Autumn groundscapes

The kind of thing I used to do a lot, it's still good to do it.

The winds and rains blowing in, the edges of the storms which are wreaking havoc across the Channel are finally stripping the trees of their foliage, but it's been a very fine autumn.

January ticking over

I don't seem to have checked in here for a bit. An agreeable number of small, fairly constructive projects and events have been occupying me, here are one or two.

My first week or so of recording for Librivox. I've used them a lot over the last couple of years, and very much admire the aims and ethos of the project, an appreciation which has grown since actually becoming involved, it really is a work of patience and integrity. It struck to me as a worthwhile and useful outside activity to which I could commit some time and effort without in fact having to leave the house. It does demand, however, an early start - for quiet, solitude, concentration, lack of self-consciousness and free time on the big computer -  respecting external deadlines, learning some new technical stuff with the software which I find not intuitive and fairly challenging - they don't turn anyone away because of their reading skills or lack of them, but do insist on the recording quality being as good as possible and a level of self-editing with it. I also find that it's helping with the lack of focus I mentioned before; reading with a view to reading aloud demands an attention to detail and meaning, like making yourself chew small mouthfuls. I'm getting over my intense, if fairly normal, dislike of my own recorded voice, and possibly improving it a bit, trying, with care but not too much artifice, to smooth out the staccato crackle I always thought made me sound like a petulant six year old, and the occasional sliding into sloppy Estuary vowels (Hertfordshire isn't quite on the Thames estuary, it's true, but it's heading that way.).

All of which is doing me great good, and it's also rather fun.

Early morning recording session

As may be seen, my recording arrangements are rather makeshift. I very quickly realised that the flimsy cheap desktop microphone is unsatisfactory, or rather unsatisfying, since with a bit of fiddling with the software an adequate sound track can be achieved, but I find myself hankering for something better, more solid, more directed, which doesn't require balancing on a pile of books and total physical immobility other than moving one's lips, and, I admit it, which looks rather more the business. Another volunteer compared it to taking up tennis, at first you make do with your cousin's old cast-off racket, then when you start really enjoying the game you start wanting a good one of your own. So I've got a rather nice looking Samson on a little stand on order; it's cheaper than a tennis racket, honestly.

While with many of the more obscure texts one might be inclined to wonder why bother to record them and who will ever listen, I can see that that's not entirely the point, it's really more like archiving or even archaeology, a question of faithful and patient excavation and recording, in the broader sense of the word. Yet despite all the work that Librivox have put in over the last ten years (and they don't object to duplication anyway), there are plenty of interesting and delightful books still unrecorded.  So far, and it's been fairly slow going to get the hang of what I'm doing, I've recorded half a dozen Alice Meynell poems, one of a collection of Irish folk and fairly tales, collected by Yeats and Lady Wilde and others, about a smartarse atheist priest who gets his comeuppance, and I'm working on two chapters of the second book of William Morris's The Well at the World's End, of which I'm also listening to the first book. Odd to be immersing so in Victoriana, much of it so heavy, ornate, ponderous and melancholy, like some of the furniture I grew up with. Yet beyond the distracting noise of the language, Meynell's 'thees' and 'thous' and aura of religiosity, and Morris's sometimes quite impenetrable emblazoned mediaeval pastiche, sometimes some true and fresh psychological awareness or sweet originality of observation shines through. Good to be renewing my fondness for Morris too, apart from anything else, I think, despite the historical image he has sadly inherited of Rosetti's put-upon cuckold, consoling himself with beardy, romantic Utopianism and pretty curtains, he honestly liked and wanted to understand women in a spirit of real generosity, friendship and admiration.

~

Still knitting plenty, of course, amongst which my first foray into Icelandic wool, which was in fact three balls of the standard (ie pretty heavy) weight Lopi which I bought not in Iceland but Amsterdam back in September. I felted a sample of it, and went on to make a felt hat. Long ago I had a Nepalese round hat, a kind of pill box shape with a gold-yellow crown and a coloured patterned band around it, which fitted perfectly and always made me feel good. Don't know what happened to it, but I've often thought I'd like to re-create something like it. On this occasion I did not succeed.

