of our German Pointer, Hunter, just over two weeks ago, the plan was to wait until later in the year before acquiring another dog. HOWEVER - last week an advertisement appeared in the local rag: Yellow labrador, 7 months old, needs re-homing (for good reasons.) Tim went to look and was impressed. (I'd say 'smitten' actually.) Sam, as he's known familiarly, has a very superior pedigree. (For labrador officianados, he's from the Drakeshead line of champion working dogs.)

He'd had a somewhat checkered career in his brief life, having been sold on by the initial owners to the people we bought him from. They, apparently, wanted to use him as a stud dog eventually, then changed their minds and decided to sell him. Thankfully, he seems not to have been too traumatised. He's friendly and eager to please - a little timid but clearly extremely happy to be here. One picture shows him in the indoor 'kennel' he has selected for himself - the knee-hole of Tim's desk, clutching the chew which is SUPPOSED to discourage him from chewing anything else! It's not the most convenient place from Tim's point of view, but he's managing. Note that the other picture proves that, once again, I've failed in my attempts to keep dogs off quilts. (Labs like to be comfortable.)

Later this year, another dog will probably join Sam as company for him - if another one as delightful, and as delightfully easy to live with, as Sam can be found.

Love in the Time of Cholera

2007-04-23T07:48:00.000Z

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Is love a sickness? Certainly, in the case of Florentino Ariza, it is: a morbid, life-long sickness. The vast sweep of this book, in both temporal and psychological terms, makes it difficult to summarise in any meaningful way. The narrative begins with what is in effect a long introduction, culminating in the death of one of the main characters. We are then taken back over the preceding fifty-year-long story of the convoluted relations between Dr. Juvenal Urbino, his wife Fermina Daza and the complex and enigmatic Florentino Ariza.

Thomas Pynchonheads his review of this book The Heart's Eternal Vow, which is as good a summation of Florentino's situation as any. (http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_cholera.html)
But his is not the only heart, or the only eternal vow, which Marquez scrutinizes.

Pynchon begins: ‘….love is strange. As we grow older it gets stranger, until at some point mortality has come well within the frame of our attention, and there we are, suddenly caught between terminal dates while still talking a game of eternity.’

Love in the Time of Cholera has been described as ‘an anatomy’ of love. Underlying the whole narrative is the unspoken question ‘What is love?’; possible answers come in a bewildering variety, but always elusive, tentative. It is this Proustian exploration of complexity, of acceptance of the impossibility of saying the last word, which makes the book so satisfying (to me, at least!) Pynchon summarises it by saying that ‘it could be argued that this is the only honest way to write about love, that without the darkness and the finitude there might be romance, erotica, social comedy, soap opera -- all genres, by the way, that are well represented in this novel -- but not the Big L.’

The whole context of the story is one of wars and pestilence, played out in the steamy climate of a post-colonial Carribbean city.

Dr. Urbino and Fermina Daza are married in an initially loveless marriage, contracted because she was of the age when it was expected that girls of her class would marry and he was ‘a good catch’; and, on his side, because he sought the stability and confirmation of social standing which marriage brought, and she was beautiful and accomplished. But mutual dependence, the need for security, grows into one of the many forms of love which are described throughout the narrative, although not without cost to Fermina; all the various limitations and frustrations of her life come pouring out one day, when she shouts at her husband: “You don’t know how unhappy I am” , to which his response is to ‘burden her with the weight of his unbearable wisdom’, saying: “Always remember the most important thing in a good marriage is not happiness, but stability.”

Many years later, when the eminently respectable and morally upright Doctor is forced to confess to her an adulterous involvement with another woman, she leaves him in a fury of rage and jealousy, until, eventually, he comes to fetch her home. Still haughty and ‘determined to make him pay with her silence for the bitter suffering that had ended her life’, she nonetheless returns because the love which has grown between them over their years of shared, everyday intimacy, the ‘stability’ of the life she has with him, has become more important than her hurt pride.

The third person in what proves, indeed, to be an ‘eternal triangle’ is the love-lorn Florentino Ariza, who remains dedicated to the idea that he is in love with Fermina for over fifty years. His is the obsessive, slightly paranoid face of love; it is Proust’s Swan and his obsessive love for Odette, Charley Summers in Henry Green’s Back, refusing to accept the fact of love’s end even faced with the objective reality of death.

An important element in Florentino’s story is the way in which, over the years he spends in waiting for her, he uses sex as an antidote, a way of assuaging the heart-ache of his unrequited love for Fermina. After his first sexual encounter, he realises that ‘At the height of pleasure he had experienced a revelation that he could not believe, that he even refused to admit, which was that his illusory love for Fermina Daza could be replaced by an earthly passion.’ Thereafter, while convincing himself that he remains viriginally untouched and faithful to his idealised love, he lives a hectic erotic life, relentlessly pursuing sexual conquests with a vast number of women in many different situations, some of whom are much more to him than uncomplicated sexual pairings. More of love's many-faceted aspects are revealed to us in these relationships.

In old age, Florentino and Fermina are finally united and although it could be said that love has conquered all - time, age, bereavement - their happiness in each other is set against a background of irreparable loss and decay, not only that of their own physical decline into decrepitude but of the world around them. The final irony is that they can only stay together by sailing the rivers under the yellow cholera flag to protect their privacy and to enable them to remain undisturbed in their mutual obsession.

Hunter ('Hunny') 1992 -2007

2007-04-07T18:57:00.000Z

The Priest's Garden, 4th April

2007-04-04T12:36:00.000Z

The priest lives at The Priory, on the opposite side of the big, cobbled square from The Brown House. The garden was once tended by a priest who loved and took great pride in it. When he retired, maybe six or seven years ago, it was left to get wild and overgrown. The 'new' priest is supportive and encouraging, although not a gardener. Two years ago, Tim dig some clearing and planting but had to give it up - no time. Now, with the (occasional) help of some members of the congregation, I try to keep it at least weeded and will do some more planting this year.

But this north-facing bed against the church was a depressing sight when I began to think about getting back into the garden this week - most of what I put in last year seems not to have survived. The garden is mostly, resolutely, east-facing and very exposed to winter winds so that's not surprising. Also, the soil is poor and exhausted now as no fertisliser has been used for years - apart from the buckets of stable manure I spread about this morning! In fact, adding fertiliser is my main project this spring.

The other, east-facing, bed was planted densely with things like balotta, rosemary and hebes and looks much better. The up-side to the exposure problem is that this bed gets lots of summer sun. The best, south-facing bed is entirely overgrown with weeds and brambles which I'll try to kill before they get mature.

Griefwork

2007-04-03T19:30:00.000Z

Griefwork
by James Hamilton-Paterson (1993)
In an un-named European city just after World War II, the distinctly odd curator of a vast municipal greenhouse garden welcomes evening guests to admire and inhale the perfumes of his tropical plants, which open only at night. In his care, the exotic species have survived the war, his life being entirely devoted to studying their habits, ministering to their needs. He lives and breaths with them, literally, inhabiting a small space within the boiler room of the vast greenhouse, maintaining himself frugally without regard to his own comfort.The narrative is illuminated throughout by the botanically precise descriptions which only a gifted amateur naturalist such as Hamilton-Paterson could provide.

