CurvilinearJuly 27th, 2009
Herb Ritts
Robert Mapplethorpe
Robert Mapplethorpe
Robert Mapplethorpe
Robert Mapplethorpe
Robert Mapplethorpe
Mark Shaw
Robert Mapplethorpe
Herb Ritts
Robert Mapplethorpe
Categories: Pictures | Tags: art, desire, Lily, photographs | 3 Comments
We’ll Call You - If We Need To, Miss Johansson…July 24th, 2009
Adrenalin is not my thing. Anything physically extreme, other than indolence, I find unappealing. So if I was granted a day in any job I wanted, (full skill set included), I’d be unlikely to choose piloting a jetfighter over Iraq, or cray fishing in the Southern Ocean, or even going fast in a police car, sirens at max volume. No, you wouldn’t find me there.
Because my first choice would be a day as a casting director.
My friend Elly and I, after a few glasses of wine, invariably cast and re cast various films. Sometimes, usually when the bottle is finished, I think we should lend a hand to those people in Hollywood who miss the mark so often. The Hollywood casting directors, I expect, have to factor in demographic appeal and box office ratings in order to secure the millions of dollars required. We’ll dispense with those details when it’s my turn.
The perfect actor for me is one who I don’t see, like John Malkovitch in Disgrace, or Penelope Cruz in Volver. I don’t want to see actors acting, and I don’t want to see heavily made-up actors ‘acting’ either – Brad Pitt in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, please step forward. I think this latter film was one for the special effects boys to take their skills out for a run around the block. But I don’t want to sit there and think, ‘Ooo, aren’t they clever, doesn’t he look old.’ It jars. It sends the necessary suspension of belief, and absorption in the story, toppling off the highwire. What I see is a celebrity acting and thus the pact between the director and me is broken.
John Malkovitch
I used to flick through the trash mags wherever I found myself in waiting rooms. I don’t now, because I don’t want to know. I don’t want to know that Celia had 14 husbands before she met the love of her life, had her breasts enlarged, reduced and enlarged again, loves steamed fish and heaps of salad for lunch and is now up on the screen trying to convince me she’s Lady MacBeth.
In an increasingly celebrity obsessed culture, if you want to remain slightly naïve and able to wallow in the make believe of film and books you have to shut these things out. You have to be careful on the internet, not just about what you reveal about yourself, but what you discover about others, and I’m not just talking about saucy pictures and stalkers. I’m talking too much information about the producers of culture.
Vivienne Leigh as Lady Macbeth
Patrick White revealed in his autobiography, Flaws in the Glass, that as an avid lover of opera, when he discovered Joan Sutherland liked to do needlepoint during breaks from the stage, he was appalled at her ‘suburban-ness’ and could no longer listen to her sing. Patrick was a bitchy old curmudgeon but I agree with completely on this matter.
I feel a similar sense of lost innocence when reading now. I read Danny Gillan’s post ‘Critiquer’s Guilt’ (see link page) and found myself agreeing with him – as I usually do. One way to kill reading pleasure, that wonderful immersion in the narrative, is to be on the lookout for comma placement and too many adjectives. I have to say it does improve ones writing skills, but what does it do to me as a reader? I enjoy a book where I don’t see the mechanics, where the form is so good it’s unobtrusive and there’s none of that ‘hey, look at me, I’m writing,’ author-in-your-face, po mo, pared down cleverness.
Having a professional editor comb through my book was a fascinating and humbling experience, not to mention invaluable as a learning experience. I subsequently went straight to editing a friend’s manuscript, less rigorously of course, and found myself unable to stop the process of distanced critical reading of any text, anywhere. I’d pick up a can of tomatoes, read the list of ingredients and think about the positioning of the full stop. Should I buy that brand if they can’t get it right? I do allow myself the luxury of refusing to eat at a café that misspells ‘hamberger’. If they can’t pay attention to spelling, what will the ‘hamberger’ be like. You dreary pedant, I hear you mutter. I do have terrible anxiety over apostrophes, so maybe I shouldn’t be so harsh.
