Monday, 31 January 2011
Photos to Create a Smile
I received these in my email at work and I thought some of them were hilarious. Hope you like them too.
Haiku:Beauty in Simplicity
Plum blossom scent
as the sun comes up
on a path through the mountains.
Old pond
A frog jumps in.
The sound of water.
Between the stones
in the mason's yard
chrysanthemums are flowering
(Matsuo Basho)
When I read Basho's haiku, I'm somehow reminded of a grasshopper jumping from reed to reed, a creature that jumps and lands with flawless accuracy or just moving so as if he is totally attuned to his environment.
Deepening a sense of life
"Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life; they feed the soul." (Anne Lamott) I came across this quotation earlier on and it seems to say so much. I'm reminded of the words of a former English teacher from 20 years ago who once said that Fay Weldon's work "Letters to Alice" is one of the greatest justifications for reading literature so it will be a definite addition on my increasingly expanding books to read list.
Sunday, 23 January 2011
Laying Down One's Roots
Isn't it strange how feelings towards yourself and your environment change with age. I've been reflecting upon where I am recently. I think this has shown itself in a current interest in DIY or home improvement. Up until a few years ago I always had a rule that I would live within walking distance of a railway station, a supermarket and a bank. Feelings of wanderlust used to be very close to my heart. I expect that's why commuting never really bothered me; they were like daily journeys opening up mini adventures crossing town. Now those things are becoming less important as I see my flat as a potential 'home' and after 10 years of living in the same city I'm finally beginning to settle in. Perhaps it's the unconscious wish to lay down one's roots and feather the nest ready for potential fatherhood. Alternatively it may be the onset of middle age although I haven't bought my Porsche or Harley Davidson as yet. I just hope it's the former rather than the latter; only time, and hopefully a lady to share the rest of my life with, will tell I guess.
Sunday, 16 January 2011
What if you had no right to read?
According to Alberto Manguel, "stories are our memory, libraries are the storerooms of that memory, and reading is the craft by means of which we can recreate that memory...by translating it back into our own experience." ('City of Words') Here I'm reminded of a novel I read some years ago by the American writer Ray Bradbury and one that has often resonated with me. He describes a society in which all books are burnt as they are considered to encourage independent thought and are therefore dangerous to the central power of the State. Information is controlled by the State and people receive their daily dosage of news/information via a wall screen which every household is encouraged to have. Yet outside of the city an underground movement grows and libraries are maintained through memory as each person has memorised a complete book or work of literature. Considering that the book was written in the 1950s, Ray Bradbury shows real and chilling foresight when you reflect upon the growing popularity of huge plasma screen televisions today.
Thursday, 13 January 2011
Different Perspectives and Bicycle Repairs.
Isn't it strange how certain things like experiences or books read just seem to remain with you. It's almost as is if they become part of who we are. I say this because last night as I was repairing my trusty bicycle I was reminded of Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences. According to the model, we have at least nine proficiencies or intelligence tendencies in given areas. Indeed in 'Frames of Mind' he asks "have you ever seen a ten year old perform an Aikido kata of 50-60 movements with crisp precision, smooth flow and not a single hesitation?" Later on he goes on to describe how Henry Moore "thinks of the sculpture, whatever its size, as if he were holding it completely enclosed in the hollow of his hand." The former Aikido practitioner is showing a kinaesthetic tendency or proficiency while the sculptor is showing a greater spatial intelligence. Yet would both be catered for in formal college examinations which as Howard Gardner argues have traditionally been biased towards those with greater strengths in logic and linguistics. Perhaps the student who sits at the back of the class so often labelled the 'bad student' has strengths in other intelligence areas as opposed to just those more suited to academic examinations.
Tuesday, 11 January 2011
On Conversation
A few days ago I went with a colleague for a coffee. After being away for the festive and new year period, I thought we could catch up. So I agreed to go as I try to value the friendship. Using the word try may raise an eyebrow as surely a friendship by its very nature is valued. Yet there we were sitting at the table in a coffee shop that perhaps is a little larger than a double wardrobe; he believes in supporting local businesses. Yet what does he do? He starts evesdropping on a conversation between two mathematicians sitting there exchanging cryptic comments about some obscure area of mathematical theory. I thought we were in a coffee shop just to relax and catch up with the news etc, yet I as opposed to we seemed to be in the midst of a university seminar. I say I because my colleague also became involved in this intellectual competition. I thought what am I doing here. To break the monotonous exchanges I ventured to ask them where they were from and low and behold one was Norwegian but had actually spent some several years in Canada. He mentioned Montreal a place I had once been to and I noticed a brief smile from a young woman sitting behind me; a spark of humanity lit a brief moment in the midst of this cerebral darkness but its fleeting brilliance soon fled as the mathematicians once again returned to their symposium or exercises in self aggrandisement.
