Kettle's Yard: places to sit

Mulling a bit over responses to Kettle's Yard, mine and yours, and matters of how we live, where we live.  

Meanwhile, though we can't live in a museum, and though we aren't allowed to touch the mobiles or pebbles or paintings, you are very welcome to sit on any of the seating, of which there is plenty, and people sometimes do.

This lady works here, so she probably gets to try out all the chairs.  And there really are a lot of lovely chairs.

and a couple of sofas too, though I didn't see anyone sprawling on those.

~

(Tom says if this England - Italy match goes into extra time he's going to bed.  Molly's snoring insouciantly, she'd rather be watching the all-black version of Julius Caesar on BBC4).

Kettle's Yard: pebbles

Alongside the art collection, the sculptures, drawings, books, old vinyl records and other artefacts at Kettle's Yard is an equally thoughtfully made and clearly well-loved collection of natural and other found objects: seed pods, pieces of driftwood, roots and stems, bones and feathers and shells and, most of all, pebbles.  Indeed, it claims: 

They are all shapes and sizes,

placed in different containers,

alongside all kinds of other objects, 

sometimes on top of other stones,

on all kinds of surfaces,

often in circles and spirals,

some of them look like other things,

and some of them just look like pebbles.

~

Kettle's Yard: plexiglass

My sister has been promising to take me to Kettle's Yard for a long time now, but somehow or other we've never quite made it; whenever we've gone to Cambridge it's been closed, or we've been committed to doing something else, or whatever.  This time, the first day I was in England, I asked if we might go.

Now I find everyone, everywhere, I mention it to tells me that they know and love the place better than almost any other museum or gallery anywhere, and it would seem that I must be the very last person on earth to visit it, so I won't write a big introduction.  The website is excellent, and will show and tell you more about the place, its founders and history, than I can; suffice it to say I can quite well understand why it is everyone's favourite museum or gallery anywhere, even though it's not really quite either of those things, in the traditionally accepted sense.

I hadn't expected to be able to take pictures, but in fact for a fee of £2 (entry is free), and on the understanding that I would not use flash, I could take all I could eat.  Tom encountered a similar arrangement at Southwark cathedral when he was in London, and it's a good one, I think.  I was the only person photographing, none of the usual hordes of slightly spaced-out looking people holding out their phones at everything like members of a Star Trek away team exploring the surface of a new planet, though I suspect this was as much to do with the milieu and the people who typically visit it than an unwillingness to pay up.  As I never use flash anyway and always have all the stupid artificial whirring and clicking noises on the camera turned off, I hope I was being discreet and not intrusive.  My niece T, who was with us, said she didn't really know if I was photographing or not, which was good. 

Taking nice photos at Kettle's Yard is really like shooting proverbial fish in a proverbial barrel (a figure of speech that has always puzzled me somewhat, since the action would seem to me unreliable and potentially hazardous, leading to a leaking barrel at best and a dangerous wet ricochet at worst; I wonder if anyone has in fact done it?)

 The beauty of the objects and spaces, their lighting and compositional arrangements, can rarely be faulted, you don't have to do any work to find a good picture everywhere you turn.

Consequently, I took an awful lot of pictures, which, with the demands of the garden in a few much needed days of dry weather, and other things, since I came home, I've not finished editing.  To start with though, this plexiglass hanging sculpture mobile: a great, slowly turning lens in a leafy alcove.  

It hung by a light nylon thread, which seemed too fine to support it, and would twirl gently when you so much as blew on it; a slight touch to it, unthinking, with the back of my knuckle, brought the wrath of the lady attendant down on my head: 'Fingermarks!' she rebuked.  Quite right too.  

There are no labels on anything here, which is one reason that it's different and better than other museums or galleries - if you want to know about anything you can buy a guide or ask one of the attendants, but in fact the meditative, immersive quality of the place, and the sense that it was, and still is, a home and the things there its inhabitants, make one disinclined to want to go around with your nose in a catalogue or needing to elicit a continuous noisy commentary from someone.

So I can't tell you who made the plexiglass sculpture mobile.

But we felt we could look at it for a long time.  T looks as if she is consulting it in oracular fashion, (perhaps to learn who is the fairest of Lucy's nieces of them all, which is an unanswerable question, they're all gorgeous).

