tasting rhubarb

Eaze

2012-01-26T13:27:00.000Z

Zizek and the olive tree

2012-01-25T13:11:00.000Z

I'm afraid this is one of those laboured links that radio presenters mock themselves for.

The potted front-garden miniature olive tree: elegant and pleasing, a small source of cheer, and at the same time a small horror, so removed from its ancient home and function and meaning. It's a symbol of dislocation, travesty - the ground, the fruit, the process: gone, all gone!

Somehow this resonated with the latest piece from Slavoj Zizek, in the new London Review of Books, which is all about things unbelievably gone, all gone.

" ...greater efficiency, raised productivity etc which produces unemployment, rendering more and more workers useless: what should be a blessing – less hard labour needed – becomes a curse. Or, to put it differently, the chance to be exploited in a long-term job is now experienced as a privilege".

Not too long or difficult an article, it's worth reading in its entirety. Sometimes it's a relief to see the monstrous global situation articulated. The monstrousness absolves me - look, it's not just me, not just my personal dislocation and threatened implosion! Just as often, of course, I wish it was just me. Or (deeply sad as it makes me to contemplate its fate) just the olive tree.

Rooms with a view

2012-01-20T14:00:00.000Z

Not often I find myself at the top of the New Building. It’s all fancy, glass-walled meeting rooms overlooking the city roofscape. Since it's quiet up here this morning, I step outside, just for a moment, to admire the panorama from the balcony encircling the whole floor. A damp, but clearish day with wide views (and long drops - ouch, look out, not down!). After the briefest of strolls around I try the nearest door and find it locked. The next door and the next also resist my hand. The door I came out through is the only one left unlocked, then, in Winter - either that or… oh no, they’re all fixed to open from the inside only! On the long walk, heart in mouth, around the building back to where I started from, I’m oblivious to the 360-degree vistas, absorbed now by mental visions of miming my embarrassing plight through the glass wall to one VIP group or the other: locked out! let me in! The door I came out of opens, of course. How quickly the mind leaps to the worst-case scenario.

Broken houses

2012-01-19T09:42:00.000Z

Broken houses have
a weird allure:
mysterious gaps
through which may lie
the past or the unconscious.

Presence

2012-01-17T13:18:00.003Z

"Everything gets a bit foggy on the eve of a journey, even a journey so habitual that it ends in a workroom much like this one. You have to force yourself to be fully where you are until the last moment, not to succomb to the sensation of having already left before you’ve left. You work, you go out to buy something, you write for a while, lie down for a siesta and don’t manage to sleep, you repeat the gestures of every day, but there’s a twinge in the stomach, a kind of vertigo threaded through daily things, like that step you trip over as you fall asleep".

Some very Buddhist words [my very quick translation] from Antonio Munoz Molina, about to fly from Madrid to New York, where he lives and works for part of each year. He captures the difficulty and necessity of staying 'fully where you are': if we aren’t present, we aren’t truly alive. Not that I’m physically taking off for anywhere, but there's a similar sensation when the mind is always on the next thing, the thing undone that should be done, when time rages and you're lost and at its mercy. "Everything gets foggy" – indeed. The small, stolen moments of observation for writing my ‘small stones’ are a breath of sanity and presence. So are the very precious moments of taking photographs. No time to describe what a scene like this, through a dirty pane of glass, made me feel. Scarcely time to feel it. But time, sometimes, to capture it visually.

The shapes of trees

2012-01-11T21:39:00.000Z

Low tide

2012-01-09T14:05:00.002Z

Metropolis

2012-01-05T15:17:00.000Z

Reflection, illusion, but in the recent grey, windy, rainy weather, the 'real' city has been feeling rather like this - which is what sent me back to look at, and reinterpret, some photos from a while ago.

Lost in transit

2012-01-03T13:26:00.001Z

Back to work today. I’m the only staff member in the office. While outside the wind and rain that crashed all night come slowly to a halt, in here the silence resounds. There is so much to do. Back for eleven weeks and then the decade or so spent working here will be over. This feels so strange. There’s something very liberating, of course, about a time of transition. But how do I generate the energy required to leave things here in reasonable order? How do I start to look forward – which I must – when the future isn’t here yet? I don’t know. How do I live well enough, productively enough, realistically, tolerably with this not knowing? How do I nurture the raw aliveness and curiosity I occasionally feel and minimise the lostness and numbness that threaten to overwhelm? How do I find words, when this weightless vacuum scarcely seems to support them?

Coming back to what is right in front of me is always a good way. The River of Stones flows again this month. It’s a small and magical practice. Stop. Look. Here you are. Right here. Right now. What do you see? Pay attention. Write it down. I’m kind of amazed and very glad to still be doing this a year after the first attempts. Do have a go, if you haven't previously - or if you have!

Edible dress: Happy New Year!

2011-12-31T12:44:00.001Z

The joy of sidelong glances, weird and unexpected apparitions, things we never even thought of looking for: for this I wish, for all of us in 2012.

Turning to the light

2011-12-23T13:44:00.002Z

I woke with a start yesterday morning at 5.30 - the winter solstice. Lie quietly as it passes, breathe, feel something pooling in my belly. How I need and long for the coming spring, for any symbol of renewal I can draw to myself. Remind myself I need do nothing, that the light, just like the dark, comes by itself.

The day before, the shortest day, I was with a friend who just this week has completed a big work/life project, in the face of chronic illness, years of repeated discouragement. She never gave up, kept faith through it all with her own talents. I'm so happy for her and inspired by her.

Having flunked out of getting up to see the sunrise yesterday, I thought: noon, then; go to an open space. We have a lot of those in Dulwich, but Belair Park is where I often take strong emotions for a walk. It's a small park around an old house, never crowded as the other parks and even the woods become on holidays and weekends. It has quiet paths, trees and water and views, and on this day long shadows in the pale, brief sunlight. I perch on one of the seats facing the football field, feel the cool, steady rays on my closed eyelids, turn my face up to the light.

More photos here.

The office is closed and the laptop is very unhappy so I may be off line until January.

Merry Christmas!

Pale

2011-12-20T12:00:00.000Z

After the icy rain, tremulous sunshine. A long bare branch trails across the pale sky, sways slowly in the breeze. Motion sickness. Not really surfacing this morning, just peering at the world around the edge of the ungraspable. The laptop needs a new battery, and that's what I need too - scoop out the hardened sludge and slot in a new energy source. If only. We treat ourselves and each other as if we were machines, but renewal is more complicated and uncertain.

Collecting

2011-12-16T17:35:00.002Z

This box file covered in exquisite Japanese paper from Shepherds was a treat to myself, a small investment in the future. It's for collecting and storing information and resources that may be of use after leaving the job in March.

There’s been so little mental or emotional space for hopes and dreams since making this momentous decision. My subconscious mind has ‘got’ it, clearly, for I wake in the middle of every night gripped by terror and unable to get back to sleep. But not my conscious mind, which remains too damned tired and full of the concerns of making it through each busy day. Slowly I’m trying to open a small bit of attention, to at least notice, grab and keep things that might be useful. It’s strange to be in a situation where everything will soon change, but nothing has yet changed at all.

The benefits of fantasy

2011-12-13T18:05:00.000Z

I've been reading a lovely book which was sheer, delightful escapism perfectly designed for me, A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness, a professor of history at the University of Southern California and former visiting scholar at Oxford University, where the novel opens. It's about a young American professor of the history of science researching rare, old manuscripts in the Bodleian Library. She's also a witch. Yes, this is a story of witches and vampires, climbing on the Twilight bandwagon, "Harry Potter for grown-ups" etc, etc. I almost passed it by, but flicking through, on one of those mindless days when nothing, nothing in the bookshop appeals, a phrase and a scene here and there caught and compelled my attention. Six hundred-odd pages later, I'm so glad they did.