Penelope Cruz in Non ti Muouere
It’s been a few weeks since this intense editing experience and I’m beginning to loosen up. I still find part of my brain hangs on tenaciously to the critical eye, but I know I’m getting better when I can read a book and lose myself in it. I was told to read James Ellroy’s book The Black Dahlia and to look for examples of the apt verb, of which he is reputed master. But I find myself enjoying the forties street slang, the character’s internal motivations, and the simple who-done-it nature of the mystery.
But I can’t help thinking as I read it, whoever cast Scarlett Johansen in the role of Kay Lake in the film version should be sent to a casting re-eduction camp. Scarlett’s a beautiful woman, but playing a hard boiled, over educated, ex call girl, who is involved with two detectives trying to solve the same murder…well, it’s way beyond her range. Who I would have cast I’m not sure. I’ll have to sit down with Elly and a bottle of wine and think about that.
Scarlett Johansson in The Black Dahlia
Categories: on reading | Tags: reading, wine, writing | 1 Comment
Camellia JaponicaJuly 22nd, 2009
20th Century Japanese Woodblock prints via Ukiyoe Gallery
Categories: Pictures | Tags: prints, vintage clothes | 1 Comment
Admire The Beast But Don’t Set It FreeJuly 19th, 2009
Narcissus, Andrew Wodzianski
‘Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.’ Andre Gide
My imagination, my inner world, has dominated my life. It has distracted me, provided hours of entertainment, led me to art and writing, protected me and led me astray in areas where it should have played only a supporting role. Imagination is hard to be without in any creative field, but you have to wield a big stick and keep it in line, because it can pick up your life and run off with it, giggling and screeching with a sly delight.
I can be so lost in my inner world that real life is hard to get a grip on sometimes. Examining the personality issues of a character and trying to arrive at her motivation filled my mind the other day. I had chores to do but set about them mechanically as I continued to dwell in my little cocoon of fancy. I took a handful of cheques to the bank; thrilled at the amount I was depositing, and presented them to the teller. She slid one back across the counter, an amused expression on her face, and said, ‘I think you have to pay this one.’ It was a hefty bill from the taxation office. How did I miss that?
A friend once described to me how he was walking through a paddock on a hot summery day and reached down into a clump of grass for a stick only to find his hand closing around a snake. Now putting your hand in long grass during an Australian summer is a risky thing to do. But he told me he was distracted by ‘his rich inner life.’ No further explanation required – for me anyway.
I know some people find the concept of an inner world repugnant, preferring to exist in a tangible predictable world. They are content with a certain material standard of living and a minimum of emotional understanding. Uncomfortable with fiction, or film and untouched by pictures and positively antagonistic to any art pursuit that may cause unease in themselves, they cannot conceive of any other way of being. I know because I meet them all the time. I meet their impatience and their faint contempt.
And it’s true; imagination can be an unreliable and hysteric guide through this material world. It can lead you to do things that you imagine will be fantastic, whereas in truth, they will be dead ordinary or even just deadly. You can kid yourself, con yourself and rearrange all of your inner furniture to fit what will always be an illusion.
But imagination is also the humid hot house where the seeds for creative work will hopefully shoot. To be unafraid of your inner world and be able to extract what you need, to not be ashamed or overwhelmed by what you find there, is essential for the artist/writer. They have to explore the complexities and dark black shapes in the corners of the mind without snapping the lid shut in fear.
Insanity has a room in the same house. Madness, artists and writers are thought to go together like fish and chips or beer and football. But real mental disorder does not allow for creativity, it’s a barrier to any sort of creative achievement because it rarely allows for a construction of form - books, painting, sculpture, poem or whatever. Discipline, persistence, reason,critical and analytical skills, essential for any sustained venture such as writing or painting, are the first casualties of the breakout of disorder.
