Good morning.

Cat books from the shelves 1

Cleveland Amory introduces these ten tales. The introduction ends with Amory's favourite cat quotation: If Man could be crossed with a cat, it would improve man but deteriorate the cat. ~ Mark Twain. 

It is not easy to photograph cats as I am finding out. Rule one: don't use flash.

Notes from another also ran . . .

     I tweaked the sidebar. Did you notice?. This is an attempt to organize the growing list of blogs I  have marked to follow. I was a boy who used to start the school term with a beautifully tidy desk -  the old fashioned kind with the sloping lid  - which by mid-term was a hodge-podge of text books, exercise books, pencils and papers. My room still gets untidy and I now have so much more stuff to unorganize. When I look for a book I usually remember the shelf it's on. I run my fingers along that row of books until I find it.  If I don't find it I then satisfy myself that at least I have touched it and that my eyes were too quick to see it. And then I find the book in blue covers not the red I had imagined. This was always so when I went looking for dad's copy of  The Ingoldsby Legends. No good me trying to be a librarian. Oh, yes I have heard of the alphabet and the Dewey decimal system; doesn't mean I have to use them at home.

     The side bar is tidy compared to the mess of blogs I have listed under the dashboard. What criteria to use when deciding to follow a blog? Is it the page design? The pictures or the writing? Is it about a subject of which you are particularly fond? Is the writing authentic, that is, from the heart? No time to read more. Time to copy the URL or hit the follow link. Quick! follow publicly or hiddenly (Huh?) .. er .. how about covertly?

     The list under the dashboard grows until one day you try to follow a blog and blogger says, "You already follow {title of the blog}." So that one must be worthwhile if I think it's worth following more than once. Isn't it? Or I link to a blog I marked to follow and a month has gone by since the last post. I begin imagining all sorts of gory* endings to a life;  or under what circumstances one might cease blogging. One might have just got tired of it and stopped. Didn't I read somewhere (probably on another blog) that the majority of blogs last no more than one year? My sceptred isle blog lasted just the duration of the trip, and a couple of addenda. There's another category: travel blogs . . . I feel the need to go tweak some more.

     Family blogs, sports-fan blogs, cliques of memes, tagging . . . oh, like the real world it gets very messy.

*I resisted punning on Gorey and gory. No I didn't. I just did.

Recherche

Zoë in her element doing what huskies do - follow a track. I can't apologize for the poor quality of the shots (but I do apologize for not being closer to the subject) as I think these are the only snapshots I have of her in the snow; they were taken with a cell-phone on her last trip up to the snow nearly two years ago now. Oh, and please note headstrong huskies should never, ever be let off a leash . . .

Meet some of the cats

 

     All cats are tabbies deep down. Yoda is a Himalayan as witness his blue eyes. He was the only short hair in a litter of five so  he's not pure Himlayan. We lost his medium haired brother Ghengis last year. That little picture of Ghengis was taken on a cell-phone about a month before he disappeared.

Yoda's head isn't really as big as it appears.
     We hand reared a litter of five fluffy white kittens from the age of about ten days after their mother was killed either by coyotes or a large raptor. Ghenis was the most ruthless at feeding time when he was a kitten. Yoda had large ears which twitched as he fed.  All kittens' eyes are blue when they first open at about ten days. When these kittens' eyes remained blue I began to wonder what breed they might be or if the males might be deaf as many white male cats are. Then at about a year old their coats began showing faint tabby markings beginning on the rear quarters. Yoda is now about eight years old.

     Leo adopted us about five years ago after wandering about the neighbourhood not finding anyone else to take him in. He and Yoda abide by the adage keep your friends close and your enemies even closer. Where one is the other isn't very far away.

     I know many people absolutely detest cats for various reasons. Woody Guthrie described  a brutal treatment of kittens in Bound for Gory. And just recently a boy in the USA decided that wrapping a cat with duct tape would be rather fun. The opening scenes of Whistle Down The Wind shows a sack full of kittens being tossed in to a pond. The farmers children rescue the kittens and keep them in a barn where a fugitive from the law has sought refuge. 

I think most people are kind to cats judging from the fuss that is made of Lionel in the bookshop. But then surely book lovers and lovers of reading are lovers period . . .