I tried to video it in motion, but unfortunately it didn't come out, I'm not familiar enough with the video function on this camera, which is not intuitive like the old one was, or I'm just inept.  Instead here's a series of  still shots.

~

More Kettle's Yard stuff later, but it's another dry day and outside I must go.

Delectable things I saw in England

Ah, British cakes.

Very self-consciously, monarchist British cakes these. Though of course the cake which Marie-Antoinette might have ( but probably didn't) contemptuously or not, suggest that the starving poor should eat was not meringue, but brioche, a kind of viennoiserie, not exactly what we'd call cake, nor pastry, nor quite bread either. 

Don't get me wrong, I like French cakes, all the viennoiseries, patisseries, tartes, beignets, millefeuilles, moelleux, fondants, madeleines and all those frothy, fluffy creamy things, and indeed the more robust and rustic specialities: kouign-amann, quatres-quarts and all the gâteaux basques, bretons. de Pithiviers etc etc.  One can easily procure cookies and American style muffins, and naturally there are no shortage of shop windows full of meringues here in France too, but they tend to be those very professional, very dry, light ones (are they what's known as Itialian meringues?), whereas these 

are glossy, and look as if they might still have slightly sticky centres, which are the best.

And here are some (only a little bit enhanced) soft fruit with which to fill them.

And I do miss all the variations of a good British sponge cake: coffee and walnut, lemon drizzle, carrot and poppy seed, apricot and almond, Jamaica ginger...

And I also try, when I go to England, to have a cupcake.

The pink one was mine, fruits of the forest, acutally not too horribly synthetic. My family members, British resident so not afflicted by my particular form of nostalgie de pays went for the American-style chocolate muffin and the French/Danish style apricot pastry.

And it's not only sweet stuff I hanker for, there is curry too.

This selection at Camden Lock.

As were these ingredients for smoothies and infusions.

Really the food was one of the best things about Camden Lock, but for the most part I feasted my eyes only, since really, one can only eat and drink one breakfast, one lunch and one dinner (and perhaps one elevenses, or second breakfast, and one afternoon tea).

But there are some delicious things you can't have too much of:

like my lovely sister, on the left, her daughter my niece T, on  the right, and in the middle my youngest niece, all the way from New Zealand. She's very gorgeous, I think you'll agree.

Bits and pieces, somewhat in haste

Something of a  mixed salad here, I keep putting things aside to post and not using them, and I'm off for a the weekend which is as good a time as any to try to use up bits and pieces.

Made a new maquette. It's a true maquette inasmuch as it's to use for a drawing and compositional aid. A chunky woman, for a picture I've got an idea for.

So far I've done a bit of drawing for them but no more, for which the maquette woman was useful.  I put her in some yoga poses, for fun.  Her head is too big, I often make that mistake, I'll trim it smaller.

I got out the old wooden lay-figure too, and confirmed what I'd always found, that these really aren't much use for figure drawing.  They bend in all the wrong ways and none of the right ones.

So she ended up in an angelic role.  According to the Apocryphon of John ( we are on one of our periodic Gnostic kicks at the moment), there are angels with weird names responsible for animating every part of the human body: Aol the right knee, Bastan the right foot, Astrops the right breast, Arouph the belly, etc.  Not sure what this one's called...

~

Stuff in the garden.

This was our first artichoke, a week or so ago, now it's at least twice the size with its little brother coming along behind, and we really ought to eat it. 

These were plants that Yvette and Paul at Kerbiriou gave us last year, which are now producing heads, just when artichokes can be had in the shops for as little as 60 euro cents.  The plants attract all kinds of different insects, none of which seem to do them any harm nor to be visibly feeding off them, they just gather round and sit on the stems and leaves: blue and green bottle flies, butterflies, horsefly-looking things, the shield bugs in the above photo, 

and ladybirds, though not the aphids that one would think the ladybirds need to eat.

When you start photographing plants and flowers, you become aware that there is always a bug there, or several, it makes you realise just how full of invertebrate life the world is:

these fragrant narcissi are long over;

the long thin green bug in this evening primrose was rather shy and retreated quickly into the centre of the flower.

This beetle on the buttercup leaf I photgraphed on purpose,  Not wishing to gross anyone out, I recognised it as what I know as a dog-poo scarab.  The are extraordinarily pretty creatures which look as if they're made of polished bronze, and most often I see them burrowing into the aforementioned excrement.  I always admire them - and the ancient Egyptians who made a creation myth from similar observations - but stop short of photographing them in that context.

