Archive - February, 2012

The Spectacular Snow Drawings of Simon Beck

 

 

Winter has finally arrived in New Hampshire. We’re expecting about a foot of snow here in the Monadnock region by the time the storm ends Thursday evening. There hasn’t been a single opportunity for snowshoeing this year, which I’ve missed.

Snowshoeing has been on my mind…This week I noticed these snow photographs popping up again and again on Facebook, Inhabitat, and other sites. Curious about their original source, I did a little digging and discovered the official Facebook page of Simon Beck, an artist who creates these incredible designs by walking in the snow with snowshoes.

The Oxford-educated, self-employed map maker creates these designs on the frozen lakes in the valley of Savoie, France, just outside of the ski slopes at Les Arcs resort. An average work is the size of three soccer fields and takes about two days to complete.

The biggest challenge for Beck (besides getting overly tired) is finding a way to reduce the visibility of his own tracks when he begins and finishes a piece. Sometimes, he might work all day only to have his design covered by fresh snow overnight. At other times, he finishes a design right at sunset and doesn’t have enough light remaining to photograph his work properly. But the inability to predict the outcome is part of the fun.

 

 

 

Snow Artist Simon Beck (Photo courtesy Now That's Nifty)

 

 

 

 

 

I love the simplicity of Beck’s method, and the impermanence of each piece. Personally, I’m partial to Beck’s simpler designs that rely more on line and texture for their effect. A number of the designs are reminiscent of crop circles and other patterns from ancient art.

All of the photographs I’ve seen flying around the web are from Beck’s official Facebook page, which is where he posts his latest work for the public to peruse. There are also a large number of beautiful pieces Beck made between 2009 and 2011 in this photo album on the artist’s personal page. You WON’T find these images anywhere else, and many of my favorite images can be found there.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Simon Beck's Snow Art (Photo courtesy Inhabitat)

 

 

 

 

 

 

The remnants of one of Beck's designs can still be see on the melting surface of Lac des Combes. A few hours after this photo was taken, the ice completely disappeared. (Photo courtesy Inhabitat)

 

If you enjoyed Beck’s snow art, please share this post with others.

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Downton Abbey : You’re Awful, But We Love You

 

Downton Abbey's Lady Sybil shows off the latest fashion. Gasp...pants!! (Photo courtesy PBS)

 

I have a few longer pieces in the works, which I’m looking forward to sharing soon. In the meantime, I thought I’d offer you a little appetizer before the main course. (Actually, it’s more like serving dessert before the main course. A rich, luscious cream puff, perhaps?)

If you’re going through Downton Abbey withdrawal, you’re not the only one. The season finale of the series earned PBS its highest ratings in years with 5.4 million people tuning in to watch the conclusion of the second season.

It’s been fascinating to witness the show’s popularity across all age groups. My young friends have been streaming the show from the PBS website, and mothers, daughters, husbands, and friends have been gathering together on living room couches on Sunday evenings. A few weeks ago, I was visiting my friend’s 92-year-old grandmother in the local retirement home on a Sunday night and was greeted with a British invasion of blaring television sets. As I walked through the corridor, Maggie Smith bellowed from behind the closed door of each and every room I passed.

According to websites that keep track of such things, a third season of Downton is in the works and Shirley MacLaine has been added to the cast of the popular show. But until today, this was all I knew about the elusive third season.

Thanks to British composer Peter Wyer, whose opera Numinous City has been featured on Gwarlingo, we may have proof that a third season of Downton Abbey is being filmed in London as we speak. Yesterday, the composer was walking down Waterloo Place (between Pall Mall and The Mall ) and had a chance encounter with this film shoot. One woman in the crowd confirmed that she had seen one of the stars from the popular series. Pete snapped these photos while he was passing by and kindly gave me permission to share them.

 

British Composer Peter Wyer had a chance encounter with a Downton Abbey film shoot this week while walking the streets of London near Pall Mall and Waterloo Place. (Photo © Peter Wyer)

 

 

A candid photo from the film set of Downton Abbey's third season. Can someone please get me a pair of the shoes being worn by the lady in green? (Photo © Peter Wyer)

 

All of these well-dressed extras milling about looks like a potential wedding scene to me. And if it is Downton, what better excuse than a wedding for Lady Cora’s mother, played by Shirley MacLaine, to make the long journey from America?

Today The Sun published the first photograph of MacLaine in her Downton Abbey attire. Rumor has it that during the third season, Lady Cora’s mother, Martha Levinson, will clash with the matriarchal Dowager Countess – played by Dame Maggie Smith. With the right script, it’s easy to imagine the sparks flying between MacLaine and Smith. Let’s hope that writer Julian Fellowes is up to the challenge. Fellowes has recently said the theme of Catholicism would be touched upon in the new season.

I’m not sure what concerns me more…The fact that I care about all of this or the fact that I just visited The Sun website?

 

Downton Abbey

Rumor has it that Lady Cora's mother, played by Shirley MacLaine, will clash with the Dowager Countess-–played by Maggie Smith during the third season of Downton Abbey. (Photo © Flynet Pictures via The Sun)

 

If, like me, you suddenly feel the need to purge the Rupert Murdoch aftertaste, perhaps this essay by James Fenton from The New York Review of Books will serve as a palette cleanser. In ”The Abbey that Jumped the Shark,” Fenton takes a few affectionate jabs at the PBS series (the show isn’t gay enough, Lady Edith would never have outed her sister to the Turkish Ambassador, Downton is shot in the South of England, when it’s set in the North, etc.)