It's a long, silly tale pure and simple, of lost alchemical manuscripts, ancient feuds and spells, with no claims to transcend its genre. But it's excellently done and, like all the fantasy and science fiction that works for me (Ursula Le Guinn, Marge Piercy, Christopher Priest), the whole preposterous edifice is full of metaphors for feelings, relationships and personality traits that we can all recognise and identify with.

The first of these is the notion of the scholar as witch or vampire. I found myself scanning through a mental parade of the fellows, lecturers and professors I work with. Oh my goodness, nearly every one a believable witch, with a vampire or two mixed in! That frisson of greater-than-average brainpower and focus wonderfully captured and played with.

Three types of 'creature' live alongside humans in the fantasy world of Deborah Harkness: witches (clever, energetic, practical and powerful), vampires (ancient, steely and perfect) and daemons (the crazy, intense, creative ones). Think about it. Isn't this just as convincing as the Myers-Briggs personality typology?

Then there's the central relationship between Diana, the historian and witch, and Matthew, the scientist and vampire. Outrageously romantic and cliched as it is, this depiction of overwhelmingly powerful attraction, fear, hostility and accommodation between members of two different species is a pretty persuasive metaphor for relations between the sexes. Daft as its details are, they actually made me think some rather profound thoughts.

Other aspects of the book I enjoyed were the evocation of Oxford's ancient buildings and misty winter riverside, the founding of a preposterous quest in a detailed knowledge of the history of science, and the loving descriptions of wine and herbs, yoga and meditation as doorways into magic - yes, they are for me too! Not to mention, finally, an ancient castle in the Auvergne, whose vampire owners have lived there for hundreds of years and speak Medieval Occitan. Readers whose tastes don't run in such directions may snort derisively at how much I loved all this, but oh I did! I can't wait for Book Two of the trilogy, wherein Diana and Matthew flee 21st century dangers by 'timewalking' to Elizabethan London, where the author can play with the stuff of her non-fiction book, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution.

Meanwhile

2011-12-12T18:09:00.000Z

I'm delighted to be part of Edition 12 of the >Language >Place blog carnival, on the topic of food and hosted by Linda Hofke of Lindguistics, who beautifully presents this edition as a long, mouth-watering menu - click through and taste every dish in full! See here for Edition 13 call, with a deadline of 8 January for submissions.

Also in January, a new River of Stones will gush forth and flow: a year since the first River and I never thought I'd still be at it, with only small pauses - almost three hundred stones and a new blog. This small daily practice has been life-changing. I look forward to stepping into the river again in the new year. It's eminently do-able, however busy you are, and the rewards are enormous. A fine and inspiring discourse on the subject is here - I agree with all of it and can't recommend this highly enough!

Winter sunshine

2011-12-10T17:45:00.001Z

Shadows on the Hotel Russell.

Mountains of the mind

2011-12-09T13:30:00.000Z

Misty

2011-12-05T17:59:00.001Z

Turning

2011-12-03T21:55:00.001Z

Dogs and children

trample the decaying gold,

turning it to mud.

Detritus

2011-12-02T13:34:00.001Z

Repas d'un midi lointain

2011-11-30T17:37:00.001Z

From the first chapter of a discontinued, hopelessly autobiographical fiction. Set in the mid 1970s, in a village near Nice. First blogged in 2006. Whole chapter here. Re-posted as my submission to Issue 12 of the >Language >Place Blog Carnival, which has a special theme of food.

Delectable though it was, the food was not the best thing around that table. The best things were the conversation and, well, the love.

Here is another day. The midday meal is simple - hard, spicy sausages cooked long and slowly with finely sliced white cabbage and juniper berries. Louise, the cook, her arm pinioned close to her chest by the scars of surgery, asks Antoine to ladle everyone's portion from the deep pot. Steam wafts around the table, the heaps of cabbage glisten damply on our plates, hiding the dark chunks of sausage, nuggets of strong, satisfying taste. It is subtle, not to be hurried. I get lost in the nuance of scent and texture and juices, but surface to notice the nuance of words and looks, how Antoine and Jean-Paul dive into the food, smacking their lips and full of praise, only the edges of their eyes betraying concern for Louise, only the tiniest flicker of fear and dread at seeing her flinch in pain.

Louise is telling Jean-Paul which Alpine foothills farmer made the sausage, debating the merits of various breeds of pig, the hardships of small farmers. They debate everything - pigs, parenting, politics - in the same tone of passionate enjoyment. They care, the thought comes to me - for the food on their plates, for each other, for Marielle and Laura's future and the future of France. Despite their smiling irony, their fierce awareness of how little difference their caring makes, they care. They experience themselves as part of a family, part of a class, a region, a country. In this they are utterly different from the people I grew up with. No wonder their food and their smiles taste so different.

They speak of strikes and factory closures, of protests against nuclear power. Giscard, they spit. Mitterrand, they spit, with a sadder, more intimate anger. The long shadow of 1968, the failed, receding revolution, overlays the shadow of Louise's cancer and the shadows of Marianne's breakdown, Jean-Paul's infidelity and guilt. So many shadows, but so much warmth and light too. Here we are, around the table in my memory, a scene in chiaroscuro.

Here is my own pale, curious face, breaking into indignation as Louise points behind me. While Marielle distracted me with chatter, Laura has been picking out the chunks of sausage from her plate and feeding them to Obélix, the cat. Whiskers shining with grease, he looks over-full and slightly sick. Laura smirks unrepentantly. I am chagrined. I'm a bad child-minder. I didn't see. Louise puts her good arm around me. 'No, chérie, it takes a lifetime to grow eyes in the back of your head. I can see you love my grandchildren. Have some more sausage before that damn cat eats it all. Antoine, give her some more sausage. You like it, huh?'

Marianne is smiling too, one eye on us, one on Jean-Paul and his father who are onto their constant bone of contention. Jean-Paul and Marianne support the mildly trotskyist Unified Socialist Party. Antoine supports no one and nothing but the native cunning of the individual working man and woman. 'Middle-class,' he says. 'sectarian. Even if their hearts are in the right place.'

'Well, some of us are middle-class, yes, Papa. I suppose I'm middle-class now. Middle class and workers together, and we see the need for organising in the unions, for building consciousness, building a vanguard of support for change, even if it's going to be a long haul now, and perhaps a long haul to nowhere. You're becoming a nihilist in your old age.'

'I'm no nihilist!' Antoine waves his fork with a piece of sausage on it. 'I believe in the hearts of men, the strength and humour I've seen them show in the face of hardship. If you'd seen what I've seen, on the docks in Marseille... ' Louise is nudging him. 'Mm? Yes, yes, have some more sausage.' He puts down his fork to serve more sausage and take a deep draught of wine. 'You must eat, my little Laura, not give it to the cat. Eat and grow big and strong to make a revolution!'

Impossible to know where laughter, pain, sincerity, performance meet and blend.

'Revoloo... loo... loo...', Laura sucks on the syllables, hungry for long, spicy words, if not yet for spicy food.

Oh dear, oh well

2011-11-19T18:32:00.001Z

Telescope, periscope, microscope

2011-11-17T20:57:00.001Z

Poetry is a telescope, bringing us closer to what is very far away, an inverted periscope that takes us down to what is hidden, a microscope that lets us see what is invisible to the naked eye, a precision lens to make what was vague and confused come clear.

Antonio Munoz Molina

(rough translation from his blog, which Blogger, in its wisdom, will not link to - it's on my Links list, above, if you read Spanish).

Willow

2011-11-16T12:30:00.000Z

Some of the strands are turning. So
the willow behind the house is streaked
yellow and pale green, in the wash
of the Fall sunshine.

My life is so crowded with ghosts
that they don't even trouble me now. They stand
wistfully at stairways, vanishing if
I turn to look at them.

What can we say? That God, for his own
purposes, saves us for his own ends?
Better surely to take it for granted, than
to take it for that.

You sat at my feet and lovingly
laced up my shoes. I read you a poem.
The sky changed; the light moved
and crossed the room. If only
I could have died then. The rest is
footnotes and addenda: the last chapter
of a biography, which you read out of duty,
since they are all alike. He got sick and died.

