tasting rhubarb

Unreal

2009-07-09T19:23:00.006+01:00

click to enlarge

All in London except the old Chinese woman, who remains at the centre of my thoughts.
God, I miss blogging, taking photographs, playing with words and ideas!

Hoping to get back here very soon.

Shanghai shock

2009-05-26T17:31:00.026+01:00

China is still on my skin, which itches, a little sore still from the sharp, salt sweat that trailed in the sudden heat. My eyes, which opened wide and stared and stared, are still slow to focus. Back home, the shock of travelling so far, so fast, for such a little time remains - shock therapy.

Normal life, and normal blogging, will be resumed some time soon, I hope.

Changing light

2009-04-18T20:54:00.013+01:00

Marching band

2009-03-29T17:39:00.033+01:00

A few messages for the G-20.

We used to do this a lot when I was young. It's all achingly familiar, as very little any longer is familiar. As I pause to let much of the march pass me and photograph the proudly brandished slogans, a wave of emotion... just for a moment I feel as if a nightmare is over and I'm being allowed to go home. Has this any meaning? Surely the huge marches against war in Iraq were the apotheosis, and the ultimate failure, of peaceful street protest in this country? But, oh well, I'm still glad some of us care enough to come out and say so.

Dark clarity

2009-03-08T18:00:00.057Z

Sickert in Venice at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Unexpectedly wonderful, these paintings are the closest representations I've seen to the pictures of Venice I hold in my mind. Sickert's substantial, gentle, subtle, mostly dark pictures, a mixture of portraits and architectural views, painted between 1895 and 1905, surprised and moved me. Walking through the long, narrow exhibition galleries was like reading a long, lyrical, studiedly vernacular poem.

Many of these paintings demonstrate the intense, contained power of a limited palette. My thoughts flew to a film I saw recently, Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Three Monkeys, suffused with a similar power by a similarly limited palette, now achieved by digital film technology. "I increased the contrast and desaturated the colours and then selected one colour, generally red, and pushed it a bit after desaturation", Ceylan, who is also an outstanding still photographer, said in a recent interview. This precisely describes many of Sickert's paintings. The interviewer asks if his films are expressionist. Some seem to think so, Ceylan responds, but he'd say more impressionist. This also seems pertinent.

My perception of the paintings, I suppose, was somewhat heightened. I'm pushing myself to work on this challenging translation project, regular hours several days a week on top of the usual busy day job. This work of translating scholarly French prose is at the very limits of my mental capacities. It's hard, rewarding... and confusing. The intense intellectual exercise arouses my thought process, fills my mind with new life, no doubt about it, but not my emotions - thinking harder doesn't make me less sad and lonely. It's a kind of rebirth, but a partial one. And, oh, I'm dead tired, shivering and nauseous some mornings with it.

Perhaps at another time I'd find these paintings too dark. Just now, they are very compelling.

Issues

2009-01-31T14:05:00.041Z

So, well, there are all sorts of issues right now - computer issues, camera issues, work issues - which are not conducive to blogging. In particular, I've taken on a substantial translation project which is going to keep me very busy, outside the very busy day job, for the next three months or so. A good thing, I think. Stretching my mind in an area where it's competent is a positive feeling I don't often get. So this space is probably going to be silent for quite a while, but something else will no doubt issue forth in due course.

On Thursday I saw the Byzantium exhibition, and today the Rothko. The ultimate in bright, shiny, intricate, infinitely various complexity and the ultimate in subtle simplicity. And the opposites, of course, meet and meld. No simplicity more complex than Rothko's.

That the Rothko has been on since September and ends tomorrow well indicates the level of energy I've been mustering in recent months beyond what's required to do the essential, hold together something that looks like a functioning person. I wish I'd gone earlier, because I took such comfort in his canvases, especially the Black-Form paintings.

Reducing Rothko to a single narrative or metaphor would be a sorry and impoverished view. I didn't, don't. Every moment they are something else. But still, hard not to see the black paintings, especially, as depicting sadness or depression; such a beautiful and heartening depiction, since they are as full of movement, complexity and life as his reds and oranges, a powerful reassurance that the dark too is life, not static, not nothing. This is meditation on pain: the more you look right into it, the more it moves and ebbs and flows and suddenly, momentarily, lets in light.

canal-side statues at King's Place

2009-01-20T10:38:00.003Z

Time for a blog break. I have no juice.

Happy Inauguration Day!

