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Dipping In And Out
2024-05-11 11:16 poliphilo
Our internet connection is coming and going, it was gone this morning so I picked a garden chair off the pile, not the top one which was wet with dew- and put it in a place on the path that the rising sun had already reached and watched what was going on in the world- which was mostly to do with birds.

The internet is on now- obviously and the woman at technical support has fixed us up with a engineer Monday morning. It's because you're on Halo, she said. She also said we could expect it it keep "dipping in and out".

Like an oar....

But sitting out there in the sun (it feels like it's going to be a really hot day) I asked myself if I could live without the Internet and concluded I probably could. Well, if it wasn't available I'd have to, wouldn't I? And could I do it happily? Yes, sure; several avenues of self-expression would be closed to me- this one primarily- but I'd find other things to do...

More From The Picture Diary
2024-05-10 21:24 poliphilo
These four are related. The theme being medieval warfare, with a dash of fantasy and a hint of Kurosawa.....

Searching The Stacks
2024-05-10 14:02 poliphilo
I was going to read The Charterhouse of Parma next but I'm into Sterne now and Stendhal will have to wait until I've re-read Tristram Shandy. I went to Camilla's yesterday and searched through her stacks. There was no shortage of Shandy's but I rejected three before I found the one I wanted.

1. Had a plastic cover pretending to be leather- I think the stuff is called skivertex- it had a vogue in the 70s- and I deplore it.

2. Wasn't bad but had leaves coming loose.

3. Was a Everyman pocket edition. Nothing wrong with Everyman editions, but of course the print is small and with a text as dense and complicated as Shandy you really want all the help you can get- and a large friendly type is desirable....

The fourth- which I bought- was lying on its side on top of properly shelved books and I overlooked it at first. It's a Folio edition- and handsome as Folio books always are. Folio editions can be a bit precious- aimed at the displayer rather than the reader- but this is perfectly decent and has woodcut illustrations- by John Lawrence- in the Hogarth tradition....

Weeding The Patio
2024-05-09 10:12 poliphilo
I cleared the patio of weeds. Ailz had bought me a hooky, knifey thing that you slide between paving stones. It was a bit like ripping stitches. In the process I disturbed a countless number of woodlice....

Europe At War In The 1760s
2024-05-08 10:19 poliphilo
Here's an odd thing about the Europe of Sterne's a Sentimental Journey- which fictionalises Sterne's actual journeys through Europe in the 1760s.

France and England are at war- but the war is a matter of governments and armies, fought elsewhere- and very much above the heads of the people of the two countries.

And so Sterne's Parson Yorick can wander where he pleases in France and meet with nothing but good-nature and civility. No-one looks at him with suspicion, insults his country or calls him names; no-one talks politics at him. There's the small matter of a passport- because he has managed to enter the country without one and this could get him locked up in the Bastille- but he makes an appeal to an Anglophile nobleman and the matter is cleared up without any fuss....

May Bank Holiday
2024-05-07 09:46 poliphilo
Come lasses and lads, take leave of your dads
And away to the maypole hie....

Yes, that's what I want to see on a May bank holiday: Maypole dancing.

Happy shepherds with ribbons round their hats, nimble maidens in white dresses with garlands of flowers binding their hair- what a pretty picture!

But if there had been a maypole set up in Prince's Park- as there wasn't, I would  have watched the dancing for five minutes and gone, "Well that was interesting, now lets do something else...."

Had I ever worked in an office I might pay more attention to bank holidays. As it is, they creep up and surprise me, and I experience them mainly as days on which the shops are shut....

Yesterday, as so often happens with holidays, it rained. Wendy and Mary came over and we took them out to lunch at the Perch (which I always want to call the Edge) in Princes Park. The Perch is a happy, noisy venue on the edge of the boating lake (which may be why I want to change its name) and full yesterday of babies and dogs. The food ain't bad. I'm sure the first time we went there they had Harvey's on draught but perhaps I'm romancing. Anyway, now it's all bottled continental beers. This isn't a complaint. I'm happy drinking Peroni. I maintain that after the first mouthful any beer is just beer and could be any beer on the planet. I'm a real ale man out of sentiment, not because I greatly prefer the taste.....

Mary wanted two cakes for her pudding and ate a little of each of them. "They're eggy," she said.....

Classic
2024-05-06 11:03 poliphilo
Mary has had her hair cut in a fringe. Yesterday she loved it. Today she grouses that it makes her look like a teacher.

"Classic Mary," says her mother.

"Classic teenager," says Ailz.

"Classic human being," I think...

From The Picture Diary
2024-05-05 19:30 poliphilo
Once again, a miscellany.....