It's dangerous to talk too long to willows.
Their arguments are twisty turny, and
they flicker in the sun. They will soon have you
agreeing that there is no difference
between a sparkle in the air and
the life of an honest man.
Trees don't think like we do.

Light through the yellow leaves,
the rattle of twigs in the shifting wind;
the creak of branches, rotten but green,
the sift of the crumbling bark.
Don't breathe the dust. Don't listen to the whisper.
Some things we shouldn't know.

From Dale Favier's first collection, Opening the World - published by Pindrop Press.

Review to follow.

Shedding light on difficulty

2011-11-15T12:32:00.001Z

(and scraping the barrel for a relevant photo)

It’s proving such a struggle to try and post something here every day this November that my chief motivation has become defiance of its very difficulty. Why so hard? Why do my simplest words go limp and numb, with a single sentence sometimes needing endless revisions? I read a short poem – The Past is the Present by Marianne Moore on wood s lot (also here). The tone, the multiple allusions, the line-lengths and the rhythm: so small, deep, satisfying is a poem, such a complex dance with words both studied and abandoned. A poem, or a paragraph of crafted writing, may be a small thing but need quite a lot of space. The image comes of my mind stuffed and swollen, throbbing with facts and worries and ‘to do’s’. Thoughts and feelings jammed together in a tight, constricted exit, waiting, tiring, with no food, no light. Oh. Magnanimously granting them a daily slot for speech, I guess, is not enough! I shall keep trying: breathe, let in some light and space, but may have to stop and let my mind rest until the swelling goes down.

Awaiting new use

2011-11-14T18:11:00.001Z

Awaited inspiration did not come today. So here are some photos I took back in the Summer of a disused mill in Leeds, awaiting reincarnation as fashionable, upmarket apartments or offices.

Reading Winnicott

2011-11-13T18:25:00.001Z

It's a while since I took this photo in the park, as you can tell from what they're wearing. Aesthetically, I was attracted by their dark skin and blue clothes against the almost-black hedge. Mostly, though, I know that, like many adults with painful childhood memories, I'm often transfixed by iconic scenes of parents and children interacting successfully. I do have memories of my dad doing exactly what this one's doing - and riding a bike is one of the few life skills I mastered fairly normally. Anyway, the photo remained on my computer, occasionally mouthing 'blog me', but demonstrating little relevance to anything... until Litlove's comment below about the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott and his concept of 'transitional space'.

I remembered reading Winnicott back in the 1970s, when I first became interested in psychology and psychotherapy - someone rather humane and progressive, less grating on a feminist than most of the mid 20th century 'mother and child' merchants. Details had faded, though, so Friday lunchtime found me in the workplace library. They don't study humanities where I work, so although I'm right next door to a big library, I rarely make much personal use of it. They do study psychology, though - social psychology, but social and clinical clearly overlap. So there was plenty by Winnicott, it transpired. I went home with a couple of not-too-heavy collections of talks and articles and spent some of the weekend reading them. Reading and wincing, because here is a story told in elementary terms of 'good enough' parenting and consequent normal development, and I know a lot of it was not my own experience. It's dispiriting, but horribly fascinating to contemplate how long ago it all went wrong.

Clapham Common

2011-11-12T19:10:00.001Z

On the grass, a flock of crows around some abandoned, unspeakable package and a flock of humans swigging from cans of beer, lolling on coats discarded in the afternoon's surprising warmth. It's a weird warmth, without light, a grey day with darkness closing in at 4 pm. Uneasy. You can see it in the scuttling steps of locals with their dogs and shopping. Only looking upwards at the statue and the rooftops and the last leaves does all seem calm and as it should be.

Temperence & Providence, 1895

Photos of Venice

2011-11-11T17:31:00.001Z

by Hiroshi Watanabe

Intent on salvaging a bit of yesterday, I remembered late-night opening at nearby Somerset House, where they’re showing the Real Venice photo exhibition, on tour from the Venice Biennale and in aid of Venice in Peril. Finding the Embankment Gallery - two floors down from street level via many minimally signposted corridors and flights of stairs - was unnecessarily arduous, but the gallery, once found, is a lovely, old, low, vaulted space with wooden floors and subtle lighting. As for the photos, wow!

I suppose any half-way decent photographer, never mind this select group of very famous ones, can’t really go wrong in Venice. Still, the variety and impact of these was really gorgeous, intelligent and emotive. A quick selection can be seen here. For a longer look at all those on show in London, and more, go here.

Only Robert Walker predictably made me wince, amidst joyful engagement with the whole two long rooms of big, lightboxed photographs. I often don't care for lightboxes, but these were so superior and the gallery light so lovely also, that it wasn’t an issue. My favourites, perhaps, were Tim Parchikov’s and Nan Goldin’s (the latter not a photographer I can always warm to, even while much admiring her work). Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s almost abstract landscapes also forced me to rethink my instinctive recoil at the sight of his name. Fabulous really, and only £5. I hope I get to go back for another look.

Ho hum

2011-11-10T17:21:00.003Z

I just had a completely unexpectedly horrible day. Deeply upset. Walking in circles in Oxford Street in floods of tears, bumping into people. (No one died). And you know what I realised – I can deal with difficult stuff! In the face of a real challenge, I actually tend to behave like a grown-up. I was upset, and then I did what needed to be done. Whatever the outcome, I think I learned something: that the worst part of my life is the lack of challenge in it. I am so depleted by tedium, by having nothing demanded of me but patience and endurance. It makes me smaller and more scared and helpless every day. Counter-intuitively (because the more depleted I feel, the less I feel capable of), I need to get out there and face some hard things – it’s the only way to be less scared. I probably knew this already, of course - It’s rather obvious. Experiencing it is something else.

Change and willpower

2011-11-09T17:06:00.001Z

radiating energy

I was intrigued to read Leslee’s post this week about a new book on Willpower.

Oh god, willpower – I don't have much! I think I know why. I can flash back all too easily to the passionately wilful, screaming toddler I once was, the fierce rejection she met from her carers, the repeated warnings that they would abandon her; submit her will to theirs, or men in white coats would come and take her to the well-known insane asylum just outside the city where they lived! She did. She went very quiet and her will got lost. No will: no willpower. Of all the things that long ago went missing, it’s perhaps the one I’ve found it hardest to recuperate – my lifelong burden a bottomless inertia that must be struggled against every day. I know what I’d like to strive for, but lack the energy: this has so often been the story. Passive resistance, endurance: I’m good at those. Goal-setting and sustained positive effort: no.

I’m so scared and anxious and distracted since I decided to leave my job. Mobilising the energy and direction required to make anything positive of this decision feels so very far beyond me. Knowing it is really, this time, a question of sink or swim does not seem to be enough. Anything that might help deserves a look, so perhaps this is a book I need to buy, along with Switch, which Dorothee linked to and which I already ordered. Or is reading a book about it more of a substitute for action than a spur to action?

As I write, at lunchtime, there's a student demonstration taking place in central London, against the recent huge rises in university tuition fees. Helicopters circle endlessly overhead and we learn that streets are lined with police in riot gear and armed with plastic bullets. In these times, it's even harder, and even more crucial, to be strong and clear and in full possession of potential strengths. We must not let ourselves be crushed. Not by an increasingly repressive state and not by our own demons. Every time a rebellious soul succombs to despair, the forces of repression have won, without firing a single plastic bullet. Sigh. I'm getting too old for such thoughts. I know: you're never too old for such thoughts.

Writing haiku

2011-11-08T18:56:00.000Z

the haiku is where they overlap?

As well as trying to post here every day in November, on TRAIL MIX I'm trying to write daily 'small stones' this month in the form of something approaching haiku (photo above illustrates today's). I've been reading about what distinguishes haiku from other micro-poems or, at worst, ditties: simplicity, present tense, a break, a shock, an existential element... What I've mostly learned from reading other writers is that clearly this must be learned through practice.

