Cutting up vegetables for Alphabet Soup: the wholesome action of taking a pair of scissors to something you've made.

There is now just under a month to go to the deadline for Alphabet Soup exhibition at Clive Hicks-Jenkins Artlog.  A generous deadline, as probably any manager, editor whatever of any experience, or really anyone of any common sense,  can tell you, is not necessarily a guarantee of a result. People commit enthusiastically, maybe make a start, then put it on the back burner with a sense that they have all the time in the world, then before they know it, the deadline is nearly upon them, other things have suddenly become urgent, and something has to give...

Not everyone works like this, some people get stuck in from the off and produce over and above (go Leonard Greco!), but many do.  I should know, I am one such, even when it's a project I've taken at least some responsibility for.  In fact I made quite a few false starts, and part of my dithering has been because I had a plan  but didn't in fact like what I was doing, and went about it reluctantly. I set off with one theme, did one piece and decided I didn't like the style and the medium, stayed with the theme but changed the style and materials, decided though these were working it was really the theme I didn't like, changed to a theme I preferred but then the style and materials didn't work for it, reverted to the first kind of medium... 

Anyone would think I was a serious artist, but serious or not, one has to be happy in one's work, as my mother used to say.  So there I was, creating an 'edible alphabet', pen and ink drawings done with fine-liners of the kind I was knocking out with happy facility when I was about sixteen (with a Rotring drawing pen then, cheap, good quality fine-liners didn't exist, Ball-Pentels were the closest, remember those?).  Only they weren't as good as the ones I was doing then.  I also had an idea to give each one not only an 'A is for...' label, but a kind of alliterative legend, for example A would be 'Amazing anyone first ate an Artichoke'.  I have completed the whole twenty-six of these ( tough depicting a foodstuff for 'i' - so I've resorted to 'Ingesting insects?  I'd instantly be ill!')

I was, still am, quite happy with this formula, and I'm actually still quite happy doing that kind of tight, illustrative old-fashioned line work, the kind of thing I grew up with, it's nostalgic, small-scale, clean  and portable so can be picked up and put down easily.  But I still didn't really like the finished pieces.  They hung together badly, looked dreadful in the scans, the borders were wobbly and soppy and oh, that awful, jejune schoolgirl script of mine!   

So I picked up a big pair of scissors and chopped them up! 

And after I'd taken the photo I screwed up the outside bits with the script on and lit the fire with them! It was great. 

So now I'm on the fourth, or the third-and-a-halfth attempt. I'm not quite sure how it will finish up, but this way I can play around with different collaging possibilities; for the script I may well print something with a proper font and sticking it on.  We'll see. What you see here are an artichoke, some beans and a cauliflower, some nuts and an orange - guess what I'll be doing for 'p'? I'll post some more as I go along.

Submissions are still open for the Alphabet Soup exhibition until the end of the month, details here.

Explorers, life, mushrooms, yellow

Some years ago now, when I was young and green in blogging, and very first made the acquaintance of Plutarch, I discovered the first ten or so of his Handbook for Explorers sonnets, which he had begun posting on a blog of their own.  I asked if I could take one for submission with some photos for an edition of Qarrtsiluni's Ekphrasis edition - strictly speaking this was not ekphrasis at all as it's mostly understood, since that's usually words in response to image rather than the other way around, but the editors at the time were prepared to be easy about it - so that was how it started.  Then I asked if I could have the whole sequence of fifty poems to illustrate in the same way, and Plutarch kindly agreed.  The results were posted in groups of five at the shared blog which bears the name Compasses.  

It was a wonder-filled time and thoroughly enjoyable project.  I received the sequence to read in groups of about ten, I think, and was entirely free to respond with pictures in any way I fancied, the only condition Joe made being that I read them all in sequence before starting to post.  It was not only my very heady early years of blogging and of the pleasure in the contacts that it brings, but also of taking digital photographs, and having a sustained prompt and purpose to the activity seemed to sharpen the vision and strengthen my drive.  Sometimes the poems drew me to photos already taken at another time and place - some of the early ones on our trip to New Zealand before I blogged at all; other times I had an idea of where I might find the right pictures to match those in the text - the images for the about hostile horses 'savage flesh made air' I knew exactly could be found in the small, ramshackle old children's carousel in St Brieuc pedestrian precinct which I'd always found rather sinister.  At other times I simply walked around with the poems in my head and recorded what came along.

It had a small but loyal and appreciative audience, often sent to read from both our own blogs, and some of you are still around now.  The strength of it lay of course in the remarkable, consistently meditated and sustained themes and visions of the sonnet sequence, my role was happily opportunistic and secondary, but we all know we rather like pictures with our words sometimes, like we like cream with our puddings!  The problem with it was the 'upside-down' blog format for a longer piece of work, which was not so bad when people were reading it as it appeared but made it difficult to go back over it satisfactorily.  Then we started using the blog for the occasional 'Questions' call and response poems, so the original series has disappeared from view altogether.

A short time after we finished, I signed up with Blurb and began to try to rework it into book form, but made little headway.  Blurb's software at the time was jumpy and frustrating, and perhaps it was a bit too recent a project to go back over straight away.  Then last year when I visited Joe in England, he had another Blurb book that his brother had made up of words and photos, and he very un-pushily (of course) said he wondered if such a thing might be done with the Handbook for Explorers...?

I let it drift again a bit longer than I meant to, but when I signed up again with Blurb (the original one I began had disappeared) the whole thing went so smoothly: the software worked easily, and coming to it afresh after such a long gap was a real joy.  There was so much I'd forgotten about it, but the feelings came rushing back: the new and exciting vision which taking photographs brought, and the sense of pride that I was handling a unique piece of work that no one except its author had probably had much to do with before, and the associations with times and places which both words and pictures evoked - especially poignant were the photos, including the one I used for the cover, which I had taken in New Zealand at moments I remember very clearly spent with my sister, sometime uncertain quite why I was taking photos of bits of grass and sand and stone on beaches, but which are now vividly and intensely bound up with those moments, and which their use in this project somehow served to strengthen.