Barred, blue

2009-01-16T13:37:00.015Z

Sunlight's dance

2009-01-07T14:11:00.021Z

When you sit and sit, breathe out, let go and sit for days and sit, breathe out, let go the flat greyness in your heart, let go the flat greyness of the fields and of the sky and sit and breathe, let go, let go, and at noon on the fourth day, the fourth dull day of breathing greyly here amid the landscape drained of all warmth and colour, you start seeing sparks through your lowered eyelids and on the millionth out-breath warmth pours over your shoulders and the sun dances in your lap, you know you didn't do it, that this is not what is meant by dependent origination, and you've been reading Fritjof Capra and thinking yes, he makes sense, there is no fundamental equation, only infinitely complex and surprising patterns, only Shiva's dance, still it feels as though on the millionth out-breath you let go of grey and let the sunlight in. You are absurd, and glad of it. And then the sunlight dances across the floor and is gone, grey, grey again.

Postal poem

2009-01-05T18:14:00.005Z

I have been here while I was gone (but did not know till I got back).

Happy New Year! Currently so bitterly cold in London, I don't think even a Bach cello suite would make me linger anywhere outside.

Solstice Greetings

2008-12-21T12:00:00.002Z

Barge Collage
Grand Union Canal, London, Summer 2008

The Winter Solstice feels like what I want to celebrate this year. Retreat and symbolic rebirth badly needed.

Fondest greetings, warmest thanks and my best wishes to all who read here and all whose online words and pictures delight me, feed me, keep me company.

Back sometime soon.

Imaginary friend

2008-12-20T15:05:00.002Z

I walk about the common with my imaginary medieval friend.
"The ponds are so shallow. Why are they nearly dried out?" he says, amazed at the state of the grass.
"What's happened to all the cowslips and buttercups - and the hay rattle flowers? Where are the clouds of butterflies that used to rise up before the scythe?
"It's so quiet. Where are the voices of the children stone-picking in the fields, where is the birdsong, where are the grasshoppers?"

Roger Deakin
from Notes from Walnut Tree Farm

Offcut VIII

2008-12-19T15:59:00.003Z

Offcut VII

2008-12-18T13:37:00.011Z

Through a glass darkly

Sauvignon blanc, National Gallery Cafe.
A favourite place. I like the food and drink,
that it's never overcrowded,
most of all the high ceiling and high windows,
the clear but muted, appropriately painterly light.
Nice chairs too.

Iron in the soul

2008-12-17T14:02:00.012Z

Wake from sporadic, uneasy sleep to darkness, and a longer stretch of dark, bitter days than there has been for years - the weather in London and in me, mutually reinforcing.

Yesterday I saw for the first time in some months a friend I am particularly fond of. This year has been a journey beyond all hope of much human contact, into a cold and broken place of relentless work and loneliness. But still there can suddenly be this searing awareness of a loved person's particularity: the curve of face and body, animated by the curve of just that mind-set. Shocking. Better, perhaps - easier, certainly - if this too would leave. But that really would be as good as death.

Lest this sound too dramatic, it was, of course, the thought of a moment only - a moment of smiles and chat, at that - in the midst of a day of ordinariness. Ah, the quality of the ordinariness is the killer, not the moment's pain. The days will grow longer again.

Offcut VI

2008-12-16T15:40:00.006Z

Offcut V

2008-12-15T12:56:00.006Z

Influences

2008-12-12T13:28:00.010Z

"...to all those writers with whom—or sometimes against whom—I have lived. To the Africans: Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Ahmadou Kourouma, Mongo Beti, to Alan Paton's Cry the Beloved Country, to Thomas Mofolo's Chaka. To the great Mauritian author Malcolm de Chazal, who wrote, among other things, Judas. To the Hindi-language Mauritian novelist Abhimanyu Unnuth, for Lal passina (Sweating Blood) to the Urdu novelist Qurratulain Hyder for her epic novel Ag ka Darya (River of Fire). To the defiant Danyèl Waro of La Réunion, for his maloya songs; to the Kanak poetess Déwé Gorodey, who defied the colonial powers all the way to prison; to the rebellious Abdourahman Waberi. To Juan Rulfo and Pedro Paramo, and his short stories El llano en llamas, and the simple and tragic photographs he took of rural Mexico. To John Reed for Insurgent Mexico; to Jean Meyer who was the spokesman for Aurelio Acevedo and the Cristeros insurgents of central Mexico. To Luis González, author of Pueblo en vilo. To John Nichols, who wrote about the bitter land of The Milagro Beanfield War; to Henry Roth, my neighbour on New York Street in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for Call it Sleep. To Jean-Paul Sartre, for the tears contained in his play Morts sans sépulture. To Wilfred Owen, the poet who died on the banks of the Marne in 1914. To J.D. Salinger, because he succeeded in putting us in the shoes of a young fourteen-year-old boy named Holden Caulfield. To the writers of the first nations in America – Sherman Alexie the Sioux, Scott Momaday the Navajo for The Names. To Rita Mestokosho, an Innu poet from Mingan, Quebec, who lends her voice to trees and animals. To José Maria Arguedas, Octavio Paz, Miguel Angel Asturias. To the poets of the oases of Oualata and Chinguetti. For their great imagination, to Alphonse Allais and Raymond Queneau. To Georges Perec for Quel petit vélo à guidon chromé au fond de la cour? To the West Indian authors Edouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau, to René Depestre from Haiti, to André Schwartz-Bart for Le Dernier des justes. To the Mexican poet Homero Aridjis who allows us to imagine the life of a leatherback turtle, and who evokes the rivers flowing orange with Monarch butterflies along the streets of his village, Contepec. To Vénus Koury Ghata who speaks of Lebanon as of a tragic, invincible lover. To Khalil Gibran. To Rimbaud. To Emile Nelligan. To Réjean Ducharme, for life."