This is a fable, the steamy, erotic atmosphere of the vast greenhouse evoking echoes of the sprawling, overgrown grounds of Le Paradou in La Faute de L’Abbe Mouret (Zola), and of the magical, but poisonous, garden inhabited by Beatrice in Hawthore’s story Rappaccini’s Daughter. We are given glimpses of the wretched, indeed tragic, history of the curator of this exotic world, of the griefs which lie beneath his curious and compulsive character. His created world is seen as a way of dealing with that past, at the same time clinging on to a lost world and lost love.

Running through the narrative is the tantalising suggestion of a hidden secret within the green house – his ‘dark secret love’, which is only, finally, brought into the open when the outside world casts the cold light of reality on this steamy idyll - it is peace, the end of the war, that at last destroys the carefully preserved environment, threatening both the plants and the secret world of the curator.

An article about this extraordinary book will appear in a future issue of the magazine Slightly Foxed.Bibliophiles who don't already know about Slightly Foxed are strongly recommended to visit their website. http://www.foxedquarterly.com/

The Akhmatova Journals

2007-03-26T19:42:00.000Z

The Akhmatova Journals by Lydia Chukovskya
Lydia Chokovskya, Akhmatova's close friend, kept intimate diaries of her life and conversations with her. First published in Russia in 1987, this intimate insight into the daily life and sufferings of Akhmatova, as well as of those around her, is ' illuminating both of horror and of genius. '

The book ends with a long section containing poems by Akhmatova, those without which, as Chukovskya says, 'my entries would be hard to understand.'

The Cellar of Memory
But it's arrant nonsense that I live in sadness
And that remembrance nags at me.
Not often am I guest of memory,
And it always leaves me confused.
When I go down with a lantern to the cellar
It seems to me once more a landslip
Thunders down the narrow stairway after me.
The lantern smokes, I cannot now return,
But I know I go there to the enemy.
And I pray as if for mercy.....But there
It's dark and quiet. My feast day has come to an end!
Thirty years have gone since bidding the ladies farewell,
That joker is dead from old age.....
I have come too late. As if it matters!
I may not show myself anywhere,
But on the walls I touch the paintings
And by the fire I warm myself. Is that not a miracle?
Through this mould, these fumes, this dust
Two sparkling emeralds flashed,
And a cat mewed. Well, let's go home!

But where is my home, and where my reason?

Remembering Anna Akhmatova

2007-03-26T19:10:00.000Z

Remembering Anna Akhmatova by Anatoly Nayman.
(Cover illustration shows a drawing by Modigliani)

Billo asked me some time ago to tell him some books about Akhmatova.
This is one by someone who knew her intimately in the last years of her life.
Akhmatova's life was tragic. During Stalin's years of terror she had seen her husband and son taken away to prison camps, suffered the disappearance of many friends, and had lived in cultural isolation and utter deprivation.

Anatoly Nayman was Akhmatova's literary secretary and disciple during her last years and he recalls here their conversations about literature and friends, anecdotes about family life and vignettes, some amusing, some ordinary and some tragic: Joseph Brodsky digging a fall-out shelter for her to her utter bemusement; Akhmatova's bravery in intervening with the authorities on behalf of Brodsky....
Throughout the book, the narrative of conversations and events is illustrated by quotations from poems by Akhmatova and others. This is one of her poems which Nayman quotes. It was written about a bouquet of roses given to her by a friend:

No doubt you're someone's spouse and also someone's lover
My casket's themes suffice without including you,
All day I've been entreated by the flute celestial
To make a gift of words as partners for her sounds.
And you were not the object which seduced my gaze.
So many avenues the night extends before me,
So many sad chrisanthmums September gives.

In his Foreword to Nayman's book (1991), Isaiah Berlin writes:
Anna Andreevna Akhmatova, a noble and most moving writer, is one of the four great poets whose art dominated and continues to dominate Russian literature; her genius and monstrous persecution by the state will be remembered as long as the history and literature of Russia continue to be known.

The Aged Beast Takes a Sunday Stroll

2007-03-25T19:06:00.000Z

A Sunday stroll on a fine Spring morning. Low tide. Blue haze of sky and sea. Skylarks larking and calling above

The Translation of Memories

2007-03-23T17:58:00.000Z

Recollections of the Young Proust from the letters of Marie Nordlinger

This book, by P.F. Prestwich, records the friendship between Marie Nordlinger, the English cousin of the musician and composer Reynaldo Hahn, Hahn himself and Marcel Proust. The three young people (all in their early 20s) met in Paris when Marie went there to study art. It was to prove a life-long friendship, extending over almost thirty years and ending only with Proust's death in 1922. The friendship between the two cousins endured until Hahn's death in 1947.

Prestwich worked with Marie Nordlinger for some years transcribing the correspondence between Marie, Proust and Hahn. She became a close friend of the Nordlinger family and was the inheritor of Marie's archive of letters and other memorabilia.

Although Proust and Nordlinger were drawn together by their shared appreciation of fine arts, cathedrals and the countryside, the mainspring of their friendship was their shared devotion to Reynaldo Hahn, with whom both were, and remained, passionately in love.

Nordlinger was one of the first of Proust's circle to publish some of the letters she received from him - forty one of them are included in Lettres á une amie (Editions du Calame, Manchester, 1942). They contain an Introduction by her giving a brief account of her collaboration with Proust on the translation of two of Ruskin's books, The Bible of Amiens and Sesame and Lilies.

Prestwich's book throws fascinating sidelight on the three characters during all the years they knew and corresponded with each other. Nordlinger herself is worth studying - the talented, artistic daughter of the typically liberal, hard-working Victorian middle class living in Manchester at that time achieved recognition as an artist and sculptor. She also became the agent for a wealthy American collector who gave her carte blanche to travel around in America buying and selling on his account, only marrying when she was 35.

The book gives a wonderfully clear and intimate insight into Proust's work and pre-occupations during the years before he finally published Á La Recherche, as also of Hahn's development as the eminent composer and conductor he eventually became.

The Last Moghul by William Dalrymple

2007-03-20T20:10:00.000Z

In an interview Dalrymple says this: The narrative revolves particularly around the last Moghul emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar who creates this wonderful renaissance at the very end of Moghul rule, and who lived to his old age to see that destroyed when the Indians rose up in mutiny against the British and were crushed horribly, in what remains one of the great unwritten genocides of the British Empire. People are aware now of the destruction of the Aborigine peoples of Australia and Tasmania, the Irish potato famine is well documented; this is an imperial horror story of a similar scale, when the British surround and destroy Delhi. It’s never been written up completely for example how the British track down, hunt and kill every last Moghul prince they can find.

Dalrymple's research for this book was as thorough and meticulous as we would expect of him. What was amazing was to learn that he and his colleagues found the Persian and Urdu documents relating to Delhi in 1857, known as The Mutiny Papers and housed in the National Archive of India in New Delhi, virtually unused. He describes his discovery of this treasure as one of the highlights of the whole project. What he describs as 'the street-level' nature of some of the material enables him to layer his narrative, giving it a totally convincing graphic quality that conventional histories miss. We get 'the larger picture', the political, religious and military forces at work, as well as detailed accounts of the way in which these were experienced by innumerable individuals, members of Zafar's family and court as well as the commmon citizens of Delhi.