Happily (or else he's just being polite...), Joe seems to have forgotten that he made the suggestion which spurred me to take up the project again, as he was very gratifyingly surprised when the book arrived! 

Inevitably, though I proof-read it both on-line and in a first print that I ordered, I now see there are a few errors of spacing which will forever annoy me, though I think the text is sound otherwise.  I didn't change much at all from the original, except that the pictures no longer break up the lines of the poems.  This is partly of necessity in that the page formats don't easily allow for it, but it's also something I don't care to do any more anyway; I prefer poems intact and images accompanying to one side, above or below them, on the whole. But I didn't want to change it too much otherwise because I felt that it needed to be reprised as it was, and the sense of association and recall that it created for me was also something I didn't want to interfere with, even if the product was a flawed one. 

Which I think it is - not the poems, those are Joe's and I don't find any fault with them.  But the photographic responses are a mixed bag.  The freedom I enjoyed so much led, I think to a fairly patchy experience.  The pictures lack the consistency that they really should have to match that of the poems, they are not all of a piece and are often distracting and intrusive.  That's what I think now, of course, but it doesn't matter, in keeping with the medium used, it was a dynamic, spontaneous and ultimately largely ephemeral thing.  Some of them worked very well, some less so, but I had no objection to recreating the more static and archival form of a book from them.  Having done so, however, I'm now thinking what I could do with it instead.

The quality of the printing is really excellent, I am very pleased and impressed with it indeed.  There is a hover fly on the yellow flowering twig in one of the pictures shown in the collage above which I never knew was there before, even though I took the photo, edited and used it here and elsewhere on Box Elder. Even the very small reproductions are very fine.  The binding also seems good (Blurb had a lot of complaints about binding before, which was another thing which put me off doing it earlier).  But print-on-demand, quite large format, with colour pics of this quality is fairly expensive. However, Blurb also make much less expensive black and white, smaller format paperbacks, which can contain black and white illustrations including photos, but the reproduction will be much simpler and more minimal ('an edgy look and feel' is I think how they describe it, never quite sure what 'edgy' is supposed to mean...).  Severely reducing the selection of photos to those which would more properly (in my view) complement the text (I would still use the original photos, but edit them appropriately) and which could be successfully rendered  in a much simpler, starker, more abstract form would give the poems the pre-eminence they deserve and hopefully make for a much tighter, more coherent piece of work, and a more affordable book for anyone who was interested.  I'd enjoy doing it.

(The current book is to be found at Blurb, here )

~~~

More stuff.  Life drawing, best of.  Not really much to show for five two hour sessions.  This is because I don't practise.  I go home all fired up and determined to do so, usually after spending two-thirds of the time frustratingly producing duds, but feeling more excitedly happy and engaged than at almost any other time anyway, and then I don't.  I might not be able to get anyone round here to take their clothes off for me (while discussing the pros and cons of female rounds and curves against male flat planes and straight lines Tom did venture to say that he could probably offer more curves than flat bits... TMI really), I could very easily practice from photos and work on hands, feet, portraits etc.  Tom dug me out some books on techniques and figure drawing, and I am resolved to apply myself. The tutor is trying to get enough people together to do a whole Sunday studio of longer poses, which will be great, so if you're in the Lamballe area on March 12 and fancy a day of life drawing, let me know.

The young pregnant woman, L., was superb, and just a lovely person, very serene and steady.  The male model, O, (a rare and sought-after thing, it seems), was slender and stringy and very wobbly,struggled to hold a pose, more so, if anything, in the apparently relaxed positions than in the more twisted up or dynamic ones - he struck a number of slightly unsettling Raft-of-the-Medusa-ish and other rather anguished romantic attitudes, but he had fabulous brows and hair, would have been a good portrait or photo model, as would the tall, dark woman we had last, J, who was also very strong and steady, but changed poses very rapidly.  I love life-drawing.

~~~

And some pretty little oyster mushrooms from the organic supermarket, not quite sure what to do with them apart from photographing them.

~~~

It seems to suit me to do one big post about once a week at the moment.  Rather a lot to prevail on people to read but them again you can always come back later if you want, as I'm not posting so often.

~~~

Lemon zest grated into a blend of cold-pressed olive and rapeseed oil and lemon juice, with a spoonful of honey, marinade for chicken piccata  (thanks Catalyst), must surely be the yellowest thing in the world. 

Logs, shoots, cards, stones...

The amount of wood due for the rental of the field, which has always been rather a moot amount, plus a cord we paid for.  A cord also seems a moot amount, as we always understood it's three cubic metres, but in fact it turns out it should be a little more than that, strictly it doesn't exist in this metric country, and who gets out the tape measure when the wood tractor arrives anyway?  Whatever, it seemed like a lot when it came to stacking it, not that we're complaining, a well-stocked woodpile gives the same sense of riches, security and comfort that I imagine squirrels get when they make a good stash of filberts, only we're not likely to forget where we put the woodpile or to have it all eaten by field voles.  Dropped in front of the house mid-afternoon on Wednesday, we ferried it round  to the back and stacked it there until rain, darkness and exhaustion defeated us, but we got it all under cover anyway.  We've been thrifty with the fire until now, which with the mild and sunny autumn we've had hasn't been a hardship really, but now we feel we can be generous with ourselves for a bit.

~

More evidence of the mild autumn and early winter, the narcissus bulbs poking their noses up to see what's going on.

~

Christmas cards.  Oh I've moaned and cogitated about this plenty before, then last year I made really quite nice cards, then this year even though I should have been less busy I didn't really get properly organised with them, and there isn't really the possibility here of just nipping out to the charity shop and picking up a couple of packets.  So I ended up doodling some stuff with pastels ans scanning them.  This coincided with the arrival of a new Canon printer. 

