I went to the press conference when the exhibition opened and shared some photographs on our Munich Artists Facebook Page. Now the exhibition is getting ready to close and I would love for you to run over to the Haus der Kunst and see the cells before they move on to their next destination.
If you hate going to Munich museums by yourself, I will be going with another Munich Artist tomorrow at 1000. Just email me beforehand and you can meet me at my studio at Frauenstrasse 18. The cost of the exhibition is 12 Euro. I have a yearly pass to the museum which is 50 Euro. (BUT don’t get a discount at the bookstore. The museum said I was lucky enough to get the 50…
That sounds very interesting. There is a great book by Volker Weidermann that discusses what actually happened in the Munich Republic-in “Dreamers: When the Writers Took Power, Germany 1918”. Then there is the entertaining book by Lucy Hughes Hallett – “The Pike” about the Fascist political poet D’Annunzio.
Poetry is a house with many rooms and so, rightly, is criticism. David O’Hanlon-Alexandra’s ‘New Defences of Poetry’ project, now available on its own website here, marked the bicentennial of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s essay ‘A Defence of Poetry’ by inviting defences of poetry today and received an appropriately diverse and challenging range of responses. I was very glad to have a piece included.
David’s introduction says everything I would want to say and more about why criticism, poetics, whatever you want to call it, is so important today. It is also generous survey of the ‘defences’ themselves, which are a treasure trove. There is a great deal to think with in there and I was humbled, frankly, to be in the same store as so many poets/critics I always look forward to reading. In the spirit of David’s call for the project to be a spark for further discussion…
Two schoolmasters sat shredding their gowns in the late afternoon in the hut and during the urbane conversation fed the torn off pieces into the gap at the top of the stove. In such a manner, a little more warmth was afforded to extend their discourse for another few minutes. Their talk was conducted with epigrams in various European languages and spiced with the odd Latin tag. The stove added to the convivial ambience and the prevailing gemutlichkeit.
Let us move on from this staffroom tale, occasioned as it was by a copy I had made of some features of a well-known painting by Braque. Here it is:-
Here is the small sketch that I made several years ago:-
I wondered why this painting held my interest and began to recall that a good number of my lessons at Grammar School were delivered in the damp but sometimes warm and cosy Temporary Huts. In my memory these seem to have been in the late afternoon and within the sound of the games field outside. One of these was the so-called Prefect’s Hut which I cannot ever remember actually entering. A good deal of R.E. seems to have taken place in such huts which were on raised piles of concrete blocks. There may have been a coloured oil map of Paul’s Journeys or the Middle East on a roller above the blackboard. Then there was German that I was supposed to be cramming for Oxbridge Entrance. All of which was rather a failure although I was quite interested in Scientific Terms like Bremstrahlung-(German: “braking radiation”; electromagnetic radiation produced by a sudden slowing down or deflection of charged particles (especially electrons) passing through matter in the vicinity of the strong electric fields of atomic nuclei. Nowadays my German has somewhat improved and in particular psychoanalytic words like durcharbeiten hold greater appeal.
In recalling particular lessons in cosy atmospheres, one in particular springs to mind taught my my own Form Master- a retired Wing Commander who had an intriguing time in Special Operations and would frequently preface remarks with “As my old friend, Bill Penny used to say…….” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Penney,_Baron_Penney Anyway, this lesson was an attempt to demonstrate measuring the acceleration due to gravity. It involved a swinging lath on a pin supported by a retort stand and a falling lead ball which left a mark on said lath when released using a string mechanism. A pipe smoker and hence possessing a lighter to burn through the thread, his use of the rather ersatz apparatus combined the master’s cricketing interests effectively. It produced a reasonable estimate of “g”.in those days in centimetre- gram-second units and we proceeded to consider some of the sources of error in the value we obtained.
The huts may be seen in the bottom left hand corner of the pre 1980 view of my Grammar School. Whilst not actually Nissen Huts these rather shabby buildings brought to mind the many black and white Second World War films that were much in vogue in the Sixties.
Sometimes the fastest way to get somewhere when walking in Tokyo is to make your way through the alleys between the major streets.
