Die Zeit/Temps Perdu

Recently I've been listening a good deal to a piece of music called Die Zeit, a composition of Alexander Rabinovitch's. It is scored for four amplified instruments: violin, cello, piano and celesta. If one puts aside the rather pretentious ideas that underpin it, the music is fresh, lively and loud, without being abrasive on the ear: not unlike some of Micheal Nyman's music in tone & texture. On first listening, I found myself trying to imagine what a celesta (played on this recording by renowned concert-pianist Martha Argerich), looked like, and felt obliged to look up an image:

Yesterday volumes 4 & 5 of In Search of Lost Time arrived in a parcel from amazon. I've opted this time to try the new Penguin translation, its lukewarm or mixed reviews notwithstanding. I'm fairly confident, at least, of finishing vol. 3, having made rapid progress through second half of part 1 of The Guermantes Way which, to my mind, has been about the most entertaining part of the story-so-far.

On Sunday we dragged home a handsome nine-foot Christmas tree. On Monday evening it took two hours to string it with four sets of 140 coloured lights, to fairly pleasing overall effect. This was a much less distressing experience than last year, when it took me almost twice as long to put five sets of the same lights on a slightly smaller tree.

On the Finding of a Glove

German graphic artist, painter and sculptor Max Klinger (1857-1920) published a suite of ten engravings in 1881...

...under the title Ein Handschuh (A Glove)...

also sometimes known as Paraphrase on the Finding of a Glove.

I’m only posting them because I like them,

because I found all of the images conveniently compiled at this site,

and because I can’t think of anything else in particular to write about today. Click on the thumbnails to see the images full-size.

A Five-Pointed Star

During Advent, the window above the main entrace of the larger of the two churches that dominate the Great Square at the heart of the town where we live...

...is decorated with an illuminated five-pointed star, presumably to symbolize the star that appeared in the Heavens to mark the birth of the Messiah:

The star itself shines rather dimly, and is such a lacklustre adornment that one wonders whether the effort of switching it on is worthwhile. At least this year, it's the right way up. Last year, and the year before, the star was inverted:

This was a faintly unnerving sight, as I had recalled reading that, whilst the pentagram or pentacle had been used as a Christian symbol, that the inverted pentacle had been adopted by would-be Satanists as a symbol of the Devil. My imagination ran with this notion and imagined the church on those drearily cold winter nights as having been overrun by some black-robed devil-worshipping sect.

Perhaps though, I reflected, the symbol had not been inverted at all, but had merely been rotated in either direction by 72 degrees: the end result would be the same, and the implicit statement not of diametric opposition to orthodoxy, but of an oblique interpretation of it. And isn't it a simplistic thing in the first place, to suppose that by turning an established symbol upside-down, that one instantly negates its meaning?

Spectrum

I was fourteen when I was given my first computer, a Sinclair ZX Spectrum:

It came with 16kB of RAM, which I later upped to 48kB, and displayed no fewer than eight colours, with a screen resolution of 256x192. The keyboard was made of rubber, whose touch was widely likened to that of dead flesh. It was probably the best-selling home computer in the UK ca. ’82-’84.

Ninety percent of the time I used it for playing games, and I sat out a few formative years, that might have been better squandered in any number of ways, absorbed in the glow of images like these:

Manic Miner


Scuba Dive


Chuckie Egg


Jet-Pac


Chequered Flag


Lords of Midnight

The So-Called Sea

The Baltic Sea (Östersjon, in Swedish, 'The Eastern Sea') is a relatively shallow inland sea surrounded by the countries of Northeastern Europe and Scandinavia. Its total area is about 370,000 km² and its volume about 21,000km². Then mean depth is only 55m, but the maximum depth reaches down to 459m. A total of nine countries border the sea: Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, and Sweden. The sea also receives surface water drainage from five other countries: Belarus, Czech Republic, Slovak Republic, Norway, and Ukraine. Almost 80 million people live within the drainage area.

The Baltic, being connected to the North Sea and the oceans beyond only by way of narrow and shallow sounds between Denmark and Sweden (which comprise a series of basins separated by shallow sills that obstruct efficient water exchange), receives the greater part of its water from rivers and precipitation, and is consequently much less saline (8 PSU* in the Southern Baltic) than the oceanic norm (35 PSU).

The brackish surface water in the Southern Baltic, such as that which surrounds the town where we live, will typically freeze at -0.45C. The subzero temperatures we have been enjoying for the past three or four days have sufficed to turn it into a silent, glassy pane.

The restricted influx and outflux of water also limits the extent of the tides, whose maxima seldom exceed a few centimetres. The lack of tidal flow, coupled with a climate more prone to lie still and calm than to rage in violent storms lends a further lake-like character to this so-called sea. There is something of the Atlantic in my blood, and I will sometimes yearn to smell the salt, or to witness the howl of a gale, or the frenzied crashing of waves.

*PSU=Practical Salinity Units, almost equivalent to Parts per Thousand (PPT).

Baltic facts & maps taken from these sites.