 We got this because the old Dell one which came with the last computer seemed to have compatibilty issues with Windows 7.  As it turned out these could have been resolved by wiggling through the preferences dialogue boxes and finding 'fit to page'.  Still, the print quality even for black and white was becoming dreadful and there didn't seem to be an evident way to service it, and I was fed up with having to send away for exorbitantly priced ink in obscure cartridges which couldn't be flogged back for recycling.  The print quality on the Canon one is very good, and the cartridges are cheaper and available from the supermarket.


So, the doodles.  Not too keen to put my name on them really - the holly's all right but the baubles look like nothing so much as radishes and turnips.        
I made some from the contact sheet and lots of fiddly snipping and pasting, but ended up putting the better designs in collages and adding text; which is always quite fun as Picasa's choice of fonts seems to get larger by the day,

They still look like boring wrapping paper though. I'll try to do better next year.

~

I've taken the plunge and put the small stones badge on my sidebar, thereby committing myself to daily blogging again in January.  Just one very brief item of observational writing every day seems like it might be a good idea, and I do admire Fiona and Kaspa for their energy and talent and consistency and all-round general good-eggness - click on the badge to find out more.  I still try to keep up Out with Mol form time to time, but the constraint, not of sticking to 30 words, which is good discipline and enjoyable, but of finding something new to observe in walking the same routes, and then remembering them, is often more than I manage.  So I'll try small stones for a month.     Then I'll probably slip back into irregular meandering posts again, but it won't do me any harm to change the pattern.

Life drawing

Life drawing took place as scheduled and was wonderful.  Drawing is something which can render me completely absorbed and blissfully happy but which for long stretches of time I just don't do, and then trying to get back into it is difficult.  Most of what I produced was unmitigated rubbish; if I didn't know that I was once capable of reasonably competent figure drawing I would have been discouraged, but by the end, from about six or eight poses and drawings I did one which I was able to put aside and feel not displeased with, and C, the tutor, came by and looked at it and asked if I wanted him to fix it, so that seemed like a mark of approval anyway.  It's got a lot of faults which are evident and I don't need to catalogue, but it's got some good bits too, and I reckon at the end of ten sessions I should be turning out acceptable work. Using charcoal is a sensual delight it was great to be reacquainted with too. 

The model was lovely, about my age I guess, an artist herself and very still and strong.  She held some very interesting and difficult poses which she mostly chose herself.

Bring on the next one (who will be pregnant, they tell us).

We had a discussion as to whether posting this here was OK, and whether I shouldn't post a NSFW warning but Tom, who's not without a Puritan streak, said he's never heard of anything so silly so I hope he's right.  I brought it home and put it across an armchair to look at and the next thing I knew Molly was trying to snuggle up to it, hence the creases.

~

Now we're off to eat kig-ar-farz for the first time ever. This is, as far as I can gather, a version of pot-au-feu with the addition of a large buckwheat dumpling cooked in a bag in the broth.  It is a speciality of the Leon region of north Finistere but we have located a restaurant not far from here where they cook it once a month, and tonight's the night!  

Have a good Friday yourselves.

Turning

Clementines, in a box made from shaved poplar wood, a blue stained band around its top, the leaves and stalks curling and growing matt and dull, that last-colour-in-the-paint-pots green.   Swearing off chocolate, just for today, but then for tomorrow too, and even, so far, for the next day, you pass the time gorging on them and on roasted chestnuts.  It was foggy and dank outside, the fire, which you didn't really need that much but which was to cheer the day, smoked and sulked.  Chestnuts are a chancey way to feast; split them with teeth and nails at the pointed end, and, with luck, you might see, and smell, if they're black and bad inside, but then there's always the risk they'll fall between the bars of the grate and into the ash pit, from where it is rarely possible to retrieve them, whether with the poker or the bamboo tongs. Then they may burn.

But when they are good, and come through ...  The crack of the brown scorched shell, perhaps just caught alight in a thin, glowing red line, smouldering like incense, the furry paper inside husk and the steaming kernel, its hard raw starches turned to chewy sugars.  You roast them one at a time, alternating eating them with the clementines, so that your fingertips go from charcoal and ash and hot to the cool and fragrant oils and juices in the skin and flesh of the citrus fruit.  Then you burn the husks and shells, the peel and the crackled drying leaves with their scent of petitgrain on the fire.  An afternoon can pass this way, with a much-loved book, and tea, and nowhere much to go and no one much to see.

~~~

Yet for all this idyll of indolence, I am prey to anxiety at this time.  I look forward to the lull, to being momentarily free of obligations, I envision a time of timelessness and dreaming, of serene emptiness, but also that somehow I will accomplish many useful tasks of restoring order in neglected corners, and still do something original and creative, and that I'll catch up on all the worthy and serious reading I've been setting aside.  In addition I see us taking long and healthy walks, as well as having the odd bit of contact with other people now and then ...

It's a lot to ask of a week or so holiday, and at a low-ebb time of year, of course, and I am inevitably stalked by a sense of failure; that I have left undone those things which I ought to have done, and done those things which I ought not to have done and there is no health in me.  Even the well-loved book seems questionable in its familiarity - why am I still hanging out with Celia and Sir James and Mrs Cadwallader and Camden Farebrother (for they are the ones I really love, more than the rather tiresome idealists and their disappointments), shouldn't I be getting out more, meeting some new and more exotic and exacting literary company?   My own drive to make anything is hampered and beset by a creeping sense of its own pointlessness, by the numberless crowds of other things there are yet to learn about, and the knowledge that other people have made things so much better already; idleness and the presence of too much of the kind of food and drink I've been getting better at avoiding bring about a creeping heaviness of body - one of the six hard-worn-away kilos back already - and spirit.  Abundance confounds me, and the weather has been dismal for walking and taking photos.

I bewail all this to Tom. Heaven forfend, he agrees, that we should actually relax and please ourselves this week.

~~~

I take out the tin of pastel pencils I bought when I went to England, and make myself draw a clementine and a chestnut, though the tin contains no colour orange.

~~~

We go to visit my new friend.  She quizzes Tom on St John of the Cross; I don't know if he passes muster better than I do but they seem quite taken with each other.  She has set up her pottery figures with the paperwhite narcissus bulb I brought last time, so that I can take a photograph.