Autumn Silence

Kathy and Mum . . .

    Mum's inimitable smile recorded at her 50th wedding anniversary dinner 6 September 1988. The picture is grainy because it is scanned and enlarged from a 110 snapshot and I think it wasn't in focus to begin with. Don't some memories become a little out of focus and grainy with the passage of time?

    Why am I posting this picture? To compare to the picture near the beginning of this meandering blog . . . or to see Kathy with short hair?

    My sister made arrangements for a small family affair at a restaurant in Earls Colne; the restuarant closed that day to begin renovations, something that had escaped the owners notice when the reservation was made, so we ended up having the restaurant and staff to ourselves.

From the Bookcase: Alsasdair Gray 6

Alasdair's favourite apparently

If you've made it this far here's the unofficial
site linked from Alasdair's site.

derivative too

The Heaven and Hell Quiz part 2                                                             30 January 1993

The Weekend Scotsman

11  What sins will you repent before entering heaven?

12  What fantasy comes true in heaven?

13  In which era is your heaven located?

14  How are you forced to occupy your time in hell?

15  Who would you choose to look like in heaven?

16  What sport is your idea of hell?

17  How would you like to enter heaven?

18  What hope for the Earth do you wish upon your departure?

19  Would you return, given the chance?  Why?

20  What would be your epitaph?

From the bookcase 34

Three volumes of poetry and art first published by Penguin in 1968 along with a teachers' handbook a copy of which I don't have. 

Derivative

The Heaven and Hell Quiz part 1                                                             30 January 1993

The Weekend Scotsman

1  What or where is your idea of heaven?

2  What or where is your idea of hell?

3  Who would accompany you to heaven?

4  Who would you least like to meet in hell?

5  Which two objects do you carry to heaven?

6  What domestic chore awaits you in hell?

7  With which books is heaven’s library stocked?

8  What film never ends in hell’s only cinema?

9  What do you listen to in heaven?

10  Who never stops playing in hell?

From the Bookcase: Alsasdair Gray 5

Poetic Licence?
or genuine errata?

Genuinely deliberate? I made the corrections with a pencil as neatly as I could .

Making music

    A few posts ago I rashly mused about writing a little about the interests listed on my profile. What a perfectly non-commital, bland word, interests. What about abiding passions or fruitful pursuits; amusing fascinations or devouring obsessions, eh? I was tempted to list all the passing fads and fancies that have distracted me from time to time or interests I no longer actively do like cycling and Scouting (once a Scout always a Scout) for instance; or dreaming up a list of exotic pass-times like, I dunno, potholing otherwise known as spelunking or caving. I don't seem to have any, what used to be called, hobbies - e.g. building model railway (railroad) layouts.

    I list the catch-all making music first then some of the instruments I practise playing.  Making music returned 12,400 profiles this morning. 

    I don't know when I was first aware of music. Mum and dad and my sister, though she doesn't practise now, played the piano. I never had piano lessons. I loved making a noise on the piano with my foot firmly on the sustain pedal; perhaps that's why I play the hammered dulcimer now - all those ringing notes. I had quite a few mouth organs (harmonicas) when I was little. I didn't learn how to make tunes on them until a girl at school played one for our village school version of show-and-tell. That brings to mind the time I read a passage from Under Milk Wood for the class; that was before I knew how Dylan Thomas came up with the name of the town Llareggub.*

    There was always singing at school in assembly and in the classroom. And prancing around for music and movement in the infants. Who remembers Singing Together  with Mr. Appleby on BBC Radio for Schools? Well, if you're English you might. I was always a member of school choirs and when I was nine followed the choirboys with whom I'd been playing into the parish for choir practise. I was so excited to tell mum  after a got home that evening. The choir was usually at least eight boys strong for the first couple of years after that, more at weddings for which we were paid, but the numbers dwindled until finally, long after my voice broke, girls were admitted. So, there is always singing . . . but I had to play a musical instrument to take the practical part of GCE 'O' level music.

    That's why I started to play a tenor recorder. At about the same time I acquired a guitar from a school friend who decided after only a few weeks that he couldn't play. I was already interested in American folk songs and soon was strumming away and learning simple finger picking patterns which then led to me playing easy pieces by Fernando Sor.

