Agostino Pepoli Museum, Trapani, Sicily

The museum, adjacent to a convent, has a garden area surrounded on four sides by cloistered walls. It is a quiet place though the silence was broken on the day of my visit by a school group that had come to study Trapani history.

Inktober was created by Jake Parker in 2009 as a challenge to improve his inking skills and develop positive drawing habits. It has since grown into a worldwide endeavor with thousands of artists taking on the challenge every year.

End of September I headed into deepest Russia together with my sister, brother, cousins and family friend and historian Lothar Deeg, to follow the footsteps of our great-grandfather Adolf Dattan and his life in Siberia. He was working at the Kunst & Albers department store in Vladivostok before the First World War, managed to grow the company tremendously and built various dependences around the Amur region.

Here some impressions from our first stop in Blagovechensk, where now the Amur Oblast Museum is housed in the former department store.

I made heavy weather of reading The Palace of Angels, not because of any flaw in the writing, but because of its devastating subject-matter.  For my entire adult life, the Israel-Palestinian conflict has been a running sore, and whether I read Israeli authors or Palestinian ones, whether the books reinforce entrenched positions or argue for some kind of resolution, I always feel oppressed by what seems to be a hopeless situation.

The Palace of Angels consists of three linked novellas, What’s is Past is Dead; Twenty Two Years to Life and The Palace of Angels. What’s Past is Dead is a prequel: it’s about two youths trading hashish for weapons for the Palestinian side.  Their plans are reckless and naïve, but their life experience is not.  They have seen the capriciousness of death and they know, as all Palestinians know, that their side is and always will be outclassed militarily. …

One of the only remaining literary critics who hadn’t become a political writer rather than an aesthetic one, Harold Bloom was among the most Romantic, pugnacious and controversial critics of his time. His dictum that ‘the only method is the self’ divided him from an academy increasingly convinced that the only method was the use of socio-political-cum- literary ‘Theory’. The New York Times once described him as ‘the most original literary critic in America’, which is underplaying it not a little.

As he once said, ‘To a rather considerable extent, literary studies have been replaced by that incredible absurdity called cultural studies which, as far as I can tell, are neither cultural nor are they studies.’

Bloom’s views of originality, influence and critical judgement are well-summed up by this quote, from his great (and perhaps most important) book, written for a popular audience, The Western Canon:

What theory did…

Obsessed by devotion
and kissing the irons
and kneeling low before love
Gradually daylight
Intruding into the house of the dead
To be gathered up
Into the dream

Move mountains
Through the slit of a window
Evening in blood
Pain possessed
A key in the lock
No letter willing to stay written
And the door is a heart thrown open

And to tally the seasons
In the dark
Who can do that

The past of this morning
Put to flight
Future only in the lines of your hand
And there once and
Never again thus it is written

Marja in flames
The house of the dead in flames
Ice and key and mute
And now this minute
Never again –

Besessen von Hingabe
und küssend das Eisen
und auf den Knien vor der Liebe
Stückweise der Tag
eindringend in das Totenhaus
und ihn zu sammeln
zum Traum

Berge versetzen
durch…

Corstorphine Old Parish Church, Edinburgh

I stumbled across this lovely church just a couple of weeks or so ago as I walked on an errand. It became the subject of a watercolour painting that I decided to do that same weekend.

Inktober was created by Jake Parker in 2009 as a challenge to improve his inking skills and develop positive drawing habits. It has since grown into a worldwide endeavor with thousands of artists taking on the challenge every year.