~~~

Today,  we walk in the fog, Molly and I, further than we have done lately.  The countryside is, as it so often seems to be at this time,  sodden and dull, reduced to earth and grey and grudging green, the last colours in the paint pots once again.  Sullen heaps of manure lowering  along the field edges provide some of the few discernible forms in the landscape. The fog has hung heavy water drops on the trees, which are almost bare except that the early cold seems to have prompted the oaks to hang on more stubbornly to their rust brown and ochre leaves.  There is an occasional breeze, despite the foggy pall, and walking under them, they throw water at me in a tetchy imitation of rain.

It is so difficult not to be affected by light, or its absence, but reason tells me that this milder, damp weather is really something I should be thankful for.  Crystalline wintry high pressure, beautiful as it is, is a worry when it comes to driving, and getting up on endlessly dark mornings to go to work, as I must again from Monday.  And the globules of dew which the fog leaves, while they don't glitter and sparkle and delight, have their own reluctant glow and grace.  For Molly too, the crushed and dampened earth, the broken vegetation and moisture laden air filled with the smells of the winter-driven wild creatures, are sweet delight, she is lively and especially interested in the world around her.  I realise that for her these days, the world as I perceive it today - visually obscure, colourless, its shapes unclear, with muffled sounds from uncertain quarters pressing on the outside of the foggy curtain - is perfectly normal.  So I enjoy the walk more through her eyes, or rather nose.

The light is always still there, it will be back.

~~~

I dreamed of my sister last night.  There were the usual incongruities and inexplicable elements of most dreams, but in essence we were back to a time before she died, but I knew what was going to happen.  There was a melée of distractions and problematical activity going on around us, but suddenly I knew the important thing was to go and put my arms round her and tell her I loved her, and I did.

I am not much for New Year, never have been.   The celebrations always seemed  forced, and usually left me feeling miserable; New  Year resolutions are a dubious tradition.  The change of date from one year to the next is necessary but arbitrary; time and change go their own way regardless of how we choose to mark them out.  But mark it we do, and that tends to lead to reflection and a taking of stock.  In a personal and family sense, 2010 will always be marked as a year of great  loss and sadness, but not one of darkness.  I resolved this year to live as well as I could, against timidity and sloth and my own limitations, as a promise to someone who showed me how.  As with any worthwhile resolve, making and keeping it is a work in progress, I fail over and over and have to renew the resolve time and again.  Resolutions, promises, commitments, aren't one-off events, announced therefore accomplished, but need perpetual review and maintenance, if they mean anything at all.

~~~

Tonight we'll watch Cate Blanchett Elizabeth the first the second and her amazing CGI Spanish Armada, and sundry other fibs and anomalies, in a spirit of why-not, which will take us past midnight here, otherwise we wouldn't bother staying up.  Lunch at friends' tomorrow, that's fine. 

Happy New Year.

Light and doorways

Three small watercolours Tom did for Christmas cards.  Some of you will have seen them already, but when he asked if I could  put one of them here to wish everyone a happy Christmas, I couldn't choose, so I've posted all three.

So, with thanks and appreciation of your company, your wise and cheering words and presence, may you have light in dark corners, and doorways opening, a very happy Christmas and a hopeful New Year.

Plane tree unleaving

Busy today, so not a long post.  But I've been watching next door's plane tree shedding its last, and thinking I wanted to do some painting, and a little while back got an invite to join a Flickr group for mixed media landscape, so I made time on Sunday morning to do something.  Inktense and some rather classy coloured paper from Lidl I couldn't quite think what to do with.

Happy Monday, you've been let off a long read!

Things I once believed, including some I still might believe.

This is an idea I got from Alison McGhee's blog. I'm continually amazed with so much in blogging that this is all free, everyone just does it for the love of it, but never more so than when I visit there.

It's one of those places that I go where I never see anyone else I know, in fact I don't see many other visitors there anyway, which is not to say they aren't there, just that perhaps they don't comment. This would be fairly incomprehensible except that Alison is, I suppose, a writer first and a blogger second, so she doesn't really do it for the chitchat (though she frequently leaves very friendly, warm responses to comments left...). I imagine she does it because she simply can't stop herself writing wonderful things.

And when I say a writer, I mean a proper one, Pullitzer Prize nominated, stacks of awards, a pile of published books, for adults, young adults and children. But starstruck as I am by all that, that wasn't why I first went there, or why I read it now.


I'm sorry to say I didn't know of her before discovering her blog (and here I imagine some people, especially perhaps American readers or those with youngsters, rolling their eyes and saying 'What, never heard of Alison McGhee?'), and I did so quite by chance when I was doing an image search a little while ago for a photograph of wild strawberries to use in a painting to make a card for someone who liked the Bergman film of the same title, and she happened to have one, along with this post on the subject.


I go on reading there for the captivating, luminous magic of the writing. Which is filled with joy and love and humour and also piercingly sad and filled with loss in ways that most people can't or daren't get close to. She seems to be one of those people who vibrates on a different frequency from the rest of us, and who knows what to do with it, takes all the raw material of memory and imagination and experience, holds it and turns it into gold, or dreamstuff, or what you will.