So I'm hoping that with practice I'll get somewhere near enough to the feel of it by the last weekend of the month, when I've signed up for a zen meditation and haiku writing retreat with a much loved and admired teacher of both. It's a challenge to give my best efforts and attention to this while knowing that feelings of competitiveness and wanting to impress can only be deservedly counterproductive. And while knowing that, fraught and frightened in the wake of recent decisions, I've rarely been less mentally equiped... for anything at all, really... Of course, that can be the best of starting points, as easily as it can be the worst, depending on how willing you are to really be in this raw place.

Anyway, writing a daily haiku is good because it must be fetched from a part of my mind that is not full of self-obsession and fear.

Because

2011-11-07T17:33:00.000Z

Because the Autumn light on water shows the way into a softer world.

Finnish music

2011-11-06T17:30:00.001Z

(no credit found for this very evocative

photo of Kaija Saariaho)

I have so many plans for the weekend, and then I lie in bed like lead and can't get up. So Saturday and Sunday mornings lately have been times for listening to a lot of classical music, and led to increased listening outside those times too.

My Finnish friend had told me about the growing fame of Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, whose music she likes very much. I found I did too - and how great that Saariaho is a woman our age, we both thought! So she invited me to the first London performance last week of Kaija Saariaho's Leino Songs, programmed alongside Sibelius, notably his Third Symphony (sending me off to reread Teju Cole going on about that very work). It was a beautiful concert: Sibelius renewed, all fresh and open and mysterious alongside Saariaho's wild, haunting music, where the voice almost seems to fuse with the orchestra in a single long sound. Here's one of the Leino Songs.

For a country of small population, Finland seems to have a great flowering in many of the arts. Perhaps their much admired education system has something to do with it.

Get behind myself

2011-11-05T19:42:00.000Z

keeping busy

feeling tired

get behind myself

and push

Rain haibun

2011-11-04T17:04:00.000Z

Six thirty in the morning. Marching grimly through the dark and rain the mile to the 37 bus-stop, on my way to see the shrink before I go to work. Damp, bleary thought: will I shrink in the wash? Mute incantation against those paroxysms of rain that get under your waterproof, umbrella and boots - I can't go home and change for thirteen hours, you know!

It was a warm night and I slept with the window cracked open, waking from weird dreams and each time lulled to sleep again by steady drumming and splashing.

These past few months of getting up at six on Fridays have been... different. A early-morning world I've never been familiar with. Closer to the earth, out here before the city mayhem gets going. Closer to the air and breeze and slowly growing light. This is the first time in heavy rain. Stride out, then. Oh, but here beneath the Linden trees the footpath is all slimy leaves!

Made it to the shelter of the covered bus-stop. Shaking my umbrella and my wetter sleeve, the left one. My trouser-legs are soaked and steaming - ugh! The water falling in sporadic sheets from shelter roof to ground, pooling and gurgling round my feet. There's not much traffic; waiting in the quiet and wet.

the rain whispers

damp little words

like trickle and drip

(bear with me - first attempt at haibun. haiku written a while ago for TRAIL MIX)

What do we want?

2011-11-03T17:47:00.001Z

Are there any other stories? What constitutes another story, as opposed to moaning about the prevailing and utterly disempowering discourse?

I’m often excited by what Slavoj Zizek chooses to write and speak about, and often disappointed by what he writes and says. After more than thirty years of trying, I still struggle to understand psychoanalytic and post-structuralist thinkers. Not to mention his apparently extreme case of ADHD. But on this year’s protests and riots, he seems to have found a more accessible voice and it’s as innovative and exciting as I always thought it might be. And he seems to have been speaking and dialoguing ‘on the barricades’, not just viewing the action from the towers of academia.

Reading this piece on the LRB Blog this week – an especially punchy version of what he’s been saying all over the place - was one of those ‘Yes!’ moments that sadly seem to get rarer as you get older. After evoking with devastating clarity the dynamics of globalisation and ‘democracy’, he goes on to address just as clearly the universal criticism of the anti-capitalist protesters’ lack of a concrete agenda:

The Wall Street protests are just a beginning, but one has to begin this way, with a formal gesture of rejection which is more important than its positive content, for only such a gesture can open up the space for new content. So we should not be distracted by the question: ‘But what do you want?’ This is the question addressed by male authority to the hysterical woman: ‘All your whining and complaining – do you have any idea what you really want?’ In psychoanalytic terms, the protests are a hysterical outburst that provokes the master, undermining his authority, and the master’s question – ‘But what do you want?’ – disguises its subtext: ‘Answer me in my own terms or shut up!’

Great stuff – thank you! This is so much what I’ve been thinking: let’s not condemn the lack of an agenda. Of course, there has to be an agenda. But there also has to be a beginning, even if this must be without one. Zizek’s metaphor is such good one. Think of a woman (it’s usually a woman) steeling herself to leave an abusive partner: does she generally know already what she wants instead? Should she hang around until she does?

Elsewhere, Zizek says:

There is a long road ahead, and soon we will have to address the truly difficult questions – not questions of what we do not want, but about what we do want. What social organisation can replace the existing capitalism? What type of new leaders do we need? What organs, including those of control and repression? The 20th-century alternatives obviously did not work.

… What one should resist at this stage is precisely such a quick translation of the energy of the protest into a set of concrete pragmatic demands. Yes, the protests did create a vacuum – a vacuum in the field of hegemonic ideology, and time is needed to fill this vacuum in a proper way, as it is a pregnant vacuum, an opening for the truly new.

There is also resonance here with Buddhist philosophy and practice: the willingness to ‘sit with’ doubt and questioning, the famous ‘don’t-know mind’. It’s not a negative or passive thing, but hard and brave and necessary.

Coincidentally, I find today a perfect image of this state in Dave’s poem and another in Roselle’s.

Resisting

2011-11-02T18:08:00.010Z

( Cambridge: playing Cat Stevens songs! - video )

A super-busy day, and already I feel tired and discouraged at the thought of daily blogging in November. So this is just links, but extra good ones.

On the very wonderful Spitalfields Life blog, terrific photos and thoughtful words from the Occupy London camps at St Pauls and at Finsbury Square. Thinking a lot about how when I leave my job I’ll perhaps be able to join in some physical acts of protest like these.

Thinking too, though, how every small act of creating words or images is also a protest – not a rejection of reality or an escape from it (well, perhaps sometimes just a bit of an escape from it), but an expansion of reality: “yes, but look, there is this too!”. If this is magnified and becomes a small bud of a movement when creators get together, blog carnivals, in their continuance and regularity, are more like saplings with many buds. So, from the defiant carnival of the protest camps to blog carnivals: there are new editions of both the >Language >Place Blog Carnival (the first anniversary edition!) and the Festival of the Trees (Edition 65!). It feels so good to link our stuff together. The commitment, knowledge and creativity converging here is a joy. Hope I’ll have time in the future to contribute more.

And then there are the places where inner and outer protest seek to become one, like this, from the Dark Mountain Project.

Path

2011-11-01T09:28:00.046Z

Heavily obvious metaphor. It's what most of us want, I suppose: a path like this, a pretty one, with no dangerous traffic, defined, contained, with a long, clear view ahead. That there never is a path through life needs no saying - it's bloody virgin jungle! The path is a story we tell ourselves, a necessary one.

My free newspaper, picked up on the bus this morning, tells in shrill tones the endlessly repeated terrible tale of the financial crisis: mutual recriminations, irreconcilable aims and no path forward. This kind of story, so prevalent in our media, only spreads cynicism and disempowerment.

It's November, month of writing and blogging challenges, and I've been thinking of how happy writing makes me, how I need a writing project for this month and don't have one. Perhaps this is the project: to keep poking about and muttering until I find, buried somewhere in the fallen leaves, the story I need to tell myself of the immediate future.

Samhain

2011-10-31T18:05:00.005Z

Cornish poet Roselle Angwin writes beautifully and knowledgeably about Samhain and the Celtic New Year. Tonight I will make my own ritual.