The combination of the felting and the depth of the crown looked kind of nice off but wearing it feels like my head is being squeezed inward and upward (can't bring myself to enlarge this photo).  I made the design myself, tulips from Amsterdam, I'm fond of yellow tulips and like ochre shades but can't wear any great expanse of them. However, I have found another use for it as a receptacle for other knitting.

meta-knitting

Trouble is the tulips are upside down, I should have stuck with an abstract pattern. It would work quite well as a busker's hat for collecting money in.

I've been on a mitten-making binge too, here are a couple of mitten still lifes.

I find homes for them or keep them.

Even more totally frivolous playing about with colour, I discovered this site, where you can make those kind of colour palettes I see all the time on Pinterest and elsewhere. You simply upload a photo URL, or use one they randomy generate, to pick out colours and make a palette selection, either by clicking directly on an area of the photo or using the grid of shades which the software automatically extracts for you. Here's one from a photo I took of the lake in Reykjavik in the twilight:

and another of a Reykjavik street view, I loved having mountains at the end of the street

and another of darling Molly in the garden on a summer day, not long before she left us

People use them supposedly for decorating schemes, or quilts, or their next season's wardrobe, or whatever, but while I like to imagine knitting handsome Icelandic wool pullovers from the colours of the townscapes, I probably won't get around to it, really it's just a way of pleasantly idling a few minutes when I doubtless ought to be doing something more useful.

Like pulling the school bus out of the ditch just up the road, where it finished up on a morning of scarcely visible black ice which took everyone by surprise:

Not having access to the heavy plant required for this task, I couldn't have done this, though I did go up and offer the lady driver shelter and a cup of coffee, and to commiserate with her on her vehicle's de-roaded state, sharing with her the memory of the time when a full cement mixer truck had done the same thing and had to be left there overnight, no longer turning so presumably the concrete within must have solidified and had to be extracted by heaven knows what process. She declined the coffee as she was waiting for her boss to come and sort things out, the children having been already transferred to another bus. Indeed, a surprising number of people appeared as from nowhere, offering their help and company and curiosity, including Victor of course, next to whose patch the event occurred:

Then Ludovic from next door-but-one who works for the municipality  in some capacity with gear and tackle and some other blokes with a van and the shiny blue commune tractor arrived and the consequent confab lasted a good hour or so, by which time I, like Victor, had retired back to the house, taking photos from the upstairs window. Finally the bus was removed from the ditch and driven off, and life in the village resumed its habitual January quiet.

Which quiet I am greatly enjoying, with some worthwhile projects and agreeable home-based activities, a few other plans still untroublingly small on the horizon. The ice on the road was exceptional, the winter is generally mild and manageable. I walk often, dance sometimes, scarcely visit the garden, mull but don't mope. Sic transit January. Time to go make postcards of my sister's quilts.

Random instances of colour on the quayside, Trestraou

 

A meandering kind of post about colour, knitting, plants etc

Some attempts at artistic, still life kind of pictures of knitting. 

This one above is only partly of knitting, the Thai silk scarf and the bottle of Jameson are just as important, but I felt light was quite Vermeer-ish, and typical of the equinoctial sun into that part of the room of an evening, and that there is light in the evenings is cause for joy. 

The same light falling on red cashmere,

just forty grammes of it, laceweight, but knit double, and made into another example of the ever-popular Hitchhiker pattern.  

The name derives from the supposed fact that there are supposed to be forty-two of the little points or steps that run down the edge of it. However, it is modular in its construction and you can make it with as many or as few points as you want. This is the third one I have made now (the previous ones were a rainbow-coloured and a blue) and none of them has in fact had forty two points, the first had thirty-seven, the second, made of much finer wool so needed to be bigger, had sixty-something, this one has a scant thirty-one, owing to its being made of just forty grammes of very fine cashmere (discounted but even so). I was slightly disappointed when the yarn arrived that, despite being assured that it came only from Mongolian goats living at very high altitude, it wasn't as fluffy and soft as I expected. However, once I was knitting with it, and even more when I came to wear it, its inner beauty became apparent; it has a long, sleek staple, and is so light and soft you don't know you're wearing it, except you're warmer by an order of magnitude.