And she likes dogs


I could go on, and on, but better to go over and read for yourself, and I'll get on and order some of her books. In response to a comment on her 'Things she once believed...' she suggested other people might like to write about things they used to believe, so I picked it up. It wasn't exactly a meme, but why not try it ?

~~~

Things I once believed, including some I still might believe.

That I was born at Sandy Bay.

That I would die when I was twenty, having been told by a friend that the dandelion juice I'd just licked off my hand was poison, but a very slow one. I wouldn't die today or tomorrow or soon, but probably...

That certain things I said or did were unforgiveable, and certain others weren't. Wrong on both counts.

That the bath salts we found in a jar by the bath really would taste like lemon snow, just like Kevin Palmer told me before I swallowed them.

That when my dad retired, we'd go and live in the country, and it would be like 'Jerry, the Story of an Exmoor Pony'

That certain things could be fixed, and I was just the girl to do it.

That eating flies gave cats worms.

That only stupid people are happy. This one still hangs around, mostly in a rather inverted way: I am frequently happy, ergo...

That talking, and straight talking, must always be a good thing.

That maybe I had a musical bone in my body.

That certain losses and disappointments must inevitably be terminal and irrecoverable.

That, having lost all that weight when life was awful, I wouldn't put it all back on and then some when life got better.

Things my sister's charming boyfriend told me, such as that his little sister was eaten by a giant spider to which she was feeding pieces of bread. He told me these things because we were not a family who indulged much in fibs and fantasy, so I was extremely gullible. Even so I think I was quite dubious about this one.

That I was cut out to be some kind of people person. That I was cut out to be some kind of recluse.

That we would not still be renovating this house twelve years after moving here. That if we were it would be some kind of shameful failure, or matter much.

That, through no effort on my part, life would begin for real some time in the future, or that the world would change in such a way as to find a place for me, and then ability, hope, motivation, willpower, and, of course, recognition, would all be mine.

That there was some use for the concept of Utopia.

That White Ted really did make his way back to me in Hertfordshire when I was ill, from the car park in Dorset where I'd dropped him.

That the box elder tree was a field maple.

That loving Tom was such a piece of egregious and undeserved good fortune that I could not possibly be allowed to hang on to it, and that he must, very soon, be taken away from me.

That, being last, I was always destined to be least.

That I could never be happier.

~~~

(In the end I made this kind of amalgam of a number of wild strawberry pictures, and only used Alison's as reference. No matter.)

Plums and ukeleles

I'm probably the last British person alive who hasn't come across The Ukelele Orchestra of Great Britain before. Catalyst out in Arizona drew my attention to them with a video of their wonderful rendition of the them from 'The Good, the Bad and the Ugly' over at his, and I ended up spending too long on Youtube watching more of them. As it was, I found it hard to choose between this one ( Streisand's tear-jerking 'You Dont' Bring me Flowers' as you've never heard it before) and their wonderful modern jazz version of Kate Bush's 'Wuthering Heights' . On their website(link above), they describe how '... the Orchestra takes us on “a world tour with only hand luggage” and gives the listener “One Plucking Thing After Another”. '

Withal, their one of the most amazing and amusing things I've seen for a while; they range between deliciously funny, oddly touching and very melodious. Have a closer look, you won't be disappointed!

~~~

I finally finished another Inktense painting, was rather taken with purples, blues and greens, so plums seemed the thing to do...

A couple of announcements.

I don't normally do this sort of thing, and I don't know whether I actually have many local readers, with the exception of Rosie/Gillian, who usually knows much more about everything that's going on round here than I do anyway, but in case there are any of you lurking out there, can I give a plug to an event in our local town, Moncontour(-de-Bretagne), the theme of which is celebrating said town in pictorial form?

I haven't yet met Barry Herniman, but he's a friend of some good friends of ours here, and he's spent getting on for a couple of years preparing an exhibition of what promise to be truly gorgeous watercolours, which will take place over the next three days - Friday 17th to Sunday 19th April. In fact even if you're nowhere near this neck of the woods or ever likely to be, I would still recommend visiting his website , or his blog, even, (which I didn't know he had...), and spend some time just basking in his luminous and evocative paintings, land- and seascapes, which seem to me to do everything that watercolours should do.

Moncontour is an unfeasibly picturesque place, which I've never really posted about because I don't quite know how to photograph it without producing a series of picture postcards, and then I might be tempted to completely debase myself by rendering them in sepia or something. I keep saying to myself that I will park the car at the top of the hill and risk my neck walking down the narrow and vergeless hairpin bend to take the shot of the ramparts which Barry has shown in the poster, since just at this moment the big magnolia tree is in bloom up there, but the period of flowering is short, and I probably won't get around to it. His dedication to his art is very clearly much greater than mine.

There's also going on at the same moment a tasting of Cornish pasties and curry at the Frog and Rosbeef, the town's amusingly named Anglo-French culinary establishment (she's English, he's French), which I understand has been well taken-up by hungry expats suffering from gastronomic nostalgie de pays (yes, it does happen... I wonder if they'll have any ginger beer?), so if you're there for that, don't hesitate to go along to the expo during the morning too.

~~~

Blowing my own trumpet now, I've posted my response to Joe's question 'Qui custodiet ipsos custodes? ' which is to say, who will police the policemen? over at Compasses.

We have been talking about how we have both expressed a degree of unease, a sense of fear or constraint, about merriment, smiling laughter. Joe has a gaoler in his head, I find a figure pops up in my mind who seems to represent something murderous and diabolic, if entertaining. Yet we are not like this, are we? I ask. It's rather interesting what comes up. To put it a little glibly, the human condition being what it is, joy cannot be unbridled. 'Smile,' says Joe 'but not without the reflex of a distant sadness.'

In response to one or two queries. The 'who said what?' element, is we think, adequately supplied by the 'posted by' label at the bottom of each post. Can we show the workings? Nah, probably not. Joe thinks it's like letting your guests into the kitchen when you're cooking. I have an open plan kitchen diner arrangement; it's nice, but sometimes I wish I didn't. Also, in the Google document we use, unless one makes an effort to keep everything, it's fugitive; we simply erase and overwrite. The rest of the collaboration is by e-mail, and we'd have to sift out anything that might be of interest from the inevitable chitchat about planting lettuce seeds and what we had for lunch. But thanks, so much, for the interest and support. It would have been worth doing if no one had read it, but there's nothing like a bit of positive interest and praise to lift one up!

Narcissus buds, and making the most of roleplay in the ELT classroom.