Nature morte

2011-10-30T11:39:00.000Z

more photos

Sated

2011-10-29T20:33:00.006+01:00

Today the clocks go back, the season turns - officially. Everything shifts. Already for me, with the decision just made, the ground had given way and set things spinning.

A day of light slanting and flickering on flushed and fragile trees and crunchy, carpeted lawns: Dulwich at its most lovely and gratitude for being here where you can walk from park to woods to park, for the precious open spaces overcrowded London still preserves.

It's all intensified: the earth, the air, their colour and their texture. Even if nothing turns out as I would wish, there will have been these nervous, sated hours.

In the rain

2011-10-27T18:21:00.003+01:00

Whatever the internal weather, the external weather continues to surprise every day, in best British fashion: such a truism, such a cliche, but oh it matters, it does - these splashes of colour on the damp ground, these unexpected curves and patterns...

Seasonal affective disturbance

2011-10-26T19:21:00.014+01:00

If all goes to plan, I’ll be leaving my full-time job at the university, where I've worked for ten years, next March. It's a lunge towards a different kind of life, and there's also an undoubted risk that I'll end up destitute and deeply regretful. Whilst I’m sure this was the best decision, it’s been a very hard one to take and continues to feel terrifying.

I could kind-of wish this hadn’t happened in Autumn - not the best time for inner turmoil, perhaps, because there’s always a dimension of anxiety and upheaval in this beautiful, melancholy, doom-laden and inevitable season. I’m reminded of a poet friend, Fatih, who said to me many years ago: “I always feel sad at sunset – it’s because I’m a poet” (yes, incredibly pretentious – we were very young – and also no doubt true; he did feel scared and sad at dusk). And Autumn is one long sunset, the dusk of the year (ahem, did I say pretentious?).

So, now suddenly there is perspective, in the sense that a firm date sits there in my future – less than five months away. And there is much perspective still lacking in the sense of seeing this in a calm and organised context and getting down to the next few months of transition, preparation and planning. This is hard.

It’s hard because navigating change is always stressful, even when it’s change for the better, and additionally stressful this time for me because it’s positive, but risky. I’ve not been good at taking risks – and my achievements in life have been commensurately small. So it’s time, well past time, to take a risk. And I am unpractised, ridiculously so for someone of my advanced years.

So I do, alas, what I am practised at: cut off from my true feelings, which are jubilant-scared-hopeful-scared-liberated-scared-proud of myself-scared-humming with creativity at the mere thought of it-scared… can’t take being scared, so cut them all off at the roots and opt for numb anxiety! Yup, that’s where I am: numb, distracted, floating anxiety. Autumn, then Winter; decision, then change - inevitable, but not thereby any easier to flow with. Yikes.

I wrote this yesterday, wanted to let it sit before posting it, and then today I read Beth’s thoughtful and heart-searching piece about Libya, revolution, minorities, emigration, watching and responding to cataclysmic events from afar, and I read Dave’s generous response, so full of care and flair, to a class of schoolkids who’d read and responded to one of his poems. I felt uncomfortable writing here about myself, as if my own life and feelings were everything. The balance is hard, isn’t it? For each of us as individuals, there are times to go into ourselves and times to put our personal concerns aside. We’re all in this together, self and others aren’t really separate. My exhaustion from work and the struggle of commuting in and out of central London is all about me and my feelings, my own questionable sense of entitlement to something more fulfilling. But it’s also what drains me of energy I might, if my circumstances were different – and maybe will, if I succeed in changing my circumstances – be able to give to creating my own small quotient of beauty and to engaging with the causes I find important.

Patterning the sky

2011-10-25T12:08:00.004+01:00

click on photos for best view on black background

Perspective

2011-10-24T09:25:00.001+01:00

For so long, I realise, there has been no perspective, just dealing with now and preparing somehow or other to get up and perform again tomorrow. This is not much of a life, and it's also deeply addictive to the insecure creatures that we are. Needing the familiar, needing to feel held, enclosed: can there be these, and also - even in such scary, brutal times - a view forward? Abstractions are not helpful. Light, stones and stories sometimes are. This is why old and beautiful things, old and beautiful places, aren't a luxury, but necessary to survival.

Transition effect

2011-10-23T15:37:00.004+01:00

Tomas Transtromer

2011-10-22T12:34:00.003+01:00

"often the shadow feels more real than the body"
from After a Death
by Tomas Tranströmer

The link above is to a lovely film about the new Nobel laureate from UK publishers Bloodaxe Books - via Dave Bonta's Moving Poems. Such a beautiful and well-judged film, saved from overwhelmingly emotionality by the poet's words, which are often sad, but always intricate, engaging and attentive.

Through the gate

2011-10-21T09:28:00.004+01:00

Somewhere

2011-10-20T13:48:00.001+01:00

In the dying light of a cold, sunny day: in Cambridge yesterday, it was good to be somewhere else - a mental shift as much as physical.

Vintage

2011-10-18T13:02:00.016+01:00

Images from Sunday that suggest a hole in time, another place: reminding myself that there is only here and now and yet in some way also not only this time, this place, the fear and desolation of this chill, flickering Autumn day, this empty ringing in my ears, this flinching and turning away, this mind that wants to be, to be, but not to be this, or thus, or something. Ah, something. Something could, I guess, be a tent pitched next to St Paul's in the City of London financial district. For now, I guess, this elderly person is watching, trying to open my heart and stretch it across the gap between the personal and the collective. Open-heartedness is difficult in a society where sheer survival often feels like it depends on quite the opposite. Action is difficult in a life requiring long hours of physical immobility and extremely restricted thought.

The right light

2011-10-17T13:36:00.017+01:00

The austere beauty of Dulwich Picture Gallery is hard to capture in photographs. This past weekend the light was right - the miracle of Soane's design picked out in gold and shadow.

Thursday

2011-10-14T17:59:00.005+01:00

Even the greyest of days...

tinywords!

2011-10-14T09:23:00.012+01:00

One of my very few really satisfying attempts to date (and that very few are is fine, of course; what I love is writing them - the moment of presence and observation) at the haiku/micro-poem genre has appeared on tinywords. I'm incredibly pleased and proud of this, as I love the tinywords concept, they attract a lot of submissions and publish some really wonderful stuff. Dave Bonta did an excellent podcast interview a while back with founder-editor Dylan Tweney, who's been publishing micro-poetry online since 2000: an excitingly appropriate and successful use of the medium.

And still the watchers on the wall

2011-10-12T12:32:00.004+01:00

The sombre resonance of these figures that still look down on the stop where I change buses every week-day morning and evening rarely fails to move me. Without a doubt, James Russell Cant's giant prints are the most powerful public artwork I've come across. Taking photographs of photographs is an odd thing to do, I know. They're irresistible. In times of particularly relentless self-obsession, I guess I appreciate even more than usual the things that regularly pull my attention outwards. I note that when these first appeared nearly eighteen months ago I presumed their welcome presence at the grim Elephant and Castle road junction would be very temporary. How wonderful that this has proved not to be the case. The longer they stay, the more powerful their presence and the more powerfully they embody the opposite of boring, ephemeral or trivialised, the opposite of what is embodied by too much of the London streetscape.

Empty, white

2011-10-11T12:04:00.001+01:00

Autumn tide

2011-10-10T13:55:00.003+01:00

Memories of

2011-10-07T12:36:00.019+01:00

In the mid 1980s I went to work for the small, under-resourced, but occasionally extravagant London secretariat of a global political network and my working life began to fill with exotic new people, objects and experiences that were to make the following decade and more both wonderful and nightmarish. One of those exotic new objects, a few months into the job, was an Apple Mac computer. We were early adopters. It was my first computer: a serial love affair that continued for the whole time I worked there, and I miss them still, my morphing parade of appley better halves. I’m long since reconciled to life with a PC, but it’s never been the same – like leaving a land of sweet little purebred stallions for one of shambling but serviceable donkeys. Long before laptops were conceived of, those early Macs – smooth and chunky and lovable and quickly grubby grey-beige boxes about 9 x 9 x 12 inches – flew with us to conferences in Africa, Latin America and Australia. Many’s the overnight flight I’ve spent with one parked under my feet (cramped uncomfortably in an Economy-class seat, I still find myself thinking: well, at least…). So many feelings and memories: not unmixed, but far from the grateful-but-alienated emotions inspired by the current PC and other techno-tools. I feel rather old, remembering 1985 and my first Mac - a few months older than Steve Jobs, who was too young to die, wasn't he?