I'm afraid our friend Dutch E does not get such luxurious fibres for her birthday present. It occurred to me that though she has a spring birthday, she always gets a rather wintry present from us: a bottle of sloe gin and usually of recent times something knitted. She is extremely fond of sloe gin and provides good coffee every week all the year on yoga mornings, so I have to make sure I husband the supplies so that there's always some available in March. If it's the vintage of the winter just passed I try to caution her to keep it as long as possible before drinking, which maybe she can for a few weeks, rarely longer, but this time there's a good bottle left from the winter before (this winter's is still on the fruit, I have been sloe slow). She's also an enthusiastic recipient of hand knits - and she must genuinely like them because she's Dutch and so does not tell white lies. So I took up some scraps and leftovers and thrifted skeins from Emmaus,

and set about making her yoga socks. These are kind of like leg-warmers, kind of like socks, only there's a slit where your heel goes, so and ribbing at the bottom which surround the arch/instep, so the foot and lower leg is covered but the toes and heels are free to grip whilst one is endeavouring to hold the tree or archer pose, for example. You can wear them inside Wellington boots too it seems, but I've never got around to making myself any so I've no idea if they're any good in either capacity, and have a feeling E will just hitch them up over her ankles and wear them like leg-warmers. Knit-savvy people might notice that these are being constructed in the round on tiny, 9-inch circular needles, a technique I'm lately experimenting with. The little jar that once held Espelette pepper flakes now holds safety pins for use as stitch markers, the smaller pâté one tapestry needles, beads and rubber bands to stop the stitches falling off the needles; the cup contains tea and the book TS Eliot. Attention span deficit, moi?

When knitting things which come in pairs - which owing to the bilateral structure of the human body - is most things apart from hats and scarves, even jumpers having two sleeves therefore requiring a level of duplication - there is always the question: to match or not to match? I am something of an enthusiast for non-matching; as well as being a source of originality, creativity and interest, it goes some way to getting round the well known SSS - second sock syndrome, or indeed second mitten, second glove, second leg warmer, even second sleeve - whereby one makes an article with brisk enthusiasm, only to experience a sinking feeling on realising that you have to do it all over again. So I decided to vary the stripes on the yoga socks:

This, however, does induce some frowning among my knitariat - did I not want to make them match? I tried to explain that there is roughly the same weight of each colour on each... But I fear they transgress the pensée unique, they are not worthy to be citizens of the Republic of Knitting, One and Indivisible. In addition they do not follow the tricouleur rule, the aesthetic maximum of three colours which divides good taste from what the English do. Ah well, it was conceded, they'll keep her legs warm, that's the important thing. 

However, I think there is a case that my yoga socks are upholders of liberté, egalité and perhaps most of all, fraternité: they are an expression of a degree of creative freedom, they are equal in size (E's legs being likewise as far as I have observed) and contain equal amounts of the same colours, just in different distribution and placement, and though they may not be identical twins, they are brothers. So, marchons!

Anyway, E being Dutch and arty and not averse to all things, counter, original spare, and strange, and usually up for some wacky colour combinations, is very pleased with them, as well as with the sloe gin.

I'm not sure truly that these things aren't more about personality than nationality or culture, though I also remember German students I used to teach in the UK rather thought their British host families were over-fond of inappropriate amounts of colour. In spite of all temptations to belong to other nations (and no longer having the vote in his own) Tom remains an Englishman, pretty much through and through, but he is quite uncomfortable with too many gaudy mismatches, and really prefers things to come in properly matching sets and a fairly limited range of generally sober colours. He can just about cope with mirror opposites, such as these slipper socks, though I don't think he'd wear them himself:

They are experimental, first trying out the tiny circular needles and then the application of bathroom silicone to render them non-slip (effective but needing further work on the application). They are weirdly shaped and rather remind me of some of the examples of early knitting and proto-socks developed in places like Turkey and Persia in the middle ages. I rather like them though.

~

Someone who doesn't worry too much about too much colour is David Hockney, who was the subject of a documentary the other night (I put the link in to the i-player even though you can't get it outside of the UK). It was one of those rather irritating wandery documentaries where people who have very little to say are encouraged to say it at great length as if it carried great import. Nevertheless I stuck it out and there was more than enough to make it worthwhile. Mentioning it in an e-mail exchange with my brother, he said he was rather put off by the hyping up of figures like Hockney, 'a pseudo-blond with silly spectacles' and that there was more satisfaction to be gained from the work of less trumpeted outsider artists. I dare say he's right, but these things aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, and I do enjoy Hockney's continuing enthusiasm for life and readiness to try new things; even the silly glasses have gone now he's achieved grand-old-manhood. He's never been really difficult as an artist it's true, and his British based landscapes of more recent years are very accessible indeed, the best of them, such as these,

seem to me to bring back the very first sense of wonder and exaltation I can remember as a small child on the top of the Chiltern or the Malvern hills, looking out over 'the coloured counties'. 