Irfan Husain, a Pakistani commentator, in an article in Khaleej Times Online says:
As so brilliantly chronicled by William Dalrymple in ‘The Last Moghul’, the British exiled the King and killed his heirs, thus ending the dynasty started by Babur over three centuries ago. To be accurate, the line had been in a state of decline for years, and the Uprising was the last nail in its coffin.

Husain goes on to explain that it was Dalrymples' book which encouraged him to search Karachi's Sindh archives and find there yet more records of the fall-out from the Mutiny - that, for example, some of the exiled prisoners from Delhi were transported from Karachi to the Andaman Islands. The whole article is here: http://www.khaleejtimes.com/ColumnistHomeNew.asp?xfile=data/irfanhusain/2007/January/columnistirfanhusain_January1.xml§ion=irfanhusain&col=yes

Dalrymple ends the book by tracing the 'fall-out' from the destruction of the Mughals' 'peaceful and tolerant attitude to life', regretting what he sees as 'the bleak dualism' of today's confrontations beween nations, ideologies and religions. There is, he says, '..much to regret in the way that the British swept away and rooted out the late Mughals' pluralistic and philosophically composite civilisation.'

Proust in the Power of Photography by Brassai

2007-03-16T19:59:00.000Z

This brilliant little book by the photographer Brassai is a fascinating study of the importance in Proust's life and writing of photography; Proust was an avid collector of photographs of his friends and social acquaintances, sometimes to the point of obsession.

Brassai (Gyula Halász) himself was born in Transylvania and after moving to France learned the language through reading Proust. He writes:

'In his battle against Time, that enemy of our precarious existence, ever on the offensive though never openly so, it was in photography, also born of an age-old longing to halt the moment, to wrest it from the flux of 'dureé' in order to 'fix' it forever in a semblance of eternity, that Proust found his best ally.'

The epigraph at the begining of Brassai's book is a quote from A L'Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleures:

'Pleasures are like photographs: those taken in the beloved's presence no more than negatives, to be developed later, once you are at home, having regained the use of that interior darkroom, access to which is 'condemned' as long as you are seeing other people.'

C/f Wordsworth:

And when upon my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude.

Wordsworth's River Duddon

2007-03-13T14:58:00.000Z

I offer this 'Thought' to all who write, or make, or aspire to do either:

‘Enough, if something from our hands have power
To live, and act and serve the future hour;
And if, as toward the silent tomb we go
Through love, through hope and faith’s transcendent dower,
We feel that we are greater than we know.’
Wordsworth: The River Duddon. Afterthought

Loveless Love by Luigi Pirandello

2007-03-07T09:11:00.000Z

Loveless Love by Luigi Pirandello

‘The Sicilian writer, Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) , is one of Italy's foremost literary figures. A teacher, translator and Professor at an Italian University, his biggest contribution was to theatre, challenging conventional dramatic Naturalism, and paving the way for playwrights such as Brecht and Beckett.’ He was most famous for his play, Six Characters In Search of an Author, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934 ’ (J.G.Nichols)

Loveless Love is a collection of three remarkable, but slightly chilling, stories, all dealing with ‘sterile, frozen love’. In his Introduction, J.G. Nichols reminds us that Pirandello was more or less contemporary with Freud (1856-1939) and although there is no suggestion of any mutual influence, he notes that they were both involved in ideas and ways of thinking about ourselves which dominated intellectual life in their time and still continue to do so. ‘They are concerned with revealing the motives of human conduct, and not only the motives which we hide from others, but also those which remain hidden from ourselves.’

While Freud's purpose was to heal his patients by formulating theories which he hoped would clarify some of their hidden motivations, Pirandello, being an artist rather than a psychiatrist, is not concerned with theory but presents his characters in concrete situations; he just shows us what happens and what is said. It is worth noting that a great deal of the narrative is delivered through dialogue, anticipating the plays which are now considered to have been Pirandello's greatest achievement.

The question implicit in all Pirandello's stories is: What is love? His answers come in different forms, but none of them make love sound conventionally rosy. His characters are not much swept off their feet by pure, irrational passion - there are always underlying currents and motivations, usually destructive.

In The Wave, a young, well-to-do man regularly rents out part of his property and makes a habit of flirting and falling in love with his female tenants, but never with serious intentions towards them. His contracts with his tenants are only for one year so he always has an easy way out of any involvement. This situation only changes when one of his female tenants proves totally indifferent to his advances because she is in love with someone else. When she is jilted, he first falls in love with her misfortune and finally is in love with what he regards as his triumph over his former rival. In the end, the pleasure he hopes to gain from this somewhat perverse form of devotion is undermined; marriage, and especially pregnancy, have deprived his wife of her youthful beauty. ‘Her condition did not allow him to achieve a complete victory, since by this stage [she] could perhaps no longer inspire in that man [i.e.his rival] the torments of jealous love.’

In A Friend to the Wives, a woman attracts advances, then repels them, so that eventually her would be suitors find wives elsewhere. Why she is so determined to reject all aspiring lovers is never made explicit, but having done so she then deliberately sets out to prove herself to be such a capable and accomplished woman, befriending the new husbands and wives in every possible way, that the husbands fall in love with her, or rather with the unattainable ideal which she represents. But her own underlying motives can only be guessed at: what is she in love with? With power? With the desire for revenge? With being loved?

These are not comfortable stories. J.G.Nichols sums them up as ‘ bleak narratives of mistakes and frustrations.’ He goes on as follows: ‘Why then are they so enjoyable? The answer is, I think, that, even if we cannot know ourselves, we are still creatures with an irresistible urge to know, and we even enjoy getting to know that we cannot know. Pirandello's birthplace was Cavusu, which in Sicilian means "chaos". It is a kind of chaos of which he writes, but his way of doing so is both controlled and calm. We can enjoy in art what we would find unbearable in life.’

Anselm Kiefer at White Cube Gallery

2007-03-03T18:08:00.000Z

On reflection, it was probably a bad idea to have read Simon Schama's Guardian review of this exhibition before actually seeing it: nothing on earth (or in art) could ever have lived up to the Schama hyberbole. Added to that, this was my first experience of Kiefer's work 'in the flesh' (or paint) so I was, in a sense, viewing it out of context. My response, therefore, was simply based on an assessment of what was before my eyes - a response somewhat modified by having read the aforementioned review.

In fact Schama's review was couched in such adulatory terms that one could be forgiven for feeling a tad sceptical before ever setting foot in the gallery.

At one point, Schama says:

The practice of perspective, invented to imagine a bucolic world where pastoral fancies were enacted in a neverland of happy radiance, is recycled in Kiefer's landscapes to exterminate the fantasy. Kiefer's skies are often black, streaked with the phosphoric licks of a descending firestorm, and what vanishes at the vanishing point are the balmy consolations of rusticity. Bye-bye Hay Wain, hello the Somme.

This is just glib - we didn't just jump from Constable to Kiefer.