Ruminating

2011-10-06T14:00:00.006+01:00

Waiting to hear about something (not life or death, well only metaphorically). There’s nothing more I can do to influence the outcome, and I’ve no idea, really, what the probabilities are. So I need, of course, to just put it out of my mind. Keep active. Stay in the moment. Thought I’d been doing this fairly successfully - I’m not consciously thinking about it much. But clearly my sub(not very sub)conscious is at it the whole time, because I note wearily that I'm eating voraciously (without chewing - another characteristic of rumination), sleeping very little and having nightmares when I do, and I can’t concentrate for shit - not on work (which is less busy, but not much less), but also not on music or fiction or art or escapism of any kind. Oh dear. Well, I can watch my mind, I suppose, and be amazed at its self-defeating capers. And try not to take it out on other people. And be glad that I’ll only have to wait a few weeks.

Ground and form

2011-10-05T12:58:00.001+01:00

by Jaume Plensa at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park

August and September: where did they go? Juddered past in a miasma of work and worry, and it's hard now to find the edge of it. Instead of groping forward, better to sit still and feel down into the ground, sit still and paint pictures in the foggy air. Form is only contrivance, only stories, but it's everything.

Herded

2011-10-03T13:01:00.001+01:00

Eek

2011-09-30T17:33:00.005+01:00

Done much more than I could do. Hurt everywhere and my head's on fire with this damn cold. Breathe hard through the chest and back pain. Open, open to the coming weekend; hope that if the door is open wide enough the dead hand of anti-climax, depression will stay outside waving wildly and not bother to come in.

Today's forecast was for ninety degrees, which never happens here in October. Darkness at 7 pm and still hot means you're not in England, but much further South. I was right then: these past few weeks have been in a strange country.

I know some people don't mind working all the time and would not understand my distress and exhaustion. We all have our own limits and, wherever they lie, to be repeatedly pushed through them is perhaps a good definition of stress.

Careful

2011-09-28T09:25:00.002+01:00

We're having warm, golden Autumn weather, in odd contrast with the fires of mental hell. This is day eleven on the trot (gallop?) of too-long hours before the computer screen and, around the fierce heat of resistance to tedium and exhaustion, the edges are getting very blurred. I'm a bit scared walking down the street: my grip on reality can waver at the best of times, and right now I don't entirely trust myself to tell a red light from a green.

Look, too much work is not as bad as many things - chronic physical pain, or catastrophic illness, or chemotherapy... of course it's not! But it's not good. You know that feeling that, if someone pokes you, you'll start making strange, uncontrollable noises? So you hold yourself carefully away from everyone, hold yourself very carefully together.

Not so long ago

2011-09-26T17:52:00.008+01:00

Et in Arcadia ego (it rained, but still...)

So

2011-09-24T19:52:00.014+01:00

So, size of workload getting very silly.

So I start to wonder: once you've been pushed to your limits and beyond, as I was long ago in that job I eventually left, do you wear it on your face, ensuring that sooner or later it's going to happen again?

So look up, look out once in a while and notice something, at least; keep trying to see something, touch something, however fleetingly.

Just don't let the inner sense of panic be the only thing.

Outside in

2011-09-22T12:57:00.002+01:00

Persist

2011-09-20T13:43:00.009+01:00

So, very busy, thence mostly absent from here. The Autumn sunshine, between rainstorms, is glorious and I feel shut away from it, imprisoned in my office and in my own damaged and armoured heart. Coming here almost makes this feel worse, as I contemplate the creativity and community glimpsed in recent years, but which continue to be only glimpsed. I often want to run from the painful knowledge of their existence, and yet don't: even a glimpse is a lot, if it's a glimpse of hope, if the beauty and the good people are out there somewhere in a mostly terrifying world, and if the not-quite-dead bits of my heart still yearn for them.

Yesterday I met blogger friend Peter Clothier of The Buddha Diaries (he also blogs for the Huffington Post) and his wife, Ellie Blankfort, on holiday in London: writer and artist, and both of them Buddhist practitioners, from Los Angeles. To have encountered such people on line and now met them in person is such a lovely thing, for which I am amazed and grateful.

I think of Peter's most recent book, a collection of essays on sustaining creativity in our crazy, over-busy times, which is beautifully written, full of hard-won experience and gentle Buddhist wisdom. I think of its title, Persist, and tell myself one more time that I will, that we all must, persist as best and as long as we can with the things that matter to us.

Wall-lights

2011-09-18T13:03:00.008+01:00

Invisible sconces of sunshine. qv

Slope

2011-09-16T18:00:00.001+01:00

The last of summer (ahem) slopes away.

Mellow

2011-09-14T12:37:00.000+01:00

Mia Wasikowska as Jane Eyre

2011-09-11T19:30:00.013+01:00

Today was not a day for consuming anything meaningless, only something timelessly emotional and resonant.

I don't recall how old I was when I first read Jane Eyre - 12 or 13 perhaps - only how much I loved it, how it was then the perfect fusion of literature and fantasy, of passionate, intricate intelligence and extravagant wish-fulfilment - was and remained and still is, all these long years later, after personal acquaintance with love and pain and Yorkshire and a man going blind and a lot of shit and a little hard-won wisdom and many, many books.

Around the time I first read the book, there was a black-and-white TV series, which must have quite impressed me for there are scenes I still remember. And down the years a number of films, all disappointing. I'd never have thought of subjecting myself to the new one, had it not starred Mia Wasikowska, who surprised and moved me so much by her performance, aged only sixteen, as the clever, troubled teenage patient, Sophie, in In Treatment. I didn't see her as Alice in Wonderland, but if she was so convincing with jeans and hoodies and iPod and an American accent not her own, why not with corsets and Yorkshire vowels and an 'earphone' hairstyle?

She didn't disappoint and nor, this time, did the film. Of course, for a million reasons, it isn't the great work the book is, but I found it rather wonderfully judged and executed, combining the gothic and the much more subtle in its way as finely as the novel. I imagine buying the DVD to watch and cry cathartic tears when times are hard.

Wasikowska is still only twenty-one. I wonder if she'll have a long career as one of our great actors or take the millions and run, do something else.

Old growth

2011-09-10T23:27:00.001+01:00

Blue sky, white sky

2011-09-09T15:04:00.009+01:00

When life is difficult, the moments of spotting and framing a photograph are sometimes the only relief from an almost unbearable frame of mind. I like this one because it's weird and not at all comforting, and yet the mural is so vivid, so unexpected (I didn't know it was there until I saw it, near the spot where I took these, just as it stopped raining) - more alive than the streets around it or the sky above.

Dereliction and revival

2011-09-08T13:10:00.006+01:00

Former railway buildings near the spiffy new/restored St Pancras International Railway Station. Their current and (to me at least) attractive use by a variety of interesting art- and craft-oriented small businesses looks to be short-term. No doubt either demolition or upmarket refurbishment awaits - I don't know which. This put me in mind of a new book that I'd very much like to read:

Hal Foster in his new book The Art-Architecture Complex turns his attention to how art and architecture have informed each other over the past 50 years. He argues that their fusion has become a defining feature of contemporary culture and provides a scathing critique of the post-industrial cultural economy in which art prompts the transformation of disused warehouses and factories into galleries, and depressed, run-down working-class areas are reborn as stylish art-tourist destinations.

Matching

2011-09-06T17:44:00.004+01:00

I said, oh, look, look, it's the same colour as my book!, and the waitress looked not at the wine or at the book, but, askance, at me.