Candles in the Window

We put up the first of our christmas decorations on Thursday last week, having dragged down our three boxes of miscellaneous yuletide stuff from the chill of the Mañana's attic. We began with the lengths of fake-fir garland that we'd adorned last year, or the year before, with bows and with red plastic berries, and wired through with white fairy-lights. We stapled one such garland into the arched doorway that separates the lounge from the kitchen, and suspended the others in cursive ws from the banisters that delimit the lounge's upper and lower levels, and the stairs that run between them. Then we put the electric candelabras in the windows, or at least the two of them that still worked - a few had fallen defunct during their year in storage. These characteristically Scandinavian 'candles' can be seen illuminating almost every window in the town where we live:

On Friday, after a further shopping expedition, we put up the remainder of these window-lights, along with some other festive lighting: some glowing plastic snowmen, etc. On Saturday evening we assembled the artificial tree that would be positioned near the balcony door in the upper part of the lounge, stringing it with flashing coloured lights, wrapping it with tinselly garland and suspending baubles from its branches. We'll be putting up a rather larger tree, a real one, in the downstairs lounge sometime later this week. The prospect of stringing lights on to that fills me with something more akin to existential dread than seasonal cheer...

On Saturday we tried åkerbärssylt for the first time. This is a rather costly preserve made from a highly-prized but elusive wild berry that grows in swamps, lakeside meadows, in ditches and along pathways in the northern parts of Scandinavia.

Known as arctic brambles, or arctic raspberries, these fruit make a truly delicious jam that yields a rich chord of flavours.

I wasted a good deal of time this weekend, as I did the weekend before, on the reprehensible pleasures of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City on PlayStation2. In the game, I'm currently helping aspiring crime-boss Tommy Vercetti to set up a counterfeiting operation in the print-works he has just purchased...

Natura Morta

Jean-Pierre Velly was a French, more specifically Breton graphic artist and painter who spent most of his working life in Italy. He excelled above all in natura morta (i.e. 'still-life') scenes, such as the following...

Notturno watercolour, 1984.

I discovered his work when my eye was drawn to the window of the Galleria Don Chisciotte one day as I was walking towards the nearby Piazza del Popolo in Rome. I peeked as best as I could at the works inside, but did not venture inside until the next time I passed by the same way, a few weeks later.

Fiori sul Mare, oil on canvas, 1985.

At that time I felt apprehensive about going into private, commercial galleries, deterred by what I imagined to be their frostily rarefied atmosphere, but curiosity eventually took me inside - and I was very glad it did, as I have very seldom felt such an immediate and powerful connection with any artist's work, before or since.

Apres, oil on canvas, 1986.

The gallery owner, Signor de Maranisch, spoke almost no English, and my Italian was still fairly poor, but I succeeded in explaining, I think, how much I enjoyed Velly's work, and bought a few small catalogues illustrating many of his etchings, watercolours, drawings and paintings.

I Cardi Blu, oil on canvas, 1989.

I scanned these images from a catalogue (published by Fratelli Palombi) of a retrospective exhibition held at the French Academy in Rome in '93. In 1990, at age 47, a boating accident on Lake Trevignano had claimed Velly's life. The next three images are taken from a collection entitled Velly pour Corbière, of works inspired by the poetry of fellow-Breton Tristan Corbière (1845-75)...

La Ciel et la Mer I, Pencil, Ink and watercolour, 1977

La Ciel et la Mer III, Pencil, Ink and watercolour, 1977

Rien, Pencil, ink and watercolour, 1978

This is one of Velly's remarkable pencil self-portraits, one of three in the 1993 catalogue:

Autoritratto a Grandezza Naturale, Pencil drawing, 1987

And this last is one of the arrestingly morbid images from his collection Bestiaire Perdu:

from Bestiaire Perdu, Pencil, ink and watercolour, 1980.

Mister Sís

One Christmas Eve in the midst of a blur of lastminute gift-shopping, I found myself in the children's section of the Blackwells bookshop in Cardiff, in search of a little something for my niece. I picked up a book whose cover caught my eye:

The Three Golden Keys by Peter Sís. Quickly leafing through it, I could see at once that it was a very lovely book, though perhaps a little hard for a four-year-old to read. I bought it anyway, thinking she could always enjoy the pictures & grow into the text.

The book follows the author's journey, in his mind's eye, back to his native city of Prague. Mr. Sís had been living in New York for many years, and apparently wanted to reclaim something of his birthplace, in part as an heirloom for his daughter: the book is dedicated to her.

Through the images and texts, the reader follows a trail of memories of the city through each of the year's seasons, and inbetweentimes learns of some of its legends, each one a golden key for unlocking the past.

I enjoyed reading this book to my niece so much that I went back and bought a second copy, for myself.

I've since read another of Mr. Sís' works, no less remarkable, entitled Tibet: Through the Red Box. This book tells of Sís' father, a documentary film-maker, who sets out on a journey from communist China into the heart of Tibet. Nominally this is, again, a book for children, but I, for one adult, found it a rich and satisfying work of literature and art.