During my last trip to Tokyo I had been out sightseeing with a retired colleague. I parted with him at a subway station so that he could make the long trip home by rail, and I headed off by foot to my hotel.
I thought about which way was the quickest way back to the hotel. By major streets I would have to walk past where my hotel was and then angle back toward it. However, I knew some of the alleys in the area and knew I could take a shorter path. Besides, I knew that I would have a scenic walk.
You can see that I had to descend down into the residential area here. A lot of the major streets may be very flat…
Here is Burrastow House near Walls on the West side of Shetland. It was built in 1759.
Burrastow House, from the garden. 20 July 2021. 10″ x 8 “
One of the delights of the house is that it has been adapted over the years. Here is a view from the vegetable garden. You see the different roof levels.
Burrastow House from the vegetable garden. 13th July 2021. 10″ x 8″
The white curved area on the left is a segment of the polytunnel. The grey circular item is the oil tank. Above that, the small circle is the satellite dish. I like the way you can see right through two windows, in the room on the top right of the picture.
Here is a view from the garden near the driveway.
Burrastow House, from the garden near the entrance. July 14th 2021
Robert Doisneau (French: 14 April 1912 – 1 April 1994) was a French photographer. In the 1930s, he made photographs on the streets of Paris. He was a champion of humanist photography and with Henri Cartier-Bresson a pioneer of photojournalism.
Doisneau is renowned for his 1950 image Le baiser de l’hôtel de ville (The Kiss by the City Hall), a photograph of a couple kissing on a busy Parisian street.
He was appointed a Chevalier (Knight) of the Legion of Honour in 1984 by then French president, François Mitterrand.
Author: Gustave Flaubert Genre: novel Title: Salammbô Published: 1862 #ParisInJuly Just awful!! Avoid this book like the plague. Greatest flaw…fraud. Title Salammbo …you would think this temptress was the main character. One expects delicate moonlit gardens ….one finds instead manure and blood and bone mixture. War is the central character…and it was so boring. Salammbo appears around […]
I came across my volume of Doshi’s poems, Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods, in the Oxfam shop and retired to the Cinema’s attatched bar to peruse it. leaving aside the huge question of how we should finance our poets- surely another test of our degree of civilization- I was delighted to acquaint myself with a new poet whose website may be found at http://www.tishanidoshi.com/
Monsoon Poem
Because this is a monsoon poem
expect to find the words jasmine,
palmyra, Kuruntokai, red; mangoes
in reference to trees or breasts; paddy
fields, peacocks, Kurinji flowers,
flutes; lotus buds guarding love’s
furtive routes. Expect to hear a lot
about erotic consummation inferred
by laburnum gyrations and bamboo
syncopations. Listen to the racket
of wide-mouthed frogs and bent-
legged prawns going about their
business of mating while rain falls
and falls on tiled roofs and verandas,
courtyards, pagodas.
The flood of insistent images together with their sounds strikes the reader as with heavy persistent rain. This type of rainfall seems charged too with eroticism from pendulous mangoes to rutting frogs. Throughout this poem this type of rain is held in contrast to the earth itself. It indicates how in one experience and its associated feeling, another mode of being may be temporarily forgotten. It does this with beauty and subtlety.
It ends by speaking of dreams and old poems we forget that –
led us to believe that men were mountains,
that the beautiful could never remain
heartbroken, that the rains arrive
we should be delighted to be taken
in drowning, in devotion.
Here is the start of another Doshi poem which is engaging:-
Jungian Postcard
Dear Carl, the days here are impossible:
all silence, and the sea. Yesterday we saw
the horizon unstitch itself from the sky
so delicately, and further down the beach,
two stray dogs materialised like lost souls
from a genie’s lamp. I just had to cry.
Our anima and animus! My love cried,
being philosophically inclined and impossible
to argue with. But the way those bony animal souls
took ownership of us – one black, one gold, and saw
fit to flex their paws on that deserted beach,
unmoved by the disentangled sky
that had banished all its birds. The sky
that slumped so languidly into the sea. I had to cry
for all my complexes.
The poem sets up an intuition of homelessness and alienation which only can be overcome by an inner resolution with the poet’s lover.
penwithlit 