Monday, 10 January 2011
A little of my artwork
These are just a few paintings I've done since starting an evening course in oriental art. As you can see there's still more work to be done, so step by step.
A Crane in a Snowy Landscape.
Asian Paradise Flycatcher
Mice Having Fun.
Sunday, 9 January 2011
Sunday Night Reflections and Jazz
For me this seems to evoke a mood of reflection and thinking ahead, typically what I do or at least try to do on a Sunday night.
Saturday, 8 January 2011
Inspiration from walking
Helen Dunmore is a writer I discovered fairly recently; her latest novel was nominated for the Booker literary award. I was attracted by the fact that it had been nominated and also by the setting: St Petersburg in the 1950s. I tend to think that any novel, film or work of literature opens a window onto another culture or time and potentially depending upon the work and the engagement it can be a very illuminating experience. Having done more research on the author, I came across this thought provoking article that she once penned on walking and the writing process.
Walking into the story
"Coleridge thought nothing of walking from Nether Stowey to Bristol; Virginia Woolf, for all her fragile elegance, would often walk the eight miles from Rodmell to Charleston to visit her sister; Keats tramped Scotland, and Emily and Anne Brontë made a holiday of walking from Haworth to Keighley and staying there overnight.
There they go, all of them heroic walkers by our timid twenty-first century standard: John Clare, James Boswell, Jane Austen, Dorothy Wordsworth, Henry Mayhew, T S Eliot haunting the brown London fogs, Katherine Mansfield discovering the New Zealand backblocks, D H Lawrence on the coast path from Zennor to St Ives. They are on foot, observant, seeing, smelling, touching, hearing, getting blown about and rained on, sinking onto milestones or sheltering in the lee of thorn-hedges, carrying stout sticks, losing their way and finding it again, meeting leech-gatherers, bores, beggars, prostitutes, drunks, thieves, flower-sellers, and writing about all of them.
What chance would they have had, from the inside of a Volkswagen Golf? Driving doesn’t just get you from place to place rapidly. It provides you with a mobile private space, which you can control even when you are stuck in a traffic jam. You listen to your own music, choose your own climate, and need speak to no-one. You are outside, but inside, moving from place to place yet never in public. In a car you’ll never smell the warm, metallic wind that gusts down a tube platform, be thrown forward as you negotiate the aisle of a badly driven bus, give up your seat or have one given up for you, be asked for money in a dozen languages, negotiate a street full of chuggers, steer clear of drunken football supporters, smile at somebody else’s baby, overhear the broken bits of conversations, watch the dexterous flicker of a blind man’s stick, hear the creak of the school crossing-lady’s slicker as she lifts her lollipop, or smell the pungency of the first drops of rain hitting summer pavements. In your car you won’t be greeted, smiled at, shouted at, cursed. Or if you are, you won’t have to deal with it, except by driving away fast. You won’t get caught by the weather, and your legs won’t ache. Above all, you will never share the neutrality and anonymity of the streets.
Maybe, for many, those are fine reasons for taking out a bank loan fast, and buying that car. Muggers and drug dealers come to outweigh the exhilaration of walking late, brilliant streets, and who wants to be bothered with picking their way over fast-food litter? We may still go for walks, in landscapes of our own choosing, but we prefer them to be beautiful. And so as we grow older we grow safer, until we shame ourselves by not knowing the fare to anywhere, and having no shoes in which we can walk more than a few hundred yards.
Besides, there’s the dimension of status to be considered. Success steps out of its black Mercedes and walks into its intimate venue. Mediocrity plods.
But writing hasn’t changed: it’s still the stuff that you do when you are not at your desk. Maybe it’s because the first things I wrote were poems - and very likely the last things will be poems too - that I’m convinced work has to grow into its own rhythm, inside the head. And there’s no place better for composition than a road. It has everything: space, time, an inner solitude which is constantly interrupted by everything from the scent of lavender rubbed against the fingers to a stretch of police tape where a murder’s been committed. Such qualified, interrupted solitude may be better for a writer than conditions which are more obviously ideal.