Narcissism is another term loosely linked with artist/writers. It’s not an uncommon association, I have to say. But a wide streak of narcissism usually prevents the creative artist from looking beyond the self. Writing disguised as therapy is unreadable after awhile, an onanistic activity with a feedback loop to the self only. A measure of empathy and interest in others, beyond the infatuated self-absorption of the narcissistic artist, is an essential ingredient. Serious creative achievements must resonate in some universal way with the viewer or reader, or at least strive for this.
Narcissus, Andrew Wodzianski
Standing back and distancing one’s self is important too. If your emotional investment is too great then sometimes the work is never completed. When this happens the risk of exposure to subsequent criticism is too great. Some writers can be working on the same manuscript for ten years or more, sabotaging its completion over and over, finding ways around because of the unthinkable consequences. Some of us write and write and write and never submit.
Writing, and most creative processes, involves managing inner tension. The tension when facing disordered symbolism is profound. There is a need to complete, to bring closure, to tighten up, but perfecting each sentence before writing it down can lead to a preciousness that is counter productive to the wholeness of the story. Keeping all the options open for months can be unbearable sometimes, but if you take it out of the oven too soon you may end up with an indigestible mess.
All these balances - imagination and self delusion, persistence and self doubt, narcissistic self absorption and curiosity about the human condition, reason and disorder - sit delicately on the scales. Those of a different mind and firmer temperament perhaps consider themselves lucky, but even though I have no choice in the matter, I consider myself, and my fellow artists and writers, to be luckier.
van Gogh, Painting Sunflowers
‘I am not strictly speaking mad, for my mind is absolutely normal in the intervals, and even more so than before. But during the attacks it is terrible - and then I lose consciousness of everything. But that spurs me on to work and to seriousness, as a miner who is always in danger makes haste in what he does.
I am risking my life for my work, and half my reason has gone.’
Vincent van Gogh
Categories: on writing | Tags: books, creativity, imagination, madness, writing | 9 Comments
Words We Love To HateJuly 12th, 2009
Le Grande Bouffe
This snippet comes to you from The Australian newspaper, via the Ledbury Poets Festival in Hertfordshire. Poets at this festival were asked to nominate a word they hated and to explain why. Philip Wells, performance poet, gives his opinion of the word ‘pulchritude.’
“It violates all the magical impulses of balanced onomatopoeic language. It of course means beautiful, but it’s meaning is nothing of the sort, being stuffed to the brim with a brutally Latinate cudgel of barbaric consonants. If consonants represent riverbanks and vowels the river’s flow, this is the word equivalent of the bottomless abyss of dry bones, where demons gather to spit acid.”
Mr Wells has strong feelings. I considered his passionate diatribe against ‘pulchritude’ and wondered if I had a word that I hated. I am temperamentally unsuited to hating for extended periods of time. I hate the lone mosquito on a summer’s night; I hate finding no milk in the fridge. But that’s about it. Or so I thought. Because there is a word I hate.
I hate it not as a poet, not for it’s root, or it’s sound but for how it is used. I hate the word ‘indulgence’. Of course the opposite to indulgence is ‘abstemious’ - a beige, sensible word if ever there was one, a flat heeled, orthopaedic word reeking of protestant excoriation of the flesh. I’ll have the red snakeskin stilettos thanks, with the lot.
I am not a voluptuary, or not all the time, but when I hear ‘indulge’ and think of it’s antonyms, I want to crown my head with a wreath of blowsy roses and dance in delirium along a food laden table, kicking the roast peacock aside, spilling wine from the horn, laughing with my fellow bacchantes in an abandoned celebration of all the joys of the flesh.
Le Grande Bouffe
The word ‘indulgence’ is scattered liberally throughout women’s magazines invariably linked to chocolate or some other foods. An indulgence, in the religious sense, means to be granted a less severe punishment for a sin. The church will indulge you if you have been good in other areas of your life. Therefore, it follows, if you eat all your vegetables you get the chocolate, or if you have worked all day and come home to cook dinner, supervise homework, put on ten loads of laundry and clean up the cat’s litter tray, you get a chocolate biscuit at the end of it. You have been indulged, you see? Now go forth and sin no more.
