Thoughts of a Dry Brain in a Dry Season.

"It's a shocking piece," [Miles] Hoffman says. "It's still startling to us today when we hear it, but it is not a confusing piece. It's compelling. We're hearing irregular rhythms, we're hearing instruments asked to go to the extremes of their capability, but we're also hearing patterns that we recognize, with pacing, contrast, fascinating harmonies, continuity — all the basic principles of what makes a piece of music work are all there.

I have treated myself to a concert ticket for one of my favourite pieces of classical music: Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring).

I have long been a convert to Modernism - by that I mean, that vast array of strange and deliberately disconcerting art forms which emerged in the Western part of the world around 1908-ish and which petered out towards the end of the 1930s. Shklovsky's definition of остранение (ostranenie or 'defamiliarisation') describes my favourite art works so splendidly: they unsettle the readers/listeners/spectators by forcing them to acknowledge the artifice of art (and thereby making a clean break with the naturalist tradition of art).

Kasimir Malevich's suprematist paintings (not pictured although the image on the left is by Malevich) and Gertrude Stein's marvellous Tender Buttons are great examples: Malevich seeks to figure out how to paint the very act of painting (and how to communicate the unnaturalness of this act to his audience): Stein plays with the building blocks of her trade - grammatical units - and attempts to uncover the act of making meaning. Stravinsky's ballet is not as ambitious and is vastly less subtle in its use of defamiliarisation - but his use of fertility rites ties in well with the Modernist preoccupation with primitivism and anthropology (Picasso, Ezra Pound, TS Eliot). Wwwwroaw.

So, yes, "I can connect / Nothing with nothing. / The broken fingernails of dirty hands / My people humble people who expect / Nothing." I'll be swept away once more.

Either I'm Nobody, Or I'm A Nation

Oh, my president-elect crush burns strong: Barack Obama seen with poetry collection. Of course it's not just any old poetry collection, it is Derek Walcott's Collected Poems. A Nobel Prize laureate; a Caribbean poet straddling colonialism, post-colonialism, and the Western canon; someone who proclaims ".. either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation". Of course, as Bookninja warns, it could be a coldly calculated photo prop, but I like the idea of Obama reading Walcott. It makes sense, y'know? Maybe Obama is just returning the favour. Walcott wrote a poem on the occasion of Obama's election victory: Forty Acres: a poem for Barack Obama.

Read more: + Derek Walcott: The Schooner Flight (and I've always maintained that Walcott is re-writing Eliot's The Waste Land with that poem) + Derek Walcott: The Sea Is History + A Life in Writing: Derek Walcott + Buy Walcott's Omeros - an epic poem/novel-in-verse charting the "restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary".

Six Weeks of Solitude: Back To Reality

Anna left an astute comment to my first post on the Six Weeks of Solitude idea:

I find the idea of six weeks alone in the middle of nowhere very tempting, but I think I’d had to not take my knitting - for me it would be less about silence, and more about not ‘keeping busy’ all the time.

When I originally thought about spending six weeks on my own, I worked out how many books I could read in six weeks, then trimmed the number as to leave me some spare time and still wound up with eighteen books. Anna reminded me of the intention behind spending six weeks on a windy island. It is not to glance at pages (however tempting) but to glance inwards.

So we will leave the number at twelve (first list, second list) plus one: Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. I remember when the US Army captured Saddam Hussein and news reports claimed that Hussein had been stashing Dostoyevsky novels in his underground chambers. My old mentor and I were enjoying coffee in central Copenhagen just after the news broke and I still remember my mentor drily saying he hoped Notes from the Underground had been one.

Six weeks of solitude. Thirteen books. A chance to centre myself. Should I bring knitting? Absolutely. Knitting can be very meditative - particular if I am knitting miles and miles of stocking stitch (as I would with my first project). Stocking stitch is not the only type of knitting that relaxes my body and focuses my mind. Lace knitting can be frustrating at its worst, but at its best I drift into a strange realm of "k1, YO, k2tog, YO.." which feels as good as any Aum.

My second knitting project would be lace. Evelyn C. Clarke's Forget-Me-Not Lace Shawl hits all the right marks, especially when I imagine it knitted up in Old Maiden Aunt alpaca/silk/cashmere in a deep forest green. Hours and hours of pleasure - and much introspection too. Knitting is good for the soul.

On that little note, I'm leaving my imagined island cottage. Time to face the busy streets of Glasgow.

Post-Election Fatigue

Yesterday I knitted this hat whilst I was waiting for the election results to come in from the US. I was sewing on the flower when Obama was declared president elect. I have no idea what to do with the finished hat, though. I will probably never wear it. I have been binging on a certain type of elegant little British novels. I read two Nancy Mitfords recently - The Pursuit of Love and Love In A Cold Climate. I would call them comedies of manner except Mitford doesn't satirise her characters as much as she gently chides them. I'm currently reading Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day by Winifred Watson (borrowed with much gratitude from Lilith). It is less upper-class twittish than Mitford's novels, but it still features men with pencil moustaches and "Oh, darling!" exclamations.

As I'm beginning to say things like "Tea would be utterly divine, darling!" to my partner, perhaps it's time I start reading some Michel Houllebecq (although, to be fair, I really liked Atomised)? I would but .. a novel about "the lack of ideas and morale in contemporary (..) society" complete with "an overarching mood of gloom and fatalism" just doesn't seem the thing to revisit right this moment.

But what on earth shall I do with the damn election hat? Knit another one?

Drinking Tea Will Muddle Your Brain

Sometimes I worry that Domestic Bliss has ruined my ice-cold demeanour and unsentimental outlook on life. To wit, I am sitting here with a lump in my throat after stumbling across this:

For me the most moving moment came when the family in front of me, comprising probably 4 generations of voters (including an 18 year old girl voting for her first time and a 90-something hunched-over grandmother), got their turn to vote. When the old woman left the voting booth she made it about halfway to the door before collapsing in a nearby chair, where she began weeping uncontrollably. When we rushed over to help we realized that she wasn't in trouble at all but she had not truly believed, until she left the booth, that she would ever live long enough to cast a vote for an African-American for president.

Then again I also found Make Art From Starbucks Junk with a really, really cool TIE Fighter and I was instantaneously reassured that despite lapses into sentimentality my inner self will remain a 12-year-old geek (with an ice-cold demeanour).

This morning I read Nancy Mitford's Love In A Cold Climate which reads like a funnier and far more grown-up version of Dodie Smith's I Capture The Castle (which left me completely cold, I'm afraid). I'm now off to find more of Mitford's novels as I think the brisk winds of October are best kept away by tea, knitting and books set in interwar England (Waugh as well, I think, in addition to Mitford). Hello, favourite bookshop, here I come.

Nobel Prize '08

Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio? I feel so insular (and Anglophone/-phile) but I had to go look him up. Lengthy discussion on why the US hasn't received a Nobel Prize in Literature for some time (parts of the discussion isn't terribly well-informed but some people do make great points). The Literary Saloon weighs in with a very, very authoritative voice and they should also be your one-stop read for reactions to Le Clezio's win.