And among the many somewhat banal things he was quoted as saying, I found some comfort in the unremarkable truism: 'Just because you stop doing something doesn't mean you've rejected it'. I know it's obvious, but one can expend quite a bit of energy in anguish and sadness by forgetting it.  (I also rather enjoyed the scene where the Hockney family were playing Scrabble, and they'd had to replace the 'X' tile with a cannibalised 'I' because the cocker spaniel had eaten the original).

~

Other cheerful things. A communication from the garden centre where we have a loyalty card of dubious worth stated they were offering a free plant and free 'rempotage' - potting on. Reading the small print I wasn't quite sure what this might consist of, but went to find out, and in the middle of the flowering plants area, a cheerful girl in rubber gloves stood surrounded by a vast amount of fluffy potting compost. One had to buy the plants and the pots, but they would pot them on for you using their own compost, up to ten. So I took the opportunity to spruce up the herb containers, with new plants of origano, Moroccan mint, lemon and dwarf thyme, in good sized pots, 

and some parsley for the window sill in a very traditional terracotta pot. 

Kitchen windowsill, with parsley and also pea shoots, cress, daffies, potted jasmine (a fragrant extravagance) and the free plant whose name I don't know.

I like terracotta but can only have it where I remember to keep it wetted enough. I have no green fingers, kill plants very easily (unless I'm trying to, in which case they thrive stubbornly), and am not honestly a talented gardener. I tend towards what I think Joan Bakewell said, that gardening is outdoor housework. To me now it has somewhat taken the place of paid work; a demand from outside (inasmuch as the seasons and the growth of plants dictates its necessities), a kind of rent I pay for my room in the world, good for my moral and bodily well-being but to some extent a kind of duty which I'm often reluctant to get on with, yet once I'm there doing it I usually realise how much I'm enjoying it, really much more than actual housework. I'm aware this is a kind of heresy, and sounds rather churlish and ungrateful. 

Anyway, having the potting-on job done, though a very small one which I could have done quite easily in a short time at home, gave me a boost and an incentive to get on with the job of clearing up and re-ordering the herbs, and I feel the better for it, and today the seeds came from Chase Organics, including, for the first time from their catalogue, some Roscoff pink onion sets, though presumably for appellation controlée reasons these are sold as Keravel pinks.

~

So, a meandering and rather long-winded post of mostly domestic detail and cogitation. We're expecting visitors at any moment so I'll most likely be gone again for a bit...

Not part of the knitting review, more a knitting forecast.

One of the pleasures of knitting, perhaps the chief pleasure*, is planning what one is going to make, to the point where there is a tendency to put aside work in progress to get on to the next thing. The addiction of wool gathering reflects this, hence the vow, made with other on-line knitters but only partially kept to, to get some things finished before starting any thing new, and if I do have to start something new, to use yarn I already have.

On the needles just now I have some fingerless gloves for Jantien, a deep, carmine pink wool mix I bought in a closing down sale at the wool shop in Dinan a while back (shame about that, the closing down bit). Jantien is tall and strong as someone who sculpts big bits of stone would be and rather beautifully androgynous, but has a charming fondness for lacy things in deep pink.

(they really are this bright; I did tweak the colours in the photo but only to make them closer to the reality. I don't think she reads here regularly so I hope I'm not spoiling the surprise.)

I probably knit more fingerless gloves as gifts than just about anything else; I figure most people can probably use them but probably don't already own many pairs, they knit up quickly and don't use too much wool so I can use something nice, and if they don't like them they haven't cost me too much in time and money so they don't need to feel bad. So I'm getting through these pretty quickly, but now I'm getting antsy and feeling the call of the wool shop because the bits of scrap yarn I've used for markers, in bright orange, ochre yellow and dark red are making me hungry to make something using all those colours together. 