But what was your sin you ask, as you scramble for the final crumbs of your biscuit? Your sin, according to the magazines, was to not keep yourself thin and desirable like all the fifteen year olds modelling the fashion that you are too womanly to indulge yourself in. So you get the biscuit, honey.
But don’t feel too bad, croons the magazine, buy this face cream, or that mascara, because ‘You’re Worth It’. You are, no, you are, really. We were just kidding about the dress sizes. You are worth placating because you might buy something if we make you feel bad enough. What’ll it be? The tub of chocolate ice cream or the face cream?
No wonder most women approach food with fear.
I hear the word ‘indulgence’ and I imagine Presbyterian pursed lips and a deeply misanthropic view of the flesh. To indulge in anything more than three serves a day of gruel shrieks of a moral flaw so deep you may never clamber out. Plato and St Paul have a lot to answer for. Two millennia of self-denial, and despite the retreat of formal religion, the culture of sensual denial lives on. You don’t eat food, you indulge in it. And if you feel yourself too impure you can ‘detox’ yourself. Once you could have your purity restored by baptism in the River Jordan. Now you can be saved by colonic irrigation – cleansed of all your fleshly indulgences.
When someone says they are going to ‘indulge’ in the orange cake, or the full fat cheese, or a potato with butter, I want to say don’t indulge, just have it. It’s only food, isn’t it? Well, it was. But our daily bread has been co-opted by the advertisers and the Mega Food Corp and now we have so much food we can torture our collective psyches with it. We can attach more fear and symbolism to it than there are calories in a white chocolate and caramel super sized frappocino. And did this start with words? Probably not, but those hairshirt words like ‘indulgence’ should be left at the back of the cupboard. So you see, I don’t ‘hate’ – I just have intense dislikes.
If you, my lone reader, have a word you particularly hate – for any reason – leave a comment and tell me why.
Categories: Food, on writing | Tags: Food, myths, writing | 4 Comments
Writing … odd and distasteful?July 7th, 2009
image via Timeless Shadow
Danny Gillan is a Scottish writer and my guestblogger for July. His novels are well observed, funny and compassionate. For more about Danny see his web address at the end of the post.
Writing is funny. By ‘funny’ I mean ‘odd and distasteful’, not actually humourous, obviously.
I’m not talking about the end result, but the act itself. The end result could well be funny, or thrilling, or enlightening, or beautiful, or scary, or rubbish, or, well, any number of things. That’s for readers to decide.
The ‘act’ of writing, though, is weird.
I’ve had what I believe is known as ‘writer’s block’ for an age, now. I finished Scratch two years ago. I kept editing it for another year or so. I think it’s finished, now. It isn’t, of course, but I’m sick of it so chose to move on.
What did I move on to? Eh …
image via Daily Mirror
I moved on to Facebook. And Twitter. And stuff.
Writing wise, I didn’t move anywhere. I was resolutely stumped.
I remember, long before I was pretending to be a writer, the phrase write what you know.
I assumed that was a credo, and followed it.
In WYLMT I wrote what I knew, or some of what I knew at least. I knew about being an unsuccessful musician, I knew about working with people with learning disabilities, I knew about, sadly, depression. I knew about dogs, I knew about drama students, I knew about disappointed but ever hopeful parents. I knew how it felt to get a terrible haircut. All the serious stuff, I knew.
That was a pretty easy, if painful, book to write.
Then came Scratch. What was left to write, that I knew about? Hmm…
Dead end jobs? Yep. Being a barman? Yep. Not knowing the meaning of the word ‘adult’? Yep. Managing to screw up relationships, even the second time round? Yep.
That was a pretty easy, if painful, book to write.