For a more measured response, try this:

Hearing the artist vigorously (disingenuously?) disavow any resonance about September 11th a few nights later on the radio – in what seemed to me a deeply shocking diminishment of the significance of that day - I went to White Cube to see the new “wall works” with mixed feelings. With Simon Schama’s recent eulogy in The Guardian in mind - an anointment of Kiefer that must have embarrassed the artist in its fulsomeness - I went to White Cube prepared to be transported by greatness, or conversely disappointed. In the event, I was neither.
I am well aware of Kiefer’s reluctance to be “understood” and his dislike of interpretation. I enjoy the deliberate opacity and complexity of his iconography, and appreciate his desire for the viewer to use his or her own stores of cultural memory. The didacticism of so much recent art shown in this gallery is tedious, so this show, Aperiatur terra (et germinet salvatorem et iustitia oriatur simul (Let the earth be opened and bud forth a saviour and let justice spring up at the same time) is very liberating and resistant to pat interpretation.
On the ground floor of this exquisite space there is Palmsonntag. Museum vitrines of plaster “embalmed” palm fronds stand sentinel over a palm tree – magnificent in its death upon the pristine gallery floor. This work is heavy with reverence and ideas of renewal. The tree is an emblem of nature in all its magnificence and Kiefer is giving its growth a form of eternity in the glass cases. The archivist in him is very present; the taxonomist too. But there is mortality and the fragility of nature in this room. Of course there is also a more human, if numinous reckoning too. We are well aware of the poignant story of Christ’s joyous arrival in Jerusalem, before the agony on Golgotha. This is Kiefer after all.

Downstairs, there are three large paintings, Aperiat Terra et Germinet Salvatorem, Olympe – für Victor Hugo and Rorate caeli et nubes pluant iustum. Though I feel Kiefer would not have it so, these are noble failures. They are almost conventional landscapes with evident vanishing points upon the horizon. Kiefer negates the eye’s natural travel into the paintings with smeared, kitsch images of poppies, with all their tragic associations, upon the paintings’ surfaces of baked earth, paint and shellac, and the result is awkward. I suspect the garishness is entirely desired, but the result is curiously antipathetic towards looking, and surely this is what he wants us to do? Kiefer’s flaws as an artist are courageous and interesting – if disturbing. In his own words the gallery holds work that takes us to “that place where we can find the goal which we can never find on purpose” but it is worth the detour to find that place in central London.
(Robin Richmond, writing on A World To Win’ website, qv:
http://www.aworldtowin.net/about.html )

Tnis book review, by Sarah Rich (1917 –2006), is also helpful:

Anselm Kiefer and the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger. - MATTHEW BIRO Anselm Kiefer and the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 327 pp.; 109 b/wills. $79.95
LISA SALTZMAN Anselm Kiefer and Art after Auschwitz New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 186 pp.; 40 b/w ills. $39.95
As an artist of the generation born just after the Second World War, Kiefer has frequently referenced Nazism and its impact on German culture, albeit in rather ambiguous terms. In his early work, Kiefer had himself photographed in his studio and outdoor locations as he raised his right arm in the "Heil Hitler" gesture. In subsequent decades, he has produced "expressionistic" canvases of epic magnitude that, in both tide and pictorial content, evoke narratives of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. However, much of Kiefer's work, in all its Wagnerlust and return to the German soil, can seem Teutonic in the extreme, wavering between critique and complicity. Kiefer has thus been praised for his courageous attempt to recall wartime histories all too frequently repressed in Germany, even as he has been condemned for cavalierly reproducing pathos-laden scenes of wartime destruction without unequivocally condemning Germany's role in the conflict.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CEEDA103CF932A25756C0A966958260

My response to the glass-cased collages was purely subjective: I love the idea of using found objects - especially plants and ex-living objects - as a basis for art; it takes me back to my Cornish childhood, when we used to use early-flowering rhodendron and camellia flowers to 'embellish' other, less floriferous shrubs. Also, the earthy colours of Kiefer's backgrounds add a subtle romanticism to the over-all effect - the shades and tints of the sandstone landscape in which I live.

The Broom by Giacomo Leopardi

2007-02-20T19:50:00.000Z

These are the first two stanzas of what is a very long poem.

Wild Broom (or The Flower of the Desert)
‘And men loved darkness rather than the light’
John, III:19

Fragrant broom,
content with deserts:
here on the arid slope of Vesuvius,
that formidable mountain, the destroyer,
that no other tree or flower adorns,
you scatter your lonely
bushes all around. I’ve seen before
how you beautify empty places
with your stems, circling the City
once the mistress of the world,
and it seems that with their grave,
silent, aspect they bear witness,
reminding the passer-by
of that lost empire.
Now I see you again on this soil,
a lover of sad places abandoned by the world,
a faithful friend of hostile fortune.
These fields scattered
with barren ash, covered
with solid lava,
that resounds under the traveller’s feet:
where snakes twist, and couple
in the sun, and the rabbits return
to their familiar cavernous burrows:
were once happy, prosperous farms.
They were golden with corn, echoed
to lowing cattle:
there were gardens and palaces,
the welcome leisure retreats
for powerful, famous cities,
which the proud mountain crushed
with all their people, beneath the torrents
from its fiery mouth. Now all around
is one ruin,
where you root, gentle flower, and as though
commiserating with others’ loss, send
a perfume of sweetest fragrance to heaven,
that consoles the desert. Let those
who praise our existence visit
these slopes, to see how carefully
our race is nurtured
by loving Nature. And here
they can justly estimate
and measure the power of humankind,
that the harsh nurse, can with a slight movement,
obliterate one part of, in a moment, when we
least fear it, and with a little less gentle
a motion, suddenly,
annihilate altogether.
The ‘magnificent and progressive fate’
of the human race
is depicted in this place.

Proud, foolish century, look,
and see yourself reflected,
you who’ve abandoned
the path, marked by advancing thought
till now, and reversed your steps,
boasting of this regression
you call progress.
All the intellectuals, whose evil fate
gave them you for a father,
praise your babbling, though
they often make a mockery
of you, among themselves. But I’ll
not vanish into the grave in shame:
As far as I can, I’ll demonstrate,
the scorn for you, openly,
that’s in my heart,
though I know oblivion crushes
those hated by their own time.
I’ve already mocked enough
at that fate I’ll share with you.
You pursue Freedom, yet want thought
to be slave of a single age again:
by thought we’ve risen a little higher
than barbarism, by thought alone civilisation
grows, only thought guides public affairs
towards the good.
The truth of your harsh fate
and the lowly place Nature gave you
displease you so. Because of it
you turn your backs on the light
that illuminated you: and in flight,
you call him who pursues it vile,
and only him great of heart
who foolishly or cunningly mocks himself
or others, praising our human state above the stars.

There is a downloadable translation of the whole poem here:

http://www.tonykline.co.uk/PITBR/Italian/Leopardi.htm

Leopardi: Thoughts

2007-02-20T17:46:00.000Z

Another little book from Hesperus Classics.