After some rather disappointing and frustrating efforts with the Inktense pencils, when I wondered if my competence was up to the medium, I'm quite pleased with this one. They really are more like painting than drawing, with the concommitent relative difficulty in controlling the result, and the unpredictable brightness and and intensity of colour and consequent risk of heavy-handedness are still a little unnerving. I still wish I could be more subtle and delicate and understated in drawing and painting, and indeed photography, and cooking, and probably everything I do, but there we are.

I was also quite pleased because I didn't use any photos for the picture, but sat down with a cup of tea after an afternoon's grass-cutting (I initially typed 'lawn mowing' there, but that is rather to glamourise the activity and our grass...) and drew the plants quite quickly. I find the buds of these late narcissus very attractive, with a touch of allium shapeliness about them.

I never draw or paint anything larger than A4, in order to be able to scan it.

~~~

Something rather good has happened with my students. We suddenly find they are capable of roleplays in class. Roleplay in language teaching can be dismal, if it isn't pitched right, if the right language isn't provided and drilled first, if the subject is unclear or inappropriate, or if the students simply lack the confidence or the desire or don't understand what they're supposed to be doing and why. So we haven't done a great deal before, but they must be making some progress as they are doing it and enjoying it now. And I enjoy it too, as it feels less like I'm having to pull them along all the time, and it's really quite entertaining sometimes to see what they come up with.

I find if I prowl around listening to try to help them while they are preparing, they become inhibited, or get distracted, so I tend to place my chair in the middle of the horseshoe of tables, and listen, and chip in occasionally when it sounds like they need it. It helps too if it looks like I'm purposefully occupied, rather than watching them or gazing into space. So I began jotting. It's a nice way of reclaiming a little bit of space and time for myself while working, and at the same time being engaged with people round me. Here are some results. I tidied them up and completed them a bit afterwards.

Haiku

Head down listening

laughter in two languages

my eyes here, ears there.

Restaurant roleplay

Somewhere in the main course the appetite falters.

It's too late to ask for a clean fork,

and the table by the window proves to be draughty.

You wonder what the bill will be, and get ready to leave,

feeling that you could have chosen better, though

the starter and the sticky toffee pudding weren't too bad.

Outside

Outside, a tailless magpie flies

into a St Andrew's cross

of faded jet trails,

and the plane tree buds

chase on the tails

of last year's pompoms.

Raymonde

Raymonde wears beads

of cranberry resin,

and a scarf striped like a bee.

The antsy child spills out

from the busy, urbane woman

of a certain age. Beneath

the peppered-and-salted centre parting,

the odd black bob,

the mischief is infectious.

(Raymonde drove me mad for several years, then I realised how fond I was of her.)

A few more minutes

A few more minutes, another sip of juice,

striped socks with ballerina laces,

and Sunday will be a grasse matinée.

" the blue smoke mounting at evening..."

" '... the whole sensible appearance of things (omnes rerum temporalium species) is the lotus flower,' said Paulinus of Nola ... it is at its greatest in Lucretius 'austerity of rapture', denying all that lies beyond the flaming ramparts of the world; at it loveliest in lines from the Georgics, the blue smoke mounting at evening from the little farms, and the shadow of the hills on the plain."

(Helen Waddell - The Wandering Scholars of the Middle Ages)

~

The frost, which deepens every morning, has caught the last of the roses,

and crushed the lemon scented geranium to sorbet. We have been sitting in a crystal sphere of high pressure, and thought the cold can be a struggle and a hardship, the days have grown into blues and golds more intense and yearning than those of summer can ever be.

It has taken me a long time to repossess my birth month as the one where I belong, the most precious of the year, to find the depth and dearness of these short days; for many years we were strangers. Now I know there is no peace like December's, no light like that of a clear day at the winter solstice, no shapes lovelier than those of leafless trees inked onto early evening sky. I feel sure I could never happily live in a place where December came in summer.

~

I light the fire early, spend much of the day at the table beside it, writing, eating, drawing, drinking - hot drinks as much as anything alcoholic - and reading. Helen Waddell leads me from the fall of Rome to the wondrous twelfth century, bringing to life the extraordinary pools and flashes, reservoirs and illuminations of grace and gentleness and beauty that held their own against the dark and brutal background of those times. History probably contains no parallels, but perhaps some echoes. She writes poetry of poetry, lyrical stories of loss and beginnings, of attainment and partings.
~

I have drenched myself in light and colour, pointing the camera at the gradually diminishing fruit bowls,

or Christmas cake,

or at the roses which came as a gift (churlish to grumble at being given roses, by a neighbour and her granddaughter whom I occasionally teach, but these sad, scentless, fondant-icing things, costly and wasteful to grow and buy, I would prefer not to have; I like the gallant, frost-perished mummified relics in the garden better).

The new coloured pencils are more vivid and luminous than should really be countenanced, nearly hallucinogenic, compelling. They still alarm me a little. I've found myself doodling cute cartoonish Georgic vignettes, or simply producing formless washes, just to swim in their colours, which don't really appear until the water touches them, rather like Japanese water flowers, or those magic painting books that I had as a child, grey dots until washed with a wet brush.

In the afternoons I walk up the hill. The only sounds the calls of birds: flocks of wintering larks and bramblings, a marsh harrier coming up out of a fallow field, jays and magpies staccato quarrelling, a majestic heron soaring. Tipped furthest from it as we are now, the sun seems paradoxically to be closer to us;

~

it bobs along at my shoulder height as I walk the ridge road, and as I stand among the lifeless and ghostly stalks and husks of the maize field,

it floods this quiet, dreaming, austerely rapturous land with rose and orange, and I think perhaps I am at the flaming ramparts of the world, and I need go no further.

The little farms of my village are stone and slate and rendered concrete now, not thatch and withies like Virgil's probably were, and indeed, are no longer even farms, though their inhabitants may be farmers, or the children or grandchildren of farmers, as I am. The comforting blue smoke is as likely from central heating boilers, though there is woodsmoke too. Yet they nestle in the shadow of the hills at evening, which stretches over the plain towards the sea, and they draw me back with so much that is held dear.

This peace, this joy are flawed, illusory; they are pampered, solipsistic and doomed, for me and for the world. Pain and despair drip in through the cracks, the intractability of our condition; the human race is living in end times, it always did. But for now, we are safe and curled in the 'whole sensible appearance of things', the lotus that can drug us into believing that the world is sweet. I can't say I mind.

The weather has changed, but not eased, the piercing clarity of the last several days has given way to a freezing fog, the lightless damp of which offsets any rise in temperature. Long since mercifully relieved of any sense of obligation to party in the New Year, or of failure that we don't, or requirement to drive home tired and dispirited (New Year clebrations usually left me feeling this way...) on dark and dangerous roads , we may or may not stay up. We'll meet friends for a lunch (or brunch, indeed, they being in part American) party tomorrow, which I'm happy about; preferring a baptism of the new to a wake for the old. The Twelfth Day, the Feast of the Kings, will be the last of my holidays. About right.

Happy New Year.