I do agree with Fenton that the plot twist with the disfigured soldier was one too many, but surely there are sharper criticisms that could be made? There is the over-the-top melodrama and hammy dialogue (both are more prevalent in the second season), plus the too-good-to-be-true timing of certain events. (Matthew suddenly appearing at Downton at the very moment Mary is rousing the soldiers and staff with a sentimental song was one coincidence I found particularly irksome).

Fenton does make a few amusing points. I particularly like his observation that no other culture has a country house tradition in literature and film like England does:

“The greatest rival to the English country house tradition is the Russian, with its rich suggestions of a feudal system in decline, and with its great questions hanging in the air: How shall I live to some purpose? How can I reform the world I know? Those who ask such questions may be querulous and ineffectual, but the questions themselves are intelligent and profound, whereas the great questions that hang over the English country house come, for the most part, from the far side of stupid: Can I score a personal triumph at the flower show while forgoing first prize for my roses? Can I secure my lord’s affection by pretending to go rescue his dog? (The answer Downton Abbey offers is yes in both cases.)”

Yes…”How shall I reform the world I know?” versus “Can I score a personal triumph at the flower show?” This sums up the situation nicely.

 

It's hard not to love the period costumes and sets, those hilarious Maggie Smith quips, Sybil's love of radical ideas, radical clothes, (and radical chauffeurs), and the sneers of Thomas and O'Brien during their gossipy cigarette breaks. (Photo courtesy PBS)

 

While I found Fenton’s essay entertaining, I thought The Guardian‘s Viv Groskop was more on target with her comparison and critique of the first two seasons (Spoiler alert: if you haven’t seen the entire series, you may want to skip this passage)

Perversely, given that creator Julian Fellowes has tried to cram so much into this series, the story has lacked any real detail. Series one was at its best when it concentrated on minute plot points – a missing bottle of wine, a bitchy moment between two sisters, Mrs. Patmore’s failing eyesight – and made us care about them. Because Downton has such a superb cast, this worked brilliantly: it was all about rivalry, betrayal, repressed sexuality, humiliation, passion, ambition. And all the action happened on the actors’ faces.

Crucially many of series one’s most perfect moments happened off-stage: the untimely death of Mr. Pamuk (“Poor Kemal!”), the theft of the snuff box, O’Brien placing the soap next to the bath. What mattered was not the events themselves, but the characters’ reactions. Series one was seen exclusively in close-up. In series two we’ ve pulled too far away from the actors to care.

That said, it has been absolutely hilarious (apart from when William died and I cried for the entire episode). Personally I am torn between feeling utter betrayal and total delight. Which strikes me as a very Downton place to be. Could it be that series two is actually better because it is worse?

As Groskop says, “Downtown Abbey: you are awful…but I like you.”

I’m in full agreement. Who cares? It’s hard not to love the period costumes and sets, those hilarious Maggie Smith quips, Sybil’s love of radical ideas, radical clothes, (and radical chauffeurs), and the sneers of Thomas and O’Brien during their gossipy cigarette breaks. The pleasures outweigh the annoyances.

As I said at the beginning, this is more like a delectable cream puff than an entree. Granted, ceam puffs aren’t high art, but they are artful–tasty, beautiful, pleasurable, and much harder to make than those Toll House cookies that come in the plastic tube.

 

The servants of Downtown Abbey (Photo courtesy PBS)

 

What are your own thoughts on the first two seasons of Downton Abbey? You can leave your comments below or share your thoughts on the Gwarlingo Facebook page.

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The Sunday Poem: Sierra Nelson and Loren Erdrich

Loren Erdrich (left) and Sierra Nelson (right)

 

If you’re close to me in age and were a voracious reader as a young person, you undoubtedly remember the Choose Your Own Adventure books, a series created by Edward Packard and originally published by Constance Cappel’s and R.A. Montgomery’s Vermont Crossroads Press in 1976. The books were written from a second-person point of view, with the reader making choices to determine the protagonist’s actions and the plot’s outcome. Choose Your Own Adventure was one of the most popular children’s series during the 1980s and 1990s, selling over 250 million copies between 1979 and 1998.

Poet Sierra Nelson and visual artist Loren Erdrich have created their own twist on this concept with their new book I Take Back the Sponge Cake: A Lyrical Choose Your Own Adventure, just published by Rose Metal Press. Each page turn features an ink and watercolor drawing, a poem, and a choice between two sound-alike words that create a variety of paths through the book. The adventure always begins in the same place, but depending on your choices, your reading experience moves by emotional meander until it finally reaches one of the possible endings.

 

 

Loren Erdrich and Sierra Nelson met while working at the Vermont Studio Center. All of the drawings (primarily ink and watercolor) are by Loren, some of the poems are written solely by Sierra, and some of the poems were written collaboratively by both specifically for this project.

Each drawing and poem comes with a choice between two homophones (or sound-alike words), with strange and lovely definitions borrowed from a 1900’s spelling book. The pairing of the images in conversation with the poems and the mapping of the book’s meandering structure was a collaborative process as well.

The book will be launched at AWP in Chicago next week with three special readings and events on Wednesday, February 29th and two events on Saturday, March 3rd. There is also an upcoming reading in Portland, Oregon. The full schedule is included below.

 

A drawing from Nelson and Erdrich's book

 

Sierra and Loren have been kind enough to send me the opening page of the book, along with the two branching choices, so you can get a sneak preview. To get a closer look at the drawings and text, just click on the image. I’ve also included the text below each spread, so it’s easier to read.