Quoting from the Introduction by Edoardo Albinati:

Both the limitations and the greatness of Leopardi's Thoughts are to be found precisely in this fact: that they are the moral maxims of a misfit - a brilliant outsider who was always set apart. They contrast with the rich moralistic tradition of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a treasure of direct experience put into focus by accomplished men of the world (like La Rochefoucauld and Voltaire) situated at the very centre of the most highly developed society in Europe. The anathema which Leopardi pronounces on worldly institutions sounds above all like the defeat of illusions ardently nourished in solitude, or even worse, like a confirmation that the ancient cynical philosophers whom he committed to memory as a boy were right. And this anathema reverberates with all his sacrificial, private, obsessive torment, even though Leopardi makes every effort to translate his ethical condemnations into impersonal axioms, trusting to a cold and unbending manner which a true man of the world would never dream of adopting.

One after another, the values and customs of so-called civilised ways of living come under fire, as in the manual of an idealistic sly-boots. Good reputation, discretion, education…….. and finally the worldly cult of seduction, regarded simply as robbery of the weak by the strong - all come under attack. Nothing can be salvaged from the mass of deception and abuse that is society.

Albinati goes on to say: The Thoughts were intended to be the mature legacy of a man who had not reached his 40th year, but their splendour is not due to any special wisdom, but on the contrary to the romantic reverberations of inexperience, exactly what makes a character of Hoffmansthal, who dies without ever having known love, say "I have been in Egypt and I have not seen pyramids…." Leopardi had not seen them either.

So, you may be wondering by now, why do we want to read this book? Try this:

'We know for certain that the majority of those whom we appoint to educate our children have not themselves been educated. And we should be in no doubt that they cannot give what they have not received, and what cannot be acquired in any other way.'

Or this, which could be a Thought for Our Times:

'If I had Cervantes' talent, I would write a book to purge - as he purged Spain of the imitation of knights errant - to purge Italy, indeed the civilised world, of a vice which, considering the mildness of current manners, and perhaps even without that consideration, is no less cruel and barbarous than any remnant of mediaeval savagery castigated by Seventies is. I mean the vice of reading or performing one's own compositions in front of others. This is an ancient vice which was tolerable in previous centuries because it was rare, but which today, when everyone writes and it is very difficult to find someone who is not an author, has become a scourge, a public calamity, one further tribulation for human beings.'

The book ends with a translation of Leopardi’s last great desolate poem, one haunting in its sheer clarity, where a new society is announced, one in which human beings are allied against suffering because they are fully possessed by it- The Broom, the lowly flower which survives in the desert. (See separate post.)

It was, perhaps, unlucky to happen upon Leopardi’s Thoughts before having read any of his other works, particularly the poetry. After having read The Broom I feel inspired to seek out more of him.

On Carrock Fell

2007-02-20T17:31:00.000Z

Sunday, 18th February. These gentle, almost featureless fells, outliers to Skiddaw to the south east, have their own beauty. For one thing, lacking the drama and rugged character of the high fells, they are much less visited. They are lonely and remote, demanding no heroic feats of the walker but affording rare peace and tranquility. You can walk for miles, thinking your own thoughts, taking your own time, and never see another soul - unlike the fells round Keswick or Ambleside, for example, where you may be just one more in a long lines of other walkers, all panting and struggling to achieve a summit.

This is a view to the West - the thin blue line on the horizon is the Solway Firth.

Mr.Simpson's Dressing gown - continued

2007-02-12T21:03:00.000Z

Pinning out the pattern pieces on the lined patchwork ready for cutting out. There is some wastage round the edges - I left plenty of excess because of shrinkage during quilting. When the construction is completed, cuffs and a hem are added in velvet (black in this case) because it stands up well to the wear and tear of daily use. Finally, a lining will be added.

Biography

2007-02-12T20:46:00.000Z

BIOGRAPHY
These are the Biographies I read in 2006.

Claire Tomalin: Samuel Pepys. The Unequalled Self (Excellent. Biographical writing of highest standard with a refreshingly different approach to presentation of material which has already been much covered; instead of following a chronological line, Tomalin present Pepys in different aspects of his life: Family/Work/Entertainment etc. etc.

Richard Holmes: Coleridge – Vol.I: Early Visions. Vol.II: Darker Reflections

Hilary Spurling: Matisse. The Master (Two Volumes) (One of the most engrossing biographies I’ve read in recent years. In particular, all post-feminists should read this book for the study it contains of the psychological development of Madame Matisse! Her life could be compared with that of Alice James (H.J.’s sister) and with that of generations of ladies who in their repression and sense of worthlessness resorted to ‘the vapours’ !)

Geoffrey Wainwright: Lucy Duff Gordon (Interesting to compare Lucy with the above-mentioned; she showed that it was possible to develop her (formidable) intellect and to lead an independent life – but she did have the benefit of being educated by a similarly energetic and enlightened mother. Also, the very moving story of her self-exile, and ultimately death, in Egypt after she was diagnosed with tuberculosis.

Molly Hughes: A London Childhood of the 1870s (Persephone)(Autobiographical memoir)

Philip Callow: Lost Earth. A Life of Cezanne (I thought this was a very dull and ploddy book which didn’t do the subject justice.)

Pointer and Poppies

2007-02-10T20:06:00.000Z

The Aged Beast - Hunter (Hunny) in the summer time.(2005)

February 6th 2007

2007-02-08T17:45:00.000Z

On Sale Fell, above Bassenthwaite Lake. Beyond, the outline of the foothills of Skiddaw.

"Mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery." (Ruskin)

Roman Wall Blues

2007-02-06T09:50:00.000Z

The view from Hadrian's Wall, for example the one shown here, might have looked very scenic, unless you were a Roman soldier! Maryport was a Milefort on the coastal defences which extended from the Wall in the North, down to Barrow in Furness in the south.

Over the heather the wet wind blows,

I've lice in my tunic and a cold in my nose.
The rain comes pattering out of the sky.

I'm a Wall soldier, I don't know why.

The mist creeps over the hard grey stone.

My girl's in Tungria; I sleep alone.

Aulus goes hanging around her place,

I don't like his manners, I don't like his face.

Piso's a Christian, he worships a fish;

There'd be no kissing if he had his wish.

She gave me a ring but I diced it away;

I want my girl and I want my pay.

When I'm a veteran with only one eye

I shall do nothing but look at the sky.

W.H.Auden

Winter Morning

2007-02-04T18:04:00.000Z

The view West across the Solway Firth, to the hills of Dumfries and Galloway. Low tide.

A Working Arrangement

2007-02-04T17:52:00.000Z

This is one corner of my workroom - but I know where everything is, honest!

Mr. Simpson's Dressing Gown 3

2007-02-04T17:27:00.000Z

As each separate pattern piece is finished and cut out, it is quilted down the strips. After this the pieces can be cut to the exact size required, ready for assembly.

Mr. Simpson's Dressing Gown 2

2007-02-04T17:24:00.000Z

The yardage is ready for the pattern pieces to be cut. The patchwork is layed on wadding and backing fabric - leaving plenty of leeway to allow for shrinkage during quilting.

The Whale Looks Forward to Spring

2007-02-04T17:03:00.000Z

Reading List

2007-01-28T18:28:00.000Z

I kept a running list of the books I read in 2006 and arranged them in approximate categories, beginning with Arts and Crafts
Some of these books are old friends I had occasion to visit during the year, either for reference or just because I find them so valuable and/or useful they are worth re-reading.