1.Episode from an Unpublished Victorian Novel



2. Mist



3. Searching for an Honest Man



 4. Waiting

Sterne's Sentimental Journey...
2024-05-05 10:55 poliphilo
Sentimentality has come to mean false feeling, but when the word came into vogue, in the 18th century, it meant true feeling. And that's how Sterne uses it.

I blame the change on the Victorians who were so keen on true feeling (which is commendable in them) that they sometimes resorted to faking it.

The Sentimental Journey is the narrative of man travelling through Europe and determined, though he slips occasionally, to think the best of everyone and everything he comes across- and to enter into  and accomodate himself to their feelings. It's on the way to being a treatise on holy living. And if that sounds dull, be it understood that Sterne is lighthearted about it, and quirky and insightful and funny.

It's a happy book, never pious- good grief, no (though Sterne was a clergyman)- and all the more remarkable in that Sterne was dying- and knew that he was dying-  when he wrote it....

Thunderstorm
2024-05-02 09:26 poliphilo
We had a thunderstorm last night where there was very little thunder but the lightning was almost continuous, centred in different places, flickering on and off above the clouds and once in a while sending a bolt down to strike the hills. I stood at the window in the baby's room and watched it. I enjoy a good thunderstorm.

But this one cost us sleep- and I'm feeling the effects of that this morning....

My favourite description of a thunderstorm is from Browning's The Ring and the Book. It goes like this...

I stood in Naples once, a night so dark
I could have scarce conjectured there was earth
Anywhere, sky or sea or world at all:
But the night's black was burst through by a blaze-
Thunder struck blow on blow, earth groaned and bore,
Through her whole length of mountain visible:
There lay the city thick and plain with spires,
And, like a ghost disshrouded, white the sea....

I took my complete Browning, Volume II down from the shelf and it fell open at this very passage: that's how much I love it.....

Miscellaneous AI Pictures
2024-05-01 12:27 poliphilo
I'm turning out AI images at a great rate. Here are some fairly recent ones-

1, Toad of Toad Hall




2. Not Dodie Smith's Castle but suggested by it....





NightCafe runs competitions which I usually enter. The theme on this occasion was Plague Doctors.

I call my effort....

3, House Call

Perfection And Imperfection
2024-05-01 11:50 poliphilo
There was a stage of his career when John Lennon was talking- quite seriously I believe- of redoing all the Beatles material and this time getting it right- which is sort-of amusing if you believe as most people do that the Beatles got it right first time round....

But Lennon was a perfectionist- and perfectionists are aware of all the tiny flaws in their work and get so they can't see the triumph for the trivia. I know how this feels.

The greatest artists are those who don't care- and the reason they don't care is because they're so busy making new things they forget about the old. Shakespeare comes into this category and Mozart and Raphael and Picasso and all those other gurgling downspouts of beauty and wisdom.

Thomas Hardy maintained that the awkwardness of his verse was essential to the poetry- and Leonard Cohen said there was a crack in everything and that's how the light gets in....

I Capture The Castle Revisited
2024-05-01 10:29 poliphilo
How magical to live in a ruined castle in the 1930s even if you have no money and have sold all the furniture and are reduced to eating meals of cold rice and sprouts....

Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle is one of my favourite books. I find that what I remember best is the narrator's voice and the castle itself. What I have forgotten is the story, which is all to the good because I have no more idea of how the plot is going to resolve itself than if this was a first reading. All the people are alive and thriving- even the two American lover-boys who I found disappointing first time round. Had there ever been a movie made the young Tilda Swinton would have been a shoo-in for the role of Topaz- the narrator's otherworldly step-mother...

(Ah, I've done my research since writing the last para- and see there was a movie made- by the BBC- in 2003 and Tara Fitzgerald played Topaz. I've no idea if it's any good. At least we were spared the projected Disney version starring Hayley Mills- which would have been horrible...)

Dodie Smith also wrote plays and 101 Dalmations- and a number of other adult novels which, according to the critics, fail to live up to this one....

....which was written in the 1940s in a fit of homesickness for England. Dodie had married a conscientious objector and they had chosen to sit out the Second World War in California. She was working as a scriptwriter on the Hollywood production line- and despising it- but finding some sort of mitigation of the awfulness in the friendship of Christopher Isherwood....

Dodie's love of England, humorous, mystical, pushing at the boundaries of what can be said in words- chimes with my own. Oh, what an excellent text this is to be reading at Beltane....

Rituals
2024-04-30 19:01 poliphilo
These two pictures go off at a tangent from the cave pictures I posted last. Here there are people involved. And they seem to be performing rituals...