So, what’s next? What else do I know? What else do I have to comment upon? Answer - nothing. I’m done. The shallow quarry of me has been fully excavated. Two novels did it, they were enough. There’s bugger all left in there, it’s a vacant lot.
But, I apparently still want to write. Is that just because it’s become a habit? A hobby?
I’ve done my demons - depression is dead to me now, I wrote it out, I killed it (in chapter one). WYLMT achieved its purpose in that respect. The fact that it ended up getting published was, and continues to be, a bonus.
Scratch let me write my way out of relationship hell. Job done.
Both books were about normal people dealing with, sometimes, not ordinary situations.
So, what do I write next?
Jesus, I’ve been searching for something, and getting it wrong. Badly wrong. I’ve made the mistake of trying to create extraordinary situations for characters to react to. That’s no bad thing, but the mistake I’ve made is to come up with the circumstance first, not the characters.
I have, so far, had an earthquake, a bomb blast, and a guy who can read other people’s minds, but only when they’re thinking about him.
These are not things I’m likely to be good at writing about. Why did I come up with them? Because they weren’t things I knew about. That was a good reason, a couple of hours ago. It isn’t, now.
It occurred to me tonight that there’s no point in denying what you’re good(ish) at. I can do real people in real relationships who get life wrong a lot.
I can’t do bombs, or sci-fi, or crime.
The only thing less interesting to me than the striations on a spent bullet is the mind of a person who finds the striations on a spent bullet interesting.
I’m going back to writing about people. Normal, real people, who swear, make mistakes and don’t solve problems with pithy one liners. Or guns. Or talent. Or skill. Or ever.
Danny Gillan at http://authordannygillan.blogspot.com/
Categories: on writing | Tags: creativity, writing | 2 Comments
Black Gilliflowers and The Rose of BengalJuly 5th, 2009
VA Serov, Girl with Peaches
I am stewing rhubarb tonight. I always associate rhubarb with darned brown jumpers and Formica tables. I was canny enough to avoid eating it as a child, but as an adult I am rather curious. What was it I was avoiding? Is it really the old knitted sweater of fruit? I lift the lid of the pot and sniff. It has a sort of earthy, hessian smell. I think of boiled rhubarb in a wooden dacha somewhere east of Moscow.
But it’s not too bad - a stringy slush to be served with custard, or porridge. But most of the pleasure was in the making and dreaming. The process of preparing a dish of stewed fruit, of making an art print or a page of writing is often more fulfilling than possessing the finished product. If you pay attention to moments in the process, sometimes a communion of sorts occurs, one that can transport the maker away in space and time.
Lawrence Durrell wrote the phrase, ‘As old as the taste of cold water.’ It has lived in my mind for many years because it suggests this communion, and I often remember it when I cook. Capturing the ‘tastes’ of long ago has always intrigued me, but you can’t really recreate the tastes of the past. We have no way of knowing what they were, and invariably when you try an old recipe, it tastes just as you expect and no revelation is forthcoming. It’s the process of making that is more likely to get me closer to what I seek.
Traditional processes are fading from the modern world. A devout and committed minority struggle to keep them alive in various enclaves on the planet. But many of the old ways are doomed. An example of this is the process of producing art prints using acid etching. The fumes, as the acid bites into the zinc or copper, will kill you - sooner rather than later. So artists have turned to solar plate etching. Solar plate etching, to my mind, has a less crisp line, but more importantly one loses the centuries old processes of the acid etch. Processes using copper, beeswax, organza, swansdown, powdered pine resin and other materials full of poetic resonance. However, a clutch of prematurely dead artists is too high a price to pay for those crisp lines.
I used to make a Seville Orange and Brandy marmalade when I had access to an orange tree. I made buckets of the stuff every winter, but I never ate it because I’m not keen on marmalade. For me making it was a potent symbolic act linking me to the earth, and the tree and all jam makers who have come before me. I loved to think of centuries of people doing as I was doing - watching the jam change colour, the way the orange peel becomes translucent, the luxurious, syrupy bubbles, and enjoying the perfume of the cooked orange rind filling the house.