~~~

With thanks, and encore de sucre.

I just wrote this post in its entirety, having squirrelled away the time out of my day with care and good conscience, uploaded the photos, copied out a recipe, etc etc and bloody Blogger's autosave and publishing failed and I lost the lot. It's enough to make one defect to Wordpress.
So I'm not feeling as cheery as I was when I started, said lack of cheer being compounded by just having heard that the euro has reached .9 against the pound and we wonder if we will ever be able to afford to live anywhere ever again.
However, I will not be deflected from expressing my thanks for the wonderful birthday wishes I so shamelessly fished for. I am much blessed.
To our left may be seen my delicious new Derwent Inktense pencils, all 36 of them. Never in my life before have I possessed such a fine array of colouring sticks. As yet I have done nothing more with them than scribble on an envelope and wet them with lick, and in truth I am a little reluctant to broach their virgin unsharpened newness, but I shall.

Indeed, it seemed that almost everything I received was inciting me to wallow in a frenzy of delight in colour, or inviting the application of it.

Here is a gorgeous, warm, tweedy red Irish wool jacket ('cardigan' is not a word worthy of it). The photo doesn't do the colour justice, it's a redder red than that. Not only does it gratify the visual and tactile senses, but the olfactory also; it smells like a real,very clean, Irish sheep, all lanolin and peaty air!


And here are my cards, see those wonderful, luminous, transparent hues and bold, infillable (I made that word up!) linework? Begging to be used as inspiration...

... and a dear little book, in fact a concertina in form, and of delightful construction, filling me with creative urges which I will probably have to give up eating, sleeping, composting my vegetable waste, making chicken stock, and other such time-consuming activities in order to indulge.

Oh, and then there were these two pretty bookmarks from Princeling. Clever boy!

I love I love I love colour.*I know black and white is more subtle and sophisticated and redolent and suggestive of memory and emotion and everything, but. On Sunday morning there was a wonderful thick white frost, and I had a whale of a time with the camera. But despite all the crisp sharp exquisite solarised line and form just crying out to be rendered black and white, I just kept seeing flashes and sheens of sumptuous frosted, dusted colour I couldn't let go, so only a few of them got monochromed. Subtlety ever evaded me.

~~~

There, I've quite cheered myself up now, and since it looks like the expat party's over, and holidays, meals out and other such frivolities will soon be the stuff of memory, it's just as well I've got plenty to keep me occupied. Like writing my blog posts twice because Blogger eats them.

~~~

Also I'd like to thank Bee Drunken for hosting a small soiree for me over at her place, with English toffee too. As promised for her Christmas sugar exchange, here are flapjacks.

Basic recipe:

6 oz / 150g / 3/4 cup butter or margarine

1 tablespoon golden syrup or honey

4oz / 100g / 1/2 cup demerara sugar

8oz / 225g / 2 cups porridge oats

Put fat, sugar and syrup in a saucepan and melt. Stir in the porridge oats and press evenly into an appropriately sized baking tin, and bake at 180C / 350F / gas mark 4, for about 20 minutes.