Instructions: Read the poem and image. Then choose one word from the given pair, using the provided sentence as a guide. When you’ve made your choice, click the corresponding link.


I Take Back the Sponge Cake

 

 

You Will Go Back Again

We have seen your future, and it’s all eyes,
you crazy head of bees.

Hurry, while they’re still sleepy—
get out the gate.

 

 

Wait: to stay
Weight: heaviness

____________, my heart is breaking.

If you choose wait, click here.
If you choose weight, click here.

 

 

 

About Sierra Nelson & Loren Erdrich

Sierra Nelson (Photo by Rebecca Hoogs)

Sierra Nelson’s poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, Poetry Northwest, City Arts Magazine, Forklift Ohio, Painted Bride Quarterly, and DIAGRAM, among others. For over a decade she has collaboratively written and performed as co-founder of The Typing Explosion and the Vis-à-Vis Society, including at the 2003 Venice Biennale and on the Wave Books Poetry Bus Tour. She received her MFA in poetry from the University of Washington and is a MacDowell Colony fellow. She currently lives in Seattle, Washington. Loren and Sierra continue to collaborate under the name Invisible Seeing Machine.

 

Loren Erdrich

Loren Erdrich is a mixed-media visual artist working primarily in drawing, sculpture, performance, and video. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, both individually and as part of CultureLab Collective. A 2011 show at the Joan Cole Mitte Gallery in Texas featured her work alongside that of Louise Bourgeois, Kiki Smith, and Félix González-Torres. Loren completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, receiving a BA and BFA respectively. She received her MFA in 2007 from the Burren College of Art and the National University of Ireland. She currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. To learn more about Loren Erdrich’s work, visit her website.

 

 

A drawing from "I Take Back the Sponge Cake"

 
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Gwarlingo’s Don’t-Miss List: Missy Mazzoli, Olive Ayhens, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, & More

 
As spring approaches I suddenly find myself inundated with invitations to concerts, readings, and exhibits. It appears that our winter hibernation is finally coming to an end.

Here is a small sampling of some of the events I’m planning to attend, along with a few I’m very, very sorry to miss…

"Computer Lab" by Olive Ayhens is on view at Lori Bookstein Fine Art through March 24th (Photo courtesy Olive Ayhens)

Olive Ayhens at Lori Bookstein Fine Art in New York City

I never tire of looking at the intricate, unruly paintings of Olive Ayhens. Her new show, Electronic Labyrinth at Lori Bookstein Fine Art in New York, finds Ayhens exploring a new artistic direction–extreme interiors. These striking paintings of genome and computer labs are like nothing the artist has done before, and yet they share all of the distinctive characteristics of Ayhens’ unique style.

The detail of Ayhens’ work is best appreciated in person. You can stop by Lori Bookstein Fine Art through through March 24, 2012.

 

 

Missy Mazzoli's "Song from the Uproar—The Lives & Deaths Of Isabelle Eberhardt" opens tonight at The Kitchen.

Missy Mazzoli’s Song from the Uproar at The Kitchen in New York City

The New York Times called Missy Mazzoli “one of the more consistently inventive, surprising composers now working in New York.” Time Out New York has dubbed her “Brooklyn’s post-millennial Mozart.”

While her music has been performed all over the world by the Kronos Quartet, eighth blackbird, the American Composers Orchestra, New York City Opera, New York City’s NOW Ensemble, and many others, Mazzoli has found that one of the best ways to see your work performed is to form your own musical ensemble, much like composer Steve Reich did. Mazzoli’s all-female quintet Victoire has been receiving rave reviews. Victoire’s album Cathedral City was named one of the top classical albums of 2010. And New Yorker music critic Alex Ross declared it “one of 2010′s most memorable albums.”

This weekend, you’ll have a chance to see the premiere of Mazzoli’s new multimedia opera Song from the Uproar–the Lives & Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt at The Kitchen. The work, which is Mazzoli’s most ambitious piece to date, is a unique combination of live musical performance and original films, inspired by the life and writings of early-20th-century explorer Isabelle Eberhardt.

The audience will witness key moments in Eberhardt’s life, from the death of her family, through her journeys in the North African desert, to her tragic drowning in a flash flood at the age of 27.

Song from the Uproar—The Lives & Deaths Of Isabelle Eberhardt from Beth Morrison Projects on Vimeo.

Song from the Uproar is presented in collaboration with filmmaker Stephen Taylor, librettist Royce Vavrek, stage director Gia Forakis, and conductor Steven Osgood, featuring NOW Ensemble with mezzo-soprano Abigail Fischer and a vocal ensemble of some of New York City’s finest singers. The show is produced by Beth Morrison Projects. 

Tickets are only $15. Song from the Uproar can be seen at 8 p.m. on Friday–Saturday, February 24–25, and Thursday–Saturday, March 1–3. More information is available here.

 

 

"Overlander" is a site-specific installation by artist Elizabeth Duffy that uses drawing, embroidery, objects, textiles, wallpaper and upholstered furniture, in an inventive way to explore the role of pattern in both data security and interior decoration. (Photo courtesy Elizabeth Duffy)

 

 

(Photo courtesy Elizabeth Duffy)

Elizabeth Duffy at the Dorrance H. Hamilton Gallery in Newport, Rhode Island

As the days grow warmer, it’s a great time to take a day trip to the shore for a little ocean air and art.