However, you know it's bad when you start seeing possible knitting projects in completely unrelated objects. For example, these deliciously coordinating lighthouses off Roscoff harbour,

I felt needed to be interpreted as a pair of socks, using a format I like for socks - odd but matching -whereby the top of one is the same as the toe of the other, as it were. Rather like the 'port and starboard' pair my nephew-in-law is sporting here:

(he's the one with the hairy legs, the other ones are my niece's)

I have succeeded in tracking down some wool of nearly the right shades, 

though if I saw some closer I'd probably buy that instead and this would end up in stash for another day. It's a rather thick pure merino which isn't the best for socks...

Knitting, travelling hopefully.

* and all kinds of making I suppose, when one is thoroughly caught up with it.

Knitting 2) My blue-green Fibonacci waistcoat

I found some pleasant soft nubby wool in a clearance basket in Phildar in Loudeac.  The sales lady and other customers smiled benignly as they stepped over me sitting cross-legged on the floor rummaging through it. When I went to pay for it she asked 'Et avez-vous trouvé votre bonheur?' a question which may or may not have been as existential as it sounds; anyway, I affirmed that I had. There were two bluish shades, a dark French blue (marine, but not the same as our navy of course, far richer) and a dark greenish-blue of a shade I can seldom resist, called persan. 

At around this time, I was balancing on my knee whilst wielding my trusty circular needle, with a clothes paeg to hold the page if I were outside ona breezy day, an old copy of Rilke's selected letters.  It is a mustard colour, clothbound edition from 1946, with a strange very thick cellophane jacket trimmed with passepartout tape, and a super heraldic engraved bookplate from Liverpool public libraries and a dour red 'Withdrawn from Stock' stamp.  Paper shortages notwithstanding, the paper is still thick and creamy and the print beautifully clear.  The translation is by R.F.C. Hull, who acknowledges amateur scholars Major Crick and Flight-Lieutenant van Rood for their help, and I find it quite moving to think of Germanophile military men at that time giving their leisure in a labour of love to offer Rilke's words to readers in English. Also thanked and providing the introduction, a fine one, was Professor E M Butler, a towering and controversial Germanist of her time, such as would have been called a blue-stocking, with quite a story of her own.  Her reading of the Faust legend, and other things, led her to an interest in the occult.  Talking of this with Heather, the question was raised as to whether someone with leanings that way could maintain their intellectual, academic, literary whatever credibility.  I pointed out that Yeats did, which she had to concede.

Why did I bring this up, apart from a vain desire to prove that my brain has not simply turned into a woolly mess?  Oh yes, the green-blue colour, dubbed by Phildar persan - Persian. I found a lovely passage in one of RMR's letters to his wife from Naples, which I feel like transcribing:

At the corner of one of the back alleyways which branch off from the Via Roma, I saw yesterday the stall of a lemonade merchant. Posts, roof and backcloth of his little booth were blue - that thrilling blue of certain Turkish and Persian amulets, shading off into green; it was evening and the lamps placed opposite the back wall of the booth made everything else show up very distinctly in front of this colour: the burnt sienna of an earthenware jug continually running over with a thin trickle of water, the yellow of single lemons and finally the smooth, glassified, ever-changing scarlet in some big and little goldfish bowls... Van Gogh would have turned back to it.

Now doesn't that make you feel thirsty?

I decided to knit the wool up into a waistcoat (or vest as Americans say, though for us that conjures up a winter undergarment for the upper body).  I found a nice looking pattern, (I found I could order a second-hand book full of patterns and pictures for less than the price of one pattern to download), decided perhaps I ought to supplement the wool by a couple of balls, which weren't on clearance at another Phildar shop thereby making it rather less of a bargain, and formulated a means of blending the two colours by using a section of the Fibonacci sequence to make graduating stripes. That's to say I used decreasing stripes of the first colour to increasing ones of the second, thus: 13 - 2 - 8 - 3 - 5 - 5 - 3 - 8 - 2 - 13 and the rest.  It's not very strict Fibbing; I left out the single row as it means you have one rather thin line of colour floating about untethered, but it's a good way to make a transition.

All very fine, but alas, the wool wasn't really quite right for the pattern, and more importantly, I didn't get the gauge right, and all that the knitting gurus say about that is true, it is the road to perdition.