---------------------

And speaking of matching, or not matching, these photos became a contribution to the latest >Language >Place blog carnival on the theme of Individuation / Assimilation - another issue full of synchronicity and allusion, recognition and surprise. I do love this project! Submissions are open for the next edition until 20 September.

Rain on Ramillies Street

2011-09-04T21:47:00.000+01:00

Visual

2011-08-29T20:53:00.003+01:00

When there is mental confusion, colours, patterns and symmetries seem more useful, somehow, than any words.

Beans, potatoes, Bach and Lydia Davis

2011-08-24T18:44:00.002+01:00

I'm reading the collected stories of Lydia Davis, as highly recommended by the most discriminating of my American friends. The UK edition from Penguin has just been published and I fell on it. I don't think of myself as a lover of short stories. Whilst I can admire them, I've rarely found in them the absorbing, awe-inspiring pleasure of the best novels. Too short. Too small. My yearning to be overwhelmed and transported by fiction too great. Only Raymond Carver, perhaps, does it for me with his short stories, and his is the voice of someone so damaged that I also find them deeply upsetting. Lydia Davis, though - yes! These exquisite, excruciating stories are crafted enough, intense enough to satisfy.

Surprising in a way that short stories have hitherto failed me, when I so love the notion of multiple small portions, when mezedes or tapas are my ideal meal. I guess I've never found till now the papas bravas, the gigandes of literary cuisine. This is it, though. I'm going to love this, have myself a long, lingering, indulgent feast on this fat volume.

These are all about form. But it's like listening to Bach suites - the form is so fine, the pleasure so visceral, that it takes me to a place that is all about content: heart, gut, emotion and the occasional mental orgasm.

Lush

2011-08-23T23:14:00.000+01:00

So much rain - everything keeps growing.

Sky with trees

2011-08-21T09:50:00.003+01:00

Trees and flowers

2011-08-18T21:05:00.000+01:00

Private views

2011-08-16T19:28:00.005+01:00

Tate Modern balcony

Stone wrap

2011-08-14T16:51:00.003+01:00

Canalside Leeds

2011-08-12T22:40:00.001+01:00

In an unmanageable world, canals are contained - a stretch of water just a few yards across, a narrow, manageable strip of accessible earth on either side - but the boundaryless sky above and its reflection in the water ensure that they never feel enclosed or limiting. They have a gentle, complex aesthetic with oft-repeated features, characteristic constructions and vegetation, constantly varying with the light - a light that is always muted and subtle. They have a history that's intricate, defined and melancholy: labour, industry, transport, deindustrialisation, decay. They've emerged into a present that's a kind of a low-key happy ending - cleaned and rehabilitated to a basic level for bourgeois leisure boats and bohemian houseboats, for walkers and cyclists on the towpaths and for dwellers - mostly young and transient - in fashionable waterside apartments. I'd like to go, one day, and walk the length of a canal with my camera, then turn and walk it back with all the views reversed. In the meantime, a few more photos from Leeds.

Views through blue

2011-08-10T17:18:00.002+01:00

One of these should be a book cover: Views Through Blue - a sequence of stories or poems. A major reason for recent trip to Yorkshire was to see the new Hepworth Wakefield art gallery, which I loved, and some time soon I'll get around to editing and posting some photos (took far too many). But these views of a fenced-off, canal-side building site were, I think, almost as aesthetically satisfying as the gorgeous new gallery.

(When I typed this a few days ago, I guess I didn't know just how much 'blue' I'd be viewing through by the time I posted it)

Linking minds

2011-08-09T13:32:00.009+01:00

As the radio told me the riots in many parts of London were moving closer and closer last night to where I live, I was frightened, and chastened by my overwhelming interest in my own safety. Voices other than those shouting 'no excuse - pure criminality!' will be much needed in the days to come. Not that there is any excuse, or that stoning and burning buildings and buses isn't criminality. But there is so much more to say when you feel every day the pain and rage, the cultural and material impoverishment, the chaos just beneath the surface. Reaffirming the power of hearts and words feels like one of the few things I can do at this moment, so below the photo is what I was going to post today anyway, and here are a few more subtle voices on the riots:

Stafford Scott in The Guardian
Camila Batmanghelidjh in The Independent (about Camila's work)
Nina Power in The Guardian
James Meek in the London Review of Books blog

I like to read and absorb things before linking to them, so it's taken me unconscionably long to point out the latest >Language >Place blog carnival, hosted by Walter Bjorkman at Qwik-bake Synthetics and revolving around the theme of 'poetry of place'. It's full of rich and multifarious and lyrical poetry, prose and images. Lovely. So nice to be part of this, and to see it coalescing into something different every time. Submissions for the next edition are open now and until 20 August.

Meanwhile, the latest BluePrintReview is also appearing, a couple of features at a time. This never disappoints. I like everything in the new issue, but my favourite is the story which a photo of mine was chosen to illustrate, Balance by Alex Bernstein - a fine, sharp treatment of a theme that hits home with me; I couldn't be more pleased (if also a little discomfited).

So good that such things sprout from international connections across the Web, and good to have a tiny part in them.

Open City opens here

2011-08-05T11:46:00.015+01:00

Becoming a regular reader of the literary and other writing by established, less established and newly minted writers available on blogs and other online spaces has been a wonderful part of my life in recent years. It’s deepened and expanded my knowledge and tastes in fiction, non-fiction and poetry. It’s not the same as reading books (and books are my dear, lifelong friends – I don’t believe they’re about to die out), but online reading has been just as powerful and brought its own strong appeal of freshness, informality, variety and, of course, interactivity. So it’s not a total surprise to see a friend first encountered through the different blogs he’s kept now find considerable success with his first novel. Not a surprise, but a new and engaging experience.

Teju Cole’s novel, Open City, was published yesterday by Faber and Faber in the UK, six months after its launch in the US, where positive reviews in small and more specialised newspapers, magazines and blogs were followed by great praise from James Wood in the New Yorker and a continuing stream of appreciation from all kinds of readers and critics. And now the UK reviews start, with a buzz of thoughtful enthusiasm, from Pankaj Mishra in the Financial Times, Petina Gappah in the Guardian, Max Liu in the Independent, Adam Kirsch in the New Statesman and anonymous endorsement in the Economist. Already available from UK online retailers, it should be in the shops any time now!

I’ve read the novel several times. I’m both too close to it and haven’t yet got close enough to write easily about it. I can point to the reviews linked above, especially James Wood’s, which was one of those that make you hug yourself in glee because they say the things you thought, but could never have articulated. And I can mention, perhaps, some of the things that particularly drew me. The intense, detailed and specific narrative, unravelling inside the mind of one man, Julius - a young Nigerian-German doctor completing his residency in psychiatry in a New York hospital - brings the city to life in a different, slower, deeper way from anything I've ever read. From this detail and specificity, it reaches out widely to the global flows of our fluxing, ungraspable world, personified by the various immigrants and asylum seekers he encounters. It reaches in, too, to touch the reader's mind and senses and emotions. The restrained, intellectual voice of this protagonist-narrator is also sensitive and compelling.

This is not one for the fan of plot-heavy pageturners, perhaps. Julius spends much time alone, walks a lot and thinks a lot, about art and memory and history. He sees a lot, as loners sometimes do, and has strange, surprising, significant encounters, as loners sometimes do. His story might seem to go nowhere much. Yet, in his journey to Brussels, his journeys of memory back to Nigeria, and in the mouths and memories of those he meets from far-flung places, it goes to Africa, to Europe... and to places in the heart. It travels too, through his observations and reflections, in time and political and cultural history. Full of seeming digressions, it digresses in fact not at all, but is a seamless deepening through detail of the whole picture and atmosphere of today's global city. And it goes to a sharp inner twist that you will not forget.