Rhode Island artist Elizabeth Duffy has a special exhibit at the Dorrance H. Hamilton Gallery at Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island through March 14th. Overlander is a site-specific installation that uses drawing, embroidery, objects, textiles, wallpaper and upholstered furniture, in an inventive way to explore the role of pattern in both data security and interior decoration. This show’s centerpiece, a custom restored horse-drawn carriage, points to the Antone Academic Center’s origins as a carriage house.

This exhibit is open to the public through March 14. The gallery is closed on Mondays. Click here for directions and hours.

 

 

Poets Ted Powers, Wendy Xu, and Mark Leidner at the Good Neighbor Series in Peterborough, New Hampshire

On Saturday, February 25th, the Good Neighbor Series continues at the Sharon Arts Center with featured poets Ted Powers, Wendy Xu, and Mark Leidner. Doors open at 7:00 p.m. There will be wine, cheese, and other treats. The suggested donation is $6, but don’t let money keep you away. The reading is conveniently located next door to the local pub.

 

 

The Low Anthem performs in Portsmouth, New Hampshire on Saturday (Photo courtesy The Low Anthem)

The Low Anthem and Redwing Blackbird at South Church in Portsmouth, New Hampshire

Also on Saturday, February 25th, the popular Providence, Rhode Island band and Nonesuch recording artists The Low Anthem will be playing at the beautiful South Church in downtown Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Opening the show will be the Monadnock region’s own Redwing Blackbird.

The Low Anthem promises the concert will be a one-of-a-kind performance. Over the course of three full-length albums, the band has not only grown in numbers, they have also added new influences and instruments. The band collects and repairs antique pump organs, oversized drum kits, hammered dulcimers, autoharps, singing bowls, banjos, steel drums, crotales, horns of all shapes, and a 600 pound pipe organ—they are obsessive scavengers, reverent of oddity and fanatical in the search for sound. The eclectic array of instruments used on their most recent release, Smart Flesh, includes jaw harp, musical saw, stylophone, antique organs, and an elaborate scheme to re-amp noise through various chambers of a factory. The resulting sound is an album as interesting as it is beautiful, that can really only be fully understood in a live setting.

Tickets are on sale now at all Bull Moose locations and online at Brown Paper Tickets.

This event is appropriate for all ages.  Doors open at 7 p..m. Redwing Blackbird plays at 7:30, followed by The Low Anthem at 8:30.

 

 

Soprano Ilana Davidson will perform in New Hampshire on Monday, February 27th (Photo courtesy Ilana Davidson)

Music for the Mountain’s Inaugural Concert at the First Church in Jaffrey, New Hampshire

Artistic directors and musicians Jonathan Bagg and Laura Gilbert have been bringing classical and new music to Southern New Hampshire for years now. Bagg and Gilbert will officially launch their new year-round music series on Monday, February 27th with a mid-winter soiree at the First Church in Jaffrey, New Hampshire.

Greek guitarist Antigoni Goni

This kick-off concert for Music for the Mountain will feature Greek guitarist Antigoni Goni, soprano Ilana Davidson, Jesse Mills, Reiko Aizawa, plus Bagg and Gilbert. The program will feature Billa-Lobos’s haunting Bachianas Brasilieras for guitar and voice, fados and canciones by Brazilian composer Jose Merlin, tangos by Piazzola, and more.

The concert is at 6:00 p.m. at the First Church in Jaffrey on Monday, February 27th. Tickets are $20. For reservations call 603-784-5265. Tickets may also be purchased at the door. Click here for more information.

 

 

 

A Philadelphia native, Jamaaladeen Tacuma broke onto the national music scene in the 70s as a member of Ornette Coleman’s electric band. (Photo courtesy The MacDowell Colony)

Jamaaladeen Tacuma at MacDowell Downtown in Peterborough, New Hampshire

Friday, March 2nd is First Friday in Peterborough, New Hampshire, which means stores will be open late and a number of special events will be happening in town. The MacDowell Colony will kick off its free series, MacDowell Downtown, with a special live performance by bassist, bandleader, producer, and composer Jamaaladeen Tacuma. A Philadelphia native, Tacuma broke onto the national music scene in the 70s as a member of Ornette Coleman’s electric band.

Releasing his debut album, Showstopper, in 1983, Tacuma has since recorded extensively on his own and collaborated with a wide spectrum of superlative musicians, including Pharoah Sanders, Marc Ribot, Carlos Santana, Anthony Davis, and former Bauhaus front man, Peter Murphy. For his Peterborough audience, Tacuma will perform selections from his current work-in-progress, 2 Groove Electric.

This free event takes place at the Peterborough Historical Society on Grove Street at 7:30 p.m. Doors open at 7:00 p.m. and free refreshments will be served. For more information, visit The MacDowell Colony website.

 

 
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Accused of Harboring an Unlicensed Dog? Take a Lesson from Writer E.B. White

 

Writer E.B. White and his dachshund Minnie--the subject of White's hilarious letter to the ASPCA

 

“Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog,” says the writer E.B. White. “Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.”

It’s been years since I’ve read White’s classic books Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little. I had forgotten how funny the author could be until yesterday, when I nearly choked on my breakfast because I was laughing so hard at this letter written by White, currently posted on Shaun Usher’s wonderful site Letters of Note.