    Another school friend gave me a bow backed Neopolitan mandolin he'd rescued from his neighbour who was about to throw it on a bonfire.

    My interest in practising all these instruments dwindled until a couple of years ago when browsing in the Folk Shop in Tucson I found, and bought, a small 13/12 hammered dulcimer. I'd been vaguely aware of dulcimers since 1986 when I first saw a dulcimer played at a renaissance fair. 

    Now I don't feel right unless I practise and play some music each day.

* Llareggub? It means bugger all.

Poem . . .

I eats my peas with honey

I've done it all my life

It makes the peas taste funny

But it keeps them on the knife

Verse and Worse  Faber & Faber (1958)

From the bookcase 33

 

My old paperback copy was worn out and this recent translation by Mark Harman is a good replacement. Schocken, 1998. Amerika, The Trial and The Castle share the fate of being unfinished; they were published after K died at a tuberculosis clinic in 1924 aged 40.

Restless night . . . again

    I have the very bad habit of reading my self to sleep. That's not strictly true because if I get to bed by ten I'm usually asleep within ten minutes. I should say I have the habit of reading in bed.This wasn't the case last night. I slept a few hours then woke about two in the morning, so I got up and . . .

    . . . watched the Ken Loach film Kes (1970)which was on during TCM's Up All Night period last night. If the film had been shot in black and white it would be gritty like  A Taste of Honey, (1961) a story by Shelagh Delaney filmed by Tony Richardson. But it wasn't, so it isn't, but it is like the book (written by a school teacher who also wrote the screenplay with the director and producer)  I'd not remembered the music, not like the theme tune of Whistle Down the Wind  (1961). The first impression, after not having seen the film since the first time nearly forty (ok thirty-seven) years ago is that a slow reader like me can actually read the credits which appear after the first scene which closely follows the first pages of the book. That I didn't remember any of the music just means that it is all incidental woven seamlessly into the film; not, as in so many movies now, dictating your emotions.

Ha,ha some of the Google ad-sense advertisements that pop up in the page after publishing a post are amusing. This post generated one about preventing bed-wetting.

From the Bookcase: Alsasdair Gray 4

A paperback.

From the bookcase 32

 

The title says it all.

Family history

    I have a copy of The Oxford Guide To Family History by David Hey into which I have hardly delved. I hadn't consciously thought that I am the last male Richardson of our corner of that family until I signed my niece's guest book at her wedding earlier this year. I haven't paid much attention because I loosely subscribe to the idea that tracing a family tree is a bit pointless as one either runs out of public records or reaches a point in the family tree where nobody cared about such things or the oral history is lost. Or why must one be a slave to the patriarchal system and only follow the mail (Freudian slip?) male line. One only has to go back four generations, to great-great-grandparents, to then have the task of following sixteen families. The book talks about something far more interesting than the bare-bones genealogy and that is finding out about the lives of ancestors, their occupations and social milieu.

    The only things I know about my grandfathers is that one served in the RAMC during the Anglo-Boer War in South Africa and was a postman in civilian life; and the other was a Gloucestershire wheelwright; and that family names include Coates, Farmer and Gaze. But my sister, being much older than I am, might put me right about some things. Of my grandparents only my paternal grandmother was alive when I was born.

From the Bookcase: Alsasdair Gray 3

Won the Whitbread in 1992.

From the bookcase 31

Edward FitzGerald made several translations of the Rubaiyat but his first version is usually the one with which we are all familiar 

EDIT 6 Oct 2009: The Folio Society is publishing a special edition of 1000 copies of the Rubaiyat to celebrate the sesquicentennial of Edward FitzGerald's translation. It is richly illustrated by Niroot Puttapipat.

Hooray for podcasts et cetera . . .

   I have a dirty secret to confess. I listen to BBC Radio 4 that bastion of middle-brow England. It gets worse: I listen to The Archers. But this morning I was really happy because Roger McGough is back with a new series of listeners' requests for Poetry Please. I also listened to Melvyn Bragg and guests discussing Thomas Aquinus on In Our Time. 