M.C.Richards: Centering in Pottery, Poetry and the Person (Out of print and apparently unavailable.) Published in 1962. Re-reading this is pure 1960s nostalgia and yet, and yet... how much of what she says is still true, particularly about the true meaning of education.)

Jonathan Holstein: The Pieced Quilt. An American Design Tradition

Bets Ramsey,Merikay Waldvogel: Southern Quilts. Quilts of the Civil War

Faun Valentine: West Virginia Quilts and Quiltmakers

Carla Needleman: The Work of Craft

Suzi Gablik: The Re-Enchantment of Art

Anne Truitt: Daybook. The Journey of an Artist

Henry Glassie: The Spirit of Folk Art

Garard Degeorge and Yves Porter: The Art of the Islamic Tile

Biography

Richard Holmes: Coleridge –. VolI: Early Visions. Vol.II: Darker Reflections

Hilary Spurling: Matisse. The Master (Two Volumes)

Molly Hughes: A London Childhood of the 1870s (Persephone)

Etty Hillesum: An Interrupted Life. Diaries and Letters (Persephone)

Geoffrey Wainwright: Lucy Duff Gordon

Iris Irigo: The Last Attachment. The Story of Byron and Teresa Guiccioli

John McGahern: Memoir

Claire Tomalin: Samuel Pepys. The Unequalled Self

Philip Callow: Lost Earth. A Life of Cezanne

Travel
A.W. Kinglake: Eothen.

Robert Byron: to OxianaThe Road

Lit. Crit.

Louis McNeice: The Poetry of W.B.Yeats. (“..for existence is still existence, whether the tense is past or future.” “..the poet is a specialist in something everyone does.”

Novels

Norah Hoult: There Were No Windows. (Persephone)

Dorothy Whipple: They Were Sisters. (Persephone)

Kashuo Ishiguro: Never Let me Go. The Remains of the Day. When We Were Orphans. An Artist of the Floating World.

Colm Toibin: The Master (Fictionalised account of later years in the life of Henry James)

Lionel Shriver: We Need to Talk About Kevin

Pat Barker: Double Vision

Michael Frayn: Spies

Noel Streatfield: Saplings (Persephone)

Sebastian Barry: A Long, Long Way

Khaled Hosseini: The Kite Runner

Kay Smallshaw: How to Run Your Home Without Help (Persephone)

Ian Mckewan: The Cement Garden

Alan Hollinghurst: The Line of Beauty

Alexander McCall Smith: Portuguese Irregular Verbs. The Finer Points of Sausage

Dogs. At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances. (Trilogy)

Laura Graham: The Unfortunates

Patrick Gale: Rough Music

Robert Edric: Gathering the Water.

Carol Shields: Larry’s Party

Marina Lewycka: A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian

Louise Erdich: The Master Butcher’s Singing Club

Nicola Kraus: The History of Love

Niccolò Ammaniti: I’m Not Scared

Some All-time Favourite Books

Andre Gide: La Porte Etroite. Les Nourritures Terrestre (Translated by Dorothy Bussy as Straight is the Gate and Fruits of the Earth

Proust: A La Recherche du Temps Perdus (In the translation by Scott Moncrieff. I’ve tried some of the contemporary translations but go back to Scott Moncrieff as being, perhaps, less literal, but more true to the spirit of the book.)

Ford Maddox Ford: The Good soldier

Tolstoy: Anna Kerenina

M.C.Richards: Centering in Pottery, Poetry and the Person (Out of print and apparently unavailable.)

Jonathan Holstein: The Pieced Quilt. An American Design Tradition

Carla Needleman: The Work of Craft

Anne Truitt: Daybook. The Journey of an Artist

T.C.McCluhan: Touch the Earth

Henry James: What Maizie Knew. Portrait of a Lady

Flora Annie Steel: The Garden of Fidelity

Edith Wharton: The House of Mirth

Jonathan Holstein: The Pieced Quilt. An American Design Tradition

The Frozen Deep

2007-01-28T17:27:00.000Z

Another book from Hesperus Press, an unashamed wallow in Victorian melodrama. The Frozen Deep was originally written in 1856 as a play. It was inspired by the true story of Sir John Franklin's ill-fated expedition of 1845 to chart the final, unknown parts of the Northwest Passage. Traces of the expedition, and some records, were subsequently found, indicating that the two ships had become ice-locked and the entire crew eventually perished, some from starvation, others being frozen to death when they abandoned the ship and attempted to escape overland on sledges.

Wilkie Collins' tale begins as a love story set in a seaport on the night before an Arctic expedition is due to sail. By a terrible mis-chance, rivals for the hand of a 'young girl, pale and delicate', sail on the same expedition and their rivalry is eventually, tragically, played out in the icy wastes of the Arctic and on the shores of Newfoundland. What adds a distinctly gothic atmosphere to the narrative is the fact that the heroine is reputed to have 'second sight', so is constantly racked by guilt and terror as she foresees the tragedy looming. There is, in appropriate Vistorian style, an uplifting moral element to the tale, when the deadly rivals are united in a desperate fight for survival, one of them making the final sacrifice for the sake of the heroine.

The play was first performed in 1857, with Dickens and Collins playing the leading roles. Collins re-worked it into a novella in 1874, for his reading tour of America.

Proust and L'Ile Inconnue

2007-01-23T19:53:00.000Z

Here is the 23-year old Proust describing the bleak and lonely last days of the young Baldassare Silvande,Viscount of Sylvania:

“ He turned his head away from the happy image of the pleasures that he had passionately loved and would never enjoy again. He looked at the harbour: a three-master was setting sail.

"It's the ship leaving for India" said Jean Galeas.

Baldassare could not make out the people standing on the deck waving their handkerchiefs, but he could guess at the thirst for the unknown that filled their eyes with longing; they still had so much to experience, to know, and to feel. The anchor was weighed, a cry went up, and the boat moved out over the sombre sea to the West, where, in a golden haze, the light mingled the small boats together with clouds and murmured irresistible and vague promises to the travellers."

As I read those words, I was haunted by echoes of Theophile Gautiere’s poem, L’Isle Inconnu, set so evocatively to music by Berlioz:

Dites, la jeune belle
Où voulez-vous aller?
La voile enfle son aile
La brise va souffler.
L’aviron est d’ivoire
Le pavillon de moire
Le gouvernail d’or fin.
J’ai pour lest une orange,
Pour voile une aile d’ange
Pour mousse un séraphin.
Dites, la jeune belle,
Où voulez-vous aller?
La voile enfle son aile,
La brise va souffler.
Est-ce dans la Baltique?
Dans la mer Pacifique?
Dans l’île de Java?
Ou bien est-ce en Norvège,
Cueillir la fleur de neige,
Ou la fleur d’Angsoka?
Dites, la jeune belle
Où voulez-vous aller?
Menez-moi, dit la belle,
A la rive fidèle, Où l’on aime toujours!
Cette rive, ma chère,
On ne la connaît guère
Au pays des amours.
Où voulez-vous aller?La brise va souffler.

Who's Afraid of Marcel Proust?