In 1951 the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals accused E.B. White of not paying his dog tax and “harboring” an unlicensed dog. White wrote the following letter in response to the ASPCA…


12 April 1951

The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals
York Avenue and East 92nd Street
New York, 28, NY

Dear Sirs:

I have your letter, undated, saying that I am harboring an unlicensed dog in violation of the law. If by “harboring” you mean getting up two or three times every night to pull Minnie’s blanket up over her, I am harboring a dog all right. The blanket keeps slipping off. I suppose you are wondering by now why I don’t get her a sweater instead. That’s a joke on you. She has a knitted sweater, but she doesn’t like to wear it for sleeping; her legs are so short they work out of a sweater and her toenails get caught in the mesh, and this disturbs her rest. If Minnie doesn’t get her rest, she feels it right away. I do myself, and of course with this night duty of mine, the way the blanket slips and all, I haven’t had any real rest in years. Minnie is twelve.

In spite of what your inspector reported, she has a license. She is licensed in the State of Maine as an unspayed bitch, or what is more commonly called an “unspaded” bitch. She wears her metal license tag but I must say I don’t particularly care for it, as it is in the shape of a hydrant, which seems to me a feeble gag, besides being pointless in the case of a female. It is hard to believe that any state in the Union would circulate a gag like that and make people pay money for it, but Maine is always thinking of something. Maine puts up roadside crosses along the highways to mark the spots where people have lost their lives in motor accidents, so the highways are beginning to take on the appearance of a cemetery, and motoring in Maine has become a solemn experience, when one thinks mostly about death. I was driving along a road near Kittery the other day thinking about death and all of a sudden I heard the spring peepers. That changed me right away and I suddenly thought about life. It was the nicest feeling.

You asked about Minnie’s name, sex, breed, and phone number. She doesn’t answer the phone. She is a dachshund and can’t reach it, but she wouldn’t answer it even if she could, as she has no interest in outside calls. I did have a dachshund once, a male, who was interested in the telephone, and who got a great many calls, but Fred was an exceptional dog (his name was Fred) and I can’t think of anything offhand that he wasn’t interested in. The telephone was only one of a thousand things. He loved life — that is, he loved life if by “life” you mean “trouble,” and of course the phone is almost synonymous with trouble. Minnie loves life, too, but her idea of life is a warm bed, preferably with an electric pad, and a friend in bed with her, and plenty of shut-eye, night and days. She’s almost twelve. I guess I’ve already mentioned that. I got her from Dr. Clarence Little in 1939. He was using dachshunds in his cancer-research experiments (that was before Winchell was running the thing) and he had a couple of extra puppies, so I wheedled Minnie out of him. She later had puppies by her own father, at Dr. Little’s request. What do you think about that for a scandal? I know what Fred thought about it. He was some put out.

Sincerely yours,

E. B. White

 

Writer E.B. White and his dachshund Minnie (Photo courtesy Wikipedia)

 

I Was Allergic to Platforms, and Still Am

Elwyn Brooks White grew up as one of six children in Mount Vernon, New York. As Michael Sims details in his article The Nature of E.B. White in the The Chronicle of Higher Education, the young Elwyn was passionate about animals from a young age. He “kept pigeons, chickens, a turkey, ducks, geese. He had a succession of beloved dogs. He helped with the horses, tended his rabbits in their hutch, watched the predatory antics of a stray cat that sometimes camped out under the stable. And sneaking around the stalls, as well as nesting under them, were thieving rats that crept into the subterranean pathways of his imagination as the embodiment of gluttonous dishonesty.”

In 1969 White told the Paris Review that his childhood “lacked for nothing except confidence.”

“I suffered nothing except the routine terrors of childhood: fear of the dark, fear of the future, fear of the return to school after a summer on a lake in Maine, fear of making a appearance on a platform, fear of the lavatory in the school basement where the slate urinals cascaded, fear that I was unknowing about things I should know about. I was, as a child, allergic to pollens and dusts, and still am. I was allergic to platforms, and still am. It may be, as some critics suggest, that it helps to have an unhappy childhood. If so, I have no knowledge of it. Perhaps it helps to have been scared or allergic to pollens—I don’t know.”

 

 

Self-doubt afflicted White throughout his career. As Sims says in his book, The Story of Charlotte’s Web: E. B. White’s Eccentric Life in Nature and the Birth of an American Classic,  White was “afraid of commitment and romance and confrontation; he hid behind animals even in his early love poems and letters to his wife.”

“I was twenty-seven or twenty-eight before anything happened that gave me any assurance that I could make a go of writing,” he told the Paris Review. “I had done a great deal of writing, but I lacked confidence in my ability to put it to good use.”

But White persisted, and before long, he was receiving a regular stream of checks from The New Yorker. He went on to publish many books, including the widely-used English language style guide, The Elements of Style, also known as “Strunk & White”.

But even after several successful publications, White struggled with a sense of inadequacy, and a nagging feeling that he had seldom written anything worthwhile. ”When you consider that there are a thousand ways to express even the simplest idea, it is no wonder writers are under a great strain. Writers care greatly how a thing is said—it makes all the difference. So they are constantly faced with too many choices and must make too many decisions.”

 

E.B. White in his boathouse in Allen Cove, Maine. "I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world," White once remarked. "This makes it hard to plan the day.” (Photo by Jill Krementz)

 

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The Sunday Poem: Seamus Heaney

 

Seamus Heaney at a turf bog in Bellaghy wearing his father's coat, hat and walking stick (Bobbie Hanvey Photographic Archives, John J. Burns Library, Boston College)

 

I must admit that I have a soft spot for the Irish poet Seamus Heaney. I scored a copy of his book Poems: 1965-1975 when I was a teenager. The collection is a compilation of Heaney’s earliest books, Death of a Naturalist, Door into the Dark, Wintering Out, and North. Along with the collected poems of T.S. Eliot, Heaney’s book was a volume I turned to again and again in my youth.