   For a dose of nostalgia I browse BBC 7 and find some of the programmes I heard when I was young: Beyond Our Ken, Round the Horne, The Clitheroe Kid, The Goon Show, Journey into Space, The Navy Lark,  ITMA (It's That Man Again, Jimmy Handley) and a few more I don't recall at the moment.

    Oh frabjous joy, calloo callay, I found the code that makes indents display. And now I've made a nonsense of that (almost) couplet by editing previous posts . . .

From the Bookcase: Alasdair Gray 2

I like short stories.

Mug shot. Thank you, Kathy.

    I think I noted somewhere that I need to grow my beard back; I don't like shaving really. I had a good night's sleep for once. I awoke once lying on my back, something I rarely do. I dreamed dreams: a small house like a semi-detached. I'm sitting with friends in overstuffed 1930s easy chairs, settees and armchairs. Paul McCartney comes into the room; gives me a twelve string guitar to tune. The strings are surprisingly slack but in tune. Out side the back deck looks like one attached to a house we used to live in and someone is saying, "Oh, they filmed a scene for that movie in the back garden of a house in Great Falls."  I wander to another room where a tall young man is playing LPs on a transparent vertical player, recording them to CDs. I'm driving a pick-up truck too fast along a road I know has curves and bends ahead, I brake and the road becomes a dirt track through earthworks. Huge piles of dirt and heavy earth-moving machinery dodging between me and the piles of dirt. Just as suddenly I am walking in a field of young sweetcorn stepping across the rows.

From the bookcase 30

 

For those times I'm feeling really nostalgic for an England that no longer exists

A misnomer

    That is what I have made the title of this blog as it has evolved with no other idea than to write whatever comes to mind about me. The 101 things non-directed exercise is far more exacting. Maybe it is easier to write about a subject other than one's self. A rather self indulgent, narcissistic exercise is this.

    The misnomer that caused me to start this post is: used book. A book may become a little shelf worn; the dust jacket may become faded, torn, chipped or lost altogether. Some readers go to the trouble of removing the dust cover from a book they are reading to protect it from damage; whilst others of us use the end papers as bookmarks. The mis-named perfect binding of paperbacks quickly breaks especially in very dry climates. Paper yellows and becomes brittle. A hard bound book's spine will become cocked if read through without care to open the book and gently release the tightness of the binding when the book is new. Insects, silverfish and book-worms; fire, water and dust - and books are very dusty things - threaten a books longevity. Fifty years is generally reckoned to be the expected life span of a common garden trade book.

    A book that has a loose binding, is bumped, scratched and is showing other signs of wear; has pages marked with notes by previous owners; has been used to the point where the owner knows the book as well as the writer does and so discards it. Read, mark, learn, inwardly digest - and then give the book away.

    Many books are now printed on archive paper, or committed to another archive medium altogether. The books we read and value now, will they last? Fashions change; new scientific discoveries are made; thinkers think and write what they think or, as in Socrates case, others write. And so with a great leap I come to tell you why I think used book is a misnomer. We read books to learn, to amuse - to distract us sometimes. Does a writer write to teach, to simply say, "This is how I see the world", or to distract? There are probably as many reasons as there are writers. It's the words on the page that matter and to a reader, no matter how old the book, the story is new.



EDIT: Thursday 17 September 2009, of course I think British usage would more likely say,"second hand." But as I've said before I do  get a little confused sometimes . . .

From the bookcase: Alasdair Gray 1

My inscription on the flyleaf (book vandal!) tells me I bought this first edition on 4 December 1985. there is a pencilled price on the leaf too so I suspect I bought this used in the year of its publication by George Braziller in the USA. Alasdair's official web site and the blog and I found this link to The Guardian .

From the bookcase 29

 

I no longer have any of John Gardner's novels on the bookshelves, but I do have some of his writings about writing and this collection of short stories published by Alfred Knopf in 1981 a year before the motorcycle crash which killed him.

Views on a neighbourhood walk . . .

Took a walk this morning. About time, too; too lazy to right write anything; anything worth reading; reading old books; books pictured for the blog; blog scheduled now that I finally discovered how to do that; that is all I have to say right now; now I shall post the rest of the pictures as I promised myself . . .

 

  

 

"quote - unquote"

To know is nothing at all; to imagine is everything. - Anatole France