Easy peasy. Big deal, I hear you say, everyone knows how to make flapjacks. However, it doesn't end there. When I became friends with Oscar, who has an egg allergy, and his family, I wanted to make something special they could all enjoy at Christmas, so started to experiment with substituting a proportion of the oats with all kinds of other things: walnuts, pecans, glace fruit (especially pretty...), dried apricots, dried cranberries, sunflower and pumpkin seeds, chocolate chips, and then, when cooled, icing them with melted chocolate, sometimes a marbled mix of white and dark. Thus they somewhat resemble hearty florentines. I vary them every year, and they have become the sweetmeat of choice of not only Oscar and his folks but many adults of our acquaintance too. You can cut them into bite-sized pieces and put them into pretty tins or boxes, and a big baking trayful goes a long way.

~~~

*And much more besides, like funny pungent smells, and dog kisses, and mud - in moderation and the right footwear - and milk chocolate better than dark...

Aubergine in a red bowl.

Near and far, the world is not a happy place. Nevertheless, we both sat down and painted for the whole afternoon, and we were happy. Tom did some watercolour cottages, and I did a painting of an aubergine with mushrooms and an onion, in gouache; the fresh produce supplies run a little low on Thursdays, so I was short of the full ratatouille. I'm fairly pleased with it, I've not done much in gouache for a while, but there's an art teacher on Flickr who badgers me to join various drawing and painting groups, and I'm glad she does, as it's a bit of a spur.

I was pleased with the enthusiastic response I received to aubergine a couple of posts back. They are certainly one of my favourite foods, in any form: ratatouille, heavy on the aubergine and light on tomato; grilled, including in sandwiches with salad and garlic mayonnaise; imam baldi (the imam fainted, either with delight or shock at the profligate use of olive oil ...), brinjal bhaji or any other use in curry, and any of the dippy kind of things from aubergine caviar to baba ganoush. A Japanese friend whose cooking, including her fish and chips, was the food of angels, used to cook them delectably in tempura. The etymology of the name is also delicious, coming as it does to French from Catalan from Arabic via Persian ultimately from Sanskrit, a distinguished and near-mystical pedigree, one might say. I thought I'd better supply a link and lo-and-behold the illustrious Language Hat has one of the best available. I should get there more often. Eggplant is also a good word, if more down-to-earth, and reminds one that they can also be as white as eggs. But when I say I love aubergine, I also mean the colour, which can only mean purple to black.

A fine memory of them was that of cycling the lanes around Muchelney in Somerset, near where my mother used to live, visiting the beautiful old Abbey and picking up a bottle or so of Burrow Hill cider, and calling in on a farm where a lady, the farmer's mother, used to sell the surplus from her vegetable garden, including delicious long thin aubergines, as well as peppers and spinach. I bought half a bottle of Burrow Hill's first ever cider brandy, and really should have kept it as it would probably be very valuable now, but it was just too good.

Some things that have given me pleasure...(because I've moaned enough lately!)

The consistent creative initiative and talent of some people around here never ceases to amaze, delight and sometimes, I'm afraid, discourage me rather, but I try not to give way to that!

Dave Bonta and Dana Guthrie-Martin have come up with a fantastic idea for a poetry site. (I mean, that Dave's going to have to pull his finger out, he's only running a blog I only don't go to more often because I know if I do I could be there all day reading and following up links, then a one-a-day Shutterchance photoblog, a Twittering microblog, one for his homeplace, Pummer's Hollow, then doing qarrtsiluni, overseeing Festival of the Trees, and who know what else... Lazy git.)

The new one's called Postal Poetry . The stipulation is that you write a poem on the front of a postcard-sized photograph, it doesn't have to be a real postcard but it must be the size of one, so the poem length is necessarily limited by that. According to a post at Dave's, people often used to write on the front of postcards, and someone speculated that the choice of image composition might be influenced by the available writing space afforded. Of course with Photoshop and such like, one can choose light text to go over dark areas, etc. some people over-write the images, others work around them. It really is a fascinating idea and a delightful site, and there's some cracking good people contributing to it.

Which is why I was more than pleased when they took my offering, which was 'written' on a facsimile old black and white photo from a museum we visited in Morbihan last year. It's here.

~~~

Because drawing and painting is still an infrequent enough part of my activities to be worthy of remark, here's the latest watercolour pencil offering. I am pleased with it, though it's even more slavishly tight than ever. An unlooked-for benefit of Flickr is that posting pictures other than photographs has led me to various art groups which poke me to do a bit more of this kind of thing.

~~~

Inspired in part by Annie, who is alarmingly young and alarmingly clever, and has recently reappeared in this corner of the blogging universe, and who draws compulsively and excellently, including from films and telly while she watches them, I've taken to keeping notebook and pen with me while watching, lest I feel moved to doodle or scribble. I feel it also makes it a less passive experience. I like the way one notebook does all, so mine contains prose, poems, journallings, doodles, shopping lists, lesson plans etc. It is quite hard to buy plain or simply lined notebooks here, the French favour squares, vertical as well as horizontal divisions, which I have often thought perhaps said something about their mentality, but now I've found I'm rather used to them, and even find myself slightly daunted by a blanker page...

I've been enjoying some of BBC4's strand on the history of arts programming on TV, including John Berger's 'Ways of Seeing', which I missed both first and second times around, though I've read bits of the book. Also the block of editions of 'Monitor' on Sunday night. I'm too young to remember 'Monitor'; the reviews have been a bit sniffy and amused about it, referring to its 'cobwebby charm', and saying you really have to be more interested in the subject matter than caring about the style of it, but to me it just feels like coming home. I gaze at the grainy black and white footage, listen to Huw Weldon's dry patrician tones, and slip comfortably into a premature (maybe...) state of fartish old reactionaryism and think 'Ah, now this is how arts documentaries should be!'

I enjoyed Henry Moore at home, so deceptively gentle and unassuming, saying how he had to stop reading Neumann's book about archetypes in his work, because, he said in effect, if he found out to much about why he did what he did he might have to stop doing it.

And I loved the Betjeman/Larkin film. (Sorry, I can't really find any links worth bothering with for this...). The first part, with Betjeman on the beach in Lincolnshire, 'Tennyson's county... three-quarters sky', looking across at Hull, I could have hung on my wall in all its monochrome gorgeousness. I'm not a Larkin expert at all; I know he was not a particularly nice person, and revelations since his death have revealed more of his sad- and seediness, but like many people, I have in my life often been stayed and cold-comforted by his clear-eyed stoicism, his putting-his-finger-on-it observations of life, his facing the emptiness, his occasional pessimistic compassion and still more occasional compassionate optimism ( 'What will survive of us...'). Oddly, for all his iconic Grumpy Old Man status, I think he is a young person's poet. He showed us that beyond all the largely put-on romantic agony, the supposedly passionate political posturing, the generally tiresome and tiring earnestness of youth, it was possible to face the underlying fear of pointlessness, the knowledge that it's hard now and it doesn't get any easier, but that there might be a tolerable way through.

And I liked the rather embarrassed and inarticulate way he talked about the beauty of the evening skies over the river in Hull, as though to confess being impressed with something as cornily, naturally beautiful was somewhat letting the side down.

So, a couple of haiku that came with the doodle. They rhyme, which is probably the equivalent of drinking sake with burger and chips or something equally crass, but the first one did it of its own accord, and then it was easy to get the other one to do it.

Henry Moore on 'Monitor'

Utterly humble

utterly sure, he'll mumble

but never stumble.

Larkin on 'Monitor'

Sunset on Hull, rose

and gold, y'know (sigh) there goes

another evening...

~and another, which has nothing to do with the above and doesn't rhyme, but because I like haiku in threes.

Autumn morning

Tom in red fleece, black

fleece leggings. Outside the jays

busy with acorns.

(Anyone any idea how to stop Blogger double spacing when you don't want it and doing it when you do?)