By that point, I had read my share of classic poetry in school. The conservative religious school I attended was particularly fond of 17th and 18th century poets like Alexander Pope, Edward Taylor, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Anne Bradstreet. (We skirted right past Byron and Shelley for obvious reasons—they were considered too racy for the eyes of good boys and girls).

Until college, I had never been exposed to contemporary poetry in school. In fact, I don’t think we ever covered 20th century literature in our English classes. The 19th century was fraught enough. (There was Walt Whitman’s homosexuality and those seemingly benign, but dangerous, transcendentalists to contend with). 20th century literature brought further complications for my teachers—religious doubt, the breakdown of traditional hierarchies, plus radical, new poetic forms. It was easier to avoid such topics entirely.

 

 

At a time when I was drowning in heroic couplets, ballads, and Christian allegories, Heaney and Eliot were lifelines in my education. They were my introduction to contemporary poetry. Eventually I would discover poets like William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Adrienne Rich, and Robert Creeley, but Heaney was an essential lynchpin. Heaney taught me that any type of life experience, including that of a farmer’s son in rural Ireland, is fodder for the writer.

In his earliest books, you can sense that Heaney is a man caught between worlds—the slogging, rural life of his Irish youth and the world of letters he aspired to be part of. His father was a farmer and cattle-herder, while his mother’s family worked in a local linen mill.

“Digging,” the first poem in Heaney’s first book Death of a Naturalist, is a fine example of Heaney’s ability to evoke the gritty toil of his rural upbringing. It is a nod to his family and neighbors, and yet there is often a sense of discomfort in these early works—the discomfort of an observer who has set himself apart by choosing a different path: the life of a writer. The final line of “Digging” shows the poet attempting to reconcile these conflicted roles.

Heaney is a master of rhythm and language, and his skill is most apparent when his work is read aloud. This video is a montage of various archive clips of Seamus Heaney reciting “Digging.” The montage was put together by the BBC NI and was broadcast in 2009 on “Seamus Heaney: A Life in Pictures.”

(If you’re reading this post in an email, click here to watch the video.)

 

 

 

 

 

About Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney is widely recognized as one of the major poets of the twentieth century. A native of Northern Ireland, Heaney currently lives in Dublin. Heaney taught at Harvard University from 1985 to 2006, where he was a Visiting Professor, and then Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University (1985-1997) and Ralph Waldo Emerson Poet in Residence (1998-2006).

Heaney has attracted a readership on several continents and has won prestigious literary awards and honors, including the Nobel Prize. As Blake Morrison noted in his work Seamus Heaney, the author is “that rare thing, a poet rated highly by critics and academics yet popular with ‘the common reader.’” Part of Heaney’s popularity stems from his subject matter—modern Northern Ireland, its farms and cities beset with civil strife, its natural culture and language overrun by English rule.

The New York Review of Books essayist Richard Murphy described Heaney as “the poet who has shown the finest art in presenting a coherent vision of Ireland, past and present.” Heaney’s poetry is known for its aural beauty and finely-wrought textures. Often described as a regional poet, he is also a traditionalist who deliberately gestures back towards the “pre-modern” worlds of William Wordsworth and John Clare.

Heaney was born and raised in Castledawson, County Derry, Northern Ireland. The impact of his surroundings and the details of his upbringing on his work are immense. As a Catholic in Protestant Northern Ireland, Heaney once described himself in the New York Times Book Review as someone who “emerged from a hidden, a buried life and entered the realm of education.”

 

"If poetry and the arts do anything,” Heaney has said, “they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness." (Photo by Felix Clay courtesy The Guardian)

 

Eventually studying English at Queen’s University, Heaney was especially moved by artists who created poetry out of their local and native backgrounds—authors such as Ted Hughes, Patrick Kavanagh, and Robert Frost. Recalling his time in Belfast, Heaney once noted: “I learned that my local County Derry [childhood] experience, which I had considered archaic and irrelevant to ‘the modern world’ was to be trusted. They taught me that trust and helped me to articulate it.”

Heaney’s work has always been most concerned with the past, even his earliest poems of the 1960s. According to Morrison, a “general spirit of reverence toward the past helped Heaney resolve some of his awkwardness about being a writer: he could serve his own community by preserving in literature its customs and crafts, yet simultaneously gain access to a larger community of letters.” Indeed, Heaney’s earliest poetry collections— Death of a Naturalist (1966) and Door into the Dark (1969)—evoke “a hard, mainly rural life with rare exactness,” according to Parnassus contributor Michael Wood. Using descriptions of rural laborers and their tasks and contemplations of natural phenomena—filtered through childhood and adulthood—Heaney “makes you see, hear, smell, taste this life, which in his words is not provincial, but parochial; provincialism hints at the minor or the mediocre, but all parishes, rural or urban, are equal as communities of the human spirit,” noted Newsweek correspondent Jack Kroll

As a poet from Northern Ireland, Heaney used his work to reflect upon the “Troubles,” the often-violent political struggles that plagued the country during Heaney’s young adulthood. The poet sought to weave the ongoing Irish troubles into a broader historical frame embracing the general human situation in the books Wintering Out (1973) and North (1975). While some reviewers criticized Heaney for being an apologist and mythologizer, Morrison suggested that the role of political spokesman has never particularly suited Heaney. The author “has written poems directly about the Troubles as well as elegies for friends and acquaintances who have died in them; he has tried to discover a historical framework in which to interpret the current unrest; and he has taken on the mantle of public spokesman, someone looked to for comment and guidance,” noted Morrison. “Yet he has also shown signs of deeply resenting this role, defending the right of poets to be private and apolitical, and questioning the extent to which poetry, however ‘committed,’ can influence the course of history.”