So what else is growing?

Foxgloves, in abundance. Yes, I do these most years.  They're weeds, of course, but we let them grow if they aren't in our way.  It never ceases to amaze me that something so magnificent grows as a weed.  I think I probably say that every year too.

The pale ones are the descendants of a large apricot cultivar we once had, which went on to roll its genes on in robust and promiscuous miscegenations here and there around the garden, rather as the big shaggy Burmese feral tom cat who hung around the lotissement down the road for many years left a progeny of skewbald, seal-pointed, blue-eyed farm strays all around these parts.

And rocambole, or tree onions.

They're in their early stages, they get weirder than this apparently. They are also called in English Egyptian walking onions., (that website has some astonishing pictures). I need to research the word rocambole, it seems to have an sense of fantasy, of baroque curlicues.  These were among some plants I ordered this year, including wild garlic and Welsh onions.  The wild garlic hasn't thriven, not surprisingly, I've only ever heard of it growing wild and if it liked to do so round here it would be growing in the woods, which it doesn't.  But these and the Welsh onions seem to be settling in the same bed as the Roscoff pinks of mythic renown.

Broad beans, which should be almost ready to eat when I get back - this isn't upside down, they grow upwards like this,

and a sweet William or two.

Ah, and pumpkins, or pumpkin plants anyway.

Back in the winter I bought an smallish pumpkin from our local vegetable box people.  It had roughish, bluey-green skin, not very pretty, but the rich orange inside was the most sumptuous of pumpkin flesh, really chestnutty, as good or better than any butternut or potimarron.  I saved the seeds which sat on a plate in the kitchen looking more and more manky, and nearly got thrown out a few times by Tom, whose not a great pumpkin fan.  I didn't really hold out much hope for them, so planted them three or four to a pot, then scattered the rest in various spots around the garden, in the raised vegetable beds and elsewhere.  They all started growing.  I have pumpkin plants sprouting in places Tom doesn't even know about, I am a pumpkin guerilla!  Maybe they are F1 hybrids and will bear no fruit, but there will still be the glory of pumpkin vines and flowers proliferating wantonly everywhere...

Yes, the blue bits are slug pellets, if I didn't put them down there would ver quickly be no pumpkin plants, so spare me your organic lectures.  These are supposed to be harmless to other wildlife, and I'm only using them on the terrace by the house, where the thrushes and hedgehogs don't come.  Interestingly, the plants down in the veg garden which I planted directly into the soil though smaller, look sturdier, and so far aren't bothered by gastropods, even though there are plenty of snails down there,

as the thrushes, who use the stones that prop up the raised beds as anvils could tell you.  

The other thing that's coming on nicely:

the understairs cupboard.  Tom's had to take it easy on construction work for a little while, at which he chafes, owing to having worn a hole in the tendon of his shoulder by doing too much of it, but lately this has shown a little improvement, and he has been converting the black hole under the stairs filled randomly with jars of macerating sloe gin, boxes of PG tips and deckchair cushions, into a bijou space which if located in central London would probably command a high rent.  Look, shelves for jars of macerating sloe gin!  

Anyway, that must needs be it as my flight goes at lunchtime today; I have wormed the dog and stocked up on cream crackers and cheese so the two of them should be all right for the weekend.  Tom has promised to look after the pumpkin plants so I hope I there will be no sabotage.  It's another flying visit to the UK, just long enough to catch up with youngest niece from New Zealand, Alison's daughter, whom I've not seen for some years, not since before we lost her mum, who is taking a few weeks in Europe.  She has requested a visit to Camden Lock, which I guess when you're 23 and 'doing' London has to be done; I don't think I've been there since I was her age.

Anyway, I've painted my toenails for the occasion, though it'll probably be too cold and wet to expose them.

Bye for now, see you on my return.

A pantoum for Hliza

Hliza said the other day that she thought the nearest thing in Malay to a sonnet might be a 'pantun'.  I remembered there was a form called a pantoum, and that it came from Malay originally, so I said I'd try to write her one.

I'd noticed it in the poet's manual, then it came up in Zadie Smith's novel On Beauty, a book in which I found much to enjoy, where the poem from which the novel takes its title is in the form of a pantoum, supposedly written by one of the characters but in reality written by Smith's husband, Nick Laird.