2007-01-23T17:54:00.000Z

If, for entirely understandable reasons: it apparently goes on for ever; style is labyrinthine; plot, in so far as there is one, is slow to virtually stationary.... you are reluctant to read even a page by Marcel Proust, but at the same time have a slightly guilty feeling that as a serious reader you ought to do so, I'd like to suggest a possible way in. Hesperus Press (http://www.hesperuspress.com/catalogue/default.asp),
whose motto is ‘Et remotissima prope (to bring near what is far), publish "works by illustrious authors, often unjustly neglected or simply little known in the English-speaking world.” The books are beautifully-designed little paper-backs and Proust’s Pleasures and Days, originally published in 1896 as Les Plaisirs et Les Jours and here translated by Andrew Brown, is one of them. It's a series of sketches and short stories depicting the lives, loves, manners and motivations of a host of characters; their amorous entanglements, idle vanities, feigned morality and, above all, their snobbery – Proust is very strong on snobbery.

The cover blurb reads: "A stunning volume of philosophical reflections, short narratives and poems", offering us “ an early glimpse into Proust’s literary genius, and revealing him as both a remarkable chronicler of metropolitan life and a compassionate recorder of the most poignant sensations and recollections."

There is an excellent Forward by A.N. Wilson, where we learn that Proust completed these stories, poems and fragments before he was 24 years old, and many of them were written when he was even younger. (One can only be awed by the knowingness, the psychological perspicacity displayed by one so young.) "What will immediately strike any reader of this volume of short stories is how surely, from the first, Proust knew his theme." And Wilson helps us to understand the literary import of Proust’s style: "The complex syntax, those long sentences with their coiling clauses that he was already practising in Pleasures, is deployed in The Search (i.e. In Search of Lost Time ) to make us slow down and take the time to notice the world and the richness of its interconnections."

Of course, if you have never even dipped your toe into A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu, that last remark won’t mean much to you, but Pleasures and And Days will give you an authentic introduction to the Proustian style and themes so that, who knows?-you may be tempted to launch forth on the great work itself!

Yosegire – Symbolism in 16th Century Japanese Patchwork

2007-01-22T17:53:00.000Z

Patchwork in Japan has historically had religious significance. In Shinto, the predominant religion, all things animate and inanimate are believed to be imbued with a spirit, and this of course includes textiles. In ancient times fabric was so highly valued as to sometimes be used as a form of currency and fabrics were given as tribute to emperors and warlords. Even today old textiles have symbolic meaning: the giving of a patchwork garment, for example, conveys a wish for long life for the recipient, while the care and preservation of textiles is seen as a spiritual exercise. My padded and quilted patchwork dressing gowns are inspired by the 16th Century Japanese patchwork style known as ‘yosegire’. The word means ‘the sewing together of different fragments’ and is a form of what we in the West would describe as ‘crazy patchwork.’

In Search of Lost Time

2007-01-21T20:22:00.000Z

Many volumes have been written on Proust’s life and works so it’s easy for interested parties to follow up on. Try Wikipedia, for openers.
My own response to A La Recherche, which is not so much a story as an interior monologue, is entirely based on an appreciation of the powerful and convincing way in which he expresses ‘ the link between external and internal reality found in time and memory’ His understanding of psychological, philosophical and sociological manifestations of human life and society seem to me uniquely true and revealing. (O.K. Henry James comes close). Proust is, undeniably, discursive and I know that many would-be reader are daunted by this, but if you stay with it you find the text is so ‘alive with brilliant metaphor and sense imagery’, and the characters are brought so compellingly before your eyes, that it becomes mesmeric and, eventually, un-put-downable.
‘ A vital theme is the extent to which Proust sees humanity's strivings subjugated—time mocks the individual's intelligence and endeavors; memory synthesizes yet distorts past experience. Most experience causes inner pain, and the objects of human desires are the chief causes of their suffering.
‘In Proust's scheme the individual is isolated, society is false and ruled by snobbery, and artistic endeavor is raised to a religion and is superior to nature. Only through the vision gained in works of art can the individual see beyond his or her subjective experience. Proust's ability to interpret innermost experience in terms of such eternal forces as time and death created a profound and protean world view and his work has influenced generations of novelists and thinkers. His vision and technique have come to be seen as vital to the development of modernism.’

How Proust Really Did Save My Life

2007-01-21T13:48:00.000Z

Things were bad. Very, very bad. My father was supportive but, never one to 'emote', instead gave me a book by way of comfort: Volume I of A La Recherche du Temps Perdus. (Yes, in French. My father would have asumed I'd want to go straight to the original. I was just lucky he didn't decide to give me Vergil's Aeneid.) At Easter, finding myself unexpectedly and unaccountably dumped on a caravan site in Wales, for company a four-year-old and two Golden Retrievers, one with a fractured leg, I opened the book. I read the first sentence: Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.' That line haunts me still, after 40 years.

I was so completely engrossed, from that opening sentence, that the pain and turmoil of real life receded; I inhabited another world, where memory and experience were constantly interwoven in a way that echoed my recollections of my own childhood. I acknowledge that this was escapism - but of a high order. And sometimes, one has to escape to survive.

My father had over-estimated my schoolgirl grasp of French, so I had to work hard at translating as I went along. Needless to say, there was no French dictionary to be found on a wet Easter week-end in rural Wales. As soon as I got back to London I explained to my father that I just HAD to read this book - but please would he get me an English version. Scott Moncrieff duly arrived the following week.

Yes, I know that Montcrieff has been accused of deviating from the literal interpretation of the work, and that the quotations used as titles for the different volumes are fanciful and sometimes bear little resemblance to the original (and yet, and yet - as a translation of A L'Ombre des Jeune Filles en Fleure doesn't 'Within a Budding Grove' capture the romantic spirit of the original far better than the literal 'In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower'?) ; and I know that there have since been other more literal translations, but I have a sentimental attachment to my 1960s editions of Montcrieff and I don't believe he has taken me too far astray from the meaning and intention of the original. I have, also, dipped into the French version from time to time, but am ashamed to report that my French isn't much better today than it was then so I still do my re-reading in English.

The Patchworks of Lucy Boston

2007-01-17T18:02:00.000Z

Lucy Boston's Patchwork of the Crosses is one of the masterpieces of English patchwork. Fifty-six blocks were made using only one template, a long hexagon ( known as a 'church window'), the edges being in-filled with squares and triangles. Her skilful and imaginative use of patterned fabrics create the illusion of infinitely varied blocks. A detail only is shown here - the full coverlet is about 88" square.

Wall quilt

2007-01-15T19:43:00.000Z

Patchwork and the Spirit of Geometry. Part Two

2007-01-11T10:04:00.000Z

Jonathan Holstein considered pieced quilts superior to appliqué quilts in variety, invention and ingenuity. "For the quilt maker, the pieced block dictated the use of basic geometric forms, the possibilities of which were later sensed and exploited by abstract painters. The beauty of appliqué quilts is more of a decorative nature than that seen in the best of the pieced quilt, which when successful are the results of legitimate questions having been posed and most convincingly resolved. The license to draw freely, if it is encumbered with considerations of what is "elegant" or in "good taste", maybe more confining than finding creative solutions within a given format."