1. In  Attendance



2. The Central Fire

An Anniversary
2024-04-30 09:37 poliphilo
Ailz was meeting a Friend for coffee at the station cafe (when I write Friend with a capital F it means they're not only mates but Quakers) while I took myself to Camilla's bookshop- that legendary Eastbourne institution- and stocked up with reading matter.

I bought:

 Lily of the Valley: My favourite Balzac- because it's nice to have a hard copy and it's time I re-read it

The Charterhouse of Parma (in the Scott-Moncrieff translation) which is also a re-read. As a teenager I was dotty for the Red and the Black and found the Charterhouse hard going but the Charterhouse is clearly the more grown-up of the two and if I had to deal with Julien Sorel at my advanced age I think I'd find him insufferable whereas the Duchess of Sanseverina and her lover, Count Mosca are calling to me and saying, "We think you'd appeciate us now...."

Bacon's Essays- because I really ought to have them under my belt

And...

Sterne's Sentimental Journey because I was reading about it the other day and came away with the impression that I'd love it....

Then I went to the Florist on South Street and bought a little pot of flowers for the Meeting House.

 After which  Ailz and I met up and went for a pizza at an Italian restaurant just off the Memorial Roundabout. Yesterday was the 33rd anniversary of our first meeting....

Endings
2024-04-29 12:00 poliphilo
The Dom Cafe- where the Death Cafe met-  has closed. It's a pity. It was a good cafe- but Eastbourne has a lot of pizza and pasta joints and if yours isn't positioned on a street the holiday-makers use you're going to struggle. The people who have bought the shop are planning to open it as a Persian restaurant in a few months time- and this, being niche, may find a steadier clientele.

The organisers of Death Cafe haven't found another venue and since they were both planning to retire at the end of the year this could be the end of it. The June Meeting has already been cancelled. If the Persians are willing to continue as hosts we may get in two or three more sessions- but there's no sign that they are. Ailz and I could have taken over at this point and worked on giving the project a future but our limited energies are fully engaged elsewhere....

Small And Local
2024-04-29 10:20 poliphilo
A Friend gave us a talk on Nicaragua.

Nicaragua has had one godawful government after another- going back to the Conqistadors. The current government- run by Daniel Ortega's wife (Ortega himself is a sick man and essentially out of the picture)- has shut down the press, gaoled political opponents, exiled the lefty Catholic priests and let in the Chinese and the US Evangelicals. Our friend was working on a progressive project which survives by staying small, staying local and keeping its head down....

Incidentally, I think staying small and local is the way of the future- the way to stay hopeful, sane and creative.  Keeping one's head down maybe not so much, though inceasingly it seems to be the way of things- even in so-called liberal democracies like the UK as weak and fearful governments inflate themselves and inflate themselves and take up more and more space....

AI Caves
2024-04-28 17:16 poliphilo
I have been caving- or spelunking. Once. A long time ago.

In Yorkshire.

I wore a wet suit. I waded through icy rivers. I squeezed through passages that were scarily narrow.

It was exhilarating and I've no wish to do it again.

I've also been in cave systems that have been fitted out with paths and staircases for the ease of tourists- in Crete, in the Czech Republic and in Britain. I'd do that again. No worries.

These pictures are of caves that do not actually exist

Minotaurs
2024-04-26 10:14 poliphilo
Monsters don't want to be monsters. Monsters are sad. The sadness of the Frankenstein monster (who didn't ask to be cobbled together out of bits of cadavers) and the sadness of Count Dracula (because who wants eternal life on such grisly terms?) form part of their continuing appeal. It's one of the better features of us human beings that we feel sympathy and even empathy for creatures that are sad....

The prototypical sad monster is the minotaur- misbegotten child of a white bull and the Cretan Queen Pasiphae. He is imprisoned inside a labyrinth and the only thing that can sustain him is human flesh. It is hardly be supposed that he enjoys this life- the loneliness the captivity, the killing....

Picasso had a thing about minotaurs. I think he saw himself as one- as a sacred monster. The British sculptor Michael Ayrton was another 20th century minotaur freak....

I'm a bit of a minotaur freak myself....

Here are a couple of minotaurs AI made for me....

Plato's Critias
2024-04-25 10:53 poliphilo
Plato never finished the Critias- which makes it easy for modern writers to overlook the fact that his account of the civilization of Atlantis was intended to be set in the context of the story of a war- which to the best of our knowledge never happened- between Atlantis and a prehistoric Athens- which to the best of our knowledge never existed.

I happen to think Atlantis was a real thing but Plato's trustworthiness is another matter.

(Of course we know very little about our ancient history and that's why I say "to the best of our knowledge".)

I want to like Plato, but every time I read something of his I find I really don't....