And nothing more quickly calms the stretched, exposed mind after a day’s writing than to walk. Walking dissolves tension, anger, disappointment, anxious self-regard. What seems important at the beginning of an hour’s walk is not the same as what seems important at its end. So much has happened. After walking past a house a dozen times, you notice that high up on the wall there’s a plaque that says that Amy Valence and Katherine Louise Medlicott lived there from 1822 to 1869, ‘devotedly serving the poor of this parish’. Or there’s a sudden, sharp quarrel between two men outside a sandwich shop which uses ‘only halal meat’. And then, after a couple of miles, the reward of a Cadbury’s Flake - and all at once the characters who were sullenly frozen begin to move inside your head, or a piece of dialogue picks up speed.
Recently some well-known writers, including A S Byatt and Minette Walters, allowed a documentary film-maker to follow their writing process from the beginning of a book to its end. Maybe the idea behind the programmes was that television might capture that invisible moment when dithering disguised as preparation becomes the thing itself: creation, the slippages of the brain as it accelerates into words that go down as fresh and wet as paint. And once that creative moment is recorded, maybe it can be pinned down, analysed, imitated.
Many of us, it seems, whether we’re writers or not, like to know how the process works. At readings, the most frequently asked questions are those about a writer’s procedure. Hours of work, discipline or lack of it, how many words per day, how many drafts per manuscript, how many years make a novel and how many novels make a professional. Absinthe or Ovaltine, Mac or PC, sitting or standing, Google or British Library, caf or decaf, fags or nicotine patches .....
But the moment of composition may have nothing to do with sitting in front of a screen, or putting words on paper. It’s a moment that does not want to be recorded, except by the one person who can find a form for it. And as the camera approaches, the moment, like the writer, retreats and walks away, becoming the shape of Coleridge with his coat on, striding across the Quantocks and into a poem."
(This article was first published in The Author)
There they go, all of them heroic walkers by our timid twenty-first century standard: John Clare, James Boswell, Jane Austen, Dorothy Wordsworth, Henry Mayhew, T S Eliot haunting the brown London fogs, Katherine Mansfield discovering the New Zealand backblocks, D H Lawrence on the coast path from Zennor to St Ives. They are on foot, observant, seeing, smelling, touching, hearing, getting blown about and rained on, sinking onto milestones or sheltering in the lee of thorn-hedges, carrying stout sticks, losing their way and finding it again, meeting leech-gatherers, bores, beggars, prostitutes, drunks, thieves, flower-sellers, and writing about all of them.
What chance would they have had, from the inside of a Volkswagen Golf? Driving doesn’t just get you from place to place rapidly. It provides you with a mobile private space, which you can control even when you are stuck in a traffic jam. You listen to your own music, choose your own climate, and need speak to no-one. You are outside, but inside, moving from place to place yet never in public. In a car you’ll never smell the warm, metallic wind that gusts down a tube platform, be thrown forward as you negotiate the aisle of a badly driven bus, give up your seat or have one given up for you, be asked for money in a dozen languages, negotiate a street full of chuggers, steer clear of drunken football supporters, smile at somebody else’s baby, overhear the broken bits of conversations, watch the dexterous flicker of a blind man’s stick, hear the creak of the school crossing-lady’s slicker as she lifts her lollipop, or smell the pungency of the first drops of rain hitting summer pavements. In your car you won’t be greeted, smiled at, shouted at, cursed. Or if you are, you won’t have to deal with it, except by driving away fast. You won’t get caught by the weather, and your legs won’t ache. Above all, you will never share the neutrality and anonymity of the streets.
Maybe, for many, those are fine reasons for taking out a bank loan fast, and buying that car. Muggers and drug dealers come to outweigh the exhilaration of walking late, brilliant streets, and who wants to be bothered with picking their way over fast-food litter? We may still go for walks, in landscapes of our own choosing, but we prefer them to be beautiful. And so as we grow older we grow safer, until we shame ourselves by not knowing the fare to anywhere, and having no shoes in which we can walk more than a few hundred yards.
Besides, there’s the dimension of status to be considered. Success steps out of its black Mercedes and walks into its intimate venue. Mediocrity plods.
But writing hasn’t changed: it’s still the stuff that you do when you are not at your desk. Maybe it’s because the first things I wrote were poems - and very likely the last things will be poems too - that I’m convinced work has to grow into its own rhythm, inside the head. And there’s no place better for composition than a road. It has everything: space, time, an inner solitude which is constantly interrupted by everything from the scent of lavender rubbed against the fingers to a stretch of police tape where a murder’s been committed. Such qualified, interrupted solitude may be better for a writer than conditions which are more obviously ideal.