Cezanne, Apples
Lily, the heroine in The Book of Love, is a jam maker. She makes jam to feed her imagination more, I suspect, than to feed people. Below is an extract from the book…
“She buttered the toast, spooned some marmalade on to it and passed it to him, watching closely as he put it in his mouth.
‘Well?’
‘It’s good, very good. Bitter and chunky.’
‘I knew you’d like it,’ she said smacking the table. ‘Try this one.’ She scampered into the kitchen and returned clutching five jars in a variety of shapes and colours.
‘It’s from a nineteenth century French cookbook. Plum and Brandy, heavenly when you use it to stick chocolate cakes together.’
He buttered another piece of toast, and Lily rushed back to the kitchen and threw more toast into the toaster. He spooned the plum jam onto the toast and ate it, nodding to her.
Her eyes blazed. A fellow jam enthusiast. ‘And now, you must have this Pear and Vanilla conserve.’
He ate that as well and she put more toast in the toaster, and three more jars on the table. ‘Here, you can’t leave until you have had this Lime and Lavender Marmalade, and this, truly lip-puckeringly amazing - Cranberry and Gin.’
‘You make all these yourself?’ he said, smelling the contents of the jars.
‘Let’s have another coffee,’ she said, fiddling with the machine again. ‘I like to try old recipes from some of the books that pass my way and I make up my own. Believe me, I’ve had some disasters. I found a recipe called Cranana, mashed banana and cranberry, it was awful, but sometimes you simply have to go for it. And then there was the great Calves Head Jelly incident last year.’ She sat down with her coffee, ‘like a horror movie, only-‘
‘Lily, can I ask some more questions about the book.’
‘Yes, it’s French, not from Provence, more a northern-‘
‘No,’ he said gently. ‘The Cesar Fanin book.’
She looked a little disappointed. ‘Oh, that. Sure, go for it.’
Apple tree
A nineteenth century jam and preserves book. How I would love one of those, if only for the pleasure of reading the names of the jellies and jams and the fruits that went into them. The names of apple varieties from the nineteenth century and earlier are like miniature haiku - Buckinghamshire Sheep’s Nose, Knotted Kernel, Summer Pearmain, Belle Agathe, Rambour Franc, Black Gilliflower and many more.
Apple and Geranium Jelly.
You need twelve leaves from a rose geranium. This plant, originally from Egypt, also goes by the name of Rose of Bengal, Lady Plymouth or Cinnamon Rose. If you can, choose your apples from the Black Gilliflower variety. You will need two kilo’s of them. But if the Black Gilliflower proves too elusive, try simple, firm cooking apples and pretend.
Peel and chop the apples and place in a saucepan with 12 leaves from the Rose of Bengal. Add four cups of water and simmer until the apple is soft. Discard the spent leaves.
Place the apple pulp into a jelly bag, or muslin, and allow the juice to drip into a bowl overnight. This part is the tricky bit. I built a precarious structure on the kitchen table of chairs stacked high to give me a place to tie my sodden apple filled muslin, but perhaps a less extravagant arrangement will suit you. Do not be tempted to hasten this process by squeezing the bag – your jelly will be cloudy. This I know.
Next morning, take a cup of sugar for every cup of juice and place in a pan. Add the juice of a lemon. Perhaps a Berna lemon of Spanish origin, Place over heat and stir until the sugar dissolves. Boil rapidly until setting point is reached, then spoon into heated sterilized jars and seal.
And while you stir, breathe in scents redolent of botanic gathering expeditions in Africa, and ponder the triumph the early settlers of America must have felt when they created the Black Gilliflower from the seeds of apples left behind in the quiet orchards of England.
The Book of Love by Phillipa Fioretti will be published by Hachette Australia in April 2010
Categories: Food, The Book of Love, on writing | Tags: creativity, Food, Lily | 2 Comments
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