(I've photographed it hanging on the bookcase as I know some of you like to nose in bookshelves.)

It is enormously wide, the armholes gape like the mouth of Hades, that special circle of it reserved for knitting sinners who do not pay attention to their gauges, it flops and slides about all over the place, is more like a shrug to wear than a waistcoat.

Even so, I find I'm very fond of it, and wear it a lot; in this warm weather it's very comfortable as an extra layer in the coolth of morning or evening, and the colour and texture are very appealing.  I found some funny little dome-shaped, Bakelite buttons in the ancestral button tin which has come down to me which must have been in there from a time before I was born, which matched it perfectly, and that was nice. The Fib sequence as I used it in fact used much more blue and less green-blue, so I have plenty of the latter left to work into things like gloves and mittens later. And in fact it was really very largely a prototype, to try out the pattern for the next project.

Light...

... on a March morning,

on a yellow teapot,

on a red wall,

on black fur,

from Jupiter and Venus (father and daughter, rarely seen out together).

Explorers, life, mushrooms, yellow

Some years ago now, when I was young and green in blogging, and very first made the acquaintance of Plutarch, I discovered the first ten or so of his Handbook for Explorers sonnets, which he had begun posting on a blog of their own.  I asked if I could take one for submission with some photos for an edition of Qarrtsiluni's Ekphrasis edition - strictly speaking this was not ekphrasis at all as it's mostly understood, since that's usually words in response to image rather than the other way around, but the editors at the time were prepared to be easy about it - so that was how it started.  Then I asked if I could have the whole sequence of fifty poems to illustrate in the same way, and Plutarch kindly agreed.  The results were posted in groups of five at the shared blog which bears the name Compasses.  

It was a wonder-filled time and thoroughly enjoyable project.  I received the sequence to read in groups of about ten, I think, and was entirely free to respond with pictures in any way I fancied, the only condition Joe made being that I read them all in sequence before starting to post.  It was not only my very heady early years of blogging and of the pleasure in the contacts that it brings, but also of taking digital photographs, and having a sustained prompt and purpose to the activity seemed to sharpen the vision and strengthen my drive.  Sometimes the poems drew me to photos already taken at another time and place - some of the early ones on our trip to New Zealand before I blogged at all; other times I had an idea of where I might find the right pictures to match those in the text - the images for the about hostile horses 'savage flesh made air' I knew exactly could be found in the small, ramshackle old children's carousel in St Brieuc pedestrian precinct which I'd always found rather sinister.  At other times I simply walked around with the poems in my head and recorded what came along.

It had a small but loyal and appreciative audience, often sent to read from both our own blogs, and some of you are still around now.  The strength of it lay of course in the remarkable, consistently meditated and sustained themes and visions of the sonnet sequence, my role was happily opportunistic and secondary, but we all know we rather like pictures with our words sometimes, like we like cream with our puddings!  The problem with it was the 'upside-down' blog format for a longer piece of work, which was not so bad when people were reading it as it appeared but made it difficult to go back over it satisfactorily.  Then we started using the blog for the occasional 'Questions' call and response poems, so the original series has disappeared from view altogether.

A short time after we finished, I signed up with Blurb and began to try to rework it into book form, but made little headway.  Blurb's software at the time was jumpy and frustrating, and perhaps it was a bit too recent a project to go back over straight away.  Then last year when I visited Joe in England, he had another Blurb book that his brother had made up of words and photos, and he very un-pushily (of course) said he wondered if such a thing might be done with the Handbook for Explorers...?

I let it drift again a bit longer than I meant to, but when I signed up again with Blurb (the original one I began had disappeared) the whole thing went so smoothly: the software worked easily, and coming to it afresh after such a long gap was a real joy.  There was so much I'd forgotten about it, but the feelings came rushing back: the new and exciting vision which taking photographs brought, and the sense of pride that I was handling a unique piece of work that no one except its author had probably had much to do with before, and the associations with times and places which both words and pictures evoked - especially poignant were the photos, including the one I used for the cover, which I had taken in New Zealand at moments I remember very clearly spent with my sister, sometime uncertain quite why I was taking photos of bits of grass and sand and stone on beaches, but which are now vividly and intensely bound up with those moments, and which their use in this project somehow served to strengthen.

