Art - eat - art - coffee

Fred Williams - Lysterfield triptych.  NGA

A day off from the office to spend time with friends visiting from Scotland, Barbara McKissack and Brian Smith.  After Spike gave us the guided tour of the Canberra Glassworks - where one of her works sits in a kiln slowly lowering its temperature before being extracted tomorrow - we enjoyed a more than decent, very late brunch on the Kingston foreshore - at the Local Press Cafe.  Then we headed for the National Gallery of Australia to see its recently re-located and re-hung national collection.  (I'm afraid we all agreed we could give the Tom Roberts 'blockbuster' show a miss.  Personally, I feel I've seen the sheep-shearing scenes enough.  There may be more to discover in them.  My opinion may change. Or not.)

On the other hand I never tire of seeing the Fred Williams triptych. It does something but I don't quite know what or understand why.  But that doesn't matter.  You simply need to look.

So good it does your head in

A gift to myself arrived from England a few days ago.  Today I got round to reading Andrew McMillan's first collection of poems, physical, which won the Guardian First Book Award 2015.  It's not difficult to see why it was a contender.  

I read the short collection in one sitting; read it aloud because poetry like this benefits from being read out loud.  The absence of punctuation wasn't a hindrance.  The rhythm of the poems takes you through the text.  Almost without conscious thought you learn quite quickly, perhaps intuitively, that two spaces between words signifies a comma, three tells you where a full stop might be.  And the lines seem to fit with the simple but profound idea that where you need to take a pause for breath the text requires a break as well.

There are echoes (for me at least) of Marianne Moore in the tightly structured verse (I thought of The Steeplejack and Poetry when I read protest of the physical, a magnificent longer poem).  I heard the whisper of T S Eliot in WHEN LOUD THE STORM AND FURIOUS IS THE GALE. There is even a bit of Billy Collins in THE FACT WE ALMOST KILLED A BADGER IS INCIDENTAL. Best of all though, this a collection from a unique and confident voice. A true poet.

Those whom the Gods wish to destroy they first make mad

Delusional man looks at tomatoes today

So I submitted my resignation this morning. I have no new job to go to. I'm returning to full time study at the Australian National University, hope to pick up bits and pieces of work where I can and use the comparatively meagre resources I have to support us. I think I can eke out two years. I'll either succeed with this bonkers plan or fail spectacularly. There is no Plan B but I intend to succeed.

In advance of the university year beginning next month I enrolled in a free, online course provided by the Open University. It's called Start Writing Fiction and encourages you to do what it says on the label. The course started today. 

One of the early exercises goes like this:

Write a paragraph (50 to 100 words) containing one fact and three fictitious elements. 

You can write about yourself, about your interests, about history – about anything you like. Then try the reverse – write a paragraph containing three facts and one fictitious element.

And this is how I responded (based on some previous attempts);

One fact, three fictitious elements 

There are lies, damned lies and - of course - there are statistics.  Everyone knows, statistically speaking, you’re more likely to be crushed to death by a vending machine tipping over than to be taken by a shark.  Except that out here, an hour east of the Whitsunday Islands, there are no vending machines of any shape, size or form.  Not one.  But I’ll bet my last soggy dollar there are more than enough sharks to go round.  Not far from here.  And this yacht is sinking.  I reckon we have an hour. 

Three facts, one fictitious element 

Four miles south-west of the Clachan Bridge, which some folk call the Bridge over the Atlantic, a five-minute ferry crossing takes you from the pier at Ellenabeich village to the island of Easdale.  It was there, on that slate outcrop, my mother gave birth at the height of the great storm in the winter of 1881.  As I entered the world, shrieking like a hungry herring gull, a monstrous wall of wild water breached the island’s sea defences, flooding the quarries.  Nothing thereafter could ever be the same.

I'm started.  As I hope to continue.  Writing.

Ziggy played guitar

Booked

Firs stop - Tokyo

Our itinerary is more or less sorted.  The flights are booked.  The day has been given over to the search for accommodation. Looking for wheelchair accessible showers is always a challenge but we've started.  One hotel booked for four nights.  3 nights sleeping on long haul flights.  That leaves 30 nights to resolve while the clock ticks down to departure. Excited.  Bit freaked out but we'll be fine.

Old habits die hard

Friday night  there, Saturday morning here and the day's first news: my football team back in Scotland progressed to the final 16 of the Scottish Football Cup.  Any ship in a storm Douglas.

No single fact can ever define us - two strong women

Another two short stories from Philip Hensher's anthology bit the dust today; both by women whose long lives straddled the turn of 18th and 19th Centuries, both of whom experienced mental breakdown, both of whom survived their traumas to write.

Hannah More by Henry Pickersgill

Hannah Moore was born in 1745, the year of the Jacobite Rebellion.  She wrote plays, poems and short stories such as the morality tale, Betty Bridges, the St. Giles's Orange Girl.  It's too easy to observe that such a one-dimensional tale of the moral improvement made possible through hard work, thrift, respect for God's laws and the beneficent power of the philanthropic middle-classes could not be written today.  But it's just as true that Miss More wrote her short, unmistakably 'Dickensian' fable three years before the great chronicler of London's poor was born.  Hannah was a leader of the Bluestocking group (maybe not proto-feminist but certainly supportive of educated, intellectual, socially-conscious and engaged women).  And when it came to the great cause of her day - the abolition of the slave trade - Hannah More was on the right side of history.

Mary Lamb

Mary Lamb was born twenty years after Hannah More and lived to the middle of the 19th Century.  What sorts of changes must these two women have seen in their lives, each of more than eight decades?  It was an era of enormous change in the structure, economy, society of Great Britain - the great age of the industrial revolution that made Victorian Britain the largest Empire the world had ever known.  Where Hannah More's story centred on the misfortunes of the urban poor and the reforming efficacy of the emergent middle-class, Mary Lamb's nostalgic rumination on childhood, The Farm House, harked back, I think, to fabrications of a lost (perhaps never-existed) agrarian idyll. I was startled, then, to discover that aged 32 Mary Lamb stabbed to death her mother who was sitting at their dinner table.  Mary was convicted of lunacy, spending short periods in institutions throughout the rest of her life.  She and her brother Charles were, however, fully engaged members of London's literary life.