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Sibylle Baier’s Colour Green: An Accidental Classic

 

 

(Note: This article is one of the first posts I wrote for Gwarlingo. I thought Sibylle Baier deserved more attention than she was getting, so I’m resurrecting this post from depths of the archive with the hope that you’ll check out this entrancing album. Colour Green is the perfect music for a Saturday in February. Enjoy!)

 

One of my favorite discoveries this winter was the German singer Sibylle Baier. The story of how her wonderful record, Colour Green, came to be is as interesting as the music itself.

She grew up in Germany in the 50s and 60s. During a particularly low period in her early life, a friend tried to cheer up Baier with a road trip to Strasbourg and the Alps in Genoa. The excursion had a lasting impact. When she returned home, she wrote her first song, “Remember the Day,” in response to her travels with her friend Claudine.
 
Baier continued to write music for herself and her family. Between 1970 and 1973 she recorded a number of songs on a reel-to-reel tape recorder at her home in Germany. Although her music was featured in the film Umarmungen und andere Sachen, and she played a role in Wim Wenders’ 1973 movie Alice in the Cities. Baier chose not to pursue an acting or music career in the end. Instead, she moved to America and focused on raising her family.

These songs might never has seen the light of day if it weren’t for Sibylle’s son Robby. Some 30 years after Baier made these intimate recordings Robby compiled a CD of his mother’s early music to give to family members as gifts. He also gave a copy to J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr., who passed the disc along to

Orange Twin, a record label in Athens, Georgia. In 2006 Baier’s music rightfully earned a loyal following when Orange Twin released the songs as the collection Color Green.

Sibylle Baier and her son Robby

The fourteen original songs on the album feature Baier singing and playing acoustic guitar. There are no background vocals or session musicians; the recordings are just as she made them in the early 70s. It was a wise decision to let these lovely home recordings stand on their own–overdubbing only would have muddied her clear, pure vocals. Everything about Colour Green is memorable, most especially Baier’s unique, haunting voice and the intimate lyrics that tell simple stories about daily life.

Baier has a wonderful eye for small, everyday details. One minute, she sings about buttered bread, apple pie, and feeding the dog and cat, and the next, she is quoting the poet T.S. Elliott. And she shares these intimate details with none of the sentimentality or false nostalgia that mars so much acoustic folk music. Baier gently evokes the experience of riding in a car, coming home from work, or visiting the zoo with her daughter and son.

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Filmmaker Hiroshi Teshigahara: Gaudi Made Me Realize the Lines Between the Arts Are Insignificant

 

In Barcelona Hiroshi Teshigahara came face-to-face with Gaudí. "The magic of it overwhelmed me."

 

In the West, Hiroshi Teshigahara is best known as the avant-garde director of the 1964 film Woman in the Dunes–an erotic, surreal film that was nominated for an Academy Award and won the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

Teshigahara’s haunting shots of sand, skin, and water amid the advancing sand dunes have stayed with me over the years. But there is another Teshigahara film, one that is less well-known, that left an even greater impression on me.

Antonio Gaudi is like no other movie I can think of. Teshigahara’s 72-minute meditation on the Spanish Art-Nouveau architect is essentially wordless. He avoids conventional  narrative and instead, lets Gaudi’s buildings do the talking.

Before watching this film, I didn’t consider myself a fan of the Spanish artist. (George Orwell described Gaudi’s cathedral, La Sagrada Familia, as “one of the most hideous buildings in the world.”) But my judgment was based on ignorance–on some vague, false impression that Gaudi’s work was not much more than bulbous, overdone kitsch.

But after viewing Teshigahara’s breathtaking film, my opinion of the Spanish architect has been entirely transformed. Anotnio Gaudi was nothing less than a visionary genius–an original, madly brilliant artist who was unappreciated and misunderstood in his own time.

 

Teshigahara's passion for Gaudi's work comes through on every frame. He's a patient, attentive director with a craftsman's eye for details. He takes the time he needs, allowing the camera to linger.

 

 

Gaudi's Casa Batllo, Barcelona, Spain (Photo by Roby Saltori via Flickr Commons)

 

 

A still from Teshigahara's "Antonio Gaudi" (Photo courtesy The Criterion Collection)

 

 

Gaudi's Casa Batlló in Barcelona. The roof, terminating in a turret and cross, could represent the sword or spear of Saint George (patron saint of Catalonia), which has been plunged into the back of the dragon. (Photo by Marcel Germain via Flickr Commons)

 

 

A still from Teshigahara's "Antonio Gaudi" (Photo courtesy The Criterion Collection)

 

 

The Casa Milà is Gaudi’s second most visited building in Barcelona. The roof of this apartment building and office block is one of the city’s hidden treasures, for its view of the nearby Sagrada Familia, as well as for its whimsical and imposing sculptures.

 

Teshigahara’s passion for Gaudi’s work comes through on every frame. Once he has set the scene with opening shots of contemporary Barcelona, Teshigahara brings his camera into Gaudi’s universe, taking us up a characteristic Gaudi spiral staircase. He’s a patient, attentive director with a craftsman’s eye for details. He takes the time he needs, allowing the camera to linger. Blue tiles shift in the light like water moving. Mosaics morph into a dragon’s scales. Güell Park, a planned garden village, feels like a surreal, fairy-tale landscape.