Happily (or else he's just being polite...), Joe seems to have forgotten that he made the suggestion which spurred me to take up the project again, as he was very gratifyingly surprised when the book arrived! 

Inevitably, though I proof-read it both on-line and in a first print that I ordered, I now see there are a few errors of spacing which will forever annoy me, though I think the text is sound otherwise.  I didn't change much at all from the original, except that the pictures no longer break up the lines of the poems.  This is partly of necessity in that the page formats don't easily allow for it, but it's also something I don't care to do any more anyway; I prefer poems intact and images accompanying to one side, above or below them, on the whole. But I didn't want to change it too much otherwise because I felt that it needed to be reprised as it was, and the sense of association and recall that it created for me was also something I didn't want to interfere with, even if the product was a flawed one. 

Which I think it is - not the poems, those are Joe's and I don't find any fault with them.  But the photographic responses are a mixed bag.  The freedom I enjoyed so much led, I think to a fairly patchy experience.  The pictures lack the consistency that they really should have to match that of the poems, they are not all of a piece and are often distracting and intrusive.  That's what I think now, of course, but it doesn't matter, in keeping with the medium used, it was a dynamic, spontaneous and ultimately largely ephemeral thing.  Some of them worked very well, some less so, but I had no objection to recreating the more static and archival form of a book from them.  Having done so, however, I'm now thinking what I could do with it instead.

The quality of the printing is really excellent, I am very pleased and impressed with it indeed.  There is a hover fly on the yellow flowering twig in one of the pictures shown in the collage above which I never knew was there before, even though I took the photo, edited and used it here and elsewhere on Box Elder. Even the very small reproductions are very fine.  The binding also seems good (Blurb had a lot of complaints about binding before, which was another thing which put me off doing it earlier).  But print-on-demand, quite large format, with colour pics of this quality is fairly expensive. However, Blurb also make much less expensive black and white, smaller format paperbacks, which can contain black and white illustrations including photos, but the reproduction will be much simpler and more minimal ('an edgy look and feel' is I think how they describe it, never quite sure what 'edgy' is supposed to mean...).  Severely reducing the selection of photos to those which would more properly (in my view) complement the text (I would still use the original photos, but edit them appropriately) and which could be successfully rendered  in a much simpler, starker, more abstract form would give the poems the pre-eminence they deserve and hopefully make for a much tighter, more coherent piece of work, and a more affordable book for anyone who was interested.  I'd enjoy doing it.

(The current book is to be found at Blurb, here )

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More stuff.  Life drawing, best of.  Not really much to show for five two hour sessions.  This is because I don't practise.  I go home all fired up and determined to do so, usually after spending two-thirds of the time frustratingly producing duds, but feeling more excitedly happy and engaged than at almost any other time anyway, and then I don't.  I might not be able to get anyone round here to take their clothes off for me (while discussing the pros and cons of female rounds and curves against male flat planes and straight lines Tom did venture to say that he could probably offer more curves than flat bits... TMI really), I could very easily practice from photos and work on hands, feet, portraits etc.  Tom dug me out some books on techniques and figure drawing, and I am resolved to apply myself. The tutor is trying to get enough people together to do a whole Sunday studio of longer poses, which will be great, so if you're in the Lamballe area on March 12 and fancy a day of life drawing, let me know.

The young pregnant woman, L., was superb, and just a lovely person, very serene and steady.  The male model, O, (a rare and sought-after thing, it seems), was slender and stringy and very wobbly,struggled to hold a pose, more so, if anything, in the apparently relaxed positions than in the more twisted up or dynamic ones - he struck a number of slightly unsettling Raft-of-the-Medusa-ish and other rather anguished romantic attitudes, but he had fabulous brows and hair, would have been a good portrait or photo model, as would the tall, dark woman we had last, J, who was also very strong and steady, but changed poses very rapidly.  I love life-drawing.

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And some pretty little oyster mushrooms from the organic supermarket, not quite sure what to do with them apart from photographing them.

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It seems to suit me to do one big post about once a week at the moment.  Rather a lot to prevail on people to read but them again you can always come back later if you want, as I'm not posting so often.

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Lemon zest grated into a blend of cold-pressed olive and rapeseed oil and lemon juice, with a spoonful of honey, marinade for chicken piccata  (thanks Catalyst), must surely be the yellowest thing in the world.