'It's Malay originally.'
'Malay!'
'It travelled.  Victor Hugo did use it, but it's Malay originally. It's basically interlinked quatrains, usually rhyming a-b-a-b, and the second and fourth lines of each stanza go on to be the first and third ... lines of the next stanza.
(Zadie Smith, On Beauty)

I checked again with the Poet's Manual, which said it was a German poet, Adelbert von Chamisso, who first introduced the form to Europe, the 19th century French poets, including Hugo and Baudelaire in their enthusiasm for Orientalism  took it up, and then Austin Dobson in English.

It turns out to be considerably more difficult than a sonnet.  The pattern is as Smith outlines above, quatrains - four-line verses - rhyming a-b-a-b, but then you repeat the second and fourth 'b' lines in the next verse, so they become the 'a' lines, so it's a chain-rhyming poem.  You can have as many quatrains as you like, the lines can be as long as you like, but at the end, you have to cast off the chain neatly by re-using the only unrepeated lines - the first and third ones of the first verse - in reverse.

Sounds horribly complicated as such things always do when you try to spell them out, but it's made considerably easier, especially with the wonders of word-processing, by laying out a template on the page, and copy-and-pasting the repeating lines in the appropriate places, then sliding things about till you get a result you're happy with.  The real difficulty, as with any form with a lot of repeating in it, is stopping the repetitions sounding annoying and/or nonsensical in relation to the lines on either side of them.  This page at an old University of Iowa 'Craft of Poetry' site has some helpful suggestions, such as running sentences over from one line to the next (enjambment) to avoid the repeats clunking too much.  The problem with that is you then have be able to cut-and-shut parts of the different sentences compatibly together.  It also suggests that you don't have to be too fussy about repeating the lines exactly, you can change them a bit, which I have, or about getting your rhymes too perfect, which I haven't.

I've absolutely no idea whether this kind of European pantoum bears any resemblance to its Malay origins.

Hliza, who lives in Malaysia, has been a blogging buddy for ages now, sometimes we don't visit each other's blogs for a long time, but then we do again. The name of hers, 'A Woman, a Mom, a Lover' at first seemed to me a bit over the top, but it turns out it's a take on a classic Malaysian film melodrama about a fallen woman, so that's Hliza having a chuckle.  In fact she's very far from a fallen woman, but a rock-steady one. Our lives, situations, cultures, characters even, couldn't really be much more different, and that's the beauty of it.  But I think we do share a need and desire to look at and note and photograph the things around us, to see the beauty in the ordinary and to try to make it extraordinary, and also to stay open and interested in people and worlds which are different from our own.  I remain very grateful to blogging for giving me opportunities to share a little of other people's lives like this.

In the scene in the Zadie Smith novel above, it says of the rather reserved, not very poetically inclined character who has been shown the pantoum:

Jack was now faced with a task he dreaded, saying something after reading a poem.  Saying something to the poet.

I do know how he feels.


Pantoum, for Hliza

There is no reason actually for you to read, except
I see things. Like how, between the breakfast dark and hungry light
the girl lies quiet, dropping stones like prayer beads into sets,
and the boy who watches, worries, saves and writes.

I see things: how, between the dark and light
he folds the notes up, gives them back and nearly breaks your heart,
the boy who watches, worries, saves and writes,
floating in watery blue, is in a world apart.

He folds the years up, gives them back and nearly breaks your heart,
who carried you as children strongly in his arms,
floating in watery blue, he's in a world apart,
she looks at him with love, and prays to keep him safe from harm.

He carried all his children strongly in his arms,
but asked to wear a suit the Mister says he'd rather not,
She looks at him with love, and thinks about his charms,
he wears his leaf-green silks instead, and my, does he look hot!

Asked to wear a suit the Mister says he'd rather not,
the mother frowns at fruit to start the day,
in gorgeous leaf-green silks he looks so hot...
red chilli spice, now that's the better way.

The mother frowns at fruit to start the day,
to seek time to herself she finds a place,
 - red chilli spice is much the better way -
arcades of coloured space give onto space.

To seek time to herself she finds a place
where patterns, words and pictures hang in rainbows,
arcades of coloured space give onto space
and joyous, loving beauty always flows.

Where patterns, words and pictures hang in rainbows
the girl lies quiet, dropping stones like prayer beads into sets,
and loving, joyous beauty always flows.

There is no reason actually for you to read.  Except...