Despite the fact that the period when many of these quilts were made, i.e. the mid-19th to the early 20th century, saw the emergence of geometric form as a consciously employed primary source in design, painting and sculpture, Jonathan Holstein reminds us that when such quilts were made they were accepted as common, utilitarian objects, not "art"; indeed, if presented as such they would certainly have been reviled. Nonetheless,,comparison between the visual effects of some of the best 19th and early 20th century quilts and paintings of that period are irresistible. Holstein points out the similarities between the "total visual effects " of some pieced quilts and examples of modern painting, for instance the retinal stimulation achieved through colour and formal relationships, and optical illusion, in the works of artists such as Vasaraly, while the use of repeated images drawn from the environment reminds us of the sequential use of images exemplified in the work of Andy Warhol. Colour variation on a single format, as seen in some Amish quilts, is compared with, for example, Josef Albers’ Homage to the Square series.

There are other points of comparison between quilts and paintings: quilts have the same format as most paintings, that is to say they are rectangular or square. (Painters fitted their frescoes largely to squared interiors and exteriors, worked on squared panels, used rectangular structures, whereas the square or rectangular format of the quilt was the fitted by the size and shape of beds.) Finally, quilts like paintings are two dimensional.

Holstein goes on to say: "intriguing and startling as the resemblances me be, any direct linking of the two media [i.e. quilting and painting] would be demeaning to the history and presence of both quilts and paintings. Implicit in the art of creating painting is the intellectual process which ties the work of an artist to his disaffected ancestors and his peers, and places sit in the history of objects specifically made to be art. This is precisely the quality which was absent in the making of pieced quilts. The women who made pieced quilts were not "artists", that is, they did not intend to make art, had no sense of the place of their work in a continuous stream of art history, did not, in short, intellectualise the production of handcraft any more than did the makers of objects in the vernacular tradition the world over."
Jonathan Holstein: The Pieced Quilt. An American Design Tradition.

Patchwork and the Spirit of Geometry - Part One

2007-01-10T21:22:00.000Z

An article I found 10 years ago on The Virtual Quilt, by Catherine Jones, seems to me as interesting and relevant today as it was then. The question she asked was this: what is the status of straightforward geometric patchwork in a time of ever more adventurous experimentation with the medium of the quilt? 10 years on, this trend shows no sign of losing its impetus, to the point where many people describe themselves as "textile artists" rather than quilters and use a huge variety of techniques to achieve their aims. Interestingly, many textile artists who started out in the quilt world tend to at least keep a toe in those waters, to exhibit at quilt shows and to teach and give talks on patchwork and quilting.

Several reasons for this could be advanced; a significant feature of the quilting world at large is the sense of community and bonding it engenders. Even people who have deviated from the mainstream retain affectionate friendships and liaison within the quilting world, while the less adventurous enjoy talks and classes with well-known makers who may challenge their assumptions and inspire them to experiment and explore. (The result is the eclecticism in styles and techniques of quilts seen at exhibitions today - everyone seems to be dyeing, painting, manipulating …….the list goes on.) There is also the fact that growth in the number of people becoming involved in patchwork and quilting, especially through the proliferation of groups and dedicated quilting shops, provides a useful and easily accessed client base for many textile artists.

But back to Catherine Jones's question. Where does this leave today’s patchwork quilt maker, someone who doesn’t wish to paint or dye fabric or turn their quilt into a collage, someone who enjoys straightforward piecing of geometric shapes? Can this be art? Jones broadens her discussion by placing patchwork in the context of geometric art forms found throughout the ages in many cultures and traditions. First, she argues that geometric art, with its straight lines and orderly arrangement which make it look so deceptively simple, challenges common expectations of what qualifies as "art". Furthermore, it conceals the mark of the maker's hand and

Furthermore, it conceals the mark of the maker's hand and discourages last-minute creative revision. "In an era that prizes individuality and the frenzy of artistic inspiration, geometric work can come across as too impersonal, too well-crafted and too deliberate."

Jones also points out that except in certain instances, most notably the world of Islamic geometrical art forms, crafts based on these forms have been traditionally associated with relatively underprivileged social groups, that is to say with people who don't usually function as mainstream arbiters of artistic taste. Both patchwork and basketry, for example, have at times been associated with poverty and a make-two-and-mend ethos. The art historian, Oleg Grabar, in a lecture he gave at the National Gallery of Art, after making a survey of non-Islamic ornament, concluded as follows "….. the areas and claims that most consistently exhibit geometric ornamentation are at the periphery of major cultural centres or at the edges of dominating social classes". He went on to speculate that "….. geometry was the privilege of the illiterate, the remote, the popularly pious, the women using (and/or making) textiles and ceramics". Grabar described the graphic artist M.C.Escher, famous for his geometric works, despite falling in to none of these underprivileged categories, as "an orphan within the pantheon of contemporary painters and draughtsman". All these attitudes conspire, in subtle ways, to relegate patchwork to an inferior status.

Jones is dismissive of attempts to upgrade the work of some contemporary quilt-makers by comparing it to that of celebrated artists, such as Mondrian, or by linking it with jazz. She says "linking quilt-making with jazz - with free-form, urban music performed mostly by men - is a tempting way to upgrade the status of a geometrical and traditionally rural, feminine, textile-based art form. But I question whether the analogy holds and whether the constrained, geometric nature of patchwork may not, in fact, be a positive feature, a source of artistic power.”
I hereby declare an interest: I love mosaic patchwork more than any other style, and will argue in further postings that its possibilities as a channel of artistic expression are inexhaustible.

The Work of Craft

2007-01-09T12:07:00.000Z

The Work of Craft An inquiry into the nature of crafts and craftsmanship, by Carla Needleman, is an extended meditation on the relationship between Craft and craftsmen. She herself is a potter, and although she doesn't directly focus on textiles as such she shows that the basic material every craftsmen works with is him or her self. Whatever is between one's hands, the clay, the wood, the wool, the fabric, responds to the quality of one's inner state. The product of one's work is not just an object but a way of being.

In reviewing this book, Frederick Franck, author of The Zen of Seeing, said that it is a book "...for anyone whose hands itch to make something - pot, piece of weaving, wooden clog, painting or book - with seriousness, so that it is undivorced from the maker's inner life."

Here are some random quotes taken from Needleman's book:

"The realisation that when I work at my craft in a way that allows each moment to fall of its own weight, without hurrying it or retaining it, such a way of working will produce in me a state of greater sensitivity, can lead me to use this method as an inner technique having as its goal the state itself, solely for the pleasure of it. (P.9)"

"What does it mean that I undertake to study myself? Perhaps it can mean that I extend myself into the Craft, willing to sacrifice any of my own opinions that experience proves false. I undertake to begin a conversation with the craft, to listen to it, to be taught by the effort of trying to understand it. (Pages 12/13)"

Carla Needleman. The Work of Craft. An inquiry into the nature of crafts and craftsmanship. Alfred Knopf. NY. 1979. isbn 0 394 49718 X

English patchwork

2007-01-07T20:39:00.000Z

An eclectic mix of cotton, velvet,silk and satin (an old nightie). Framed under glass as mock Victoriana. Piecing this block in thse fabrics would have been difficult by any other method.