Jeepful of Meat

My wife came back from a farm near Kalmar yesterday with 105 kg (c. 230 lbs) of beef packed into five banana boxes in the back of the Jeep. She'd visited the farm a couple of times before, after picking up a flyer from an organic produce stall in the town square market back in the spring. On one previous visit, the farmer had mentioned that, a couple of times each year, they slaughter an organically-farmed bull, and asked my wife if we'd be interested in putting our names down for a share of the meat the next time around. She said yes, as we seldom see organic beef in the supermarkets here, and often look in vain for particular cuts such as T-bone steaks. There are no specialist butchers' shops for many miles around: one must either go to a supermarket, else direct to a farm. Last Thursday, the farmer called to say that a bull was about to be killed that night, and a quarter of it remained unsold. We asked around, and found that my collague Mr. T______, and his wife, were interested in coming in on the quarter-share with us.

I went back to the T______s' place after work, where Mr. T______ and I waited while our wives stocked up on freezer bags, foil, ties and labels, and, in our case, a new chest freezer, which they also managed to somehow squeeze into the back of the Jeep. When they arrived, it cost the four of us almost two hours' effort to separate, pack, wrap and label the five boxes full of fine-looking meat and bones. After that we had to load our c. 52.5 kg share back in the car, drive it to the Mañana, then get it, and the new freezer up to the fourth floor. Having done all that, we weren't in the mood for a steak right away, so I walked across to O'Leary's and ordered some take-away stuff, while Dog delightedly gnawed at the marrow in a length of bone we'd given him.

A Compass Rose

On our first arrival to Sweden, August 31st 2000, my wife and I drove in our hire-car, somewhat unsure of the way, a short distance north of Stockholm’s Arlanda airport, when we had meant to head south.

In August ’74 I went with my family on a Mediterranean cruise – this the only time I travelled outside the UK as a child. My father had suffered several broken bones after a workplace fall, and the compensation for these injuries funded our trip, at whose easternmost extreme lay Istanbul.

The third time I went to Newfoundland, at the end of June ’99, I travelled out alone, a week or so after my love, who had some business to conclude there. It turned out that I travelled the return leg to London alone as well, after her mother fell ill during the Canada Day festivities. This particular journey went via Halifax, and my two-hour stopover there remains my one & only time on the North-American mainland.

See East above. The SS Oriana passed twice through the Straits of Gibraltar during our cruise, which occasions I take to mark the southermost extreme of my travels. I glimpsed the rock of Gibraltar again last year: on clear days one could catch a distant sight of it from vantage points near the hillside villa where we stayed.

Such is the compass rose which, whilst it does not enfold the world within its petals, nevertheless encompasses a continent, an ocean, and my life.

Compass Roses from Portuguese nautical charts taken from this site.

Wet Hair

If I go to bed with wet hair, I invariably wake up looking more than usually stupid, with at least one substantial tuft sticking up or out at an angle in excess of forty five degrees. When I opted to take a bath last night then, at about eleven fifteen, having taken Dog out for his last walk of the day, I resolved to resist the allure of our bed for a while, and give my hair a chance to dry. My wife had already been asleep for a couple of hours, her sleep-wakefulness cycle being in one of its sporadic episodes of disarray. I sat down in front of the TV with a bottle of Velletri, a wine of old acquaintance that is especially well-suited to cool autumn or winter evenings.

I drank from the one survivor of the pair of good wineglasses we'd bought at the Kosta Boda factory shop last year. I wasn't in the mood to watch any one particular thing, and flicked restlessly through a range of channels, pausing to listen to a minute of something on one of the music channels, or to catch a snip of news, or to ogle at a few moments of soft-porn. At about one-fifteen I slipped into bed and was very soon asleep. Whereas in the summer I will rise unprompted at six or seven, at this time of the year I tend to sleep in until eight or so, as this morning, when my alarm call came in the feline shape of a mrrrrow and a brush of fur to my face. I felt groggy: due, in part, to the wine's after-effects, though no worse overall than the sober grogginess I had experienced the morning before. During the ensuing morning chores of dressing, dogwalking, breakfast-preparation and ironing, I caught myself voicelessly repeating such bland admonitions as musn't forget to drink your orange juice and pointless self-advice like the navy-blue shirt will be easier to iron, which struck me as the kind of patronising instructions one might issue to a feeble-minded underling. It was not the interior monologue that was unusual here, rather the dissociated mindset that allowed me to simultaneously enact the monologue and at the same time to be self-consciously and standoffishly aware of its intense banality.

Whenever I've resumed a journal in the wake of some or other blank-paged interval, I have always found it easier to begin with specific details, than with a broad summary of the weeks or months that have gone unaccounted-for. For a while I was concentrating all of my writing efforts on my abortive entry for NaNoWriMo 2002. Alas, I didn't succeed in writing a novel, and find myself left instead with an almost-completed novella of about 25,000 words, which, provided I do actually finish it, will still be the longest piece of fiction by far that I've ever written. For another while I just didn't feel much like writing (or reading) anything of any substance, a stale and static phase which this is an attempt at shaking myself out of.