In his Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, 7 December 2008, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio thanks the writers who have influenced him. Just a bit of catching up for most of us to do there! A terrific lecture, as were Doris Lessing's and Orhan Pamuk's before him.

Offcut IV

2008-12-11T17:49:00.007Z

Annie Liebovitz: too much

2008-12-10T19:35:00.013Z

Not really expecting to like it and certainly not to warm to it. Mega glossy celebrity stuff, bah! However stunningly talented, bah! No postcards here. No photos on the exhibition leaflet, not even tiny ones, not even written-across. Bah! There was nonetheless the thought that an opportunity to see a whole lot of the work of a great photographer should not be passed up.

Well, it wasn't quite like that. Not so easy. The huge, flashy, overwhelmingly perfect works are interspersed with photos of her family and friends: small, powerful pictures of love and death. Holding, responding to the two modes simultaneously was a complex and troubling experience. The two poles, perhaps, of what photography can be, or convince you that it is: personal and mechanical, distilled reality and pure artifice. They can cancel each other out, but here were both so blatantly present that they didn't, just existed in powerful contradiction.

I was both compelled and repelled, both pleasured and sickened, and on the whole came away feeling less negative about the photographer, more interested, and pretty impressed really by what could inspire such a strong and complicated response.

Offcut III

2008-12-09T15:22:00.007Z

Offcut II

2008-12-07T13:52:00.000Z

Cello love

2008-12-05T13:08:00.030Z

The wonderful Zoe Keating.
I was going to say she looks like a perfect metaphor for her music,
simultaneously iconic and iconoclastic, but I guess
it's the other way around, the music that's the metaphor.

Pity anyone who lives or works in my vicinity and doesn't share my taste in music, as I tend to play a newly discovered piece or artist over and over obsessively. Recently, since a friend linked to her, it's been avant-garde cellist Zoe Keating.

Is it cello music I love best, more even than choral? Maybe not quite, because I can't split listening to any choral music from the memory of first seriously listening with Jean-Marie, on his very good hi-fi with the enormous speakers (bigger was better in the 1970s, ever-so-many 'watts': say it with a French accent, like 'ouate', which is French for cotton-wool). I remember always how my silly young heart would soar with the voices, soar with how much I adored him, how his eyes would close and his mouth change shape and his pale, sinewy hands move just a little, watching him escape into the music, having no idea, bless me, what it was that this witty, attractive man with his lovely parents, his lovely wife and children, his satisfying career, might want to escape from, but sensing something deep and fundamental.

Being musically not very knowledgeable and, sadly, rather tone deaf (but also a bit synaesthesic, I think), my appreciation of music is always that subjective, that much attached to personal narrative, always blurred, or if focused then narrowly so - thence, perhaps, the tendency to obsessiveness.

So I couldn't tell you how I love Fauré's Requiem without mentioning Jean-Marie. But while I could tell you with equal emotion, for example, that I love Simone de Beauvoir because her many, big, fat books filled my lonely, neurasthenic evenings living in Ambert, I could also give you several other, specific, informed, nuanced reasons why I love them.

Simple, blurry love and complex, illuminated love: I wouldn't say one was better, just different.

Offcut

2008-12-04T16:57:00.003Z

Dulwich trees in December

2008-12-03T17:41:00.035Z

We have so many big, old trees around where I live. Native species that used to fringe and hedge the large farms that covered this area until in the mid nineteenth century it became more lucrative to sell off the land to the builders throwing up the sprawling red-brick Victorian suburbs. And lush plantings of both native trees and exotica in the two large public parks that are also our legacy from Victorian planners. Thanks to those municipal park designers and to Dulwich College, which has vast land holdings and has kept of lot of them green (though in other ways they are a less benign landlord, keeping out useful, ordinary shops and services by their extortionate rents), the trees shelter us on all sides from city filth and ugliness, a blessed counterweight (though, squinting up, up, up through the viewfinder, one of these days I'm going to overbalance).