Teshigahara moves his camera slowly through these fluid, organic spaces. Slow tracking shots give us a sense that we’re actually inhabiting these bizarre, sublime places. Gaudi’s curved, organic designs are shockingly surreal and erotic. Like Woman in the DunesAntonio Gaudi pulses with human sensuality, and yet there is also something of the divine in both Teshigahara’s film and Gaudi’s fertile imagination.

Hiroshi Teshigahara

This meditation on the power of and beauty of nature is enhanced with music and sound effects by the renowned Japanese  composer Toru Takemitsu and two collaborators, Kurodo Mori and Shinji Hori. As the critic Stephen Holden explains, Takemitsu was an eclectic impressionist “whose music blended avant-garde Western techniques, electronics and random compositional methods with more conventional symphonic music and Japanese traditional instruments.”

The spiral motif, associated with the seashell, is emphasized in Takemitsu’s soundtrack, which incorporates the sound of the distant sea. “The score for Gaudi is a kind of free-floating East-meets-West impressionism,” says Holden, “whose organic flow mimics the sprouting curvilinear shapes of Gaudi’s buildings. The score includes four Catalan folk pieces, electronically altered and combined with other sounds.”

Antonio Gaudi is a tactile film–a visual poem that lingers in your memory long after its over. If you have the patience to listen and look and to defer any pressing questions you may have about Antionio Gaudi the man until the DVD extras, you will find the melding of Gaudi’s inventive architecture, Teshigahara’s sensitive camerawork, and Takemitsu’s haunting score a rewarding experience.

 

A spiral staircase in the bell tower of Gaudi's Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. The spiral motif, associated with the seashell, is emphasized in Toru Takemitsu’s soundtrack, which incorporates the sound of the distant sea. (Photo courtesy SantiMB via Flickr Commons)

 

 

The atrium of Casa Mila (Photo by Chong Ming courtesy WikiCommons)

 

 

The Park Güell bench as seen in Teshigahara's "Antonio Gaudi" (Photo courtesy the Criterion Collection)

 

 

Gaudí’s structures, Teshigahara once said, "made me realize that the lines between the arts are insignificant. Gaudí worked beyond the borders of various arts and made me feel that the world in which I was living still left a great many possibilities."

 

 

Tile patterns from the Park Güell Bench, designed by Gaudi (Photo courtesy Make Mine Mosaic)

 

 

The staircase at Casa Batllo (Photo by Chong Ming courtesy WikiCommons)

 

But how exactly did the avant-garde, Japanese filmmaker Hiroshi Teshigahara develop such an intense appreciation for the architecture of Antonio Gaudi? I was curious to know more.

Continue Reading…

Ansel Adams: I Know What Love Is

 

A portrait of photographer Ansel Adams, which first appeared in the 1950 Yosemite Field School yearbook (Photo by J. Malcolm Greany)

 

Today is Valentine’s Day–a day for candy hearts, sentimental cards, flowers, garish lingerie, and romantic dinners for two. It’s another holiday aimed at consumers, a holiday especially tortuous for my friends who are “single and still looking.”

So today, out of respect to the singles of the world, I’m bucking the trend and sharing a post that’s fit for everyone, regardless of your romantic status.

 

Ansel Adams, photographing in Yosemite National Park from atop his car in about 1942 (Photo courtesy the Cedric Wright Family)

 

The website Letters of Note is a treasure trove of interesting correspondence. I recently came across this moving letter written by the legendary landscape photographer Ansel Adams in the Letters of Note archive…

In 1936, in the midst of an overwhelming workload and the near-demise of his marriage, Adams suffered a nervous breakdown. After a stay in the hospital, desperately in need of escape, Adams returned with his family to the one place where he could find solace: Yosemite, California.

Some months later, as his health returned, he wrote this letter to his best friend, Cedric Wright. A violinist and wilderness photographer, Wright was Adams’s mentor and closest friend. In his autobiography, Adams described Wright as “almost an occupant of another world and a creator and messenger of beauty and mysteries. Perhaps his greatest gift was that of imparting confidence to those who were wavering on the edge of fear and indecision; often it was me.”

 

Ansel Adams, Cedric Wright, and Adams' son Michael packing for a trip in 1941

 

June 19, 1937

Dear Cedric,

A strange thing happened to me today. I saw a big thundercloud move down over Half Dome, and it was so big and clear and brilliant that it made me see many things that were drifting around inside of me; things that related to those who are loved and those who are real friends.

For the first time I know what love is; what friends are; and what art should be.

Love is a seeking for a way of life; the way that cannot be followed alone; the resonance of all spiritual and physical things. Children are not only of flesh and blood — children may be ideas, thoughts, emotions. The person of the one who is loved is a form composed of a myriad mirrors reflecting and illuminating the powers and thoughts and the emotions that are within you, and flashing another kind of light from within. No words or deeds may encompass it.

Friendship is another form of love — more passive perhaps, but full of the transmitting and acceptance of things like thunderclouds and grass and the clean granite of reality.

Art is both love and friendship, and understanding; the desire to give. It is not charity, which is the giving of Things, it is more than kindness which is the giving of self. It is both the taking and giving of beauty, the turning out to the light the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit. It is the recreation on another plane of the realities of the world; the tragic and wonderful realities of earth and men, and of all the inter-relations of these.

I wish the thundercloud had moved up over Tahoe and let loose on you; I could wish you nothing finer.

Ansel

 

Ansel Adams, Half Dome, Merced River. Mural sized (Photo courtesy Sotheby's-Click to Enlarge)

 

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