And nothing more quickly calms the stretched, exposed mind after a day’s writing than to walk. Walking dissolves tension, anger, disappointment, anxious self-regard. What seems important at the beginning of an hour’s walk is not the same as what seems important at its end. So much has happened. After walking past a house a dozen times, you notice that high up on the wall there’s a plaque that says that Amy Valence and Katherine Louise Medlicott lived there from 1822 to 1869, ‘devotedly serving the poor of this parish’. Or there’s a sudden, sharp quarrel between two men outside a sandwich shop which uses ‘only halal meat’. And then, after a couple of miles, the reward of a Cadbury’s Flake - and all at once the characters who were sullenly frozen begin to move inside your head, or a piece of dialogue picks up speed.
Recently some well-known writers, including A S Byatt and Minette Walters, allowed a documentary film-maker to follow their writing process from the beginning of a book to its end. Maybe the idea behind the programmes was that television might capture that invisible moment when dithering disguised as preparation becomes the thing itself: creation, the slippages of the brain as it accelerates into words that go down as fresh and wet as paint. And once that creative moment is recorded, maybe it can be pinned down, analysed, imitated.
Many of us, it seems, whether we’re writers or not, like to know how the process works. At readings, the most frequently asked questions are those about a writer’s procedure. Hours of work, discipline or lack of it, how many words per day, how many drafts per manuscript, how many years make a novel and how many novels make a professional. Absinthe or Ovaltine, Mac or PC, sitting or standing, Google or British Library, caf or decaf, fags or nicotine patches .....
But the moment of composition may have nothing to do with sitting in front of a screen, or putting words on paper. It’s a moment that does not want to be recorded, except by the one person who can find a form for it. And as the camera approaches, the moment, like the writer, retreats and walks away, becoming the shape of Coleridge with his coat on, striding across the Quantocks and into a poem."
(This article was first published in The Author)
Friday, 7 January 2011
Moments of Reflection
It's marvellous to have time away from work to relax and take stock. I've always found that reading poetry helps to retrieve those increasingly distant memories so they can become once again those gently breathing embers warming the glow of the mental hearth. These are two I've recently encountered.
Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth like a garment wear
The beauty of the morning; silent , bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky,
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did the sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!
...William Wordsworth 3 Sept, 1802
The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference
...Robert Frost
Thursday, 6 January 2011
Vignettes
I came across these photos earlier on while reading through 'The Independent' newspaper online. Perhaps though the term photo could be replaced with vignette as each face within each scene seems to tell a story in itself. They're almost like film stills initiating new encounters but anyway see what you think.
Photos are by Jason Bell.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/britons-in-new-york-2054878.html
or there's an audio slideshow at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-11029799
The limits of language and a blue guitar.
It's strange how certain thoughts constantly reoccur in your mind. I say this because since last night I've been quietly mulling over something I read on the act of reading itself. In fact it reminds me of Wittgenstein's idea of "the limits of my language are the limits of my world." The writer Robert Rowland Smith argues that "the book you're reading can't release any meaning without your mind to coax it out, the book suffers the same limits you do-it can mean only as much as your mind is capable of letting it mean." ('Breakfast with Socrates') In other words the "verbal aquarium of characters, colours and currents" can only become so in the mind. Yet there could also be another interpretation here and one that sends me back to the dictionary for the daily digest; that is to say the life of the text is bound or determined by our internal or mental dictionaries. I'm no fan of Arthur Scargill but he once said that his father would read the dictionary every day: "he says your life depends on your power to master words." So it's back to the dictionary then after some lunch of course.
The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."
The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."
('The Man With the Blue Guitar' Wallace Stevens)
The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."
The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."
('The Man With the Blue Guitar' Wallace Stevens)
Wednesday, 5 January 2011
Tuesday, 4 January 2011
New Year's Resolutions
I was always taught that at the beginning of each new year, it was tradition to make three new year's resolutions. Now from experience, come February and whoops what's happened to the resolutions, the new start, the new you... well perhaps not going that far. Chances are that if you have already been doing the activity such as going to the gym, then it becomes much easier to see the resolution through to the end of the year. So here goes for 2011 and the big three:
1. to read at least one book a month (with work and research commitments this could be a challenge)
2. to practise more art (much easier to do a drawing or painting a week)
3. to go to the gym at least 3 times a week (perhaps the easiest of all as I usually do anyway)
Tips from a psychologist to keep those new year's resolutions:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-12068595
1. to read at least one book a month (with work and research commitments this could be a challenge)
2. to practise more art (much easier to do a drawing or painting a week)
3. to go to the gym at least 3 times a week (perhaps the easiest of all as I usually do anyway)
Tips from a psychologist to keep those new year's resolutions:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-12068595
New Year Celebrations in London 2010
These superb photos are from the BBC website. It seemed like a great night with all enjoying themselves which is the main thing.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_pictures/8436891.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_pictures/8436891.stm
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