There are scenes that remind me of those Hungarian photographs (and an exhibition of photos by Munkacsi features in the book), scenes so sharply, delicately detailed that they become a picture, a pattern, that is not only figurative, but not less human or humane for that – more so. Here Julius recalls arriving, with his then girlfriend Nadège and a group from her church, to visit a detention centre for undocumented immigrants; they disembark from the hired bus at a bleak spot in the outer reaches of Queens:

It was then that I saw Nadège’s uneven walk. It was, in a sense, the first time I had really seen her: the slanting afternoon light, the vicious landscape of wire fencing and broken concrete, the bus like a resting beast, the way she moved her body in compensation for a malformation

There is lovely writing about art, and I’ve been noticing recently how often this is central to the novels that most affect me; Siri Hustvedt’s What I Loved and Deidre Madden’s Authenticity spring to mind. A favourite section of Open City that floats perfectly in my memory is at the American Folk Art Museum:

Standing before Brewster’s portraits, my mind quiet, I saw the paintings as records of a silent transaction between artist and object. A laden brush, in depositing paint on the panel or canvas, hardly registers a sound, and how great is the peace palpable in those great artists of stillness: Vermeer, Chardin, Hammershøi. The silence was even more profound, I thought as I stood alone in that gallery, when the private world of the [deaf] artist was total in its quietness. Unlike the other painters, Brewster hadn’t resorted to indirect gazes or chiaroscuro to communicate the silence of his world. The faces were well-lit and frontal, and yet they were quiet…

…for the moment of the painting, and, therefore, for all time, he is a little boy holding a bird by a blue string, clad in a white chemise with a carefully observed lace frill.

I kept thinking, too, that reading this book felt like listening to music: the repetitions, variations, transitions and resolutions of the structure and the way I’ve been reading it over and over with increasing pleasure, both bits and the whole, which is what I do with the latest musical enthusiasm, not so much with books, which are usually a one-off (however powerful) experience. And then I read the piece in Largehearted Boy blog that quotes Teju Cole:

Open City owes more to music than it does to other books… It is Mahler… who provides the mood for the book… but a greater influence on me in terms of compositional structure was Mahler’s great rival in the 20th century symphony, Jean Sibelius… Big forms and small forms are intimately related: listening to the violins scurry away on a theme, one becomes aware that the basses are ambling along in a patter than unexpectedly fits… That was the moving target I was chasing all the way through Open City: how could I get one sentence to open up to another in a way that was organic, but not predictable? I spent a long time thinking about the very beautiful end of the first movement of the Symphony No 3 in particular. I wondered how to use that kind of ending in a prose work: not merely a quiet ending, but an ending that sounds like conversation between three motifs, none of them loud.

I’ve been wondering whether, just as I’ve only grown in recent years to love some of my now favourite novelists – Sebald, Coetzee, Josipovici, as well as Hustvedt and Madden - I might have been less engaged by Open City twenty years ago, when I was the author’s age. Or perhaps I might have loved it just as much, if for more limited reasons. Full of complex ideas and wide intellectual references, it’s also accessible and moving. Alongside the crafted formal qualities and the dizzyingly wide allusions, there’s the aspect neither intellectual nor formal, but of character. Julius is, among other things, a person damaged by estrangement from his mother – or estranged from his mother because he is damaged. As someone in that same position of estrangement from family, which I experience as an amputation of part of the self, this is a psychological portrait I find wrenchingly convincing.

Open City does a rare thing, I think: it both challenges moral, aesthetic and narrative assumptions and holds a space for the reader to face that challenge by leaving us not alone and empty, but consoled (perhaps that is too soft a word) and accompanied by music, art and language. As James Wood wrote, making me a fan of his for life: 'what moves the prose forward is the prose – the desire to write, to defeat solitude by writing'. I hope lots of my friends and compatriots and fellow Londoners from everywhere will read it, now it’s here.

Standing in the sunshine

2011-08-04T15:06:00.005+01:00

Well, right now, I'm not standing in the sunshine. Not physically: it's raining. Not metaphorically: in my soul it's worse than rain. But this shot, from last evening in the park just before sunset, is a joyful thing. The consolations of photography.

Trying

2011-08-03T21:14:00.001+01:00

Trying is a funny thing - essential, but never enough. If you don't try, not much will happen, probably. Equally, though, trying can expand to fill all the space, to crowd out hope, imagination, openings... and thus ensure that all your efforts will be in vain. It's finding the balance between doing and being, I suppose - something our culture isn't very good at.

Hungarian idols

2011-07-31T09:54:00.000+01:00

The Royal Academy's exhibition of black and white works by Hungarian photographers is simply overwhelming. It includes so many of the great, great photographs: the ones I've seen and loved for so long and internalised and half forgotten, the ones that influence every aesthetic judgement I've ever made about a photograph, every sensual-emotional response. All day would be insufficient to take in one room, but the time I could spend in all seven rooms was limited - how long can you gorge on chocolates from a giant box? So I tried to cruise and lick one here and there and savour and retain the after-taste.

(Capa, Kertesz, Kertesz, Munkacsi, Munkacsi, Vadas, Haar, Escher, Brassai, Angelo)

Canal collage

2011-07-30T09:58:00.000+01:00

Time's reflection

2011-07-27T22:44:00.002+01:00

A few more photos of Thwaite Mill are here. (It was closed, which meant I had the view to myself, but also only one view - from outside the gate).

Still

2011-07-26T12:57:00.005+01:00

So I went away for a week. But not away from myself, so it wasn't really that much of a break. And it rained a lot. And I wanted to write, but found no words - they were part of what I needed a break from, probably. But there were photos to be taken, and I'm endlessly thankful for the different mode of mind and perception this gives entrance to, the absorbing oddness and beauty. The pond was near to where I stayed. It was a rather new pond, beside a rather new apartment complex, but already a rich, established little world of flora, fauna, shapes and shadows and reflections. More pond photos here.

In Leeds, it rained

2011-07-24T12:29:00.005+01:00

Oh well. Rain, of course,
is more photogenic
than sunshine.

Confined

2011-07-15T13:58:00.001+01:00

Still vibrant in their urban confinement.

Plastic

2011-07-14T14:14:00.005+01:00

Real tree, plastic backdrop: more interplay of nature and unnatural city surfaces.

Down there, slightly blue

2011-07-13T17:37:00.001+01:00

Passing through

2011-07-11T13:22:00.003+01:00

Walking through the photo I was trying to take of something else.

Staring at me from another time.

The Tree of Life

2011-07-09T21:34:00.006+01:00

Today I saw The Tree of Life, and came out with an incipient migraine which felt like the result of overwhelming emotions, but was probably the result of weird lighting effects. Apart from that, I liked it a lot, was absorbed and transported and moved. Well, it's rare that I don't like something widely labelled slow and self-indulgent.

Brad Pitt gives a haunting, nuanced performance and Sean Penn is beautiful to look at - one rather expects the other way around, I suppose. Jessica Chastain is beautiful to look at also, but she's really a part of the scenery. This is all about boys and men. The young boys are memorable - fine actors wonderfully directed both in their individual roles and as a group.

I've never seen more stunning filming of nature or of big-city architecture, could have sat for hours and watched just that. So involving and emotive was it that I had no problem then accepting the arrival of rather anthropomorphised dinosaurs.

The evocation of the 1950s, cars and clothes and, oh, the hats (I remembered all those old photos of my father wearing a hat) was powerful for me, though the resonances of Texas in those days and of young men dying in the Korean (?) war must be more powerful for a US audience.

I loved this depth and intensity and prolongation of feeling and, perhaps most of all, the extreme vision of skyscraper cities as a frightening nightmare we've made real. To see the horror I have felt so well portrayed was paradoxically consoling.

So, yes, I loved it. Bring it on. This is what today's technology and the film industry's millions are for. But I came out with the headache and later an emotional hangover. As if I'd drunk rather a lot of a fabulous wine. Then I felt a little more sympathetic to the nervous giggles that had accompanied the closing credits - only a little.

Reflection in a summer puddle

2011-07-08T17:59:00.000+01:00

Still here. Trying to write something and not managing to finish it.